As for the press, a decade and a half after the election of Margaret Thatcher they remained overwhelmingly pro-Conservative in their editorial bias, widely criticised (and not just by the Left) for their partisan interventions in British political life. The worst offender in this regard, Rupert Murdoch, was regularly at loggerheads not only with the Labour Party but with the BBC, viewed by News Corporation as an unfairly subsidised obstacle to its commercial ambitions in the UK (a criticism still voiced, of course, and not only by Murdoch). Sky News was still something of an upstart in the journalistic marketplace.

How things have changed. Now, the BBC and ITN have joined Sky in the rolling news business. The provision of television news has expanded by 800 per cent, from an average of thirty hours per week in 1986 to 243 hours in 2001, and digitalisation will push those numbers still higher in the coming years. Counting CNN and Bloomberg, the UK TV viewer with the appropriate reception equipment now has access to five 24-hour English-language news services.

And after years of open warfare between the two organisations, the BBC under Greg Dyke last year joined with Murdoch’s BskyB to take over the digital terrestrial TV licence formerly held by ITV. Having survived 18 long years of suspicious, at times, hostile Conservative governments, its confident collaboration with Murdoch signalled that by 2002 the BBC had moved into a position of unquestioned dominance in British broadcasting, and broadcast journalism in particular. ITN, though still the only serious rival to the BBC on five channels of terrestrial TV, was by the late 1990s in a state of on-going crisis, seeing its income and resources whittled away by the need to compete with Sky and other new entrants for commercial news contracts. ITN had also been seriously damaged by battles around scheduling, which first saw News At Ten cancelled then, after much protest and prevarication, brought back from the dead, but only on three days a week, and not always at ten. As ITV dithered over its scheduling, News At Ten became News at When? Viewers lost patience, and for the first time in many years average ratings for BBC1’s news bulletins overtook those of the commercial channel.

The scourge of Labour

Through it all, debates about the quality of British journalism continued to revolve around a few familiar themes: “dumbing down”, “tabloidisation”, “Americanisation”, “commercialisation”, are all terms brandished as accusations at UK news media during the last ten years. Others, including this writer, argued that British journalism is, if anything, “braining up” (the phrase was first used by Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian in March 1998) as it interacts with and necessarily adapts to an increasingly choice-rich market of sophisticated, media-literate consumers. With the recent exception of the Star (up by 21 per cent in the year to October 2002), Britain’s tabloids have experienced steady falls in circulation since 1994. Most of the broadsheets and mid-market titles, on the other hand, have held steady or increased their sales.

Some retort that this resilience has been at the cost of an editorial shift down market, with coverage of celebrity, sexual sleaze and other human interest themes replacing the serious treatment of politics, economics and foreign affairs, even in the broadsheets. But this “narrative of decline” is as old as the press itself, and firmly nailed by John Carey in 1992 in The Intellectuals and the Masses, his discussion of the intellectual contempt shown for the popular press (and for popular tastes) in the late 19th century. Of course, the erosion of social deference and the voyeuristic power of new communication technologies, fuelled by commercial pressures, have encouraged journalists to pay greater attention to the lives, including the private lives, of the rich, the famous and the powerful. Whether this is to be condemned as “dumbing down” or welcomed as the market-driven democratisation of news culture depends on how one sees the scrutinising, watchdog function of the journalist, and the legitimate limits on that scrutiny. I, for example, have defended coverage of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, because it concerned events which took place in the Oval Office and questioned the sexual morality of the U.S. President, who had lied in public. On the other hand, the humiliation of Robin Cook when he left his wife seemed excessive, given that he had never claimed any moral high ground on matters of the heart.

On the subject of journalistic ethics, outrage at the excesses of some news organisations – such as the News of the World’s “naming and shaming” campaign against alleged paedophiles – has continued to be expressed, though not with the regularity of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Kelvin MacKenzie and other tabloid editors placed the British system of press self-regulation at serious risk with their coverage of the Hillsborough disaster and other stories. The product of that infamous era, the Press Complaints Commission, has performed its light-touch regulatory function with a quiet competence for 13 years now, and kept the advocates of privacy legislation at bay. Interestingly, those tabloids most frequently found wanting on ethical matters, such as the Mirror, The People, The Sun and the News of the World, have seen some of the largest falls in circulation since the high point of “bonk” and “yuck” journalism in the late 1980s. Whether this is because the political furore which forced them to clean up their collective act drove readers away, as Piers Morgan once claimed, or because readers were finally turned off by the excesses of their Daily Screw, remains a matter of debate.

Ian Hargreaves’s and James Thomas’s recent Old News, New News study reports that in broadcasting, overall TV news consumption has fallen by 5.6 per cent since 1994, but if that figure is viewed against the greatly increased availability of outlets through which people can consume their news, it hardly seems alarming. More worrying, and the source of much anxiety among analysts in recent years, has been the decline of what its advocates call “serious” current affairs and documentary. A 1999 report by the Campaign for Quality Television concluded that “serious documentaries” were an “endangered species” on ITV. According to BARB figures quoted in one recent report, viewing of current affairs on all TV channels has fallen by 31.7 per cent since 1994. Commercial pressures to maximise ratings have been blamed for this, in so far as they have fuelled the expulsion of Panorama, World in Action and the occasional documentaries of John Pilger from peak time to graveyard slots (Sunday night for Panorama; late on week nights, typically, for Pilger), where they survive at all. These programmes have been progressively squeezed out by a myriad of reality TV and docu-soap formats, or programmes such as McIntyre Undercover and Tonight with Trevor McDonald which emphasise door-stepping drama and tear-jerking entertainment value over investigative, expository journalism.

Demand for accuracy

Such concerns should not be allowed to obscure the bigger picture: that the dominant trend in news and journalism in the UK since 1993 is one of growth, across all platforms. The emergence of online journalism may well turn out to be the most significant element of this process, though it remains as yet peripheral to the provision of news through established press and broadcast platforms. When the first edition of News & Journalism in the UK (N&JUK) was being researched, there was no such thing as journalism on the Internet. Today, no self-respecting news provider is without its online portal, supplying an estimated global market in mid-2002 of about 600 million net surfers. In Britain, it is estimated that every month nearly 11 million people are using online news sites, operated by established news brands like those of the BBC, The Guardian and the Financial Times. Many journalistic sites are independent of the established news providers, offering information alternatives to the mainstream. Many, such as BBC Online, are free (although they assume access to a computer and a telephone line). Some, such as FT.com, are developing innovative ways of packaging content for a globalised world in which geographical and cultural borders are increasingly porous, and people are prepared to pay for what they perceive to be quality news brands.

And then there is the dramatic expansion of real-time news, bringing with it the creation of a global audience for events such as the September 11 attacks, as well as access to broadcast journalism all day, every day, for those who want it. Although still, by 2003, reaching only a fraction of the audience for news on the free-to-air terrestrial channels, there is no doubt that in the multi-channel, digitalised future, rolling news will form a key sub-sector of the British media market.

Regional and local news provision has also expanded. An observation made in the first edition of N&JUK is even more apparent a decade later – cultural globalisation does not reduce the need or demand for local media; on the contrary, it increases that need. New communication technologies have permitted more precise targeting of local “micro” markets with cable channels, radio, and free sheets of real journalistic quality. At the same time, editionising of UK titles has allowed them to compete more aggressively with newspapers in the nation-regions of Scotland and Wales.

Audiences for radio have also expanded. Despite the proliferation of television news and online journalism, it is clear that people still want to listen to radio, for news as well as entertainment. Radio 5 Live has emerged as an important public space for what Steven Barnett last year called “deliberation on important political issues”. The Internet, moreover, has given radio listeners a means of readily accessing thousands of overseas stations hitherto unavailable to them.

The national press has declined in total circulation over the decade or so since 1993 and average circulations for last year showed a continuation of that trend. Roy Greenslade’s analysis of the ABC figures for December 2002 pointed out that more than 13 million national newspapers are sold in Britain every day. Year-on-year, circulations of three titles were up on the same period in 2001 (the Daily Star, by 16 per cent; the Express by 5 per cent; The Sun by 4 per cent), while the majority were down, from between 1.57 per cent (Daily Mail) to 8.67 per cent (Daily Record). Greenslade did note, however, that circulations in December 2001 were still benefitting from the post-September 11 effect, and a fall in circulation a year later was probably inevitable. Yet the sector remains profitable, in the main, given that the range of journalistic alternatives to the humble paid-for newspaper or magazine has increased to include the thriving Metro free sheets, the Internet, and even the mobile phone.

A benefit to newspapers

Contrary to the cultural pessimism which has characterised debate on the subject, then, the state of British news and journalism is, at the beginning of the 21st century, healthier and more robust than most observers would have predicted ten years ago. British audiences have access to an expanding public sphere of reportage, analysis and commentary, producing and disseminating far more information than any one individual could possibly absorb, from a greater variety of journalistic providers than has ever been the case. The key economic issue is not, as many feared it would become at the height of Thatcherism, how to ensure the survival of quality journalism in the UK, well-resourced and politically balanced, against the brutal logic of the free market and the right-wing media barons. It is how, in an intensely competitive environment, to finance the vast quantities of journalistic output now produced across print, broadcast and online media, both public and commercially-funded, at local, national and international level, given the finite capacity of the audience to absorb and pay for it.