Page 144 - Culture Society and the Media

134 CONTROL OF THE COMMUNICATIONS INDUSTRIES
network of connections binding the major communications corporations to other
core sectors of British capital.
These patterns of media ownership appear to breathe new life into the
instrumentalist argument in both its versions. The resilience of individual
ownership fits easily into the long-standing debate about the nature and scope of
proprietorial intervention in media production, while the intermeshing of
communications companies and general capital re-emphasizes the question of
how far media corporations operate in the interests of the capitalist class as a
whole.

DYNAMICS OF CONTROL

Specific interventions and particular interests

All owners of media corporations have a basic interest in increasing the
profitability of their enterprises. They may or may not also be interested in
influencing the output in line with their views and values. When commentators
talk about proprietorial intervention, however, they mostly have in mind this
second, ideological, dimension. Concern about this reached its height in Britain
between the two world wars, when the activities of press barons provided almost
daily examples of owners using their papers to promote the social and political
views they favoured. As Lord Beaverbrook, the celebrated proprietor of the
Daily Express, told the 1948 Royal Commission on the Press, he ran the paper
‘purely for propaganda and with no other object’, although he quickly added that
a paper is no good ‘for propaganda unless it has a thoroughly good financial
position’, and admitted that he had ‘worked very hard to build up a commercial
position’ (Royal Commission on the Press 1948, para. 8656 et seq.). For him,
high circulations were a means to a mainly ideological end. For the present owners,
Trafalgar House Ltd, profitability has become the primary goal, although
ideological intervention is not entirely unknown. According to one inside account,
Daily Express editors were still subject to pressure from the board, in the person
of Victor Matthews, the Chief Executive who
would delight in pouring out home-spun wisdom at considerable length
often at the busiest time of the day. This would sometimes have to be
recreated by a journalist in the form of an editorial. He would hold hour-
long post-mortems, and would discuss at length the main headline on the
front page. (Jenkins, 1979, p. 101)

Over and above these sorts of individual interests, recent changes in patterns of
ownership have added a new corporate impetus to ideological intervention.
Because of the trend towards conglomeration and the growth of institutional
investment, media enterprises are increasingly linked to companies operating in