More TV, More Democracy
More TV, More Democracy
The fight for media freedom goes back to the 1700s
The US Congress tried a new experiment in democracy and mass communication in March 1979, 45 years ago this month. Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network (C-SPAN) went live for the first time.
The brainchild of founder-turned presenter Brian Lamb, C-SPAN was – and still is – sponsored by America’s big TV networks and first concentrated on proceedings in the House of Representatives, later expanding to the Senate in 1986.
Al Gore, then a little-known representative of Tennessee, gave the first televised speech on the channel and Republican Newt Gingrich was one of the first politicians to eagerly exploit its ‘gavel-to-gavel’ coverage to build his own political career.
As Keach Hagey, writing in Politico, put it: “Gingrich’s astute use of C-SPAN to project an energised and combative conservative caucus engaged in challenging the dominant Democratic majority — with him as its dynamic leader — showed an understanding of the political power of television and of messaging that was revolutionary for its day.”
Though apolitical, C-SPAN could be criticised for giving more power to political incumbents. But the channel would later expand to the campaign trail and broadcast public debates (Christopher Hitchens vs Peter Hitchens in 1999, for example).
In many ways the C-SPAN’s Book TV, where Lamb would calmly discuss any given public or historical topic with an author, served as a precursor to long-form podcast interviews and YouTube channels like Politics and Prose.
TV Politics
But the channel wasn’t the first outlet to broadcast proceedings in Congress; that had already happened decades before in July 1947. The British, by comparison, didn’t allow TV crews to broadcast proceedings in the Houses of Parliament until January 1985.
Equally, the first televised White House press briefings came in the 1990s under Bill Clinton and Mike McCurry, a successor of George Stephanopoulos.
McCurry, who was in the White House Press Secretary role for more than three and a half years, later regretted the decision when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke.
But The Washington Post’s Peter Baker and Howard Kurtz praised McCurry when he announced his resignation in July 1998: “McCurry became the most recognizable face on the Clinton White House staff with televised daily briefings flavoured by detailed explanations of policy and punctuated by pithy one-liners intended to defuse tense moments.”
The UK is still waiting for televised Lobby (political journalist) briefings. Boris Johnson’s administration spent £2.6 million on a broadcast suite, only for the room not to be used for this purpose.
Instead, its blue background became infamous after Allegra Stratton, then Downing Street Press Secretary, was recorded joking about a secret Number 10 party that took place, flouting Covid-19 lockdown restrictions.
Any arguments that these briefings would trivialise the exchanges between Number 10 and the Lobby were proven to be false during the Covid period when political journalists were able to quiz the Prime Minister and his scientific advisers live on national TV.
But the cameras have been quietly put back in their boxes, despite trust in politicians being in ‘free fall’ and the media facing a similar fate with the British public.
“The UK has one of the lowest levels of trust in news as well as one of the highest levels of news avoidance, according to a new study,” The Press Gazette reported last June.
“The 2023 Digital News Report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that trust in news in the UK was just at 33% – joint 12th lowest among the 46 markets studied.”
Cobbett’s Legacy
Though free and open mass communication should be a cornerstone of any healthy democracy, the UK’s lag behind America should come as no surprise. It is intertwined into the countries’ joint history.
Pamphlets and papers helped popularise the revolutionary cause of the Thirteen Colonies against the British state, Parliament and King George III.
With the war behind Britain and the newly formed United States, the First Amendment was passed into the Bill of Rights (a precursor to the US Constitution) in December 1791.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” the passage read.
Only a year later Common Sense author Thomas Paine, who had briefly returned to England and then fled to France, was tried in absentia for seditious libel.
With the bloody French Revolution ongoing across the Channel, Paine became a target of William Pitt’s government after the publication of the second part of Rights of Men.
The best-seller advocated for mass political and social reforms, including universal suffrage, public education and even a universal basic income, a policy that has become popular once again in recent years.
Paine also argued that it was morally and politically permissible for a government to be overthrown if it did not protect people’s natural rights.
In what was an 18th Century show-trial, Paine was found guilty of seditious libel in December 1792. He never returned to England, but his followers and reformers, most notably the London Corresponding Society, would face — and beat — treason trials in 1794.
Pitt would go on to heavily tax newspapers and advertisements, building on levies which were first introduced in 1712, according to late historian Arthur Aspinall.
These taxes had helped raise funds for the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) between England and France, the failed fight-back against the American Revolution (1775 – 1783) and another skirmish with the French near the end of the century, the Anglo-French War (1778–1783).
The levies would also help suppress government opposition. Pitt increased stamp duty on papers once again in 1797, as Revolutionary France tried to invade England. The newspaper industry faced another blow when Tory Prime Minister Robert Jenkinson increased stamp duty in 1815, near the end of the Napoleonic Wars.
Fast-thinking reformers were able to get around the levies by using reading rooms, while the upper-classes tended to read their news and periodicals in coffee houses.
The C-SPAN of its day, William Cobbett’s Political Register, including its cheaper pamphlet version, nicknamed the ‘Two-Penny Trash’, brought news of parliamentary proceedings to the masses.
By 1818 it reached a weekly circulation of between 40,000 and 50,000, according to Aspinall and US literary scholar Richard Altick. But with additional taxes and the Reform Act of 1832, which introduced major changes to the electoral system in England and Wales, Cobbett’s publication effectively flamed out.
However, its legacy still lives on today as a direct precursor to Hansard, the official public proceedings of the House of Parliament.
Cobbett also finally fulfilled an ambition of becoming an MP (he had tried four times previously), being elected as the representative for the new constituency of Oldham in the first general election after the passing of the Reform Act in 1832.
“He fought to reduce taxation, supported a Bill to limit factory work to ten hours a day for those under 18 and opposed the Poor Law Amendment Act that set up the prison-like workhouses,” according to The Times, which used to be a bitter rival of Cobbett’s.
Before he passed away, aged 72 in June 1835, he may well have heard a fellow MP of the ‘32 intake, William Tooke, remark in the House of Commons that: “Whatever passed in Parliament ought to be communicated to the public.”
No doubt the old reformer would have agreed with the remarks made in 1834. That’s because Cobbett and Tooke understood a rule that holds true today: more communication lends to more democracy.
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