Abstract
Steven Barnett’s thesis in this book, written for a broader audience of citizens concerned about the state of the media in the UK, is that British television journalism has until recently been rather good in comparison to the USA. This is because of a combination of tight regulation, the existence of the BBC and healthy competition between particularly ITV and the BBC. High quality news and current affairs programmes, the lifeblood of democracy as they enable an informed citizenry, are simply not profitable and so reliance on the market means the death of such programming with clear consequences for democracy. The problem for British television and for democracy is that from Thatcher onwards there has been a drive towards deregulation and reliance on markets and while it appears that news provision has held up quite well, current affairs have been badly affected.
For many media academics this is a familiar and convincing case. The merits of this book lie more in the attempt to bring this case to a wider audience in the public sphere rather than in providing new arguments or new evidence. The central problem with the book is that it tries to do too much. The comparison between television news in the UK and USA is key to the argument that the market cannot deliver and yet there are relatively few pages on the history of US television. The comparison is not sustained throughout the book. This is essentially a book about British television journalism and its treatment of the US is underdeveloped. A second problem with the book is that it switches mode mid-way. The first third is a potted history of British television journalism that draws extensively on secondary sources and first-hand accounts from participants. It is a whistle-stop tour of the well-trodden highlights and lowlights of British journalism (General Strike, Second World War, Suez and so on). Subsequently, however, there are a number of relatively self-contained essays on various episodes, events and developments in the British media landscape (on Hutton, the rise of 24-hour news channels, tabloidization and so on). These essays are generally illuminating and thoughtful but they are a collection of essays on contemporary British television journalism. This switch of mode is manifest in the insistent presentation of normative arguments about the parlous state of television journalism in the UK, the highpoint of which was in the mid- to late 1980s. The difficulty here is that Barnett does not establish a normative framework for his judgements. Reference is made to the need for journalism to sustain its ‘public sphere ideal’ but which public sphere ideal are we talking about exactly? There are a number and it is by no means clear that British TV journalism fulfils any of them. Without establishing a normative framework on which judgements can be based, Barnett is open to the charge that he wants to see more programmes aimed at a liberal elite audience paid for, directly or indirectly, by a broader audience. While this ‘cultural populist argument’ is wrong and indeed well past its highpoint in academic circles at least, it cannot be shown to be wrong without a more thorough theoretical engagement than offered here.