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JOURNALISM UNDER CAPITALISM

John E. Richardson

Too often a socialist discussion on journalism starts from the idea that some aspect of society is somehow 'the media's fault'; that 'the media' brainwashes us, or makes people think and act in certain ways. As Colin Sparks said, it's 'an old and honourable tradition in the labour movement that, if you want some applause, you attack the capitalist media' ('Inside the media', www.socialistreviewindex.org.uk). Of course, the reasons for this are pretty clear, particularly at the moment. Almost every day, newspapers demonise Muslims, ridicule the working class and fail to hold leaders like Bush and Blair to account for their catastrophic policies. But I don't think that this is a particularly useful starting point for a socialist critique. For a start, it tends to treat 'the media' as a singular entity rather than a plurality of outlets. Second, and more importantly, it slides a little too close to an idealist idea of society rather than a materialist position. As Marx argued, the origin of the problem of capitalist society is not the mistaken ideas that are spread by amongst other things 'the media'; the problem is the misshapen nature of social reality that generates mistaken ideas. What we need to do, I think, is to re-establish this materialist link between economic relations and ideas in society by looking at journalism as a product of unequal (or exploitative) material social relations.

Before I attempt this, perhaps a useful starting point concerning the analysis of news is firstly to ask: what is journalism for? To answer this, we can't simply describe what it actually does - if you take this line of approach, you might as well say that education is meant to fail the working class on the basis that this is what it does. I assume that journalism is meant to exist to enable citizens to better understand their lives and their position(s) in the world. Over the past four years, I've taught trainee journalists at University, and while they did have differing reasons for entering into journalism, not one entered into the profession to disseminate ruling class ideology. Most wanted to help inform the public, to educate, to play a role in the democratic system. For this reason, journalism is still a very honourable profession. Journalism's success or failure rests on the extent to which it achieves its role: does journalism help you to better understand the world and your position within it? Of course, as a socialist I mean something specific when I say that journalism ought to help people understand their lives: that is, their position in relation to the means of production, their role in the creation of surplus value, that social change is not only possible but inevitable and the fact that all social change comes from the people - from them.

This is what journalism should do. Now, it is clear to everyone that this is not what journalism does. The reasons for this are wide and varied, so I'll limit myself to two inter-locking areas: the economic and the audience. Many discussions regarding the economics of journalism begin with the fact that most journalistic outlets are businesses. Too often however, this is also where the discussion ends: 'the media are a business [-note the false singular again], and that explains everything'. Well, yes and no. The commercial logic of the newspaper market is two-fold: firstly, a newspaper is a product and one that must be made attractive or appealing to a market of consumers. There's a great deal of evidence to suggest that this overly emphasises stories that are amusing, pleasurable and engaging to these identified consumers which, in turn, encourages the dumbing down of the press. But of course newspapers don't just sell copies they also sell advertising space - that is, adverts aimed at a particular set of consumers. The content of the newspaper is used as a lure to attract these consumers so that advertisers can then target them. So the audience aren't only consumers of the product, they are the product themselves; the 'Guardian reader' is what the Guardian Newspaper Group produces everyday, and access to them is sold to advertisers in order to create surplus value. Certain products only sell to certain segments of the population and hence only need to be advertised to these segments: BMW cars need only be advertised to the rich, while dodgy loan companies need only be advertised to the poor. Look in the ad-section of any UK red top tabloid, and it's page after page of what are now called 'loan consolidation' companies - the paper sells access to a poor audience segment that need to go to these companies. On the other extreme, a month or so ago, in the FT Saturday magazine there was an advert for a plane - not a holiday company, an advert for a company that sells actual planes.

Of course, in a capitalist system, the value of an audience is in direct relation to their wealth, or more specifically their disposable income and their willingness to over consume. Wealthy readers count for more when calculating ad revenue: a paper for 'top people' can survive with a low circulation because advertisers pay more to target wealthy readers; on the other hand, papers read by poor people need much higher sales to offset their low ad receipts. The demise of the Daily Herald is a significant and oft-quoted example of this. The reliance on advertising to create surplus value therefore has a profound effect on newspaper publishing, encouraging more newspapers that satisfy the tastes and preferences of these richer audience segments - the middle and upper classes. Recent figures from the Inland Revenue show that the richest twenty five per cent of the population (the bourgeoisie and the A/B classes) own around eighty eight per cent of the wealth in the UK (www.statistics.gov.uk). This is up from possessing eighty one per cent of the wealth when the purportedly 'progressive' New Labour came into power. These are the people predominantly buying and reading broadsheets. As is well known, the broadsheets are targeted at the old A and B social classes; the Express and Mail are the C1 and C2 social classes; and the red tops at C2, D and E social classes. So, the A/Bs, who make up perhaps twenty per cent of the population, have five daily papers to choose from. Readers in these social classes do have a range of political beliefs, and because of their wealth, advertisers subsidise a range of newspapers that reflect this variation in political position. Similarly, within particular broadsheets, columnists with a range of political positions are used to reflect the range of opinion in the audience (or at least the range within 'thinkable thought'). On the other hand, the C2, D and E social classes - around sixty per cent of the population - own only two per cent of the wealth and so, are the target reader for only three tabloids. The three tabloids are also far less diverse in their political opinions than the five broadsheets. This, again, is due to capitalism: tabloid reporting tends to be standardised (see Franklin, 2005), populist and safely within the range of most readers' interests in order to maintain the mass circulations required for survival.

To summarise: it is the very structure and commercial logic of a capitalist system that imposes a reduction 'in the number and diversity of newspapers on offer, head for head of population, on the steps down from establishment and bourgeois public to wage-earning public' (Westergaard, J., 1977: 103, 'Power, Class and the Media', in J. Curran, M. Gurevitch & J. Woollacott eds Mass Communication and Society).

Second, I believe that sustained critique of the current capitalist social order would find a substantial audience in the current wage-earning population. However, that audience would not currently run into the millions - which it would have to in today's market, given that such a newspaper would attract zero advertising revenue. We therefore need to acknowledge that the most significant obstacle for journalism is the logic of the capitalist system: capitalism allows for no radical mainstream press. Under the current conditions of capitalism there cannot be a commercial popular press that contributes to critical social understanding: in short, it is capitalism that stops journalism doing what it is meant to do.