Toward a Democratic Press

...Admittedly, this has not prevented Social Democrat Willy Brandt and his allies from winning an election...

...The other factor is the chain reaction set off by the rebellions in Berkeley, Paris and Berlin...

...At Le Monde, however, power has simply been redistributed by giving members of the staff a proportion of shares sufficient to prevent a takeover bid...

...He admitted, with remarkable candor, that he saw no easy answer...

...Gruner then sold out to his own partners, and the upshot of the revolt was the establishment of an "editorial committee" with the power to hire or fire the editor, as well as to veto the firing of any staff member unless two-thirds of the committee approved...

...And if it did, would it answer the conundrum left unsolved by Williams a decade ago...

...Ideologically, Williams was saying, this situation was far from ideal...

...Axel Springer today has greater control of the German press (40 per cent of the dailies, 80 per cent of the Sunday papers, and he is now angling for a television station) than Hitler's friend Alfred Hugenberg ever did...

...Also, what about independent, nonparty newspapers...

...Clearly, what the Open Secret and its allies across the Channel would like to see is newspapers and other mass media controlled by those who actually produce them (including, among the more idealistic, the compositors, the electricians and other technicians...

...The objections to such a scheme were evident enough...

...Perhaps a government could be found that would do this...

...But on the Continent at least, it appears thai the Age of the Bourbons is nearing its end, and that the fourth estate of journalism has got the bit between its teeth...

...So why all the worry about the communications media...

...The failure of the Observer would be a very serious loss, not only to England but (thanks to its news service) to many countries throughout the world...

...Since that time the readership figures for Right-wing publications in most countries have gone up (the Sunday Times, at well over a million, has left the Observer far behind), and it is the Left-wing papers (the old Left-wing Sun finally gave up the ghost this month) that are in financial trouble...

...To begin with, there is widespread discontent with the "control"-If it deserves that name-the Independent Television Authority is supposed to exercise over the quality of itv programs...

...yet, pragmatically, it was not nearly so disadvantageous to the British Left as was often suggested...

...One independent television network, Thames Television, after promising a gourmet's diet of opera, ballet and high culture, has fallen back within months of receiving its government-approved contract on a sorry package of cheap American films from the '40s and '50s and provides almost no serious programing at all...

...Yet, what Der Stern's staff was anxious to insure was the freedom of every individual journalist to write as he wished...

...Still, nobody connects this trend with any anti-Labor reaction, or imagines that the outcome of the next General Election will be determined by these facts...

...Did they not have a useful, indeed essential part to play in sustaining a democratic society...

...An English publication, the Open Secret, has been set up to probe, first, the scandalous state of television in this country and, secondly, to see whether the journalist-power successes of our foreign colleagues cannot be repeated here...

...Obviously, too, it would not do to except one paper from the competition of the marketplace (like the bbc), unless Parliament were prepared to extend the principle to other sections of the communications world...

...A series of similar events has led to the assertion of journalist-power in Paris at Le Figaro and Le Monde...

...In part, I dare say it would...

...There is, of course, no direct control by the advertiser as in the U.S., but that is little comfort...

...The answer is twofold...

...leadership figures would work out a great deal higher, but high Tory newspaper scorings could not insure a permanent majority for the Tories...

...This suggests, of course, just how differently the doctrine of absolute monarchy is interpreted on the two sides of the Channel...

...Would this work...

...The experiment is undeniably exciting, and it will be fascinating to see how it turns out...

...Not only would a fair distribution be impossible to obtain (10 per cent for the Liberals, 45 per cent for Labor and 45 for Tories...

...Hopefully, too, a parliamentary commission that was set up a year ago will limit Springer's (or any other German press-lord's) share of the market to 30 per cent both daily and Sunday, and something comparable in the case of magazines...

...Thus journalist-power does not really answer the points raised by Williams...

...But the objections by Williams that I quoted at the beginning of this article would still stand...

...If you added these figures together, you got a likely readership of some 12-15 million, roughly what Labor could expect to poll at a General Election...

...For, again, the situation has grown worse over the past 10 years, with the concentration of newspaper ownership increasing steadily...

...By the standards of our society, then, it deserves to perish...

...According to the rules, the Observer would have failed because not enough people wanted to read it (or, more accurately, not the right kind of people to pull in the advertising...

...This, it had been argued, could be done on a democratic, pluralistic basis by having the financing of newspapers correspond to the vote received by any given party, perhaps averaged over a period of years, regardless of its financial resources...

...The government can manipulate postage rates, as it does in France, to provide a hidden subsidy for the whole range of the press...

...And why, come to think of it, should journalists claim the right to speak, as it were, in the name of democracy as a whole...

...And it assumes wider significance in the light of Vice President Spiro Agnew's current efforts to exert pressure on the major U.S...

...If student-power, why not journalist-power...

...Tiat was 10 years ago...

...but the notion of party control of newspapers was no less calculated to send shivers down the spine of us old-type New Leftists than the existing (and enduring) condition of absolute monarchy under which we were suffering...

...Worse, the bbc has tended to follow suit over the past 10 years, in order to keep up in the rating rat race...

...now it is probably poorer than French or German, and rapidly sinking to the American level...

...We are back to the dilemma we started with...

...In addition, there was the ever-ailing Sun-formerly the militantly Labor Daily Herald-whose circulation hovered at about 1.5 million, and whose sad fate illustrated more than anything else what happens to newspapers when they are committed to a party line...

...I remember this question being put to ideologist Raymond Williams 10 years ago, at a New Left meeting in London...

...A journalist subjected to editorial pressure here would have the protection of his union, and would have far greater opportunity to find suitable employment within a relatively pluralistic framework in this country than in most countries on the Continent...

...If a paper like the Observer, which is known to be in difficulties, found itself with its back to the wall, it is not at all apparent that a committee would be of much help.in solving its problems within a capitalist society...

...But the revolt has now taken deeper root...

...For the educated Left-winger there was the Guardian on weekdays and the Observer on Sundays, both at about 700,000, with a readership double that...

...It remains to be seen which method will prove the more effective...

...Might not the Stern-Figaro-Monde system simply substitute for a toppled absolute monarchy an enlightened, but possibly highly exclusive oligarchy...

...Even a paper run by a committee has to make profits, or at the minimum break even...

...This is, in a sense, a democratic verdict...

...Then there was a further objection, pointed out by Williams himself: The distribution of circulation and proprietorship, although (as in the U.S., France and Germany) it on the whole favored the Right, satisfied the needs of the electorate...

...But that it is the ultimate democratic, let alone Social Democratic, answer to the problem of how to control the mass media, I find difficulty in accepting...

...Most people would agree that commercialism has brought this about -hence the sentimental nostalgia of Socialists for the high-thinking, if paternalistic prewar rule of Lord Reith...

...Hearing of the proposed sale, the entire staff threatened to resign...

...Bauer, who calculated this would cost him no less than $15 million in compensation of old and hiring of new staff, took fright and withdrew...

...Take the example of Der Stern, the leading German color magazine -a kind of Leftish, muckraking, but highly successful variant of Life...

...It was to be sold by its publishers, Gruner and Jahr, a relatively respectable house that also publishes the influential, liberal die Zeit, to a certain Heinrich Bauer, who runs a stable of nudie-illustrateds...

...They have been considerable...

...Should it then be subsidized...

...It is the old question: Who elects the electors...

...A working-class pro-Labor tabloid, the Daily Mirror, had the largest sale, 5 million, and a readership over twice that number...

...EXPERIMENTS IN JOURNALIST-POWER Toward a Democratic PressBY john mander London Finding a way to bring the press and other mass media under social control, while preserving editorial independence, is an old conundrum for Europe's Democratic Socialists...

...One solution, I recall, he rejected out-of-hand: that newspapers should be licensed, even possibly subsidized, much as the British Broadcasting Corporation (bbc) has been here-or, in a much looser form, the commercial independent television stations (itv...

...television networks...

...It is something-and most English Tories would probably agree-that would be highly undesirable in terms of the general political and social health of the nation...

...British television once had a good claim to being the best in the world...

...True, the Tory John Mander's most recent book is The Unrevolutionary Society...