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may range from efforts to shape specific communications, actions to influence
the editorial environment, to efforts to influence the broader orientation of
media vehicles and their allocation of resources to tell stories and reach parti-
cular audiences. However, other critical scholars argue that the influence of
advertising on media is better understood as an impersonal force and offer a
structuralist explanation. Curran describes how advertisers in nineteenth century
Britain refused to place advertisements in radical newspapers on political
grounds. But he argues that the main way in which advertising influenced British
media from the early twentieth century was not through deliberate acts of
control or political censorship. Advertising operates as an ‘impersonal force’; the
cumulative decisions of advertisers seeking the most cost-effective vehicles to
reach target consumers, creates a source of finance that is unevenly distributed
across media.
However, while advancing a structuralist explanation against an instrumentalist
one, Curran provides a carefully circumscribed historical analysis. Changing
conditions ‘made it easier for radical journalism to make a breakthrough in the
first half of the twentieth century’ (Curran 2011: 5). Advertising agencies became
established as intermediaries, evidence-based selection of media vehicles for
advertising improved (reducing political bias), and the rising worth of working
class consumers helped papers like the Daily Mirror and left-wing Daily Herald,
aimed at those readerships, attract advertising finance. Yet the structure of the
press after 1945 was one in which papers with more upscale readers gained
greater advertising revenue. The Daily Herald had a circulation share of 8 per
cent when it ceased publication in 1964 but its advertising share had slumped to
3.5 per cent. Advertising was a largely impersonal force, but a powerful one,
delivering market censorship: the distribution of ad finance across newspapers
remained very unequal because of the ‘advertising bounty’ that flowed to papers
attracting upscale readers while minority papers with low-income readerships
‘were not viable, because they did not attract the same commercial subsidy’
(2011: 166).
Advertising subsidy functions as a de facto licensing system, determining which
ad-dependent media have the resources to survive and thrive. Yet, advertising
influence is usually impersonal, first, in that decisions are based on advertising
effectiveness (reaching the right prospects in as cost effective a manner as possible)
rather than judgements concerning the media vehicle or editorial content as
such. Second, the ‘licensing’ effect arises from the innumerable decisions of
individual advertisers. Baker (1994) highlights another dimension: ad-placement
decisions can lead to outcomes which are not intended by advertisers, and are
detrimental to their interests. Directing advertising income to the media vehicle that
can reach the largest number of the target market at low cost may drive com-
petitors out of business, but then advertisers face a monopolist who can raise
advertising rates. That occurred, argues Baker, when the distribution of ad
finance contributed to monopolisation in US local newspapers from the late
nineteenth century. Baker concludes (1994: 103):