Picture postcardsA B C D E F G H IJKL M N O P R S T U VXYZWment Information and Communication Service
(GICS) was considered ‘no longer fit for [its]
purpose’ and ought to be disbanded.
The report criticized the lobby system (see
lobbying; lobby practice) in which some
media are favoured over others, chiefl y because
they can be relied on to provide the government
with a ‘good press’. It urged more transparency,
more openness, as against briefi ngs in ‘a closed,
secretive and opaque insider process’ behind
closed doors.
Th e report also voiced serious concern about
the role of the civil service in the communica-
tions process, perceiving an erosion of impartial-
ity brought about by government pressure. As
for the response of government information
services to the public, the Phillis Review urged
a speeding-up of the official response rate to
enquiries by members of the public, citing a case
in which the Ministry of Defence took six years
to respond to a query.
Th e public should, recommended Phillis, be
guaranteed a reply to enquiries within twenty
days of receipt, a move the report believed could,
along with other measures – such as reducing
the power of ministers to veto the provision of
information – address the problem of the lack
of trust on the part of the public, and its current
disenchantment with government information
services.
In its Media Manifesto, 2005, the campaign
for press and broadcasting freedom
describes the government’s response to Phillis as
‘lamentable’, failing to act on the recommenda-
tion to cap the number of political advisers or
limit their powers; ‘in the face of opposition
from political correspondents at Westminster,
the Downing Street press office has backed
away from changing the rules in order to allow
lobby briefi ngs to be televised’. See freedom of
information act (uk), 2005.
Picture postcards German Heinrich von
Stephan is generally considered to have thought
up the idea of a postcard, in 1865, though
Emmanuel Hermann ran him close, persuading
the director-general of the Austrian Post to issue
the fi rst government postcard, in 1869. It was
called a ‘Correspondence Card’. In 1870 the fi rst
government postcard was issued in the UK; 70
million such cards were sold in the fi rst year. Th e
US government followed suit in 1872.
Since then the picture postcard has provided a
treasure house for the analysis of contemporary
interests and attitudes: art, fashion, new tech-
nology, warfare, royalty, exploration, history,
travel; ideas of patriotism and Empire, of family,look for ways to cover confl icts more aff ordably’
the number of journalist deaths, beatings and
imprisonments is ‘going to grow’.
Today photo-journalism competes with
pictures of altogether diff erent genres – fashion
and celebrity. Fewer newspapers and TV stations
now go to the expense of sending their report-
ers and photographers to areas of confl ict, to
the point where freelancing seems, for many
photo-journalists, the only way forwards in
their careers. See documentary; journalism:
citizen journalism; mediasphere.
▶John Hartley, Th e Politics of Pictures: Th e Creation
of the Public in the Age of Popular Media (Routledge,
1992).
Photomontage Process of mounting, super-
imposing, one photograph on top of another;
a method almost as old as photography itself.
Th e Dadaists and Surrealists experimented with
photomontage to produce visionary pictures.
Laslo Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) combined
several picture components in the production
of a new work and termed his approach ‘photo-
lastics’. Malik of Berlin were the fi rst publishers
to use photomontage for book jackets. Most
extensively, the process has been employed in
advertising, though the British artist Peter
Kennard has created many unforgettable – and
satirical – images using photomontage. See
picture postcards.
Phototypesetting Method that bypassed the
traditional metal-type stage of print production
by printing type photographically from an
optical or electric store of individual characters.
Th ough the fi rst photocomposing machine was
created as early as 1894, it was not until it could
be ‘manned’ by computers, in the 1960s, that the
process became widespread. Modern typeset-
ting allows operators to lay out pages on VDUs:
this means that the same person can enter copy,
make up the pages and check errors; then, one
touch of a button and a high-quality proof is
produced. See topic guide under media:
technologies.
Phillis Review of Government Communica-
tions (UK), 2004 Examined the relationship
between British government information
services, the media and the public, identifying
a lack of trust on the part of the public in the
communications performance of government.
The report by an independent committee
chaired by Bob Phillis, Chief Executive of the
Guardian Media Group, declared that favourit-
ism, partisanship, collusion and distortion have
become the key features of the relationship
between government and media. Th e Govern-