The notion that the British press is a great instrument of liberty providing a check on the abuse of government power – any power - is a central part of our political culture. Indeed, the concept is a cornerstone of liberal accounts of the press. "[I]f people don’t know about power and let their attention wander completely", wrote Andrew Marr last year, "then those in power will take liberties".

According to Marr, the BBC’s political editor and a former editor of The Independent, "the only way to keep the huge power of the market and the political elites in some kind of check is through an informed, active and occasionally difficult citizenry. And this, in turn, needs public-sphere journalism, even if it doesn’t always realise it." (’Is it possible that no news is good news?’, The Independent, March 16, 2001). Since the rise of the ’fourth estate’ in the mid-nineteenth century, conventional liberal thought has subscribed to the view that the press acts as an ’instrument against political power’ rather than an instrument ’of’ political power. The idea that the press is a vital defender of public interests is a myth that derives from classical liberal theory.

It can be argued that social theorist James Mill (1773-1836) was the originator of the concept of the ’watchdog’ function of the press. He advocated press freedom because it "made known the conduct of the individuals who have chosen to wield the powers of government". But as John Merrill ponders in his 1993 book, The Dialectic in Journalism: "would he have cancelled the liberty of the press for those units that failed to live up to his rationale for such freedom? One is left contemplating since Mill does not answer it."

Editorial and journalistic practices in western democracies depend largely on liberal concepts of freedom, democracy and an ’independent’ press. Influential media players ennoble themselves by hijacking the concepts of ’freedom’, ’independence’ and ’public interest’ for their economic benefit, while abusing those very same words to justify entrenched professional habits that uphold, or refrain from challenging, illegitimate centralised authority. Such ’authority’ includes the giant media corporations: an integral part of the elite forces that are driving economic globalisation, and that employ these same ’independent’ professional editors, journalists and columnists.

Genuine freedom would allow honest commentators to generate intense public debate around the question of how a corporate media can possibly be relied upon to report the truth on corporate abuses of people and the planet. No wonder that George Orwell warned in his 1946 essay ’The Prevention of Literature’ of the "dangerous proposition [by vested interests] that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness".

The moral obligation of the press ought to be the monitoring of the instruments of political control and the highlighting of abuses of power: dual roles which the media singularly fails to perform, despite the pious claims made for it by modern commentators such as the BBC’s Andrew Marr. On the other hand, the freedom and responsibility of genuine journalism reflect a profound duty to the society in which it is embedded. As noted by the third Press Complaints Commission in 1977, in linking press freedom with democratic responsibilities: "We define the freedom of the press as the freedom from restraint which is essential to enable proprietors, editors and journalists to advance the public interest by publishing facts and opinions without which a democratic electorate cannot make responsible judgements."

Critics such as Jean Seaton and James Curran have successfully exposed the myth that the press is a stauch defender of the public interest. In Power Without Responsibility, originally published in 1981, Curran and Seaton sketch out the interlinked political and commercial powers that came to preside over the media industry in Britain: "In the first place, some groups – stronger, richer, and with better access – are always able to secure more attention than others … the [liberal] theory was produced to justify those who created the press and whose interests it largely served. This does not mean that newspapers, television, and radio have generally been instruments of crude propaganda: rather that the media are political actors in their own right."

In the early nineteenth century, when printing presses were becoming abundant and accessible to citizens, journalists started addressing vital issues through the press, such as ’the rights of man’ and ’the relationship between master and slave’. This permitted a more radical analysis than before or since, with the Poor Man’s Guardian of October 19, 1833 arguing that, "rather than there being a top and bottom in society, there [should] be no bottom at all". Some journalists challenged mainstream editors, accusing them of being "the very mouthpiece of an oppressive and morally defunct dominant culture" (Gilmartin, K: ’Print politics,’ Cambridge University Press, 1996).

The radical media acquired huge popularity among British citizens. Workers would wait on street corners for the papers to arrive, gather in the shops to discuss political issues and read aloud for the benefit of the illiterate. The radical press, such as Poor Man’s Guardian and Dispatch, was a powerful force in popular journalism. This was a press independent of established political pressure and still free from any commercial influence; a dynamic manifestation of both a working class and a working class movement.

As the radical press was self-sufficient on the proceeds of sales alone, it proved tricky for the government to assert any direct control. Various administrations did, however, attempt to suppress the radical press in any number of ways, one of them being through libel prosecution. This failed – and the radicals thereby gained further popularity. So press taxes and stamp duties were subsequently either introduced or raised. Stamp duty was increased by 266 per cent between 1789 and 1815. In 1819, stamp duties were redefined to include political periodicals. Press taxes served to restrict readership of newspapers to the well-to-do by raising cover prices and adding other taxes in order to try and restrict ownership of the press to ’men of some respectability and property’, as Lord Castlereagh explained to the Commons in 1834.

It was generally agreed among the elite, including the evolving middle-class reformists, that it was potentially dangerous to social order for the lower classes to administer printing presses. Privileged opinion, as recorded in parliamentary debate in 1832, held that substantial stakeholders in society would conduct newspapers "in a more responsible manner than was likely to be the result of pauper management". Merchant reformers wanted to run the presses and stressed the importance of engineering broad social consent through the press, with the desire for private profits riding higher than any altruistic notion of democracy or diversity of statement. Parliament seemed happy to grease the corporate wheels. As the Lord Chancellor put it in 1834: "The only question to answer, and the only problem to solve, is how they [the people] shall read in the best manner; how they shall be instructed politically, and have political habits formed the most safe for the constitution of the country."

A tenacious campaign by ’reformers’ to repeal press taxes was successful in the 1850s and 1860s. The subsequent ’free market’ phase went hand in hand with intense industrialisation and commercialisation, including heavy reliance on advertising revenue. The radical press was rapidly eclipsed by cheap newspapers that propagated views conducive to elite authority and the maintainenace of ’social order’. In terms of the press, the words ’freedom’ and ’independence’ rapidly began to lose their meaning.

Structural changes within the industry encouraged the absorption or elimination of the early radical press. "One in four things happened to the national radical papers that failed to meet the requirements of advertisers", observe Curran and Seaton. "They either closed down; accommodated to advertising pressure by moving up-market; stayed in small audience ghetto with manageable losses; or accepted an alternative source of institutional patronage".

The reformed approach to the role of the press in the nineteenth century yielded an approach to political indoctrination that is recognisable today. As Noam Chomsky, the US commentator, explains: "The basic principle, rarely violated, is that what conflicts with the requirements of power and privilege does not exist." The engineered mainstream misperception of press freedom persists to this day; namely, that the ’freedom of the press is rooted in the freedom to publish in a free market’ with advertising acting as the ’midwife’ of press independence. Anyone who dislikes the current choice of newspapers (and other media outlets) is supposely ’free’ to set up their own alternatives – at crippling cost to all but a privileged few.

By the late nineteenth century, wealthy business men had taken on the role of establishing and maintaining capitalist order while basking in the approval of a society that, following the repeal of various taxes and duties, believed the press was finally free and independent. The role of the mainstream press was subverted to defending the stability of the state itself. The state is "the ideological universe within which the press freedom campaign was constructed", as Curran and Seaton note. "A tacit model of society which admitted no conflict of class interest, only a conflict between ignorance and enlightenment and between the individual and the state, provided the intellectual framework in which a free press could be perceived as both a watch dog of government and guard dog of the people".