Page 232 - Culture Society and the Media

222 COMMUNICATIONS, POWER AND SOCIAL ORDER
the institutions that sustained and enforced the domination of the capitalist class.
This more advanced perspective sign-posted the way forward towards a radical
programme of reconstruction in which, in the words of the Poor Man’s Guardian
(19 October 1833), workers will ‘be at the top instead of at the bottom of society
—or rather that there should be no bottom or top at all’.
Admittedly, this proto-Marxist analysis was often conflated with the old liberal
analysis in an uncertain synthesis. There was, moreover, a basic continuity in the
perspectives offered by the less militant wing of the radical press. But the rise of
mass readership newspapers that challenged the legitimacy of central institutions
of authority, linked to an analysis that came close to repudiating the capitalist
system, was none the less a destabilizing influence. Britain’s first General Strike
(1842) and the political mobilization of the working class, on a mass scale, in the
Chartist Movement were symptoms of an increasingly unstable society in which
the radical press had become a powerfully disruptive force (18) .

COMMUNICATIONS AND SOCIAL CONTROL
As I have argued elsewhere, market forces succeeded where legal repression had
failed in containing the rise of a radical press against the background of growing
prosperity and the reassertion of ruling-class cultural domination. The operation
of the free market, with its accompanying rise in publishing costs, led to a
progressive transfer of ownership and control of the press to capitalist
entrepreneurs. It also led to a new economic dependence on advertising that
encouraged the absorption or elimination of the early radical press and inhibited
its re-emergence (Curran, 1978a and 1979a).
Significant changes have occurred since the industrialization of the press in
Victorian Britain. Ownership of the press has become more concentrated and has
largely passed into the hands of powerful multinational corporations with
interests mostly outside publishing; the personal domination of press magnates
has been replaced by less coercive controls; political prejudice amongst
advertisers has declined, and this has materially assisted the growth of a social
democratic press in a depoliticized form. But these changes have merely
ameliorated rather than fundamentally changed the control system
institutionalized by the so-called free market (Murdock and Golding, 1974;
Hirsch and Gordon, 1975; Curran, 1978b, 1979b and 1980; Curran, Douglas and
Whannel, 1980; Curran and Seaton, 1981).
By contrast, British broadcasting has developed under the mantle of the state.
Broadcasters have gained, nevertheless, a genuine autonomy from political
parties and individual administrations as a result of an extended historical
process of negotiation and resistance. Such is the compactness of the British
ruling class and its continuing cultural hegemony that this increased autonomy
has been achieved, however, without the broadcasting system becoming a
dissident or seriously disruptive force.