Page 235 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 225
the concepts of power delegated from below and feudal kingship limited by contract:
it paved the way for government by an oligarchy of landed capitalists and, through
a relatively peaceful process of transition, to popular participation in a liberal
democracy. In contrast, the establishment of theocratic kingship in France, based on
the hierocratic principles of divinely-instituted monarchy, blocked the route to
peaceful evolution and led to absolutism followed by revolution. Whereas the feudal
conception of kingship could evolve naturally through institutionalized channels of
negotiation into representative democracy, the papal model of divine-right monarchy
permitted only two forms of response—total subjection or total repudiation. The
different pattern of development of modern France and modern Britain can thus be
explained partly in terms of the failure of the papal conception of divine-right
monarchy to take firm root in England, unlike France, during the middle ages.
11 This process of political disaffiliation resulted in half the national daily press in the
October 1974 General Election being opposed to the election of a goverment
constituted by a single party (Seymour-Ure, 1977).
12 The decline of media partisanship reflects the increasing commercial pressures on
newspapers to reconcile the divergent political loyalties of newspaper readers; the
progressive displacement of political patronage by advertising patronage of the press;
the growth of local newspaper monopoly; the development of a professional ideology
that has tended to repudiate the adversary tradition of journalism; the
institutionalization of non-partisanship in publicly-regulated broadcasting; the
weakening of ties between politicians and journalists, and growing mutual rivalry;
and a deep-seated anti-partisan tradition in British political thought that pre-dates the
modern party system.
13 A number of political and social changes have also contributed to the decline of
partisan allegiance in Britain. For a useful discussion of these, see Butler and Stokes
(1976).
14 The changes that have taken place in the British mass media closely resemble those
that have taken place in the media in other western industrial societies where there
has also been a tendency for partisan allegiance to decline.
15 There are modern parallels in which new media have undermined established
institutions by by-passing their internal communication systems. The development
of broadcasting and the press independent of ecclesiastical control has probably
contributed to the secularization of society and the long-term decline of the Christian
churches. The transmission of heterodox views on issues such as contraception,
abortion and divorce has probably also contributed to divisions within the Catholic
community over these issues. Similarly, the mass membership of the British trade-
union movement is also being exposed to hostile coverage of trade unions (Hartmann,
1976 and 1980; Morley, 1976; Glasgow University Media Group, 1976 and 1980;
McQuail, 1977; Beharrell and Philo, 1976) mediated by press and broadcasting media
that by-pass the much less well developed internal communication system of the
union movement. This poses a serious threat, in the long run, to the unity and
corporate loyalty of trade-union mass memberships. New media have also displaced
mediating institutions and groups, although without the dislocative consequences
that followed the partial displacement of the priests as mediators of religious
knowledge in early modern Europe. Thus the rise of television has undermined the
role of parliament as a political forum. It has also undermined the role of grassroots
political organizations as mediators of political communications (Rose, 1967).