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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 137
socially and politically contentious areas such as oil and military technology.
This, as Neal Ascherson has argued, leads to ‘the increase of potential “no go”
areas for critical reporting’ and presentation, as corporations seek to use their
media enterprises to promote a favourable image of their other activities
(Ascherson, 1978, p. 131). According to Richard Bunce, for example, American
communications conglomerates systematically use their television production
wings to defend and advance their other interests. By way of illustration he cites
a WBC documentary on urban mass transportation-systems which he claims
stemmed directly from the fact that the company’s parent corporation,
Westinghouse Electric, is the country’s main supplier of such systems. Similarly,
he maintains that the major reason that the three main television networks turned
down the first option on the ‘Pentagon Papers’ (exposing American military
strategies in Vietnam) was that their parent companies were all heavily involved
in servicing the war effort (see Bunce, 1976, chap. 6).
Although such interventions cannot be entirely discounted in a complete
account of corporate power, critics have pointed out that very few instances have
been convincingly documented and that those that have been are generally
atypical. However, the fact that allocative controllers may not intervene in
routine operations on a regular basis does not mean that there is no relationship
between the owners’ ideological interests and what gets produced. For as
Westergaard and Resler have pointed out, the exclusive concentration on the
active exercise of control

neglects the point that individuals or groups may have the effective
benefits of ‘power’ without needing to exercise it in positive action….
They do not need to do so—for much of the time at least—simply because
things work their way in any case. (Westergaard and Resler, 1975, p. 142–
3)

According to this view, proprietors do not normally have to intervene directly
since their ideological interests are guaranteed by the implicit understandings
governing production.
As I pointed out earlier, even where they have absolute operational autonomy,
newspaper editors are still bound by the overall policies set by the board. As The
Mirror Group told the last Royal Commission on the Press, although

the heavy hand of the proprietor has been generally removed from editors…
their freedom is and must always be limited by the traditional policy of
their papers…. The editor of The Times is not free for example to convert
his paper into a left-wing tabloid. (Royal Commission on the Press, 1975a,
p. 21)

Other commentators have pointed to the way that reporters exercise
selfcensorship by holding back from investigating areas that might prove