Search

Historians of Partition have focused upon the bitterly polarized yet vibrant public sphere of the last days of the British Raj, wherein newspapers representing Congress, Muslim League and Akali opinion vied for influence through increasingly hostile propaganda targeted at the 'other/s'. Such studies' focus on ideological battles and propaganda results in relatively less attention being given to what became of these papers once the British departed and the parties these papers espoused or opposed captured power. This paper will seek to revisit such assumptions by analyzing the trials and tribulations of the significant newspaper houses unfortunate enough to be located on the geographical frontlines of Partition and in major centres of communal conflagration. Through such analyses, I will seek to show that it was a combination of initial mob action, reinforced often by state repression and even popular reproach, that forced newspapers viewed as belonging to the 'other' party to move to safer (and greener) pastures. In the process, late-colonial India's once pluralist public sphere came to be partitioned into sections that broadly conformed to the ideologies that the respective Dominions' new rulers espoused. While aligning newspapers with the majoritarian public opinion, this Partition occasioned shifts of personnel and presses that would fundamentally alter the postcolonial press industry in West and East Pakistan, and to a lesser extent, in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thomas Smits's first book has received a good deal of well-deserved attention. In his study of reporting on the Crimean War Smits argues that we need to consider newspaper illustrations as composite texts rather than, as too often happens, analyze them without regard to their accompanying captions or story. By revealing what I Cassell's i purchased, what it changed, and what it did not choose to buy Smits's study offers important insight into how the paper envisioned and sought to create a British story about the war. [Extracted from the article]

This study examines local government reporting in the English provincial press from 1900 to 1950. It has two main findings—firstly, that the press moved from verbatim council reports in the early part of the century to selective news stories that were designed to maximise news values and commercial revenues. City council meeting reports were re-shaped, re-focused and re-formulated to resemble news stories, often featuring on the front pages. They conformed to journalistic news values such as drama, conflict and personalities and provide evidence of a move to a more news-driven approach to local government reporting. The paper also demonstrates the often-invisible commercial links between some elected representatives and the local press, on whose boards of management they sat. Overall, it provides a challenge to the conventional wisdom that the provincial press interest in municipal issues declined in the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1917, after the United States joined the war in Europe and was no longer politically neutral, on the American front, the German ethnic press became a target for censors and critics. The general assumption was that German language papers bred disloyalty among German immigrant communities and posed a threat to the United States' war efforts. This study explores the editorial and political views of the German-language press during the summer of 1917 by assessing the tone of a sample of German language mainstream newspapers during July 1, 1917 through September 30, 1917. The findings show that the overall coverage was less loyal to Imperial Germany than had been argued by U.S. officials and censors. In an effort to assimilate, German immigrant newspapers widely published the U.S. government's official position, showed support for the American war effort, and focused on cultural affairs of the immigrant community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers whether there was a national press before and during the Second World War. After considering the terms used by historians to describe the UK national press, and how it is defined, it looks at aspects of the industry that made it appear national and those which did not. The question of just how national the press was between 1939 and 1945 is then addressed, followed by some concluding comments. It argues that the wartime press was characterised by a high degree of uniformity in terms of organisation, co-operation and content, throwing into relief the more diffuse nature of the industry before and after. The idea of the national press downplays the extent to which newspapers varied considerably in readership, geographical reach, political and social significance. It obscures the important role of the provincial press, abstracting mass circulation London daily morning papers, from their place within an evolving network of mass communications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The title of this paper refers to both the personality and work of two Spaniards, who, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, had to abandon their homeland fleeing from the absolutism of King Ferdinand VII (1784–1833). The exile of the Spanish liberal writers started in 1814 and was characterized by two major milestones: the first between 1814 and 1820, where Great Britain was the main destination; and a second wave which began in 1823 and ended in 1833, wherein France gained prominence as a reception centre. Although the journalistic activities that were both undertaken in Paris were less relevant than those carried out by other writers in London, the truth is that with their reading, we can better understand the study of this exile journalism and the subsequent liberal journalism that was developed in Spain when the conditions allowed it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the case of the first Irish journalist to be imprisoned for refusing to reveal his sources. In his capacity as political correspondent with the Irish Press, Joseph Dennigan (1910–1950) was called as a witness in a case in December 1933 against a member of the ‘Blueshirts’, a quasi-fascist organisation. Dennigan declined to identify the official sources who he consulted in writing an article about the prohibition of the organisation. The decision to impose a one-month sentence on the journalist generated considerable political reaction and extensive coverage in the Irish and international press. Drawing on Dennigan papers, this article examines the contempt case and also issues that arise from this particular episode, specifically government transition and politician-source relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1976 David Murphy wrote his critique of the role of the UK regional press in local politics—The Silent Watchdog: The Press in Local Politics. Through the next two decades, local 'papers of record' attempted to report on the activities and decisions of their local councils regularly and diligently but the decline of the regional press in the twenty-first century has rendered Murphy's critique obsolete. This article will look at what was expected of local journalism in the 1970s. It will show what was delivered until the twenty-first century and then look at how local press coverage of local government has declined, raising the scenario of a 'local democratic deficit'1 whereby local politics in some communities receives little direct coverage, creating a danger of a disconnect between local government and local communities caused by the abandonment of its former role by the regional press. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Liverpool can boast one of the earliest newspapers in the north of England. Then, in the nineteenth century, as trade and population soared, the 'Second City of Empire' was served by the most extensive and diverse newspaper press in England outside London. However, the twentieth century saw the Liverpool press become a virtual monopoly by one newspaper group. Today, just the Liverpool Echo survives. The history of the Liverpool newspaper press was not simply a reflection of the rise and fall of Liverpool as a centre of trade. Trade was a key enabler for growth but the subsequent decline was largely due to commercial factors within the wider press industry. In between, a continually innovative press demonstrated how diversity could work to everyone's advantage. Liverpool's experiences and achievements are relevant today in a world where the press is often much less diverse than its readership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The title of this paper refers to both the personality and work of the Spaniards who, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, had to abandon their homeland fleeing from the absolutism of King Ferdinand VII (1784–1833), and the inhabitants of the Spanish colonies in the New World, the forerunners of the struggles for independence in their respective countries. Both ended up settling in London, a city that served not only as a refuge but also as a place from which to disseminate their slogans in favour of freedom. Three areas are discussed: the publications of liberal Spanish exiles in London in the early nineteenth century, the interaction between Spanish and (Latin) American exiles and the role of women in this endeavour and in the cause of liberalism in general. The London press shaped this exile journalism and the subsequent liberal journalism in Spain when the extreme censorship from which these exiled journalists had fled was finally lifted. We believe that this global approach offers an original perspective from which to highlight the role of women, with a view to filling the traditional historiographical lacuna in this regard. To this end, we have employed recent relevant literature and primary sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Press censorship was introduced in both Britain and Ireland at the start of World War I. As a more radical form of nationalism rapidly gained popularity in Ireland following the 1916 Rising the censorship was extended beyond the duration of the war. The censorship was mainly deployed to restrict the reporting of the more militant pronouncements of Irish republicans. This article explores how the censorship impacted on provincial newspapers, which constituted the greater part of the Irish print media. It specifically examines the censorship framework and considers if it was applied in an impartial and even-handed manner. It also outlines the cases of those provincial newspapers that were either suppressed or were subjected to attacks by Crown forces that resulted in prolonged closure. Finally, this article provides a broad assessment of the effectiveness of press censorship in Ireland during this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the formal Anglo-Irish union ended, Tim Healy, Irish nationalist politician turned Free State Governor-General, and Lord Beaverbrook, politician and press baron, entered their second decade of friendship. Whereas existing scholarship privileges the place of this Beaverbrook-Healy nexus in pre-independence high politics, this article uses correspondence preserved in the Beaverbrook papers to rectify neglect of the post-1922 era and reintegrate the relationship into Anglo-Irish and British media history. The article demonstrates how this enduring informal connection functioned as a vital forum for the exchange of material relating to British and Irish affairs and examines its influence on news content. Tracing the construction of individual stories and overall editorial lines, this case study also facilitates a broader re-evaluation of the process of content production and, by analysing feedback relayed in the letters, provides fresh insight into the place of the British press in the new Irish Free State. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rather than focusing on the printing scene in Calcutta, already well researched and documented, both Gupta and Joshi are particularly interested in the concept of the "Mofussil". These two excellent and informative books both offer a wealth of granular and hard-researched detail on the spread of print in India in the nineteenth century and they both contribute importantly to our understanding of a growing public and political sphere in India in this period. Joshi says it is sometimes hard to know if a series of issues of a newspaper have just disintegrated and disappeared, or if the newspaper was in fact censored by the government during that period, so little has survived in terms of office logs or day books for these the presses. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines the changing journalistic norms and roles in terms of mobile and sedentary news work at the end of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The analysis draws on the research into the small everyday tools of bureaucracy and science. The focus is on the quill, the scissors and paste pot, the body of the reporter and the computer. Journalistic neutrality and truth seem at any given time to be defined in line with the practices made possible by the available tools. A change in tools makes new practices possible, meaning that the norms have to be redefined. Journalism was once synonymous with mobile reporters reporting on events they themselves witnessed. Journalism today, however, is often sedentary copy-and-paste work, much resembling the scissors-and-paste journalism of the nineteenth century. Comparison reveals that such transmission of texts and images produced by someone else always runs the risk of reproducing the voices of the elites. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Little is known about the relationship between the anticolonial movement in Cyprus and the role of the Greek Cypriot press. This paper aims to fill a small gap by presenting the findings of a study dealing with the Liberation Movement of Cyprus (EOKA—the National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters) and how it was depicted through the Greek Cypriot press. The period under study is 1957-1960, during which the EOKA movement was active. This study investigates the positions of three leading Greek Cypriot newspapers of that period and aims to present the positions of each newspaper at the level of policy towards the liberation movement. Findings suggest that the Greek Cypriot press under the colonial regime presented the liberation and the ‘Enosis’ (unification) movement more in its news-articles-reports and less in opinion articles and commentaries, while journalists were reluctant to take sides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The popular press is often seen as the 'voice of the people'. However, an intensive examination of the Daily Mirror, Daily Mail and Daily Express during the Second World War demonstrates some problems with this claim. In fact, the wartime popular press was uninterested in popular political movements, notably the Common Wealth Party, which had a string of by-election successes in the second half of the war. They only took notice of the organisation after it was electorally successful, and even then, its focus was less on its popular support than on the political elites within the party. This paper discusses the Common Wealth Party's relationship with the press and the implications this has for our understanding of the way non-mainstream political parties were represented in the wartime popular press. It adds to current scholarship by presenting the first detailed discussion of the Common Wealth Party's coverage in the British press, and widens the debate on the role of the press during the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Newspaper reports of actual or suspected infanticide were by no means unusual in early twentieth-century England, yet few of these ever resulted in conviction on the capital charge. This article traces the ways in which both local and national newspapers reported on one of the rare cases which a woman was sentenced to death for the murder of her baby: the 1909 trial of Alice Cleaver at the Central Criminal Court. Despite clear evidence of her guilt, newspapers focused instead on the ways in which the defendant had conformed to ideas about respectable femininity, and were united in depicting Cleaver as deserving of judicial and public sympathy. Comparing press reports of the trial with unpublished Home Office papers also reveals the deliberate silence of the press on matters which conflicted with the ‘standard’ representation of infanticide cases—including the fact that Cleaver had a learning disability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The enormous changes wrought in the British newspaper industry during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought about a revolution in newspaper reading habits, financing and influence, all aspects of which have been well documented by historians of the press. But what of the contributor, particularly the freelance whose millions of words formed, mostly anonymously, the content of the new mass market press? How did writers negotiate changes in the literary marketplace during this time as editors demanded more ‘news’ and less in the way of whimsical paragraphing, and sketches, the traditional newspaper output of the professional man, or woman, of letters? Through the study of memoirs, correspondence and the fictional output of contributors to the press during this time, it is possible to discern the often fraught relations between writers and their most lucrative market. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In a fascinating article, Peter Sinnema points to the prominent role that (illustrated) newspapers play in the work of Jules Verne (1828-1905).[10] In I Around the World in Eighty Days i (1873), Phileas Fogg reads the I Illustrated London News i all over the globe. Let me start by expressing my sincere gratitude to the participants of this roundtable discussion. As far as the digital turn in media history is concerned, my colleague Melvin Wevers, the I Living with Machines i project, and the I impresso i project apply sophisticated digital methods to analyze the I mer à boire i of digitized newspaper collections.[20] As far as the illustrated press is concerned, there is (luckily) still much work to be done. The main aim of my book was to chart the transnational shape of the visual news culture: to prove that Van Gogh and Yoshiiku could not only see the same illustrations but also understand them within the same context. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines how the 1940s Lisbon Flower Exhibitions and their impact on the press served the propaganda of the Portuguese dictatorship as they fostered and disseminated a positive image of the government's policies and competencies. The propaganda used the garden culture to fabricate an idea of national identity, bestowing Portugal as a modern and culturally elevated regime. Based on archive files and press clippings, this research demonstrates that constructing the concept of 'national flowers' was used to fuel the pride of nationalistic feelings according to the regime's policy. However, the investigation also revealed an inconsistency between narrative and practice in designing and applying this concept, as exotic or 'foreign' plants continued to appear side by side with the native ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In early nineteenth-century German-speaking Europe, the press was a key cultural forum, in which emotions were discussed in public through newly emerging journalistic practices and discourses. The era of educational reforms created debates about the right kinds of means of cultivating the human. One of the key concepts of these debates was the concept of 'education of the heart' (Bildung des Herzens). The searchable collections of German-language newspapers and periodicals, such as the ANNO and digiPress repositories provided by the Austrian National Library and Bavarian State Library, open up new vistas of exploring the material across regional borders and established categories and genres, which provides new insight into the ways in which the press shaped ideas of and discourses surrounding the education of emotions in German-speaking Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The phenomenon of letters to newspapers developed into a nationwide and pervasive culture of local letters in the mid-1800s Finnish-language press. A characteristic feature of this culture was that the readers' letters published in the press were written in the names of local communities. Thus, the writer of the letter claimed to represent the entire local community. This interaction between different locations via the press transformed local into societal and societal into local. The culture of local letters had decisive influence on the development of Finnish society, nationalism and civic society in the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, while tracing the relationship of the press in princely state of Jammu and Kashmir state with politics and religion, tries to locate the origins of journalism as a distinct field. It fills a major gap in the South Asian media scholarship that has for long ignored the media cultures of the princely states, which covered two-fifth of the territory and possessed a quarter of the population of what was simply referred to as India. The article attempts to map and recognize socio-political actors that have contributed to the growth of the press while tracing their relationship with the princely politics, indigenous politico-religious movements, and the British colonial state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between journalists and the Irish rebellion of Easter 1916 is a complex one. While the Rising was led in large part by a miscellany of poets, editors and journalists (many of whom feature prominently in the Rising’s historiography) many lesser-known journalists acted as planners and participants in the insurrection. As well as assessing the contribution of these lesser-known journalists to the events of 1916 and the Rising’s impact on journalistic life in Dublin, it explores how a representative organisation—the Irish Journalists’ Association—acted as a cover for the clandestine insurgent-related activities of many journalists. It finds that the IJA played a key role in facilitating the expression of radical views by this cohort of journalists who could not express their radicalism through their everyday posts on the mainstream media and, by so doing, it played a key, though hitherto unacknowledged, role in the events of Easter 1916. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses how D-Day and its aftermath were reported in the British press. It focusses on the logistical operation that shaped the news flow from the front line back to the Ministry of Information headquarters at Senate House, London, and out again to British newspaper readers, and explores the extent and range of news reporting that this made possible. It argues that the ways in which the news operation surrounding the D-Day invasion was organised and pursued can best be described as a mutually sustaining collaboration between the military on the one hand and the British media, including the press, on the other. Far from being an independent 'Fourth Estate', when it came to D-Day and the Normandy invasion the British newspaper press was--and absolutely considered itself to be --another weapon of war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During World War II the Portuguese press was under strict control of the dictatorship regime that ruled in the country. While censorship was given the task of preventing many news pieces from reaching the public, newspapers were also forced to give visibility to all propaganda events organized by the regime. In many cases this meant relegating crucial news on the war to the interior pages while the front pages were reserved for national stories. The article combines document research with an analysis of the front pages of the two major Portuguese daily newspapers from the outbreak of the war until the capitulation of France. It demonstrates how the censorship apparatus played a role that went way beyond deciding what could and could not be published by ensuring that the press would report an alternative reality that was created by the regime's propaganda which aimed to 'conveniently guide' public opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on extant literature placing consumption as a dominant feature of British life by the interwar period, this article explores how commercial advertising drew on that position on the British home front of the Second World War to explain the part it played within the wider war effort. It reveals how advertising messages stressed free consumption as an indicator of democracy and as a symbol of British national identity. The advertisements analysed highlight how this, to date, overlooked channel of propaganda fell in line with the prevailing narrative of the war, supporting, reinforcing and perpetuating the common vision of that conflict. Whilst it is not suggested that these often fanciful representations were accepted unquestioningly at the time, it is argued that the widespread circulation of such an unequivocal version of events became the definitive, non-negotiable understanding of what Britain's war was about and how ordinary people could play their part within it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented which discusses articles in the issue on how one can systematise news so as to understand it through a digital humanities research project.

This article explores the polemical presentation of Oxford, the royalist capital between 1642 and 1646, in parliamentarian newsbooks. It argues that the novel seriality of the form offered opportunities for constructing political identities and identifying enemies through strategies of repetition and echoing within and across parliamentarian news media. Discussion of Oxford in these news titles suggests ways in which seriality helped establish and elaborate anti-royalist discourses by repeated reference to the corrupted centre of royalist politics. Sustained attention given to Oxford in weekly newsbooks built up a cumulative and complex picture of the city, and by extension royalism more broadly, as variously mired in Catholicism, subject to the damaging influence of female and foreign rule, riven by deviant sexualities, and possessed of a form of collective madness. The composite image of Oxford built up across parliamentarian news media helped construct a journalistic shorthand in which ‘Oxford’ came to denote a wealth of polemicised meanings readily accessible to comparatively humble readers. The article thus argues for a better recognition of the ways in which civil war news authors adopted the opportunities of serial publication for the elaboration of novel political stereotypes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In January 1916 a party of journalists from seven Irish newspapers visited Irish regiments serving on the western front. Such a privilege came at a price. Organised by the Department of Recruiting for Ireland, it was made clear to the journalists that this embedded tour had an agenda: they were ‘to set down what they saw there for the benefit of recruiting in Ireland’. This article examines the extent to which the three national titles included on the tour accepted this role of communicating and legitimising recruitment policy. It sheds light on the involvement of two national newspaper editors in shaping recruitment policy in Ireland, illustrates how each of the three national titles reported the tour, and examines the effects such reportage had on recruiting in Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As a contribution to the historiography of female criminality, this article charts the discursive contours of media representations of female habitual criminals. The discussion is based on analysis of the ways in which the late Victorian and Edwardian newspaper press in New Zealand reported cases of female criminals through the gendered and classed trope of ‘the adventuress’. The specific focus is on how concepts of class were implicated in the ways in which competing representations of female fraudsters, swindlers and thieves were portrayed in syndicated international articles and local news media. It is argued that representations of adventuresses sensationalised as headline-making anomalies in the news media need to be understood within the context of changing constructions of the thief. Newspaper reporting of their ‘exploits’ operated as implicit cautionary moral tales that reinforced normative constructions of feminine respectability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research into Greek press history has not yet gone through all the necessary stages, including cataloguing, content analysis, synthesis and comparative study of the data. Only recently have researchers attempted to utilize information obtained from the press as an authentic source of information leading to better understanding of political and cultural phenomena and attitudes, and the reactions of public opinion—aspects of historical research that were not previously considered. The revitalized thinking that allowed the linear narrative presentation of previous years to evolve into more complex interdisciplinary approaches has helped broaden the thematic focus and brought the study of the press into the research limelight. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article will discuss propaganda in the press used by the Italian fascist regime to create and disseminate a negative image of France and socialism. The ‘Paris, 1937’ exhibition represented a pretext for the Italian press to attack the Popular Front on both policy and competence. Manipulating information, the propaganda fabricated an idea of ‘otherness’, presenting France as the chaotic antithesis to the orderly Italian regime. France was presented as a country full of drunks and idlers, as a nation descending into chaos due to the social economic reforms of the Blum government; images that were juxtaposed with a state thriving under fascist corporatism. With the use of archive files and press-clippings, this work intends to illustrate the construction of stereotypes to feed the fear of socialism in Italy by the fascist press. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the summer of 1928, the arrest on a disorder charge of a young woman in north London who gave her name as Helene Adele led to a press sensation after she claimed that the officers had falsely accused her in order to discredit her claim that one of them had sexually assaulted her. The constables were ultimately prosecuted, convicted and discharged from the Metropolitan Police. This article considers the Adele case in the context of intense concerns about the possible abuse of police powers—particularly in cases involving women—in the late 1920s. Adele was catapulted onto the front pages of Britain's sensationalist press: her serialised memoir appeared in a newspaper and was reprinted in a women's magazine. However, her case was more than just a tabloid spectacle. Contributing to historians' reconsideration of the sensationalist inter-war press, this article shows how the coverage of the case fit into the press's interest in young working-class women's lifestyles and sexuality, highlighting how ‘human interest’ journalism could be intermixed with social critique. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In Norway, one of the best examples for examining cultural narratives of murder is what is known as the Lensmannsmordersaken, i.e., ‘the case of the county police officers murder’. After summarising the key events of this sensational 1926 case, this article will consider its presentation in the Norwegian press, the impact of contemporary debates around the death penalty, the influence of scientific understandings of criminality, and the case's subsequent reimagining in literature and film. This article shows how inter-war criminalistic fantasies reflected a broad variety of fears, notably those related to ethnic otherness and anxieties related to Norway's then recent achievement of full political independence. A literary version of the case from the 1930s—one of Norway's first ‘true-crime’ novels—is also considered, as is a post-war feature film based on the murder that was banned (for privacy reasons) in 1952 and not released again until 2007. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]