The Media and Public Life

A History

John Nerone

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780745660219, 9780745660202
• eBook ISBN: 9780745695938
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

1
The 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...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1: The Printer's Newspaper and the National Public Sphere
• 2: The Editor's Newspaper and the Partisan Public Sphere
• 3: The Commercial Public Sphere
• 4: The Industrial Media and the Culture Industries
• 5: Institutionalization, the Professional Media and the Expert Public Sphere
• 6: The Late Modern Press, the Digital Media, and the Network Public
• Conclusion: Coming to Judgment on Public Intelligence
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement