Chapter 13
The English Press, instead of enlightening, does, so far as it has any Power, keep the People in Ignorance. Instead of cherishing Notions of Liberty, it tends to the making of the people Slaves; instead of being their Guardian, it is the most efficient Instrument in the Hands of all those who oppress or wish to oppress Them.
William Cobbett (1807)
The idea of the press as a ‘fourth estate’ came to prominence during the nineteenth century. Its origin is unclear, but Robert Carlyle, writing in 1841, stated that ‘Burke said there were Three Estates in parliament; but in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all’; and his own 1837 work The French Revolution: A History referred to ‘A Fourth Estate of Noble Editors’. In 1855, The Times leader writer Henry Reeve wrote that ‘journalism is now truly an estate of the realm; more powerful than any of the other estates’ (quoted in Boyce 1978: 23); and the idea was satirized as arrogant and self-important by Trollope the same year in his novel The Warden.
In this essentially liberal view of the press, journalism is seen as a central component of democracy and, in particular, as a crucial check on the power of the state. Liberal theory holds that the right and duty of the press is to:
serve as an extralegal check on government…to keep officers of the state from abusing or exceeding their authority…to be the watchdog over the workings of democracy, ever vigilant to spot and expose any arbitrary or authoritarian practice…[and] to be completely free from control or domination by those elements it was to guard against.
Siebert et al. (1963: 56)
This is a position associated with figures as varied as David Hume, Tom Paine, Thomas Jefferson and James Mill, inter alia, and which still underpins much thinking about journalism today. The fourth estate view of journalism is a seductive one (not least for journalists themselves), but it is also highly questionable – in particular, its tendency to assume that it is the state that is today the greatest enemy of press freedom. Equally problematic is the fact that it is frequently (albeit implicitly) underpinned by a form of free market theory which assumes that, as long as the press is not shackled by state restrictions, the market will ensure that it reflects a wide range of views and interests. Newspapers that reflect readers’ interests will survive, because there is a market for them, and those that don’t, won’t. Newspapers submit themselves to the public judgement every day that they go on sale, unlike politicians who stand for election only occasionally. Thus, newspapers are actually more representative of the people than are MPs. However, as James Curran points out:
Concealed beneath the folds of these arguments, often well out of sight, is a contentious premise. Liberal theory assumes tacitly that press freedom is a property right exercised by publishers on behalf of society. According to this approach, publishers should be free to direct personally their newspapers, or delegate authority to others, as they see fit. What they do is consistent, ultimately, with the public interest since their actions are regulated by the free market. This ensures, in liberal theory, that the press is free, diverse and representative.
Curran and Seaton (2003: 346–47)
This view was clearly evident in the report of the final Royal Commission on the Press, which approvingly quoted Justice Wendell Holmes’ famous 1919 judgement that ‘the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market’ (1977: 109). The Commission itself stated that:
In the case of the press, with certain limited exceptions, no legal restriction is placed on the right to buy or launch a newspaper. The justification is that this freedom produces a sufficiently diverse press to satisfy the public interest by ensuring a broad spectrum of views, and at the same time meets the individual interest by enabling virtually anyone with a distinctive opinion to find somewhere to express it. Consequently, there is no specific obligation on editors or proprietors to have regard, in what they publish, to the need to meet either the public or the individual interest, since the invisible hand of the market is expected to fulfil both.
Royal Commission on the Press (1977: 9)
This view of the press, and specifically of press freedom and accountability, is still very much the dominant one in press and official circles in contemporary Britain. But it is possible to take a very different view, in which the British daily and Sunday national press, far from being a watchdog over the establishment, is actually a crucial part of it, and where market forces, far from being the guarantor of press freedom, are at least as great a threat to it as are controls and restrictions emanating directly from the state. Such a view of the press would be an example of what Curran (2002a) calls the ‘radical narrative’ of media history. And the purpose of this chapter is to resume that narrative – mostly through Curran’s own accounts of British press history and those of like-minded press historians – and then to suggest its continuing relevance to recent British press history.
In order to illustrate this narrative, Curran (2002a: 34) focuses on Habermas’ The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, which shows how ‘modern media fell under the sway of public relations, advertising and big business… encouraged consumer apathy, presented politics as a spectacle, and provided pre-packaged, convenience thought. The media, in short, managed the public rather than expressed the public will’. Organized commercial interests and an expanded state, often acting in concert, increasingly circumscribed the realm of the public; in political terms, straightforward control or patronage of the press by political parties was replaced by the modern machinery of media management, and politicians and media owners increasingly struck mutually beneficial deals in which the public interest counted for little or nothing. The press may have been liberated from direct political controls in the nineteenth century, but the market to which it was delivered would rapidly reveal itself to be a ‘system of control rather than an engine of freedom’ (ibid.: 35) in which power was exercised by wealthy, and frequently conservative-minded, individuals and corporations, while the market itself was constituted in such a way as to make it either inherently inimical or downright hostile to left/liberal values.
Indeed, many of those who argued for the abolition of the Stamp Duty and other ‘taxes on knowledge’ that fettered the press in the first half of the nineteenth century did so because they thought that a commercially successful press firmly in capitalist hands would serve as the best possible antidote to the radical press and so could help to preserve and spread values that were supportive of the status quo. As the Lord Chancellor put it in 1834: ‘the only question to answer, and the only problem to solve, is how they [the people] shall read in the best manner; how they shall be instructed politically, and have political habits formed the most safe for the constitution of the country’ (quoted in Curran and Seaton 2003: 18). Or as Bulwer-Lytton argued in 1832: ‘we have made a long and fruitless experiment of the gibbet and the hulks. Is it not time to consider whether the printer and his types may not provide better for the peace and honour of a free state, than the gaoler and the hangman. Whether, in one word, cheap knowledge may not be a better political agent than costly punishment (quoted in Curran 1978: 55). He also claimed that the Tolpuddle martyrs would probably never have been created if the Stamp Duty had been repealed; in his view, ‘instruction, not the strong arm of the law, was the only effective instrument to put them [the unions] down’ (ibid.). Likewise, the MP George Grote argued that not only ‘the evil of the unions’ but also ‘a great deal of the bad feeling that was at present abroad amongst the labouring classes’ was due to the ‘want of proper instruction, and correct information as to their real interests’ (ibid.) caused by the economic restraints upon the press. As Curran himself puts it, for these parliamentarians, ‘the cause of a free market press was synonymous with the suppression of trade unionism: the dream for which they fought was an unfettered capitalist press that would police the capitalist system’ (ibid.: 56) and secure the loyalty of the working class to the social order.
So, for example, Thomas Milner-Gibson, the president of the Association for the Repeal of the Taxes on Knowledge, argued in 1850 that repeal would create ‘a cheap press in the hands of men of good moral character, of respectability, and of capital’ and would ‘give to men of capital and respectability the power of gaining access by newspapers, by faithful record of the facts, to the minds of the working classes’ (Curran 1978: 60). In 1854, Palmerston argued that: ‘the larger we open the field of general instruction, the firmer the foundation on which the order, the loyalty and good conduct of the lower classes will rest’ (ibid.: 58). The Irish MP John Francis Maguire proclaimed that, with the repeal of the taxes on knowledge, ‘you render the people better citizens, more obedient to the laws, more faithful and loyal subjects, and more determined to stand up for the honour of the country’ (ibid.). Meanwhile, Gladstone declared that ‘the freedom of the press was not merely to be permitted and tolerated, but to be highly prized, for it tended to bring closer together all the national interests and preserve the institutions of the country’ (ibid.). And in 1859, Alexander Andrews, the editor of the first journalists’ trade magazine, wrote in The History of British Journalism to 1855 that the great mission of the press was to ‘educate and enlighten those classes whose political knowledge has been hitherto so little, and by consequence so dangerous’ (ibid.: 60). He continued: ‘the list of our public journals is a proud and noble list – the roll call of an army of liberty, with a rallying point in every town. It is a police of safety, and a sentinel of public morals’ (ibid.). The cause of freeing the press from the taxes on knowledge was thus, in certain highly influential circles, inextricably intertwined with the notion that educating (read indoctrinating) the working class with the ‘right’ ideas was the best way of warding off social unrest and maintaining the capitalist system.
With powerful capitalist forces entering the newspaper market, considerable technological innovation and development followed. Increasingly, a craft system of newspaper production was replaced by an industrial one. This had the result of significantly increasing both running costs and fixed capital costs in the newspaper sector, making it difficult for those with more limited funds to remain in, let alone break into, the marketplace. On the other hand, the major operators could benefit from economies of scale, offering attractive products while still keeping cover prices low. This combination of rising expenditure and lower cover prices forced up the circulation levels that newspapers needed to reach in order to become profitable, which meant that it was difficult for newcomers to enter the marketplace, especially if they were undercapitalized and not aimed at a mass audience.
Equally significant in marginalizing (and ultimately destroying) the radical press was the rise of advertising as a means of funding newspapers after the abolition of the advertisement duty in 1853. The influx of advertising revenue meant that newspapers could halve their cover prices, and then halve them again, in subsequent decades. But it also meant that they became heavily dependent on advertising, as their net cover prices no longer covered their costs. As Curran puts it: ‘advertisers thus acquired a de facto licensing power because, without their support, newspapers ceased to be economically viable’ (Curran and Seaton 2003: 30). Radical newspapers were unattractive to many advertisers for two reasons – their politics and the nature of their readership. Regarding the latter point, the head of a well-known advertising agency wrote in 1856: ‘some of the most widely circulated journals in the Empire are the worst possible to advertise in. Their readers are not purchasers, and any money thrown upon them is so much thrown away’; while in 1921 an advertising handbook warned: ‘you cannot afford to place your advertisements in a paper which is read by the down-at-heels who buy it to see the “Situations Vacant” column’ (both quoted in ibid.: 31). Radical papers were left with two options – either to move upmarket in an effort to attract the kind of readers attractive to advertisers or to remain minority publications with manageable losses that could be offset by donations from readers. What they could not do, without incurring crippling losses, was to move into the mass market and sell themselves, without advertising, as cheaply as competitors effectively subsidised by the advertisers.
As George Boyce (1978: 25) points out, the opportunities provided by the press in the second half of the nineteenth century ‘attracted people whose interest lay, not primarily in enlightening or informing public opinion, nor in criticising public policy, but in making money by giving the public what it wanted – or, at least, what it was supposed by the entrepreneur to want’. Equally, the politics of these papers were those that would sell – especially to the increasingly prosperous and literate lower middle classes – which meant appealing to popular prejudices and an essentially conservative, ‘common sense’ view of the world. Here, the archetypal paper was the Daily Mail, which was launched on 4 May 1896, and the archetypal proprietor was its owner, Lord Northcliffe, who knew exactly how to market his journalism to readers and his readers to advertisers. He also understood perfectly how to address people both as readers to be informed and as consumers ready and eager to spend their money on goods and services. Ideology and economics were inextricably bound together, as the paper, determined not to alienate its readers, confirmed them in what they thought they already knew as opposed to trying to provide a challenging or alternative view of the social order. Thus the jingoism and xenophobia of its coverage of foreign affairs (the Boer War in particular) was as much commercial as ideological in origin, as it precisely reflected the views of the paper’s predominantly lower middle class readership. By 1900, its circulation had almost reached the million mark, and henceforth other popular papers had to compete with Northcliffe on his own terms.
In 1903, Northcliffe proclaimed: ‘every extension of the franchise renders more powerful the newspaper and less powerful the politician’ (quoted in Smith 1979: 169). However, it would be an extremely grave mistake to underestimate the profound links between politicians and the press from the last third of the nineteenth century onwards. By the 1870s, governments had come to realize that carrots rather than sticks represented the more effective way of getting and keeping the press onside. As Alan J. Lee (1976: 205) puts it: ‘the most successful way of doing this was by the provision of information, and by making certain journalists feel at home within the “governing classes”, and even within the political system’. Lord Palmerston had already established a close relationship with the Morning Post between 1838 and 1864, and various political grandees followed suit with successive editors of The Times (see Boyce 1978: 26). In this respect, Boyce’s analysis of the Morning Post’s relationship with leading politicians between 1911 and 1937 is singularly revealing (ibid.: 29–31). And if journalists could be seduced by information, the honours system could have the same effect on proprietors – thus giving new meaning to the term ‘press baron’ (see Lee 1976: 205–8). Lee also estimates that by 1885 there were no less than twenty-two MPs who were press proprietors and concludes that ‘there can have been few large newspaper companies who lacked a parliamentary representative, and to this extent the newspaper industry resembled other successful Victorian industries, and like those other industries the press had to a considerable degree become integrated into the political system by such a process’ (ibid.: 209).
Close financial links between newspapers and political parties remained firmly in place until well into the twentieth century. For example, Boyce (1978: 28–29) reveals how substantial funds from the Unionist Central Office were channelled to the Standard, Globe, Observer and Pall Mall Gazette between 1911 and 1915. The Morning Post was bought by a Conservative syndicate headed by the Duke of Northumberland in 1924, while Lloyd George engineered the purchase of the Daily News in 1901 by the Cadbury family in the Liberal interest (not least in whipping up support for the Boer War) and arranged the purchase of the Daily Chronicle in 1918 with monies accumulated through the sale of honours. Boyce (1978: 29) thus concludes that ‘the press was an extension of the political system, not a check or balance to Parliament and Executive, but inextricably mixed up with these institutions. Government was not “government by journalism”…but government by politicians, with journalists acting as go-betweens, advisers, and, occasionally, opponents of the practising politicians’.
What is so striking about this particular narrative of press history is that it demonstrates how most of the salient features of today’s press were well in place by the end of the nineteenth century. In the years that followed, the press continued to develop along the same lines and, as Boyce (1978: 36) puts it, ‘the newspaper world appeared more and more to be a mirror of the worst aspects of the capitalist world, with its transformation into a major enterprise, and the consequent emergence of the commercial corporation’. Most newspapers were, and remained, decidedly right wing, but even when they were not lending their support explicitly to the Conservatives, they radiated an illiberal, authoritarian-populist world view that blatantly appealed to popular prejudices and folk wisdom and was resolutely hostile to progressive opinion of all kinds. Jingoism, xenophobia and an increasingly shrill nationalism were crucial ingredients of this unappetising ideological brew, in which the creation of folk-devils of one kind or another (early examples being the ‘Red Menace’ and Jewish immigrants) played a key role in creating the ‘imagined community’ of the British (increasingly the English) to and for which the press presumed to speak.
On the economic front, concentration of ownership became the order of the day; thirty newspapers closed between 1921 and 1936, although the total sales of newspapers doubled in the same period. The result was an even greater narrowing of the range of political and ideological viewpoints available in the daily and Sunday national press. Between the two world wars, newspapers had to cope with radio as a rival news medium and, in the 1950s, television. After the war, readership began to decline and, in the 1950s, production costs began to rise steeply. Advertisers thus became an even more important source of revenue than they had been hitherto, further accentuating the process whereby, as Anthony Smith (1979: 147) puts it, ‘newspapers came to look upon their potential readers as segments of consumerdom’. Newspapers increasingly tailored their content to what would appeal to advertisers – which also meant avoiding content that threatened to puncture the ‘buying mood’. At the same time, however, the popular press remained more dependent on readers than on advertisers as its main source of revenue. Competition for readers thus became ever more intense. As a result of all these factors, journalism became ever more market driven, first in the popular papers and then in the so-called ‘qualities’, which many accused of becoming tabloid not simply in format but in terms of their content as well. Martin Conboy’s (2004: 181) definition of tabloidization as ‘an increase in news about celebrities, entertainment, lifestyle features, personal issues, an increase in sensationalism, in the use of pictures and sloganized headlines, vulgar language and a decrease in international news, public affairs news including politics, the reduction in the length of words in a story and the reduction of complexity of language, and also a convergence with agendas of popular and in particular television culture’ is not only usefully inclusive but also serves to remind us of all the various processes that have been developing within British journalism ever since the latter part of the nineteenth century.
In the twin processes of concentration and commercialization, the minority left-liberal tradition was decisively the loser, with the News Chronicle closing in 1960, the Daily Herald being transformed in 1964 into the Sun (which was sold to Murdoch in 1969, who turned it first of all into a tabloid and then into a raucous cheerleader for Thatcher) and the Sunday Citizen (formerly Reynolds’ News) closing in 1967. The fate of the Herald and Chronicle illustrates all too clearly the truth of Conboy’s (2004: 179) observation that ‘the demands of advertisers for specific target groups meant that newspapers increasingly restricted their appeal to particular groups based on income as well as social class’. The Daily Herald in particular was hit by loss of advertising, not because it was left wing but because its readership was disproportionately working class, male and ageing. When it closed, it had a circulation five times greater than that of The Times; similarly, when the News Chronicle closed, its circulation was roughly the same as that of The Daily Telegraph.
From the mid-1970s until the end of the Thatcher era, the vast majority of the press became even more stridently partisan towards the Conservatives and bitterly hostile to Labour than it had been hitherto. Conservative newspapers played an absolutely key ideological role in paving the way for the Thatcher regime which, once in power, found no more vociferous supporter than the British press. Indeed, the Kulturkampf that was Thatcherism was fought out largely in the columns of illiberal British newspapers, both tabloid and otherwise, in a fashion that makes one wonder whether their authors had read Gramsci. In Thatcher, British newspapers had at last found a leader in their own image, and they not only backed her to the hilt and cheered her every excess but excoriated any criticism of their heroine as akin to treachery. As Tim Gopsill and Greg Neale (2007: 251) put it in their history of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ): ‘this was a period of shame for the British press: rarely before or since – even in wartime – had they been so close to government. Most papers were besotted with Margaret Thatcher’.
Newspapers are, of course, entitled to their own (or rather their proprietors’) views, but what needs to be emphasized here is that the Thatcher government, the most ideologically driven and extreme that Britain experienced in the twentieth century, came to power determined to rip up the political consensus and rule solely in the interests of those who elected it. Furthermore, it faced a desperately weak opposition in the shape of a Labour party bitterly divided against itself and then, additionally, fatally split between Labour and the SDP. Never, therefore, had there been a greater need for a press that would act as a check and watchdog on overweening state power, in other words as a genuine fourth estate. However, the vast bulk of the British daily press, with the honourable exceptions of the Guardian, Financial Times, Independent and Mirror (the only mass circulation paper of the four), chose instead to act as Pravda to Thatcher’s Brezhnev and, in so doing, forfeited the last vestiges of any residual claims that they might have had to be a fourth estate in any meaningful sense of the term.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Trafalgar House (which owned the Express, Sunday Express and Star from 1977 to 1985) made substantial donations to the Tories. While Thatcher was in power, its owner, Lord Matthews, delivered himself of the view that ‘I would find myself in a dilemma about whether to report a British Watergate affair because of the national harm. I believe in batting for Britain’ (quoted in Curran and Seaton 2003: 71). And on the eve of the Thatcher government’s first budget, he prevented the editor of the Star from writing a leader critical of it, informing him that ‘there aren’t any poor. You can take my word for it. There are no poor in this country’ (ibid.: 72). The group’s next owner, United Newspapers, was headed by Lord Stevens, who stated that ‘I think it would be very unlikely that I would have a newspaper that would support the socialist [sic] party. That isn’t what some people would call press freedom, but why should I want a product I didn’t approve of? I believe it is in the best interests of United Newspapers in terms of its profits and shareholders to support the Conservatives’ (quoted in Snoddy 1993: 133). Sir Nicholas Lloyd and Sir John Junor, editors of the Daily and Sunday Express respectively, both received their knighthoods during the Thatcher regime, as did Sir Larry Lamb (Sun) and Sir David English (Mail) in what can only be considered as rewards for services to the Conservative party as opposed to journalism.
The classic Tory-supporting proprietor was of course Rupert Murdoch. The oleaginous Journals of Woodrow Wyatt are full of evidence of the unhealthily close relationship between Thatcher and Murdoch. For example, in the first volume, we find, on the occasion of the US bombing raid on Libya from British bases: ‘Rupert has been magnificent. I told her [Thatcher] that he had rung saying how much he admired what she had done. She commented on The Times and the Sun giving “wonderful support”’ (Wyatt 1999: 125). And in Press Gang, Roy Greenslade (2003: 384) quotes Times editor Charles Douglas-Home thus: ‘Rupert and Mrs Thatcher consult regularly on every important matter of policy, especially as they relate to his economic and political interests. Around here he’s jokingly referred to as “Mr Prime Minister”, except that it’s no longer much of a joke. In many respects he is the phantom prime minister of the country’.
As already noted, at the Sun, Murdoch changed the paper’s allegiance from muted Labour to strident Tory. News of the World editor Barry Askew complained that, in the early Thatcher years, Murdoch ‘would come into the office and literally re-write leaders which were not supporting the hard Thatcher monetarist line. That were not, in fact, supporting – slavishly – the Tory government’ (quoted in Hollingsworth 1986: 18–19). Having acquired The Times and The Sunday Times in 1981 in a deal that should have been referred to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission but wasn’t, thanks to the Faustian pact that he had struck with Margaret Thatcher, he proceeded to make his hostility to the latter’s liberal editor, Frank Giles, abundantly clear. According to Giles, he would spread the paper out before him and demand ‘“what do you want to print rubbish like that for?” or, pointing to a particular by-line, snarl “that man’s a commie”’ (quoted in Curran and Seaton 2003: 70).
Nor was dissent from the Thatcherite line to be tolerated outside the Murdoch empire. Thus, when during the Falklands War the BBC’s Peter Snow had the gall to question the government’s veracity, the Guardian printed a mildly critical cartoon and the Mirror took a stand against the whole enterprise, the Sun responded, on 7 May 1982, with an extraordinary editorial headed ‘Dare call it treason’, which alleged that ‘there are traitors in our midst’ and went on to remark of the Mirror: ‘what is but treason for this timorous, whining publication to plead day after day for appeasing the Argentine dictators because they do not believe the British people have the stomach for a fight, and are instead prepared to trade peace for honour?’ Similarly, a few years later, the once-liberal Sunday Times embarked on a sustained and overt campaign of liberal baiting reminiscent of those American papers that supported the McCarthyite witch hunts of the 1950s. Thus, for example, an editorial of 20 September 1987 entitled ‘Britain’s breed apart’ lamented that ‘rarely have the ideals of the country’s intellectual elite been so out of kilter with the aspirations of plain folk’. And battle was joined again by Brian Walden in his column on 29 November. According to him, ‘the preoccupations of many intellectuals in our society are divorced from popular sentiment…Eventually the bulk of the population will be confronted by an elitist culture which shares few of its values’. Further on, we discover that ‘the frightening truth is that any anti-capitalist, anti-Western, anti-Israeli material is meat and drink to many intellectuals. They swallow it uncritically’. As a consequence, Walden argues, ‘there is already a widespread view, faithfully reflected in the tabloid press, that our cultural and intellectual elites are inherently treacherous. They are seen as the enemies of what most people want and the friends of those who want to destroy Western values’. The end result of this ‘treachery’, it is claimed, is ‘a severance of much of the intellectual community from the rest of society’.
No wonder, then, that Sir Ian Gilmour (1993: 2) claimed that, in the Thatcher era, the press ‘could scarcely have been more fawning if it had been state controlled’. Nor that the Tory MP Richard Shepherd called it the ‘hallelujah chorus’ (quoted in Gilmour 1993: 8). Similarly, the former Sunday Times investigative journalist Bruce Page (2003: 393) condemned it as ‘grossly servile’. And interviewed for a BBC2 Open Space programme on the so-called ‘Loony Left’ transmitted on 14 March 1978, the veteran Fleet Street political editor Anthony Bevins stated:
You don’t really have to differentiate between certain newspapers and the Conservative Party. Certain newspapers, from where I stand as an independent journalist, are the Tory Party. They go out and they get the press release, they go back to their offices, they write the press release as if it was some great feat of investigative journalism. They go to Bernard Ingham at 10 Downing Street, to hear what he says, then they go away and they regurgitate it. It is all part and parcel of Conservatism. What’s the difference between Conservative Central Office and some of the newspapers in Fleet Street? I can’t distinguish between the two. If I want to know what the Conservative Party is thinking, I’ll read the Daily Telegraph and get the dirt first hand.
However, the collusion between the majority of the press and the Thatcher government cannot be explained simply in terms of ideological affinities. With the Thatcher era came media deregulation, in particular allowing the press into areas of the media hitherto denied to it by cross-media ownership restrictions. The relaxing of such regulations speeded up the process whereby press barons were mutating into media barons who, whatever their personal political preferences, were willing to bestow their favours (namely their newspapers) on whichever party would best serve their own corporate interests and ambitions. As Steven Barnett and Ivor Gaber (2001: 6) argue, from this there followed
a growing interdependence of media entrepreneurs and political parties for their own respective self-advancements. Senior politicians have become more and more convinced (whether rightly or not) of the power of the media and have therefore sought to create harmonious relationships with a few elite owners. Simultaneously, electronic and market developments in the media have raised important legislative issues (for example, on cross-ownership and pay-TV access) which have made it more imperative for owners seeking government favours to ensure productive relationships with ruling parties.
Again, the Thatcher-Murdoch axis provides a particularly acute example of such a mutually productive relationship: Thatcher twisted the rules to allow Murdoch to buy The Times and The Sunday Times, to operate Sky as a purely commercial enterprise largely exempt from the public service obligations of his terrestrial competitors and effectively to take over his satellite TV rival BSB. In return, Murdoch’s papers lauded Thatcher as ‘Britannia come to life’ (the Sun’s words) and ceaselessly excoriated her critics – including, of course, the minority liberal press.
Subsequently, the Murdoch press, along with other Conservative newspapers, turned against John Major. This was partly because they could never forgive him for being the beneficiary of what they regarded as the Thatcher Dolchstoss. However, in the case of the Murdoch press, the attack was intensified because Major was seen as being insufficiently supportive of – if not hostile to – the further expansion of the Murdoch media empire. This becomes abundantly clear in the third volume of the Wyatt journals (the relevant entries of which are quoted in Page 2003: 424–25). And subsequent history has demonstrated all too clearly that Murdoch has been prepared to offer support to New Labour – albeit far more qualified and conditional support than was offered to Thatcher – to the extent that Tony Blair will support Murdoch’s business interests.
Murdoch’s relationships with the Thatcher and Blair governments (as well as with governments in Australia, the USA and China) lead one inescapably to the conclusion that, to quote Bruce Page (2003: 372), ‘political journalism consists of maintaining sympathetic relations with authority’. In this, however, Murdoch is hardly alone in the modern British press, and nor, as we have seen, is what Page calls this ‘politico-business’ model of press/government relations a particularly new one. Murdoch’s papers, and in particular their extraordinarily close relationship with the Thatcher government, are but the most recent products of tendencies which, as the radical narrative of British newspaper history demonstrates, have had a long gestation within the British press. These may have brought considerable benefits to politicians and press proprietors but, as Page puts it (2003: 479), they also involve politicians and journalists in ‘a dance of folly which has at least the potential to be a dance of death for democracy’. The spectacle of Murdoch pimping his papers to whichever party he thinks will best serve his business interests, while titles such as the Telegraph, Mail, Express and Star insist on treating Labour as usurpers who have somehow ousted the ‘natural’ party of government, is one that is entirely inimical to the idea of the press as a fourth estate. Of course, we still have a minority liberal press, in the shape of the Guardian, Observer, Independent, Financial Times and, on a good day, Mirror and Sunday Mirror, but so illiberal has New Labour become (partly, of course, in order to placate the Conservative press) that, bizarrely, it now regards these last remaining bastions of what’s left of the fourth estate as far more poisonous than its traditional Conservative foes.