Radical Mass Media Criticism

Harold Innis and the Paradox of Press Freedom

Robert E. Babe, The University of Western Ontario, Canada.

Abstract: Harold Innis proposed that cultural/political/economic power normally guides, distorts or corrupts science, education, and scholarship; and that science itself acts recursively on culture ('the vernacular'). Science and popular culture are integrated in their service of political-economic power by supporting monopolies of knowledge since (a) scientific innovations ('media') leave their mark on what is transmitted, and (b) powerful groups control the means of communication. 'Freedom of the press', as guaranteed by the US Constitution, according to Innis, aided the monopolisation of the vernacular in four ways: strengthened by the First Amendment, the popular press grew to such a size that it began accommodating the interests of advertisers; second there was a supplanting of empathetic conversation (oral dialectic, community discussion and democracy) by what Innis referred to as the 'cruelty of mechanized communication;' there was, thirdly a marked decline in the number of message originators and a concomitant expansion into mass reception; finally by attaining economies of scale in news/knowledge distribution, the press emphasised space to the preclusion of time. In Innis's view, the vernacular and the scholarly are usually cut from the same cloth, and reinforce one another, emphasising the present to the neglect of time both as duration and as a sense of the future; there being little contradiction between scholarship and popular culture, they comprise in combination the monopoly of knowledge of our day. Together they serve military and commercial force, and in Innis's terms, drive out true understanding.

Keywords: Political Economy, Press Freedom, First Amendment, Monopolies of Knowledge, Medium Theory, Power and Knowledge, Science and Technology Vernacular, Popular Culture, Newspapers, Economies of Scale, Mechanized Communication, Bias, Advertising, Time and Space, Present Mindedness.

'You supply the pictures. I'll supply the war' (William Randolph Hearst).

'Freedom of the press under the Bill of Rights accentuated the printed tradition, destroyed freedom of speech, and broke the relations with the oral tradition in Europe' (Innis, 1952: 120).

'In the United States the dominance of the newspaper led to large-scale development of monopolies of communication in terms of space and implied a neglect of problems of time' (Innis, 1950: 170).

Force and Knowledge

In the late 1940s and early 1950s economic historian, Harold Adams Innis (1894-1952), arguably Canada's preeminent scholar of the twentieth century, helped inaugurate the now burgeoning field of media studies. According to American media scholar James W. Carey, Innis 'founded the modern studies that now exist under the banner of media imperialism' (Carey, 1981: 80; emphasis added). Likewise Paul Heyer proposed that 'Innis should be considered the "father" of what has become known as "medium theory"' (Heyer, 2003: 52). Similarly, Marshall McLuhan attested that his own breakthrough book, The Gutenberg Galaxy, was but 'a footnote to the observations of Innis' (McLuhan, 1971: ix).

Surprisingly, given such resounding praise, Innis's work remains obscure. Among media scholars outside Canada, Innis's scholarship is for the most part unread and unacknowledged. In their recent historical survey of radical media criticism Scott and McChesney, for example, leave unmentioned one of the US press's most original and trenchant critics, Harold Adams Innis (McChesney and Scott, 2004; Scott and McChesney, 2006;). Yet Innis, as will become increasingly apparent during the course of this paper, brings much to the table that even celebrated critics of the press, scholars like McChesney, Chomsky and Herman, do not offer; namely, a nuanced and detailed historical interleaving among the dynamics of technological/media change, shifts in political economic power, changes in culture, media messages, and monopolies of knowledge. After reading Innis, one would develop a much more nuanced understanding of the boosterism and jingoism of press coverage leading up to the US-Iraqi war than would otherwise be the case.

A partial explanation for the aforementioned exclusion of Innis within international scholarship may be that press criticism was but one component of Innis's broader, more comprehensive historical work (see Babe, 2000: 51-88; Heyer, 2003; Watson, 2006). But that explanation alone is insufficient because the larger body of Innis's work, too, remains basically unacknowledged. In this article I endeavour to begin redressing the Scott-McChesney oversight, leaving for another time or place speculation regarding the broader question, namely the neglect internationally of Innis within media and communication studies.

An essential key to understanding Innis's media writings generally, and his press criticism in particular, is his insistence, following the classical Greeks, on an opposition between power and knowledge (Watson, 2006: 313ff). A dialectic or contradiction between knowledge and power may seem quaint or out of place in contemporary mainstream western culture. Indeed, the mainstream of western thought seems still to adhere to the dictum of Francis Bacon (1561-1626), that 'knowledge and human power are synonymous' (Bacon, 1620: Aphorism 3, 43); for Bacon, the precise purpose of science/knowledge is to increase human power over nature (Bacon, 1620: Book One, Aphorism III). Likewise, moving ahead several centuries, no such contradiction is evident in the pragmatist philosophy of writers like John Dewey (1859-1952), who maintained that the validity of knowledge could be established only by its usefulness, that is its practical outworking. In the same vein, contemporary society is often referred to, with great pride and approval, as the Information Society and the Knowledge Economy, implying still today a continuing congruence between knowledge and power, particularly as facilitated by new media of communication. Innis, though, saw things quite differently. He declared: 'Power and its assistant, force [are] the natural enemies of intelligence' (Innis, 1952: xxvi). And again: 'Force is no longer concerned with his [i.e., the scholar's] protection and is actively engaged in schemes for his destruction' (Innis, 1957: 31).

In his 1947 essay, 'Minerva's Owl', Innis explained why he believed organised force actively strives to restrain scholarship and critical thought. He wrote:

'In the words of Hume: "As force is always on the side of the governed [due to vastly greater numbers], the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is, therefore, on opinion that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and the most military governments as well as to the most free and most popular." The relation of monopolies of knowledge to organized force is evident in the political and military histories of civilization' (Innis, 1947: 4).

Consequently, according to Innis, political, military, and financial centres normally endeavour to control knowledge production and distribution. Thereby, they direct, bias, distort, or reconfigure 'knowledge'. Innis termed these power centres, 'monopolies of knowledge.' He proposed further that a creative highpoint in the life cycle of civilisations occurs when each one enters its death throes, for it is then that organised force inadvertently loosens its grip, freeing knowledge workers to pursue truth, be creative, and engage in critical work. Innis wrote:

'With a weakening of protection of organized force, scholars put forth greater efforts and in a sense the flowering of the culture comes before its collapse. Minerva's owl begins its flight in the gathering dusk not only from classical Greece but in turn from Alexandria, from Rome, from Constantinople, from the republican cities of Italy, from France, from Holland, and from Germany' (ibid: 5).

Innis's essay, 'Minerva's Owl', marks the only instance in which this seminal scholar invoked Greek mythology to help make a point (Watson, 2006: 306), the allusion well illustrating the influence upon Innis of several classicists at the University of Toronto. The owl, pet of the war goddess, Minerva, is a metaphor for knowledge, whose flight represents 'the movement of the centre of Western civilization from one people and place to another' (ibid: 308). Normally, the owl is docile, meekly serving power and force, signified by Minerva. However, periodically, Minerva's grip is loosed, and the owl is free, but soon thereafter, according to Innis, it is forced to flee because the conditions supporting its existence are in decline. Although toward the end of a civilisation, 'scholars put forth greater efforts and in a sense the flowering of the culture comes before its collapse', the civilisation does collapse, and scholarship in that location becomes more difficult or impossible. According to Innis, then, on the one hand, knowledge depends upon force to ensure stability, but on the other, force erodes the integrity of knowledge.

According to Innis, another moment or opportunity of freedom for critical scholarship and for creative artistic endeavour occurs within a civilisation when one mode of communication, normally introduced from the margin or the hinterland by groups aspiring to power, begins to challenge, eventually perhaps to supplant, the older medium. In Empire & Communications, Innis surveyed civilisations both ancient and modern to show linkages among changing media, transformations in knowledge, and shifts in power, as illustrated by the following several, brief extracts:

'The profound disturbances in Egyptian civilization involved the shift from absolute monarchy to a more democratic organization [coinciding] with a shift in emphasis on stone as a medium of communication or as a basis of prestige, as shown in the pyramids, to an emphasis on papyrus' (Innis, 1950: 15).

Regarding Babylon,

'A flexible alphabet in contrast with cuneiform and hieroglyphic or hieratic writing facilitated the crystallization of languages and favoured the position of cities and smaller nations rather than empires' (ibid: 43).

In Europe,

'The monopoly of knowledge built up under ecclesiastical control in relation to time and based on the medium of parchment was undermined by the competition of paper' (ibid: 139).

Later in Europe, another seismic shift occurred with the arrival of the printing press:

'Printing accentuated a commercial interest in the selection of books and the publisher concerned with markets began to displace the printer concerned with production. The monopoly of monasticism was further undermined. The authority of the written word declined. The age of cathedrals had passed' (ibid: 143).

But Innis was not interested only in civilisations of the past. In his essay, 'A Critical Review', for example, he focused on the contemporary period of the late 1940s in the aftermath of World War II and the onset of the Cold War, to emphasize 'the suppression or distortion of culture, particularly through its influence on science' (Innis, 1948: 193). In fact, a careful reading of the foregoing statement reveals that Innis proposed a recursive relationship between culture and science. On the one hand, 'culture' (here, power centres) impinges upon science, distorting its findings; on the other, science biases, distorts, or suppresses culture.

To illustrate the first possibility, we could point to certain scientists in the employ of, for instance, tobacco companies (Sorell, 1998) or of certain oil companies (Environmental Defense 2006), who for pecuniary reasons may have skewed 'findings' concerning health or environmental consequences of their sponsors' activities and products. Likewise, Christopher Simpson has documented how, for several decades beginning in the 1940s, main figures in US media and communication scholarship had strong pecuniary links to the CIA and the US military (Simpson, 1994), linkages which may well have induced these scholars not only to eschew but indeed to repudiate critical political economy in their theorising (Babe, 2006a). On another front, Innis himself remarked that 'the bias of economics … makes the best economists come from powerful countries' (Innis, 1952: 91), indicating that in his view mainstream economics favours the wealthy in their contestations with the poor. Innis also drew attention to the close conjuncture between science and the military, writing: 'The universities are in danger of becoming a branch of the military arm' (Innis, 1948: 195).

The paradox, and tragedy, of science, as Innis saw it, was that once science became free from the monopolies controlling time (a victory represented symbolically, perhaps, by Galileo's ultimate victory in his contestations with the Church), it eventually succumbed to the monopolies controlling space (the military and commercial concerns): 'Science had gained in the escape from the monopoly of knowledge in terms of time but eventually lost in the development of knowledge in terms of space; an obsession with monopolies of space has been evident in the effects of militarism on geography' (Innis, 1951: 129).

Much more could and should be said about this aspect of Innis's political economy of knowledge thesis. Instead, however, I turn now to its reverse. According to Innis, the problem is not just that cultural/political/economic power tends to guide, distort or corrupt science; the problem is also that science acts recursively on culture. He wrote:

'The impact of science on cultural development has been evident in its contribution to technological advance, notably in communication and in the dissemination of knowledge. In turn it has been evident in the types of knowledge disseminated; that is to say, science lives its own life not only in the mechanism which is provided to distribute knowledge but also in the sort of knowledge which will be distributed' (ibid: 192).

The manifestation, or material embodiment, of scientific knowledge in new technologies is obvious enough: internet, satellites, television, radio, and other 'mechanisms … provided to distribute knowledge.' The very presence of such evolving infrastructure, irrespective of content or the ostensible 'messages', may well have cultural consequences: for instance, regarding the awe and esteem with which one regards science and large corporations. Innis's second point in the foregoing extract, however, namely that new media are inherently biased or selective in the types of messages they transmit, is a more nuanced claim, and hence deserves elaboration. In his 'Introduction' to Empire & Communications, Innis summarised what has since become known as 'medium theory':

'The concepts of time and space reflect the significance of media to civilization. Media that emphasize time [continuity, duration] are those that are durable in character, such as parchment, clay, and stone. The heavy materials are suited to the development of architecture and sculpture. Media that emphasize space are apt to be less durable and light in character, such as papyrus and paper. The latter are suited to wide areas in administration and trade … Materials that emphasize time favour decentralization and hierarchical types of institutions, while those that emphasize space favour centralization and systems of government less hierarchical in character. Large-scale political organizations such as empires must be considered from the standpoint of two dimensions, those of space and time, and persist by overcoming the bias of media which over-emphasize either dimension. They have tended to flourish under conditions in which civilization reflects the influence of more than one medium and in which the bias of one medium toward decentralization is offset by the bias of another medium toward centralization' (Innis, 1950: 7).

Here Innis claims that by their intrinsic attributes (their heaviness and durability; but also the extent to which they can store messages and their ease or recalcitrance in being encoded), media are intrinsically biased either toward supporting control through time (as exercised by religious leaders and others invoking custom, tradition, local culture, continuity, myth, collective memory, teleology), or control over space (as by large corporate businesses, government leaders, or the military, all of which are intent on administering large territories in the present). An alternative formulation of this space-time dialectic is being vs. becoming (Innis, 1951: 111). Paper, for example, being lighter and more tractable than stone, and with the larger storage capacity, is the more space-binding of the two, emphasising being in the present; paper in conjunction with the printing press is even more space binding than paper in a manuscript culture. Furthermore, Innis declares that for a culture to flourish, time bias and space bias need continually to offset or counterbalance one another through rival media.

In Innis's mind the space bias of contemporary society (that is, an undue emphasis on being), is associated strongly with what he termed 'mechanized' media, and this space bias, not being offset to any large extent by oral dialectic (Innis's favourite time-binding medium), causes difficulties of understanding. He stated unambiguously, 'The conditions of freedom of thought are in danger of being destroyed by science, technology, and the mechanization of knowledge, and with them, Western civilization' (ibid: 190). Innis, one might infer, adopted an apocalyptic view of western civilisation. Let's look in turn at each of the notions brought together in that condensed sentence.

Innis believed that the inventions of the mechanical printing press and the paper machine heralded a revolution in the mechanisation of knowledge production and distribution (Innis, 1947: 27). Mechanisation, he observed, gave rise to specialisation, indeed to an, 'obsession with specialization' (Innis, 1951: 139), and to the pursuit of economies of scale in knowledge production and distribution (ibid: 205-6), thereby inducing the arrival of the 'information industries' (ibid: 83). (Very likely this is the first time the term, 'information industries', now commonplace, was used). In referring to mechanisation of knowledge and of media, Innis had in mind not only larger presses and larger print runs (ibid: 206), but as well: larger class sizes in universities (ibid: 193); the use of mechanical instruments including books as teaching aids which tend 'to emphasize the factual and the concrete [as opposed to] abstract ideas' (ibid: 204); the discouragement of oral dialogue and the concomitant decline of critical, creative thought (Innis, 1950: 138; 1951: 191) insistence on the efficacy of formulaic knowledge (Innis, 1951: 86); and perhaps most importantly the undue emphasis on the present and the transitory ('present mindedness'). (Citing Laski, Innis wrote sardonically that 'education … became the art of teaching men to be deceived by the printed word', ibid: 139).

In tying greater problems in understanding to the mechanisation of media (Innis, 1947: 31), Innis made three major claims. First was at the international or cross-cultural level. Advances in communication, he claimed, decrease the ability of one culture or nation to understand or empathise with another. (How totally against the grain of the received wisdom of our day is that thought! We still tend to blithely indulge in the nostrums of the global village and greater understanding through international trade/communication). Innis, however, pointed to, for example, 'the varied rate of development of communication facilities' as one source of cross-cultural tension (ibid: 28). Literate and less literate cultures grow apart; regions rife with instant messaging, we might speculate, become even more remote to countries lacking basic telephone service, and vice versa. But Innis goes further:

'The large-scale mechanization of knowledge is characterized by imperfect competition and the active creation of monopolies in language which prevent understanding and hasten appeals to force … Application of power to communication industries hastened the consolidation of vernaculars, the rise of nationalism, revolution, and new outbreaks of savagery in the twentieth century' (ibid: 29). (As today, we might add, with Christian-Moslem confrontations all about us, spurred on through rival control over media of communication!).

Within cultures or countries, too, a proliferation of communicational activity breeds specialisation and thereby differentiation and hence segregation. Innis wrote: 'In the vast realm of fiction in the Anglo-Saxon world, the influence of the newspaper and such recent developments as the cinema and the radio has been evident in the best seller and the creation of special classes of readers with little prospect of communication between them' (ibid: 28). For Innis, likewise, ease in transmission of scholarship fragmented the university; proliferation of disciplines, sub disciplines and specialties created 'congeries of hardened avid departments obsessed with an interest in funds in which the department which can best prove its superficiality or its uselessness is most successful' (Innis, 1951: 84). And again: 'Knowledge has been divided to the extent that it is apparently hopeless to expect a common point of view' (ibid: 190).

Innis also claimed, thirdly, that the mechanisation and proliferation of media increase the difficulties of understanding at the level of the individual. There is, for example, an inordinate increase in the trivial. Innis declared, 'Mechanical devices become concerned with useless knowledge of useful facts' (ibid: 205). The trivial, for Innis, is virtually synonymous with 'present-mindedness'. Mechanised communication, he claimed, has virtually 'destroyed a sense of time' (Innis, 1951: 86). Innis cites Keynes' dictum, 'in the long run we are all dead', as indicating an obsessive present-mindedness on the part of even the most esteemed of scholars. Keynes basically claimed that 'we have little other interest than that of living for the immediate future' (Innis, 1951: 86). More generally, Innis maintained, 'work in the social sciences has become increasingly concerned with topical problems and social science departments become schools of journalism' (Innis, 1951: 86). For Innis, then, in scholarship as in popular culture, 'the balance between time and space has been seriously disturbed with disastrous consequences to Western civilization' (Innis, 1951: 76).

Culture and education, Innis believed, ought properly to be concerned with 'the capacity of the individual to appraise problems in terms of space and time and with enabling him to take the proper steps at the right time' (Innis, 1951: 85-6). But in this, contemporary media and education fail us, and indeed it is here that the contradiction between true scholarship/creativity, or what Innis termed 'civilized culture' on the one hand, versus power and force on the other is most apparent. The state and business are focused on administering affairs in the present over vast geographic expanse. Innis commented, 'We are compelled to recognize the significance of mechanized knowledge as a source of power and its subjection to the demands of force through the instrument of the state … Centralization in education in the interests of political organization has disastrous implications' (Innis, 1948: 195).

In summary, to consolidate and extend power, according to Innis, organised force dominates, and thereby skews or distorts, scholarship, education, science, and other knowledge generation/replication activities. Innis also insisted, however, that organised force normally controls what he sometimes termed 'the vernacular', or what we might term popular culture. He wrote: 'The success of organized force is dependent on an effective combination of … the vernacular in public opinion with technology [or media of communication] and science' (Innis, 1947: 5). Indeed, he claimed, once science had enfeebled the power of religion 'as an anchorage', the state (and we could add corporations) became 'more dependent on cultural development' (Innis, 1951: 130). It is in the area of 'cultural development' that Innis's analysis and commentaries on the press become so poignant.

Law, Technology, and Press Freedom

Harnessing Science and the Vernacular

According to Innis, by controlling science, 'organized force' controls the trajectory of technological change, particularly innovations in the media of communication. In support of this claim it may be recalled that the optical telegraph, radio, computers, satellites and the internet all came about through activity or funding of the military. Control over the media of communication is essential to those in power, in Innis's view (pursuant to Hume's axiom), because organised force cannot long continue to govern without the approval of the governed. Winning this approval, however, is contingent on maintaining control over the means of communication.

In this section I sketch out briefly certain aspects of Innis's detailed depiction of technological change as it related to press systems and how that in turn relates to the structure of power. Three important areas in this regard were: paper production, application of the telegraph to press systems, and increased speed of printing presses. In combination these developments led to a revolution in the production and distribution of news, giving rise to a new 'monopoly of knowledge', whose power was cemented in the USA by the Bill of Rights.

In Europe prior to the age of the electric telegraph and fast presses, interests associated with the landed aristocracy and the crown endeavoured through censorship, licensing, taxation, grants of monopoly, and other means to curtail the emerging printing technologies from fostering and spreading dissent. In England, France, and elsewhere by the end of the sixteenth century, however, according to Innis, periods of book suppression 'were accompanied by the rise of news-letters which evaded censorship.' Innis continues:

'The extreme difficulties of the press were accompanied by the growth of advertising as a source of revenue, and it was significant that the first advertisements included books or products of the press, quack medicines, tea, chocolate … Suppression of the printing of certain types of literature released the facilities for other types … ' (Innis, 1950: 150).

Suppression of radical thought was supplemented by efforts at co-optation. In the USA, for example, Jefferson, who championed small landowners as opposed to banking and commercial interests (Innis, 1952: 24), recognised the potential of the newspaper as 'an element of strategy' (Innis, 1951: 157). Jefferson not only encouraged inauguration of the National Gazette (begun October 21st, 1791), but also, through the grant of a monopoly of congressional news and a 'generous share of public printing,' persuaded the National Intelligencer to move from Philadelphia to Washington. In the 1820s, according to Innis, four of five members of President Andrew Jackson's cabinet were 'experienced journalists' (Innis, 1952: 163). He continues:

'Other rewards of patronage to editorial partisans included government printing, advertising of letters on hand in post offices, and appointments to the post office involving the right to half the revenue from newspaper postage, the privilege of franking estimated to be worth four or five hundred dollars a year, the possibility of restricting newspapers with opposing views, exemption from military and jury service, and the advantage of early intelligence' (Innis, 1951: 163-4).

In 1791 the American Bill of Rights was enacted, which states, among other things that 'Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press' (Emery, Emery and Roberts, 2000: 62). For many, this provision established in law a basic democratic freedom. Innis, however, was of a different mind. He claimed that through devices like those enumerated above, the press remained (for a time) staunchly under political control and hence, it would seem, by decreeing freedom of the press the dominant political interests of the day did not reduce and may even have extended for a time their freedom/power. In any event, for Innis, the legislation soon had consequences unforeseen by those enacting it: 'The full impact of printing did not become possible,' he wrote, 'until the adoption of the Bill of Rights in the United States with its guarantee of freedom of the press' (Innis, 1951: 138-9). By 'full impact', Innis meant, in part, generation of a new monopoly of knowledge.

Technological Change and a New Monopoly of Knowledge

Exports of paper to the United States had a large impact on the development of the American newspaper industry. Newspapers in the American commercial centres before 1812 responded to the needs of business by running 'a large number of small advertisements,' often legal notifications. They enjoyed circulations, however, only in the hundreds. These 'broadsheets' endeavoured to conserve paper by reducing font sizes and trimming their physical dimensions (Innis, 1971: 158). According to Innis, by the 1830s, however, increases in supplies of wood pulp dramatically reduced the price of newsprint (Innis, 1972: 161) which, accompanied by technological advances in printing, gave rise to 'a new type of paper,' namely the penny presses, focused on mass circulation, on sensational news, and sustained by advertising directed toward 'consumers' (Innis, 1971: 160).

As newspapers gained circulation, they gained political clout. Rather than being dominated by political interests, as was the case in Jefferson's day, newspaper proprietors came to be highly influential in regard to influencing public policy. One of their keenest interests, of course, concerned the price of newsprint. At the turn of the century, newsprint prices were increasing and newsprint companies were amalgamating, as evidenced by the formation in 1898 of the International Paper Company, composed of nineteen hitherto independent companies. Innis reports that 'with the enormous advantage of control over publicity,' newspaper owners exerted political pressures. To court press favour, Theodore Roosevelt launched a conservation campaign with the slogan, 'We are out of pulpwood,' while his successors, H.W. Taft and Woodrow Wilson, reduced and then finally removed tariffs on newsprint from Canada (Innis, 1952: 75-6). Moreover, appeals to the importance of a 'free press' blocked plans by the International Paper Company to acquire newspapers to secure markets for its output. 'Insistence on freedom of the press became a powerful factor in the defeat of newsprint producers' (ibid: 77).

Also central to the transformation of newspapers was the invention of the electric telegraph (circa 1837) and its application to journalism. This coupling helped erode 'political control through the post office' in a similar fashion seen previously by the lowering of prices in newsprint. In this case, regional presses were freed from their dependence on the metropolitan press (Innis, 1951: 169). Innis, however, goes further: 'The telegraph destroyed the monopoly of political centres and contributed, in destroying political power, to the outbreak of the Civil War' (ibid: 59). This may seem extreme, but Innis observes repeatedly in his surveys of ancient and modern civilisations that changes in the mode of communication give rise to periods of instability, often accompanied by civil strife, as one monopoly of knowledge ebbs and a new one flows. In this instance the monopoly of knowledge associated with land was challenged and defeated by interests centred on commercialism and finance. As Innis explains, 'Printing assumed mass production or reproduction of words and once it escaped from the pattern of the parchment manuscript it compelled the production of vast quantities of new material including material to meet the demands of science and technology. Improvements of communication hastened the development of markets and of industry' (ibid: 138-9). Thereby, 'a press less subservient to the political control of the Republican party followed the introduction of new inventions' (ibid: 174).

By Innis's account the invention of the telegraph and its application to journalism virtually forced newspapers 'to pool their efforts in collecting and transmitting news (ibid: 168), leading in 1848 to the organisation of what soon became the Associated Press, which in turn destroyed the 'parochial monopoly of New York papers' (ibid: 178). But, the Associated Press itself, of course, became a concentrated news source and distribution system, and helped to redefine the very notion of news. Interestingly, a Supreme Court decision establishing a property right in the news further entrenched AP's power (ibid: 180), although in another decision, United States v. Associated Press (326 U.S. 20), the same Court decreed:

'Freedom of the press from government interference under the first amendment does not sanction repression of that freedom by private interests … Surely a command that the government itself shall not impede the free flow of ideas does not afford non-governmental combinations a refuge if they impose restraints upon that constitutionally guaranteed freedom' (quoted in Innis, 1952: 58).

The news cartel represented by the Associated Press and other ownership concentrations, although important, was not, however, what Innis had foremost in mind when he described the press as constituting a new monopoly of knowledge. Rather, in Innis's view, all presses - AP, the competing Hearst press, the independents, in combination or as a totality - formed a new monopoly of knowledge in the sense of undue commercialism and an utter disregard of time in the sense of continuity and duration.

The third technological change (actually, a succession of changes) contributing to the transformation of the newspaper business and supporting a new monopoly of knowledge was the development of increasingly faster presses. 'With the linotype, advertisements could be changed daily and became a part of news' (Innis, 1951: 174). 'The cost of printing was vastly reduced with more efficient presses' (Innis, 1952: 75). Also important in the transformation of the newspaper were technological developments regarding the reproduction of illustrations and photographs, after the 1880s:

'Pulitzer's use of the cartoon had contributed to a quadrupling of circulation by the end of the first year. His success in increasing circulation with pictures was immediately followed by others. The multi-colour rotary press was introduced in the early nineties with pictures. By 1890 nearly all daily papers in the United States were illustrated' (ibid.).

Time-Space and the Monopoly of Knowledge

Innis noted that in holding down the price of newsprint and expanding circulation, newspapers favoured a 'marked extension of advertising.' In St. Louis between 1875 and 1925, for example, newspapers reduced space allocated to news from 55.3 to 26.7 percent, with a concomitant increase in the space devoted to advertising. For Innis, news for the 'cheap papers' was little more than 'a device for advertising the paper as an advertising medium' (Innis, 1971: 162). 'Freedom of the press,' as guaranteed by the US Constitution, Innis observed dryly, narrowed the 'marketplace of ideas' because the industry began accommodating the interests of its advertisers (ibid: 139; 1972). For one thing, advertisers were interested in 'a constant emphasis on prosperity.' Moreover, muck-raking in the financial field disappeared. And, beginning with Ivy Lee, PR professionals began 'disguising advertising material and planting it in unexpected places to be picked up as news' (Innis, 1952: 81). In brief, 'freedom of the press as guaranteed by the Bill of Rights in the United States [became] the great bulwark of monopolies' (ibid: 94-5). Attempts to increase circulation for advertisers, moreover, gave rise to comics, photos and features, and 'a prevailing interest in orgies and excitement' (Innis, 1951: 78). According to Innis, 'The steadying influence of the book as a product of sustained intellectual effort was destroyed by new developments in periodicals and newspapers … The Western community was atomized by the pulverizing effects of the application of machine industry to communication' (ibid: 79). Arguably, the 'pulverizing effects' of mass media gave rise to a new 'philosophy', namely poststructuralism or postmodernism (Babe and Comor, 2006). It has been contended that Innis was a precursor or a forefather of poststructuralism (Wernick, 1999), but in fact, while anticipating this outlook, Innis detested what he foresaw.

In Innis's view a second unfortunate consequence of the Bill of Rights was a further supplanting of empathetic conversation by what he termed, the 'cruelty of mechanized communication' (Innis, 1951: 191). He explained:

'The printing press and the radio address the world instead of the individual. The oral dialectic is overwhelmingly significant where the subject matter is human action and feeling, and it is important in the discovery of new truth but of very little value in disseminating it. The oral discussion inherently involves personal contact and a consideration for the feeling of others, and it is in sharp contrast with the cruelty of mechanized communication and the tendencies which we have come to note in the modern world' (ibid.).

A third contention was that by empowering mechanised communication, the Bill of Rights fostered 'a narrowing of the range from which material is distributed and a widening of the range of reception, so that large numbers receive, but are unable to make any direct response' (Innis, 1952: 89). The right to freedom of speech specified in the Bill of Rights has been interpreted by the courts as an individual right to engage in personal conversation, not as a right of citizens to access media of communication owned by corporations. The freedom to publish affirmed in the Bill of Rights, therefore, is a right possessed by owners of the press to publish what they wish, and pari passu to exclude viewpoints and spokespersons as they see fit (Ruggles, 2005). Hence, again, the Bill of Rights shored up the rights of the powerful and, at least relatively, reduced the rights of the general public. In a very real sense, the Bill of Rights reduced free speech; as Innis remarked: 'Those on the receiving end of material from a mechanized central system are precluded from participation in healthy, vigorous, and vital discussion' (Innis, 1951: 89).

Finally, and most importantly in Innis's view, as empowered by the Bill of Rights, the press developed into a new monopoly of knowledge in the service of space, to the preclusion of time. This is a continuing theme in Innis's work, and perhaps a few brief extracts will suffice to establish its central importance in his system of thought:

'The influence of mechanization on the printing industry had been evident in the increasing importance of the ephemeral. Superficiality became essential to meet the various demands of larger numbers of people and was developed as an art by those compelled to meet the demands. … With these powerful developments time was destroyed and it became increasingly difficult to achieve continuity or ask for a consideration of the future' (ibid: 82).

'The overwhelming pressure of mechanization evident in the newspaper and the magazine has led to the creation of vast monopolies of knowledge of communication. Their entrenched positions involve a continuous, systematic, ruthless destruction of elements of permanence essential to cultural activity. The emphasis on change is the only permanent characteristic' (Innis, 1952: 11).

'In the United States the dominance of the newspaper led to large-scale development of monopolies of communication in terms of space and implied a neglect of problems of time' (Innis, 1950: 170).

The Vernacular and the Scholarly

An undue focus on the problems of space ('present mindedness') to the exclusion of time (continuity, the future) can have disastrous consequences. Ecologist David Suzuki reminds us that virtually all mainstream media neglected to cover the signing in November 1992, by over half of the world's living Nobel laureates, of 'World Scientists' Warning to Humanity,' a document which began starkly: 'Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course …' (Union of Concerned Scientists 1992). Comments Suzuki: 'Half of all living Nobel prize winners suggesting that humanity could have as little as 10 years to avoid an absolute catastrophe are rated unworthy of reportage by media that obsessed for weeks and months, sometimes years over O.J. Simpson, Bill and Monica, Princess Diana, Michael Jackson, Martha Stewart, and Jennifer-Brad-Angelina' (Suzuki, 2006: F4).

Reading the foregoing extract from Suzuki's article, one might see popular culture and scholarship as on a collision course regarding time and space, with scientific wisdom here being ignored by the present-minded press. Not according to Innis, however. In Innis's view, popular culture and science, the vernacular and the scholarly, are usually cut from the same cloth, and more often than not reinforce one another, emphasising the present to the neglect of time both as duration and as a sense of the future; there being little contradiction between scholarship and popular culture, they comprise in combination the monopoly of knowledge of our day and together they serve military and commercial force, and in Innis's terms, drive out true understanding.

In the 'Preface' to Changing Concepts of Time, his final publication within his lifetime, Innis wrote:

'Intellectual man of the nineteenth century was the first to estimate absolute nullity in time. The present - real, insistent, complex, and treated as an independent system, the foreshortening of practical prevision in the field of human action, has penetrated the most vulnerable areas of public policy. War has become the result, and a cause, of the limitations placed on the forethinker. Power and its assistant, force, [are] the natural enemies of intelligence' (Innis, 1952: xxvi).

These are thoughts for our day - as America, for example, struggles with the fall-out from its hasty ('present-minded') invasion of Iraq, and as the present-mindedness of consumerism takes a continuing, and deepening, environmental toll. Innis's basic constructs - time vs. space, becoming vs. being, knowledge vs. force, monopolies of knowledge and the triangulation of power/technology/culture - all unfolded within an historical perspective that covers not just centuries but millennia - these are some of the riches that media scholars can recover through a perusal of the works of this neglected theorist.

Professor Robert E. Babe is the Jean Monty/BCE Chair in Media Studies, The University of Western Ontario, Canada.

As is so often the case, the author again gratefully acknowledges the helpful comments of Edward Comor on a previous draft.

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