The ownership of newspapers thus became one strategy by which large business organizations sought to influence the environment in which they operated. This strategy was pursued mainly on the basis of an arm’s length relationship between newspapers and conglomerate newspaper companies during the 1960′s.
(Curran 1991: 101)
Indeed the full extent of the material transformation of the press is perhaps most cleverly revealed by comparing the launch and establishment costs of newspapers before and after the industrialization of the press. As we have seen, the total cost of establishing the Northen Star, a national weekly newspaper, on a profitable basis in 1837 was little more than £690. It was able to break even with a circulation of about 6,200 copies, which was probably achieved within the first month. In contrast the Sunday Express, launched in 1918, had over £2 million spent on it before it broke even, with a circulation of well over 250,000. Thus while a public subscription in northern towns was sufficient to launch a national weekly in the 1830′s, it required the resources of an international conglomerate controlled by Beaverbrook to do the same thing nearly a century later.
(Curran 1991: 36-7)
But the parliamentary campaign for a free press was never inspired by a modern libertarian commitment to diversity of expression. Indeed the ruthless repression of the unstamped press in the mid-1830′s had much the same objective as the campaign which set the press ‘free’ twenty years later: the subordination of the press to the social order. All that had changed was a growing commitment to positive indoctrination of the lower orders through a cheap press, and a growing conviction that free trade and normative controls were a morally preferable and more efficient control system than direct controls administered by the state.
(Curren 1991: 30)
[Die redakteur] is ‘n instrument van ‘n direksie, en in sy hande is ‘n belegging van miljoene rande met hoë deurlopende koste. Hy moet sorg dat die koerant of tydskrif in sy hande die nodige rendement lewer, of anders…
Dit geld vir ‘n redakteur op elke vlak: skoolpublikasies, studentepublikasies (al is by hulle minder geld op die spel) of meer gevorderde produkte. Almal is onderworpe aan die kostegreep en die knellings van die samelewing: wette, sensuur, politieke omstandighede, invloed van drukgroepe. Tot die geringste publikasie het ‘n skoolhoof of ‘n studentedekaan wat oor die inhoud waak.
(Vosloo 1982: 12)
The radical press not only helped to erode political passivity, based on a fatalistic acceptance of the social system as ‘natural’ and ‘providential’, but also began to dispel the collective lack of confidence that had inhibited working-class resistance. The least valued section of the community was able to obtain a new understanding of its role in society through its own press. [...] This novel view of the world, popularized through the more radical journals, provided a means of reordering the entire ranking of status and moral worth in society. The highest in the land were degraded to the lowest place in society as unproductive parasites: working people, in contrast, were elevated to the top as the productive and useful section of the community. The early militant press thus fostered an alternative value system that symbolically turned the world upside down.
(Curran 1991: 22)