8

Communications, power and social order

JAMES CURRAN⁽¹⁾

Mass communications are generally discussed as if they were exclusively modern phenomena. Indeed, this assumption is embodied in most social scientific definitions of the mass media. According to McQuail (1969, p. 2), for instance, ‘mass communications comprise the institutions and techniques by which specialized groups employ technological devices (press, radio, films, etc.) to disseminate symbolic content to large, heterogeneous, and widely dispersed audiences’. Only modern technology, it is widely assumed, has made possible the transmission of communications to mass audiences; for, as Maisel (1973, p. 160) amongst others would have us believe, ‘in the pre-industrial period, the communication system was restricted to direct face-to-face communication between individuals’.

In fact, a variety of signifying forms apart from face-to-face interaction—buildings, pictures, statues, coins, banners, stained glass, songs, medallions, rituals of all kinds—were deployed in pre-industrial societies to express sometimes highly complex ideas. At times, these signifying forms reached vast audiences. For instance, the proportion of the adult population in Europe regularly attending mass during the central middle ages was almost certainly higher than the proportion of adults in contemporary Europe regularly reading a newspaper⁽²⁾. Since the rituals of religious worship were laid down in set liturgies, the papal curia exercised a much more centralized control over the symbolic content mediated through public worship in the central middle ages than even the controllers of the highly concentrated and monopolistic press of contemporary Europe.

Centralized control over mass communications is thus scarcely new. An historical comparison with older communication forms—including communications reaching small élites as well as mass audiences—serves, moreover, to throw into sharp relief certain aspects of the impact of communication media that the ‘effects’ research tradition, relying upon survey and experimental laboratory research techniques, has tended to ignore. Our concern will be with the impact of communications on the power structures of society. In particular, attention will be focused upon the effect of new media in bringing into being new power groups whose authority and prestige have derived from their ability to manipulate the communications under their control; the consequences of their rise in generating new tensions and rivalries within the dominant power-bloc; the wider dislocative effects of new media which by-pass or displace established mediating organizations and groups; the emergence of new media which reflect and amplify increasing conflicts within the social structure; and the central role of the media, when there has been a close integration between the hierarchy of power and control over communications, in maintaining consent for the social system.

This examination will concentrate mainly upon three historical periods—the central middle ages, early modern Europe and modern Britain. It will take the form of a schematic analysis in which we will move backwards and forwards in time in order to elucidate particular aspects of the impact of the media⁽³⁾. Inevitably a survey covering so broad a canvas will be highly selective and, in places, conjectural. But hopefully it will serve as a mild antidote to the conventional approach to examining media influence, in which media institutions are tacitly portrayed as autonomous and isolated organizational systems transmitting messages to groups of individuals with laboriously-measured and often inconclusive results, that has dominated media research for so long⁽⁴⁾.

COMMUNICATIONS AND POWER

The rise of papal government is one of the most striking and extraordinary features of the middle ages. How did the See of Rome, which even in the early fourth century was merely a local bishopric with no special claim to legal or constitutional pre-eminence, become the undisputed sovereign head of the western Christian Church? Still more remarkable, how did a local church with no large private army of its own and initially no great material wealth and which for long periods of time was controlled by minor Italian aristocrats develop into the most powerful feudal court in Europe, receiving oaths of allegiance from princes and kings, exacting taxes and interfering in affairs of state throughout Christendom and even initiating a series of imperialist invasions that changed the face of the Middle East?

The See of Rome had, of course, certain initial advantages which provided the basis of its early influence. It was sited in the capital of the old Roman empire; it was accorded a special status by the emperors in Constantinople who were anxious to unite their Christian subjects in the west; and it was the only church in western Europe which was thought to have been founded by St Peter.

The papacy capitalized on this initial legacy by spearheading the missionary expansion of the church and by skilfully exploiting the divisions within the deeply fissured power-structure of medieval Europe to its own advantage. Successive popes played off rival monarchies against each other, exploited the tensions and conflicts between monarchies and feudatories and even, on rare occasions, backed popular resistance to aristocratic repression. The papacy also utilized to its own advantage the desire of some leading ecclesiastics to increase their independence from lay control as well as the tensions and rivalries within the Church itself, notably between the episcopacy and the monastic order. The rise of papal government, as a number of scholars (for example, Brooke, 1964; Southern, 1970; Richards, 1979) have convincingly shown, was thus partly the result of the dexterity with which the papacy harnessed the interests and influence of competing power-groups to build up its own power.

But neither the papacy's imperial and apostolic legacy nor its policy of divide and rule adequately account for the transformation of a local bishop into a papal emperor. In particular, it does not explain why (as opposed to how) the papacy should have profited so greatly from its interventions in the power politics of medieval Europe, nor does it adequately explain why the papacy managed quite rapidly to expand its power over the Church far beyond the authority accorded to it by the Roman emperors. The rise of the papacy can only be properly understood in terms of its early dominance over institutional processes of ideological production that created and maintained support for its exercise of power. As St Bernard of Clairvaux wrote perceptively to the Pope in 1150: ‘Your power is not in possessions, but in the hearts of men’ (quoted in Morris, 1972, p. 14).

The expansion of the Christian Church in early modern Europe provided the institutional basis of papal hegemony. It created a new communications network capable of transmitting a common ideology throughout western Europe. Rome could not exploit this network, however, until it had asserted its authority over the western Church⁽⁵⁾. During the fourth century, the papacy upgraded the status accorded to it by the emperors in the east by claiming leadership of the Church on the basis of scriptural authority. Its claim rested upon a passage in St Matthew's Gospel in which Jesus hails St Peter as ‘this rock (upon) which I will build my church…’ As a title-deed, it left much to be desired, not least because it made no reference to the See of Rome. The omission was made good, however, by the production of a spurious letter, the Epistola Clementis, whose author was stated to be Clement, the first historic bishop of Rome, informing St James of the last dispositions of St Peter which designated the bishops of Rome as his successors. This was followed by additional forgeries of which the most influential was the Donation of Constantine, which purported to document how the Emperor Constantine had formally handed over large, but mostly unspecified, provinces in the western hemisphere to Pope Silvester; and a collection of canon law called Pseudo-Isidore, which included fraudulent canons of the early Christian Councils and equally spurious decrees of early bishops of Rome, representing the pope as the primate of the early Christian Church. Distinguished early popes added to this myth-making by proclaiming as fact obviously false stories about the development of the early Christian Church⁽⁶⁾. The papacy and its allies thus set about reinterpreting history—a practice common to all great ideologies, although in this case conducted with unusual thoroughness by the actual fabrication of historical sources.

The ideological strength of the papacy was based, however, not so much on a single biblical text (important though this was), or on a selective view of history, but on what Kantorowicz (1957) calls ‘the monopolization of the Bible’—the selective interpretation of the Bible in a way that constituted a compelling way of viewing the world. Papal and ecclesiastical propaganda provided a teleological view of existence in which all actions of Christians were directed towards the attainment of salvation. According to this perspective, the pope as the supreme ruler of the Church had the duty to direct all men towards the goal of salvation by means of the law. And since every aspect of human life was encompassed within the corporate and indivisible body of the Christian Church, the pope as head of the Church had a universal sovereignty. There was, according to papal ideology, no inherent right to power or property, because these derived from the grace of God and could be revoked or suspended by God's appointed agents. In short, the papacy constructed an ideological system based on two central premises: (a) that all power derived from God; and (b) that the Church was indivisible. These premises provided the foundation for an elaborate superstructure of thought that expanded the bishop of Rome's claim to headship of the Church into a divine-right, absolutist authority over mankind (Ullmann, 1970).

The hierocratic themes of the papacy were mediated within the Church through the established hierarchical channels of communication. The papal curia had the largest collection of records and archives and the most sophisticated team of scholars and polemicists in the western hemisphere during the early and central middle ages. It reiterated with relentless insistence the central tenets of papal propaganda in correspondence, official pronouncements and legal judgements.

To some extent the mediation of papal themes within the institution of the Church also occurred independently of curial supervision. Ullmann (1969) shows, for instance, that the Frankish episcopacy during the Carolingian period stressed the sovereignty of the papacy, and the assumptions that underlay it, in an attempt to establish their autonomy from royal and feudal control. There was thus a natural affinity of interest between the papacy, in remote Italy, and the ecclesiastical hierarchy in other parts of Christendom that resulted in a partly unco-ordinated assertion of the sovereignty of the papacy and the primacy of the clergy in an impersonal ecclesiastical order. This facilitated, in turn, the extension of papal control over the Christian Church in the west. Through increased influence over senior ecclesiastical appointments, insistence upon regular visits to Rome by bishops, and the extension of direct papal control over the monastic order, the papacy was able to exercise increasingly centralized power over the Catholic Church and to harness its resources to the advancement of its power and authority within western Europe.

The Catholic Church translated the sophisticated, hierocratic ideology of the papacy into graphic and readily comprehensible forms in an age when the overwhelming majority of the population—including the nobility—were illiterate. Such has been the preoccupation of medievalists with literary sources, however, that surprisingly little attention has been given to the role of non-verbal communication, and in particular to religious magic, in shaping the outlooks and perspectives of the mass population in the middle ages⁽⁷⁾. Yet the whole paraphernalia of ecclesiastical sorcery and ritual was of crucial importance in mediating an ecclesiastical construction of reality that underpinned papal hegemony.

The medieval Church acted as a repository of magical power which it dispensed to the faithful to help them cope with a wide range of daily activities and secular problems. In this way, it symbolically affirmed the indivisibility of the Church, while at the same time asserting the magical potency of God and the special role of the Church as the mediator of divine power. Thus the rites of passage (baptism, confirmation, marriage, purification after childbirth, last unction and burial) administered by the Church invested with religious significance each stage of the life cycle, thereby affirming that every aspect of human existence fell within the compass of the Church. Their impact was reinforced by the cluster of superstitions that developed around each rite. Baptism, for instance, did not merely signify the entry of the new-born child into membership of the Church: many believed that it was essential if the child was not to die and be condemned to an eternal limbo or, as some churchmen insisted, to the tortures of hell and damnation. Similarly, the Church both sanctioned and fostered the medieval cult of the saints: the superstitious belief in miracleworking spirits whose aid could be enlisted through pilgrimages to their shrines, through acts of propitiation before their images or by simple invocation. While clergy were mere general practitioners in sacred magic, the saints were prestigious specialists whose help could be invoked in situations requiring special skills. St Agatha, for instance, was popularly thought to be best for sore breasts, St Margaret for reducing the pangs of labour, and so on. The Church also administered a battery of rituals, normally entailing the presence of a priest, holy water and the use of the appropriate incantations, as stipulated in medieval liturgical books, for blessing homes, purifying wells, preventing kilns from breaking, making tools safe and efficient, making cattle or women fertile, ensuring a good harvest or a safe journey. Indeed, there were few secular activities for which the Church did not issue a form of liturgical insurance policy and few secular problems for which the Church did not offer a magical specific.

Religious charms, talismans and amulets were worn as prophylactic agents against evil and bad luck. Such devices were the essential props of medieval superstition, symbolically expressing the potency of religious magic mediated by the Church. The Church also daily displayed an impressive feat of magic in its celebration of mass: inanimate objects were transformed into flesh and blood, or so it was proclaimed, in the sacrament of the eucharist. In order to emphasize the mediational role of the clergy, this demonstration of magical prowess was given special significance through being employed for a variety of secular as well as spiritual purposes, from curing the sick and guarding travellers against danger to shortening people's stay in purgatory. In addition to this powerful arsenal of sacred magic, the Church expressed through religious architecture and art basic tenets of papal ideology (Panovsky, 1951; Evans, 1948). The construction of churches towering above their pastoral flock symbolized the looming presence of God over all aspects of life. Sculpture, paintings and glass windows that depicted the divinity of Christ and the macabre tortures of hell served a similar purpose: they were a reminder of God's omnipotence in both the earthly world and the afterlife. As Pope Gregory I commented, the illiterate ‘could at least read by looking at the walls what they cannot read in books’ (quoted in Innis, 1950, p. 124).

The bizarre superstitions that encumbered popular medieval devotion were not all imposed from above. In part they derived from participation by a superstitious laity. But they had their origin in the sacred magic proclaimed and administered by the medieval Church and were tolerated by the often sophisticated incumbents of the papacy as the expression of simple piety binding God and his children closer together (Thomas, 1973). They served the wider purpose of maintaining the ecclesiological conception of the universe that legitimized papal imperialism.

Indeed, the conscious ideological ‘work’ that sometimes went into the elaboration of religious ritual is clearly revealed, for instance, by successive modifications made in the liturgical orders of the coronation of the Holy Roman Emperors in the west, a ritual of central importance since it was intended to remove the papacy still further from the authority of the emperors in the east by establishing a western emperor. Scrupulous care was taken to ensure that the ritual investment of the western emperor clearly designated his subordinate status to the pope. Following the coronation of the first western emperor, Charlemagne, the papacy introduced a new rite, the anointing of the emperor with holy oil, in order to symbolize the central theme of papal propaganda that imperial power ‘descended’ from God through the mediation of the papacy. At the next coronation (A.D. 823) yet another new feature was introduced—the giving of a sword to the emperor by the pope—to stress that the role of the emperor was to defend and protect the pope and carry out, through physical force if necessary, his will as a filius-defensor. And finally, to avoid any possible ambiguity and misunderstanding (such as the notion that the emperor was consecrated an autonomous priest-ruler), coronation ceremonies by the eleventh century utilized a liturgically inferior grade of oil, which was used to anoint the emperor, not on the head as before, but on his right arm and between his shoulder-blades. These and other innovations, involving the introduction of new symbols, gestures and prayer-texts, were graphic ways of expressing to an illiterate nobility through one ritual the complex theoretical ideas of papal hierocracy (Ullmann, 1970).

In addition to non-verbal techniques of communication, the ecclesiastical authorities actively proselytized their congregation through conventional methods. Priests reached in aggregate a mass audience through sermons delivered in vernacular languages; the legatine system reached all corners of Europe, and papal legates addressed vast crowds during their tours. The law administered through the ecclesiastical courts both embodied and mediated papal hierocratic themes. And from the thirteenth century onwards, the growing number of travelling friars, who often combined their evangelical role with reporting ‘the news’ to curious listeners, became an effective propaganda arm of the papacy.

The ecclesiastical hierarchy also decisively shaped élite culture in ways that supported the exercise of papal authority. Monasteries dominated book production until the development of university scriptoria from the thirteenth century onwards. As a result, texts supporting or expounding papal ideology were generally copied at the expense of texts that explicitly or implicitly challenged an ecclesiastical view of the universe. The clerical and monastic order also dominated the transmission of knowledge through formal education during the early and central middle ages. Until the eleventh century, education was confined largely to the clergy and its content was decisively shaped by the ecclesiastical hierarchy from at least the ninth century (Laistner, 1957; Leff, 1958). It was only in the twelfth century that there was a substantial increase in lay education and lay centres of learning, and even many of these centres came under direct or indirect ecclesiastical supervision (Cobban, 1969).

The nature of this cultural domination is illustrated by the steps taken to contain the threat posed by Aristotle. His teaching challenged the dominant perspective of a single political-religious society, an indivisible Church that underpinned papal hegemony. Perhaps for this reason, the principal works of Aristotle were allowed to ‘disappear’ during the early middle ages. When they were rediscovered, their study was banned at Paris University until such time as they had been ‘purified’. And when William of Moerbeke finally translated Aristotle from Greek into Latin in the thirteenth century, he was obliged to use words like politicus (political) and politia (government) with which most of his colleagues were unfamiliar. Even to make a distinction between religious and political matters, between Church and State, a distinction that directly challenged a key premise of papal ideology, required the learning of new terms. The principal medium of communication between the cultured élite, the universal language of Christendom, was thus itself shaped and defined by the precepts of papal ideology (Ullmann, 1975).

It was thus not simply the power of religious faith that sustained papal authority. The success of the ecclesiastical hierarchy in shaping the dominant culture led, for a long time, to the general (but not total) exclusion of ideas and concepts that might undermine papal ascendancy. Scholars were induced to perceive and, therefore, to ‘experience’ reality in a way that sustained papal rule regardless of whether they were or were not pious members of the Church.

The papacy's cultural domination, even during the meridian of its power in the central middle ages, was admittedly far from complete. There is ample evidence of a lay culture expressing ‘secular’ values in song, dance, story-telling and poetry, existing independently of, but overlapping with, a more church-centred religious culture (Southern, 1959). The secular organization of medieval society also often functioned on very different principles from those of the eccesiastical order projected in papal propaganda (Bloch, 1961). And the papacy's direct control over the principal agency of mass communication, the Church, was even at the height of its power far from absolute in practice.

But although the papacy's hegemony was never total, its dual domination over the institutions of mental production and mass communication was nevertheless sufficient to enable it to gain increased authority and power at the expense of adversaries with apparently infinitely greater resources at their disposal. This process of aggrandisement can be briefly illustrated by perhaps the best-known confrontation of the middle ages. In 1075, Pope Gregory VII brought to a head the papal assault on lay control over ecclesiastical appointments by banning lay investiture (i.e. the ritual symbolizing lay conferment of ecclesiastical offices). This was followed by public pronouncements, sermons and pamphlets in a sustained propaganda war. The German monarch, Henry IV, found to his cost that this ideological assault was highly effective, because it drew upon a consensus of opinion that had been built up over the centuries through constant reiteration of ecclesiastical propaganda. When he was excommunicated, temporarily deposed, and the oaths of allegiance made to him by his vassals suspended by the pope, his position became increasingly perilous. His itinerant court did not possess the historical records that would have been needed to challenge effectively the papacy's claim to sovereignty over the Church, and he had no access to an alternative, literate tradition of thought that would have legitimized his authority as ruler independent of the Church. He was king by the grace of God, and this grace had been withdrawn by God's supreme agent. His vassals began to defect with, as Brooke (1964) put it, ‘the gates of hell clanging about their ears’, though in some cases defections were clearly caused by more opportunistic motives. At the Diet of Tribur, the German princes formally declared that Henry IV would forfeit his throne unless he secured absolution from the pope. The most powerful ruler in the west, who had merely sought to maintain the practice of lay investiture sanctioned by custom for centuries, was forced to go to Italy as a penitent to seek the pope's absolution. While the papal cause subsequently suffered a number of reverses, the German monarchy finally abandoned lay investiture of the clergy after the Concordat of Worms in 1122 (Davies, 1957; Brooke, 1964; Ullmann, 1970 and 1977).

In short, the rise of papal government in the early and central middle ages was based ultimately on the papacy's successful manipulation of élite and mass media to transmit not merely its claims to church leadership but an ideological perspective of the world that legitimized its domination of Christendom. It was only when the papacy's domination of the élite centres of knowledge and mass communications was successfully challenged in the later middle ages that the papacy's ideological ascendancy was broken⁽⁸⁾. With the loss of its ideological control, the papacy's power collapsed. The issuing of excommunications which had brought the most powerful European monarch literally to his knees in 1077 was not sufficient even to insure the payment of papal taxes by the fifteenth century.

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Just as the extension of the Christian Church throughout Europe in the early middle ages laid the foundation of papal power, so the development of new media of communication has created new power groups. Perhaps the most notorious of these in British media history have been the press barons. Their rise is of interest, however, as much for the contrast as for the comparison it affords to the rise of the papacy.

In the eighteenth century, press proprietors were, for the most part, unimportant and far from respectable tradesmen. The practice of showing advance copy of scurrilous stories to their victims in order to extract a fee for suppressing their publication, lowered the reputation of those associated with the press generally. In 1777, for instance, it was said of William Dodd, a preacher charged with forgery, almost as corroboration of the charge, that he had ‘descended so low as to become the editor of a newspaper’ (quoted in Smith, 1978, p. 165). Apart from exceptional proprietors like James Perry, the wealthy owner of the largest-circulation Whig daily in the late eighteenth century, owners of newspapers were not admitted into polite society (Christie, 1970). Even writing articles for the press was judged by aristocratic politicians to be, in Lord Brougham's phrase, ‘dirty work’ (quoted in Asquith, 1976, p. 277). The low prestige of press proprietors was also a reflection of their lack of independent political influence. Few papers sold more than 1000 copies before 1800, and many papers were heavily dependent upon political patronage in the form of subsidies, sinecures, politically tied advertising and information handouts.

During the nineteenth century the prestige and influence of press proprietors increased as a consequence of the growing circulations they commanded and an increased measure of political autonomy. Leading proprietors and editors were assiduously cultivated by government ministers (Anon, 1935 and 1939; Hindle, 1937) and a growing number of them entered parliament. Their increased political weight was reflected in the substantial legal immunities awarded to the press during the period 1868–88 (Lee, 1976). At the same time, the role of the press was widely reinterpreted as that of an independent fourth estate in order, as Boyce (1978) has argued, to establish for newspapers a ‘claim for a recognized and respectable place in the British political system’.

But it was only when newspapers acquired mass circulations that the position of proprietors underwent a fundamental change. Lloyd's Weekly was the first Sunday paper to gain a million circulation in 1896, while the Daily Mail was the first daily to cross this threshold at the turn of the century. By 1920, the national Sunday press had an aggregate circulation of 13.5 million, with a mass working-class as well as middle-class following. National dailies subsequently gained a mass readership amongst the working class, growing from 5.4 million to 10.6 million between 1920 and 1939 (Kaldor and Silverman, 1948). The growth of the press as a mass medium was accompanied by increased concentration of ownership, giving leading press magnates ultimate control over vast aggregate circulations. Three men—Rothermere, Beaverbrook and Kemsley—controlled in 1937, for instance, 45 per cent of national daily circulation and 51 per cent of provincial morning circulation, with an aggregate readership (including their evening papers) of over 15 million people⁽⁹⁾.

This domination over the principal agency of political communication transformed the social standing of press proprietors. Men whose occupations would have caused them to have been shunned by aristocratic politicians in an earlier age as mere tradesmen were showered with titles and honours. As Northcliffe's sister Geraldine wrote facetiously in 1918, ‘in view of the paper shortage, I think the family ought to issue printed forms like Field Service postcards, viz: Many congratulations on you being made Archbishop of Canterbury/Pope/Duke/Viscount/Knight, etc.’ (quoted in Ferris, 1971, p. 215). Her facetiousness had a point to it: five of her brothers were given between them two viscountcies, one barony and two baronetcies. Indeed, Viscount Rothermere was singled out for an even greater honour. After campaigning vigorously in his papers for the return of lost territories to Hungary, he was seriously asked by leading Hungarian monarchists whether he would fill the vacant throne of St Stephen as King of Hungary. He contented himself with an address of gratitude signed by one and a quarter million Hungarians (a sixth of the population).

The stars of the new media also exercised real power. Northcliffe's campaign against the shortage of shells on the Western Front in 1915 reinforced mounting opposition to Asquith, and contributed to the formation of the coalition government under Lloyd George in 1916. Their newspaper fiefdoms helped them to gain high political office, as in the case of Rothermere (in charge of the Air Ministry 1917–18), Northcliffe (Director of Propaganda in Enemy Territories, 1918–19) and Beaverbrook (Minister of State and Production 1941–2, amongst other posts). They also exercised a more intangible but nonetheless important influence in sustaining the dominant political consensus between the wars, and in mobilizing conservative forces in opposition to radical change (Curran and Seaton, 1981).

But the direct influence exercised through their papers was none the less severely circumscribed. When pitted against entrenched political power, the major campaigns initiated by the press barons were relative failures. Rothermere's campaign against ‘squandermania’ after World War I met with only limited success, and his attempt to force the coalition government's hand by backing anti-waste candidates in parliamentary by-elections failed, despite three notable successes. The Empire Free Trade campaign promoted by both Beaverbrook and Rothermere also failed through lack of sufficient Tory party support, and their subsequent attempt to force through a change of policy by launching the United Empire Party was largely, though not entirely, unsuccessful (Taylor, 1972). These and other failures underlined the fact that the mass audiences reached daily by the press barons had an independent mind of their own. A more realistic appraisal of the power exercised by press magnates reduced their influence on internal politics within the Conservative party. When Rothermere's demand to be informed of at least eight or ten Cabinet ministers in Baldwin's next ministry as a condition of his continued support was repudiated by Baldwin in a famous speech as ‘a preposterous and insolent demand’ in 1931, the limitations of press power were publicly proclaimed. The point was rammed home a few weeks later when the official Conservative candidate loyal to Baldwin defeated an independent conservative backed by both Rothermere and Beaverbrook in the celebrated St. George's Westminster by-election. The press magnates’ ability to address a mass following, based on a cash nexus, proved no match for a party machine, manned only by a relatively small number of activists but able to invoke deeply-held and stable political loyalties.

The contrast between the extensive secular power exercised by the papacy in the central middle ages and the more limited influence of the press barons reflects a number of more important differences. The papacy sought to exercise a universal sovereignty, whereas the ambitions of the press magnates were more modest. The papacy developed a powerful ideological programme that legitimized its claim to divine-right monarchy: the press barons articulated a more defensive ‘fourth estate’ ideology that sought merely to legitimize their place within the constitution (for example, Northcliffe, 1922; Beaverbrook, 1925). The papacy successfully dominated for a time all the principal institutions of ideological production and imposed a construction of reality that legitimized its supremacy. In contrast, the press barons merely amplified systems of representation furnished by others (politicians, civil servants, judges, the armed forces and so on) that legitimized a power structure of which they were only a constituent element. Furthermore, they were unable to impose even a uniform inflexion of these dominant systems of representation. Their control over the press itself was incomplete; they did not always share the same political objectives; and they had little influence over other agencies of mass communication—books, films, radio, and later television. And by comparison with the papacy, they were faced with a much more unified power-bloc, offering few opportunities for them to play off rival factions in order to build up their own power.

THE DESTABILIZATION OF POWER STRUGGLES

The rise of a new élite, linked to the development of new communications, has tended to destabilize the power structure by generating or exacerbating tensions and rivalries within it. This will be illustrated by examining the conflicts exacerbated by the papacy in the middle ages and by the effect of the modern mass media on the development of the British political system.

The extension of the Catholic Church throughout Europe created, in one sense, a new element of instability in medieval society. As we have seen, the papacy and the ecclesiastical hierarchy sought to regulate social knowledge through its control over medieval communications in order to appropriate some of the power and authority exercised by the traditional leaders of feudal society. This process of aggrandisement was made more disruptive by the fact that the papacy possessed the moral authority to undermine its opponents, without possessing the military means to conquer them. Consequently, the papacy was forced to rely upon others to take up arms on its behalf, and this sometimes led to a positive incitement of fissiparous elements opposed to the nation-building, centralizing strategies of medieval monarchies. Thus, the papacy played a leading part in deliberately provoking feudatories to oppose the German monarchy during the long drawn-out conflict over control of ecclesiastical appointments, thereby contributing to the growing instability of Germany and North Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

The development of new communications under ecclesiastical control had a destabilizing impact in another, more indirect way. The ecclesiastical hierarchy exploited its control over medieval media to build up monarchical power, which provoked a feudal reaction throughout medieval Europe. Although the initiative often came from medieval rulers, they found in the clergy willing and skilled agents in the ideological reconstruction of their authority, partly because the traditional feudal conception of kingship, and the indigenous northern European traditions from which it derived, constituted a powerful negation of the ideology and new social order which the ecclesiastical authorities sought to impose. According to papal ideology, you will recall, all power descended from God and was institutionalized in the form of law-giving by divinely appointed monarchies under the jurisdiction of the papal emperor with absolute authority over the children of God. But according to indigenous feudal tradition, all power ascended from below: the monarch was not an absolute ruler, but the first amongst equals bound by the reciprocal obligations of the feudal contract and constrained by natural law enshrined in custom. The early medieval institution of the monarchy was thus a functioning denial of the impersonal ecclesiastical order which the papacy proclaimed, the embodiment of an older, oral ideological tradition that directly challenged the premises of papal ideology.

The ecclesiastical hierarchy sought to refashion the institution of the monarchy through learned tracts, sermons, official pronouncements, liturgical symbolism and ritual. Thus, numerous innovations were made in royal coronation ceremonies, for instance, during the period A.D. 400–1300, in an attempt to suppress the traditional feudal conception of kingship and establish in its place a divine-right monarchy whose power derived through the mediation of the church (Kantorowicz, 1957; Ullmann, 1969, 1975 and 1978). The person of the monarch was deliberately invested with sacred magic properties, with the result that throughout much of Europe the superstition developed that kings could cure scrofula merely by touching its victims. Even armed resistance to the king, unless he was deposed by the Church, was defined by clergy as an act of sacrilege against the Lord's anointed. In addition to reinterpreting the legitimacy of the monarchy, the clergy also played a central role in developing court administrations as effective agencies of authority.

This concerted attempt to transform the position of medieval monarchs in accordance with the interests and ideology of the ecclesiastical order posed a major threat to established interests within the hierarchy of power. It advanced royal authority at the expense of aristocratic power. It implied, moreover, a fundamental change in the relationship of the monarch to his feudatories, from that of feudal chieftain with limited powers to that of divine-right monarch with absolute powers accountable only to God and his appointed agents. Inevitably this attempt to alter the distribution of power led to fierce armed resistance, of which the successful baronial revolt against King John of England in the early thirteenth century was but one example (Ullmann, 1978)⁽¹⁰⁾.

* * *

The rise of professional communicators in modern Britain has been, by comparison, less dislocative, largely because professional communicators have more readily accepted a subaltern role than their priestly predecessors. Media professionals interpret the political system in a relatively passive way without seeking fundamentally to alter the power-structure of society. An increasing disjunction has occurred, however, between the British media and the British political system, with potentially disruptive consequences.

Ironically, the development of the press in Victorian Britain played an important part in the creation of the modern party system. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the press forged close ties with the parliamentary parties and tended to be highly partisan in its political coverage. The expansion of this press helped to convert what had been, in effect, aristocratic factions in Parliament into political movements with a mass following (Vincent, 1972; Lee, 1976).

During the course of the twentieth century, the character of the British press began to change. An increasing number of newspapers became more independent of the major political parties⁽¹¹⁾. This resulted in papers providing a more bi-partisan coverage of politics, particularly during the postwar period (Seymour-Ure, 1977). The popular press also became progressively depoliticized, with some national papers more than halving their coverage of public affairs as a proportion of editorial space during the last fifty years (Curran, Douglas and Whannel, 1980). These changes altered the relationship of newspapers to their readers. By 1979, over a third of national daily-paper readers bought papers with political allegiances different from their own. Even newspaper readers buying papers with the same political affiliation as their own were exposed in these papers to more ‘straight’ reports of what their political opponents had said and done. And increasingly the newspaper reading public, as a whole, consumed entertainment rather than public affairs content in the press. While the tradition of a politically affiliated, partisan press reaching a partisan audience has certainly not disappeared, all these changes have weakened the ability of the major political parties to maintain their supporters’ loyalty through the press.

The rise of broadcasting has further weakened the position of the political parties. The emergence of television as the principal medium of political communication has resulted in a shift away from consumption of a medium with a tradition of partisanship to a medium which is required to be politically balanced and impartial. This trend has been particularly pronounced during the last two decades. There has been a very rapid growth of public affairs coverage in TV, with a three-fold increase on BBC TV between 1962 and 1974. And while public affairs items in the press only obtained a below-average readership (both before and after the introduction of TV), TV news programmes have secured above-average audiences. More people have thus been exposed to more bipartisan communications.

The progressive detachment of the mass media from the party system has been confounded by the mutual rivalry between professional politicians and professional communicators. Both groups have competing claims to legitimacy: they both claim to represent the public and serve the public interest. As Gurevitch and Blumler (1977) point out, they are, to some extent, rivals who have different definitions of their roles which produce mutual tension and conflict. This tension is reflected in media portrayals of party politics which are, at times, not so much bi-partisan as anti-partisan. This anti-partisan perspective is typified by this excerpt from a Sunday Times editorial:

Mr. Callaghan condemns the income tax cuts forced on the government by the Tories and other opposition parties as looking after the rich and striking a blow at the family budget…. The Prime Minister is a politician and is therefore, no doubt, entitled under the rules of the game to play politics. But a newspaper is equally entitled to remind readers that politics is what he is playing. We must not be tempted by rhetoric to take Ministers’ words at face value, and forget what they have said in the past. What the Conservatives have done for the higher tax-payers is precisely what the Government itself would do if it had the political nerve—or if its party would let it. (Sunday Times, 14 May 1978)

This editorial makes unusually explicit some of the assumptions that underpin the rhetoric of media anti-partisanship. Prime Ministers ‘play politics’ whereas The Sunday Times is disinterested. Politicians dissemble and lie while The Sunday Times fearlessly speaks its mind. Politicians are encumbered by vested interests and party ties, whereas The Sunday Times is concerned only with the public interest—even when discussing tax cuts for affluent Sunday Times journalists and readers.

Anti-partisanship is present not only in explicit form in political commentary. It is also implicit in the interpretative frameworks within which a good deal of current affairs coverage is set in both the press and broadcasting media. In particular, there is a tendency for politics to be defined in pragmatic, technocratic terms as a process of management and problem-solving; for political conflict to be de-contextualized from the political and economic struggles that underlie it; even, in some cases, for genuine conflicts over principle or of class interest to be represented as mere clashes of personality. Such representations of politics inevitably detract from political loyalties based on class affiliations and political principle.

This anti-partisan bias of the media is the consequence of a number of converging influences⁽¹²⁾. Perhaps the most important of these is a rationalistic, anti-partisan political tradition that has long been particularly pervasive amongst the professional middle class. As Reith, the founder of the BBC (and former engineer) wrote, for instance, in his diary: ‘I reflect sometimes on “politics”. The whole horrid technique should be abolished. Government of a country is a matter of policy and proper administration, in other words efficiency’ (Reith, 11 October 1932). The view that rational, non-party criteria interpreted by disinterested professionals should determine government has a natural attraction: it legitimizes the claim of the professional middle class to stand above sectional interest, to define the public interest, to speak on behalf of us all. A technocratic perspective of politics has thus come to be expressed through the media partly because it is an expression of a more generalized ideology widely diffused within the intermediate strata, of which professional communicators are a part, which legitimizes the prestige, power and status accorded to the professions.

The detachment of the media from the political parties has had only a partially destabilizing effect on the political system. The mass media continue to provide positive support for the principles of representative democracy; they confer legitimacy on the political parties by giving prominence to the parliamentary and party political process; and the publicity they give to elections is of crucial importance in assisting the political parties to mobilize their supporters to the polls. But the commercialization of the press, the rise of TV as a bi-partisan political medium of communication, and the anti-partisan bias that characterizes some media political coverage, have all contributed to the marked decline of party loyalties and the increase in electoral volatility during the last two decades ⁽¹³⁾. In eroding popular support for the political parties, the media are eroding the basis of Britain's stable political system during the period of mass democracy⁽¹⁴⁾.

THE DISPLACEMENT OF MEDIATING AGENCIES

The introduction of new techniques of mass communication has tended to undermine the prestige and influence of established mediating organizations and groups. By providing new channels of communication, by-passing established mediating agencies, new media have also posed a serious threat to the stable, hierarchical control of social knowledge. The best illustration of this process of displacement, and attendant social dislocation, is provided by the rise of the book in late medieval and early modern Europe.

From the thirteenth century onwards, paper rapidly displaced parchment as the principal raw material of books, thereby making the preparation of manuscripts cheaper, simpler and faster. This important innovation was accompanied by a massive increase in the number of people (mostly women) engaged in the copying of books, with the development of commercial and university scriptoria, and by the establishment of a fully organized international book trade, in the later middle ages. The introduction of printing with moveable metal type for commercial purposes in 1450 was thus the culmination, rather than the beginning, of a major expansion of a book-based culture. Print resulted, however, in an enormous gain in productivity, with output per capita engaged in book production rising by well over a hundred-fold, to judge from estimates provided by Eisenstein (1968). Print also led to a sharp reduction in costs, so that the printed works of Luther, for instance, could be purchased in England for 4d or 6d a copy in 1520—the equivalent of about a day's wage for a craftsman. This increase in output and fall in costs, combined with rising rates of literacy, resulted in a spectacular increase in book consumption. About twenty million books were produced in Europe between 1450 and 1500, rising sharply thereafter (Febvre and Martin, 1976).

This expansion of book production resulted in the mass dissemination of religious texts, and in particular Bibles in vernacular languages. There were, for example, nineteen editions of the Bible in High German before Luther, and Luther's own translation of the Bible was published in whole or in part in no less than 430 editions between 1522 and 1546. This diffusion of the Bible undermined the monopolistic position of the clergy as agents of religious communication, and threatened their authority as mediators of religious knowledge by providing direct access to an alternative, more authoritative source of religious teaching—that of Christ as reported in the scriptures. As John Hobbes wrote disapprovingly in the seventeenth century: ‘every man, nay, every boy and wench that could read English thought they spoke with God Almighty, and understood what He said’ (quoted in Hill, 1974, p. 154).

It was mainly in order to maintain priestly, hierarchical control over religious knowledge that determined attempts were made to restrict public access to the Bible. The Catholic Church proscribed Bibles printed in languages that people could understand. The English Church under Henry VIII tried a more discriminating approach. Bible-reading was banned in 1543 among the lower orders, namely ‘women, apprentices and husbandmen’ (Bennett, 1952).

In a less immediately apparent but more important way, the rise of the book undermined the authority of the clergy by diminishing their intermediary role. The prestige and influence of the Catholic clergy (and of the Catholic Church as an institution) derived from their special status as the mediators of divine power. This found concrete and dramatic expression in a variety of rituals symbolizing the role of the clergy in transmitting—and even coercing—supernatural power through their intercession. The development of a book-based culture encouraged a new orientation in which the word of God mediated through print was placed at the centre of religion. This new approach tended to reject the elaborate ritualism and expressive iconography of pre-literate forms of religious communication in which the priest was the principal actor. It frequently repudiated also the efficacy of the rites administered by the priest, thereby diminishing his status as a dispenser of grace. Indeed, in its more extreme form, it fostered an individualistic, private approach to religion that gave precedence to the study of the Bible and private prayer at the expense of the corporate organization of religion, based on collective rituals administered by a professional priesthood. Print thus helped to displace the mediating and intercessionary role of the clergy, and even of the Church itself, by providing a new channel of communication linking Christians to their God.

The development of a lay scribal and print culture also undermined the ideological ascendancy of the Church. The growth of commercial scriptoria and subsequently commercial printing enterprises made it more difficult for the ecclesiastical authorities, who had previously directly controlled the means of book production, to exercise effective censorship. The failure of the Church to maintain its domination over centres of learning in the later middle ages also weakened its grip on the content of élite culture. Through the medium of the written and printed word (as well as in a sense through changing styles of representation in Renaissance art), an anthropomorphic view of the world that stressed man's innate capacity to regulate his environment was expressed that directly confronted the more traditional theocentric view of a divinely ordained and ordered universe that underpinned papal imperialism. Developments in political thought—most notably the modern distinction between Church and State and a belief in the legitimacy of state power as being derived from people rather than from God—was also mediated through books to a larger élite audience, undermining the premises that sustained papal ascendancy (Wilks, 1963; Ullmann, 1977).

The rise of the book, pamphlet and flysheet also to some extent undermined the authority of the Church leadership by expanding the boundaries of time and space: publications increased knowledge of early Church history in which Rome had played an inconspicuous part, and spread information about the greed and corruption of the Renaissance papacy which, though probably no worse than that of the papacy in the tenth and early eleventh centuries, became more widely known. In a more general sense, the rise of the manuscript and subsequently of the printed book also fostered the development of an alternative culture. Although the bulk of scribal and early print output was in Latin and religious in content, the production and dissemination of vernacular texts helped to foster a parallel secular culture based on national languages and dialects, drawing upon indigenous cultural traditions. The ecclesiastical hierarchy in late medieval Europe sought to contain the threat of this ‘new learning’ through proscriptions and censorship, direct patronage and the creation of what Southern (1970) calls ‘a separate university system’ through the Franciscan and Dominican orders. It was unable, however, to neutralize the dislocating influence of new techniques of communication that by-passed the established information order of the Catholic Church.

Indeed, the rise of the book not only subverted the authority of the Church, but also acted as a directly centrifugal force within it. It polarized the Catholic congregation between literate and pre-literate definitions of religious experience and positively fostered heresy. The close connection between Bible-reading and heretical belief has often been observed by historians (for example, Dickens, 1964 and Thomson, 1965). Just why this should have been the case is less than clear without reference to modern media research. This shows that people tend to read, understand and recall elements within a communication selectively, in ways that accord with their prior disposition (see, for example, Cooper and Jahoda, 1947; Hovland, Janis and Kelley, 1953; Klapper, 1966). The widely different responses to the Bible, expressed in different forms of heresy, can be partly explained by the divergent traditions of late medieval and early modern Europe. To see the Bible as ‘producing’ heresy is somewhat misleading: rather, exposure to the Bible caused prior differences within Christendom, reflecting the different social backgrounds, national traditions and religious orientations of the new Bible public, to be expressed in the form of divergent religious interpretations. Thus, the dissemination of the Bible did not so much create differences within the Catholic Church as cause them to be expressed in the form of differences over doctrine.

Other contingent factors probably reinforced the schismatic impact of vernacular Bibles. Centuries of exegetical analysis and interpretation had produced Catholic doctrines lacking a clear scriptural basis. The Bible is an inherently equivocal text which lends itself to very different interpretations based upon an apparently literal understanding of different parts of it. The failure of the ecclesiastical authorities to prepare the ground adequately for the reception of the Bible also limited their ability to defuse its divisive impact. While the research of historians like Heath (1969) and Elton (1975) clearly calls into question traditional conceptions of a ‘corrupt’ preReformation Church, there can be no doubt that inadequate, if improved, clerical training and the continuing ritualistic formalism of the late medieval Church prevented effective ecclesiastical supervision of lay responses to the Bible.

The causes of the rise of Protestantism are exceedingly complex, and are only partly to do with religion. But, at one level at least, Protestantism can be viewed as a synthesis of the different disruptive tendencies set in motion by a new technique of mass communication. Protestantism was a movement that was inspired, in part, by access to an alternative source of religious doctrine, the Bible, mediated through print, that competed with hierarchically mediated orthodoxy; it took the form of a fundamentalist reconstruction of Christian dogma based on a literal interpretation of the scriptures; it was a book-centred definition of religious experience that rejected many of the pre-literate, ritualistic forms of religious communication and the central intermediary role of the Catholic priesthood; it was a revolt against papal sovereignty, which the printed word had helped to foster by contributing to the decline of the papacy's prestige and ideological ascendancy; and, in some ways, Protestantism was also the expression of a growing secularism and nationalism that the growth of a lay scribal and print culture had helped to promote.

That Protestantism was, in some respects the product of print is underlined by the way in which Protestant churches sought quite deliberately to supplant traditional, pre-literate modes of religious communication with a new system of communication based on the printed word. Church murals were whitewashed over, church sculptures were destroyed, stained glass was smashed and replaced with pane glass, relics were destroyed, the images of saints were even given to children as toys. Sacramental rites were also suppressed, church ritual was simplified, and the sacred magical role of the priest was de-mystified with the abandonment of celibacy. Bibliolatry took its place with the mass production of the Bible, the training of pastors as biblical experts and a sustained literacy drive aimed at enabling congregations to understand God's teachings through the printed word.

In contrast, the Counter-Reformation in the late sixteenth century resulted in a determined counter-offensive in Catholic countries aimed at containing the disruptive impact of print. The introduction of the Index, the proscription not only of vernacular Bibles but also of many religious bestselling commentaries, and the relative neglect of primary education in Catholic countries, all served to reinforce the central role of ritual and iconography in the Catholic Church and to reassert hierarchical control over religious knowledge by the ecclesiastical authorities. The Catholic revival served also to entrench the authority of the priest since, at its deepest psychological level, Tridentine Catholicism was an image-based rather than a word-based experience in which the role of the priest as the administrator of sacred rites was more important than the printed word of God.

The Anglican Church established by the Elizabethan Settlement was, by contrast, a compromise between Catholicism and Protestantism. Its doctrinal evasions were designed to reconcile the sharp divisions over doctrine which a long drawn-out war conducted in print had helped to exacerbate (Davies, 1976); and its liturgy represented an accommodation between the traditional iconography of Catholicism and the bibliolatry of Protestantism (Thomas, 1973). It neither sought to entrench print at the centre of religion nor to exclude it, but merely to contain its social dislocation⁽¹⁵⁾.

MEDIA AND CLASS CONFLICT

There is substantial agreement amongst sociologists writing from different ideological perspectives that the mass media legitimize the social systems of which they are a part (Lazarsfeld and Merton, 1948; Janowitz, 1952; Breed, 1964; Miliband, 1973; Tuchman, 1978; etc.). This consensus is based upon the study of the mass media during a period when control of the mass media has been closely integrated into the power structure of most developed industrial societies.

Control of the media has not always been so successfully integrated into the power structure, as will be illustrated by the rise of the commercial press and subsequent development of a radical working-class press in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Both developments illustrate the disruptive consequences that follow upon mass media evolving in opposition to the dominant social order⁽¹⁶⁾.

During the early eighteenth century, the middle class in Britain was largely excluded from the institutionalized political process by the limited franchise which gave to the great landed families effective control over small and unrepresentative constituencies. The middle class was also, to some extent, excluded from the central bureaucracy and spoils of office by the patronage system of the dominant landed class who controlled the state. It was denied even the opportunity to participate in a meaningful way in national politics (and therefore to advance its interests) by the consensual political values of the landed élite that discouraged political participation. Central to this consensus was the concept of ‘virtual representation’ by which politicians drawn from the landed élite were said to represent the public by virtue of their independence and tradition of public service, even though they were not directly elected by the people. Great stress was laid also on the independent, deliberative role of the parliamentarian and the complexity of statecraft in a way that discouraged popular participation in the political process. As Burke put it, the parliamentarian is like ‘a physician (who) does not take his remedy from the ravings of the patient’ (quoted in Brewer, 1976, p. 237).

Regulation of the press was one means by which aristocratic political ascendancy was maintained. Newspapers were subject to strict legal controls—the law of seditious libel, which was used to prevent criticism of the political system, general warrants issued at the discretion of the authorities against people suspected of committing a seditious libel, and a legal ban on the reporting of parliament. In addition, taxes on newspapers, advertisements and paper were introduced in 1712 mainly in order to increase the price of newspapers and thereby restrict their circulation. Successive administrations also sought to manage the political press by offering secret service subsidies, official advertising and exclusive information to newspapers in return for editorial services rendered to the government as well as giving rewards and sinecures to sympathetic journalists. Opposition groups in parliament countered with similar tactics in order to sustain an opposition press. Consequently, the political press (consisting largely of London papers) was completely dominated by the landed élite which controlled both government and parliament.

Rising levels of press taxation were frustrated, however, by economic growth which created a growing middle-class public for newspapers and a rising volume of advertising which aided its development. The number of local provincial newspapers increased from 22 to about 50 titles between 1714 and 1782 (Cranfield, 1962; Read, 1961). The provincial press also increased its coverage of public affairs, assisted by the improvement in local and postal communications and the increase in the number of metropolitan papers from which it shamelessly plagiarised material. This expansion of a more politicized, regional press fostered the development of a middle-class political culture, centred on the clubs, political societies and coffee-houses of provincial England. In promoting a political awareness amongst its readers, the emergent commercial press helped to lay the foundations for the subsequent middle-class assault on the aristocratic order.

The commercial press in the provinces both catered for and was controlled by the commercial middle class. The majority of newspaper proprietors were merchants, tradesmen, printers or booksellers—people drawn precisely from the class that was politically excluded. Journalists came from more varied backgrounds, but would seem to have been drawn primarily from the petitbourgeoisie (Cranfield, 1962 and 1977; Rogers, 1972). It was only a matter of time before a section of the commercial press adopted a more critical stance towards the landed élite, if only to attract a larger circulation amongst the expanding middle-class audience.

The person who first successfully mobilized the commercial press was, as Brewer (1976) shows, John Wilkes, who transformed a fairly commonplace occurrence—his imprisonment by general warrant for writing an article attacking the government—into a major political issue. His subsequent exclusion from the Commons, despite repeated re-elections, became a national scandal; and his calculated act of defiance as a magistrate in freeing printers who had published reports of parliament, brought the mobs out into the streets of London in a mass action of support that clearly created amongst the landed aristocracy in parliament something bordering on panic (Rudé, 1962). As Burke commented sardonically (his frantic private notes at the time belie his detachment), MPs responded to the mobs outside parliament like mice consulting on what to do with the cat that tormented them.

The controversies surrounding John Wilkes were the first notable occasions in which the newspaper press defined the central issues on the political agenda in active defiance of the consensus amongst the landed oligarchy in parliament. It was also the first important occasion in which the newspaper press conferred status upon and brought into public prominence a champion of bourgeois interests, enabling him to appeal over the heads of the landed élite in parliament to the disenfranchised constituency that lay outside. The coverage given to Wilkes's campaigns in the commercial press also demonstrated the power of the emergent press (reinforced by printed propaganda) to mobilize discontent on a national scale that was unprecedented in eighteenth-century England: Wilkes received not only the backing of the London mobs, but also the support, manifested in demonstrations, marches and petitions, of people all over the country from Berwick-on-Tweed to Falmouth. Largely as a result of popular pressure, general warrants were declared illegal in 1765 and the ban on the reporting of parliament was effectively abandoned in 1771. The press became increasingly free to subject parliamentary proceedings and government to public scrutiny, and to initiate debate outside the parameter of parliamentary consensus. The politics of oligarchy were at an end: Wilkes inaugurated a new era of political participation sustained by an increasingly independent commercial press.

The 1760s were a watershed in another sense. The commercial press began for the first time to challenge the legitimacy of the political system. Its critique was cautious and indirect at first, taking the form of extensive coverage of American criticism of British imperialism. But the slogan of ‘no taxation without representation’ used to mobilize resistance in America to the stamp duty was soon linked to the British context. Government was corrupt, incompetent and oppressive, it was argued in the more radical commercial papers, because it was unrepresentative. This led in turn to demands for extension of the franchise, and the formation of an extraparliamentary pressure group for electoral reform which gained extensive publicity in some commercial papers.

The commercial press expanded steadily during the late Georgian and early Victorian period. Between 1781 and 1851 the number of newspapers increased from about 76 to 563; their aggregate annual sales rose from 14 million in 1780 to 85 million in 1851 (Asquith, 1978). This expansion accelerated with the lifting of press taxation between 1853 and 1861.

Commercial newspapers also became increasingly independent. The ability of governments to control the press through the law was limited by two important reforms. In 1792, the seditious libel law was weakened by Fox's Libel Act which made juries the judges of libel suits. Libel law was further modified by Lord Campbell's Libel Act of 1843, which made the statement of truth in the public interest a legitimate defence against the charge of criminal libel. No less important, there was a spectacular increase in advertising expenditure on the press (reflected, for instance, in a five-fold increase in the advertising revenue of the principal London dailies between 1780 and 1820) which profoundly influenced the character of the commercial press. Increased advertising largely financed the development of independent news-gathering resources that rendered newspapers less dependent upon official information; it also made it possible for more newspapers to employ full-time rather than freelance journalists, thereby reducing the number of casually employed and frequently venal reporters; and, above all, it encouraged a more independent attitude amongst proprietors by making it more lucrative to maximize advertising through increasing circulation than to appeal to government and opposition for political subsidies. The growth of advertising thus provided a material base that encouraged greater independence from aristocratic influence and patronage, whether mediated by governments or by opposition factions in parliament (Aspinall, 1949; Christie, 1970; Asquith, 1975, 1976 and 1978; Cranfield, 1977⁽¹⁷⁾.

A section of this expanding commercial press fostered a positive class identity amongst its readers by characterizing ‘the middle classes’ as the economic and moral backbone of England. ‘Never in any country beneath the sun’, declared the Leeds Mercury in 1821, ‘was an order of men more estimable and valuable, more praised and praiseworthy than the middle class of society in England’ (quoted in Read, 1961, p. 119). The Mercury's assessment was modest by comparison with those that appeared in other middle-class publications of the same period. James Mill in the Westminster Review, for instance, hailed the middle class in 1826 ‘as the glory of England; as that which alone has given our eminence among nations; as that portion of our people to whom every thing that is good among us may with certainty be traced’ (quoted in Perkin, 1969, p. 230). By celebrating the virtues of the middle class, and in some cases by attacking the traditional leaders of society as parasitic, decadent and unproductive, commercial newspapers helped to coalesce disparate groups within the middle class by reinforcing a growing consciousness of class.

The commercial reform press contributed, moreover, in a very direct way to advancing middle-class interests and influence. The full enfranchisement of the middle class during the 1830s, the repeal of the Corn Law and the decontrol of trade during the 1840s and 1850s, and the initial reforms of the civil service, universities and armed forces during the 1850s and 1860s, transformed the position of the middle class in Britain. These gains were the culmination of pressure-group campaigns in which the reform press played a central part by generating publicity for reform, raising (in some cases) finance for reform organizations, and gaining converts by representing reform as the universally valid and shared interest of all.

The assault of the reform press on the ancien regime in Britain had disruptive consequences in the short term. Some of the campaigns that the reform press backed—from ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ in the 1750s to electoral reform in the 1830s—came close to inciting popular armed resistance to aristocratic rule. But viewed from a long-term perspective, the rise of the commercial press represented an integrative rather than dislocative influence. It acted as an early-warning system in an increasingly unstable society, alerting aristocratic politicians to the need for accommodation and change in order to preserve the social order.

The commercial press also helped to maintain the initially fragile alliance between the aristocracy and bourgeoisie that developed from the 1830s by providing an internal channel of communication within the new class coalition. Although the aristocracy dominated parliamentary politics until late into the nineteenth century, parliament nevertheless enacted many of the demands of the industrial and professional middle class. The commercial press provided an important institutional means by which middleclass opinion was organized and pressure effectively mounted to ensure that these demands were met, thereby averting a renewed confrontation. The commercial press also furnished a moral framework that legitimized the British capitalist system during a dislocative phase of its development. Indeed, with the building of mass circulations during the second half of the nineteenth century, commercial newspapers and magazines came to play an increasingly significant role in engineering consent for the social system within the working class.

* * *

The development during the early nineteenth century of a militant press, financed from within the working class, posed a more serious threat to the social order. Governments largely abandoned attempts to regulate the radical press through seditious libel law by the mid 1830s because they found that libel prosecutions were often counter-productive. They relied instead upon the so-called security system (requiring publishers to place financial bonds with the authorities) in an attempt to exclude ‘pauper’ ownership of the press, and press taxes designed to price papers beyond the pockets of working-class consumers. The objectives of these fiscal controls were frustrated, however, by determined resistance. During the early 1830s, radical publishers successfully evaded both the security system and press taxes. This was followed in the next two decades by the organized pooling of financial resources by working people in order to launch and also to purchase newspapers which the authorities sought to exclude from them. People clubbed together on an ad hoc basis to buy newspapers, exerted pressure on taverns to purchase radical papers, and bought left papers through branches of political and industrial organizations. As a result of this collective action, leading radical newspapers gained circulations far larger than those of their respectable rivals throughout most of the period 1815–55.

The expansion of this radical press played an important part in the cultural reorganization and political mobilization of the working class during the first half of the nineteenth century. Radical newspapers linked together different elements of the working-class movement, fragmented by sectional affiliations and local loyalties. They extended the field of social vision by showing the identity of interest of working people as a class in their selection of news and analysis of events. By stressing that the wealth of the community was created by the working class, they also provided a new way of understanding the world that fostered class militancy. And by constant insistence that working people possessed the potential power through ‘combination’ to change society, the radical press contributed to a growth in class morale that was an essential precondition of effective political action.

The radical press also directly aided the institutional development of the working-class movement. Radical papers publicized the meetings and activities of working-class political and industrial organizations; they conferred status upon the activists of the working-class movement; and they gave a national direction to working-class agitation, helping to transform community action into national campaigns.

The Left press also helped to radicalize the working-class movement by providing access to an increasingly radical analysis of society. Initially its critique was limited since it was derived largely from middle-class attacks on the aristocratic constitution and focused mainly upon corruption in high places and regressive taxes. Conflict was defined in these early papers largely in terms of an opposition between the aristocracy and the people (including working capitalists). During the 1830s, however, the more militant papers shifted their attack from ‘old corruption’ to the economic process that enabled the capitalist class to appropriate in profits the wealth created by labour. Their principal targets became not merely the aristocracy but the capitalist class as a whole, and the institutions that sustained and enforced the domination of the capitalist class. This more advanced perspective sign-posted the way forward towards a radical programme of reconstruction in which, in the words of the Poor Man's Guardian (19 October 1833), workers will ‘be at the top instead of at the bottom of society—or rather that there should be no bottom or top at all’.

Admittedly, this proto-Marxist analysis was often conflated with the old liberal analysis in an uncertain synthesis. There was, moreover, a basic continuity in the perspectives offered by the less militant wing of the radical press. But the rise of mass readership newspapers that challenged the legitimacy of central institutions of authority, linked to an analysis that came close to repudiating the capitalist system, was none the less a destabilizing influence. Britain's first General Strike (1842) and the political mobilization of the working class, on a mass scale, in the Chartist Movement were symptoms of an increasingly unstable society in which the radical press had become a powerfully disruptive force⁽¹⁸⁾.

COMMUNICATIONS AND SOCIAL CONTROL

As I have argued elsewhere, market forces succeeded where legal repression had failed in containing the rise of a radical press against the background of growing prosperity and the reassertion of ruling-class cultural domination. The operation of the free market, with its accompanying rise in publishing costs, led to a progressive transfer of ownership and control of the press to capitalist entrepreneurs. It also led to a new economic dependence on advertising that encouraged the absorption or elimination of the early radical press and inhibited its re-emergence (Curran, 1978a and 1979a).

Significant changes have occurred since the industrialization of the press in Victorian Britain. Ownership of the press has become more concentrated and has largely passed into the hands of powerful multinational corporations with interests mostly outside publishing; the personal domination of press magnates has been replaced by less coercive controls; political prejudice amongst advertisers has declined, and this has materially assisted the growth of a social democratic press in a depoliticized form. But these changes have merely ameliorated rather than fundamentally changed the control system institutionalized by the so-called free market (Murdock and Golding, 1974; Hirsch and Gordon, 1975; Curran, 1978b, 1979b and 1980; Curran, Douglas and Whannel, 1980; Curran and Seaton, 1981).

By contrast, British broadcasting has developed under the mantle of the state. Broadcasters have gained, nevertheless, a genuine autonomy from political parties and individual administrations as a result of an extended historical process of negotiation and resistance. Such is the compactness of the British ruling class and its continuing cultural hegemony that this increased autonomy has been achieved, however, without the broadcasting system becoming a dissident or seriously disruptive force.

The modern mass media in Britain now perform many of the integrative functions of the Church in the middle ages. Like the medieval Church, the media link together different groups and provide a shared experience that promotes social solidarity. The media also emphasize collective values that bind people closer together, in a way that is comparable to the influence of the medieval Church: the communality of the Christian faith celebrated by Christian rites is now replaced by the communalities of consumerism and nationalism celebrated in media ‘rites’ such as international sporting contests (that affirm national identities) and consumer features (that celebrate a collective identity as consumers). Indeed, the two institutions have engaged in some ways in very similar ideological ‘work’ despite the difference of time that separate them. The monarchy is projected by the modern British media as a symbol of collective identity just as it was by the medieval Church. The modern media have also given, at different times, massive and disproportionate attention to a series of ‘outsiders’—youth gangs, muggers, squatters, drug addicts, student radicals, trade-union militants—who have tended to be presented as powerful and irrational threats to ‘decent’ society (Young, 1971; Cohen, 1973; Hall, 1974; Morley, 1976; Hall et al. 1978; Whannel, 1979). The stigmatization of these ‘outsiders’ has had effects comparable to the hunting down and parading of witches allegedly possessed of the devil by the medieval and early modern Church. Moral panics have been created that have strengthened adherence to dominant social norms and encouraged a sense of beleaguered unity, transcending class differences, in the face of a dangerous, external threat.

The mass media have now assumed the role of the Church, in a more secular age, of interpreting and making sense of the world to the mass public. Like their priestly predecessors, professional communicators amplify systems of representation that legitimize the social system. The priesthood told their congregations that the power structure was divinely sanctioned; their successors inform their audiences that the power structure is democratically sanctioned through the ballot box. Dissidents were frequently de-legitimized by churchmen as ‘infidels’ intent upon resisting God's will; dissidents in contemporary Britain are frequently stigmatized as ‘extremists’ who reject democracy (Murdock, 1973). The medieval Church taught that the only legitimate way of securing redress for injustice was to appeal to the oppressor's conscience and, failing that, to a higher secular authority; the modern mass media similarly sanction only constitutional and lawful procedures as legitimate methods of protest (Hall, 1974). The medieval Church masked the sources of inequality by ascribing social injustice to the sin of the individual; the modern mass media tend, in more complex and sophisticated ways, to misdirect their audiences by the ways in which they define and explain structural inequalities (Hall, 1979). By stressing the randomness of God's unseen hand, the medieval Church encouraged passive acceptance of a subordinate status in society: the randomness of fate is a recurrent theme in much modern media entertainment (Curran, Douglas and Whannel, 1980). The Church none the less offered the chiliastic consolation of eternal salvation to ‘the meek (who) shall inherit the earth’; the media similarly give prominence to showbusiness personalities and football stars who, as ‘a powerless élite’, afford easily identifiable symbols for vicarious fulfilment (Alberoni, 1972).

There is, of course, some differentiation in the output of the modern media just as there was in the teaching of the medieval Church. Conflicts have developed between the media and other power centres in contemporary society just as there were conflicts between the papacy, episcopacy and the monarchies of the middle ages. But these conflicts are rarely fundamental and are generally contained within the moral framework that legitimizes the social and political structure. The new priesthood of the modern media has supplanted the old as the principal ideological agents building consent for the social system.

NOTES

1   I would like to express my thanks to Professor Walter Ullmann for his very detailed and helpful comments on the section of this essay dealing with the medieval papacy.

2   By the central middle ages, the Catholic Church was established in a monopoly position throughout most of Europe, extending from Estonia to northern Spain on an east-west axis, and from Iceland to Sicily on a north-south axis. Regular church attendance was maintained not only through the pull of religious belief, but also sometimes by penalties imposed for non-attendance. For evidence about the level of newspaper readership in different European countries, see JICNARS (1979), Hoyer, Hadenius and Weibull (1975) and Smith (1977).

3   General questions about the cultural impact of new media have been largely ignored. For a brief review, see Curran (1977). For an admirable examination of the cultural impact of print see, in particular, Eisenstein (1968, 1969 and 1979), whose analysis is very much more interesting than the better known commentary of McLuhan (1962).

4   This is not intended to imply agreement with the still fashionable denigration of survey-based research methodology. On the contrary, the application of survey methods is now essential for a more adequate development of Marxist perspectives within mass communications research.

5   For a particularly illuminating interpretation of the rise of the papacy, upon which this essay draws heavily, see Ullmann (1969, 1972, 1975, 1977 and 1978).

6   For instance, Pope Innocent I claimed in the early fifth century that St Peter or his pupils were the founders of all the bishoprics in Italy, Spain, Gaul, Africa and Sicily. There is, of course, not a shred of truth in this.

7   Much of the following information is derived from Thomas (1973) whose research, although mainly concerned with the early modern period, also sheds light on popular religious devotion in the middle ages.

8   A simple summary of these developments is provided in Curran (1977).

9   Calculated from the Royal Commission on the Press (1949) appendices 3 and 4, and readership per copy estimates derived from the Institute of Incorporated Practitioners in Advertising (1939).

10   The ecclesiastic reconstruction of kingship in the middle ages had disruptive long-term as well as short-term consequences. The feudal reaction in England kept alive the concepts of power delegated from below and feudal kingship limited by contract: it paved the way for government by an oligarchy of landed capitalists and, through a relatively peaceful process of transition, to popular participation in a liberal democracy. In contrast, the establishment of theocratic kingship in France, based on the hierocratic principles of divinely-instituted monarchy, blocked the route to peaceful evolution and led to absolutism followed by revolution. Whereas the feudal conception of kingship could evolve naturally through institutionalized channels of negotiation into representative democracy, the papal model of divine-right monarchy permitted only two forms of response—total subjection or total repudiation. The different pattern of development of modern France and modern Britain can thus be explained partly in terms of the failure of the papal conception of divine-right monarchy to take firm root in England, unlike France, during the middle ages.

11   This process of political disaffiliation resulted in half the national daily press in the October 1974 General Election being opposed to the election of a goverment constituted by a single party (Seymour-Ure, 1977).

12   The decline of media partisanship reflects the increasing commercial pressures on newspapers to reconcile the divergent political loyalties of newspaper readers; the progressive displacement of political patronage by advertising patronage of the press; the growth of local newspaper monopoly; the development of a professional ideology that has tended to repudiate the adversary tradition of journalism; the institutionalization of non-partisanship in publicly-regulated broadcasting; the weakening of ties between politicians and journalists, and growing mutual rivalry; and a deep-seated anti-partisan tradition in British political thought that pre-dates the modern party system.

13   A number of political and social changes have also contributed to the decline of partisan allegiance in Britain. For a useful discussion of these, see Butler and Stokes (1976).

14   The changes that have taken place in the British mass media closely resemble those that have taken place in the media in other western industrial societies where there has also been a tendency for partisan allegiance to decline.

15   There are modern parallels in which new media have undermined established institutions by by-passing their internal communication systems. The development of broadcasting and the press independent of ecclesiastical control has probably contributed to the secularization of society and the long-term decline of the Christian churches. The transmission of heterodox views on issues such as contraception, abortion and divorce has probably also contributed to divisions within the Catholic community over these issues. Similarly, the mass membership of the British trade-union movement is also being exposed to hostile coverage of trade unions (Hartmann, 1976 and 1980; Morley, 1976; Glasgow University Media Group, 1976 and 1980; McQuail, 1977; Beharrell and Philo, 1976) mediated by press and broadcasting media that by-pass the much less well developed internal communication system of the union movement. This poses a serious threat, in the long run, to the unity and corporate loyalty of trade-union mass memberships. New media have also displaced mediating institutions and groups, although without the dislocative consequences that followed the partial displacement of the priests as mediators of religious knowledge in early modern Europe. Thus the rise of television has undermined the role of parliament as a political forum. It has also undermined the role of grassroots political organizations as mediators of political communications (Rose, 1967). Arguably, this process of displacement has been one factor in the growing demand for increased internal party democracy within the Labour Party: party activists have responded to the decline of their traditional role and status within the party by demanding more power and influence.

16   The role of the printed word in contributing to England's only social revolution, and to ‘the revolution within the revolution’ constituted by the Levellers’ revolt, has yet to be fully explored. But as Siebert (1952) shows, the censorship system began to collapse in the years leading up to the Revolution. The Revolution itself produced an unprecedented spate of polemical literature. Stone (1972) estimates that 22,000 speeches, pamphlets, sermons and newspaper titles were published between 1640 and 1660. For a scholarly, but not very illuminating, study of the early newspaper press during this period, see Frank (1961).

17   These accounts provide a conventional Whig interpretation of the emancipation of the press from the state. Their narrow perspective causes them largely to ignore the growing independence of part of the commercial press from aristocratic control. The limited time-span they cover also causes them to ignore evidence of increased interpenetration between the press and the political parties in the later Victorian period that belies their claim that the press evolved into an independent fourth estate in the nineteenth century. Government subsidies continued in the form of government advertising allocated to friendly papers well into the nineteenth century (Hindle, 1937); government management of news remained an enduring form of influence (Anon, 1935 and 1939); newspaper proprietors and editors long continued to be intimately connected with one political party or other, whether in or out of office (Lee, 1977; Boyce, 1978); indeed, a number of leading newspapers received political subsidies well into the twentieth century (Seymour-Ure, 1976; Inwood, 1971; Taylor, 1972). The detachment of the press from the political parties, and consequently from government, was a much more gradual and extended process than the accounts cited in the text suggest.

18   For accounts of the rise of the radical press, see, in particular, Glasgow (1954), Thompson (1963), Read (1961), Wiener (1969), Hollis (1970), Harrison (1974), Prothero (1974), Tholfsen (1976), Epstein (1976), Berridge (1978), Curran (1979a) and Curran and Seaton (1981).

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