Television

Television seems to be the first choice among the various mass media. The average Briton spends 28 hours a week watching what he or she calls ‘the box’, ‘the telly’ or ‘the TV’.

There are four main TV channels in Britain. BBC1 and BBC2 are broadcast by the BBC without any advertising. Independent television consists of two channels: ITV and Channel 4, which carry advertisements. There are also two satellite TV channels (SKY and BSB), and several small cable networks.

ITV has a regional network – each region is run by a different company, so many television programmes may differ from region to region. ITV gets its money from advertisers who pay to show films advertising their goods between programmes and during breaks in programmes – ‘commercial breaks’, as they are called. The time allowed for commercial breaks is not more than six minutes in an hour.

There is a choice between four TV programmes:

BBC1 and BBC2 (which are broadcast by the BBC without any advertising);

ITV and Channel 4 (which carry advertisements).

Radio

Almost all households in Britain have at least one radio set; most have more than one. The TV licence includes radio and is paid each year.

The BBC has five national radio stations. They all broadcast news bulletins.

There are also many commercial radio stations, which mostly broadcast pop music. Each of the national BBC radio stations specializes in a particular type of programme.

British Press

Newspapers and Periodicals

Reading a newspaper is a very popular pastime in Britain. Though British people are reported to be the world’s most dedicated home video-users, they haven’t given up reading. They are the world’s third biggest newspaper buyers, only the Japanese and the Swedes buy more.

There are national daily papers (published in the morning), national evening papers, more than eighty local morning and evening papers and regional daily papers.

National papers are mostly printed in London and distributed from there. National papers are either ‘quality’ or ‘popular’.

The popular newspapers, or the tabloids, small-size newspapers, have the biggest sales. The Sun, for example, sells over 4 million copies a day; The Daily Mirror almost as many. These papers are read more for entertainment than for news. The Royal family, scandals, personalities, and glamorous women and men are popular subjects in them.

Quality newspapers, like The Times, The Guardian and The Independent, sell about 400,000 copies each per day. The best-selling quality newspaper is the Daily Telegraph. Quality newspapers concentrate on serious news.

The Financial Times is always printed on pink paper. It sells a third of its 2.8 million circulation outside the UK. Sunday papers have lots of pages. They have many different sections, and most of them also have a colour supplement. You can spend a whole day reading The Sunday Times or The Observer.

Popular papers are all ‘tabloids; this means they are published in a small page format.

The “quality papers” are considered to cater for the better educated readers while the “popular papers” concentrate on human interest stories.

However, the main difference between them is in the treatment of the topics they cover. The way politics is presented in the national newspapers reflects the fact that British political parties are essentially parliamentary organizations. Although different papers have different political outlooks, none of them is an organ of a political party. What counts for newspaper publishers is business. Their primary concern is to sell as many copies as possible and to attract as much advertising as possible.

The British press is controlled by a rather small number of extremely large multinational companies. This fact helps to explain its two features. One is its freedom from interference from government influence. The press is so powerful in this respect that it is sometimes referred to as the “fourth estate” (the other three being the Commons, the Lords and the monarch).

The other feature of the national press is its shallowness. Few other European countries have a popular press which is so “low”. Some of the tabloids have almost given up dealing with serious matters. Apart from sport, their pages are full of stories about the private lives of famous people. That’s why most people don’t use newspapers for serious news. For this they turn to another source – broadcasting.