Page 236 - Culture Society and the Media

226 COMMUNICATIONS, POWER AND SOCIAL ORDER
Arguably, this process of displacement has been one factor in the growing demand
for increased internal party democracy within the Labour Party: party activists have
responded to the decline of their traditional role and status within the party by
demanding more power and influence.
16 The role of the printed word in contributing to England’s only social revolution, and
to ‘the revolution within the revolution’ constituted by the Levellers’ revolt, has yet
to be fully explored. But as Siebert (1952) shows, the censorship system began to
collapse in the years leading up to the Revolution. The Revolution itself produced
an unprecedented spate of polemical literature. Stone (1972) estimates that 22,000
speeches, pamphlets, sermons and newspaper titles were published between 1640
and 1660. For a scholarly, but not very illuminating, study of the early newspaper
press during this period, see Frank (1961).
17 These accounts provide a conventional Whig interpretation of the emancipation of
the press from the state. Their narrow perspective causes them largely to ignore the
growing independence of part of the commercial press from aristocratic control. The
limited time-span they cover also causes them to ignore evidence of increased inter-
penetration between the press and the political parties in the later Victorian period
that belies their claim that the press evolved into an independent fourth estate in the
nineteenth century. Government subsidies continued in the form of government
advertising allocated to friendly papers well into the nineteenth century (Hindle,
1937); government management of news remained an enduring form of influence
(Anon, 1935 and 1939); newspaper proprietors and editors long continued to be
intimately connected with one political party or other, whether in or out of office
(Lee, 1977; Boyce, 1978); indeed, a number of leading newspapers received political
subsidies well into the twentieth century (Seymour-Ure, 1976; Inwood, 1971; Taylor,
1972). The detachment of the press from the political parties, and consequently from
government, was a much more gradual and extended process than the accounts cited
in the text suggest.
18 For accounts of the rise of the radical press, see, in particular, Glasgow (1954),
Thompson (1963), Read (1961), Wiener (1969), Hollis (1970), Harrison (1974),
Prothero (1974), Tholfsen (1976), Epstein (1976), Berridge (1978), Curran (1979a)
and Curran and Seaton (1981).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alberoni, F. (1972) ‘The powerless elite: theory and sociological research on the
phenomenon of the stars’, in McQuail, D. (ed.) Sociology of Mass Communication,
Harmondsworth, Penguin.
Anon (1935) The Thunderer in the Making, History of The Times, vol. 1, London, The
Times.
Anon (1939) The Tradition Established, History of The Times, vol. 2, London, The Times.
Aspinall, A. (1949) Politics and the Press, 1780–1850, Home and Van Thal. Reprinted
(1973) by Harvester Press, Brighton.
Asquith, I. (1975) ‘Advertising and the press in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries: James Perry and the Morning Chronicle, 1790–1821’, Historical Journal,
17.