Political reporting is the art of gathering and disseminating information about the state and its rulers while maintaining at least some degree of independence from them. When states seek out this kind of information for themselves, often in secret, it is better described as intelligence; when statesmen and politicians publicize information to advance their own interests, often selectively or misleadingly, it is propaganda. Political reporting therefore challenges the state’s control of information. Its history bears the weight of arguments about the rise of civil society and the public sphere, the making of democratic political cultures, and the proliferation of such antidemocratic dangers as polarization, sensationalism, and apathy.
Oral cultures of political reporting both predated the rise of written news and persisted long afterward. Gossip originating in courts, councils, and parliaments routinely found its way into script and print. In *early modern London, the *coffeehouse served as the primary waystation for this traffic, where clerks and courtiers sold the latest information and news writers transcribed rumors for the benefit of their subscribers. In Paris, some *Enlightenment-era *salons doubled as news bureaus, where guests filed items as they entered and the results were compiled into nationally circulated newsletters (nouvelles à la main). The ubiquity of the phrase “we hear” in English publications, mirrored by on dit in French, attests to the porosity of the boundary between conversation and reportage. In the reception of political news, too, spoken and written communication was symbiotic. Well into the nineteenth century, people commonly pooled resources to buy newspapers, which were then read aloud in clubs, pubs, and other public spaces—a practice that enabled a measure of political participation even for those with no formal political power and little formal education.
In a similar way, scribal modes of political reporting long preceded and coexisted with print. Even when printing technology was readily available, material that might attract the notice of censors was often disseminated in manuscript. In seventeenth-century London, manuscript copies of royal addresses and parliamentary speeches reached tens of thousands of readers at least; so did handwritten pamphlets purporting to pierce the veil of official secrecy with intercepted letters or purloined documents (not all of them genuine). In eighteenth-century France, likewise, the nouvelles à la main evolved from intelligence reports for aristocratic patrons into subscription-based news services without passing through the printing press along the way. Manuscript and oral communication fed off each other as well as print: the most trenchant contemporary commentary on the reign of Louis XV came in poems that were scrawled on bits of paper and sung on street corners.
Examples like these help to explain why the eighteenth century has often been seen as a formative moment for political discourse beyond the reach of the state. And yet, the circulation, reliability, and independence of political information in that period remained limited by later standards. Politics usually played a marginal part in the textual culture that reached the vast majority of people: the broadsheets and ballads filled with colorful tales of crime, the supernatural, and the occult. In publications aimed at the commercial and professional classes, meanwhile, the heavy hand of the state kept a lid on potentially subversive reporting. Across the European continent, censorship, licensing, and privilege systems rendered independent reporting on domestic politics a tenuous prospect at best. The only legally permissible way to publish a newspaper story about government in prerevolutionary France, for instance, was to reprint items from the official Gazette de France (Gazette of France). It is true that a lively extraterritorial press, whose Francophone output was printed in the Low Countries and then flowed across the border, circumvented this restriction to a great extent. But many European newspapers avoided potential complications by simply transcribing official documents without commentary, leaving practical-minded merchants and lawyers to calculate the consequences for themselves. Printers’ dependence on government advertising and other contracts offered another incentive for political quiescence.
Britain was unique in the European context as the home of a robust in-country press that regularly and critically covered domestic politics before the end of the eighteenth century. After the 1695 lapse of the Licensing Act, which provided for prepublication censorship and the registration of printing presses through the Stationers’ Company, a lively new crop of newspapers sprang up to rival the official London Gazette, not just in the capital but in provincial cities as well. While the threat of postpublication censorship by prosecution persisted for more than a century—along with the use of fiscal policy to hamper radical titles—the shift away from the systematic prior regulation of political print proved decisive. “Of publick transactions,” Samuel Johnson could write in 1773, “the whole world is now informed by newspapers.” (It was, of course, a less triumphant story in Britain’s colonies overseas, where the seizure of presses, the prohibition of subversive publications, and the imprisonment of dissenters constrained press freedom for as long as the British ruled.)
The growth of the public sphere in eighteenth-century Britain was closely linked to the rise of partisan media. As Whigs and Tories vied for power, deep-pocketed patrons on both sides subsidized newspapers and paid off journalists. Savvy governments learned the lesson that “managing” press coverage—not only with bribery, but also through the dissemination of favorable stories, the cultivation of sympathetic writers, and the dangled promise of access, prestige, and advancement—had certain advantages over the brute force of censorship. As the press became more political, the information it provided did not necessarily become more reliable; gossip, innuendo, and character assassination loomed large. Alexander Pope, in his 1743 satire The Dunciad, identified “three chief qualifications” for political writers (whom he revealingly termed “Party-writers”): “to stick at nothing, to delight in flinging dirt, and to slander in the dark by guess.”
The métier of the journalist—to summarize and clarify events, constructing narratives out of disorderly experience—itself encouraged the definition of ideological battle lines, the labeling of factions, and the identification of heroes and villains. In debates over the ratification of the US Constitution in the 1780s, as in in the French revolutionary tumult of the 1790s, the number and circulation of newspapers exploded. The overwhelming majority of them staked out identities as Federalist or anti-Federalist, revolutionary or counterrevolutionary, even when they also bemoaned factionalism and paid lip service to national unity. British radicals like John Wilkes and William Cobbett made their name as writers and editors, touted their publications as the lifeblood of popular sovereignty, and transformed their battles against sedition charges into causes célèbres. Partisanship was not only a subject of political journalism, in other words, but also a creation of it.
A corollary to this development, in the nineteenth century, was the idealization of political rhetoric. Britain again offers a paradigmatic case. As parliamentary liberalism fostered romantic visions of enlightened men debating their views in a reasoned way, conveying those debates to ordinary people emerged as a major function of the liberal press. While circulation grew with the gradual elimination of levies on cheap print (the so-called taxes on knowledge) between 1836 and 1855, newspapers devoted a significant portion of their columns to reprinting the text of political speeches, reflecting a paternalistic ambition to elevate and improve the values of an expanding electorate. One indication of this civic-mindedness is that the parliamentary reporters who scribbled *shorthand notes in the gallery above the House of Commons were regarded as the elite of the journalistic tribe; most were university educated, and many, like Charles Dickens, went on to prestigious careers in other fields. When platform addresses outside Parliament became common in the 1870s and 1880s, newspapers printed them verbatim as well. With the advent of the telegraph, readers across the country could pore over the text of a speech within a few hours of its delivery.
For all the attention lavished on their rhetoric, Victorian political leaders never communicated with the electorate in a totally unmediated way. It was political identity, not the quality of stenography, that distinguished newspapers from one another; everything from editorial commentary to the choice and placement of stories reflected a clear ideological slant, a partisan affiliation, or both. Even so, the pronouncements of political leaders received overwhelmingly respectful treatment. The “penny press,” which supplanted the more radical “pauper press” after 1855, was both a crucial base of support for the Gladstonian Liberal Party and a champion of small-l liberal values. The didactic sensibility of these newspapers, urging humble readers to prove themselves worthy of the franchise, injected a lofty sense of purpose into political journalism—though, notably, without any hint of the later belief that journalists themselves were mere observers rather than participants in politics.
Only in the final decades of the nineteenth century did newspapers across Europe and the United States begin to deemphasize their identity as political actors. That is when liberal-style political journalism was eclipsed by novel forms of commercial journalism. The economics of the newspaper business changed as brash newcomers—the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail in Britain, Le Petit Journal (The little daily) and Le Petit Parisien (The little Parisian) in France, the New York World in the United States—chased the widest possible circulation, trading steady subscription fees from modest but dedicated readerships for the advertising-driven revenue of the mass market. These papers soft-pedaled ideological and partisan loyalties to avoid alienating potential readers, pinning their hopes on the appeal of compelling stories instead. (In Britain, moreover, the 1883 passage of the Corrupt Practices Act prevented parties from buying off editors as they had routinely done in the past.) “News” accordingly displaced opinion on many front pages, elevating journalistic values of detachment, impartiality, and neutrality to newfound prominence. At the same time, “news” itself had less and less to do with politics, as *publishers found better luck boosting sales with human-interest stories, celebrity profiles, and the old standbys of crime and catastrophe. The rise of colorful faits divers (miscellaneous, often sensational human interest stories) came at the expense of the comparatively dry rhetoric recorded in parliamentary debate columns, which steadily shrank. The advent of objectivity, in other words, had less to do with the ethical reformation of political journalism than with the intensification of a struggle for the public’s attention. Although few newspapers renounced their political voice altogether, politics no longer furnished their raison d’être, and commercialism imposed constraints on their ability to intervene in politics.
Discontent with political reporting in the present often stems from a desire to recapture the civic purpose of nineteenth-century liberal journalism without replicating the conditions that made it possible: deference to the authority of political leaders; unabashed partisanship; rootedness in the associational life of parties and clubs; and insulation from the pressures of a mass market. Every one of these conditions became far more elusive in the twentieth century. A newly adversarial style of reporting—especially pronounced after the 1960s—treated politicians with skepticism and attached little significance to their rhetoric, devaluing the ideas behind the speeches along the way. Ever more restrictive notions of objectivity, meanwhile, discouraged reporters from expressing ideas of their own. As party organizations withered, journalists had to appeal to atomistic news consumers rather than tapping into existing loyalties, favoring decontextualized novelty over intellectual coherence. The increasingly capital-intensive character of the news business, in print and even more dramatically in broadcasting, only strengthened incentives to cover politics as entertainment. So did the digitization of media, which unbundled stories from newspapers and made each one a commodity to be valued in clicks, “shares,” and “likes.” In much of the world, political reporting freed itself from the grip of the state, only to end up under the dominion of the market instead.
Erik Linstrum
See also bureaucracy; commodification; digitization; governance; newsletters; newspapers; public sphere; publicity/publication; readers