Page 82 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

GOODBYE, HILDY JOHNSON 71

Hamilton, 1981 and 1984. The most influential statement of the ‘decline
of partisanship’ thesis is by Colin Seymour-Ure in Chapter 8 of his The
Political Impact of the Mass Media, London: Constable, 1974.
7 That is Koss’s key distinction, for example at op. cit., vol. i., pp. 16–17.
8 This is most vividly illustrated in the case of external threats to the
national elite. The case of Northern Ireland is very well known but it is
not unique. Fred Halliday concluded a study of the British media
coverage of a colonial war in Dhofar in the 1970s by arguing that ‘The
Oman story is therefore a particularly striking case of press collusion
over many years in a case where strategic interest, commercial advantage
and publishing timidity interlocked’ (‘New management and counter-
insurgency’, in J.Seaton and B.Pimlott (eds), The Media in British
Politics, Avebury-Gower, 1987, p. 199).
9 Koss, op. cit, vol ii, pp. 657–8, quotes, and dismisses much too readily, a
version of this explanation advanced by Richard Crossman in 1952.
10 See L.Chester, S.Fay and H.Young, The Zinoviev Letter: A Political
Intrigue, London: Heinemann, 1967. The authors, journalists, write:
‘This (high) degree of political commitment was the single most
significant feature of the newspapers in the ‘twenties. Political prejudice,
and sometimes political ambition, was the motivation underlying the
opinions of most proprietors, and expression of prejudice was almost the
raison d’être of their papers. Reporting an approximation of the truth was
subordinated recklessly to a determination to get some message across’
(pp. 128–9). This might stand as a fair comment on the material recorded
by James Curran in Media Coverage of London Councils: Interim
Report, London: Goldsmiths’ College Media Research Group, 1987, and
which claimed: ‘Our conclusion is that not one of these stories is
accurate. A few appeared to have been conjured out of thin air; the rest,
although loosely connected with some basis of fact, have got important
details wrong and are misleading’ (p. 1).
11 This stance by the Independent was certainly important and I will return
to its implications below.
12 Geoffrey Goodman, ‘Not one national paper backs Labour’, New
Statesman, 9 January 1987, p. 14. In the event there were two
equivocating supporters. The Alliance did even worse with only one.
Readers were, in general, fairly well aware of the political views of their
chosen papers, although those papers with large working-class
readerships and Tory politics recorded low percentages of awareness
(Bob Worcester, ‘Trying the food on the dog’, New Statesman, 24 July
1987, p. 13).
13 Raymond Williams’s work, and in particular his essay ‘The press and
popular culture’, in Boyce et al., op. cit., is the classic development of
this idea. Williams, and the present writer, tend to argue the case in terms