Page 220 - Culture Society and the Media

210 COMMUNICATIONS, POWER AND SOCIAL ORDER
major threat to established interests within the hierarchy of power. It advanced
royal authority at the expense of aristocratic power. It implied, moreover, a
fundamental change in the relationship of the monarch to his feudatories, from
that of feudal chieftain with limited powers to that of divine-right monarch with
absolute powers accountable only to God and his appointed agents. Inevitably
this attempt to alter the distribution of power led to fierce armed resistance, of
which the successful baronial revolt against King John of England in the early
thirteenth century was but one example (Ullmann, 1978) (10) .
* * *
The rise of professional communicators in modern Britain has been, by
comparison, less dislocative, largely because professional communicators have
more readily accepted a subaltern role than their priestly predecessors. Media
professionals interpret the political system in a relatively passive way without
seeking fundamentally to alter the power-structure of society. An increasing
disjunction has occurred, however, between the British media and the British
political system, with potentially disruptive consequences.
Ironically, the development of the press in Victorian Britain played an
important part in the creation of the modern party system. During the second half
of the nineteenth century, the press forged close ties with the parliamentary
parties and tended to be highly partisan in its political coverage. The expansion of
this press helped to convert what had been, in effect, aristocratic factions in
Parliament into political movements with a mass following (Vincent, 1972; Lee,
1976).
During the course of the twentieth century, the character of the British press
began to change. An increasing number of newspapers became more
independent of the major political parties (11) . This resulted in papers providing a
more bi-partisan coverage of politics, particularly during the postwar period
(Seymour-Ure, 1977). The popular press also became progressively depoliticized,
with some national papers more than halving their coverage of public affairs as a
proportion of editorial space during the last fifty years (Curran, Douglas and
Whannel, 1980). These changes altered the relationship of newspapers to their
readers. By 1979, over a third of national daily-paper readers bought papers with
political allegiances different from their own. Even newspaper readers buying
papers with the same political affiliation as their own were exposed in these
papers to more ‘straight’ reports of what their political opponents had said and
done. And increasingly the newspaper reading public, as a whole, consumed
entertainment rather than public affairs content in the press. While the tradition of
a politically affiliated, partisan press reaching a partisan audience has certainly
not disappeared, all these changes have weakened the ability of the major
political parties to maintain their supporters’ loyalty through the press.
The rise of broadcasting has further weakened the position of the political
parties. The emergence of television as the principal medium of political
communication has resulted in a shift away from consumption of a medium with
a tradition of partisanship to a medium which is required to be politically