Newspaper

D

Newspapers in Postcolonial Governments

Even in countries not directly affected by World War II, newspapers endured challenges to their independence. After India gained its independence from Britain in 1947, the Indian government adopted restrictive press controls. The Objectionable Matters Press Law of 1951 forbade the publication of defamatory content. The Indian government used its own heavy advertising budget as a way to punish or reward particular papers for the way they portrayed government issues. The Price and Page Law of 1957 regulated the size and price of newspapers and the proportion of allowable advertising. While that law’s defenders advocated it as a way to help small and regional papers compete with major dailies, the law had the effect of keeping the Indian press financially weak and vulnerable to official pressures.

Newspapers in other developing nations also endured pressure from newly independent governments. These regimes urged the press to play a patriotic role in nation building by assuming a less critical view of the government. Such pressure was intense in Indonesia under the leadership of President Sukarno, who governed from 1945 to 1968. In 1957 the Indonesian government suspended 30 newspapers and arrested a dozen editors.

In South Korea, the government forbade newspapers to criticize President Syngman Rhee at any time during his regime, which lasted from 1948 to1960. The South Korean press faced stricter and more repressive government controls after Rhee was ousted in 1960. Press control finally relaxed when democratic reforms were adopted under President Kim Young Sam, who led the country from 1993 to 1998. In Pakistan, Article 8 of the nation’s constitution guaranteed freedom of the press, but the penal code contained several clauses under which newspapers were repeatedly punished for offenses against the government.

In South Africa the 1963 Publications Act permitted the government to censor any newspaper that did not agree to a self-policing and self-censoring code of conduct. The Rand Daily Mail chose to publish frequent criticisms of the Nationalist government and its policy of apartheid. As a result, the paper faced government harassment, fines, the confiscation of its journalists’ passports, and advertising boycotts.

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E

Breakdown of Communism in Eastern Europe

A dramatic expansion of press freedoms came in the 1980s in the country least expected to produce them, the USSR. For most of the Soviet regime’s 70-year existence, the government and the Communist Party rigidly controlled the Soviet press. At times, however, the press challenged the limits of Communist Party power. Under the brutal dictatorship of Joseph Stalin, which lasted from the late 1920s to 1953, many journalists were executed or sent to labor camps in Siberia. In the early 1960s Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev relaxed some controls, and the Communist Party’s daily, Pravda (Truth), published a defense of exiled novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, as well as an attack on censorship.

During the 1980s, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev began a policy of glasnost (openness), which included increased freedom for the press to probe Soviet history and particularly Stalin's crimes. Glasnost allowed the Soviet press to criticize and discuss foreign policy and to publicize social problems such as crime, alcoholism, and poverty. The Soviet press had not enjoyed such freedom since before the Russian Revolution of 1917. The press exposed the underworld of organized crime. It informed the public of governmental policy changes initiated under Gorbachev. Western politicians and journalists were invited to write commentaries in Soviet papers. These and other freedoms created a new awareness among Soviet people, setting the stage for the political reforms that ultimately resulted in the breakdown of the USSR in 1991 and the ensuing collapse of Communist governments in Eastern Europe.

IX

The Newspaper Industry Today

The newspaper industry today continues the trends of consolidation and concentration of ownership first established in the 19th century. But a late-20th-century phenomena, the Internet, promises to revolutionize the newspaper industry worldwide.

A

Consolidation

The number of newspapers in circulation continues the steady decline that began at the turn of 20th century. Most U.S. and Canadian cities today have only one newspaper publisher. In Canada, only 6 cities are served by two or more separately owned newspapers. In more than 170 American cities, a single publisher produces both a morning and an evening paper. Fewer than 30 U.S. cities have competing papers with different ownership.

Many people believe that the lack of competition compromises the integrity of news coverage in those cities. Without immediate competitive threats to keep them in check, papers may be less likely to present alternate views of public issues or may present the views of the publisher or owner not as opinion, but as fact. In some areas, competition for advertising with radio, television, and magazines may encourage newspapers to present all points of view. Many newspaper publishers, however, own radio and television stations, often in the same city where their papers are published.

B

Newspaper Chains

The tendency toward newspaper chains—ownership of a number of newspapers by a single company—which began with Hearst and Scripps in the United States in the late 1800s, has also increased worldwide. In Canada about two-thirds of the total circulation is owned by five large corporations, four of which operated internationally. The largest newspaper chain is Gannett Co., which owned 94 newspapers with a circulation totaling about 8 million worldwide in 2002.

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