Michael Bailey
The inspiration for this collection of essays has its origins in the work of James Curran. Widely respected as a communications scholar of international repute, Curran has been at the forefront of media research for some thirty-odd years now, providing a source of intellectual inspiration for students and colleagues alike.1
Noted for his extraordinarily wide-ranging and polymathic approach to mass communications – he is the (co)author or (co)editor of eighteen books that draw upon a variety of different methodologies, intellectual traditions and academic disciplines – Curran is probably best known for his contribution to media history. Unlike some media scholars who, judging by their research, live in a perpetual state of historical amnesia, for Curran, history and media studies are fundamentally connected insofar as one can only really begin to understand the contemporary media landscape if one knows something about how communication technologies – and their social uses – have changed over time. Such knowledge is not only useful in terms of better understanding the world in which we live. It is also useful in terms of acquiring a concrete understanding of the social relations of media production and consumption apropos the historical development of modern liberal democracies and their political economies. In short, past media systems and practices continue to inform media systems and practices in the present day. And if we want to change those systems and practices, we have to comprehend their past history, for the past and the present are inextricably intertwined.
Curran’s (e.g. 1977 and 1978a) own accounts of British press history are exemplary for the way in which they continue to inform our awareness of the British newspaper industry in the present day. Prior to him reappraising standard interpretations of the historical emergence of a ‘free’ press from the nineteenth century onwards, it was very hard for contemporary media scholars to think outside – much less challenge – the prevailing orthodoxy that would have us believe that the emergence of a commercially funded popular press was an essentially democratizing development, not only for press journalism, but for society at large. Thanks to Curran, we now know this explanation to be overly simplistic in that it fails to take into account the way in which market forces have helped to contain democracy by effectively silencing radical opinion and political criticism. Furthermore, without this critical understanding, it would make the case for contemporary press reform even more difficult than it already is.
However, when Curran wrote his seminal essays on the history of the British press in the 1970s, he was one of only a handful of media historians. In fact, the phrase ‘media history’ was still relatively uncommon, even among those with an interest in such academic foci. It was with this in mind that Curran (1991: 27) famously noted, over fifteen years ago now, that historical research has tended to be the ‘neglected grandparent of media studies’, in the sense that it is uncared for, marginalized and visited only occasionally. Even then, visits are often fleeting and performed reluctantly.2
This neglect is undoubtedly due to the complexities of historical research, particularly for those who do not have an academic background in history. For the inexperienced, historical enquiry can appear difficult and cumbersome, not unlike some grandparents! One can understand why media students might opt to write an essay about the contemporary media, rather than trying to familiarize themselves with their antecedents. Media history can also appear unfashionable and uninteresting. Why spend time with your frumpy grandparents when you can be hanging out with your infinitely more chic contemporaries. There is also the question of relevance: most media students choose to study the media in the hope that they will secure a job in the media industries. Hence the often asked question: what use is media history for somebody who wants to work as a media practitioner in the rapidly changing digital age?
Yet another reason for the relative underdevelopment of media history is to do with the disciplinary formation of media studies (see O’Malley 2002). Historically, the birth and early development of British media studies was an unlikely symbiosis of functionalist sociology, western Marxism and literary criticism, with history as the poor relation.3 This unevenness was further exacerbated following the establishment of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in 1964. Although some extremely important and interesting media research was carried out by many of its early members, not least by Stuart Hall, much of the work produced was largely concerned with theory, textual analysis and audience studies, in short the ideological effects of mediated representations (see Hall et al. 1992 [1980]). Consequently, a great deal of media research has tended to be ahistorical, according little if any attention to the historical materiality of one’s object of analysis.
While some of the above points remain pertinent to the way in which media history is perceived, recent developments bode well. One might even go as far as to say that media history has undergone something of a renaissance, to the point where one can now, arguably, talk about the subject as a mainstream field of study (cf. Hampton 2005). As well as a notable increase in media history-related conferences, there has been a significant growth in the number of contributions to the field, not just from communication scholars but also from historians (recent publications include Bingham (2004), Briggs and Burke (2002/2005), Cannadine (2004), Chapman (2005a), Conboy (2004), Hallin and Mancini (2004), Hampton (2004) and Holmes (2005), among others). The rise of cultural history has no doubt assisted in this symbiotic interaction between ‘media’ and ‘history’, as has the recent growth of history programmes made for television (see Champion 2003), or what has been dubbed ‘telehistory’.
All things considered, the future of media history looks a great deal brighter than it did just a decade ago. Curran (2004: 33) himself was markedly more optimistic about the subject’s growing popularity in a recently published article on the ‘Rise of the Westminster School’, noting that ‘it was relatively easy to document alternative ways of viewing the role of the media in the development of modern British society…something that had been almost impossible a quarter of a century earlier’. Of course, Curran has played a significant part in stimulating this surge in academic interest. Indeed, the document that he is referring to is an essay he himself wrote, entitled ‘Rival Narratives of Media History’ (see Curran 2002).4 As well as reiterating the need for communication scholars to take media history more seriously, even more significant is Curran’s mapping of different media historiographies – liberal, feminist, populist, anthropological, libertarian, radical and technological determinist – in an effort ‘to present media history as a series of competing narratives’. In synthesizing what were previously narrowly focused accounts of individual mediums into opposing theoretical models of interpretation, he has provided us with a highly original and commanding overview of British media development over the last 300 years.5
However, it is important to point out that Curran is not advocating Nietzschian-type perspectivism or an inane postmodern celebration of historical relativism. He is not suggesting that we collapse media history into a beguiling myriad of intertexuality and free-floating signifiers, to the point whereupon the past, or any semblance of the past, is simply determined by a historian’s ideological point of view. Instead, what he proposes is that we critically evaluate each narrative by attending more closely to the dichotomy of fact and interpretation, or to paraphrase E. H. Carr (2001 [1961]: 23), to steer carefully between the Scylla of ‘history as an objective compilation of facts’ and the Charybdis of ‘history as the subjective product of the mind of the historian’.
Starting from this premise, Narrating Media History represents an attempt to critically engage with Curran’s foregoing taxonomy, not only to identify and contrast the various articulations between media histories, but also to encourage dialogue between different historical, political and theoretical perspectives. The book is divided into seven sections, with each section comprising a brief introduction and two essays – published here for the first time – that illustrate the particularities, strengths and weaknesses of one of the aforementioned narratives. In some cases, contributors make a compelling case for their respective narrative, while others tread more carefully by offering a more holistic account, thus reflecting some of the ambiguities and continuing uncertainties of the field as it is developing currently. In addition to these essays, the book is framed with a reworked version of Curran’s original essay, updated in the light of recent developments in the field. Finally, while the book falls short of realizing Curran’s original clarion call for ‘a new synthesis’, it is my hope that it will nevertheless contribute to a wider process whereby new narratives of media history are realized, thus developing the field of study yet further.
1 Before becoming professor of communications in the internationally renowned media department at Goldsmiths College, University of London, Curran started his academic career as one of the pioneers of the first media studies degrees in the UK, at what was then the Polytechnic of Central London (later renamed the University of Westminster in 1992) in the mid-1970s. Along with other key members of what has since been characterized as the Westminster tradition of media studies – e.g. Nicholas Garnham, Vincent Porter, Jean Seaton, Paddy Scannell, Colin Sparks, John Keane, Brain Winston and Steven Barnett, among others – Curran was instrumental in broadening the development of media scholarship during its formative years, not least as a founding editor of Media, Culture & Society and co-author (with Jean Seaton) of Power Without Responsibility, both of which quickly and justifiably became, and remain, essential reading for media researchers.
2 Alternatively, media history is a subject that, to quote Anthony McNicholas (2003: 15), ‘dare not speak its name’. Consequently, those who teach media history have had to approach the subject with caution, avoiding any direct reference to the h-word! When the subject does speak its name in lectures and seminars, one is still occasionally greeted with looks of uncertainty, anxious mumblings or, worse still, complete silence!
3 For a fuller discussion of the complexities of the various conflicts and points of academic synergy between the above disciplines, see Abrams (1982), Burke (1980), Lepenies (1992) and Williams (1962 [1958b]).
4 An abridged version of the essay was published as ‘Media and the Making of British Society, c. 1700–2000’ (Curran 2002b).
5 Similarly, Mark Hampton (2005: 240) recently noted that ‘Curran’s taxonomy and call for synthesis…could be a major field-defining moment’.