The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself (68 page)

18.2 
An Englishman's delight or news of all sorts
. The list of titles on his topmost sheet comprises ten different papers.

This transformation came at a cost. If newspapers were to play a direct role in shaping opinion, then statesmen would wish to control them; and journalists, eager above all to secure a competent living, were not always unhappy to be controlled. By 1792 in England the government had bought up half the press.
⁷
The
Diary or Woodfall's Register
was subsidised by the Treasury throughout its existence for £400 a year. The editor of the more established
Morning Herald
was confronted in 1790 with the choice of prison or leasing his title to the government, for £600 a year. He chose the latter. Six hundred pounds seems to have been very much the going rate, and enough in 1795 to secure the support of
The Times
. Other papers, whose political influence was not thought worthy of Treasury subsidies, turned instead to extortion, accepting cash from public figures in return for suppressing disobliging gossip. The London press was an extreme example, but not unique. The press
in America, widely praised as a bastion of liberty in revolutionary times, soon earned a bleaker reputation.
⁸
‘There has been more error propagated from the press in the last ten years than in a hundred years before,’ was the jaundiced judgement of John Adams, second president of the United States, and a frequent victim of press vituperation and ridicule.
⁹

Thomas Jefferson, his one-time friend and ultimate nemesis, of course dis-agreed. Jefferson's famous declaration on the question, ‘were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter’, was more of a rhetorical device than a proposal for action. But its spirit strongly animated the work of the Founding Fathers and saw its monument in the first amendment to the American constitution, guaranteeing freedom of the press.

There is little doubt that in this period the news media, and the news market, were both entering a new phase of their development. What, finally, was the contribution of the preceding four centuries to preparing this new world? Even before the vast acceleration of change in the last part of the eighteenth century, the news world of 1750 was palpably different from that of 1400 or 1500. This change was underpinned by three critical developments in European society. First was the movement, in contemporary thinking, from an emphasis on divine to human agency in the explanation of events. This was by no means complete. Western society was still overwhelmingly populated by believers, who continued to seek God's Providence in events. ‘It is God that has done it, therefore what can I say,’ was the response of one soldier in the Continental Army to the British victory at New York in 1776.
¹⁰
But there is a palpable shift from the pamphlet literature of the sixteenth century, where virtually every event could be framed as a parable of God's Providence, to the more dispassionate reporting in the routine despatches of eighteenth-century newspapers.

Second, and not unconnected with this, was the increasing emphasis on timeliness in the reporting and reception of news. Previously, when people looked to the news for the key to eternal verities, contemporaneity had been a much less urgent concern. An account of a flood, murder, or diabolical possession could be as pungent whether it occurred last week or some time ago, whether locally or in some distant region. Its moral force was in this respect timeless. But when news was regarded less as a key to God's purpose and more as a catalyst for action, then timeliness became critical. In the eighteenth-century clash of empires that provided so much of the copy for newspapers, this sense of urgency became far more evident, and also helped spur the progressive improvements of the infrastructure that underpinned the increasing density of news communication. Throughout the period under
study the postal network made a series of giant leaps forward: first with the completion of the transcontinental European post; then with the addition of new branch lines. The rise of the north European trading empires in turn stimulated a concerted effort to repair the chronic deficiencies of the English and French postal networks, and ultimately to extend these improvements across the Atlantic.
¹¹

Governments had always been aware that knowledge was power. One of the first acts of the Massachusetts Assembly after the outbreak of the revolutionary conflicts was to set up a whole network of new post offices up-state. Control of the communications network was one aspect of the war in which the insurgents enjoyed total supremacy; in a long defensive war it was potentially decisive.
¹²

Finally we should not underestimate the importance of the sheer volume of news in circulation. This was experienced in Europe as a series of surges: the first pamphlet fury of the Reformation; the later political convulsions of the Paris League, the British Civil Wars and the Fronde; the baptism of fire for news print in the Thirty Years War; the birth of party politics in England; the American and French Revolutions. This allowed European society to experience not only the expansion of access to new markets, but also the persuasive power of volume and repetition. Benjamin Franklin, one of the most perceptive and analytical minds to observe the power of contemporary reporting (his first career was as a printer), reflected openly on the potency of an orchestrated press campaign:

With these three developments the building blocks were in place for the dramatic developments in the nineteenth-century news market. It was then, and only then, that the daily newspaper became the predominant instrument of news distribution. In North America the number of newspapers increased between 1790 and 1800 from 99 to 230. This represented not only the emergence of a reading public, but a deliberate act on the part of the Founding Fathers to create an informed citizenry. In this case the federal government provided a powerful financial inducement by offering the newspapers highly privileged access to the postal network to ensure economical and timely distribution.
¹⁴
In continental Europe the development of the press was more
uneven; but by the middle of the new century the daily newspaper had largely superseded the weekly or bi-weekly paper as the predominant form.

These nineteenth-century developments were made possible by two further critical technological innovations: the invention of the steam-press and the substitution of wood pulp for rag-based paper. ‘Steam-powered knowledge’ propelled the capacities of the daily edition, which had reached an effective ceiling of 3,000 copies in the hand-press era, to many multiples of this figure.
¹⁵
Paper based on wood pulp permitted the exploitation of a new and abundant resource. The impact of these technological developments was compounded by the approach to something closer to universal literacy, at least among the urban populations that were the most important consumers of news. This in turn encouraged a heightened political activism among the previously unenfranchised, a great driver of demand for newspapers. It also encouraged the profound diversification of papers in terms of subject matter and content, as newspapers began to feed the appetite for information and diversion across a whole range of cultural and recreational activities. In this way newspapers became both longer and qualitatively different from anything that had come before.

This, the great age of the newspaper, would last for a century and a half, a period when the contest for power within Europe's nations gave impetus to the long struggle for democracy, and the contests between rival powers sowed the seeds of the catastrophic warfare of the twentieth century. In these conflicts, too, newspapers would play their part, but no longer as monopoly providers. As European ingenuity designed ever more destructive weaponry and ideologies, so too the march of science created new competitors for news print: first radio, then television. As these new media became embedded in society they swiftly demonstrated their potential for the distribution of news. They too had to be shaped and manipulated by those to whom the control of information was a crucial attribute of power. But it was only with the arrival of digital media that the role of printed news in this evolving ecology would seriously be questioned.

The dominant role of print in the delivery of prompt, regular digests of news can no longer be taken for granted. Put in this context, the age of the newspaper seems comparatively fleeting, rather than, as it was when the first histories of news were written, the natural order of things. Still less does the newspaper appear, as its admirers would once have seen it, as an instrument of empowerment and emancipation that represented the natural culmination of the civilising process.
¹⁶

Living as we now do through the uncertainties of the evolving and unstable multi-media world that characterises the early twenty-first century, it is
perhaps easier to see why a similar variety of news delivery would have seemed utterly appropriate to the four centuries that have been the central concern of this book. The arrival of print in the mid-fifteenth century offered many new opportunities; but it had to make its way in a world where networks for the distribution of news had already been developed: networks with standards, conventions and social freight with which those in circles of power were fully conversant. In the centuries that followed print disrupted and then reshaped this infrastructure, bringing new customers into the circle of news but without fully superseding the established norms. The news media of this era presented every bit as much a multi-media phenomenon as our own. It is that which gives this period its particular fascination.

Notes

Introduction: All the News that's Fit to Tell

1.
Weekly Review of the Affairs of France
(17 February 1704). A magnificent new edition, edited by John McVeagh, is
Defoe's Review
(London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003–11). An atmospheric selection is available in William L. Payne,
The Best of Defoe's Review: An Anthology
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1951).

2.
Review
(fasc. edn, New York, 1938), viii, 708, book 21. Quoted Harold Love,
The Culture and Commerce of Texts
(Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), p. 3. See now also Dror Wahrman,
Mr. Collier's Letter Rack: A Tale of Art and Illusion at the Threshold of the Modern Information Age
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 19–29.

3.
Instances can be found, for example, in at least ten of Shakespeare's plays:
King Henry VI, Part 2
, Act IV, scene 4;
King Henry VI, Part 3
, Act II, scene 1;
King Richard III
, Act IV, scenes 2 and 4;
The Taming of the Shrew
, Act V, scene 2;
The Merchant of Venice
, Act 1, scene 2;
Twelfth Night
, Act 1, scene 1;
Hamlet
, Act IV, scene 7;
Timon of Athens
, Act 1, scene 2;
King Lear
, Act 1, scene 2;
Macbeth
, Act 1, scene 7. Instances supplied by Paul Arblaster.

4.
Claude Holyband,
The French Littelton
(London: Richard Field, 1593). Below, Chapter 6.

5.
This regular exchange, between Aberconwy and Strat Florida, is reported in
The historie of Cambria, now called Wales
(1584), sig. vr. I am grateful to my colleague Alex Woolf for this reference.

6.
Jürg Zulliger, ‘“Ohne Kommunikation würde Chaos herrschen”. Zur Bedeutung von Informationsaustauch, Briefverkehr und Boten bei Bernhard von Clairvaux’,
Archiv für Kulturgeschichte
, 78 (1996), pp. 251–76. Below, Chapter 1.

7.
Below, Chapter 2.

8.
Below, Chapter 7.

9.
Nate Silver,
The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail but Some Don't
(New York: Penguin, 2012).

10.
Ulinka Rublack,
The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 16–19.