The Rise and Fall of the British Press

Mick Temple

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138895102
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351716994
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Social Sciences

The Rise and Fall of the British Press takes an artful look at the past, present and immediate future of the printed newspaper. Temple offers a thought-provoking account of the evolution of Britain's news consumption across the centuries, situating it within significant social, cultural and political currents of the time.

Chapters cover:

• The impact of key technological developments; from the birth of print and the introduction of television, to the rise of the internet and digital media;
• The ever-shifting power play between political parties and the press;
• The notion of the 'public sphere' and how newspapers have influenced it over the decades;
• The role of news media during some of Europe's most significant historical events, such as the French Revolution, the First and Second World Wars and the Suez crisis;
• The aftermath of the Leveson inquiry and the question of increased media regulation;
• The successes and failures of important media players, including Baron Beaverbrook and Lord Northcliffe in the nineteenth century, and Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Throughout the book, parallels are drawn between current issues impacting on the press and society and those from previous decades, further illuminating the role, both historic and ongoing, of the news media in Britain. Temple concludes the book by looking to the future of print journalism, calling for a reassessment of its role in the twenty-first century, redefining what journalism should be and reasserting its value in society today.

This far-reaching analysis will be an invaluable resource for both students and researchers of journalism and media studies.

1 The first mass medium is born

Introduction

Before the World Wide Web, no other invention in human history challenged the powerful as much as printing. For the first time, ideas circulated directly to a mass audience and inevitably challenged the received wisdom of churches and states who had a vested interest in perpetuating long-established notions of their right to rule. Equally inevitably, established rulers attempted to censor that potential power. Those attempts were ultimately as pointless as those in the twenty-first century which seek to constrain the free expression of views via electronic media. However, unlike the decline of the printed newspaper, which has been dramatic and swift, the rise of a political press was slow and, literally for many brave pioneers, tortuous.

Early news

As the first human civilisations developed, those early communities needed to transmit ‘news’ over distances, generally by relays of messengers, beacons, signallers and drums. Reliable communications became easier with the development of writing. The Sumerians of 3500 BC developed a pictographic system on clay tablets, but the Egyptian invention of papyrus, a much lighter material, made the carrying of information easier. The Greeks improved the Phoenician alphabet (Allan 2004: 8), and their mastery of writing was a crucial element in their huge strides in scholarly knowledge. The transmission of news to the citizenry was also vital. For example, in ancient Rome, Julius Caesar decreed that reports (acta diurna) of important events were to be posted on public buildings.

Long before the arrival of printing, merchants and travellers carried reports of foreign events and trading conditions back to English ports. As trade expanded, the need for more frequent and reliable information led to private handwritten newsletters funded by banks or groups of merchants who established networks of information across Western Europe (Conboy 2004: 8). Paper arrived in Europe in the twelfth century and was first used in Britain in 1309, but parchment (made of animal skins) remained more popular even in the early years of printing (Allan 2004: 9). Literacy was limited to an educated elite. In many British towns, the official town criers (dating back at least to 1066) would read out proclamations to their largely illiterate audiences. Given that announcements could be unpopular (for example, the imposition of new taxes), town criers were covered by royal protection to reduce the chance of attacks. Ballads and broadsheets sung in the streets were the main source of ‘news’ for the masses (Harrison 2006: 46). The circulation of handwritten pamphlets and ballads on a variety of subjects indicates the urge of all classes for up-to-date information – news and entertainment – was well established before the arrival of printing. But the printing press would challenge the ruling elite’s control of information.

The birth of print

Moveable type, using porcelain characters, was invented by the Chinese in the eleventh century. Around 1450 in Germany, Johannes Gutenberg built a printing press using metal type, and his famous Gutenberg Bible is probably the first printed book in Europe. In 1475 (while in Germany) William Caxton published the first printed book in English, Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye. A year later, Caxton set up Britain’s first printing press in Westminster. In 1513, the ‘first known surviving news pamphlet’ was printed; prepared with royal authority, its purpose was largely propagandist (Conboy 2004: 9). At the start of the sixteenth century there were only five printers in London, but by 1523 there were 35. Soon scholars, who for centuries had been expected to be polymaths, were complaining of ‘information overload’: there were too many books for one man to read.

Initially, presses were strictly controlled. The Tudor monarchs forbade private presses outside London, making exceptions only for the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Some official bodies had a legal right of censorship, including the Privy Council and Church authorities (Harrison 1974: 10). Queen Elizabeth’s reign saw the severest sanctions: it became a capital offence to publish seditious material (Griffiths 2006: 4). Despite this, imported works continued to introduce radical continental ideas.

In the early seventeenth century the audience grew as literacy levels rose. But literacy was not essential because the public reading of news was common. For example, in 1634 Thomas Cotton would read out his weekly London newsletter every market day in Colchester, drawing large crowds (Harris 1996: 7). Short-lived publications were available in bookshops and coffee houses, and hawkers and peddlers carried these publications to rural areas. They featured ‘sex and scandal, fantasy, sensationalism, bawdiness, violence and prophecy … and most horrible murders’ (Craven 1992: 3), but news of wars, trade and politics was also occasionally featured. The mixture sounds similar to much of today’s newspapers, and to items promoted as clickbait on the internet.

Early publications usually related a single story, but collections of news collated and in a single weekly volume soon began to appear. From 1621, the first dated and sequential ‘newsbooks’ signalled the start of a news revolution in which printers and journalists began to appreciate the commercial benefits of producing news at regular and publicly anticipated intervals (Sommerville 1996: 4; Smith 1979: 9). And newsbooks and pamphlets were to play an important role in the most divisive event in England’s history. English journalism was about to make its first significant and prolonged inputs into the political public sphere.

The English Civil War

There is no space here for a full account of this period (see Ackroyd 2015). Charles I had succeeded to the throne in 1625. His commitment to the Divine Right of Kings, maintaining that hereditary rulers had authority to rule directly from God, led to frequent clashes with Parliament, who favoured a more rational basis for political legitimacy. In 1629 he dismissed Parliament. Financially straitened and under political attack, not least from thousands of anti-monarchist tracts and journals, Charles was forced to recall Parliament in 1640, but the power struggle continued. A school of ‘savage, satirical writing’ developed, and some 30,000 pamphlets and journals were published yearly (Marr 2005: 6). Like their Tudor predecessors, these early ‘journalists’ (or more accurately, political propagandists) ran the risk of torture and death.

King Charles used the Star Chamber, a court established in medieval England to deal with breaches of the peace, to try to enforce unpopular policies and punish his critics. It is striking that most attempts to censor were directed at publications containing news rather than those containing anti-monarchist propaganda (Harris 1996: 3), an indication of the increasing impact of newsbooks on public debate. In 1632 the Star Chamber ordered newsbooks to cease publication (Herd 1952: 15), but with the abolition of the Star Chamber by Parliament in 1641 the authority of the monarch over printing temporarily disappeared – and in August 1642 the English Civil War began.

Hundreds of periodicals mixing news and entertainment, ‘often of the most scurrilous kind’, burst into ephemeral existence (Conboy 2004: 150). After four years of bloody conflict, the parliamentary forces under the control of Oliver Cromwell defeated the Royalist resistance. Charles was captured but escaped, and in 1648 he and his Scottish allies attempted to regain power. They were finally defeated at Preston and a year later Charles was executed. ‘This day the King was beheaded, over against the Banqueting house by Whitehall’ is, for Engel, the ‘intro of the millennium’ (1997: 15). This eyewitness news account of the king’s death in the publication A Perfect Diurnal was a superb piece of reportage, with lines such as ‘the executioner at one blow severed his head from his body’ (in Griffiths 2006: 9), demonstrating the graphic and gripping prose of the unknown journalist. Perhaps for the first time, the ‘news’ had been reported in a way we can recognise as ‘modern’ – factual and to the point, yet brilliantly conveying the drama of a momentous occasion. The account was, truly, journalism as the first draft of history.

Under Oliver Cromwell, there was a return to controls and censorship rivalling that exercised by the Tudors. However, by the mid-seventeenth century the press had become permanently established as an important element in social and political life and an identifiable ‘news culture’ had been established (Conboy 2004: 42–43). In 1670 the term ‘newspaper’ was first used (Herd 1952: 36). Publications began to deliver that mixture of news, comment, gossip and invective which continues to this day. The harsh punishments inflicted on dissident printers, publishers and writers had not deterred publications opposed to censorship and tyranny. But despite their relative freedom following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, there were still plenty of potential problems for newspaper publishers.

The beginning of the ‘public sphere’

The modern ‘public sphere’ has its genesis in the mid-seventeenth century, and the emerging newspaper press was vital to its development. Put simply, the public sphere is the space in which individuals and groups disseminate and debate matters of common concern (Dahlgren 1995: 7). This space or realm, however idealised or theorised, is essential for democracy. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas argues that ‘a portion of the public sphere comes into being in every conversation in which private citizens assemble’ (Habermas 1989: 49); so, the public sphere has both informal (for example, chatting about immigration online) and formal (for example, a town hall meeting) elements.

The public sphere of today is so dominated by the mass media that it now makes more sense to talk of the ‘mediated mass public sphere’, and the internet has seen the emergence of myriad discrete and overlapping ‘public spheres’, but in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the public sphere was effectively restricted to a small section of society. The first and highly fashionable coffee houses began to appear in London from around 1650 and were soon established in all major cities. Here, copies of newspapers and journals could be read alone or aloud. For Habermas, this was the birth of the modern public sphere, a place where politics and social events could be discussed and where public opinion was influenced and formed. Debate was often vigorous, the new stimulus of caffeine being an undoubted contributory factor. From 1680 to 1730 the coffee houses were at the height of their influence (Conboy 2004: 51). An indication of their financial importance is that both the Lloyds shipping register and the London Stock Exchange had their origins in regular meetings in coffee houses. All sorts of printed material were available, leading to a space where reporters and pamphleteers could both listen to ‘public opinion’ and also gather news and information to be fed back into the public sphere. While it was largely a ‘bourgeois public sphere’, dominated by the prosperous middle and ruling classes, coffee house clientele had a mixed social character (Harris 1996: 17), potentially allowing the expression and reporting of a wider range of opinion.

Newspapers were vital contributors to this. It was chiefly through the press that news and information were circulated in the coffee houses. Outside the political elite, newspapers were now the dominant former of public opinion and the major source of reasoned debate (Barker 2000: 1). At a time when ‘reasoned debate’ was dangerous and disagreement with the dominant ruling group provided enough justification to execute a man, the courage of early journalists deserves restating. And however idealistic, the public sphere’s ideal of a public opinion formed without coercion and by a process of mutual understanding continues to inform (however controversially at times) British press and broadcasting in the twenty-first century (Ruiz 2014).

The development of a national press

As the seventeenth century drew to a close, the social and economic conditions – including improving literacy, better roads and relative economic prosperity – were in place for a national press. With the end of formal censorship of the press in 1695, newspaper production rapidly expanded. On 11 March 1702, the first regular daily paper, the Daily Courant, appeared, as a two-column single sheet which sold for one penny. The contents were almost exclusively of foreign news translated from Dutch and French newspapers, but news of specific concern to British readers soon appeared. With a circulation of only 800 it struggled to survive, although its eventual closure in 1735 meant it had lasted a considerable period in what was by then a competitive and cutthroat market. As we shall see, it also lasted longer than the newspapers launched in the 1980s technological revolution.

The early press boasted some literary giants: Daniel Defoe’s Review and Jonathan Swift’s Examiner were just two of the many political periodicals. However, despite their stature, not all aspects of those early journalists look good to a modern audience. Some supplemented their income with bribes. Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, was among the journalists paid for their support by Robert Walpole, who from 1721 was Britain’s first prime minister. The interaction between politicians and journalists went beyond bribery. Then, as now, there was a symbiotic relationship, especially as politicians began to understand the importance of the press as a conduit to the ever-fickle public.

With good reason, Daniel Defoe has been called the ‘father of English journalism’ (Griffiths 2006: 26), although we can see that while Defoe was declaring the importance of truth and the need for ethical journalism he was also apparently subverting those principals. But it would be unfair to apply today’s expressed ethical standards: if we did, the practices investigated by the Leveson inquiry (2011–2012) might make us appear hypocritical. Defoe’s major importance in the story of journalism lies in his commitment to the art of reporting. Although notions of journalistic impartiality had yet to develop, Defoe went beyond the widely established mode of uninformed partisan argument. He believed in finding out things first-hand and also popularised a clearer and more direct way of reporting, arguing that the ‘perfect style’ of communication was to imagine 500 people of all sorts and write in a way that could be ‘understood by them all’ (Griffiths 2006: 28). Today he might be accused of ‘dumbing-down’.

Many more people read newspapers than their small circulations indicated – they were widely shared – but readership was overwhelmingly from the middle and upper classes (Harris 1996: 15). And despite many female readers there were few women reporters and publishers. Elizabeth Alkin (‘Parliament Joan’) was a parliamentary spy during the Civil War but also helped to produce newsbooks (Conboy 2004: 41–42). The first known woman editor was Mrs Mary de la Riviere Manley, who produced and edited the Female Tatler and in 1711 replaced Jonathan Swift as editor of the Examiner. There were also some women printers, but journalism remained male-dominated.

In 1712 the first Stamp Act was introduced, taxing the press at a basic rate of a penny a paper. It was probably a result of Queen Anne’s plea to Parliament for a remedy to ‘the scandalous libels in the press’ (Griffiths 2006: 36). The tax increased at regular intervals until 1855 when stamp duty was finally abolished. Despite the increased expense stamped newspapers continued to flourish, and by the middle of the eighteenth century London had five dailies, six tri-weeklies, five weeklies and, despite official suppression and prosecutions, several ‘unstamped’ and irregular papers. The brief flourishing and large sales of unstamped papers, selling for a farthing (a quarter of an old penny) during the 1730s, until their partial suppression in 1743, is an early indication of the prospect of a mass newspaper readership. In 1725 a newspaper typically cost 2p; by 1797 that had risen to 6p, beyond the purse of most. But by the end of the century, reading societies where workers clubbed together to provide newspapers, books and periodicals were flourishing.

Local papers were also well established by then (see Chapter 6 for an account of their development), although most were filled with news from London and frequently failed to cover key local events (Barker 2000: 130). As communications improved, they also faced competition from better produced London papers. In 1764 just over one million London papers were distributed through the Post Office: by the end of the century the figure had risen to 4.5 million (Harris 1996: 15). London’s domination of the national newspaper market was established. The development of railways during the nineteenth century, enabling a fast and efficient national delivery service, cemented that domination.

The press may now have become ‘free’, but clashes between the monarch and newspaper publishers continued. In 1762, MP John Wilkes founded the weekly North Briton which he used to attack King George III and his ministers. In 1763 he accused the government of lying in its King’s Speech. Arrested for libel and accused of sedition and treason, Wilkes was released but expelled from the House of Commons. Popular support and violent demonstrations in favour of Wilkes, who argued ‘the freedom of the press is the birthright of a Briton’ (Conboy 2002: 82), led to General Warrants – allowing governments to arrest anyone without evidence of their guilt – to be made illegal.

In 1785, arguably the most famous newspaper in the world first appeared. The Daily Universal Register (renamed the Times in 1788) was perhaps the first to recognise the primacy of news as the essential element of any newspaper. For most of the nineteenth century the paper achieved an authority which has probably never been matched. Despite this, its circulation was low and only passed 30,000 in 1848 (Engel 1997).

The power of the Church ensured that it was not until 1779 that the first British Sunday newspaper appeared, the British Gazette and Sunday Monitor, although it was soon to be followed by many titles still vibrant today, notably the Observer and the Sunday Times. The News of the World was to be a casualty of the Leveson inquiry. So, by the nineteenth century, the newspaper’s status as the most important element of the public sphere was established. British journalism had secured a position as an important contributor to public opinion and newspapers’ increasing commitment to news, as opposed to opinion, was a key factor. Only technological change, first broadcasting and then the internet, would challenge that dominance and even now British newspapers retain a key agenda-setting role.

However, there were huge interests that this press did not represent. England and Scotland had ‘low-level mass literacy skills’ and urbanisation was increasing those levels (Barker and Burrows 2007: 9). But despite average wages being high enough for many of the working class to afford an occasional paper, stamped newspapers felt no need to court this clientele. The mainstream public sphere, based on a bourgeois coffee-shop culture, had little place for the needs of the poorest sections of society. And so radical publications emerged and began to build large readerships among the urban poor (Williams 2010: 86–91).

The slow rise and sharp fall of the radical press: the fourth estate emerges

The French Revolution of 1789 sent alarm throughout the ruling classes of Europe. The Times sent reporters to cover the revolution in person from Paris (Barker & Burrows 2002: 7), adding to its growing reputation as a purveyor of up-to-the-minute news and informed a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables
• 1 The first mass medium is born
• 2 The press barons arrive – ‘power without responsibility’
• 3 The challenge of broadcasting
• 4 The long decline begins
• 5 From Wapping to today
• 6 The rise and fall of the local newspaper
• 7 The rise of a fifth estate?
• 8 The futures of newspapers – and journalism
• Bibliography
• Index