Northcliff e revolution
‘... if it’s moved again, whoever does it is fi red’.
Curran and Seaton speak of how the personal
tastes of the Barons influenced the popular
journalism of the time: ‘Northcliff e had a lifelong
obsession with torture and death: he even kept
an aquarium containing a goldfi sh and a pike,
with a dividing partition, which he would lift up
when he was in need of diversion.’ He told staff of
the Daily Mail to fi nd ‘one murder a day’.
Meddling with the content by newspaper
proprietors was not, of course, new. It had gone
on throughout the nineteenth century, but then
interference had focused mainly upon political
matters. What was diff erent with Northcliff e and
his ilk was that the new proprietors meddled in
everything. See newspapers, origins. See also
topic guide under media history.
▶Kevin Williams, Get Me A Murder a Day! A History
of Mass Communication in Britain (2nd edition, Get
Me a Murder a Day! A History of Media and Commu-
nication in Britain, Bloomsbury Academic, 2009).
N-step theory See opinion leader.
NVC See communication, non-verbal (nvc).O
Object See sign.
Objectivity Professor Stuart Hall has expressed
the view that objectivity, ‘like impartiality, is an
operational fi ction’ (in ‘Media power: the double
bind’, Journal of Communication, Autumn 1984).
In examining the media, analysts encounter the
‘Famous Four’: balance, consensus, impar-
tiality and objectivity, upon which all good
reporting is said to be based. The questions
arising from this precept are: balance between
what and what? Consensus among whom?
Impartiality in what sense? Objectivity in whose
eyes? Considering the complex processes of
mediation between an event and its report
in media form, is it possible to have value-free
information?
‘All edited or manipulated symbolic reality,’
says Hall, ‘is impregnated with values, view-
points, implicit theorizings, commonsense
assumptions.’ When there are differences
between what is objective and what is not, whose
opinion wins the day?
Hall says of consensus that it is ‘structured
dominance’. The prevailing definition usually
rests with the power elite, the ‘power-ideology
complex’ in any society whose control of and
infl uence upon the media gives them a domi-
nant say in the definitions of objectivity. See
cultural apparatus; elite; hegemony;
machinery of representation.general societal norms and to express the norms
of certain social groups. In addition, the media
have the potential to shape expectations of
behaviour, particularly with regard to individu-
als or groups with whom the viewer, listener or
reader is unfamiliar. It is this potential that has
aroused considerable research interest. See
culture; male-as-norm; values.
Northcliff e revolution New schooling in the
late nineteenth century in the UK, following
the Foster Education Act of 1870, created a
rapidly expanding readership of literature and
news. Alfred Charles William Harmsworth
(1865–1922), later Lord Northcliffe, perhaps
the most dynamic and extraordinary of the
press barons, built a press empire on the new
fl ood-tide of literacy. Creator of the Daily Mail
(1896) and the Daily Mirror (1903), Northcliff e
combined a ‘popular-educator’ emphasis with a
marketing sense that was energetic, imaginative,
daring and ruthless. Northcliff e represents the
fundamental shift towards the exploitation of,
and increasing dependence upon, advertising
as a means of newspaper fi nance.
Publicity was everything. Rivalry between
papers, in terms of sensation-seeking and atten-
tion-grabbing stunts, resembled (as it continues
to do today) the Battle of the Titans. Raymond
Williams in The Long Revolution (Chatto &
Windus, 1961) says, ‘Th e true “Northcliff e Revo-
lution” is less an innovation in actual journalism
than a radical change in the economic basis of
newspapers, tied to the new kind of advertising.’
By 1908 Northcliff e’s press empire included the
Mail, the Mirror, Th e Times, two Sunday papers
(Observer and Dispatch) and an evening paper
(News), plus a host of periodicals such as Tit-Bits
and Answers (whose circulation had leapt from
12,000 at its inception to 352,000 two years later).
Th ough the so-called Northcliff e revolution
was chiefl y characterized by the employment of
new technology, the drive for mass circulations
and the wholesale reliance on advertising as the
prime source of press revenue, the ‘fl avour’ of
that revolution must not be overlooked, that is
the style and content emanating from the Press
Barons themselves. James Curran and Jean
Seaton in Power Without Responsibility: The
Press and Broadcasting in Britain (Routledge,
6th edition, 2003; see 7th edition, 2010, Power
Without Responsibility: Press, Broadcasting and
the Internet in Britain), write that ‘Northcliff e
and Beaverbrook shaped the entire content of
their favourite papers, including their lay-out’.
When The Times changed the place in the
paper of the weather report, Northcliff e raged,