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Free Dissertations - Journalism Dissertations

Coupled With The Power They Had In The Process Of Hiring And Firing Of Staff ...

Coupled with the power they had in the process of hiring and firing of staff who dissented from the specific market and ideology oriented lines, it appeared that the gratification of the press barons' egos, along with a tendency for the kind of quasi-autonomy that is often represented in the imagery of advertising, created a particularly interesting illusion of press freedom directed from within rather than via government insurgency.
In addition, the background of the free press has to be challenged by the increased trivialisation of political matters. Indeed, it may be surprising to some to realise that the dumbing down of political affairs is not something new to the past twenty years of print journalism, but that the effects of privatisation and the intervention of the free market has been in the process of dumbing down political affairs since the market was opened up in 1855. The trivialisation of politics was a trend that was complicated by the introduction of the free market. It appeared that, when stamp duties were placed on the radical newspapers, there appeared to be an innate political interest at the heart of the newspaper. Chalaby (2000) comments that From the 1880s onwards, the focus of political coverage progressively shifted from issues raised by politicians to aspects of the political game itself. Gradually journalists paid less attention to the substance of the political debate and began to to report events which they found newsworthy for reasons other than their political significance (107). As such, the development of the free press served to remove people's interest in the details of political affairs. It could be said that the depoliticization of the masses that was the result made them considerably less astute then considering the political implications of the First World War. The development in the influential paper The Pall Mall Gazette tells us about the nature of political coverage and what exactly political coverage constituted. One of these competitions asked contestants to rate members of the Commons in 12 categories, including ‘best orator', ‘best debater', ‘greatest bore' and ‘most eccentric' (108). While it is obvious that this level of gimmickry in the press eschews the impact of a genuinely political and agenda-based impact, it is also interesting that politics is reduced to a spectacle in which politicians are merely categorised based upon their ability to speak or debate, and the content of what is actually debated is relegated to mere rhetorical pointlessness. What has happened is not simply that press freedoms have changed the political agenda, but they have served to take the political agenda out of the question.


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