Page 79 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

68 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

as the arena in which it operated. To a very considerable extent the
serious press was and still is addressed to, and in Britain read by, the
national ruling class and their elite servants and hangers-on. The
development of a global economy has meant that the site of at least
some of the key decisions about the economic and political life of even
the largest capitalist countries is now outside of the immediate control
of the appropriate state. Of course, the realities of imperialism have
meant that for most of the world’s population this has been the case,
either formally or informally, for at least the last century, and much of
the debate about the NWICO (New World Information and
Communication Order) has been concerned with the consequences of
these realities for national media systems. What is new about the latest
phase is that this process has reached into the heartlands of imperialism
themselves.
The last few years have seen an internationalization of the production
of a number of newspapers, most obviously the Financial Times and the
Wall Street Journal. Both in content and in global form these
newspapers correspond to the evident globalization of the world
financial markets. They provide information and commentary to what we
might call the ‘international ruling class’ and they are, pre-eminently,
newspapers of the serious type of legend. The Financial Times is by far
that newspaper in Britain which is most concerned with matters of the
‘public sphere’.
The second important trend located by theories of a ‘new media age’,
and in particular by theories of the postmodern, concerns the
development of self-reflexivity as a conscious strategy of media
artefacts. Again, this is most often thought of as an aspect of television,
but it clearly also relates both to the relationship between television and
the popular press and to the content and form of the popular press itself.
The full implications of this trend are not apparent if we confine our
attention to television. In broadcasting, as we have noted above, there is
an organized separation between news and current affairs on the one
hand and entertainment on the other which is not reproduced in the
organization of the popular press. This is reinforced in that the priorities
of TV news continue to reflect very clearly the priorities of the serious
rather than the popular press. Thus the debate about TV news tends to
be one about the possible limitations of the form in which it is presented
rather than its substantive content. If we look at the press, on the other
hand, it is clear that this sharp division between self-reflexive
entertainment and serious news cannot be sustained and that what has in
fact happened in the popular press is that the boundary between the two