| Abstrakt: |
The article explores some major trends in the British press during "the age of television". While the press industry remains in a broadly healthy financial state, television has played an important part in other major changes in the press. Television has indirectly played its part in major changes in the pattern of British press ownership. This article concludes by noting that the empirical facts can be seen as illustrating both Marxist and functional accounts of mass media in market economies. In 1900 both the national and provincial press were still organized on the basis of competition between political parties and factions. Today the London press is mainly a morning press organized on social class lines. As if to emphasize the national/provincial polarity even more, by the 1970s local weekly newspapers were the ultimate in non-partisanship and often the ultimate in profitable local monopoly. Marxists and functionalists can often agree on the facts. The present state of the British press could, however, also be quite easily explained in functional terms. |
