THE PRESS
Out of print?
BILL GRUNDY
I am indebted to Mr Jeremy Tunstall. He is the man who taught me my only word of Japanese. It is `Shimbun', which means newspaper, or Express, or Mail, or Daily, or something which I now forget. It cropped up in a lecture Mr Tunstall delivered at the University of Essex when he was a Fellow of Sociology there. The lecture was called 'Fleet Street Myths and Multi-media Realities' and was a hell of a sight more readable than its title. It contained a lot of good stuff, including a suggestion that the British press ought to be looking, not to America, but to Japan, where what is happening is far more relevant to us.
Mr Tunstall has now moved on. He has become Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the Open University, and he has just edited a massive book, called Media Sociology (Constable, hardback 3 gns, paperback 30s). It is big-574 pages—written by a long list of contributors, some two dozen in all. Most of them work in or around the media, and they have produced something very valuable. There's a lot of jargon, but once translated it reveals many insights extremely helpful to people working in, or worrying about, television, radio, and the press.
The range of contributions is wide, but they have been well organised by Mr Tunstall under five main headings, each broken down into anything up to seven sub- jects. All of them are worth thinking about, but I want to concentrate on the chapter written by Mr James Curran of Trinity Col- lege, Cambridge University. It is called 'The Impact of Tv on the Audience for National Newspapers, 1945-68' The title is an exact description of the, sub- ject matter. Curran has seized on the old groan that television has displaced the more traditional medium of the newspaper, 'caus- ing a drop-out among newspaper readers, depressing newspaper sales, reducing the time spent reading newspapers and running down still further the already tarnished im- age of the press'. His faith in the truth of this complaint was not strengthened by discover- ing that other people claim that exactly the opposite is true—that television has recruited new readers, boosted sales, and so on. He therefore set about examining the issue from scratch.
At first sight, there's a lot in the first view—that papers have been clobbered by the spread of television. Twenty years ago, when TV was a rarity (only three-quarters of a million sets compared with about fourteen million today), the combined sales of national newspapers in this country were six thousand eight hundred million copies a year. Nowadays sales are down by about eight hundred million, to around the six thousand million mark.
There seems to be a very clear correlation. But is there? Mr Curran points out that television is only one of the claimants on the public's leisure time. There is no actual proof that television is the cause of the decline in newspaper sales. The decline might be due to any number of things, including a drop in the quality of the press itself.
But how far is the decline really one at all? Twenty years ago, newspapers were meagre things, subject to paper rationing, which meant they could be read in about two minutes flat. They were also still very cheap
indeed (far too cheap, as I and many others have been arguing for a long time). Both these factors made it likely that people would buy more than one paper—because they wanted more to read, and because they could afford to. As papers became bigger and cost- lier, Mr Curran says, people bought fewer of them. He supports his statements with some highly impressive tables, and really, when you come to think about it it does seem inevitable that people will read fewer papers now than they did then, if only because there are still only the same number of hours in the day, whereas there are far more pages per paper. For instance, again comparing twenty years ago with today, 1950 saw an average of about 8+ pages in our na- tional dailies, and about 121 in the Sundays. Today the figures are up to 22+ and 35+ respectively. Not far short of three times as many in each case. Reading more than one paper a day gets more and more like a full- time job, an art almost. And though art is long, life is short.
I think there's no doubt Mr Curran makes his case. But he doesn't make another very important point—presumably because it was no part of what he set out to do. And that is that whether or not Tv is responsible for a reduction in newspaper circulations, it is most certainly there, doing things that until recently only papers _could do, and doing them better. However well described those insane Belfast riots were recently, nothing could convey the madness as well as the television news film did. As reporter of what Tom Baistow recently described as 'the overt event', the plain truth—plain for all to see—is that television can do the job far bet- ter than even the best-written descriptive piece in the papers. Its visual immediacy ensures that.
Which is not to say that old windbag McLuhan is right when he says the written word is on the way out (incidentally needing several written books to say it). Mr Curran is quite clear about that: 'Nor is there a shred of evidence to support Professor McLuhan's sweeping assertion that television viewing, by changing our sensory equipment, has eroded the need for the printed word'
But the appearance on the scene of television surely means that many of the traditional functions of newspapers are on the way out. Why read all about it, when you've seen all about it? The answer is pro- bably implicit in .a remark of the editor of the Times, Mr Rees-Mogg is optimistic; `The great weakness of television,' he is quoted as saying, 'is the brevity of its current affairs and news coverage ... The brief vivid snapshot, the actual sight of the people in- volved, the headline news or the inconclusi. e five minute discussion, often make television coverage an aperitif for newspaper coverage in greater depth.'
He could very well be right. The aperitif might very well make the public want a more solid meal. But the implication must be made explicit, and acted on. When newspapers have changed to meet television's natural ad- vantage in reporting the overt event, then their position may become as near• invulnerable as is suggested by the closing words of Mr Curran's essay, when he talks about 'the enduring appeal of the press medium'. The changes are coming. What might be the vital question, though, is—are they coming fast enough?
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