Page 83 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

72 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

of social class but the point is most easily grasped in the instance of a
society in which there are substantive linguistic divisions.
14 It is this press which can be compared in social role with the party press
of the classic European Social Democracy.
15 The mid-nineteenth-century popular Sunday press, for example, can be
considered in the context of the whole range of ‘street literature’ and
other printed ephemera at least as usefully as it can be compared to The
Times.
16 Hamilton Fyfe, Press Parade, London: Watts, 1936, p. 109.
17 Francis Williams, Press, Parliament and People, London: Heinemann,
1946, p. 156.
18 ibid., p. 158.
19 The fact that Williams and the staff of the Daily Herald in the 1930s
were all, or almost all, highly experienced and successful mainstream
journalists who did succeed in building a mass-circulation paper is
important, since one of the major schools of thought about the failure of
News on Sunday is that it foundered on the lack of journalistic sense of
its political controllers. See P. Chippendale and C.Horrie, Disaster! The
Rise and Fall of News on Sunday, London: Sphere, 1988, for a
particularly crude and unthinking version of this thesis. This school of
thought avoids the painful conclusion that the problem is structural rather
than personal.
20 On this aspect of the ‘quality press’, see C.Sparks and M.Campbell, ‘The
inscribed reader of the British quality press’, European Journal of
Communication, 2, 4, December 1987. Preliminary results of a follow-up
study suggest that the changes in this sector of the UK press market since
then have acted to accentuate the gap between the Financial Times and
the other papers.
21 op. cit., pp. 14–15.
22 Newspaper Society, Annual Report 1986, London: Newspaper Society,
p. 6.
23 See, for example, Leo Lowenthal, ‘The triumph of the mass idols’, in his
Literature, Popular Culture and Society, New York: Spectrum, 1961.