Journalism

A Critical History

Martin Conboy

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781446224915
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Traditional news values no longer hold: infotainment has the day. Journalism is in a terminal state of decline. Or so some contemporary commentators would argue.

Although there has been a great diversity in format and ownership over time, Conboy demonstrates the surprising continuity of concerns in the history of journalism. Questions of political influence, the impact of advertising, the sensationalisation of news coverage, the ?dumbing down? of the press, the economic motives of newspaper owners - these are themes that emerge repeatedly over time and again today.

In this book, Martin Conboy provides a history of the development of newspapers, periodicals and broadcast journalism which

· enables readers to engage critically with contemporary issues within the news media

· outlines the connections, as well as the distinctions, across historical periods

· spans the introduction of printed news to the arrival of the ?new? news media

· demonstrates how journalism has always been informed by a cultural practices broader and more dynamic than the simple provision of news

By situating journalism in its historical context, this book enables students to more fully understand the wide range of practices which constitute contemporary journalism. As such it will be an essential text for students of journalism and the media.

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The Consequences of Printed News

Beginnings – from Culture to Controversy

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The suitability of print as a technology to disseminate news was not immediately appreciated. The point must be emphasized that although printing was not journalism or even news in itself, it constituted part of the social and economic changes which would create the conditions in which printed news and early versions of journalism could emerge and then flourish. Caxton set up his Westminster Press in 1476 and printing was at first used to reproduce what could be generally considered religious and literary works such as the Bible and the works of Chaucer. The Tudor monarchs were all concerned to maintain their political authority and thereby the integrity and stability of the realm, and this meant controlling the flow of political information. Concerns about the control of this new technology and its consequences for political stability were heightened by vivid memories of the preceding anarchy of the Wars of the Roses (1455–87). It was not until the accession of Henry VIII that the social and political potential of print was beginning to be appreciated as its use spread from arts and literature to the political and religious controversies of the day. In fact, it could be claimed that the Reformation in England constituted the first widespread and sustained debate that was, through the medium of print, made into a public and even a national one because of this linguistic power shift. A few key dates will enable us to chart the development of the Tudor approach to the potential power of printing.

In 1513 the first known surviving news pamphlet was printed and disseminated concerning the Battle of Flodden, Hereafter ensue the trewe encountre or Batayle lately done betwene Englande and Scotlande. This pamphlet also contains a woodcut illustration of troops preparing to fight in the battle and is an astute attempt to bridge its appeal between a literate readership and those whom Watt describes as on the fringes of literacy, enabling them to become involved in the cumulative process of cultural change:

Printed words were disseminated by word of mouth, transforming the culture of the ‘illiterate’, and the oral modes of communication shaped the structure of printed works. The interesting process was not only the spread of literacy and readership, but the complex interweaving of the printed word with existing cultural practices. (Watt, 1991: 8)

This pamphlet was, of course, printed and disseminated by royal authority as much for propaganda as for informational purposes. Heretical printed books, as distinct from the previous manuscript translations, were being imported from 1520 in the wake of the Reformation in Germany, especially the work of Martin Luther which explicitly linked the flaunting of the authority of the Catholic Church in Rome to the printing and dissemination of religious texts in the local language. This use of the vernacular had enormous implications in the development of secular society as it wrested power away from the ancient language of authority, Latin, guarded by religious and political elites, and broadened discussion of religion into the language of the everyday (Anderson, 1986). This was an important moment in the break from religious literacy to political literacy. The Church in England was unable to control the flow of these texts translated from German and into English which were subverting its authority over religious language and thought and turned to the Crown who found that the fear of execution was more effective than the Church’s threat of excommunication in controlling it. Despite the fact that unauthorized printing continued, albeit at a lesser rate, in 1529 the first list of prohibited books was published to reinforce the threat. Those works prohibited included: ‘any book or work, printed or written, which is made, or hereafter shall be made against the faith catholic, or against the holy decrees, laws, and ordinances of holy church, or in reproach, rebuke or slander of the king, his honorable council, or his lords spiritual or temporal’ (Siebert, 1965: 45).

In 1529 and 1530 Henry VIII issued two proclamations which outlawed importing or being in possession of heretical books printed in English on the Continent and the printing of any religious book without approval from the appropriate religious authority. In addition, in 1530 and 1538 proclamations were issued which constituted the earliest attempts at systematizing the licensing of printing. To a large extent, the reactions of the Tudors were retrospective attempts to come to terms with a technology whose power was only emerging incrementally. In 1500 there were only five printers in London and their increase to 35 by 1523 was indicative of the growth of the trade in the Tudor capital. The Royal imperative to protect the stability of the country and the welfare of its people was applied with regard to print throughout the Tudor era, but it was already in conflict with the profitability of printing. Astutely aware of the potential impact of printing on authority, particularly because of events in Germany, Henry VIII’s reforms throughout his reign were widely publicized in the form of printed news pamphlets by loyal supporters. By the time of the 1534 Act of Supremacy the monarch had total control of the state, church and printing and from 1546 there could be executions for the expression in print of ‘erroneous opinions’. These royal proclamations, together with the short chronicles published by men like William Rastell and Richard Grafton in the early to mid-1500s, indicated that news had begun to make its way into print (Woolf, 2001: 91).

Inevitably, the dissemination of printed news was conducted in the vernacular as it formed part of this process of the widening base of people with a stake in the functioning of the economy and the polity. Eisenstein (1979) claims that it was the activity and implications of print itself which provided the impetus for the revolutionary changes such as commodity capitalism and secularism which restructured Western Europe in the Early Modern period. The impact of print in Western Europe at this particular time therefore surpassed the merely technological and had a growing influence on the changes in the structures of political and social authority. Print enabled topical information to be reproduced quickly enough to produce a profit at a time when an increasing number of readers were interested in rapidly evolving political and social events. The shift precipitated by printing was emphasized by a move from letters and literature to politics and religion as the key texts of the era. This immediately posed problems for those in authority which would remain as salient for any form of journalism to this day. In its potential to disrupt closed circles of communication among elite groups and in its ability to act as a rapid conduit for dissenting opinion, print threatened hierarchies, especially religious and monarchic ones, during a period of rapid social change and economic growth. This potential is claimed in its strongest form when Herd elides the role of journalism and the contestation of authority: ‘There has never been a period in our history when authority has genuinely liked the idea of full publicity for all its activities and unchecked criticism of its conduct’ (Herd, 1952: 11).

If the threat of the Reformation spreading from Germany had been the first battle for the English authorities against the onslaught of print, on the European mainland, the Gazetta of Venice was an indicator of the commercial and political anxieties engendered by a danger from a different source, the threat of invasion by the Turkish Empire. This first news-sheet of modern times provided the merchant and political classes of Venice with eagerly anticipated news of the perceived threat of the Turks to the whole of central Europe and the progress of the war being waged against them. They were at first handwritten from about 1536 but later, from about 1570, they made best use of print technology. Their contents were read aloud in public arenas which meant that the contents were written partially with an ear for public performance and that the culture of the written word was more efficiently disseminated through alignment with older oral traditions. In England, with less foreign trade and a more centralized monarchy, developments in print culture and, in particular, its ability to deal with news were slightly slower than elsewhere on the Continent, which would explain how regular news in print arrived in England as late as it did in the early seventeenth century.

The Strategic Incorporation of the Printers

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One of the first alternatives to the plain outlawing of printed matter was the foundation by Royal Charter in 1557 of the Stationers’ Company. This demonstrated a prescient awareness of the potential for a self-interested collection of printers to police their own output and thereby encourage them not to jeopardize their profitable business by falling foul of a higher authority. As with the other better established guilds of the Middle Ages, they were awarded the power to regulate the craft and output of printing from within their membership. In order to effectively self-regulate, they had the powers to grant the rights of property ownership, record and accredit apprenticeships and ensure the trade was kept free from opportunists and work of poor quality. These rights could be enforced through property searches if the members felt it justified. The Charter constituted an enormously influential set of powers over the embryonic printing trade. The political elite felt that these rights fully incorporated the printers into the existing political power structures and demonstrated this by allowing the members of the Company voting rights in London and parliamentary elections. There were not only profits to be made for stationers from their monopoly on printing, they were also quick to exploit the more punitive aspects of their authority in terms of fines for unlicensed printing or sales of printed matter. Records indicate a healthy income from ‘fynes for defautes for pryntynge withoute lycense’ (Clegg, 1997: 15). These violations indicate that there were still financial benefits or matters of belief significant enough for printers to be willing to provoke the wrath of the newly formed Company. The practice of printing was clearly too volatile to be entirely controlled by statute alone and too hybrid in the motivations of printers in this era of ideological turmoil and increased interest in commercial enterprise.

After the rigours of Henry VIII’s pursuit of absolute control over printed matter of all kinds, books, pamphlets, ballads and other scurrilous printed material flourished in an age of religious antagonisms under the early tolerance of first Edward VI and then during the early years of Mary before many printers fled abroad under the restrictions of her later reign to countries with more liberal attitudes to printing freedom. This indicated that such was the appetite and the economic incentive for an increasingly diverse range of printed matter that whenever restrictions were relaxed, the floodgates opened and in a competitive environment the print culture diversified and flourished, developing a whole gamut of possibilities for printers, publishers and writers. Printers, non-conformists and occasional Members of Parliament all drove the increasing curiosity over current news and opinion. The dissemination of such material was located in a complex position somewhere between profit, conviction and ambition. It seems likely that no one at this time really objected to some form of control in principle, as patterns of social deference still meant that there was a broad acceptance that there must be some limitation on the trade in opinion, but most objected to somebody else having final authorization over the acceptability of their own printed output in practice. In this way, printing freedom developed pragmatically in its relationship to authority.

In 1559, the London High Commission had been founded as the principle means by which Elizabeth’s regime expected to suppress opposition to her religious settlement and by now this meant printed opposition as well. It was partially because of the failure of this to adequately deal with the flow of material that the Stationers’ Company was given more authority. From 23 June 1586, the first formal licensing system established by the Star Chamber decree was to be the most thorough articulation of control and laid the foundation for the subsequent regulation of printing until 1637 when it collapsed along with the crumbling authority of Charles I. Under the terms of the Decree, further restrictions were placed on the numbers of printers and apprentices. London and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge were the only centres allowed printing presses and employment was restricted to members of the Company and their apprentices. This meant that Elizabeth’s solution to the flow of unlicensed material was a return to the severity of Henry VIII’s time, with the Stationers’ Company more fully and formally charged with the control of the press. Enlightened self-interest backed up by the weight of the Crown epitomized the practices of the Stationers’ Company. In their zeal to control the flow of unauthorized printed material and in their deployment of their increased powers of search and seizure, the Stationers’ Company blended protection of their own privileges and the imposition of the expectations of the governing classes. Siebert has characterized this political delegation in the following way: ‘The skillful use of the corporate organization of printers and publishers in the suppression and control of undesirable printing has long been considered a masterstroke of Elizabethan politics’ (1965: 64).

Much of this pragmatism was directed by the Tudor monarchs towards the suppression of opposition to their religious reforms, as they recognized the potential of printing to stabilize their rule and the powerful incorporative effect of offering the printers a privileged position within the output of the presses. The Stationers’ Company control must have been deemed more successful than the ultimate sanction of execution which the Crown reserved for itself, since this was only resorted to once in this century when the Catholic William Carter was hanged, drawn and quartered in 1584 for ‘the printinge of Lewde pamphlettes’. A variety of punishments was used in addition to threats of execution or excommunication which included pillory, removal of ears, imprisonment, branding and the removal in perpetuity of writing or printing materials. In addition, printers such as Bastwick, Burton and Prynne were prosecuted for the very malleable offence of seditious libel. Yet in an expanding market, the authority of the Stationers’ Company was undermined by the gradual increase in apprentice printers with no prospect of work in the trade once they had served their time. This meant that they were drawn by economic necessity to the printing of illicit material for which there was always a ready market and a good profit margin. This perspective of the trade was complemented by responses from readers. As the culture of print expanded its reach, it has been eloquently described as ‘the low rumble of the demand of the people to see, hear and to know was gathering momentum’ (Siebert, 1965: 87).

In the early history of printing, it was not facts or even rumour but the powerful assertion of informed political opinion which drove the production of the most incendiary materials of the age, the political pamphlets, and it was these which preceded the development of regular printed news. There were always those willing to make a point or a profit by printing such dissonant opinion. In 1579, John Stubbe wrote, and Singleton the printer produced, a pamphlet entitled: The Discourie of a Gaping Gulf Whereinto England is like to be swallowed by another French marriage; if the Lord forbid not the banes, by letting her Maiestie see the sin and punishment thereof. This was written in reaction to the rumour that Elizabeth I had offered herself in marriage to the Duc d’Anjou, the brother of the King of France, Henry III, in order to delay the annexation of the Netherlands by Spain. Stubb was tried and imprisoned but despite the Queen’s desire that he should be executed for this ‘lewde and seditious book’, he was condemned to the lesser punishment of having his right hand severed.

The restrictions imposed by the Star Chamber decree merely gave rise to secret presses and they provided the liveliest trade on the streets of London in the selling of occasional, and of course illegal, pamphlets. This had its most striking impact in the publication of the Martin Marprelate tracts which argued from a Puritan perspective for the introduction of an episcopal Church government. The printing press which the tracts were printed on was smuggled all around the country to avoid detection, indicating the limitations of a London-based system of licensing and the levels of support for Puritan opposition within the printing community. It stands as a prominent early example of belief preceding profit in the printing trade. The Martin Marprelate tracts combined satire with serious theological arguments and drew in a larger readership for these discussions, popularizing religious debate to an extent not seen before in England. They are significant in the history of journalism because of the radical breaching of the threshold of linguistic deference: ‘By attacking the bishops in language hitherto used only for the personal, Martin Marprelate decoupled the decorum of language from the decorum of subject’ (Levy, 1999: 33). It was often to be journalism’s ability to use language in ways which innovated and destabilized convention which lent it much of its ability to retain a freshness and a connection to the patterns of private speech of its audience.

Political and Economic Imperatives

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Another development facilitated by printing and driven by the appetite for news and opinion in printed form was the practice of news writers disseminating their reports on Parliament, thus destabilizing the privileges of parliamentary confidentiality. Siebert records that in 1589 the Speaker of the House of Commons warned members that: ‘Speeches used in this House by the Members of the same be not any of them made or used as Table-talk, or in any wise delivered in notes of writing to any person or persons whatsoever not being Members of this House’ (1965: 103). Anxieties relating to the political and religious stability of the country sometimes took subtle forms and influenced the monarch’s view of what should be authorized in print and what should not. From 1578, Watkyns and Roberts received a licence to print almanacs after Elizabeth’s government became concerned about the destabilizing potential of prognostications of her imminent death.

Towards the end of the sixteenth century, England was becoming a more dynamic economic nation and more prominent on the world stage. Its acquisition of colonies and the rise of England as a maritime power after the victory over the Spanish in 1588 led to an increase in commodity wealth in England and the corresponding rise of a commercial class to rival the landed aristocracy. The implications of the trade in news in early capitalism were complex and began only slowly to make themselves apparent in first reinforcing and then breaking open social patterns of communication:

On the one hand this capitalism stabilized the power structure of a society organized in estates, and on the other hand, it unleashed the very elements within which this power structure would one day dissolve. We are speaking of the elements of the new commercial relationships: the traffic in commodities and news created by early capitalist long distance trade. (Habermas, 1992: 15)

These merchants depended on the provision of regular and reliable information. News was increasingly being traded as a commodity in lubrication of other commodities. This prompted an increased demand for all sorts of news, but because of the restrictions imposed through the Stationers’ Company, it was not yet able to be channelled through print media. The means of transmitting this information was in the handwritten newsletters of the day. The writers of these letters were not yet referred to as journalists and their wares were far from regular. They were called intelligencers and the most prominent were John Chamberlain, John Pory, William Locke, Rev Larkin and Rev Mead. Many had started providing information services for particular families who paid them well but the trade was so much in demand and so lucrative that they soon became fully professional, able to live off their intelligence distribution and employing scriveners to copy material for distribution to a widening clientele. In addition to their written output, these writers were also highly priz...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Journalism: History and Discourse
• 1 The Consequences of Printed News
• 2 Journalism as Miscellany: Newsbooks and Mercuries
• 3 Periodicals and the Formation of the Bourgeois Public Sphere
• 4 Profit, Politics and the Public
• 5 Radical Journalism: Its Rise and Incorporation
• 6 The Discourse of the Fourth Estate
• 7 Women’s Journalism from Magazines to Mainstream
• 8 Popular and Consumer Periodicals
• 9 From New Journalism to the Web
• 10 Broadcast Technology and Journalism
• 11 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index