The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself

by Andrew Pettegree

  Partly this professional warfare was the consequence of a crowded market. London papers drew very largely on the same sources of information for the bulk of their copy, made up of news from abroad. The search for an original angle naturally gave occasion for some artful embroidery. This inevitably caused readers some perplexity, particularly if they read the same report in different places. As Joseph Addison expressed it, with characteristic elegance, in his Spectator:

  All of them receive the same advices from abroad, and very often in the same words; but their way of cooking it is so different, that there is no citizen, who had an eye to the public good, that can leave the coffee-house with peace of mind, before he has given every one of them a reading.40

  Addison reproved the dangers of journalistic licence; but this largely commercial pressure to embroider news was greatly compounded by anxieties that news was deliberately framed to a partisan agenda. This, the scourge of opinion, was a concern that extended far beyond the crowded London market.

  12.4 An attack on The London Gazette. The author may not have reflected that such an attack on the English paper of record did nothing to enhance the credibility of the medium as a whole.

  Here it is important to remember the historical roots of the newspapers in the manuscript newsletters: a form of news reporting that valued unadorned fact almost to a fault. Those who subscribed to the avvisi and their print successors valued the total separation of news from the more discursive, analytical and frankly polemical style of news pamphlets. The fear that the serial news publications might be polluted by this parallel strand of news reporting was widespread and increasing in the early eighteenth century. The publication of what were in effect serial polemics in the English Civil War was an extreme case. But even the German newspapers could not be entirely oblivious to the loyalties of their local readership in times of war. By the early decades of the eighteenth century English newspapers were openly abusing each other for their partisan loyalties, as much as their inaccuracies. Even so, newspapers still by and large fought shy of explicit attempts to direct their readers’ opinions. The first leading article or editorial in a German newspaper was published in Hamburg in 1687, but this proved to be an aberration: a product of a market where competing serials encouraged experimentation to win readers.41 More typical was the high-minded declaration with which the editor of The Daily Courant addressed his readers in the first issue in 1702:

  He will quote the foreign papers from whence ‘tis taken, and the public, seeing from what country a piece of news comes with the allowance of that government, may be better able to judge of the credibility and fairness of the relation. Nor will he take upon him to give any comments or conjectures of his own, but will relate only matter of fact; supposing other people to have sense enough to make reflections for themselves.42

  This was all well and good, but how could the reader be certain of this? Even if the proprietor held to this worthy intention, how could the reader be assured that the papers would not be suborned by politicians with their own agendas?

  The Heavy Hand of Power

  From the first days of print Europe's rulers had recognised the need to regulate the new industry. The religious conflicts of the Reformation brought a new sensitivity to the power of the printed word, but magistrates also wished to control any debate on public policy that seemed to infringe their prerogatives. Systems of control evolved very rapidly in the course of the sixteenth century. Both Protestant and Catholic regimes practised censorship, though with a rather different emphasis. In Catholic countries it became the norm, following the example of Rome, to issue a comprehensive list or ‘index’ of forbidden books and authors. In Protestant jurisdictions it was more usual to require the examination of any text to be published locally before it was sent to the printer.

  It was this second system that provided the model for the regulation of news publications. But whereas it could be applied with reasonable success to the production of books and pamphlets, such a system was far less suited to monitoring serials. Those nominated to undertake pre-publication examination of texts were generally busy men. Publishers complained of long delays and oppressive fees even for relatively uncontroversial books. When it came to news serials, which had to be printed on a particular day of the week, any delay was unconscionable. Pre-publication censorship seldom worked well in practice.

  In general, then, most places where newspapers were established relied on a third scheme of control: the punishment, after publication, of anyone who printed anything the authorities deemed to be offensive. These interventions were all the more effective for being infrequent. Newspaper publishers knew that they put their livelihoods at risk with every issue. Where printers might risk a cheeky pamphlet, particularly if it could be sent out under the cloak of anonymity, this option was simply not available to publishers of newspapers. Their address had to feature prominently on every issue, so that subscribers could know where to send payments, and drop-in customers could find their shop.

  So newspapers were very careful to avoid giving offence. As so often, self-censorship was far more effective than any system of regulation. The pressure to conform was particularly intense where any newspaper held a local monopoly; this applied to most parts of Europe where papers were published. In France the Gazette was an unapologetic cheerleader for royal power, but this was only the most extreme example of a general phenomenon. In Italy, newspaper proprietors in Milan and Piedmont were happy to establish their papers in the government printing house, in the case of Piedmont with a government pension for the publisher.43 Even in the Dutch Republic, famed as a haven of toleration, the exuberant cacophony of mid-century had been quietly suppressed by 1690. Now each city had a single paper enjoying a lucrative monopoly.

  It was generally understood that papers would abstain from comment on matters of political sensitivity; this explains the long-standing prejudice against the publication of domestic political news. But sometimes political pressures went beyond this, and the reporting of foreign news had to be slanted to conform to the policy priorities of the local power. Even the most enthusiastic defender of a wider readership for newspapers, Kaspar Stieler, believed that they should never publish anything that might impugn their sovereign's reputation. ‘A publisher has to remember who he is and where he lives, who his lord and master is.’44 If the authorities required it, the newspapers should be willing to circulate news they knew to be false. No wonder Stieler urged the reader to show a sharp critical sense, paying close attention to the origin of a report, and whether it came from a Protestant or Catholic locality.

  None were more aware of the difficulties of a compromised, tainted source than the news men themselves. Newspaper editors returned repeatedly to the theme, promising only the best impartial news. ‘In one thing,’ claimed Théophraste Renaudot in the Paris Gazette, ‘I yield not to anyone, in the search for truth.’ The London Courant of 1688 promised to write ‘with the integrity of an unbiased historian to do justice to all parties, in representing things as they shall really happen’.45

  Nowhere were these truth claims more insistently repeated, and more tenaciously challenged, than in London, home to the most robustly contentious press of the era. But the hope that a less stringently regulated market would promote a civil discourse of truth-telling went unrequited, as it would a century later in revolutionary France.46 The London papers may have been free of the oppressive burdens that bore down on a single paper in a monopoly market; but they were not, for all that, free of political pressure. Rather, English statesmen swiftly realised that to make their case they needed to have tame papers. Newspapers were quickly identified as Whig or Tory; leading writers accepted pensions to write in the party interest. In 1726 The Craftsman was set up by the Tory Lord Bolingbroke explicitly to mobilise political opinion against the Walpole administration. Robert Walpole responded sensibly enough by marshalling his own press. In his last decade as prime minister he controlled five papers, and paid out a total of £50,000 –
a quite enormous sum – to compliant news men.47

  What price a free press? Of what value the insistent claim of devotion to the unvarnished truth? As the newspaper passed the end of its first century, the serial press presented an awkward paradox. The more the newspapers extended their readership and their political influence, the less they were trusted. It was a difficult and complex legacy to carry into the age of Enlightenment.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Age of the Journal

  THE debate about truth represented a crisis of authority for the reporting of news. With the development of a more adversarial political culture, news reporting seemed in some ways to have regressed. The search for facts came to be smothered in a fog of opinion, and the abuse and manipulation that went with factious politics. Politics had polluted the news. This, of course, is a problem that would never truly be resolved. The need for news prints also to be agents of persuasion would continue to challenge the critical faculties of readers into the modern age. But the first hints of a way forward emerged in the eighteenth century in a new form of periodical publication quite distinct from the noisy and insistent newspaper press. This would be the age of the journal.

  The eighteenth century witnessed a spectacular rise in the periodical press. As the century wore on, newspapers would comprise only a small portion of this. Instead, the new century saw the establishment of a large number of other publications presented in serial form for a regular subscribing readership: literary, cultural, scientific and learned journals circulating on a weekly or monthly basis. The new periodicals proved to be enormously popular. This was an era of rising prosperity, and rising literacy. The expansion of professional elites was accompanied by a growth in confidence in scientific and professional expertise which the new periodicals were able to exploit by enrolling these professional groups as both writers and subscribers. These publications, in contrast to the newspapers, would draw on traditional founts of authority, expert writers and discursive analysis. This was also a period that witnessed the emergence of a bourgeoisie with larger amounts of disposal income.1 These new members of an increasingly vibrant consumer society had more money for polite diversions: literature, music, the theatre. But they were also amenable to guidance as they took their first cautious steps into society: those new to refined pursuits welcomed help in matters of taste and fashion.

  For publishers, the development of a market for journals was also to be welcomed. The avoidance of direct comment on contemporary events minimised the risk of official disapproval, though many more journals espoused such a policy than strictly adhered to it. They certainly regarded high society, and the fashionable doings of the great, as a subject of obsessive interest. What was in vogue became the business of the journals; and the social elite, and their enterprises, were often very much à la mode.

  The rise of the journal was important both as a social phenomenon and for its impact on the news market. The growth of journals with their longer articles and more personal tone encouraged the development of a journalistic tradition that had so far eluded news reporting. In fact, many of the critical and stylistic features that we regard as inherent in journalism emerge first in these eighteenth-century journals. They gave the public what they had so far missed in the newspapers, with their worthy recitations of battles and court levées. Journals offered criticism, taste and judgement, but in a lighter tone than the hectoring political review papers. They spoke directly to their audience; they took time to explain and develop an argument. They were funny and diverting. Most of all they offered something entirely new to an audience that had not previously experienced anything like the sort of recreational miscellany presented in the eighteenth-century ‘spectators’: a distinctive voice that would return to their drawing rooms week after week, bringing both familiar characters and new fashions. It was a beguiling, intoxicating mixture.

  Tools of Enlightenment

  In 1665 there appeared in the highly controlled French market a wholly new periodical to set alongside the venerable Gazette: the Journal des sçavans. This was a major innovation in the European book trade: a journal devoted primarily to discoveries in the arts and sciences, with some additional notification, for legal customers, of decisions taken by the civil and ecclesiastical courts. It was set to appear weekly, on the grounds that novelties lost their lustre if held back for a monthly or annual publication. But pagination was continuous through the year's issues, indicating that they were intended to be bound up together at the end of the year. The volume was also provided with a full scholarly apparatus: tables, notes, index and cumulative bibliography. Like the Gazette, this was to be a privileged enterprise, enjoying a protected monopoly in this section of the market. And it was expected to be lucrative. For the French intellectual community the Journal des sçavans would be both an inspiration and an essential prop, a means to keep abreast of a vast literature that they could not hope to traverse alone.

  13.1 The Journal des sçavans.

  The Journal des sçavans provided the prototype of a new scholarly journal that would prove enormously influential.2 Its impact was most immediately felt across the Channel in London. Here within a few months a similar venture was established, the Philosophical Transactions. As its name would suggest, this was more earnestly scientific. Its editors were closely connected to the recently founded Royal Society, whose fellows provided a large proportion of its articles.3 But the journal was not formally under the Society's control, a circumstance that led to some difficulty when the two branches of the Society, based in London and Oxford, fell out and used the pages of the Transactions to impugn each other's scholarly credentials. Just as the Journal des sçavans was published in French, the articles in the Philosophical Transactions were published in English. This was far from a matter of course. Educated men were expected to be Latinate, and Latin was still the language of international scientific discourse. In fact, scholars were soon complaining that the retreat from Latin made their life more difficult, as they now had to master so many languages. But the first editor of the Transactions, Henry Oldenburg, was adamant that it should be so: ‘Because they are intended to be for the benefit of such Englishmen as are drawn to curious things, yet perhaps do not know Latin.’4 Here the Society was making a statement of importance for the future of European culture. It proposed the vernacular as a language of erudition, notwithstanding that this went against all the established traditions of European culture, letters, and the social hierarchy represented by a good education. It was a significant symbolic step in the process of liberation from the long shadow of the humanist tradition.

  The Philosophical Transactions was nevertheless a more elitist venture than the Journal des sçavans. The three hundred copies printed were more than enough for the fellows, and the Society made little attempt to spread its reach beyond the circle of experts. Both periodicals, however, were self-consciously a part of the international community of learning and discovery: the Republic of Letters celebrated in Pierre Bayle's monumental and long-running review journal, Nouvelles de la république des lettres (1684–1718). The first issue of the Philosophical Transactions contained one article contributed from France, and another from Italy; subsequent numbers frequently carried articles translated from the Journal des sçavans.

  The scientific journals also profited from the widespread scholarly concern to organise knowledge into large encyclopaedic publications, many published in parts. The journal was now conceived in much the same way, as a tool of reference to be archived and searched. Eighteenth-century readers were increasingly prone to treat their newspapers in precisely this way.5 A journal, or paper, would have a double value: as a topical information sheet, and as an incremental archive of knowledge. It was a knowledge bank in which science played an increasingly important role.

  The Philosophical Transactions and Journal des sçavans paved the way for a growing market in serious specialist journals, which would eventually cover a large range of topics. This would be one of the most buoyant an
d lucrative areas of the eighteenth-century book market. It would prove particularly important in France, where the market for news and current affairs publications was so constrained by the strictly enforced monopoly of the Gazette.6 Around two hundred journals made their appearance there before the end of the seventeenth century. Between 1700 and the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 the figure was in excess of eight hundred. This was the age of specialist journals: among the most important were the prestigious Journal économique (1751–72), the Observations de la physique (1752–1823) and the Journal de médecine (1754–93). The journals established in this mid-century period were particularly successful, as these long-lived ventures bear witness: of 115 periodicals established between 1750 and 1759, 63 lasted a year and 21 ten years or more. Other journals served communities of interest in medicine, agriculture, commerce, music and art.