Page 76 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

GOODBYE, HILDY JOHNSON 65

working-class entertainment and politics do not, at least at present,
coincide and that they cannot be joined by will-power together.
While the problem of the cultural complexity of the newspaper can be
seen most clearly in the working-class press, it is not one which is
exclusive to that social position. The same distinction occurs in the
middle- and upper-class press, although in rather different form and
with quite different results. Of the national newspapers in the UK today
only the Financial Times can be regarded as unequivocally ‘serious’ in
its address: all of the other papers devote much more space to sport than
to parliament, for example. The peculiar economics of an advertising-
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financed press system means that at the top end of the market it is still
possible to combine the serious and the unserious elements of the press
in one newspaper while further down the market it is much more difficult,
if not impossible, to produce the same mixing, even with very different
proportions.
In arguing this, I would not wish to minimize the serious
consequences of unserious material. There can be little doubt that the
ideas and attitudes articulated by the popular elements of the press have
implications for the serious parts. Nor is it the case that the serious
material, in its selection and presentation as much as in its substantive
content, is an unimportant element in the popular press. What is crucial,
however, is to recognize that a theory and history of the press which
begins from the premise of the serious role of the press obscures much
that is central to the understanding of the papers read by most people in
modern Britain. What is more, the purchase it does give is for the
recitation of a long and extremely familiar list of complaints which have
been echoing around since at least 1896. On the left it provides a perch
from which to denounce the market and all its works, from the right it
provides a perch from which to denounce the low intellectual level of the
working class. Whatever truth either position may contain is far
outweighed by the way in which they both obscure reality.
If we are prepared to accept that our current focus is not really
adequate, and to admit the necessity of adjusting our attention to take
account of the fact that quite a lot of the press, and thus of journalism, is
primarily concerned with producing a product whose function is
entertainment, then certain things follow. One is that the term press, and
thus the terms journalism and journalist, must give much more weight
to the magazine sector. There may once have been an intellectual
justification for drawing a sharp line between those people whose
function it was to provide social and political information to the
population and those whose tasks were more centred around the