On 23 January a series of ten open forums on 'Marxism and the Mass Media' started in London. Organised by members of Equity and the National Union of Journalists in the International Marxist Group, they were an attempt to stimulate a discussion on these very neglected questions in the broad revolutionary left. The first, on the development and role of the mass media, was attended by 130 people and introduced by RAYMOND WILLIAMS, author of several books and essays on the subject. We re-print his introductory speech below.
We must start with the common view of the media on the left, which is that they're owned by the capitalist class to indoctrinate popular and working class opinion. This is so often, in effect, true that for many purposes it is not necessary to look further. But once you really begin to apply your mind to the whole range of developing problems of the use of these very different media in this kind of society, you find that you have to make the definitions at almost every point a good deal more precise.
For example, if you compare the organisation of the media as institutions in a capitalist society like Britain, in one like the United States, in one like France or in West Germany, you immediately find significant differences. One difference is that in this country the press is very much more centralised. A national press is predominant in ways that it is not in France or West Germany or the United States. This immediately alters the whole status of the press as an institution.
Second, in this country, although there is now — after the pressure campaign of the Fifties — a commercial television network which resembles that of the United States in its majority services, we have had since the Twenties in Britain a very particular kind of organisation of broadcasting, the public corporation. This is still the majority service and the predominant one in sound. To define this in simple terms in relation to a capitalist economic system is obviously not easy. So the simple proposition that these are capitalist organisations already has to be qualified.
On the first point that I mentioned, the national press, a very specific feature of British capitalism, I think that nobody yet has really found an adequate historical explanation. It obviously has something to do with the earliness of the British Industrial Revolution, the development, at a time when the press itself was developing, of a railway network in a comparatively compact country. This enabled the national press to override the provincial press and the local press in ways that have never been possible in the United States and that were, on the whole, not attempted in France and Germany. But the predominance of the national press in this country affects the content and structure of the press in very specific ways, and there are quite observable political differences between the Fleet Street papers and the network of local and provincial newspapers which we find. So that's a correction of structures.
The public corporations — this perhaps needs more careful analysis than anything in the whole media range. Because of course it is a familiar liberal tenet, and with some interesting evidence to support it, that the institution of an independent public corporation was a way of taking this most powerful medium out of the market and at the same time out of crude political control. Now again, if you compare an organisation like the BBC with the American networks or with state broadcasting systems in France, Italy, West Germany, you find a significant difference in the existence of that public corporation. At the same time, and this involves a quite complicated theoretical argument, I think, it is impossible to live in this society watching the behaviour of that public corporation and accept the proposition of independence in the terms in which it is offered—an independence at a certain level from competing political parties. But is it really an independence from the state?
The fact is that there is something very specific here about British culture which allows a different kind of organisation. We have an unusually compact ruling class with very deeply shared cultural assumptions and habits, which allows much of the effective state life of this country, things which would in other countries be the province of the state and of official agencies, to be delegated to public appointed authorities which have a certain measure of autonomy. If you look into the real relation of those corporations to the state, then you find of course that they are subject in financial policy finally to the state, that the heads of the organisation are appointed, a characteristic of this method, but are then given the kind of term of service which takes them beyond the patronage of any particular party government, if we look into the structure of say the governors of the BBC, the governors of the IBA, comparable bodies like the Arts Council and so on, we see a very specific feature of British life.
Unless one analyses it carefully, the slogan which we use is rebutted by what is actually no more substantial a slogan — that Britain has solved the problem, has moved between the twin dangers of the state control of the broadcasting service (which in France in the Sixties, for example, was complete) and the purely market service which is characteristic of the great part of American television. We have to understand the specifics of this peculiar British structure of the autonomous yet always essentially state linked organisation. That it is state linked rather than state directed is a crucial precision.
Now the next thing that we have to say is that there is a very complex relationship between two factors which you can see throughout the development of modern communications systems, which leads us to have to make a much more precise statement than the simple one of indoctrination.
Let me just go back for a moment to the history of the press in this country. Now the press was almost entirely a creation of the bourgeoisie in the 18th century against the remnants of a feudal and post-feudal state. The newspapers in the 18th century won their commercial independence and in the course of it a very important area of freedom of the press including, for example, the right to report parliamentary debates, a battle which lasted a generation. Because the newspapers were linked to a precise commercial function they existed as combined news and advertising sheets — the advertising then, of course, being primarily classified advertising appropriate to that stage of the economy. But that battle against state control, state censorship has remained a permanent memory in the press as an institution and more widely in this society. It is why it is so difficult to talk about alternatives to the present system. That battle, which was real and which was fought over a hundred years, was against a very deliberate state attempt to prevent the emergence of the independent newspaper at all. It wasn't after all until the 1850s that the taxes on knowledge, the stamp duties on the press, the monopoly patent theatre controls about drama, were finally removed when the bourgeois class had finally reached ascendancy in British society. So that fight is real and we must never forget it.
At the same time that was still very much a small press serving local communities or, where it was national, serving to dispense information from London to the provinces in what ultimately was a two way process. In the early 19th century something very interesting happened, which was the emergence of an independent, radical press which preceded the availability of the vote. If you look at that early 19th century press, the Political Register, the Black Dwarf, and all the others, or if you look at the very important institution of the Sunday paper which preceded the daily paper by a long way in terms of popularity, you will find that this was the first popular press and that in its early stages it was essentially independent. We must distinguish between the radical and the Sunday press, a thing which would take longer than I have. But just briefly: the radical press was tied to political campaigns, mainly then for the vote but also on direct economic issues; the Sunday press carried on elements of perhaps an older popular culture but certainly the new urban popular culture. It included a lot of reports of crime, a lot of reports of scandal — indeed, the Sunday newspaper as a distinct phenomenon is quite traceable from the 1820s to the present day — but it had a popular readership, often a collective readership when buying it was beyond the powers of individuals. And even those Sunday papers of crime and scandal were linked to radical politics because the audience was of that kind.
There's a very popular myth which you can still find in quite standard history that the popular press only occurred in Britain at the end of the century, in the so-called Northcliffe revolution when people, having been taught to read by the board schools set up under the Education Act of 1870, had this cheap newspaper provided for them. This is totally untrue. At any time in the 19th century there were more than enough people to read, to sustain the modern circulation of the Daily Mirror. It was never a case of waiting for literacy, and the error of that history is that they are tracing the daily political newspapers. But what happened in the early 19th century was the emergence first of the radical campaigning newspaper and second of this very specific kind of Sunday paper with this mix of interests.
Now in the second half of the nineteenth century, as this was beginning to expand, there was an incorporation of those interests which effectively leads to the present day. Papers which had been independent until the [illegible] of the last century most newspapers were typically owned by one printing family or one printing house — were incorporated in the first versions of the corporate press-houses that we have today. In the 1880s and '90s what happened was the emergence of corporate organisations of great bodies of newspapers and magazines owned by a single owner or firm; and second, and this is crucial, the corporation of advertising money of a new kind as the basis of a cheap paper. It's a fact of 19th century history that however popular the papers were, and however much advertising there was on the streets, there was hardly anything in the press except the classified advertising. Northcliffe's revolution was to bring display advertising into the economic organisation of the press and on that basis sell the paper well below cost. That has been the specific economics of the British press ever since.
As everybody knows, because the crises are recurrent, the British press has since that time never sold on its ordinary revenue from readers. It has been essentially dependent on large supplies of advertising revenue of a block kind, to the extent where it accounts for anything between 50 and 56 per cent in the daily and Sunday press. Now this leads to a very important point. In the last 20 years we have seen one newspaper after the other disappear in financial crises. Some of them one was sorry to see go, others at best indifferent. But it has had a particular political effect—there is no national press that I know of which has as limited a political spectrum as ours. I mean basically as you go left for really distributed papers you stop at the Guardian, there is nothing to the left of that. This is very unusual in even quite comparable capitalist societies.
Second, those national papers which closed — the News Chronicle, the Daily Herald, the old radical Sunday paper Reynold's News — all had circulations of a very large size by comparison with those of any other capitalist society. That is to say, they closed with their circulation typically between 1 million and 2 million. The largest circulation of any newspaper in France, a similar sized country with a very similar kind of economic organisation, is today about 650,000. How is it, in this very real case which affects people, the disappearance of papers (on the whole including a much higher than average proportion of papers on the left), that this has happened within this very specific British press structure? It is because the economy since that reorganisation in the 1890s has been based not on how many papers you can sell — because on that criterion papers could survive in this country in the same way that they do in France on circulations much lower than the present level of viability — but on the availability of advertising money. And in this way, in a much more interesting way than simply the fact that the owners of the press are capitalists (which is self-evident), you have a tie between the press and the nature of this specific capitalist economy which directly affects the range of papers that are made available.
The possibility of starting new ones, the possibility of maintaining a full political range, all are determined by this fact. Why did the News Chronicle die? Because it had a large proportion of elderly and in advertising agents' terms Class C, D and E readers. In other words, for an advertiser it was not an important medium. For people reading the newspaper it was still clearly very important, but for advertisers it was not interesting. This is happening and I would like to predict will continue to happen because at the moment not more than two or three of our national newspapers could be guaranteed a life beyond five years. Now this is not just a general feature of capitalism to be resolved into a slogan, it is a very specific feature of British capitalist society and a now very deeply embedded structure of the development of the press economy in Britain.
Now it is at that point that one has to introduce the other complication, which is the contradiction between the bourgeois market and what is a perfectly straightforward, discoverable intention of managing news and opinion. It is not indoctrination. Indoctrination requires a much more controlled, authoritarian situation than this one. You can talk of indoctrination if you like in a school where you have a captive audience. You cannot seriously, I think, talk of indoctrination in a situation where people can choose at least over a limited range and in which they can choose whether to take the thing or not at a quite basic level. What you have is something more interesting and something which explains many of the local contradictions in which people working in the media and people observing it find themselves caught. Because at a certain level, if you look at the economic interests and the political affiliations of the people who own the press, it is not surprising that the press puts the kind of political and social lines it does. The effects of this are very deep. They select the issues, they select ways of treating them, and there is a permanent job of defence and enlightenment against those procedures.
On the other hand, there is all the time another kind of pressure. For example, take the phenomenon of the Daily Mirror, which began as a simple picture paper, in a fairly typical ideology of the early 20th century, for women. Women would not want to read about politics, anyway they didn't have the vote, but they would like to look at pictures, they would like to read some gossip, they would like the national events of the day treated in a lively way. This was the ideology of first the Sketch and then the Mirror.
Now take the transformation of the Mirror which occurred in the 1940s. Transformation is perhaps a strong word, but in any case a substantial alteration. The Daily Mirror campaigned in a radical way, as it said, now on behalf of the men in the army. It campaigned at a certain level against the old ruling class. That adjective 'old' is important, I think, because it is still a way of identifying this kind of radicalism — you campaign against the 'old' ruling class and not the current one. It had a distinct political shift which at a certain level doesn't correspond at all to the political affiliations or the economic interests of its owners.
Now take this problem across for a moment to the case which is exactly comparable, of the content of ITV and BBC, and indeed the basis of some interesting comparisons between them. If the purpose were what we sometimes say it is, in understandable anger when there is some case of blatant political management of the news, that this is simply indoctrination, then there would be certain things which get done on BBC, which get done on ITV, which get reported in the press, which would never be there at all. You've only got to go to a really managed news-system, read a Spanish newspaper for example until a year or so ago, or even go to the fascist press itself or to a good deal of the East European press, to see what a system which is really concerned with excluding other points of view, other kinds of fact, what that's like. Here again, as you compare this system with those systems, a liberal proposition is waiting which says: 'Here after all the press is open to all points of view, it reports the facts as they are, it reports the argument as it runs, with contributions from all points of view'.
Actually something much more interesting is happening. At a certain level the ideological function, which in certain parts and actually on certain issues is very explicit and is often a quite identifiable part of the internal structure of an organisation, is contradicted by the requirements of a bourgeois market of an ordinary kind. I mean these people, precisely because they are of the class that one identifies, are interested in making profit in a competitive market with their particular commodity as against others. What is true at that level of the capitalist market has been true between the major broadcasting corporations since there have been two competing for an audience. At this point something really much more interesting than indoctrination begins to occur. And this is the process which in the end you have to analyse as the attempt to incorporate — which, however, is always likely to fail if it is done in too crude a way, and which typically requires people from outside the old ruling class to do it.
This is the most interesting phenomenon of the last 30 years. To give a brief example from the BBC/ITV competition of the late Fifties and early Sixties — people say now: 'What a breath of life ITV brought to television as against the stuffy old BBC. How they pushed forward the frontiers of television'. And at that level it's true. If you look at what the BBC was like before there was competition it is true, because the BBC was then in its old sound radio position, where the unity of the culture rather than any particular political intention was expressing itself in a particular set of relationships with listeners and viewers. These were always the relations of an educated class to — the usual word was 'uneducated'. This word 'uneducated', which lasted after 80 years of compulsory education — a very interesting commentary on the education system — was the word they used. Or the 'half-educated', which is an equally interesting comment. It's very interesting, if you look at it, that that distinctly identifiable upper class culture (even when they were being entertaining the tone was still there) was bypassed by what? Not by British popular culture — that is the trap that is prepared for one, in the official accounts of the development of that organisation: that the old stuffy upper class monopoly was swept away by a wave of democratic sentiment, as the first Director-General said. No, but by American imports! The British working class audience, faced by a choice between American imports and what the English upper class was offering it, fairly quickly made its preferences felt.
Now at that point there is a great danger of taking what is the purely market phenomenon, with interesting implications for the state of mind of the society, as if it were a popular phenomenon; and the same thing is true about the Mirror. If you look at what the Mirror campaigned about, I remember reading it then and reading it on through the elections of the Fifties. In the election of 1955, for example, actually sitting in a polling station at 7 o'clock in the morning, I saw the Mirror and there on the front page was a picture of Sir Anthony Eden at Eton (it's been reappearing in the obituaries), and I was sitting to my embarrassment with a working class woman who was the Tory teller, and she said, 'I don't think his lot will get in', although she was telling for his party! One of those complications of British life . . .
The point was, if you look at that situation, the resentment or the contempt or the sense that these are other people was very skilfully incorporated. The whole language of the Mirror through that evolution from the Forties to the Fifties was a very skilful miming — it is miming — of colloquial English, to reassure people that these are not the all-too-familiar voices of the established culture but these are people like yourself. You know you couldn't even, as Hoggart said years ago, say 'It's going to rain' — which is colloquial enough. You had to say 'Take a mac, mate', because this sounded folksy. It established the sales, and these were skills that were very highly rewarded. Let's not underestimate them, they took a long time to work out — at a certain level you had to persuade people that you were speaking for them and in their way against this identifiable old culture which was not theirs. Although obviously as an institution, and on every decisive level of political choice and economic affiliation, the very organ doing it was part of the class which it was presumably rejecting. But precisely what it was rejecting was an old ruling class, and so it couldn't be identified with something as substantial as IPC, which is a modern ruling class phenomenon.
Now this means that we must be very careful when we talk about indoctrination. On the one hand, what is happening is not as simple as that; and on the other hand, as it is perceived that it is not as simple as that, there is a very simple relapse into a position which I've seen a good many people get into, and which I think is a peculiarly dangerous one. This is that, failing to understand the inwardness of this phenomenon — and it's a very deep phenomenon — people acquire a contempt, which is always possible in the political vanguard, a contempt for the majority of their own fellow countrymen. They say, 'How can they be fooled by that? .... How can they choose to take in the propaganda, the selection of views and opinion which is so evidently that of another class?' Now you can only understand this phenomenon — and it's a very complex one in the way it works out — if you put forward the notion of incorporation rather than indoctrination. That is to say, it is crucial for that kind of popular press — as it was for the incorporation of the genuinely independent popular press of the early 19th century — that the real interests within existing society of the majority of readers be spoken to. You had to include those interests — crime was there, the scandal was there, because people wanted to read them. The sport was there as organised sport developed. Without these interests the old independent political papers of the first half of the century could not compete, although when it came to political opinion on its own, whenever it could be tested, they still held the majority of the class. But when it came to buying a paper there were all these other interests.
The very fact of a politically campaigning paper, the independent paper, excluding the existing cultural affiliations of the majority of its potential readers, has this self-defeating effect. The commercial popular press, which is a very specific thing, is extremely careful to incorporate, and it learns a language for its political argument. It learns a language for its handling of news which at a very deep level involves the process of the self-identification of the reader with much that is apparently being spoken. This is done, if not in their name, then apparently from their position and with their kind of life-style and interests. And this is often very different from what they will hear if they hear someone actually much closer to them in political interest and in real experience who has become politically committed. This has also happened in commercial advertising on an extreme scale with the careful miming of other people's feelings — for example, taking great care to get an actress to look like a housewife who can't quite say 'biological' without being trained, if she's going to talk about a washing powder. This is the point of people who understand that 'biological' might be a trick word and who therefore get the identification.
Now all of this is of course a trick, but it is the crucial theoretical correction to what is often our simple received notion of indoctrination. Of course that occurs in certain places and at certain times, but it is the incorporation which I think is the true challenge to the left. If you think incorporation only happens to other people, then I just say you're lucky. Because every time I've ever done any analysis of this, I've found how many of my own feelings, responses are triggered. Take one that I'm a sucker for, just to conclude. I'm a Welsh rugby fan, so if somebody wearing a Welsh rugby jersey comes on with a pint of someone's beer and says 'Boyo' (of course he has to say 'Boyo', he doesn't say 'chaps') I have to really work it out.
The point about this is that we are faced undoubtedly with very specific phenomena of late capitalist society, which we are often still describing in the terms of early capitalist society. In terms of their economic structure, the increasing movement towards corporate monopoly ownership, the exclusion of media which do not meet their economic criteria, the steady control (of which we should be increasingly reminded) of the so called independent public corporations, by the very fact of appointment from the state at their controlling levels — all these phenomena require the most detailed investigation. My argument is that if we look at the historical evolution we can find the material for this analysis, so we shall have in many ways to learn a new language for addressing ourselves to the problem of the media in our own times.