Page 45 - Sport Culture and the Media

26 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

knowledge’ were as much driven by desires for capital accumulation as by
appeals for freedom of thought and expression – the removal of many political
impediments to newspaper production allowed the economic power of ‘new
money’ entrepreneurs (especially press barons like Lord Northcliffe and, a
little later, Lords Beaverbrook and Rothermere) to assert itself. Thus, cheaper,
widely distributed papers, made attractive to advertisers by toning down
political rhetoric and to readers by sensational copy, edged out the radical,
‘disreputable’ press (Curran 1981b) and created and then serviced a different
market to that of ‘highbrow’ newspapers.
The new technological capabilities of the media meant that the content of
the popular ‘penny dreadful’ scandal sheets that were sold on the streets
could be readily disseminated in a manner that reflected the economic power
generated simply by the exposure of large numbers of people to imprecations to
buy products and services. The emerging ‘yellow press’ (associated in the USA
with Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst) was not much admired by
the guardians of nineteenth-century media morality but, just as occurs in the
contemporary world, the immediate riposte was that demonstrable public
demand for ‘bad’ journalism had to be satisfied, and that no group of privileged
individuals had the right to dictate what the ‘masses’ wanted to read and see.
Disputes over media morality and ethics, and especially their political and
economic power, are no less apparent long after the daily newspaper first made
its mark. Indeed, as Schultz argues, they may have been exacerbated in the
current ‘information age’:
As the engines of global economic growth switch from industrial to infor-
mation production, the rhetoric which, for two centuries, has legitimised
the media as more than just another business needs to be re-examined.
More than any other industry the media have been characterised by ‘deeply
ethical’ debates about role and responsibility – profit was never the sole
criteria [sic] on which the media were judged. But as the profits generated
by the media continue to grow the tensions between serving the public and
making money are also likely to escalate.
(Schultz 1994: 61)
This idea that the media are ‘not just another business’ sits particularly
uncomfortably with developments in the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries that have seen the media’s principal currency – information and
images – become also the prime unit of exchange, and the role of the media far
exceeds that of the idealized vocation of nineteenth-century quality journalism.
Indeed, the development of new media technologies such as the Internet have
not to date had the predicted impact of democratizing communication and
reducing media concentration, leading instead to converged media interests and