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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: New Directions in Media History - Polity
- Sprache: Englisch
Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2015
In this lucid and intelligent guide, John Nerone traces the history of the media in public life. His unconventional account decenters professional journalism from its central role in providing information to the people and reconceives it as part of a broader set of media practices that work together to represent the public. The result is a sensitive study of the relationship between media and society that sheds light on the past, present and future of news and public life.
The book demonstrates clearly that the media have always been deeply embedded in social, economic, and political institutions and structures. Large transformations and historical shifts are brought to life in the book through closer study of key moments of change such as the rise of liberal political institutions, the market revolution, the industrial revolution, bureaucratization and professionalization, globalization, and the ongoing digital revolution. By integrating theoretical concepts with detailed and vivid historical examples, Nerone shows how print and news media became entangled with public institutions.
The Media and Public Life brings new light on the ways in which people have understood the meaning of a free and democratic media system. It is essential reading for all students and scholars of media, history and society.
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Seitenzahl: 522
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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Table of Contents
Title page
Copyright page
Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1: The Printer's Newspaper and the National Public Sphere
Origins of News Systems
The Public Sphere
British North America
Colonial Newspapers and the Public Sphere
The Zenger Case
The Colonial Press, the Atlantic System, and the Revolution
The French Revolution
2: The Editor's Newspaper and the Partisan Public Sphere
The Conflicted Revolutionary Legacy
The Press of the First Party System
The Rise of the Second Party System
The Abolitionist Press
The Gender Line
The Party Press in Europe
3: The Commercial Public Sphere
A Tangled Story
Commercialization and Newspapers
Commercialization Changes the Press
The Commercialization of the Press in Britain
Conclusion
4: The Industrial Media and the Culture Industries
The Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Communication Infrastructure
Industrializing the Newspaper
The Reinvention of Journalism
The Muckraker as Proto-Professional
Industrial Journalism and Public Life
5: Institutionalization, the Professional Media and the Expert Public Sphere
The Business of the Media in the Twentieth Century
Public Opinion and the Problem of the Media
The Subject of the Culture Industries: Individual Rights and Public Opinion
Fear of Media Influence and the Professionalization of Journalism
Institutionalization and the Demand for Professionalization
The Invention of Objectivity
World War II and the Media
Postwar Media and Responsibility
The High Modern Moment
6: The Late Modern Press, the Digital Media, and the Network Public
The End of the Age of Mass Communication
The News Media and the Shifting Public Sphere
Vietnam and Watergate
The Movement for a New World Information and Communication Order
Media in Rising Asia
The Limits of Late Modern Journalism
Abundance and the Age of Digital Media
The Lost Promise of the Digital
Conclusion: Coming to Judgment on Public Intelligence
Tests of Capacity
Shot through with Chips of Messianic Time
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Figure 1.1: The printer's newspaper as a network of relationships
Figure 3.1: The partisan newspaper as a network of relationships
Figure 3.2: The commercial newspaper as a network of relationships
Figure 4.1: The industrial newspaper's division of labor
Source:
Typical Metropolitan Daily,
c.
1913. Willard Bleyer,
Newspaper Writing and Editing
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1913), pp. 2–6.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Start Reading
CHAPTER 1
Index
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Copyright © John Nerone 2015
The right of John Nerone to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2015 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
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Malden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6020-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6021-9 (pb)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9593-8 (epub)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9592-1 (mobi)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nerone, John C.
The media and public life : a history / John Nerone.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7456-6020-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 0-7456-6020-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-7456-6021-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) – ISBN 0-7456-6021-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Mass media–Social aspects. 2. Journalism–Social aspects. I. Title.
HM1206.N47 2015
302.23–dc23
2014043775
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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Figures
1.1 The printer's newspaper as a network of relationships
3.1 The partisan newspaper as a network of relationships
3.2 The commercial newspaper as a network of relationships
4.1 The industrial newspaper's division of labor
Acknowledgments
I wrote this book over many years in various places, and owe thanks to many people who directly or indirectly contributed. Among the institutions who hosted me while doing research for this book are the American Antiquarian Society, which awarded me an NEH fellowship, and where John B. Hench and Caroline Sloat were especially generous; the University of Texas at Austin, where Ellen Wartella and Chuck Whitney were my hosts; and the University of Bergen in Norway, where Martin Eide was my host. Several colleagues were especially important as interlocutors: Kevin Barnhurst, Sandra Braman, Richard Campbell, James Carey, Clifford Christians, Norman Denzin, Fernando Elichirigoity, Kathy Forde, Barbara Friedman, James Hay, Robert McChesney, David Nord, Kent Ono, Dan Schiller, Mira Sotirovic, Bill Solomon, Inger Stole, Angharad Valdivia, and Barbie Zelizer deserve special mention.
The Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been my intellectual home since 1983. The most important part of my involvement there has been working with several generations of extraordinary graduate students, many now well advanced in distinguished academic careers. Among those who contributed significantly to this book are John Anderson, Jon Bekken, Tabe Bergman, Scott Berman, Jack Bratich, Wenrui Chen, Richard Craig, Matt Crain, Letrell Crittenden, Ian Davis, Kevin Dolan, Brian Dolber, Kelly Gates, Dong Han, Andrew Kennis, Holly Kruse, Nina Li, Chunfeng Lin, Sascha Meinrath, Molly Niesen, Mark Nimkoff, Andrew O'Baoill, Jeremy Packer, Victor Pickard, Carrie Rentschler, Paul Riismandel, Craig Robertson, Gretchen Soderlund, Jonathan Sterne, Mandy Troger, and Fred Wasser. Many others helped shape my thinking.
Polity Press has been supportive and efficient; Andrea Drugan and Helen Gray have edited with great discretion. They have earned my gratitude. I also thank the anonymous readers, whose comments were substantial, useful, and often wise.
Finally, family members have materially contributed to the book. Ivy Glennon edited passages for style, encouraging me to be more direct and assertive on the page. Miranda Glennon-Nerone, who was born a few months after this project was conceived, graduated from high school shortly after its last revision. As an infant and toddler, she burst into tears every time I turned to a keyboard; as a new adult, she drew up roughs of three of the diagrams included in the book. It would have been a very different book without their support.
Introduction
This book sits at the intersection of the history of the public sphere, journalism history, and normative media theory. Partly a social history, partly a history of institutions, and partly a history of ideas, it addresses the particular task that a media system is supposed to perform in governance, and especially in democracies. It understands that task as public intelligence.
Both “public” and “intelligence” have a range of meanings. Public can mean of and for The People, and it is a common though sloppy habit to refer to the people as the public. Public can also mean open, as in, there to be seen by everyone. Intelligence can refer to a particular kind of information, the kind that allows a special insight into affairs – this is the Intelligence in the Central Intelligence Agency. More commonly in our time, it refers to the capacity to make sense of things. What I mean by public intelligence is a combination of all these meanings. In any political order, there has to be a mechanism that makes sense out of things by sifting through information in a way that can be presented publicly as both worthy of guiding policy and as the sort of thinking that really represents the way the public thinks and the way people would think if they had enough time and knowledge.
The part of “public intelligence” that's easiest to study and the readiest subject for a historical narrative is the media system, and especially the news media. As a result, much of this book looks like what is called “journalism history.” But it's weird journalism history, because its purpose is to deconstruct journalism as it is commonly known and rethink it as a particular formation of practices involving public intelligence. So one of the arguments of the book is that journalism as we know it is a very recent phenomenon – not much older than me – and that it has deformed governance in part because its practitioners consistently misrecognize it.
Instead of treating journalism as a profession, and looking for its origins, this book treats journalism as a set of practices involved in what I call the representation of public opinion. This approach is meant to turn the common sense of journalists on its head. Journalists believe that they should and do make democratic government possible by making information available to people, who then discuss it and think about it and make up their minds and vote. It would be nice if that were the way things work, but we know people don't pay much attention to news, and forget what little they learn within a very short time. In other words, journalism doesn't make governance work by making people smarter. Rather, journalism works by representing the public. It represents the public in two ways. First, journalists stand in for the public in the halls of power. They speak and are spoken to on behalf of the public. Second, journalists depict the public, both explicitly when they describe the public mood or predict public reactions to events, and implicitly when they assume an agenda on behalf of the public, treating some things as relevant and others as trivial.
So public opinion really does matter in governance. But it matters not because that's what people think. It matters because the people who run things accept the fact that they have to answer to a universal supervising intelligence that is represented by journalism, among other things. This notion of a supervising public works as a “regulative fiction,” to borrow a term from Nietzsche. Journalism has worked well in supporting this regulative fiction when it has been able to point to an overwhelming consensus, and when there has been a powerful movement that journalists see as righteous. Thus, by the mid-1960s, US journalists had come to portray the Civil Rights movement as a manifestation of a right-thinking public (Alexander, 2007). But professional journalists do a very poor job of representing an intelligent public in cases of partisan division or when the glamor of expertise misleads them. Foreign-policy elites continually misled journalists during the Cold War, leaving them baffled and stunned by the collapse of the Soviet empire. Journalists do an execrable job of holding candidates accountable during election campaigns, retailing talking points while showing off their chops by gaming the strategy behind them. A commitment to neutrality or objectivity makes journalists vulnerable in such cases. By default, they end up representing the public as indifferent or, worse yet, an idiot.
Journalism has been the most compelling mechanism for representing public opinion in my lifetime, but it has never held a monopoly, and its authority is weakening. There are older mechanisms, of course. Voting is one of them. Other forms of news practices have also represented public opinion, like partisan newspapers. Before the age of the public-opinion poll, if a politician wanted to assess the likely outcome of approaching elections, he (usually) would read a bunch of newspapers to find out what their editors were arguing. Beginning in the 1930s, public-opinion polling and other forms of social science began replacing these more vernacular ways of representing public opinion. By now such techniques have reached a level of precision that politicians no longer have to extrapolate from a sample to an abstract demography; instead, they can build databases of every voter, with enough individual data points to accurately predict behavior (Issenberg, 2012).
This means that journalism's representation of public opinion can be immediately refuted and discarded when it suits the purposes of the people who run things. The supervising public is no longer a regulative fiction, at least in the advanced western countries. In its place, ever more naked calculations of advancing interests have come to replace pretensions toward rational debate; the people who run things no longer need to clothe their maneuvers with appeals to the common good. It is this fact, rather than a lack of information or the weakness of the legacy news-media business model, that troubles public intelligence today.
Don't take the grumpiness of this position as indicating nostalgia for the old press establishment. For a US American of my generation, which came of age in the years when journalists routinely and cynically passed on disinformation about race relations and the war in Vietnam, today's disarray should be refreshing, even hopeful. The more powerful press of the second half of the twentieth century did an inadequate job of keeping the powerful in check, arguably because it tried too hard to be professional. The press made it easy for the Nixons and Thatchers of the world to slap it around.
The book explains this by tracing a long history. The history is too big, however, to be told without violent simplification, and my treatment makes no pretense to being encyclopedic. Instead, I've chosen to construct a narrative around a series of moments, using the term “moment” in the way that a physicist would, as a particular line of force. After explaining how and why news systems tend to function in governance generally, I turn to the rise of European printing and the invention of the newspaper form. The book then looks at transformations of news or publicity coming out of larger political and social changes.
The first transformative moment was the rise of liberal political regimes in the Age of Revolution. This moment appears in the narrative as a North Atlantic story, concentrated in the UK, the US, and France. It produced a fantasy about public politics in which the media system was supposed to function as a frictionless space for public information and deliberation. This fantasy animated policy in the US and elsewhere, and continues to be productive, but has always been at odds with unruly realities. Today we notice its naivety about social inequality. In earlier centuries, many pointed out its conflict with the partisan uses of the press, first, and then the commercial uses of the press.
Politicization and commercialization are the second and third moments I discuss. Politicization means the integration of the press into emerging systems of mass politics; commercialization means integration into emerging market systems. Both are large and complex moments, taking different forms in different places. I have simplified these by concentrating on the US and the UK experiences. More on this choice in a minute.
The fourth moment is industrialization, which transformed the infrastructure and mode of production of news media even as it worked to transform social relations more broadly. The rise of industrial media organizations in industrial societies caused a general reorganization of public life. For news media, this prompted the moment of institutionalization, in which the press became a supposedly expert, professional element of the governing process (Cook, 1998). This fifth moment produced what Dan Hallin (1992) has called journalism's “high modern” moment.
The decline of high modernism is sort of the sixth moment the book discusses. It's hard to call this a “moment,” because the broad social process remains unclear at the time of writing. I've variously called it “corporatization,” “digitization,” and “globalization.” But these are lines of force that operate in different ways, and it's not clear to me which one drives the changes under way now.
I've chosen to talk about “moments” rather than periods or stages. As lines of force, moments don't stop operating when another one emerges. This conceptual framework makes it easier to understand the first half of the nineteenth century, then, when politicization and commercialization operated simultaneously, driving change in sometimes harmonious and sometimes dissonant ways. Periodization has long been a problem in journalism histories that want to see a “partisan” period ending at a precise point when a “commercial” period begins.
Another way of understanding how moments transform the media system is to think of media as networks of relationships (Barnhurst and Nerone, 2001). Kevin Barnhurst and I have applied this term in our analysis of the development of newspaper forms, which we see as constituted out of a collection of tubes, as it were – some carry content, some revenue – that converges in the newspaper office but embeds the medium itself in the larger society. We identify particular formations of media-as-networks-of-relationships, each explained by a master metaphor. The printer's newspaper (master metaphor = the town meeting) became the editor's paper (the courtroom), the publisher's paper and the industrial paper (the department store), the professional paper (the social map), and now the corporate (or digital) paper (the index). The printer's paper had a relatively simple set of relationships. Printers took content from letters, official documents, and other newspapers, assembled them into digests, produced printed newspapers in craft shops, sold them to gentlemen readers, and exchanged them with other printers. The rise of partisan editors added a set of relationships with parties and voters to this network. Commercialization added intensified relationships with advertisers, who related to readerships as consumers rather than voters. Industrialization transformed the relations of production in the pressroom and the newsroom, and situated news organizations within a growing infrastructure of content providers – wire services and features syndicates, obviously, but also industrialized financial entities like stock exchanges and cultural complexes like the entertainment industry. Industrialization introduced new economies of scale that produced bottlenecks that in turn required and supported professionalization among newsworkers. The framework of this book differs slightly in that it focuses on one dimension of these formations, the mode of production, and relates them to networks of relationships that include but can go beyond newspapers.
This narrative usefully makes the point that news practices don't disappear. Rather, new moments and new relationships augment the overall formation. There is an editor's paper buried within the layers of content that go into the making of a corporate paper. The conceptual framework also makes it easier to talk about news media other than newspapers, which tend to respond to the same lines of force and to be constituted out of similar relationships. I also hope that the conceptual framework can be applied outside the specific historical episodes that this book dwells on.
This is a parochial book with a guilty conscience. Although it begins and ends with discussions of global developments, the concrete stories that the book tells are mostly confined to the English-speaking part of the world, and especially the US. The practical reason for this is that it's the history I know best. The justification for it is that the English-speaking world and, since the second half of the nineteenth century, the US have exercised hegemony in the development of news systems and political life. These are sound reasons, but different sound reasons would also support other decisions. Hence the guilt.
I've tried to shape the narrative so that it doesn't present Anglo-American history as normative. I've incorporated other histories, and pointed out counterhistories wherever I can. A critic might say that these are simply exceptions that prove the rule, but in defense I would say that the whole point of this history is to show the contingency of the state of affairs that liberal ideology wants to present as normative for the world. Though it would be fair to say that such a case would be more effective were I to write more about India or Brazil, this criticism still operates on the level of equity among nations. I make the attempt to tell the story as a transnational one, with the Anglo-American history as central to and exemplifying a world system. Still, national systems of government have exerted a strong gravitational pull.
Another criticism would point to the relative absence of subaltern voices in this history. Here I have to acknowledge an uncomfortable lack of fit between theory and practice. At several points in the book, I point to groups and movements outside the mainstream as being especially transformative, but the bulk of the narrative involves mainstream media. The book could be written without any white male protagonists, just to prove the point that media history has been made by outsiders. Instead, I've settled for showing the deep relationships between outsiders and insiders, and for pointing out mechanisms that kept outsiders outside. It's ironic that US journalists today owe so much to African Americans like Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells-Barnett – more than they do to their white counterparts like Thomas Ritchie or Thomas Cox – yet US newsrooms remain characterized by what Kevin Dolan calls “white incumbency” (Dolan, 2011). The durability of whiteness in the face of all of the work of people of color itself testifies to the hegemony of the mainstream media organizations that I focus on. I wish it weren't so; I hope that telling the story the way I do makes it easier to change things.
This book has been a long time in the making, and its agenda has evolved. It began by trying to address the dissatisfaction of my generation of teachers and scholars of the media system with the tools that were left to us 30 years ago. There had been a wave of criticism directed against histories that focused too narrowly on media in isolation from broader social and political histories. Beyond this critique of mediacentrism, I also wanted to disturb the tendency of media historians to invoke grand narratives, whether of the stages of media development (oral, literate, print-literate, electronic, as in Innis and McLuhan) or of the triumphal march of liberty in the world (as in the inevitable rise of freedom of the press in US journalism histories).
This is a history of media and public life, but it doesn't claim to be the history of media and public life. Like any history, it is very much a creature of its own time: histories aren't about the past, but about the relationship between the past and the present (Johnson, 1982). As a result, it is possible to write multiple true histories of any event or period; the number of true histories to be written about any complex subject approaches infinity. Historians of my generation had this drilled into us in grad school; we all have copies of Hayden White's Metahistory (1973) on our shelves, with the spine cracked and the underlinings diminishing by mid-book.
A decade and a half later, we all read Habermas's Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989), an old book that became urgently relevant in the post-Berlin Wall and pre-9/11 west. At that point, a common sense emerged that said that history had ended with the triumph of market-oriented media systems, which provide a meaningful marketplace of ideas and allow journalism to be independent. If that were the case, why were democratic systems so manipulable? Why was public discourse so cynical? Why were voters so apathetic? This moment produced the public journalism movement. It also informed the development of the “blogosphere,” so called out of an awareness of its potential as a public sphere. Bloggers picked pseudonyms like “Publius,” in conscious imitation of eighteenth-century habits.
That moment had at its core a notion about legitimate government that has run through modern political theory in various forms but can be stated quite simply. For a government to be legitimate, it has to make it possible for the stronger argument to win on its merits. The political philosophers who recur in this book – Habermas, but also de Tocqueville, Gramsci, and Walter Lippmann – all express some version of the concern that the governing system make it possible for political action to be taken because it is the right thing to do. In democracies, this notion has a more particular form, in that voices representing ordinary citizens have to participate in public deliberation. Media systems are obviously implicated. A media system of a legitimate democracy must have the capacity to allow the public to participate in the kind of debate in which the stronger argument wins on its merits. This dream animated the “public-sphere” moment.
That moment has passed. The notion of the public sphere was an especially useful tool for deconstructing the mythology of the press system, but it had the disadvantage of inspiring a mythology of its own. Critics effectively pointed out that Habermas's historical account was partial and opportunistic. Then public-sphere fatigue set in.
After a few decades of this discussion, there remain two elements of liberal notions of public life that I have held on to as worthwhile. One is the notion of an intelligent supervising public as a regulative fiction. The fantasies of Internet enthusiasts about a new public of actually engaged, actually informed individuals have mostly evaporated, and it is tempting to just dismiss the public in general. But it seems to me that it is still worthwhile to try to find mechanisms by which to hold power accountable to something like an intelligent public, even as it's become increasingly apparent that professional journalism won't work as such a mechanism. The media system should be able to shame the people who run things into honoring basic truths and simple logic.
The second element – article of faith, really – that I hold on to is the worth of independent journalists. This may seem at first to contradict my criticism of professional journalism. The distinction is that professional journalism is an institution; independent journalists are citizens who engage in knowledge practices and discourse aimed at making public life more intelligent. What this looks like in practical terms is easy to explain. Just take the historical exemplars that professional journalists genuflect to – Lincoln Steffens, or I. F. Stone – and imagine what public life would look like if the media system made it possible for every ordinary journalist to work like them.
This is a history, but it's a curious one. It shuttles between two different kinds of voices. In parts it is abstract, while in other parts it lapses into concrete historical narrative that is often biographical in style. These concrete narratives are meant to carry the abstract parts forward. I believe that, if a history could be written in which every story is told, it would fully bear out the abstract arguments in this book. Put another way, I believe that the concrete lives of all the world's newsworkers have made the history that the abstractions try to sketch out. An argument like “objectivity came from the three-way battle between owners and workers, on the one hand, and owners and the public on the other” makes a promise, which is that, if one were to drill down into the everyday tensions and struggles in any news workplace, one would find that abstract narrative expressed. All the abstractions I've written in this book, I believe, would stand up to the test of microhistory. Let a thousand dissertations bloom!
1The Printer's Newspaper and the National Public Sphere
We tend to approach the broad terrain of media, government, and public life with a set of concepts and habits of thought formed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Before that, thinkers considered both democracy and publicity generally bad ideas, which made it harder for a government to govern. At the time of the American and French Revolutions, there had been relatively little successful experience with free media and self-government. Half a century later, it was possible to not just philosophize about them but to empirically observe them.
In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States. He spent two years compiling the observations that would become Democracy in America, one of the foundational works of the eventual discipline of political science. De Tocqueville intended his book to be a scientific study of the strengths and weaknesses of democracy in general. He saw its strengths in achieving equality and freedom for people, whose heightened participation in government generated unprecedented energy while, surprisingly, also reinforcing stability. Its most striking weakness was the possibility of oppression and stagnation through the omnipotence of the majority, which governed not just the state but, because there was no other source of authority, also every area of social and cultural life. He saw the white majority subjugating minorities, especially African Americans. He saw the immense gravity of a middling mainstream propelling a tsunami of mediocre popular literature and fashions. So powerful was the majority that he concluded that he had never seen a society with so little real freedom of thought. Absolute freedom on the individual level led to absolute determinism on the collective level.
De Tocqueville devoted a number of long passages to describing the newspaper press of the Jacksonian era, an age of mass electoral politics. In his judgment, the press was one of the most powerful engines of democratic government, but it was also one of the most abused. If the largest danger in a democracy was the emergence of a tyranny of the majority, then the press was one of the key mechanisms by which tyrannical majority opinion could have expression. The entire political system as a result oscillated between stalemate and wild swings of popular enthusiasm.
It is easy to dwell on the criticisms in these still powerful chapters. On the other hand, it is also easy to poke holes in the analysis. The very generation that de Tocqueville observed was already producing the great writers who came to be known as key figures of the American Renaissance, as well as the great social reformers and political activists who would abolish slavery, fight for woman suffrage, and enact federal laws protecting minority rights. Moreover, they used the engines of the media system to drive these movements. Still, he had a point, didn't he? The system he observed seemed designed to make it hard for the public to be smart and make good choices.
What did de Tocqueville want from a democratic media system? Clearly, it was not simply the free expression of individual beliefs and interests – what would later come to be called the “marketplace of ideas,” arguably the most powerful metaphor in common language for media democracy. Instead, he seemed to want the public to think straight. He wanted intelligence, in both senses of the word – the kind of information that early modern public folk used to make wise decisions, and the capacity to think clearly about the state of affairs and available policies.
In both the norm of intelligent discussion and the criticism of press abuse, de Tocqueville stood in a long line of theorists of political communication. Political leaders like Thomas Jefferson, activist intellectuals like John Milton, and numberless anonymous printers and editors had fantasized about a press system that would enable modern societies to govern themselves like ancient Greek city-states. Citizens, who would all be literate and economically independent, would all read newspapers, which would contain reliable, authoritative information, and also provide a platform through which they could discuss matters of common concern. Intelligent public opinion as formed and manifested in the press would then pilot the political process.
This set of concepts and expectations is now so obvious as to be taken for granted, not only in the west but also in the command economies of the Pacific Rim and the post-socialist countries of eastern Europe. But it would be hard to find sincere knowledgeable people anywhere who think that the media system is living up to this ideal. Why has the media system been saddled with responsibilities that it apparently lacks the capacity to perform? How did this strange situation come about?
This chapter begins an attempt to tell a coherent story about the history of media engagement with public affairs. Because this is so large a history, played out on a global scale over several millennia, the beginning of the story is necessarily presented as very abstract. But the story, at least as presented here, will become more specific in the years between the political crisis in Europe of the mid-seventeenth century and the period of the world wars of the twentieth century. After that, I'm afraid things become abstract again. The overall story looks something like an hourglass, wide at the top and bottom and narrowing toward the middle. So let's drop ourselves into the wide top.
Origins of News Systems
The capacity to govern requires communication. Governments always and everywhere develop systems of communication as tools of administration. Usually, they maintain some kind of news system for their administrators and try to limit access to it by those outside the bureaucracy.
The first formal news media were designed for use by governing elites. Imperial China and Korea, well ahead of western Europe in developing both paper and printing, circulated handwritten bulletins of court information, for instance. In Korea, which had developed a system of alphabetic printing with movable type before the European invention of printing, the court bulletins were printed for a short period beginning in 1577, giving Korea a claim to having produced the first printed newspaper (Kim, 2013). But these media were not produced for general circulation; rather, they were meant to circulate among a bureaucratic elite.
Any government also has a need to communicate to the public. Often this is done through spectacles, like the coronation of a monarch, and monuments, like the massive architecture of national capitals, which combine to produce a sort of official memory of how power has come to be exercised and why it is legitimate. On an everyday level, governments have to tell their subjects how to do things. The Roman Republic inscribed its laws in stone in the public forum, apparently not planning any major changes in those laws. The Roman Empire produced a daily news report, the Acta Diurna, informing the public of “vital statistics,” like the numbers of births and deaths, and some affairs of state, like the outcomes of trials. (No copies survive, but the Acta is referred to by ancient authors, including a parody, set at Trimalchio's banquet, in Petronius's Satyricon (1959: 60).) This would become a common practice for many early modern governments, which established printed newspapers or “gazettes” as official organs of public information.
These two fairly timeless kinds of news media, the one for internal use and the other for public consumption, aren't very interesting. Historians of the news media sometimes mention examples of them as a way of clearing their throats before speaking about the real history of the media. But the history of news media becomes interesting at the point where governments lose their control over the uses of news, making it possible for unofficial actors to change the way states behave.
There also have been non-governmental uses for news in most societies. In every society, ordinary people have a use for tales of the novel or weird. There has always been some form of ballad culture or popular oral literature to tell stories that more recent generations would describe as “human interest,” or “tabloid fare,” or “infotainment.” The stuff of such culture is often formulaic and timeless. In early modern European newsbooks, for instance, one finds fantastic stories being recycled from time to time (Stephens, 2007). Usually this type of news culture has been very moralistic as well. This is particularly true of crime reports, always a staple of popular news, whether oral or printed. There is a moral and a commercial logic to this. If one wraps a sordid tale inside a fine lesson of the evils of crime, then whatever titillation the story provokes can be rendered incidental and tolerable (Cohen, 2006). Popular culture often has needed a pro-social pretext.
Elite uses for news require less misdirection. Among the many kinds of specialized knowledge that news media have supported, commercial information has consistently been prominent. Handwritten newsletters containing financial information began to circulate in Renaissance Europe. The most famous of these were “avvisi” produced in Venice during its imperial years (Infelise, 2002, 2007; de Vivo 2007: 80–5; Kittler, 2009: 87–8). Mostly compiled from merchants' private letters, these circulated primarily among subscribers in trade centers, beginning in the first decade of the sixteenth century. They were meant to help a merchant elite make better-informed business decisions.
Modern news media developed out of this kind of “correspondence,” a term that continues to inhabit the language of news. Newsletter writers gathered news through the emerging postal networks that linked European cities, allowing them to correspond with government officials, commercial agents, and intellectuals (Wilke, 2008, 2013). Although it was possible for the wealthiest merchants to exchange correspondence through private couriers, any broader circulation would rely on publicly administered postal systems as essential infrastructure; these became formalized in the seventeenth century. The French system, for instance, was established in 1603 (Gough, 1988; Mattelart, 2006). It is difficult to overstate the impact of regular postal systems, which not only facilitated the work of merchants and printers but also allowed dispersed networks of intellectuals to correspond as they collaborated on the projects which produced the scientific revolution and built the Enlightenment Republic of Letters.
The more successful newsletter writers assembled material from their own correspondents and from newsletters and other documents into a summary of current affairs that had a certain coherence. The newsletter allowed its readers to update their already sophisticated maps of the flow of power and history, and thus to make strategic decisions regarding the conduct of their affairs. Because subscribers looked to newsletter writers for competitive advantage over other merchants, the less publicly familiar the news the better. In this, newsletters differed from later news media that tried to reach as large an audience as possible. The news in newsletters, at least in the original scheme, became public only by accident (Infelise, 2010).
But publicity had its uses too. The famously complex political machinations of the Italian city-states of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – in which, for instance, Venetian leaders sought ways to circumvent papal authority, or merchants in Genoa or Naples sought to undermine the influence of Spain in the western Mediterranean – encouraged newsletter writers to tactically publicize rumors and scandals, often with the support and patronage of political leaders. As Brendan Dooley has pointed out, simply by publishing such matters, newsletter writers changed the political environment by creating a kind of representation of public knowledge or public opinion (Dooley, 1996). The advent of printing intensified this kind of action by making publication seem universal. The power of the press has been imagined in many ways – as the power of truth, for example, or the power of reason – but one aspect of it has certainly been the power to represent public opinion.
News became a tool of competition among the powerful under specific circumstances: that's where the history gets interesting. In Renaissance Europe, partly at least because of the separation between the religious authority of the Roman Church and the emerging power of secular rulers, elites challenged each other across a range of issues. The divisiveness of European civilization seems to have been a key enabling factor for the growth of printed news.
Printing had been developed many times before its European invention. But its European history differed from, say, its earlier Chinese history in that, in Europe, no authority had both the geographical scope and administrative capacity to control it. Because the printing press happened to be introduced at a time when secular rulers sought to carve out a sphere of control separate from the Universal Church, it became a tool in the competition among different organized centers of power. It is because jurisdictions were so fragmented that it became common to talk about a “printing revolution” in Europe but not elsewhere (Eisenstein, 1979).
The argument that printing sparked a cultural revolution in Europe is most powerfully associated with Elizabeth Eisenstein. She argued that the printing revolution came from the “fixity” that was an essential affordance of print technology. Criticisms of the Catholic Church had sparked reform movements before printing, but, because Martin Luther printed his criticisms, they spread through space and lasted through time in a more powerful way. In the same way, printed astronomical observations helped overturn the Ptolemaic model of a geocentric universe. Eisenstein's argument about “typographical fixity” has been challenged by Adrian Johns (1998), who points out that print technology in its first century produced the same kinds of opportunities for forgeries and piracies that the Internet had in its early years. Only when state actors had codified property rights in printed products did typography become associated with fixity. This debate cannot be settled here. But it is interesting that the development of printed formats for news involved extensive dialog between the business interests of printers, the political interests of partisans, and the administrative interests of states, and so emerged only very gradually after the European invention of printing in 1450. The newspaper form did not emerge effortlessly from the technology of printing. In fact, it had to swim upstream.
Even when they fought with each other, elites could agree at least on the wisdom of keeping their affairs out of the reach of ordinary people. Then, as now, the powerful typically collaborated to create bodies that regulated the flow of information and punished those who used publication to weaken the authority of the state. All states do this, though democracies tend to adopt different policies and justify them on different grounds than monarchies or theocracies. Historically, every state has reacted to new communications technologies, from printing to the most recent digital technologies, with some form of regulation.
But in really interesting circumstances, competition among elites opened a space for ordinary people to change the way things happen. The conflicts that arose over Martin Luther's rebellion against papal authority in the sixteenth century are a prime example. Among other things, Luther produced a series of short texts that were commercially ideal for printers in places like Wittenberg. It has become something of a commonplace to argue that the printing press made the Reformation, but it is also true to say that the Reformation gave a tremendous impetus to the growth of printing in select areas (Pettegree, 2010: 91–129). Similarly, the European discovery of the Americas and the dynastic competitions in the early sixteenth century produced a swarm of cheap news pamphlets, written in a popular tone and intended for wide consumption; not that many of these survive (Pettegree, 2010: 130–41, Pettegree, 2014: 5–8). One particular genre of news pamphlet, which started appearing in Germany in 1509, used the title Neue Zeitung. These flourished especially in the 1530s, and were a reliable source of profit for printers. Of the 4,000 or so copies that survive – a surprisingly large number for relatively cheap ephemera – most deal with “high politics” (Pettegree, 2014: 74). The wars of religion that followed, especially the Thirty Years War (1618–48), produced a number of cases in which politics broke through the boundaries of class and privilege. The most famous involve Germany, the birthplace of European printing, the center of Luther's Reformation activities, and the home of the first regularly printed news periodicals; the Netherlands, where a rebellion against Spain produced a ferment of republican politics, and where the first English-language newsbook was published; and England, where a period of Civil War beginning in 1640 led to a flowering of news culture (Briggs and Burke, 2009; Raymond, 1996).
Histories of news usually cite German-language newsbooks, the first of which appeared in Strasbourg in 1605, as the first real newspapers. Scholars distinguish these newsbooks from news pamphlets because they were printed regularly, usually weekly; they distinguish them from avvisi because they contained information for a general public. In the seventeenth century, more newsbooks were published in Germany than in the rest of Europe combined (Baron and Dooley, 2001; Welke and Wilke, 2008). Other countries followed. The first Dutch newsbook appeared in 1618; the first English-language newsbook was printed in Amsterdam in 1620; the first French one in 1631; the first Spanish in 1641; the first Italian in 1643. These began appearing at the beginning of the seventeenth century partly because of dramatic political events, but also because of a general reorganization of postal services in western Europe. The postal system was an indispensable infrastructure for the news system, and could be considered a revolutionary technology in the same way as the printing press (Pettegree, 2014: 167–81).
These newsbooks – let's call them newspapers from here on – hewed to a common form. They were quarto or octavo in size, meaning they were made by printing four or eight pages on each side of a large sheet of paper and folding it two or three times. (The typical modern newspaper is a folio, made by printing two pages on each side of large sheets of paper and folding them once.) The make-up looked more like a book than a newspaper, often with something like a title page, and text not broken into columns. (Dutch newspapers were an exception; they were folio with two columns per page (Pettegree, 2014: 188–9).) Typically, the content consisted of a series of excerpts of other newspapers or of correspondence, not headlined but datelined with a place and date: “Amsterdam, 17 October,” for instance. The events in that paragraph would not have taken place in Amsterdam on 17 October, however: that was the place and date of the written source of the information. Excerpts would flow, usually without commentary, in roughly chronological order. Sometimes a reader could detect a unifying narrative. Usually the reader would have to supply his or her own. These early newspapers typically lacked an editorial voice. Blandness kept the censors happy. Sometimes they included texts of state documents or transcripts of official addresses, which signaled a quiet political allegiance. In times of political conflict, however, the form could be readily adapted for propaganda purposes. But there was nothing in these newspapers that would qualify as “journalism” in the twentieth- or twenty-first-century sense of the term, which implies a professionalized newsgathering discipline.
Printed newsbooks had a complicated relationship with the handwritten newsletters that preceded them. They began as simply printed versions of handwritten newsletters, but, because they were more public, they avoided the confidential voice, strategic commentary, and implied political engagement found in the handwritten newsletters. Because of these features, the handwritten form remained useful to elite audiences long after printing had spread through Europe.
Printed news prompted states and churches to intensify their efforts to control the flow of information. The Vatican had long used forms of licensing to restrict publications; these efforts increased with the Protestant Reformation and the rise of printing (Pettegree, 2010: 204–8). Catholic states, like France, incorporated these techniques into their own systems of regulation.
Seventeenth-century France developed an effective system of press regulation based on grants of monopoly for particular kinds of printed matter. One printer, for instance, owned a monopoly for political news, another for scientific news, and a third for literary news, and each published a national title that dominated its field: the Gazette, the Journal des Savants, and the Mercure Galant, respectively. These patent holders paid for their rights, but were then permitted in turn to license other, especially regional, printers to copy their material. This system of intellectual property encouraged printers to work to keep the favor of the Crown, and hence to censor themselves, beyond the still existing requirements of formal censorship (Gough, 1988).
This system was not leakproof. A literary underground flourished, and has been studied most famously by Robert Darnton (1982, 1996). Much of what is known about these unlicensed publications and the news culture they helped sustain comes from police records. In other words, we know it existed because we know how it was surveilled and suppressed.
But even France, the most unified and powerful of the seventeenth-century nation-states, lacked the capacity to control printing beyond its borders. Printers in neighboring countries, such as the Netherlands and Switzerland, saw a business opportunity in producing French-language publications. Their governments, which would have prevented publications aimed at domestic audiences, tolerated and encouraged this sort of extraterritorial printing. Protestant states saw no problem in circulating literature that the Catholic French monarchy saw as subversive. Many of the famous works of the French Enlightenment were produced in Switzerland and circulated clandestinely in France (Darnton, 1979). This aspect of France's history points out the inescapably transnational nature of publication in a Europe divided by overlapping borders of politics, religion, and language. The porousness of political borders also allowed for cultural influence to spread outward. The influence of French salons was transmitted through both publication and correspondence, taking the form of a discussion without borders, known as the Republic of Letters (Eisenstein, 1992; Goodman, 1994).
Protestant powers also regulated printing. In England, the Tudor monarchs created an elaborate system of licensing that enfranchised not just the Crown but also the Church of England and the Stationers' Company, the private guild of printers and booksellers. The Crown granted the Stationers' Company a licensed monopoly on printing and bookselling; in return for the Crown's protection of its copyrights, the company policed its membership, limiting the number of legal printers and discouraging the publication of critical or destabilizing material.
The Tudor system also had its weaknesses. Printing was a relatively portable technology that could be deployed in small productive units, so it was difficult to control. There were always qualified printers who could not gain membership in the Stationers' Company and who were willing for the right price to print illegally. Printers tended above all else to follow business incentives. Dissidents (in England, Puritans and Catholics) with ready cash could beat the system (Siebert, 1952; Mendle, 1995; Clegg, 2001); Thompson (1998), on the other hand, finds censorship becoming more restrictive in the 1630s. So controversy found expression in newspapers and other printed forms. The forms and techniques of public debate in print developed early in the Elizabethan period, and members of the court used them to maneuver for advantage by invoking public opinion (Lake and Pincus, 2007). Conflict drove demand for news, which spurred the rise of both licensed and unlicensed printing in the seventeenth century, particularly during the Thirty Years War (1618–48).
The most dramatic outburst resulted from the revolution and Civil War of the 1640s. That conflict produced a total collapse of print regulation (Mendle, 1995; Raymond, 1996; McElligott, 2007). The revolution came from conflicts that had a lot to do with freedom of religion but, ironically, little to do with freedom of information or expression. Tensions between Puritan religious reformers and the established Church of England interacted with tensions between the Stuart monarchy, which needed revenue to wage an ambitious foreign policy, and the House of Commons, which balked at passing taxes. When the political system deadlocked, King Charles I retreated from London, raised an army, and went to war. When the Crown vacated the government, every factor in the system of press regulation – the King, his Privy Council, the Court of Star Chamber, the grant of monopoly that established the Stationers' Company, and the Bishops of the Church of England – lost its source of legitimacy and ceased to function. All of a sudden there was total freedom of the press. The result was a blossoming of pamphlets and newsbooks of every persuasion. Now all could see what an unrestrained press looked like.
With very few exceptions, elites did not like what they saw. Every leader, faction, or institution wanted freedom from regulation for itself, but none, or almost none, wanted freedom for everyone else. The revolutionary Parliament quickly restored licensing, substituting its authority for the authority of the Crown, setting up a licensing board and renewing the monopoly of the Stationers' Company. A few objected on principle.
John Milton made the most enduring argument against this renewal of censorship in his famous pamphlet, Areopagitica, later cited as the first mature formulation of a philosophy of freedom of the press. His justification rested on the notion of an emerging Truth, which he described in metaphorical terms: as a flowing brook, as a house under construction, as a tree or bush, with many branches growing out of a common root. Damming up or paring back Truth while it's flowing or growing would at best delay and at worst prevent its full emergence. It's what the Vatican had tried to do to Luther, and Milton wanted his fellow Puritans to be sickened by Parliament's misstep in imitating the Church of Rome. On the other hand, Milton had very large exceptions to his principle of free printing, most particularly “Popery, and open superstition.” He urged freedom for various Protestant sects, whose “neighboring differences, or rather indifferences,” could be seen as branches from the same root, but not for Catholicism, which was dedicated to undermining true religion and “civil supremacy.”
The most often quoted of Milton's metaphors for free expression invoked athletic competition. He alluded to a wrestling match between Truth and Falsehood, and said: “Let her and falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter? For she is strong, next to the Almighty.” The Divine power of Truth should always beat falsehood – in a free and open encounter. But what are the conditions for a “free and open encounter”? Clearly, Milton did not consider the Church of Rome's attempts to censor or purge Protestant arguments a free and open encounter. Even if the Roman Church were deprived of its power to censor, the very nature of its ideas and their authority, based on a corrupt hierarchy, meant that it could never engage in the kind of encounter Milton imagined.
To understand what Milton meant by a free and open encounter, we should look at the form his argument took. It was a pamphlet, printed in a run of about 500 copies and published in London. Rhetorically, it was structured as a speech to the Parliament – “Lords and Commons” – but its title, which invoked a similar speech by the Greek orator Isocrates, indicated that it was produced in writing for the larger public, as an open letter, and not to be orally delivered in the closed meeting space of the Parliament. Milton's argument was meant to be presented as a private citizen's petition to the government, with the condition that the entire citizenry could pay attention. The literary form of Areopagitica anticipated what Jürgen Habermas would later call the bourgeois or liberal model of the public sphere. I'll talk about that more later in this chapter.
Obviously, the whole citizenry, for Milton, did not include ordinary people. So much is obvious from even a superficial reading of the text. Milton expected his readers to know some Latin and Greek, to be familiar with the arguments of the Church Fathers, and to know the history of the early Church and of the Reformation. His imagined readership included only a highly educated fraction of the Protestant adult male population. In this he wasn't unusual. Most political pamphleteers would have assumed that their audience consisted of educated people who had been following public affairs, a small political class by later standards.
His argument and its publication put Milton toward the left end of the political spectrum, but not the far left. There were factions, like the Levellers and the Diggers, who believed in a far more expansive notion of rights, equality, and citizen participation. Milton included their leaders in the range of people who deserved to have a voice (Hill, 1978), unlike Catholics.
Milton drew boundaries around free expression because his core argument was based on the emergence of divine Truth, not the free flow of news. He seemed to flinch at unregulated publication of news, which would necessarily be mixed with rumor and falsehood, and might conceal all sorts of political agendas. One of his criticisms of the licensing board that Parliament had set up was that it lacked the capacity to prevent the publication of royalist newspapers, which turned up in the streets of London with the ink still damp from the press. Later, Milton would himself take on the job of licensing the official government newspaper.
Although modern liberals often criticize Milton as inconsistent, even hypocritical, there is a logical consistency to his thinking and to the media imaginary that informs it. His concern for the freedom of seekers after divine Truth sees freedom not as a natural right but as a moral one, conditioned by adherence to a reformed Christian faith. These seekers were a vanguard, whose learning and virtue earned them membership in a circle of privilege that should participate in the deliberations that would guide state policy. Free printing, properly used, would extend Parliamentary discussion outward to this circle – though not to everyone. Areopagitica itself, written in esoteric style and with an initial printing of perhaps 500 copies, was an example of this extension of privileged Parliamentary discussion.
