Mass Media in Great Britain

The British are a nation of newspaper readers. There are few homes to which at least one paper is not delivered every morning. Many households have two, or even three newspapers every day. The people have a daily paper delivered to their home just in time for breakfast.

As in other countries, newspapers in Great Britain differ greatly in their ways of presenting the news. British newspapers can be divided into two groups: quality and popular. Quality newspapers are more serious and cover home and foreign news thoughtfully while the popular newspapers like shocking, personal stories as well as some news. These two groups of newspapers can be distinguished easily because the quality papers are twice the size of the popular newspapers. The readers of serious papers want to know about important happenings everywhere. Those who read popular newspapers prefer entertainment to information. There are newspapers whose pages are largely filled with news of sport and with stories of film stars, or accounts of crime and of law court trials. The News of the World, the biggest Sunday paper in Britain, specializes in news of scandals, crimes, incidents, gossip.

Quality newspapers: The Times, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, The Independent.

Quality Sunday newspapers; The Sunday Times, The Observer, The Sunday Telegraph.

Popular daily newspapers: The News of the World, The People, The Mail on Sunday, The Sunday Mirror, The Sunday Express.

The London newspaper that is best known outside Britain is probably The Times.

It began in 1785. The correspondence columns of the newspaper are interesting and often amusing. Most of the articles are on serious subjects, but from time to time there will be a long correspondence on a subject that is not at all serious, perhaps on a new fashion of dress, or the bad manners of the younger generation compared with the manners of thirty years ago. The Times, of course, does not publish the strip cartoons that are so common in the cheaper and popular papers. It does, however, publish a cross-word puzzle every day, with clues that are both clever and amusing.

British newspapers are always associated with Fleet Street, located in Westminster City of London. Fleet Street was the home of the nation’s newspapers till the recent past. But not long ago practically all the newspapers moved their headquarters to Docklands, a newly developed business centre in the eastern part of London. Only two newspapers The Daily Express and The Daily Telegraph are still in Fleet Street. However, people still say, «Fleet Street to mean the press».

Watching television is one of the great British pastime! Broadcasting in the United Kingdom is controlled by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA). The BBC receives its income from the Government, but the private companies controlled by the IBA earn money from the advertising. The BBC has two TV channels. The IBA is responsible for looking after the regional independent TV who broadcast their own programmes and those they have bought from other regions.

National radio is controlled by the BBC, the listeners can choose between four stations. There are many local stations, some private and some run by the BBC. Their programmes consist mainly of music and local news.