Page 81 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

70 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

cannot, at least for the moment, adapt to this aspect of reality. As the
public sphere disappears, its characteristic organs atrophy or transform
themselves. Those that survive, and the newly created replacements for
the casualties, are more and more concerned with the narrow private
world defined within a pre-given framework of politics, economy and
society.
Hildy Johnson, you will recall, was a reporter. He worked for a big
city daily newspaper. His reporting assignments included all of the
classic situations of hard news. His great triumph was to expose a
corrupt city administration and save the life of a deranged murderer, at
the expense of his personal future. His day is passing.
Already in 1940, Howard Hawks had given him a sex-change and
today statistics are catching up with the cinema. Hildy Johnson is no
longer a reporter. She is a sub-editor and she works for a magazine. Her
work involves processing copy and designing pages and what matters is
not whether it is hard or soft news, news or feature, politics or sport, but
how to make it entertaining. She no longer dreams of bringing down the
mayor or the government in the wake of a great scandal. That only
happens in the movies.

NOTES

1 Royal Commission on the Press: Final Report, London: HMSO, Cmnd.
6810, 1977, p. 8.
2D.McQuail, Analysis of Newspaper Content, London: HMSO, Cmnd.
6810–4, p. 24.
3 James Curran first drew attention to this long-term shift in J.Curran et
al., ‘The political economy of the human interest story’, in A.Smith (ed.),
Newspapers and Democracy, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1980).
4 For critical accounts of the journalistic uses of the serious definition, see
G.Boyce, ‘The Fourth Estate: the reappraisal of a concept’ and P. Elliott,
‘Professional ideology and organizational change: journalism since
1800’, both in G.Boyce, J.Curran and P.Wingate (eds), Newspaper
History: From the 17th Century to the Present Day, London: Constable,
1978.
5 It is important to keep in mind that by ‘political press’ we mean
something rather different in the British case than the role of the press in
the construction of the mass social democratic parties of the European
continent, most notably in Germany before 1933. Only the Daily Herald
of British papers plays any similar role, and then only to a limited extent.
6 The classic statement about the ‘political press’ is S.Koss’s two-volume
The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain, London: Hamish