Page 216 - Culture Society and the Media

206 COMMUNICATIONS, POWER AND SOCIAL ORDER
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Just as the extension of the Christian Church throughout Europe in the early
middle ages laid the foundation of papal power, so the development of new
media of communication has created new power groups. Perhaps the most
notorious of these in British media history have been the press barons. Their rise
is of interest, however, as much for the contrast as for the comparison it affords
to the rise of the papacy.
In the eighteenth century, press proprietors were, for the most part,
unimportant and far from respectable tradesmen. The practice of showing
advance copy of scurrilous stories to their victims in order to extract a fee for
suppressing their publication, lowered the reputation of those associated with the
press generally. In 1777, for instance, it was said of William Dodd, a preacher
charged with forgery, almost as corroboration of the charge, that he had
‘descended so low as to become the editor of a newspaper’ (quoted in Smith,
1978, p. 165). Apart from exceptional proprietors like James Perry, the wealthy
owner of the largest-circulation Whig daily in the late eighteenth century, owners
of newspapers were not admitted into polite society (Christie, 1970). Even
writing articles for the press was judged by aristocratic politicians to be, in Lord
Brougham’s phrase, ‘dirty work’ (quoted in Asquith, 1976, p. 277). The low
prestige of press proprietors was also a reflection of their lack of independent
political influence. Few papers sold more than 1000 copies before 1800, and
many papers were heavily dependent upon political patronage in the form of
subsidies, sinecures, politically tied advertising and information handouts.
During the nineteenth century the prestige and influence of press proprietors
increased as a consequence of the growing circulations they commanded and an
increased measure of political autonomy. Leading proprietors and editors were
assiduously cultivated by government ministers (Anon, 1935 and 1939; Hindle,
1937) and a growing number of them entered parliament. Their increased
political weight was reflected in the substantial legal immunities awarded to the
press during the period 1868–88 (Lee, 1976). At the same time, the role of the
press was widely reinterpreted as that of an independent fourth estate in order, as
Boyce (1978) has argued, to establish for newspapers a ‘claim for a recognized
and respectable place in the British political system’.
But it was only when newspapers acquired mass circulations that the position
of proprietors underwent a fundamental change. Lloyd’s Weekly was the first
Sunday paper to gain a million circulation in 1896, while the Daily Mail was the
first daily to cross this threshold at the turn of the century. By 1920, the national
Sunday press had an aggregate circulation of 13.5 million, with a mass working-
class as well as middle-class following. National dailies subsequently gained a
mass readership amongst the working class, growing from 5.4 million to 10.6
million between 1920 and 1939 (Kaldor and Silverman, 1948). The growth of the
press as a mass medium was accompanied by increased concentration of
ownership, giving leading press magnates ultimate control over vast aggregate
circulations. Three men—Rothermere, Beaverbrook and Kemsley—controlled in