Primary groups
Today zinc or aluminium sheets are used and the
design to be printed is applied to the plates by a
photographic process.
Off -set lithography, the main process of plano-
graphic printing employed today, came about as
a result of an accident by American printer Ira
W. Rubel who had allowed the rubber cover-
ing of the impress cylinder to become inked.
He discovered that the perfect impression it
transferred to the sheet of paper was of better
quality than that produced by direct contact
with the plate. Th e fi rst patent for a system of
printing using photocomposition was taken out
by William Friese-Greene in 1895, though type-
setting by photography was not in commercial
use until the early 1950s. See cylinder press;
linotype printing; monotype printing;
newspapers, origins; underground press.
See also topic guide under media history.
▶Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, A Social History of the
Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet (Polity, 2002).
Prior restraint Legal term describing the rights
in some countries for censorship to be exer-
cised before publication. In the United States,
where the Second Amendment of the Constitu-
tion protects freedom of speech, there is no such
thing as prior restraint. In the UK, however, it
was prior restraint, on the grounds of confi den-
tiality, that prevented the publication of Peter
Wright’s book, Spycatcher (see spycatcher
case).
In February 1999 New Labour’s Home Secre-
tary, Jack Straw, attempted to impose prior
restraint on the Sunday Telegraph when he
received information that the paper intended
to publish extracts, three days before its offi cial
release, of the Macpherson Report into police
conduct in the case of the murdered teenager,
Stephen Lawrence. Justice Rix at fi rst imposed
a court order, then 24 hours later removed it
again. A Guardian leader, headed ‘A very British
farce’, declared prior restraint ‘as fundamentally
inimical to free speech’. See super-injunction.
See also topic guide under media: freedom,
censorship.
Privacy A keenly debated issue of our time is the
perceived threat to, or indeed loss of, individual
privacy. Our privacy is at risk from those in
authority who hold information about us, and
from the media, part of whose mission is to
make public the private; to uncover dark secrets,
to bring illumination to facts held from view. Th e
right to privacy obviously clashes with the right
to know, and there is a long and colourful history
of actions by those in the public eye, from politi-
cians to celebrities, who wish to protect theirrecency, asserting that that which is most recent
is the more likely to have greatest impact and
retention.
Primacy puts its faith in first impressions,
recency in last impressions; both are marginal
factors in the real context of debate where who
goes fi rst or last, and what is said fi rst or last,
in what situation and by what means, are more
fundamental criteria.
Primary groups See groups.
Primary, secondary definers In relation to
events, primary defi ners are those such as the
police who are in a position to speak authori-
tatively in matters of crime and public order;
who are structurally dominant in terms of their
potential for defining reality. The media are
secondary defi ners, either re-presenting, inter-
preting or rejecting the dominant defi nition. Th e
position becomes complicated when the fi eld of
defi nition is occupied by rival defi ners, such as
when employers and unions are in confl ict.
Primary, secondary texts See tertiary text;
text.
Prime time US term to describe the peak TV
viewing period: generally between 8pm and
11pm.
Printing John of Gutenberg (c.1400–68) intro-
duced printing using movable type in 1450,
though the Chinese had developed print tech-
nology centuries before. Printing made the mass
production and dissemination of knowledge and
information possible for the fi rst time, and had a
revolutionary impact on the conduct of business,
commerce, government, learning, literature,
politics, the recording of history, the advance of
technology and the sciences.
Gutenberg’s system, still widely practised
today despite sophisticated advances in
computer-generated texts, worked by the
application of ink, and subsequently paper, to
a raised surface, a process called relief printing.
Other methods are planographic and intaglio
or gravure. With the former, the design to
be printed and its background are in one fl at
surface; in intaglio printing the part to be
printed is etched or cut into the plate, the exact
reverse of relief printing.
Bavarian actor/playwright Alois Senefelder
in 1798 found that some kinds of stone absorb
both oil and water. He drew on the stone with
a greasy crayon and then dampened the stone,
which absorbed the water only where there was
no crayon design. He then made an ink of wax,
soap and lamp-black which stuck to the crayon
and came off on paper, producing a print. Lithog-
raphy, from the Greek ‘lithos’, stone, was born.