ABSTRACT
The Second World War and its aftermath had a considerable impact on the British media and society. For the press it represented the end of its ascendancy over the process of mass communication in this country. This was relinquished to the wireless: radio and the BBC had a good war. Auntie, as the BBC affectionately came to be known, emerged ‘from the war as both a symbol and an agent of the victory’.1 The press was under public regulation from 1939 to 1945 and the issue of censorship and news management was even more sensitive than during the First World War due to the greater threat posed to national survival. What was peculiar about the system of censorship adopted in Britain was its basis in the tacit assumptions shared by newspaper proprietors and editors, civil servants and politicians, senior military personnel and ministers that coming from the same social background they would co-operate in the prosecution of the war.2 Considerable unity underpinned Britain’s war effort and newspapers that criticised or put forward alternatives to the government strategy were closed or threatened with closure – most notably the Daily Worker and the Daily Mirror. Tension between parts of the press and the government over the conduct of the conflict was a feature of the Second World War. The ‘British way of censorship’ conducted during the war3 laid down the framework within which relations between newspapers – and the rest of the mass media – and the State have developed since 1945. A system of nods and winks determined what the public should and should not be told. The functioning of newspapers changed significantly on the outbreak of
war. Shortage of newsprint meant that newspapers had to shrink in size. The
typical daily newspaper between 1939 and 1945 had just four pages. Distribution was disrupted by the dislocation of people and production was affected as many newspaper men and women went into the armed forces or domestic wartime service. Demand for news increased, producing a radical readjustment in the content of the press which saw news stories reassert themselves against other kinds of content. Efforts to understand the public improved as the government propaganda machine sought to gauge as accurately as possible the state of public opinion and adjust policy to ensure morale was maintained. Mass Observation gathered valuable information about newspaper consumption habits. Newspapers increasingly emphasised the importance of knowing their readers, and employed more sophisticated means of investigating their tastes and values. The most noteworthy occurrence in press history during the Second World
War was the success of the Daily Mirror. Struggling on the eve of the war, the newspaper emerged from the combat to speak for a wide cross-section of society. The Mirror articulated the views of the British people more consistently and clearly than any of its rivals. The close relationship it forged with its readers was in spite of the troubled relationship the newspaper had with Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the wartime coalition government. By 1945 it was Britain’s most widely read newspaper, with a reputation for serious popular journalism which has never been surpassed. The Mirror played a crucial role in the post-war reconstruction, representing the opinion of many working people about the kind of society that should be rebuilt following the decimation wreaked by the war. Its support for the welfare state and the pursuit of a more just society was a major factor in shaping its reporting. The adjustment of the newspaper industry to the economic and social
circumstances in post-war Britain proved painful. The lifting of the restrictions on newsprint in the mid-1950s exposed the vulnerabilities of many newspapers which had been hidden by the special circumstances of the war. Many in Fleet Street called for the restrictions to be lifted more slowly.4
Rising costs and increased competition resulted in the demise of many famous and longstanding titles. Most of the newspapers that disappeared were mid-market papers, dailies, Sundays and provincial titles, which further widened the gap between the popular and serious press. Their death was attributed to the arrival of commercial television in 1955, which heightened competition to attract advertisers. There is a debate about the extent to which television was responsible for the demise of these newspapers but by 1958 ITV’s advertising revenue had exceeded that of the combined total of national newspapers.5 Advertising agencies were also more discerning in their choice of newspapers as a result of the increasing amount of market research available to them. The closure of newspapers raised questions about the diversity of opinion represented in the press; the 1961 Royal Commission on the Press was charged with the task of examining how diversity could be maintained in the changing economic circumstances. Its
conclusions were pessimistic, reinforced by growing tensions in industrial relations in Fleet Street. Much of the pessimism about the future of newspapers in the 1950s and
1960s was due to the rapid rise of television as a medium of mass communication. Television had resumed as a service in 1947, limited primarily to the London area. By the end of the 1950s most households in the country had a television set. As television established itself as the dominant media, newspapers had to change their content to maintain their readers.6 Competing with the immediacy of TV news forced newspapers to emphasise other kinds of content. The shift inside newspapers from hard to soft news was one response. The expansion of specialist reporters and beats was another. The year 1957 was the high point for newspaper sales. The next three decades would witness a steady decline in the number of people reading newspapers. This decline was hidden by the high profits and high reputation of the newspapers which survived in this period.
