Chapter 1
It was a happy chance that took me to see Copenhagen, a play that re-enacts, from different perspectives, fateful interchanges between a Danish and a German physicist during the 1930s and 1940s. It gave me the idea of presenting British media history as a series of competing narratives, in the opening chapter of my book, Media and Power (Curran 2002). The book was translated into five languages and led directly to this volume, which explores media history in terms of my proposed ‘rival’ narratives.
In adopting an unconventional formula for a literature review, I was responding to what seemed to me to be three underlying problems. British media history is highly fragmented, being subdivided by period, medium and interpretive tradition. It is often narrowly centred on media institutions and content, leaving the wider setting of society as a shadowy background. And media history has not become as central in media studies as one might expect, given that it pioneered the study of the media. So I was looking for a way of integrating medium history into a general account of media development, connecting these to the ‘mainframe’ of general history and conveying how media history illuminates the role of the media in society – in the present, as well as in the past.
In returning to the subject of my essay some six years after it was first written, I shall attempt to do two things. I will briefly restate the essay’s central themes, although in a new way by concentrating primarily on recent research. I will also suggest, with great diffidence, possible new directions in which media history might develop in the future, including the reclaiming of ‘lost narratives’.
Any review of British media history must begin with its leading and longest established interpretation – the liberal narrative. This was first scripted, in its initial form, in the nineteenth century, and comes out of the hallowed tradition of ‘constitutional’ history which examines the development of Britain’s political system from Anglo-Saxon times to the present.
Key landmarks in Britain’s constitutional evolution are said to be the defeat of absolutist monarchy, the establishment of the rule of law, the strengthening of parliament and the introduction of mass democracy in five, cautious instalments. It is also claimed that the media acquired a ‘constitutional’ role by becoming the voice of the people and a popular a check on government.
This constitutional elevation is usually recounted in terms of two intertwined narrative threads. The first of these records that the press became free of government control by the mid-nineteenth century, and its emancipation was followed by the liberation of film and broadcasting in the mid-twentieth century. The second thread is concerned with how independent media empowered the people. Recent historical work has focused on the latter theme, so this is what we shall concentrate upon.
There is broad agreement among liberal media historians that the rise of a more independent press changed the tenor and dynamics of English politics. Newspapers increased their political content during the eighteenth century and successfully defied the ban on the reporting of parliament during the 1760s. This enabled newspapers to shine a low wattage light on the previously private world of aristocratic politics. People outside the political system could observe, through the press, factional battles among their rulers. How spectators reacted to these battles began to matter, as increasing references in the later eighteenth century to the wider public testify. In a more general sense, the rise of the press was part of a profound shift, in which it came to be accepted that the general public had the right to debate and evaluate the actions of their rulers. Some publications also directly attacked corruption and oligarchy, functioning as pioneer watchdogs monitoring the abuse of official power. In short, the growth of public disclosure through the press rendered the governmental system more open and accountable.1
The expansion of the press after the end of licensing in 1695 also contributed, it is argued, to the building of a representative institution. During the eighteenth century, newspapers mushroomed in different parts of the country and expanded their readership. An increased number of newspapers published views as well as news reports, seeking to speak for their readers. By the 1850s, following a period of rapid expansion and enhanced independence, the press allegedly came of age as an empowering agency. Its thunder echoed down the corridors of power.
However, the central unanswered question at the heart of this eloquent liberal narrative is precisely who was being represented by this ‘empowering’ press. A much favoured answer, over a quarter of a century ago, was the dynamic forces of the ‘new society’, that is to say primarily the middle and working classes in the expanding urban centres of the ‘first industrial nation’.2 This interpretation stressed the progressive nature of the evolving press, the way in which it broke free from the political agenda of the landed elite and supported campaigns to reform the institutions of British society. Indeed, in some versions of this argument, the growing power of the press helped to usher in a new political order that reflected the changed balance of social forces in British society.
This beguiling interpretation has been undermined from two different directions. Revisionist histories of nineteenth-century Britain increasingly emphasize continuity rather than radical change. They point to the embedded nature of the ancien regime before the extension of the franchise; the powerful pull of Anglicanism, localism and tradition; the incremental, uneven nature of the industrial revolution; and, above all, the landed elite’s continued dominance of political life until late into the nineteenth century.3 Meanwhile, historical research has drawn attention to the continuing importance of the conservative press (which greatly strengthened in the last quarter of the eighteenth century), the diversity of the nineteenth-century newspapers and the tenuous evidence that the press strongly influenced political elites and public policy, save in special circumstances (Black 2001). The thesis that an independent press, representative of a transformed society, helped to forge a new political order now looks distinctly unconvincing.
So whom did the press represent? The undermining of the claim that the later Hanoverian press championed a progressive social alliance has encouraged a return to a traditionalist Whig view of the press as the voice of an indeterminate ‘public’. Typical of this shift is Hannah Barker’s (2000) now standard textbook which argues that newspapers gained a larger, more socially diverse readership and came to be shaped primarily by their customers. ‘The importance of sales to newspaper profits’, she writes, ‘forced papers to echo the views of their readers in order to thrive’ (ibid.: 4). By 1855, she concludes, ‘the newspaper press in England was largely free of government interference and was able – with some justification – to proclaim itself as the fourth estate of the British constitution’ as it informed and represented public opinion (ibid.: 222).
However, some liberal historians remain rightly uneasy about viewing the press as the voice of an undefined public. Jeremy Black, for example, argues that ‘the press was at best a limited guide to the opinions of the public’ and should be viewed as connecting to ‘public opinions rather than public opinion’ (Black 2001: 107). This more nuanced view enables him to conclude that ‘public culture’ (in which the press was central) became less representative of political difference after the 1850s (ibid.: 192). Other liberal historians point to the growing interpenetration of journalism and politics in the second half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century when much of the national press became an extension of the party system (Seymour-Ure 1977; Boyce 1978). The liberal historian Stephen Koss (1981/1984) even argues that the British press did not become representative of the public until the late 1940s and 1950s when national newspapers allegedly shed their close party attachments.
But if the Whig conception of the press as a fourth estate looks vulnerable, there is another interpretation waiting in the wings. In 1982, Brian Harrison wrote an erudite essay assessing the role of the pressure group periodical in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He showed that these modest, and widely overlooked, publications helped to sustain public interest groups ‘through three major functions: inspirational, informative and integrating’ (Harrison 1982: 282). They inspired some converts to the cause; they armed activists with factual ammunition and sustained commitment; and they sometimes helped to unify reforming movements. By contributing to the functioning and effectiveness of pressure groups, the minority political press contributed to the development of a pluralist democracy.
This is an important line of argument that can now be extended, with the help of more recent research, to the earlier period. The eighteenth-century press provided the oxygen of publicity for political campaigning centred on petitions, addresses, instructions (to MPs), public meetings and concerted demonstrations (Brewer 1976; Black 2002; Rogers 2006). These fostered a ‘modern’ style of politics based on public discussion and participation, rather than on personal relationships, clientelist networks and social deference. Sections of the press aided this new politics by conferring prominence on leading campaigners, by communicating their arguments and demands and by mobilizing public support. They contributed in other words to the building of an infrastructure of representation based on collective organizations.
In the nineteenth century, radical newspapers contributed to the growth of trade unions; reformist publications sustained a growing multiplicity of interest groups; and a new, party-aligned press helped to transform aristocratic factions in parliament into mass political parties. This last development – often attracting disapproval from liberal press historians – represented a crucial contribution to the building of a key institution of democracy. Political parties became key co-ordinating organizations within the British political system: they aggregated social interests, formulated political programmes that distributed costs and redistributed resources across society, and defined political choices for the electorate.4
A view of the press as an agency contributing to the building of civil society is subtly different from, and more persuasive than, a traditional conception of the press as the ventriloquist of the public. Yet, arguments and evidence supporting this alternative interpretation are to be found in numerous radical as well as liberal accounts (for example, Hollis 1970 and Black 2002). These portray the press as contributing to the development of civil society organizations through which different publics were represented. Implicitly, they also depict civil society rather than the press as the main locus of representation.
Mark Hampton (2004) has adopted a questioning view of traditional liberal press history in another way. In a notable book, he documents the mid-Victorian elite vision of an educative press that would recruit large numbers of people to ‘politics by discussion’. This gave way, he shows, to growing disenchantment when newspapers became more commercial and sensational, and large numbers of people turned away from ‘liberal’ enlightenment. After 1880, the educational ideal was increasingly replaced by a view of the press as a representative institution – something that Hampton, drawing on radical press history, largely rejects.
His chapter in this volume can be read as an account-settling epilogue to his book. In effect, he concludes that the twentieth-century press may not have measured up to the unreal expectations of Victorian visionaries, nor fulfilled the heroic destiny assigned to it in Whig history, yet neither should the press’s democratic role be written off as an illusion. There were times during the twentieth century – most notably during the South African War, the onset of the Cold War in the 1940s and the 1970s debate about economic management – when the British press offered multiple perspectives. This enriched public debate and manifestly contributed to the functioning of democracy.
Some liberal historians also argue that the educational mission of the press may have faltered, but it was absorbed by radio and television. The rise of public service broadcasting, it is claimed, diminished the knowledge gap between elites and the general public, aided reciprocal communication between social groups and fostered the development of a public interestoriented, policy-based discourse of democratic debate.5
The countercharge to this is that public service broadcasting was locked into a paternalistic style of journalism, a view that is in effect endorsed in Hugh Chignell’s essay in this book. However, his contention is that BBC radio introduced more popular styles of journalism, particularly during the 1960s, in response to social change, competition and the possibilities created by new technology. This popularization produced a furious reaction from elite critics, who were placated in the 1970s by the development of a more analytical, research-based form of journalism on BBC Radio 4. The implication of this study is that the BBC learnt to develop different registers of journalism, which responded to the divergent orientations of different audiences.
Liberal media historians usually shrug off criticism by ignoring it. Both Hampton and Chignell are unusual in that they incorporate critical arguments from different intellectual traditions. In doing so, they provide more guarded and persuasive liberal histories.
The dominance of the liberal narrative is now challenged by the rise of feminist media history. This argues that the media did not become fully ‘independent’ when they became free of government, because they remained under male control. And far from empowering the people, the media contributed to the oppression of half the population. This feminist interpretation is thus not merely different from the liberal one but directly contradicts it.
It comes out of a historical tradition that documents the subordination of women in the early modern period when wives, without ready access to divorce, could be lawfully beaten and confined by their husbands, and when women did not have the same social standing or legal rights as men. It describes the struggle for women’s emancipation and advance as a qualified success story in which women gained new legal protections, greater independence and improved opportunities, but in a context where there is not yet full gender equality. Its account of the development of media history is told as an accompaniment to this narrative.
Feminist media history is now the fastest growing version of media history. So, this return visit will focus primarily on recent feminist media research that is revising the pioneer version of feminist media history.
This pioneer version argued that popular media indoctrinated women into accepting a subordinate position in society. It did this primarily by portraying men and women as having different social roles, with men as breadwinners and women as mothers and housewives. As the Ladies Cabinet, a leading women’s journal, apostrophized in 1847: woman ‘is given to man as his better angel…to make home delightful and life joyous’ and serve as a ‘mother to make citizens for earth’ (cited in White 1970: 42). This understanding of the proper role of women was justified in terms of the ‘natural’ differences between the sexes, established by divine providence. During the course of the nineteenth century, this gender discourse was given a turbo-boost by being articulated to discourses of class and progress. Images of femininity were linked to those of elegant affluence, while understandings of domestic duty were associated with the moral improvement of society. Traditional gender norms were upheld by family custom, peer group pressure and education, and rendered still more coercive by being reproduced in mass entertainment – including media produced especially for women.
This pioneer version also stresses the underlying continuity of media representations of gender from the nineteenth century through to the late twentieth century. The main concerns of women were defined, according to this account, as courtship, marriage, motherhood, home-making and looking good. There were minor shifts of emphasis over the years (for example, a stress on being a professional housewife and mother in the 1930s, ‘make do and mend’ in the 1940s and ‘shop and spend’ in the 1950s). But the central message remained, it is argued, essentially the same. Women’s concerns were projected as being primarily romantic and domestic; men and women were depicted as being innately different; and women who transgressed gender norms were generally portrayed in an unfavourable light. The functionalist cast of this argument is typified by Janet Thumim’s analysis of postwar film. ‘Our exploration of popular films’, she concludes, ‘shows that screen representations in the period 1945–65 performed a consistently repressive function in respect of women. There are, simply, no depictions of autonomous, independent women either inside or outside the structure of the family, who survive unscathed at the narrative’s close’ (Thumim 1992: 210). Popular media, in short, consistently sustained patriarchy.
This stress on the continuity of social control is now being challenged within the feminist tradition. First, revisionist research is drawing attention to women’s active resistance to patriarchal domination through the creation of their own media.6 In particular, Michelle Tusan shows that a women’s press grew out of a dense matrix of women’s associations and single-issue campaigns in Victorian Britain. Originating in the 1850s, the women’s press confounded Lord Northcliffe’s observation that ‘women can’t write and don’t want to read’ (cited in Tusan 2005: 99) by gaining a significant readership before the First World War. Its leading publications reported news that was not covered in the mainstream press, developed women-centred political agendas and advanced alternative understandings of society. Even when the women’s press was in decline during the 1920s, it still boasted the early Time and Tide, a weekly that published a satirical ‘Man’s Page’ and thoughtful commentary by leading feminists from Virginia Woolf to Rebecca West. Eclipsed in the 1930s, the women’s press was reborn in the 1970s.
Second, revisionist research argues that representations of gender changed in meaningful ways in response to wider changes in society. Thus, Adrian Bingham (2004) attacks the standard view that the popular press sought to contain the advance of women during the interwar period. A narrow focus on women’s pages, he argues, ignores the diversity of viewpoints that were expressed in the main body of popular daily papers. Although reactionary sentiments were sometimes voiced, the prevailing view expressed in the interwar press was that there should be no going back to the prewar era. Women’s increased freedom from restrictive social codes and dress was generally welcomed; successful women in public and professional life were depicted both prominently and positively; the greater independence, assertiveness and athleticism of ‘modern women’ was widely presented as being part of a generational change and an inevitable step towards greater gender convergence; there was an increased stress on the need for a companionate marriage and for an appropriate adjustment of traditional male behaviour; and women were invested, in a variety of ways, with greater prestige (not least as newly enfranchised citizens).
However, this scholarly study acknowledges that change was not unidirectional or across the board. Fashion, housewifery and motherhood still dominated the women’s pages. The women’s movement was under-reported; feminism itself was frequently said to be outdated and ‘superfluous’; and the Rothermere press opposed votes for women under thirty. Women were more often presented in sexualized ways, which had no counterpart for men. But, although Bingham’s assessment stresses complexity and diversity, his conclusion is that the interwar popular press adopted, overall, a more enlightened view of gender.
Third, revisionist research has drawn attention to the ambiguity or ‘textual tension’ of some media representations. This argument is not new and can be found in earlier studies of eighteenth-century ballads (Dugaw 1989), nineteenth-century women’s magazines (Beetham 1996) and twentieth-century women’s films (Landy 1991), which sometimes provided, it is argued, a space in which women could imagine a different gender order or express a veiled form of protest. But while this argument is not original, it has become both more prominent and more explicitly linked to social change. For example, Deborah Philips and Ian Haywood (1998) draw attention to popular 1950s women’s novels that featured women doctors. These heroines were held up for admiration and were even portrayed as builders of a brave new world inaugurated by the post-1945 welfare state. But they were also presented as being traditionally feminine, and their careers were implicitly viewed as being an extension of women’s traditional caring role. These books, according to Philips and Haywood, were pleasurable partly because they offered a mythological resolution to conflicting impulses, one embracing change and the other harking back to the past.
Deborah Philips (2006) extends this argument in a subsequent study. In her account, 1980s ‘sex and shopping’ novels celebrated women’s advance, with-out questioning the structures of power that held women back. 1990s ‘Aga saga’ novels reverted to domesticated romance, while expressing unmistake-able dissatisfaction with contemporary men. And some early 2000s ‘chick lit’ novels depicted successful women in search of still more successful men. Philips argues that these novels responded, in different ways, to contradictions in feminine sensibility: between hoping for a future where things would be better for women and clinging to aspects of the past.
Fourth, revisionist research points to a different denouement of the feminist narrative. Instead of arguing that media representations of gender remained fundamentally the same, the case is now being made more often that a sea-change took place from the early 1980s onwards. A growing number of TV series – made or shown in Britain – featured independent women with successful careers as sympathetic objects of identification and portrayed them as being strong, capable and appealing (Cooke 2003; Lotz 2006). Teen magazines emerged that expressed female sexuality in new, more open ways (McRobbie 1996). But traditionalist representations of gender also persisted (Macdonald 1995). Depictions could also mislead by implying that gender equality had been achieved: indeed, as one analyst wryly notes, women in the fictional world of television have advanced further than women in real life (Boyle 2005). Some seemingly ‘progressive’ lifestyle journalism also had conservative undertones, urging women to take control of their lives in individualistic ways rather than seeking to change society through collective action (Blackman 2006). The complexity of the media shift that took place, and of responses to it, is perhaps best conveyed by the popular TV series Sex and the City (1998–2004). It is interpreted very differently: as a beacon of ‘third wave’ feminism (Henry 2004) and as a return to a reactionary past (McRobbie 2005). But, whichever view is taken, the series staged a running debate about what women should expect out of life between four friends, each of whom initially espoused a different position: homecentred traditionalism, romantic idealism, sex without commitment and qualified feminism. This was part of its appeal. It is also what made it emblematic of a more questioning orientation towards gender relations in the media at the turn of the century, compared with even twenty years before.
This feminist narrative, in its revised form, does not dispute the past role of the media in socializing women into the norms of patriarchy. But the contours of this narrative, and its ending, are changing in response to new research. David Deacon’s contribution to this book can be read as contributing to this revisionist drift. He documents how female journalists, mostly from privileged backgrounds and with influential male patrons, made a breakthrough in the 1930s by breaching a traditional male preserve: the reporting of war. Even so, female journalists were still encouraged to concentrate on the everyday lives of ordinary people and to report war as an extended human interest story.
Michael Bailey’s essay in this book sits more uneasily within the revisionist feminist canon. He argues that the BBC sought to educate women into being efficient housewives and informed mothers during the interwar period. However, the BBC’s briefing was more than just helpful advice because it was also a way of making women internalize a sense of domestic duty and of feeling guilty if they fell short of the standards expected of ‘modern women’. The BBC’s domestic education is thus viewed by him as psychologically coercive and strongly conservative in reaffirming women’s place in the home. This is a subtly different interpretation from Adrian Bingham’s ‘take’ on similar press content during the same period, which he characterizes as an extension of newspapers’ discourse of modernity that rejected a return to the reactionary past, and as advice that rendered domestic labour ‘more acceptable to the “modern woman”’ (Bingham 2004: 105).
It is an indication of feminist history’s growing influence that both contributors to this section of the book are men, as this tradition was once largely the preserve of women. Research is also developing into the evolution of masculinity in a way that shadows, and supports, the feminist narrative.7 In short, a new way of viewing the media’s evolution has come into being that takes account of one of the most important social developments of the last 150 years – the advance of women. It requires media history to be rewritten.
The liberal tradition is also assailed from another direction. Writers of radical media history attack the same vulnerable point of the liberal narrative as feminist critics: the assumption that the media switched allegiances from government to the people when the media became ‘free’ from official control. Radical media history argues that, on the contrary, mainstream media remained integrated into the underlying power structure and continued to support the social order.8
Radical media historians seek to understand the part played by the media in this ‘containment’. In particular, they seek to explain why the media supported the social order when they were no longer under direct government control. In essence, their answer boils down to three arguments. The market developed as a system of control (not as an engine of freedom, as in the liberal narrative). The rise of mass market newspaper entry costs in the period 1850–1918 contributed to the consolidation of unrepresentative, business control of the press (and also of the music hall and, later, film and television industries). The media’s growing dependence on advertising also disadvantaged the left, while the development of media concentration curtailed choice.
Elites exerted influence on the media through state institutions, principally by informal processes rather than legal coercion. A professionalized apparatus of news management developed, beginning with the introduction of the lobby system in 1885 and culminating in the enormous expansion of state public relations in the period after 1980. Coalitions between political factions in government and press controllers were constructed, as during the Chamberlain and Thatcher eras. Above all, elites set the parameters of political debate in broadcasting through their ascendancy over state institutions, especially parliament and the civil service.
Dominant groups also influenced the culture of society and, in this way, shaped the content of the media. The prevailing ideas of the time, from the intensification of nationalism in the eighteenth century, the rise of imperialism in the nineteenth century, the diffusion of anti-communism during the Cold War to the triumphalist neo-liberalism that followed, have tended to support, it is argued, the existing disposition of power and privilege. Media staffs were controlled, in this view, through the air they breathed.
This narrative is recounted, in part, in Julian Petley’s essay in this volume. It continues to be enriched by new studies – to take just three such studies almost at random: further research into the radical press during its heroic Chartist phase (Allen and Rushton 2005); an illuminating study of the role of the media in the transformation of Queen Victoria into the ‘Mother of her People’ and symbol of imperial and industrial greatness (Plunkett 2003); and a radical, Foucauldian analysis of how the BBC sought to ‘train and reform the unemployed as docile but efficient citizens’ during the 1930s (Bailey 2007a: 464).
This historical tradition has unstitched the more vulnerable seams of traditional liberal history. It also makes an insightful contribution to a historical understanding of why socialism was defeated in Britain. But it suffers from one central defect: its failure to acknowledge that the reformist heirs of the early working class movement succeeded in the twentieth century in significantly modifying the social system. Moreover, a progressive alliance did so partly as a consequence of securing an extensive hearing – even support – from a section of the media system. Simplistic arguments about the ‘refeudalization of society’ after 1850, linked to a very simplistic sketch of a subordinated media system, as in Jurgen Habermas’ (1989 [1962]) classic radical account no longer seem satisfactory – even to the author himself (Habermas 1992). In short, the traditional radical narrative needs to pay more attention to political success rather than to failure, and to the media’s involvement in progressive change. To this, we shall return.
The populist tradition of media history has an ambiguous relationship to the liberal orthodoxy. It describes the development of the media as a prolonged escape story – not from government but from a cultural elite that sought to impose its taste and judgements on the people. The denouement of this populist history is that the people obtained more of what they wanted from the media: entertainment rather than high culture and uplift.
This interpretation connects to two themes in the general history of Britain. One documents the erosion of deference to authority (whether based on birth, wealth, occupation or age). The other charts the development of a market society in which life became better, and class dominance was subverted by consumer power. These two themes are entwined to provide the filament of the populist media narrative. This describes a popular revolt against a cultural hierarchy, and claims that it succeeded as a consequence of the ‘egalitarian’ power of the consumer in a world made better by mass consumption.
The core of this narrative is based on specialist studies that record the triumphs of the entertainment-seeking public over high-minded Victorian elites and their heirs: registered for example in the advent of the ‘new journalism’ in the 1880s, the stocking of light fiction in public libraries, the expansion of popular music on radio and the cumulative popularization of television. This narrative has as an important subsidiary theme a celebration of the pleasure people derived from the media.
New studies continue to fill out this narrative. Thus, a recent study of the rise of a consumer society in nineteenth-century Britain portrays the growth of popular journalism as part of an efflorescence of ‘bright colour, light and entertainment’ (Flanders 2006: xvii) in which life became more fun, fuller and richer – enhanced by the retail revolution and the rise of football, mass tourism, bestselling books and the music hall.
Similarly, another populist study argues that the expansion of popular music through the gramophone, radio and dance hall immeasurably improved the quality of life in interwar Britain, just as cheap food, electricity and better housing also did. The enormous pleasure derived from popular music was allegedly a direct consequence of its commercialization. ‘In an important sense’, writes James Nott (2002: 227), ‘the application of the profit motive to cultural production was democratic’. It meant that music was directed towards what people wanted, rather than what disapproving – and sometimes snobbish and racist – cultural gatekeepers thought was worthy. Nott also argues that commercial popular music during this period had vitality, affirmed the ordinary, connected to popular romanticism and produced sounds and songs that have lasted.
Jeffrey Millard’s essay in this volume comes from the same intellectual home. He documents the sometimes patrician, paternalistic and platitudinous thoughts of those who shaped, in the 1950s and 1960s, a public service broadcasting regime that embraced both commercial and public television. The advent of digital television is now undermining, he argues, this paternalist framework of regulation, and is offering people more of what they want.
The populist tradition of media history also continues to spawn celebrations of popular media content, as being connected to the real lived experiences of ordinary people and as validating popular taste (for example, Hills 2005; Wilson 2005). The assumption is that it was in the public interest for the media to have provided whatever the public enjoyed: the customer was always right. But this tradition’s narrow focus on consumer satisfaction disregards the media’s role in enabling democratic self-government (prompting clashes with liberal historians),9 classifies our concerns about the media’s support of inequality (causing conflicts with radical historians) and sometimes fails to engage adequately with issues of cultural quality (leading to disputes with post-Leavisites). Yet, despite its flaws, populist media history illuminates the life-enhancing pleasures generated by the rise of the media.
The liberal, feminist, radical and even populist traditions belong recognizably to the same intellectual family. They recount media history in relation to the evolution of different forms of power – political, social, economic and cultural – and intersect or confront one another, either implicitly or explicitly. However, there are three other narratives that have only a tangential relationship to this core of media history. Yet, these offer versions of media history that are illuminating.
The anthropological narrative, inspired by the insight that the nation is partly a cultural construct, explores the role of the media in fostering national identity. The United Kingdom is a relatively ‘new’ nation: created formally (although there had been a prior build-up) through the political union of England and Wales with Scotland in 1707 and the constitutional union of Britain and Ireland in 1801 (followed by a messy divorce with most of Ireland in 1920–21). The emergent media system, it is argued, played a significant part in bonding this collective of nations and forging a sense of being ‘British’.
Thus, print media helped to foster a British national identity in the eighteenth century principally through Protestant bigotry and antagonism towards Catholic France (with whom Britain was at war for much of the century) (Colley 1992). This identity became overlaid subsequently by a strong sense of imperial superiority, expressed in a hubristic and racist understanding of national character, as well as by widely diffused images of Britain as a rural arcadia that persisted even when Britain became highly urbanized (Mackenzie 1984; Richards 1997). However, the decline of Protestantism and the dismantlement of the Empire after 1945 undermined the traditional conception of Britishness, while conventional visualizations of Britain as an unchanging Constable painting did not accord with a new stress on modernity. With difficulty, and still in a contested form, a weaker national identity emerged after the 1960s, a time when the United Kingdom joined the European Union and was exposed to increased globalizing influences. This took the form of a multicultural, multiethnic, plural understanding of Britishness. Thus, the optimistic claim of this media narrative is that British national identity, forged originally through religious hatred and racist imperialism, evolved to include people of all religions and none, and to embrace people of different ethnic backgrounds.
Recent research has extended this argument, giving it greater depth and detail. For example, James Chapman’s (2005b) examination of British historical films between the 1930s and 1990s argues persuasively that these films say as much about the time they were made as about the past. Among other things, his study draws attention to a deepening sense of national decline during the 1950s. Richard Weight’s (2003) study of patriotism between 1940 and 2000 describes the attempt made in the 1980s, with strong press support, to reverse this sense of national decline through the projection of Britain as a recuperated nation, the victor of a short, exciting war (Falklands), and regenerated through a return to traditional values (with an implied single ethnicity). This failed to capture permanently the national imagination, Weight argues, and gave way by the 1990s to a looser, more inclusive and multiple understanding of Britishness. However, a sense of being British has always been mediated through other identities, including class, gender, region and membership of the nations of Scotland, Wales and Ulster. As Paul Ward (2004) argues, there is an underlying continuity in the fractured and mediated nature of British national identity between 1870 and the present.
Indeed, more critical attention is now being given to media and identity in the ‘national regions’. This has produced groundbreaking research into Englishness. Richard Colls (2002) argues that a sense of Englishness was buried inside the mythologizing of the ‘Anglo-British imperial state’ and came to be viewed as synonymous with Britishness. But this equation of England and Britain was undermined first by the death of imperialism (in which all countries of the United Kingdom had a shared investment) and then by political devolution. However, the English found difficulty in expressing their subnational identity partly because readily available images of England were so outdated. As Richard Colls eloquently puts it, ‘island races, garden hearts, industrial landscapes, ecclesiological villages, fixed properties, ordered relationships, native peoples, cultural survivals, northern grit, southern charm, rural redemption, rule Britannia – all these discourses persist, but with less conviction’ (Colls 2002: 380). This portrait of ‘Englishness’ as a buried, inarticulate consciousness accords with Krishan Kumar’s (2003) subsequent study, which argues that an English identity was deliberately repressed for the sake of imperial and national unity (with clear parallels to Austria and Russia).
Historical exploration of Englishness has been accompanied by renewed interest in Welsh and Scots national identity (and a boom in good, revisionist books about Irish nationalism that lies outside this review). Especially notable is a study of the media in Wales (Barlow et al. 2005). The Welsh region of the BBC (radio) was established in 1937; a Welsh ITV company in 1958; a unified Welsh BBC television service in 1964; and the Welsh television channel, Sianel Pedwar Cymru (S4C), in 1982. All these initiatives came about partly as a consequence of Welsh nationalist pressure and helped to sustain a distinctive Welsh identity. S4C played an especially important role in supporting the declining Welsh language (which is now spoken only by 20 per cent of Welsh people).
But these developments should not obscure the extent of national (and predominantly English) domination of Britain’s media system. In 2002, 85 per cent of daily morning papers bought in Wales came from across the border (Barlow et al. 2005: 47). In 2003, less than 10 per cent of the output of BBC1 and 2 and ITV1 (HTV) was produced specifically for Welsh consumption, and much of this was accounted for by news (Barlow et al. 2005: 144, table 6.2). While emphasizing the complex factors in play in sustaining rival national identities, this study highlights just how important the national integration of the United Kingdom’s media system has been in supporting an overarching British national identity.
The increased attention given to ‘regional nationalism’ is thus an important feature of the way in which the anthropological narrative is developing. This is probably a response to the revival of separatism and the establishment of the Scottish Parliament and Welsh National Assembly in 1999. Day’s and Medhurst’s essays in this book reflect this shift of focus.
The libertarian media narrative arises from different developments in British society. There was a sustained decline in religious belief and observance from the later nineteenth century onwards. The increasing de-Christianization of Britain, combined with greater individualism fostered by market development, contributed to the advance of social liberalism in the 1960s. This was fiercely resisted by traditionalists who sought to turn the clock back. A titanic battle between social conservatives and social liberals ensued that provides the central theme of the libertarian narrative for the second half of the twentieth century.
The best documented part of this narrative is provided by research into the social reaction that took place against 1960s social liberalism. This highlights the role of the media in generating moral panics about a succession of deviant groups from the 1960s through to the 1980s. The media presented these groups in stereotypical and exaggerated ways; represented them to be part of a deeper social malaise; mobilized support for authoritarian retribution; and recharged in promethean ways social conservatism (Hall et al. 1978; Cohen 1980; Golding and Middleton 1982; Hall 1988).
Recent work, within the libertarian narrative, updates this narrative and offers a different provisional ending. Thus, one study examines the emergence of a new kind of left in municipal politics – owing more to 1960s counterculture than to Marxism or Methodism – which was symbolically annihilated in the media during the 1980s. Yet, its political agenda and some of its once controversial policies became almost mainstream in the early 2000s when the 1960s generation gained control of leading public institutions. This outcome ‘was because in Britain – unlike America – progressives were winning major battles in an unacknowledged culture war’ (Curran et al. 2005: 286).
If this study suggests that the tide of social reaction receded after the 1980s (although this did not extend to issues arising from immigration and terrorism during the early 2000s), another survey reappraises the concept of moral panic, the deus ex machina of the radical libertarian narrative. Chas Critcher (2003) argues that some moral panics were prevented through opposition and expert intervention (as in the 1980s, over AIDS); some were deflected from authoritarian repression towards harm minimization (as in the 1990s, over raves and ecstasy); and some led to ritualistic illusions of effective action (as when the complexities of child abuse were reduced, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, to a hue and cry against ‘stranger paedophiles’). The concept of moral panic, concludes Chas Critcher, is an ‘ideal type’ which, in reality, takes different forms and has different outcomes. This is a significantly different position from the depiction of the moral panic as a mechanism for the reassertion of the ‘control culture’ that featured in his earlier co-authored work (Hall et al. 1978).
The libertarian narrative exists only in embryonic form and is in need of more work and clearer definition. However, one can obtain a glimpse of how it can be projected back in time through research into media representations of our groups. These helped to establish boundaries in terms of what society was willing to accept or tolerate.
In the case of sexual minorities, there has been a clear change over time. During the 1880s, there was a press-supported outcry against gay men (accompanied by the strengthening of penal legislation), followed by a comparable crusade against lesbians in the 1920s. Representations of sexual minorities continued to be strongly hostile until there was a softening of media homophobia in the 1960s (accompanied by the partial de-criminalization of gay sex). Even so, gay people were often presented on British television in the 1970s as being either silly or threatening. The 1980s witnessed a dichotomization in TV drama: positive portrayals of gay men tended to be confined to those who appeared reassuringly asexual, while the sexualized were more often projected in strongly negative ways. It was only at the turn of the century that gay people were more often featured as ‘ordinary’ (Gleeber 2004; cf. Cooke 2003). The symbolic turning point was the British television series, Queer as Folk (1999–2000), a soap opera set in Manchester’s gay village. It portrayed, in bright primary colours, a young generation of gay men as intelligent, attractive, heterogeneous and ‘normal’: free of shame or concealment and relatively untouched by the stigmata of traditional celluloid representation. The perspective of the series’ narrative, the gaze of its camera, even its sex scenes normalized rather than pathologized being gay. It marked a mile-stone of social change, followed by legislation in the early 2000s that ended some forms of continuing discrimination against gays and lesbians.
Another way in which the libertarian narrative can be extended over time is through studies of moral regulation of the media. There was draconian censorship in the first half of the twentieth century (especially in relation to sex, morality and bad language), but this tended to diminish overall during the second half. Here, the two relevant studies in this volume, by Bingham and Holmes, complexify the libertarian argument in an interesting way. They extend an understanding of moral regulation to include issues such as protection of privacy; reveal that the impulse to censor came from the left as well as the right; and show that the media deflected these assaults on their freedom partly through self-censorship.
The last of the alternative interpretations of media history, technological determinism, transcends national frontiers and represents a proposed ‘master narrative’. Instead of seeing the media as being linked to change, it portrays the media – or rather its communications technology – as being the origin and fount of change.
There are a number of classic studies advancing this position. Innis (1951) argues that each new medium of communication changed the organization of society by altering dimensions of time and space. Eisenstein (1979) maintains that the printing press contributed to cultural advance in early modern Europe by preserving and making more widely available the intellectual achievements of the past. McLuhan (1964) claims that the rise of electronic media fostered a ‘retribalized’, syncretic culture by simultaneously re-engaging the human senses. Meyrowitz (1985) argues that the universality of television changed social relations by demystifying the ‘other’.
This tradition is now being renewed through accounts which argue that the internet is fundamentally changing the world. The internet, we are told, is ‘blowing to bits’ traditional business strategy (Evans and Wurster 2000); rejuvenating democracy (Tsagarousianou et al. 1998); empowering the people (Poster 1995); inaugurating a new era of global enlightenment (Stratton 1997); transforming human sensibility (Turkle 1997); rebuilding community (Rheingold 2000); generating a self-expressive culture (Anderson 2006); and undermining, with interactive television, established media empires (Negroponte 1996).
I have discussed technological determinism in relation to the internet elsewhere (Curran and Seaton 2003; Curran 2008), and there is not sufficient space here to do more than register briefly two points. First, the evidence strongly suggests that the offline world influences the online world – in particular its content and use – more than the other way round. Second, this should not lead us to accept a social determinist position, the mirror opposite of technological determinism, which is now gaining ground. This last sees the internet – and by implication all new communications technology – as merely an extension of society reproducing, in a closed loop, its culture and social relations. This misses the point that the specific attributes of internet technology (its international reach, cheapness, interactivity and hypertextuality) make a difference. It also tends to present society as a simplifying abstraction, instead of investigating the ways in which the architecture, content, use and influence of the internet have been shaped by interacting and contending forces within society that have evolved and changed over time.10
Wider issues in relation to new media are explored in three essays in this book. Scannell makes an eloquent case that communications technology – viewed in conjunction with technology in general – has built a better world, not least by extending communicative sensibility. Murdock and Pickering address one aspect of this claim, arguing that the telegraph and photography have not automatically promoted communication and understanding through killing distance: in fact, photography has sometimes impeded understanding through objectification, while the telegraph has been used to extend control. Blondheim concludes that the starting point of many influential accounts – their view of communications technology as autonomous – is misleading, weakening their claims.
Where does this leave us? The obvious next step is to construct alternative syntheses of the seven narratives in a battle of meta-narratives. However, rather than recapitulate my own outline version (Curran 2002), it is perhaps more useful to reflect upon what has been left out of this review.
I set about writing my original essay, after some initial difficulty, by listing on a sheet of paper key trends in British history and then reflecting upon what the available media historical literature said in relation to each of these. Some trends I had to omit because there was not enough evidence and argument to sustain a linked media historical account. The six trends that survived this winnowing process were: (1) national unification; (2) mass democracy; (3) defeat of socialism; (4) advance of women; (5) rise of consumer society; and (6) decline of moral traditionalism/religion.
But this leaves out important developments in the history of Britain in which the media played a part. It is worth drawing attention to four ‘lost narratives’, in particular, which failed to make the shortlist. They merit further investigation.
The most glaring omission is the building of the welfare state, linked to a ‘reformist’ narrative of media development. Adapting rather freely a celebrated essay by the social democratic theorist, T. H. Marshall (1950), it is possible to see British history as an evolving, collective struggle for securing human rights: civil rights (notably the right to assembly and equal justice), political rights (the right to vote), social rights (including access to free health care and social security) and cultural rights (including access to ‘cultural privilege’, public affairs information and symbolic representation). The first of these two struggles had been largely (but not wholly) won by 1918. The period from 1918 to the present marked the intensification of the collective battle for social and cultural entitlements. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century advances in social welfare were greatly extended in the 1940s to include state protection ‘from the cradle to the grave’. In the cultural sphere, nineteenth-century advances – free elementary schools, public libraries, parks, museums and galleries – were extended in the twentieth century through the expansion of free education, public service broadcasting, cultural subsidies and the creation of the free world wide web.
This historical perspective bears some resemblance to that proposed by Graham Murdock (1992, 1999). McKibbin’s fine study (1998) is a key source for this narrative, showing the way in which a solidaristic working class culture, supported by popular entertainment, reached its zenith of confidence and influence in the 1940s. Elements of this narrative are to be found in Curran and Seaton (2003), which dwells, in three chapters, on the early 1940s, a time when much of the media system (including a radicalised section of the wartime press) contributed to building a consensus in favour of a consolidated welfare state. This study also differentiates between the positive role of public service broadcasting (including regulated commercial TV) and the web and the negative role of a debased press, a theme partly shared with other histories (Eldridge et al. 1997; Williams 1998). This critical celebration of public service broadcasting is supported by other studies documenting the development of innovative public service TV journalism (Tracey 1983; Holland 2006), the BBC’s struggle to defend public service virtues under siege (Barnett and Curry 1994), public service television’s extension of symbolic representation in the second half of the twentieth century (Williams 2004) and, of course, Briggs’ (1961–95 [2000 reprint]) history of the BBC. More generally, there is a strong historical tradition of policy analysis (O’Malley 1994; Goodwin 1998; O’Malley and Soley 2000; Freedman 2003; Tunney 2007) that examines successful and failed attempts to reform the media and to resist neo-liberal transformation (although some of these authors would object vehemently to being characterized as ‘reformist’ historians). There are rich secondary materials available for the development of a reformist media history, especially in the twentieth century. But these are currently too fragmented and, more importantly, their perspectives are too internally divided for this proto-history to make it into the ‘canon’ of established media historical narratives. But there is a gap here that needs to be filled.
The second missing dimension is a narrative that describes the distributional battles between social classes in terms of power, status and material rewards, and describes the evolving role of the media in relation to these. Surveying the last two centuries, there have been two major losers: the aristocracy, which used to rule Britain (but does so no longer), and the working class, which was once a powerful political, economic and cultural force but has now contracted, subdivided and in important respects lost ground. The great victors have been key sectors of the middle class best adapted to the globalizing economy. A class media narrative can be constructed for the nineteenth century, but – because of the present state of research and shifting fashion – it loses coherence by the later twentieth century. In essence, this would be a more ambitious version of the radical narrative we have already.
The third lost dimension is the rise of the British economy (and associated gains in living standards and job creation) paired with an economic history of the British media. Britain became the ‘first industrial’ nation, was overtaken by the United States and then evolved into a prosperous service-based economy. This has parallels with the development of British media which it would be interesting to explore. Imperial Britain played a key role in the development of telegraph technology and of news agencies; the United States, not Britain, pioneered industrialized, mass journalism; Hollywood locked horns with, and defeated, the British film industry by 1910; Britain failed to capitalize on the construction of a pioneer digital computer in 1944 and its prominent role in the development of packet-switching network technology during the 1960s; yet, Britain became (and remains) the second biggest exporter of television programmes in the world and played a significant role in the development of the web. Whether similar processes were at work in the successes and failures of the British media, and of the British economy, remain a largely unexplored avenue of research. Stefan Schwarzkopf’s essay in this book, examining the context of the American takeover of the British advertising industry, is a pioneer contribution to this narrative.
A fourth theme was half in and half out of my review. This featured a technological determinist view of new communications technology in a supranational context. It was not possible to present an alternative version of this perspective in a UK context, given the existing nature of research. Good historical work has been done in this general area, but primarily limited to researching influences shaping communications technology, and their use, mostly in other countries.11 But it would be interesting to develop a nuanced account of how new communications technology changed British politics, culture and social relations.
In short, what I came up with was necessarily highly selective. It offered an account determined by what was available rather than what was needed. But, hopefully, its portrayal of how the media contributed to the making of modern Britain – as a series of competing narratives – will provoke further discussion and serve as an antidote to the mind-numbing narrowness of too much media history.
Of course, specialist studies provide the essential building blocks of all areas of enquiry. But it is also important to advance a tradition of media history that seeks ambitiously to situate historical investigation of the media in a wider societal context. In due course, this approach should widen the context still further through comparative research. There are a growing number of media historical studies, especially in America, that make explicit comparisons across national frontiers (for example, Starr 2004 and Nerone 2006). Pioneer comparative media histories (Briggs and Burke 2002/2005; Chapman 2005a) have now surfaced. However, the most ambitious of these (Briggs and Burke 2002/2005) falters when it enters the nineteenth century. Perhaps the next phase of comparative media history should begin by identifying key trends that leading western nations had in common, and recount the role of the media in relation to these. Indeed, the sequel to this admirable book might be called Narrating Western Media History, to be followed by a third volume entitled De-Westernizing Media History.
1 See in particular Harris (1996) and Barker (1998).
2 For example, Read (1961), Perkin (1969) and a more recent airing of this argument, Brett (1997).
3 Among others, Clark (1985), Price (1999) and Cannadine (2000).
4 Political theorists differ in where they locate political parties within their conceptual maps. Parties are perhaps best viewed as being half in and half out of civil society: indeed, ideally, conduits between civil society and the state.
5 The classic exposition of this interpretation is provided by Scannell (1992).
6 This is the key point made in DiCenzo’s (2004) critique of my original essay.
7 See, for example, the pioneering study by John Tosh (1999).
8 While space does not permit a full exposition of this and subsequent narratives, they are presented more fully (and more extensively sourced) in my original essay running to over fifty pages (Curran 2002).
9 See for example the elaborately polite debate between Wiener and Hampton in Hampton et al. (2006).
10 For a fine historical exemplification of this argument, see Turner (2006).
11 See, for example, Abbate (2000), Flichy (2002), Turner (2006) and Winston (1998). Only the last of these relates to the British context.