Page 44 - Sport Culture and the Media

UNDERSTANDING SPORT AND MEDIA || 25

television. To see these technological developments out of social context is,
however, also to view the development of media as an inevitable, evolutionary
process. But the history of media, like that of sport, is a much more com-
plicated tale of struggle. In this case it is between powerful groups (first the
church, then the state) to control the circulation of ‘dangerous’ texts, such as
officially unapproved versions of the Bible, and other, often less powerful
groups and individuals (political movements, trade unions, unaffiliated people
asserting their rights of liberty) who wanted access to these texts and to the
means to circulate their own texts. Not only did the rise of representative
democracy, citizenship and the nation-state demand a free and efficient media
as a political imperative, but so also did the new capitalist class require the
capacity to display its goods nationally and, later, internationally in obedience
to an economic one. McQuail traces our contemporary notions of the ‘ideal’
newspaper to:
The ‘high bourgeois’ phase of press history, from about 1850 to the turn of
the century, [which] was the product of several events and circumstances:
the triumph of liberalism and the ending, except in more benighted
quarters of Europe, of direct censorship or fiscal constraint; the establish-
ment of a relatively progressive capitalist class and several emergent
professions, thus forging a business-professional establishment; many
social and technological changes favouring the operation of a national or
regional press of high information quality.
(McQuail 1987: 12)
The establishment of the values and practices of ‘good’ journalism (fearless
independence from government and other powerful groups, a commitment to
rooting out corruption, an authoritative voice on which the public can rely, and
so on) was followed by a more overtly commercial concern with advertising.
The ‘quality’ newspapers could exercise political influence by reaching a rela-
tively small but powerful readership, as Hartley (1996) notes in his comment on
the 1835 painting by B.R. Haydon, Waiting for the Times, in which one gentle-
man impatiently covets the broadsheet in the hands of another, anxious not
to remain ‘absent from the imagined community of VIP readership’ (p. 14). As
Curran (1981a) notes, attempts by the British ruling class to deny this level of
power and influence through the media to others by imposing stamp duties
and by harshly enforcing laws of libel and sedition, paradoxically also helped
the nineteenth-century radical press (like The Poor Man’s Guardian and the
Northern Star) to flourish by slowing ‘the development of a mass market for
newspapers, and consequently the development of expensive print technology
to service it, while the duty on advertisements limited the growth of advertising
expenditure on the popular press’ (p. 25). Campaigns against ‘the taxes on