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On the Power or Vulnerability of the British Press: A Dynamic Analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

W. L. Miller ,
J. Brand  and
M. Jordan
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Extract

The existence of fairly strong correlations between newspaper readership and socio-political variables is well known. The interesting question about these correlations is not whether they exist but why they exist. In their analysis of British political behaviour in the sixties, Butler and Stokes put forward three possible explanations.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 12 , Issue 3 , July 1982 , pp. 357 - 373
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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References

1 Butler, David and Stokes, Donald, Political Change in Britain, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1974), p. 117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Following Butler and Stokes, we have stated these alternative models in simple, unembellished form. Other workers, primarily interested in communication rather than politics, have used more complex variants in attempts to discover large media effects. Thus they have focused on more volatile aspects of political attitudes – on turnout, for example, rather than party choice. Similarly they have searched out subgroups of the electorate whose youth, doubts, uncertainties, ignorance or political apathy made them more responsive to media influences. Our sample size is too small to allow us to treat such complexities. But no amount of sophisticated sub-group analysis can alter the basic fact that sub-group responses must add up to the overall response by the electorate as a whole. Hence non-cancelling media effects in sub-groups can only be significantly larger than in the whole electorate when the sub-groups in question are small. Sub-group analysis provides no new answers, it merely changes, and to some extent evades, the question posed so simply by Butler and Stokes. See, for example, Blumler, Jay and McLeod, Jack, ‘Communication and Voter Turnout in Britain’ in Leggatt, T., ed., Sociological Theory and Survey Research (London: Sage, 1974), pp. 265–312.Google Scholar

3 Butler, and Stokes, , Political Change in Britain, p. 116.Google Scholar

4 When Rupert Murdoch took control of the Sun in 1969 he rescued it from financial collapse by, amongst other innovations, devoting the third page of each issue to a large picture of bare bosoms (except on 3 May 1979, when he used it to extol the virtues of Mrs Thatcher). His competitors followed suit and the phrase ‘page three’ entered standard English vocabulary as noun and adjective. We have used the phrase to designate all those non-political features of a paper which might attract readers generally, or, more especially, particular socio-economic categories of reader. Murdoch's own ‘page three’ seems to have appealed to younger and more working-class subgroups. Thus the non-political aspects of the Sun may have appealed to Labour-voting subgroups despite the paper's switch to anti-Labour politics under Murdoch. Similarly, the Glasgow-printed Daily Record may have appealed to Scots because local printing meant up-to-date news rather than because its Scottish printing or editorial politics appealed to Scots national sentiments. We use the phrase ‘page three’ to refer to all these non-political attractions, not just to the page-three girls themselves.

5 Butler, and Stokes, , Political Change in Britain, p. 116.Google Scholar

6 See Butler, and Stokes, , Political Change in Britain, 1st edn (1969), p. 242.Google Scholar

7 British press readership contrasts sharply with that in Europe or America. Evening papers are local but little more than advertising sheets. The only papers important for Britain-wide politics are a handful of morning papers which are often, but erroneously, described as national. Five ‘popular’ and two ‘intellectual’ papers were published in London and competed with each other throughout England and Wales. A different set of two ‘popular’ and four ‘intellectual/local’ papers accounted for over four-fifths of Scottish paper sales. Only the Express appeared in both these sets of papers. There were thus two ‘national’ markets for morning papers in Britain. The names, politics and 1979 circulation (in thousands of papers) of the London published papers were: Sun (Conservative, 3,855); Mirror (Labour, 3,623); Express (Conservative, 2,447); Mail (Conservative, 1,963); Telegraph (Conservative, 1,441); Guardian (Independent anti-Conservative, 327); The Times (Independent anti-Labour, on strike in 1979 but normal circulation about 290). The Sun, Mirror, Express and Mail were tabloids, i.e. had half-sized pages. The Telegraph had pretensions to be an intellectual paper but was characterized by extreme partisanship as much as intellectual quality. In addition the Express group started up the Star in 1979 to capture the bottom of the market. It sold almost 900,000 copies by dismissing politics and political news while concentrating all its attention on its page-three girls. See Bilton, Michael and Himelfarb, Sheldon, ‘Fleet Street’, in Butler, David and Kavanagh, Dennis, The British General Election of 1979 (London: Macmillan, 1980), pp. 231–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar. When Butler and Stokes undertook their analysis in the mid-sixties the Star did not exist while the Sun was Labour but sold only 1,200,000 copies. The Mirror came top with over four times that number and the Express second with over three times. So Labour papers had almost half of total circulation, compared with only a quarter in 1979.

8 See McKay, Ron and Barr, Brian, The Scottish Daily News (Edinburgh: Cannongate Press, 1976)Google Scholar; or Bradley, Keith and Gelb, Alan, ‘The Political Economy of Radical Policy: An Analysis of the Scottish Daily News Worker Co-operative, British Journal of Political Science, IX (1979), 1–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Throughout 1979 the names, character and circulation (in thousands of copies) of papers within Scotland were: Record (Labour, pro-devolution, 725); Express (Conservative, anti-devolution, 275); Courier (Dundee area, Conservative, 135); Herald (Conservative, 120); Press and Journal (Aberdeen area, 115); Scotsman (Independent, pro-devolution, 95). The Record and Express were ‘popular’ tabloids. The Herald had a special interest in the west of Scotland and the Scotsman in the east, but both were primarily national Scots ‘intellectual’ papers. The Courier and ‘P and J’ were primarily local papers. In addition, the London papers sold a few thousand copies in Scotland: Sun (150), Star (60), Mail (40), Telegraph (30), Mirror (25), Guardian (10), The Times (10). Despite the small size of Scotland, with an adult population of less than four million, the British tendency to buy newspapers, coupled with the Record's overwhelming dominance in the Scottish market, meant that the Record sold more copies than any West European newspaper except the German Bild Zeitung – about as many as Corriera Della Sera and substantially more than Ouest France or the West Deutsche Allegemeine, the top sellers in Italy, France and Germany (Bild Zeitung excepted). A decade earlier the Scottish Daily Express had been Scotland's best seller. See Figure 1 for circulation trends in Scotland.

10 Compared with our full set of 1974 respondents, those whom we managed to re-interview in 1979 differed (in 1974) as follows: panel respondents were more SNP (by 1·5 per cent) and more likely to vote (by 2 per cent), but no different in terms of Labour or Conservative voting; on the other hand they were more interested in politics (by 8 per cent) and 7 per cent more of them claimed to follow politics in the press at least ‘fairly closely’. Our overall panel survival rate of 38 per cent compares with just under 42 per cent in Butler and Stokes's 1963–70 panel (see Butler, and Stokes, , Political Change in Britain (1974), p. 436Google Scholar). While we should be the last to express satisfaction with these low survival rates, we have no reason to suppose that panel bias affects the findings reported in this article. However, panel attrition certainly produces a most unwelcome reduction in our sample size.

11 ‘Spontaneous’ class identifiers were those who replied affirmatively to the question: ‘One often hears talk about social classes. Do you ever think of yourself as belonging to any particular class?’ Most respondents agreed to describe themselves as either ‘middle-class’ or ‘working-class’ if pressed to make a choice but, as can be seen from Table 2, only a minority of Express readers opted for a class before being pressed.

12 See Butler, and Stokes, , Political Change in Britain, 1st edn., p. 232.Google Scholar

13 See Lazarsfeld, Paul and Merton, Robert, ‘Mass Communication, Popular Taste and Organized Social Action’ in Rosenberg, Bernard and White, David, eds, Mass Culture (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1957), especially pp. 469–73.Google Scholar

14 The political impact of consensual media coverage of the ‘Winter of Discontent’ has been noted by, for example, Crewe, Ivor in ‘Why the Conservatives won’ in Penniman, Howard, ed., Britain at the Polls 1979 (Washington: American Enterprise Institute, 1981) especially p. 266Google Scholar; and in a Scottish context, by Miller, William in The End of British Politics? (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 248–9.Google Scholar