The Press and the Labour Movement
This chapter explores the dynamic relationship between the labour movement and the press. It argues that recognition of the need to negotiate or counter the growing pre-eminence of the press and other forms of mass-communications media compelled some of the twentieth-century labour movement’s most original intellectual and strategic advances. Equally, at other moments, a tendency on the part of beleaguered labour leaders to overestimate the hegemonic reach of the ‘right-wing’ or ‘capitalist’ press served to mask shortcomings and lacunae in the movement’s own ideological and strategic perspectives. Rather than approaching the relationship between labour and the press as one of essential conflict and antagonism, the chapter seeks to understand them as two aspects of the same ongoing historical process.