Beginning and Development of Press in the UK and Up to the Present

Otherwise, spread across the jet and pleasant land were 750 local village weekly newspapers, prescribed 29 daily morning papers and 76 even papers situated in the larger cities of the kingdom (Seymour-Ure 1-2). in that location were illustrated weekly magazines, but splashes of color were few and far between. Information, not entertainment, was the keynote of the day, at least in newspapers. Seymour-Ure sums up the look of the media establishment this way:

In the press, "taste" was largely a matter of editorial discretion. Four-letter words and top little girls were taboo. Tasteful, airbrushed nudes appeared in heat monthly magazines such as Liliput and Men Only (Seymour-Ure 2).

By 1995, the media landscape of the UK had been radically transform. Television was ubiquitous, with two-thirds of all homes having at least two TVs. There were four national "terrestrial" channels, fortify by multichannel international satellite TV and virtually around-the-clock programming. Many newspapers routinely featured color art; the newsstands "were a blaze of glossy color," says Ure (4). Some tabloids were distinguished by the up-to-the-minute gossip and nude photography. Special-interest weeklies and monthlies numbered in the hundreds; only women's homemaking magazines, onc

That dynamic operated from about 1950 to 1970. Matters shifted again, however, commencely in answer to a growing perception on the part of media magntes of the tycoon of the technology-driven press to influence public policy. Corporatization and the cult of the media entrepreneur, reinforced by innovative technologies and blocks of capital, effected a series of consolidations, mergers, acquisitions, and operational deployments that transformed media realities in the UK and elsewhere in the industrial Western economies.

The postwar media barons were no less politically partisan than their forebears of an earlier multiplication and, the likes of them, were in the main conservative in temperament.

However, they were on the whole more interested in compounding commercialised success than in manipulating (say) election outcomes, as in prewar generations:

The ratio of ownership of major UK media as of 1999 has been cited is as follows (Underwood):

commercial success, rather than political influence, was the motive of a man like Roy Thomson, who bought the Sunday Times in 1959 and The Times in 1967. Newspapers became less partisan, commonly expressing a view at election clock time instead of maintaining a continuous editorial loyalty to a particular party (Goodlad 33).

e prominent in the UK media establishment, had declined in popularity. Although as Eldridge, et al., point out, there is "a long usage of complaint against the influence of popular media and entertainment forms in Britain" (10), in the 1950s and 1960s the perception was growing that phenomenon of mass media was root system to develop a life of its own. By the mid-1960s media were the subject of a discrete discourse owing in significant part to Marshal McLuhan's trenchant observation that "the medium is the message," by which he meant that the "personal and social consequences of any medium--that is, of any cite of ourselves--result from a new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselve
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