Page 221 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 211
balanced and impartial. This trend has been particularly pronounced during the
last two decades. There has been a very rapid growth of public affairs coverage
in TV, with a three-fold increase on BBC TV between 1962 and 1974. And while
public affairs items in the press only obtained a below-average readership (both
before and after the introduction of TV), TV news programmes have secured
above-average audiences. More people have thus been exposed to more bi-
partisan communications.
The progressive detachment of the mass media from the party system has been
confounded by the mutual rivalry between professional politicians and
professional communicators. Both groups have competing claims to legitimacy:
they both claim to represent the public and serve the public interest. As
Gurevitch and Blumler (1977) point out, they are, to some extent, rivals who
have different definitions of their roles which produce mutual tension and
conflict. This tension is reflected in media portrayals of party politics which are,
at times, not so much bi-partisan as anti-partisan. This anti-partisan perspective
is typified by this excerpt from a Sunday Times editorial:

Mr. Callaghan condemns the income tax cuts forced on the government by
the Tories and other opposition parties as looking after the rich and striking
a blow at the family budget…. The Prime Minister is a politician and is
therefore, no doubt, entitled under the rules of the game to play politics.
But a newspaper is equally entitled to remind readers that politics is what
he is playing. We must not be tempted by rhetoric to take Ministers’ words
at face value, and forget what they have said in the past. What the
Conservatives have done for the higher tax-payers is precisely what the
Government itself would do if it had the political nerve—or if its party
would let it. (Sunday Times, 14 May 1978)

This editorial makes unusually explicit some of the assumptions that underpin
the rhetoric of media anti-partisanship. Prime Ministers ‘play politics’ whereas
The Sunday Times is disinterested. Politicians dissemble and lie while The
Sunday Times fearlessly speaks its mind. Politicians are encumbered by vested
interests and party ties, whereas The Sunday Times is concerned only with the
public interest—even when discussing tax cuts for affluent Sunday Times
journalists and readers.
Anti-partisanship is present not only in explicit form in political commentary.
It is also implicit in the interpretative frameworks within which a good deal of
current affairs coverage is set in both the press and broadcasting media. In
particular, there is a tendency for politics to be defined in pragmatic, technocratic
terms as a process of management and problem-solving; for political conflict to
be de-contextualized from the political and economic struggles that underlie it;
even, in some cases, for genuine conflicts over principle or of class interest to be
represented as mere clashes of personality. Such representations of politics