Abstract
I commission book reviews for the BJR, and my effort to find a reviewer for this one illustrates a conflict inherent in this journal's concept. The title makes clear that it is an academic book, with a price tag suggesting it is aimed at institutional libraries. Naturally I approached a distinguished professor in the field, who agreed to take a look at it.
After leafing through it he told me he couldn't possibly review it because he was parti pris: indeed, his name occurs several times in the index. He added that the same would apply to almost any other media academic worth their salt, even if they were not among the 56 contributors of essays to this sprawling volume. So he suggested I should invite a journalist to do it instead.
I demurred, knowing from experience that the default position of most journalists with regard to academic books is to pour excrement on them from a great height. They object to the rigours of scholarship being applied to what they regard as their essentially creative and instinctive calling. Print and broadcast journalism are by nature ephemeral and do not always stand up well to the application of wisdom after the event. That is why journalists tend to scoff at the idea of media studies and for good measure lampoon the prissy, and often opaque, prose style deployed by many academics.
Deciding to review it myself, I found a useful discussion of that very issue by Graham Murdock and Peter Golding. They write of “long-standing political attacks on media studies, amplified by popular media commentary that dismisses media studies as an area that has no legitimate place in a university” and go on to challenge the assumption that “because some of the objects of media analysis are ephemeral and of contestable aesthetic value, their systematic study must be both trivial and easy”. They argue convincingly that the opposite is true, that “media studies is indispensable to any full understanding of the organization of modern life, the play of power and the dynamics of change”.
Their viewpoint is supported by the impressive range and authority of the essays in this book. It is true that some of the authors come at the subject from a sharply ideological standpoint: “Mass media are predominantly global capitalist organisations and their main aim is to sell us things on behalf of themselves and other global capitalist organisations,” writes Mick Temple, in a trenchant essay on representations of class in post-war media.
Then Jonathan Cable tells us that “the common thread running through the media coverage of social conflict over time is that the antagonists have been consistently demonised, depoliticised and depicted as deviant.”
Those two chapters come in what many will find the most contentious of the book's eight sections that are devoted to media and society. When it ends, it is a relief to find ourselves suddenly in the calmer waters of conventional newspaper history, beginning with the 17th century newsbooks that developed 100 years later into something like the newspapers we know today.
Then we go on to Alfred Harmsworth and the mass circulation press: Hearst, Beaverbrook, Murdoch and the rest of the usual suspects, followed by chapters on press regulation and the provincial press, leading to a discussion of the Leveson inquiry and the future of newspapers in the digital age. The title of the final chapter in the newspaper section, “Online and on death row,” neatly summarises the view of the author, Tim Luckhurst, of the industry's future – a view clearly shared by several other contributors.
There follow sections dedicated to magazines, radio, film, television and digital media.
Among the essays that stand out is Siân Nicholas' examination of public service broadcasting, which she defines as embracing “universality of access; diversity, distinctiveness and quality of programme content; serving of minority as well as majority interests; freedom from commercial pressures through public financing and from political interference through independent oversight; public accountability; impartiality and a commitment to innovation”. She concludes optimistically that, although the media landscape has changed beyond recognition since Lord Reith introduced the concept in the 1920s, “the legacy … still persists, in Britain and beyond, to this day”.
Whether that legacy will survive in the longer term will, I imagine, depend on the forthcoming negotiations and debate on the funding of the BBC.
This ambitious book amounts to a comprehensive account of current thinking on all aspects of the subject and should prove an invaluable reference work for all students of the media, journalism and related disciplines for many years to come.