Media fundamentalism: the immediate response of the UK national press to terrorism-from 9/11 to 7/7

The media of the United Kingdom are subject to levels of centralization and concentration which are rarely found in the media in other geo-social environments (for the press, see Media Ownership 1995: 38; McNair 1996: 137–38). Newspapers published in London for distribution throughout the UK—the national press—while numerically small, have accounted for a majority of daily circulations since the 1920s. Unlike in, say, Germany or the United States, neither the regional nor the metropolitan press (with the possible partial exceptions of Scotland and, until the 1980s, Northern Ireland) has offered any serious challenge to the secular “rise of Fleet Street�? (Lee 1976: 73–76; Harris 1997). Aggregate circulations have declined since the 1950s. Nevertheless at the beginning of the twenty-first century almost 60 percent of the UK population read a national daily newspaper (Bromley 2000: 1), and about as many people—one-fifth of the total population—read the Sun, a national daily tabloid, as all 74 regional (metropolitan) evening newspapers combined (National Readership Survey 2002). The national daily press remained substantially important even in “the video age�? (Tunstall 1996: 1–3, 7–17).