Journalism Today E-Book

Jane L. Chapman

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 630

Beschreibung

Journalism Today: A Themed History provides a cultural approach to journalism's history through the exploration of overarching concepts, as opposed to a typical chronological overview. Rich with illuminating stories and biographies of key figures, it sheds new light on the relationship between the press and society and how each has shaped the other. * Thematic study of the history of journalism, examining the role of journalism in democracy, the influence of new technology, the challenge of balancing ethical values, and the role of the audience * Charts the influence of the historical press for today's news in print, broadcast, and new media * Situates journalism in a rich cultural context with lively examples and case studies that bring the subject alive for contemporary readers * Provides a comparative analysis of American, British, and international journalism * Helpful feature boxes on important figures and case studies enhance student understanding of the development of journalism and news as we know it today, providing a convenient springboard for follow-up work.

Leseprobe

Contents

Preface: How To Use the Book and Summary of Sections

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Uses and Abuses of History: Why Bother With It?

Part I: Journalism and Democracy: A Sibling Rivalry?

1 A Right To Know

Résumé: Walter Lippmann

Résumés: The Founding Fathers

FactFile: The Development of Rights and Liberties

2 The Road Not Taken

Résumé: Tom Paine

FactFile: Anthony Haswell and Freedom of the Press

Résumé: Edward Smith Hall – An Australian Pioneer

FactFile: Habermas and the Changing Public Sphere

FactFile: The Lincoln–Douglas Debates

3 Digging the Dirt

Résumé: Lincoln Steffens

Résumé: S. S. McClure

Résumé: John Dewey

Résumé: Henry Luce

4 Spinning a Good Yarn and Developing Community

FactFile: The Pseudo-Event

Résumé: Ivy Lee

Résumé: Edward Bernays

FactFile: Neoliberalism’s Threat to Community

Part II: Technology, Work, and Business: Is Journalism More Than Just a Job?

5 Changing Roles in a Changing World

FactFile: The Cold Type Revolution

Résumé: Lord Beaverbrook

Résumé: Charles Dana

Résumé: William Cobbett

Résumé: John Stuart Mill

6 A New Journalism For A New Age

Résumé: Joseph Pulitzer

Résumé: Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe

Résumé: E. L. Godkin

FactFile: Appeal to Reason

FactFile: Ida M. Tarbell and Standard Oil

7 He Who Pays The Piper

FactFile: Advertising, Class, and the Daily Herald

FactFile: Forza Italia

FactFile: The Broadcast Reform Movement, 1928–35

FactFile: Edward R. Murrow and See It Now

8 A Power Worth Fighting For

FactFile: Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation

FactFile: Cable News Network and the “CNN Effect”

Part III: Ethics: A Matter of Judgment?

9 Private and Confidential?

FactFile: Privacy Codes in the United States

FactFile: Privacy Codes in Great Britain

10 Fakes, Rakes, and “On The Take”

FactFile: Faking It

Part IV: Audience: Citizen Consumer or Consumer Citizen?

11 Finding an Audience

FactFile: News Values

FactFile: Joe and Jolene Sixpack

Résumé: George Newnes

Résumé: C. P. Scott and the Manchester Guardian

12 How Audiences Rewrote the Script

FactFile: La Fronde

FactFile: Le Petit Journal

FactFile: Audience Reaction to W. T. Stead’s “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon”

13 Watching and Listening

FactFile: Leo Lowenthal and Celebrity “Idols”

FactFile: Measuring the Audience

Résumé: Marshall McLuhan

Part V: Conclusion: A Future History

14 Paper Tigers?

Résumé: Paul Julius Reuter

FactFile: The “Net Benefit to Canada” Test

Index

Journalism Today

This edition first published 2011© 2011 Jane L. Chapman and Nicholas G. H. Nuttall

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Preface

How To Use the Book and Summary of Sections

The Approach

The idea for this book first evolved from an attempt to identify the major themes facing journalism today, and then to trace their historical roots. We wanted the approach to history to center on these themes and thus, by definition, to be selective. So our starting point has been to identify current and longer term issues for journalism and society. We have then elaborated the arguments and presented empirical historical evidence to back them up. All of the FactFiles and Résumés, for instance, predate the twenty-first century.

We selected four themes, and to each we devote a section of the book:

Journalism and democracyTechnology, work, and businessEthicsAudience and its impact on journalism

In the process of historical exploration, we found that we had identified a further four themes that define modern journalism, as both significantly different from its forebears and at the same time having a clear familial connection with those antecedents:

PersonalizationGlobalizationLocalizationPauperization.

Using the Book

This has been a voyage of discovery to connect past with present as it relates to journalism. We hope that readers will want to share the journey by reading this book cover to cover. It promises to be a fascinating and entertaining journey! Alternatively, the book is also designed to be consulted in sections, or indeed, in chapters and parts of chapters. You can dip in and out, picking names or episodes that seem to stand out from the page, or serve any other purpose that you may have.

Class usage

Class usage is likely to be more systematic than individual usage, so here are some suggestions.

1 This book can be used for discussion purposes – students, for instance, can read a section or chapter on a selected theme before attending a class on that theme, or an allied subject.

2 Chapters can also be used for follow-up work: the book is clearly divided up so that it will provide background for essays and project work. The “résumés,” and case studies for instance, are intended to be an “aide-memoire” or prompt for further research on the life of the person selected, or the issues involved. In a relatively short book like this it is not possible to provide a complete history of journalism as a chronological transition from A to Z. Rather we have selected case studies that are indicative of those issues still relevant today, and those that also hold the potential for further discrete research as subjects in their own right, using this book as a springboard. The people who have been selected are neither definitive nor unique. Our choice is not exclusive: it is pragmatic to the extent that it is guided by the existence of a body of work (speeches, diaries, books, films, and other reflections) or scholarship – not necessarily on the people themselves and their lives but rather relating to their outstanding contribution to the overall context, enabling readers to investigate in more depth where they wish.

3 The contents of this book do not pretend to be definitive. We realize that other topics and different personalities can offer comparable insights into major events in the world of journalism as much as in the wider world itself.

An Introduction to the Themes

The main themes covered in this book – widening of participation in the public sphere, “nonprofessional” reporting and reporters, globalization of news and news organizations, concentration of ownerships, technological transformations, audience responses to the complexity of multiplatform delivery – are all historical phenomena dating back at least to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, often in countries outside the United States and Great Britain. This book traces some of these influences, not as an all-embracing chronological history (for these exist elsewhere), but more as a thematic “potpourri,” highlighting in particular those journalistic functions that relate to and interact with wider society. In doing so, we take a long view, stressing continuities as well as change.

The four main sections each attempt a thematic approach that of necessity foregrounds the press and print journalism to a greater extent than its broadcast equivalent. This reflects the much longer history of the printed word itself. Similarly, the examples used throughout attempt to be representative or emblematic of the issues under discussion and there has been no attempt to be all-embracing of either journalism history or ideology.

The Introduction: Uses and abuses of history

The Introduction explains the rationale for our approach and acts as a discursive springboard for the rest of the book.

Part I: Journalism and democracy

Here we explore aspects of the historic relationship between journalism and democracy, first in terms of philosophical milestones such as Magna Carta, John Milton’s Areopagitica, the writings of Tom Paine and of Jürgen Habermas; then in terms of legal and political struggles for freedom of expression such as the trial of John Peter Zenger, the Haswell case, and the story of Edward Smith Hall, an Australian free speech pioneer. The role of the press in the American Revolution, the First Amendment to the Constitution and other aspects of journalism and democracy (or the lack of it – such as censorship and oppressive laws), as well as challenges from investigative reporting and renegade proprietors, are all discussed. Examples of active political cultures, public debate, the impact of commercialism, and the growth in influence of public relations provide historical illustrations of journalism’s good and less auspicious influences on democracy. Critiques of journalism such as the Hutchins Report highlight weaknesses in political coverage and lead on to debates about how journalism can facilitate a new sense of community in the future.

Part II: Technology, work, and business

By tracing historical themes and examples relevant to the evolving relationship between technology and commerce and their impact on the business of journalism, this section explores some of the reasons for the way the news business presently operates. The main trend mapped out here is the continuous march of a business and commercial ethos and the way it has influenced journalism over time. An underlying thread during the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century is the gradual “corporatization” of journalism, that many believe has come to threaten the concept of a “free press.”

Part III: Ethics

Journalists have a history of clashing with authority. This can be because they expose the rich and powerful, they antagonize governments or vested interests, or they “get it wrong” for one reason or another and end up in court. The law is one form of constraint but from the late nineteenth century journalists themselves devised various codes of ethics that they hoped all practitioners would adhere to, and in so doing both legitimize the profession and earn the public’s trust. This section examines these various ethical codes, from those devised by labor unions and journalists’ organizations to those promulgated by proprietors, editors, and individual journalists themselves.

We also draw attention to the ways in which a journalist has to constantly reconcile a variety of ethical standards while doing the job on a day-to-day basis. For it should be remembered that “one very important function is the idea that it [journalism] is seen to bridge a gap between events and audiences, and therefore to mediate experience.”1 It is in the process of mediation that ethical factors become significant, and how they are “played” determines to a large extent how journalists are perceived. Are they trusted? Do they command respect? Answers to these questions are suggested within a historical context that traces the development of ethical codes primarily in Great Britain and America. Major issues studied include privacy and celebrity, the press and royalty, and how fakery, both within the media and from external sources, has at times threatened to undermine public confidence in print and broadcast journalism alike.

Part IV: Audience

Attitudes towards audience have changed considerably over the years – in essence early audiences were self-selective and early newspapers focused on a narrow constituency of readers: “The eighteenth century in England had no ‘mass’ audience in the modern sense; that was to come only in the next century. But the eighteenth century was modern in the sense that, from that time on, a writer could support himself from the sale of his works to the public.”2 The eighteenth century ushered in the first major development in audience building: the “shift from private endowment (usually in the form of patronage by the aristocracy) and a limited audience to public endowment and a potentially unlimited audience.”3 It is the pursuit of that unlimited audience that has in many respects driven the journalism engine ever since.

Audiences can be serviced, represented, misrepresented, or unrepresented; they can be involved in the process of news production or remain discrete and uninvolved. But there has seldom if ever been an even balance between the producers of news and its consumers, for media tend to be either controlled by hegemonic power, or else act as an expression of counterhegemonic forces that are largely defined by their audiences. This section therefore addresses the argument that journalism has gradually become more democratic and empowering of a better informed and responsive public. But at the same time it rebuts the idea that there has been a continuous trajectory of progress throughout the past toward a glorious present, exemplified by the democratic potential of the internet.

By highlighting some historical examples of different sorts of audience awareness and involvement from the early days of newspapers to the present, it can be shown that a blurring of the boundaries between consumers and producers is a constant leitmotiv of journalistic development. The contribution of celebrity, tabloidization, “dumbing down,” and increasing personalization of news agendas is also assessed.

Part V: Conclusion

We have allocated the Conclusion a discrete section all by itself. This is because the chapter can be read as a separate exercise in its own right – as the summing-up session for the end of a particular module, program, or series of classes. This chapter contains the ideas to walk away with for the future: we cannot predict accurately – nobody can – but we can provide food for thought. In that respect, we hope we have supplied a satisfying, and also a gourmet experience!

Notes

1 David Berry (ed.), Ethics and Media Culture: Practices and Representations (Oxford: Focal Press, 2000), p. 28.

2 Leo Lowenthal, Literature, Popular Culture, and Society (Eaglewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1961), p. 55.

3 Ibid.

Acknowledgments

With thanks to Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, where Jane Chapman is an honorary associate of the Centre for Media History and a Visiting Professor. With thanks also to editor Elizabeth Swayze and her assistants for their continuing vision and sound judgment throughout the long project of book writing, and to all the production team at Wiley-Blackwell for their professionalism and efficiency. We are also grateful to our colleagues in the Lincoln School of Journalism for all their encouragement and to Kate Allison for her help with picture/website research.

Part I

Journalism and Democracy

A Sibling Rivalry?

But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing.

(Thomas Paine,Rights of Man)

1

A Right To Know

The development of a news culture is closely allied to the development of democratic societies. If democracy is, in Abraham Lincoln’s words, “Government of the people, by the people, for the people” then journalism at its best exhibits a similar pluralist propensity. Indeed, journalism and democracy can claim a longer marriage than that between journalism and the commercial imperative of media for profit. Yet it is the latter which seems to have taken precedence in the twenty-first century. In the past, the presentation of “diverse” stories and information was useful to the workings of democracy, but by last century’s end editors, whether by inclination or circumstance, were increasingly defining news within a business context in order to maintain or increase revenues. News had become commercialized.1 The process by which this happened is examined in more detail in Part II, but in Part I we examine the implications for democracy.

Who’s Right and Who Knows?

“I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow. Vice President Ford will be sworn in as President at that hour in this office.” These words were spoken on August 8, 1974 and brought to an end one of the most bizarre series of events in American history as President Nixon became the only president ever to resign from office. The Watergate scandal, as it became known, was an example of the finest journalism pursued from the highest of motives by men of unquestioned integrity. Richard Nixon, of course, didn’t agree.

But how important were the two Washington Post journalists, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, in the whole saga of the Watergate break-ins? How significant was journalism in the Watergate story? History is a movable feast, but after 35 years history may already be giving its verdict. To take one example: the internet Wikipedia page, Watergate Scandal, is some 7,500 words long. Woodward and Bernstein are referred to only briefly in the main text despite the celebrity status accorded them in the immediate aftermath of the scandal itself. So are we right to assume uncritically that this was a shining example of journalism taking the moral high ground and coming to the rescue of a democracy treated with contempt by a president and a people treated with disdain by the ruling elite? Is it inevitable that our affirmation of one is always at the expense of our faith in the other?

Twenty years later, on October 20, 1994, the UK Guardian newspaper published a front-page article by its Westminster correspondent which alleged that a lobbying company, Ian Greer Associates, had paid two Conservative MPs £2,000 a time to ask parliamentary questions on behalf of Mohamed Al-Fayed, the owner of Harrods department store in Knightsbridge, London. This was the first time the names of MPs Tim Smith and more notably Neil Hamilton had entered the public consciousness. Junior Northern Ireland minister Smith resigned immediately, fueling speculation that the allegations were indeed true. But Hamilton and Greer served the Guardian with libel writs. Subsequent events led to Neil Hamilton, a junior minister at the Department of Trade and Industry, losing his safe seat at Tatton in Cheshire to journalist Martin Bell. Many political commentators believed the “cash for questions” affair, as it became known, was instrumental in the fall not only of Neil Hamilton but also of John Major’s Conservative government and the subsequent election of Tony Blair and New Labour in 1997.

The British media’s coverage tended to follow the Guardian line. But Neil Hamilton always denied the allegations contained in the Guardian article and subsequent newspaper stories. There was an official investigation by Sir Gordon Downey, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, which vindicated the Guardian’s version of events. Downey found the evidence “compelling” that Neil Hamilton had indeed been paid large amounts of “cash in envelopes.” There the matter might have rested but for the diligent research and enquiring minds of two freelance journalists, Jonathan Boyd Hunt and Malcolm Keith-Hill. Hunt was a former reporter on the regional TV news program Granada Tonight and Keith-Hill was an experienced investigative journalist. They had already joined forces to produce a TV documentary (never aired) on the “cash for questions” affair provisionally entitled “From Ritz to Writs.”

The conclusions of the Downey Report, at complete variance with the results of their own research for the documentary, led them to pursue the issue with renewed vigor. It was their contention that the whole story was a fabrication, that there never was any “cash” and that Tim Smith, Neil Hamilton, and Ian Greer were innocent of all charges. Hunt and Keith-Hill alleged further that the Guardian framed Neil Hamilton with Mohamed Al-Fayed’s cooperation and that “when the lobbyist and one of the MPs sued the Guardian for libel, for which the Guardian was uninsured, its editors, journalists, and lawyers enacted a cynical cover-up.”2

Yet Hunt and Keith-Hill were unable to get their story published in the press or anywhere else. To combat this, Hunt wrote a book on the affair, Trial by Conspiracy, and set up the website www.guardianlies.com as a way of publicizing his and Keith-Hill’s investigative work. The world wide web thus became a bona fide outlet for a piece of investigative journalism that might otherwise not have seen the light of day. As the two journalists stated, “This website is undoubtedly the first of its kind in the world. It was constructed to overcome a news blackout enacted by the British media of the two freelances’ investigation.”3

Can we assume from this story that the internet is now a respected and trusted media outlet in its own right rather than just the last resort of cyber-stalkers, ax-grinders, whistle-blowers, or the merely insane? Should we accept it as a legitimate forum for investigative journalism and one that offers a potential corrective to the vast power of a modern media conglomerate? There is no doubt that the internet has become increasingly important to media organizations. The BBC, for example, employs more staff on its website than on its news programming. However, if the internet is to be trusted, it must be possible to distinguish between the legitimate website and the disingenuous. This isn’t a problem with the websites of well-known media organizations but for the independent site or newcomer blog issues about trust and truth loom large. For the journalist who has a story to tell and nowhere else to tell it, the internet may well be a boon, but he or she still has to overcome people’s natural cynicism when presented with startling “revelations” that have not found a home in a mainstream media outlet.

So, why is it that one of these stories resulted in the two journalists concerned being feted, writing a book, All The President’s Men, and having a film made of their exploits, while the two journalists telling the other story were only able to publish it on the internet? What does this say about the state of our democracy or, for that matter, the state of our journalism? This chapter will attempt to put these issues into a perspective that takes account of both historical factuality and changing journalistic imperatives.

The motivation behind such stories, however, is always the same: the journalists’ sense that the public has a “right to know,” that the story is in the public interest and not just of interest to the public. But even more than this perhaps is the broader principle that journalists actually have a duty towards the public. According to the Italian Charter of Duties of Journalists, for example, “A journalist’s responsibility towards people always prevails over any other thing.”4 That responsibility includes alerting people to issues, events, situations, and individuals that deserve attention as well as providing them with the information needed to make valid judgments about their rights and responsibilities as citizens. Journalists inform public opinion by reporting, interpreting, and providing background information and context. Journalists serve democracy by pointing out “what, if anything is being done elsewhere, what options exist, what the admitted likely consequences of various actions might be, what choices their (the public’s) political leaders are considering.”5

It was not, of course, preordained that journalists should be the ones to provide such political news and editorial comment. The earliest newspapers, known as corantos or courants (news books), contained little news. However, the development of the newsbook and the news sheet in seventeenth-century Britain was accompanied by an upsurge in political and foreign “intelligence,” or news. This was produced by men who were paid for their labor and it became known as journalism, after the journal or daily newspaper that published their writings. The word journalist entered the language for the first time toward the end of the seventeenth century. Thus the historical role of journalism as supporter of democracy is based on those continuities that the profession has struggled to achieve over the last three hundred years. There are three traditionally linked responsibilities:

1 The presentation of a diversity of informed views on matters of the day including political issues and their interpretation;

2 Watchdog of the public interest, as a guard against politicians and officials who may act in their own interest or threaten democracy rather than serve the public – the notion of the press as a Fourth Estate;

3 An ability to expose untruths and support truth wherever power is wielded arbitrarily, because journalists are, at least in principle, independent from the control of others.

Obviously, by definition, mass communications always relay messages to more people than have a specific need for them. In addition, there have always been (and always will be) journalists and media practitioners who endeavor to contribute to the various forums where public life is scrutinized, for as Walter Lippmann noted, “There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the information by which to detect lies.”6 But as deregulation advances and commercialism becomes more widespread, there has been a marked increase since the end of the nineteenth century in personal “affairs” journalism epitomized by the human interest story. Whether in the arena of sport, business, or entertainment, such stories provide information for people to make sense of their own personal “world” and lifestyle as opposed to their responsibilities as public entities.

Sometimes described as the commodification of culture, where the “consumer is king,” this trend has come to symbolize what cultural critics describe as an obsession with the acquisition of personal goods and an equal passion for media-generated entertainment. Fewer people, it seems, are willing to devote time and effort toward the achievement of a common, collective good. Public affairs journalism on matters of national, regional, and local government, whether aimed at the welfare of entire communities, collective private interests, or wider society has in consequence suffered. This democratic “deficit” has left many commentators wondering about the future, in particular how journalism’s unique mission can be protected and what the prospects are for any remaining relationship between journalism and democracy.

RésuméWalter Lippmann

Walter Lippmann was one of the most influential journalists and cultural commentators of the twentieth century. He believed journalists were a link between the governors and the governed and as such had an almost sacred duty to the truth and objectivity, although he understood that all truth was necessarily subjective. He was an elitist and promoted the idea that a “governing class” of experts, specialists, and bureaucrats was needed to safeguard democracy because the notion of a public competent to direct public affairs was a “false ideal.”

    Lippmann was born in New York in 1889. He studied philosophy and languages at Harvard and graduated in 1909. In May 1910 he wrote to Lincoln Steffens, the “muckraking” investigative journalist, asking for a position on Everybody’s Magazine “because there is no kind of work that appeals to me as much as yours does.”7 Lippmann soon became one of its editors and Theodore Roosevelt described him as the most brilliant man of his age in all the United States.8

    He established a political weekly, the New Republic, in 1914 and was a member of the US delegation to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. He also helped to draw up the covenant of the new League of Nations. By then he was a “personality,” became an informal adviser to many presidents and wrote a number of significant books on journalism and politics. In 1931 he joined the New York Herald Tribune and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1958 and 1962 for his syndicated newspaper column “Today and Tomorrow.” He popularized the term “the Cold War” when he published a book of the same name in 1947, and his now famous phrase, the “Manufacture of Consent,” was adapted by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky for the title of their 1988 groundbreaking book on the political economy of the mass media, Manufacturing Consent. Lippmann died in 1974 in New York.

This relationship is traditionally reflected in the kind of democracy a country enjoys. The North American continent, colonized in the seventeenth century, was in itself a democratic undertaking. Yet the development of the press, mainly because of the sheer size of the continent, has always remained a largely regional affair in the same way that politics at state level can be a more potent force in a citizen’s life than federal politics. Similarly a strong state legislature was reflected in a strong regional press clustered around individual states, towns, and cities. Iconic titles of the American press, for example, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, are all named for the cities in which they operate.

These practical continental problems were acknowledged by Founding Fathers James Madison and Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers (1787) where they argued that transport engineering and newspapers would unite the nation.9 Cultural historian James Carey expanded on this simple dictum: “The United States was … the product of literacy, cheap paper, rapid and inexpensive transportation, and the mechanical reproduction of words – the capacity, in short, to transport not only people but a complex culture and civilization from one place to another, indeed between places that were radically dissimilar in geography, social conditions, economy, and very often climate.”10 Carey’s acknowledgement of the “radically dissimilar” in the United States has not precluded a vibrant print community, even though transport engineering did little to promote a national press.

Magazines, on the other hand, were more likely to flourish because they operated with more flexible deadlines, weekly or monthly, and broader news agendas which allowed for the vagaries of early transport systems. A good example is The Nation, a weekly magazine known as “the flagship of the left,” which was first published in 1865 and flourishes to this day. Its early remit was to secure full rights for freed slaves and it still campaigns for traditionally “left-wing” causes. Eventually, modern distribution systems enabled proprietors like Henry Luce to produce magazines that appealed to the broadest possible readerships. His Time magazine began publication in 1923 and now boasts a Time Europe edition published in London and Time Asia based in Hong Kong. Its direct competitor, Newsweek, was first published in 1933 but has always trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue. Today it is published in four English language editions and 12 global editions written in the language of the circulation region.

In Britain, the first modern newspapers emerged in the eighteenth century, followed by the concept of “public opinion” and accompanied by ideas about free speech and a free press. Crucially, the beginning of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of a viable national press aided by the early development of mechanized printing presses, the railways, and a national postal service. As a much smaller country distribution was never the issue it was in the USA. And its smaller population encouraged a national press as the main route to profitability.

Magazines similarly were profuse from the early years of the nineteenth century, benefiting from advantageous postage rates and speedy distribution. Today, for example, the UK can boast the largest publishing industry in Europe, with around 3,000 more firms than Germany, the next largest European market. According to Frontier Economics’ “Comparative Analysis of the UK’s Creative Industries,” a report to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport published in 2006, the worldwide journals market, based on data from The Publishers Association, is estimated at £5–7bn and involves around 17,500 publishers and 35,000 journals. Frontier Economics also estimate that the UK has around 25–30 percent of the world market, with a total turnover of £1.5–2bn. Exports account for 60–75 percent of sales for most journals, and for some, the figure will be as high as 85 percent. There are almost 1,300 regional newspapers in the UK. According to the Newspaper Society, they are read by 84 percent of the adult population, compared with the 70 percent who read national newspapers.

The emergence of broadcast media raised fresh concerns in the press and governments on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, the Communications Act of 1934 established the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) which ensured that broadcasters acted in “the public interest” in exchange for permission to lease the airwaves. When government exercised some control over broadcast content, there was a substantial amount of news transmitted. But by the time Ronald Reagan became president in the 1980s, news coverage was already dwindling and Reaganomics, as it became known, began the era of deregulation which inevitably accelerated the whole process of decline – in quantity if not quality. In Europe, the survival of public service broadcasting has ensured the tenuous existence of factual programming in the “public interest” – a safety net of sorts for serious journalism.11 In Britain the BBC was set up, in part, to frustrate the commercial tendencies apparent in American radio. Its acceptance by most people as a “monopoly,” indeed its very legitimacy, was in large part a result of its national character. It wasn’t until 1967, for example, that the first local radio station, Radio Leicester, began broadcasting. However, in our search for a way forward, we need to go further back in history than the twentieth century to find inspiration.

Magna Carta and Journalism Today

Magna Carta is the birth certificate of liberty. This great charter enshrines the rights of the individual against the state. When disaffected English barons forced King John to sign it in a field after the battle of Runnymede in 1215, they did not realize that this was a document that would enshrine enduring principles. About a third of the world’s population is governed according to the principles laid down in Magna Carta: that no person is above the law; that no person may be persecuted by power or imprisoned without fair trial. This latter right – the writ of habeas corpus allowing appeal against unlawful imprisonment – is included within the American constitution. The Fifth Amendment simply rephrased Clause 39 of Magna Carta: “No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process.” Founding Father Alexander Hamilton considered habeas corpus to be the “bulwark” of individual liberty, and condemned secret imprisonment as the most “dangerous engine of arbitrary government.”12