Introduction
On February 17, 1643, six months into the English Civil War, the weekly newspaper Mercurius Aulicus (âCourt Mercuryâ) led its front page with a story exposing what it considered to be political corruption. âThe people have admiredâ, it observed, âwhy the remnant at Westminster [that is to say, the Parliamentarians opposed to King Charles I] should delight to sit voting while all the kingdom is involved in bloodâ. The explanation, it declared, was that âall or most members have legislative pensions paid every week out of the common stock of plunder and contributionâ. In other words, King Charlesâs enemies had a financial interest in prolonging the conflict because they were secretly lining their pockets from taxes and war booty. And where did this information come from? An anonymous source â âone, should I name him, you would easily creditâ (Anon, 1643).
Such tales, some true, some false, were common in the press on both sides in the Civil War, and nearly four centuries later we recognize them today as political journalism. The writer, employed by a weekly publication, has unearthed new information; he presents it in forthright terms; he does his best to convince readers of its veracity and he explains what he sees as the implications for public affairs. The language is different and the supporting evidence thin, but this is what we expect a political news reporter to do today. And Mercurius Aulicus and its rivals didnât just provide their readers with news and scandal; they also delivered that other staple of modern political journalism that we call, variously, analysis, commentary or opinion. Indeed, the output of the parliamentary Mercurius Britanicus in particular was often dominated by polemics directed against Aulicus (Raymond, 1996).
Does the output of these Civil War weeklies represent the starting point of political journalism in Britain? Press history is a field where, given the volume and variety of publication at any time, claiming to identify âfirstsâ is usually unwise, but in this case we can say that, while examples can be found in earlier years, political journalism operated in the mid-1640s on a scale and with a vigor not seen before. Public hunger for political information and debate was high â these had, after all, become matters of life and death â while the supply became much more generous. Not only were there frequent events of the highest drama to be recorded and discussed, but the fragmentation of authority had disrupted official censorship, opening up for public debate matters that previously only the foolhardy would have tackled. And importantly, there was money in it, since parties to the struggle were ready to invest in propaganda. It was thus a period of dynamism, energy and, to a degree, freedom for the political journalist. Yet it would be a mistake to imagine that this was the little acorn from which, over the ensuing centuries, the great oak of professional political journalism inexorably grew: the relative freedom of the 1640s, and the ready supply of information about political events, are better seen as historical anomalies â a mere glimpse of what was possible. Political journalism since then has had a halting evolution and has been buffeted and shaped by a great variety of external forces, among them commercial pressures, technological change, corruption, social developments, influences from abroad and the dictates of governments. While it is undoubtedly the case that political journalists have innovated and created, they have as often simply adapted to circumstances.
âPartyâ and opinion journalism
The freedoms of the civil war period began to fade almost as soon as Parliament gained the upper hand in the late 1640s, and the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 brought no relief. Charles II reintroduced state licensing of printing presses â all presses, whether they produced books, pamphlets, song-sheets or newspapers â ostensibly as a means of curbing sedition. Only printers producing approved material received licences and although some unlicensed publications continued to appear, the climate did not favor political journalism of any other kind than recording and praising the actions of the state. The eagerness of governments to preserve this climate, and their conviction that it was their duty to do so, would not diminish until the middle of the 19th century, though the instruments they employed would vary. Licensing was soon replaced as a means of control by taxation: newspapers were subject to a stamp tax, meaning they had to pay to have a special stamp on every sheet of paper, and the fee for this came to be set at levels that would keep newspapers beyond the budget of the ordinary citizen. Since this also had the general effect of making publishing only marginally profitable, governments that felt threatened were often in a position to bring papers to heel by squeezing their revenues (Aspinall, 1949: 16; Boyce et al., 1978: 84). And there was another lever they could pull: a law of libel which in practice permitted the imprisonment of journalists and printers for the mere act of giving offence to authority: the truth or otherwise of a contested article was largely irrelevant (Harling, 2001).
That political journalism survived in such conditions it owed primarily to the phenomenon of âpartyâ â the open contest between Whigs and Tories that persisted through the 18th century. A legacy of the upheavals of the previous century, this marked Britain out from most other European states, where debate was rarely tolerated (Smith, 1979; Starr, 2004). That policy differences and rivalries between parties were publicly acknowledged created a limited space in which journalists could operate â and better still, people on both sides of the divide, including governments, were ready to fund partisan newspapers. So it was, for example, that Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, was able to operate as a political journalist. From 1704 to 1713 he produced The Review, a four-page London paper that appeared three times a week in support of his friend and benefactor, the Tory politician Lord Harley. The Review had three sections: an essay on the affairs of the day, a light-hearted column entitled âAdvice from the Scandalous Clubâ and a few advertisements, mostly for dubious medicines and new books. The emphasis was on opinion, and where news appeared it was normally in the sly, satirical proceedings of the Scandalous Club. It was also in support of Lord Harley, and with his backing, that in 1710 Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliverâs Travels, brought out The Examiner. Swiftâs opening manifesto declared, âI meet with a great variety of papers, neither so correct, so moral or so loyal as they ought to beâ. Bad as they were, he lamented, such publications âyet have their influence upon the generality of readersâ, so he promised to âset people rightâ in their opinions, adding that his âchief businessâ would be âto instruct my fellow-countrymen, and perhaps I may endeavour now and then to divert themâ (Swift, 1710).
Opinion-writing more or less in the style practised by Defoe, Swift and their contemporaries would dominate political journalism for the rest of the 18th century and beyond, indeed practitioners such as Samuel Johnson, John Wilkes and the pseudonymous âJuniusâ stand in a line of continuity with columnists writing for newspapers and news websites today. And although there were celebrated controversies about what journalists could or could not do, we should not imagine that this was a world of constant chafing against the constraints of authority: by and large, editors and commentators accepted the prevailing constraints, and it helped that they were often quietly rewarded for doing so (Aspinall, 1949). Where governments made use of their levers of control it was usually to manage press responses to external events such as the revolutions in America and France. As for the journalists, there were ways in which they could subvert the rules: they used codes and nicknames; they published in verse; they presented criticism in satirical form; they described events while leaving names blank. And, almost always, they published anonymously.
Why, incidentally, do we label this particular form of political discourse âjournalismâ? After all, political debate is as old as human society and, although pamphlets and books on political themes had been printed since the invention of the press in the 15th century, few would class these as journalism. The answer is that convention associates journalism with regularity of publication: in other words with the periodical press, which may appear every day, every week or at some other frequent interval.1 This connection is not merely arbitrary, for regularity of publication imbues its content with a special character for both writer and reader: a pamphlet may be meant to endure but journalism is of the moment, fresh and perishable, with todayâs words superseding what appeared previously and set to be overtaken, in turn, by the edition that follows.
If the line of continuity between the 18th and 21st centuries is clear where political commentary is concerned, the same cannot be said in the field of political news reporting. They called themselves newspapers and boasted of their ability to bring readers up to date, but look for political news âstoriesâ in the earliest London daily paper, the Daily Courant of the 1710s, or in the Gazetteer of the 1750s, or in the Morning Chronicle of 1800 and you are likely to be disappointed. Not only are there are no headlines worthy of the name and little apparent hierarchy of information; the news story form that is familiar today, which involves thrusting the most important elements before the reader bluntly and urgently, is absent. Until the 20th century, in fact, political news in the press had a quite different character because newspapers acted as (to use a modern term) data aggregators. Magpie-like, they lifted paragraphs from other papers and from new books, reproduced official announcements, printed court judgments, reprinted lists of bankruptcies and public appointments, provided stock prices and loyally gave prominence to the court circular. And, in most cases, they were careful not only to identify where this information came from, but also to stress that it belonged to those sources. So, rather than acting as professional, autonomous uncoverers of new facts and presenting those facts in their own language and style, rather than asserting âownershipâ of th...
