Introduction: Parliament Predominant

The relative success of the British parliamentary system has proved to be a crucial influence on extra-parliamentary reporting. Throughout the twentieth century, in as much as the majority population saw itself acknowledged, if not fully represented, in the parliamentary process, so many readers were often ill-disposed towards extra-parliamentary activity and took little interest in the coverage thereof. Meanwhile the recurring prospect of their own marginalisation prompted various responses on the part of particular publications aligned to different kinds of extra-parliamentary activity– from the interwar communist press and its efforts to embed itself in the life of the working class, to the implicit elitism of the underground press in the 1960s and 1970s, which all but reserved itself for an educated minority of hippies or ‘heads’. At the same time, mass-circulation newspapers have tended to treat extra-parliamentary activity as marginal, sometimes in a concerted attempt to prevent it becoming mainstream. To say that in this intent the mass media were largely successful, is also to say that extra-parliamentary journalism has struggled but often failed to come out from under the shadow of its senior partner– the parliamentary system and the primacy which professional journalism has afforded it.

However, this does not mean that parliamentary democracy and its presentation in the mainstream press have provided the majority population with sufficient representation of its sociopolitical situation. Rather, it suggests that extra-parliamentary reporting has typically failed to capture the experience of the working class. Moreover, such reporting has been unwilling (sometimes) or unable (frequently) to remedy the extent to which working-class experience remained largely unrepresented in the parliamentary system and concomitant press coverage.

Not that this failure was in any way pre-determined. The power struggle between classes was often in the balance. If there had been different outcomes in that struggle, no doubt the journalism which ensued would have been of a different order also.