vi
Preface to the 8th edition
Much of modern life is mediated and thus the interplay between interpersonal and mass
communication also needs to be considered. advertising and other aspects of media culture
contain many messages that may impact on the development of a sense of identity; the entry on
self-identity thus embraces discussion of second-life identities. Th e arrival of facebook and other
social networking sites also opens up the debate about what it is to have a ‘sense of self ’.
Th e Internet has not so much taken over and transformed traditional media as appropriated the
way we think about the broad spectrum of communication. Change has been in the air, but how
fundamentally has hegemony been shaken, how seriously has it been stirred?
A key issue concerning claims to ‘democratization’ and popular involvement in the exercise
of power is whether the ‘usual suspects’ – the corporations, the fi nancial organisations, the mass
media – have at any time of late lost or surrendered their powers. It could be that we are so busy
talking among ourselves, networking, vanishing into the magic whirlpools of our iPods, iPlayers
and iPads that we fail to notice something: the power elites have not gone away; nor have they
undergone any Pauline conversion except to embrace the opportunities, for commerce and control,
that the Network Society off ers the alert entrepreneur.
Paging Mr Murdoch
Th is is not to say that predictability rules. Until the summer of 2011 the global media empire ruled
by Rupert Murdoch was widely seen as an unstoppable force, a threat to the plurality of media and
a malign infl uence on governments, obtaining from them concessions in return for a generally
supportive press: ‘Touch Your Forelocks to Mr Murdoch’ was embossed on the dance-card of every
politician ambitious to achieve power or hold on to it (see british sky broadcasting, bskyb).
Th e phone-hacking scandal (see journalism: phone-hacking) involving News International’s
News of the World, and the dramatic closure of the 168-year-old paper in July 2011, may well have
brought about a sea-change, not only for the murdoch effect specifi cally but for the media
generally in its relation to politics and policing.
Some would say it is ‘not before time’ that politicians and public in the UK paid attention to the
systemic practice of prying electronically (and illegally) into the lives of citizens high and low. Public
outrage and a united parliament forced Murdoch to retreat, at least temporarily, from his ambition
to own the whole of BSkyB; something Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt had, until revelations turned
from a trickle to a tsunami, been ‘mindful’ of accepting.
It is fi tting to celebrate the true purpose of journalism in action, holding power – that of govern-
ment, corporations, institutions, the police and the media themselves – to account. Varyingly
called ‘the best political thriller of our times’ and likened to the ‘crumbling of the Berlin Wall’, the
hacking scandal – fearlessly revealed by the Guardian, initially alone in the UK and battling against
denial and indiff erence – raised wider issues concerning media ownership and its connection with
politicans and police.
Not least among public concerns was the way the Murdoch empire did everything in its power
to hush up the scandal. Th e Daily Mirror editorial of 15 July declared that ‘News International has
mishandled the crisis engulfi ng it with the fi nesse of an elephant trying to tap-dance on an oil-
smeared fl oor’. History was truly made when Rupert Murdoch, his son James, Chairman of News
International, and (just resigned) Chief Executive Rebekah Brooks were summoned to appear before
House of Commons special committees for questioning; this in the same week as the Commis-
sioner of the London Metropolitan police, Sir Paul Stephenson, and his Assistant Commissioner,
John Yates, resigned following evidence of their connections with the under-scrutiny organization.
For the present, we leave it to media watchers to monitor the after-shock of such seismic events;
to track how far remonstration, indignant headlines, mass petitions, committees of inquiry actually
impact, in the long run, on the status quo; and whether a new dawn will produce a less exploitative,
more balanced media more answerable to public interest, to the law and to media ethics.