The Voice

Media Language Media Representations Media Industries Media Audiences

Social Political Economic Cultural

Paper 2

The Voice, first published in 1982, is a British newspaper committed to celebrating black experience and delivering a positive change by informing the black community on important issues with its news stories, in-depth interviews, opinion pieces and investigations.

The paper is owned by GV Media Group Limited and aimed towards an African-Caribbean audience. It is based in London and was published every Thursday until 2019, when it became monthly. It is available in a paper version by subscription and also online, and remains Britain’s most successful black newspaper.

Media Language

Media Representations

Paul Gilroy

Stuart Hall

Media Industries

David Hesmondhalgh believed that most companies involved in cultural industries were motivated by profit rather than a duty when it came down to public service broadcasting. No one would invest in a newspaper unless it was going to make money, however, the social and political context of the early 1980s allowed The Voice‘s founder, Val McCalla, to secure £62,000 from Barclays Bank who had attempted to counteract the negative publicity they had gained from investing in South Africa, where racial segregation was institutionalised in a system known as apartheid, by showing support for African-Caribbean causes. McCalla obtained the money with the backing of the Loan Guarantee Scheme which was part of a series of initiatives set up by Margaret Thatcher‘s government to help the unemployed begin their own businesses. The Voice was a success and the bank loan was paid off within five years.

Media Audiences

Clay Shirky argued audience behaviour has progressed much further from the passive consumption of media texts to a more active consumption, interacting with both the products and each other.

Stuart Hall‘s reception theory describes how producers use various signs to encode a programme’s meaning, according to their ideologies and resources, which the viewers then decode, to interpret the message through their own framework of knowledge, shaped by their age, social class, ethnicity, geography, and a myriad of other factors.

The circulation of the paper peaked at 55,000 in the early 1990s with young women being a substantial majority of its weekly buyers.

Context

Post-Colonialism

In 1978, Margaret Thatcher had a concern that the UK would become “swamped by people of a different culture”. This led to ‘Operation Swamp‘ in 1981, where the Metropolitan Police used their authority to arrest innocent members of the public, with a disproportionate number of people from the African-Caribbean community being taken into custody, prompting accusations that the police were motivated by racism.