Home Search Sitemap Contact Bookmark

Free Dissertations - Journalism Dissertations

Some Scholars, Such As Ivon Asquith, Comments That The Independence Of The ...

Some scholars, such as Ivon Asquith, comments that the independence of the press has nothing to do with these governmental laws, but instead relies upon simple market economics: it was the growing income from advertising which provided the material base for the change in attitude from subservience to independence (Curran 2003, 3). As such the extrication of the press from governmental persuasion can be attributed to the shift from government to capitalist motives. Arguably, this has its own ideological ramifications while advertising in the 1850s is generally seen as a force for good; a move that freed mainstream and radical newspapers from the constraints of supporting a particular ideology, the reliance of the newspaper industry upon advertising itself could be said as having created a noticeably more subtle propaganda that restricted press freedoms even more greatly than before. Indeed, Curran argues that the motivations for the creation of a free press in the 1850s were largely the same as the stamp duties placed upon the radical imprints of the 1830s; namely, the aim was to subordinate the press to the social order (22). Largely based upon the failures of the stamp duty in preventing the widespread dissemination of the radical press among the working classes, the free press was introduced to appeal to a growing Victorian middle class, who could use the press to expand their own interests: Curran comments that the parliamentary campaign for a free press was never inspired by a modern libertarian commitment to diversity of expression (22). Instead, the repeal of the laws were merely seen as such by critics after the actual event, and the liberation of the press was merely done so in order to quash or dilute the efficacy of the radical press in the free marketplace.
Therefore, it can be suggested that the free market allowed for a greater manipulation of bourgeois interest in the press to be disseminated among the working classes. Indeed, the internal organisational structure of the presses at this point continue in a fashion to this day. Conservative personalities and an entrepreneurial instinct became prevalent in the newspaper media, and characters such as Northcliffe, whose crusades during the First World War veered towards jingoistic, opinion-based pieces instead of supposedly unbiased reportage, has left deep imprints on the world of popular journalism today. Chalaby (2000) comments that During the war, the Daily Mail [] targeted the government's mismanagement of the conflict and were akin to calls for social reforms, but translated to war-related issues (37). Meanwhile, the creation of a lower-middle class market and the development of upward mobility and individualist, bourgeois sentiment interlocked with the desires of advertisers, whose aim, after all, was not a communist revolution and the empowerment of the proletariat, but was to sell products.


Thanks