Brave new world

Abstract

The BBC commentator and presenter describes a changing culture and recalls a time when "Britain's culture was much more rigidly divided - there was a class divide in culture far wider than today's. Similarly, the political obsessions of newspapers from the 1950s and 60s right through to the early 80s reflected a tormented, divided, angry society, plagued by intense arguments about nuclear weapons, trades unions, inflation, national decay and mass unemployment. Today we have big arguments too, on everything from Iraq to windfarms, but there isn't somehow the bitterness. Our cultural walls have been slowly demolished. I don't simply mean we have dumbed down; indeed what's happened is something far more interesting and positive than that - the arrival of a genuinely common culture." Marr concludes: "Where we stand is on the edge of a democratic culture we haven't had before, at a time when journalism seems to be growing a little stronger again, enjoying comparative freedom of speech and information, and when only the means of delivery is in doubt, because of the speed of technological change. And as we move into deeper, digital times, now is the time to reassert verbal clarity. Journalists again must be the people who champion good writing against the triumph of image."