[Miriam_Dobson,_Benjamin_Ziemann]_Reading_Primary_(BookZZ.org)

190 David Carlson

13The term ‘signifier’, taken from the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure, has become a staple of literary criticism in the wake of postmodernism. Again see the glossary for detailed explanation.

14P. Lejeune, On Autobiography, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

15J. Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation: Texts and Discussions with Jacques Derrida, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988.

16F. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, New York: Random House, 1967, p. 221.

17P. DeMan, ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’, Modern Language Notes 94 (1979), 919–930.

18De Man ignores the fact that many autobiographers (Protestant writers of conversion narratives such as John Bunyan or Jonathan Edwards, American Indian writers of ‘postcolonial’ autobiographies such as Charles Eastman or N. Scott Momaday, and immigrant writers) foreground and meditate on historical changes in personal identity.

19E. Bruss, Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.

20M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, New York: Pantheon Books, 1978;

M.Foucault. ‘What is an Author?’, The Foucault Reader, New York: Pantheon Books, 1984, pp. 101–120.

21P.J. Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.

22This list of questions is adapted from S. Smith and J. Watson, Reading Autobiography:

AGuide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

23‘Bildungsroman’ refers to a novelistic form that focuses on the moral, intellectual, social, or psychological development of a young protagonist, typically beginning in childhood and ending at maturity. A ‘coup tale’ is a traditional form of oral narrative that involves recounting acts of bravery and exploits in war.

24S. Burroughs, Memoirs of Stephen Burroughs, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1924.

25Ibid., p. 1.

26Ibid., p. 2.

27Ibid., p. 3.

28Ibid., p. 4.

29Ibid., p. 5.

30Ibid., p. 6–7.

31W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.

32Ibid., p. 332.

Select bibliography

Bruss, E., Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.

De Man, P., ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’, Modern Language Notes 94 (1979), 919–930.

Derrida, J. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference Translation: Texts and Discussions with Jacques Derrida, trans. P. Kamuf and A. Ronell, ed. C. McDonald, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988.

Eakin, P.J., How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.

Gusdorf, G. ‘Conditions and Limits of Autobiography’ (1956), rpr. in J. Olney (ed.)

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Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980, pp. 28–48.

Lejeune, P. On Autobiography, trans. Katherine Leary, (ed.) P.J. Eakin, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

Olney, J. Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.

Pascal, R. Design and Truth in Autobiography, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960.

Smith, S. and Watson, J., Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Spengmann, W.C., The Forms of Autobiography: Episodes in the History of a Literary Genre, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.

11 Newspapers

Stephen Vella

Newspapers offer a wealth of information about the social, political, economic and cultural life of the past. They easily lend themselves to the work of comparative textual analysis, opening windows onto the intellectual culture that prevailed in a particular time, place or community. A critical reading of newspapers can lead to significant insight into how societies or cultures came to understand themselves and the world around them.

At their most superficial level, newspapers reveal those events of which contemporary readers were made aware. But newspapers do much more: they document the ways in which reporters and editors thought about their own society and the world around them, how they organized and presented information, filtered out or neglected other potential news reports, created influential categories of thought and established, enforced or eroded conventional social hierarchies and assumptions. Far from simply reflecting contemporary events or public wants in objective, mirror-like fashion, newspapers often shaped the news and views of their readers by employing a particular framework for understanding events and institutions. In the words of historian Roger Chartier, ‘representations of the social world themselves are the constituents of social reality’.1 In this sense, one can appreciate how newspapers have influenced society as much as they have reflected it.

In a similar vein, Anthony Smith has argued that ‘journalism was the art of structuring reality, rather than recording it’. Though newspapers ‘developed a mission (and a defense) of “objectivity” in the twentieth century’, their claim to objectivity remains highly dubious. The journalist ‘weaves the tapestry of reality which society accepts – or rejects – as being a true image of “things as they really are”’. A speech may be written as spoken, stock prices accurately recorded, battles described as they have been fought; yet even in these apparent instances of objective journalism, ‘who directs the attention of the reporter from one arena to another?’ Smith asks. ‘What forces motivate the feature writer to weep for one cause and scoff at another?’2

More news takes place in a given day or week than can possibly appear within a newspaper. The raw material of news events must therefore pass through successive filters that narrow the range of stories published. Reporters and editors determine the news to which the public will have access, including the standard of what is ‘newsworthy’ in the first place. They also fix the premises of discourse and

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interpretation for their stories once they have been selected. Newspapers are not then neutral conduits of information, but rather gatekeepers and filterers of ideas. These decisions even come to affect readers’ own expectations. As Smith writes, ‘we approach the newspaper product having absorbed certain routines of comprehension, accepting the special codes of the newspaper genre’ and so read it with a set of ‘habitualised assumptions’.3 The task of scholarship is to dismantle these routines and examine them with care.

While newspapers are not often transparent about themselves, their expressions in print can reveal much to a careful reader. Newspapers differ considerably from other cultural products such as letters, memoirs and novels, behind which creations usually sits a single author (even as we grant that the ‘discourse’ employed by an author is informed by a larger social context of thought). Behind a newspaper lies a vast, complex machinery of literary production and layered social networks, for which no single individual is wholly responsible, even at the level of a news article.

Concentrations of wealth and power in any society inevitably influence the spectrum of topics and opinions expressed in its newspapers. The dominant domestic groups that own and control the mainstream newspaper press naturally see their priorities and interests reflected in news coverage, though this is never perfectly accomplished, even in police states. Rather than simply report a reality ‘out there’, newspapers filter, frame and report news and analysis in a manner supportive of established power structures under whose authority they function, thus limiting the bounds of debate and discussion accordingly. This process is more complex and subtle in nominally democratic societies than in despotic regimes, but the fact of a constraint upon the public discourse of newspapers is all but universal, as is its denial by those who operate within such systems. These filters have come to work so naturally over the past two centuries, and the constraints have become so powerful, and are built into newspapers in such a fundamental way, that alternative modes of news production often prove difficult to imagine.

During the past two decades, advances in information technology have allowed for wider and deeper access to historical news print and the interdisciplinary field of media studies has achieved recognition within academic institutions. As a result, scholars have come to appreciate newspapers as both sources and subjects in their own right, rather than as mere funds of data into which to dip in order to buttress claims made about the past from traditional archival sources. Still, the availability of published circulation, subscription and pricing figures for most historical newspapers remains very limited and uneven. When extant, however, these statistics, along with advertisements, allow scholars exciting opportunities to piece together a picture of newspaper readership as well as the demographic of reader that publishers coveted. Published letters to the editor reveal the responses of certain readers to news coverage. Nevertheless, short of systematic polling and survey information or an extensive search for reactions in contemporary letters and diaries, scholars find it a great challenge to assess newspaper reception (that is, how contemporary readers absorbed, interpreted and judged the news reports set before them).

So what is a newspaper? It is at once a text, a record of historical events, a representation of society and a chronicle of contemporary opinions, aspirations and

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debates. A newspaper is also a business enterprise, a professional organization, a platform for advertisements and itself a commodity. Newspapers are simultaneously open and closed systems of communications: on the one hand, newspapers are and have been available to anyone with enough change to spare; yet as private enterprises or centralized state organs, newspapers shroud their inner workings in secrecy. Newspaper scholars can thus focus upon content (what the reader saw in print) and, where archival sources permit, institutional history (managerial and hiring practices, growth and competitive strategies, changes in ownership and political and business ties, for example).

What most distinguishes a newspaper from any other writing genre, however, is timing. By definition, newspapers generate writing on fresh developments and must publish with speed. Just what constitutes ‘the new’ in newspapers, however, is historically relative. Daily newspapers were rare in most of Europe and North America until the late nineteenth century. For the average reader, the most common sources of news were weekly papers, whose reports a twenty-first-century reader likely find too ‘dated’ to accept as ‘news’ at all. In the early nineteenth century, news from parts of the British Empire, like India, averaged between two and three months to reach London. By the time it was published as ‘news’ in the UK, the event was already history in India. The spread of telegraph cables in the 1850s thus revolutionized the meaning of news and heralded the creation of publications like the Daily Telegraph (1855). Newspapers without telegraph cables of their own could subscribe to press agencies – such as Havas (France), Reuters (UK) and Wolff (Germany) – for access to breaking news from across the globe. Because of the high cost of this new technology, however, telegraphic dispatches were initially extremely terse and colourless in writing style, a compromise made for timeliness.

In its study of reading strategies, this chapter emphasizes British newspapers at the consumption end (as a finished textual product) rather than at the production end (as a business organization or state/party organ). However, the socio-political, economic and ideological structures from which news stories arise remain crucially important background to a full understanding of newspaper texts. Even where this context is lacking, a savvy reading of news reports and editorials can allow scholars to discern the kind of institutional framework that generated them.

Historiography: histories of newspapers and newspapers in history

In 1846, Charles Mitchell published the first book devoted to the study of newspapers in the United Kingdom. His annual Newspaper Press Directory summarized and compared the price, circulation, ownership, political character and local context of British newspapers while offering advice to readers, publishers, politicians and journalists. In a chapter on the ‘philosophy of advertising’, Mitchell advanced rules that took for granted the newspaper ‘as an advertising medium’ and cautioned advertisers ‘to regard [the readership’s] quality rather than its quantity. Some of the most widely-circulated journals in the empire are the worst possible to advertise in,’ he warned. ‘Their readers are not purchasers and any money spent in them is so much thrown away.’ A newspaper that had won ‘the confidence of the monied and

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respectable classes of society’ would prove to be ‘a better medium for advertising, with a circulation of 2000, than another with a circulation of 4000, that circulation being chiefly confined to inns, public-houses, and beer-shops.’ Why was this so? So-called respectable families, who typically read at home, ‘look to advertisements as a part of the contents of the paper in which they may be interested’, whereas those in the public houses, who often heard the articles spoken aloud, ‘read for the news and the politics, not for the advertisements’.4 As the logic went, newspapers should not seek to raise their general circulation numbers in order to improve profits, but rather aim to concentrate circulation amongst affluent circles. In the twentieth century, this common strategic manoeuvre would come to be known as ‘moving up-market’.5

Thus before the middle of the nineteenth century, one can already trace in Britain the development of a strikingly modern, sophisticated business attitude towards the class and social identities of readers. Mitchell’s book also revealed divergent definitions of newspaper content by contemporaries: one which included advertising as an intrinsic component of newspaper reading and another which saw it as entirely separate from the broadsheet proper.

Yet newspapers were more than mere businesses; they were shapers of ideas, even of nations. In 1834 Thomas Carlyle recognised to his chagrin that:

Journalists are now the true Kings and Clergy: henceforth Historians . . . must write not of Bourbon Dynasties, and Tudors and Hapsburgs; but of Stamped Broad-sheet Dynasties, and quite new successive Names, according as this or the other Able Editor, or Combination of Able Editors, gains the world's ear.6

Mitchell himself highlighted the central importance newspapers had already assumed in the life of the British nation as a social salve. Queen Victoria, he noted, unwittingly ‘owes the stability of her throne, and the tranquillity of her reign, more to the press than to the rude contrivance of a standing army’.7 A quarter-century later, another press historian concurred. ‘Public feeling, not only politically and morally, but socially, is powerfully influenced in all countries by the tone of their public journals’, wrote James Grant in his multi-volume History of the Newspaper Press. ‘It is impossible it could be otherwise’, he continued, ‘for the community in every country must, however unconsciously, imbibe the spirit of the newspaper which they daily read.’8 Few scholars today would disagree.

The decade of the 1850s saw the first burst of interest in newspapers by book publishers. Not least of these was the first major history of newspapers in the United Kingdom, Frederick Knight Hunt’s The Fourth Estate: Contributions Towards a History of Newspapers, and the Liberty of the Press. As the title immediately indicated, Hunt shared Carlyle’s estimation of the social power of newspapers and measured journalism as an index of the progress made in the struggle to secure English liberties.9 Hunt was no disinterested outsider either: he worked for the Daily News as an editor from 1846 to his death in 1854.10 Surprisingly, booklets on the history of the English-language newspaper press of British India anticipated these domestic histories.11 In part, such public attention arose from long-lived

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concerns for the scarce civil liberties granted to British servants of the East India Company, as press advocates complained that Parliament failed to extend the same measure of domestic liberties to newspapers produced in the British Empire.12 Controversy surrounded the reduced free-speech rights of ‘free-born Englishman’ in India until it was surpassed by the same demands made by Indian nationalists at the century’s end.13

General histories of Victorian newspapers emerged before 1900 as journalists, editors, and other newspapermen sought to assess and assert their own profession’s triumphs, critique competitors and engage in gossip as they surveyed the state of the contemporary press. Despite the many golden nuggets of information contained within them, these dry histories usually fail the standards of modern scholarship, indulging as they often did in unstructured ambles down memory lane, the settling of personal and political scores and the propagation of colourful inaccuracies.14

While their quality improved considerably over the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the great bulk of newspaper histories continued to adopt a classic Whig interpretative framework. This conventional wisdom portrayed the commercial press as engaged in a heroic battle against state censorship and government taxation in the cause of civil liberties, principally from the period of the French Revolution until the Second World War. This contest resulted in a slow but steady ‘transition from official to popular control’ of the press, according to the standard account. At the core of this Whig school of thought existed a presumed linkage between the ‘progress’ of the commercial press one the one hand and democracy, or the more general ‘broadening of political liberty’, on the other.15

Since the 1960s, this grand narrative has come under fire as cultural theorists, literary scholars and historians have identified more subtle forms of ideological and social control at work in the discursive realm of the text. In their role as exponents of bourgeois liberal values, newspapers came to function as key ideological agents in class, gender and race oppression even as they contained the potential for radical critiques of such systems of power. In escaping more direct forms of government censorship, the press did not come under popular democratic control. Instead, newspapers largely passed from state control into the hands of private power interests and thus failed to democratize themselves as they became enmeshed in the gears of capital.

In their reassessment of newspaper history in the United Kingdom, James Curran and Jean Seaton detailed the rise of a radical press in the early nineteenth century that reached a national working-class audience. Evading the duties imposed by the state, the ‘unstamped’ press flourished, as did some of its radical commercial brethren, most prominently the Chartist Northern Star. This alternative press proved instrumental in fostering an alternative value system for disenfranchised labourers and a shared framework for looking at the world. When coercive attempts by the state to squelch these publications failed in the early nineteenth century, they were abandoned by mid-century in favour of the liberal view that the free market itself would enforce a tendency towards ‘respectable’ newspapers. Curran and Seaton demonstrate that this strategy largely accomplished what direct state intervention failed to do. Following the repeal of government taxes on newspapers

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between 1853 and 1869, a new daily commercial press came into existence, while the radical press collapsed. Not one new local working-class daily was established through the rest of the nineteenth century.

In its efforts to reach larger audiences for advertisers, newspapers saw a vast rise in scale and a corresponding increase in capital costs from the mid-nineteenth century onward. The expansion of the free market was accompanied by an ‘industrialization of the Victorian press’. As radical newspapers with low-income working class readers failed to attract sufficient advertising from the business community and were forced to raise prices above levels that workers could afford, ‘advertisers thus acquired a de facto licensing authority since, without their support, newspapers ceased to be economically viable’.16 Profitable commercial newspaper publishers with great financial reserves stepped in to cater to the new ‘popular’ taste with a focus on entertainment, sensation and scandal. ‘The repression, the isolation, the containment and eventually the incorporation of an autonomous popular press had nothing inevitable about them’, Raymond Williams wrote. ‘[T]hey began as conscious political acts and continued as an effective deployment of financial resources to keep poor men’s reading matter in rich men’s hands.’17

When he wrote his preface to Animal Farm in the early 1940s, journalist George Orwell took for granted that most daily newspapers are ‘owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics’.18 Yet of greater interest to Orwell was the prevalence of journalistic self-censorship, ‘a general tacit agreement that “it wouldn't do” to mention’ certain facts in print:

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is not done ‘to say it’,

just as a Victorian gentleman would not mention trousers in the presence of a lady. ‘Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness’, Orwell concluded. ‘A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.’19

The most sustained efforts to subject periodicals to historical examination in the last half century have in a sense been elaborations upon Orwell’s sketch, deploying theories of ideology, hegemony and discourse to locate the ways in which newspapers inculcated in their readers a culture of conformity with the economic or social status quo.20 Historian Brian Harrison reasoned that ‘in modern conditions social cohesion could no longer be taken for granted: it needed to be energetically worked for’.21 In the late eighteenth century, the Gordon and Priestly riots, reinforced by the role of the ‘crowd’ in the French Revolution, convinced both conservatives and reformers of the need to forge new links between government and people. Williams argued in his study of England in the 1840s that scholars should view newspapers as part of a ‘chain of significations and determinations, and its nature and function as a signifying practice and a reproducer of ideologies’.22 Leslie Williams has also emphasized, in examining British press coverage of the Irish famine of the late

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1840s, that ‘Victorian publications were also disseminators of ideas, bulwarks of values, normative gatekeepers, and social barometers’.23 Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff have argued that it was during the Victorian period (1837–1901) specifically that ‘the press, in all its manifestations, became . . . the context within which people lived and worked and thought, and from which they derived their . . .

sense of the outside world’.24

In the last two decades, newspaper studies have drifted away from institutional brands of social critique and have instead come to focus upon the ways in which texts betray complex ambivalences towards power, nation, empire, race, class and identity. Rather than being seen as pure ideological monoliths, newspapers are recognized as a contested ground in wars of cultural meaning.25 In part the close attention paid by newspaper scholars to textual patterns and devices in the construction of that meaning continues the work of the ‘linguistic turn’ in literary studies. At the same time, growing numbers of newspaper scholars have followed an ‘imperial turn’ in their work, recovering long-ignored networks that linked newspapers and the wider world of empire.26 This growing movement in the literature has taken inspiration from Benedict Anderson’s positioning of newspapers as co-creators of the ‘imagined communities’ (the modern nation-state and empire) to which nearly all modern peoples have formed sustaining allegiances, including nationalist movements for independence in European colonies.27

Analytical toolkit

The questions that scholars bring to newspapers divide generally into three broad categories of investigation: institutional structure (the social context), format (the textual context) and content (the text). Each of these impinges upon how one reads a newspaper.

Readers interested in the institutional setting and structure of a newspaper ask questions about its internal organization and how it fits into the broader society and its systems of power. Newspapers are, above all things, human institutions: fallible, imperfect, with material or ideological interests of their own. Rarely do existing archives provide a detailed record of newspapers’ internal hierarchies, decisionmaking processes or outside influences. To the extent that the structure is known, one can hypothesize what the news product will look like. One can then study the news product itself and decide whether it conforms to obvious assumptions about the nature of the newspaper in question. In conducting such an institutional analysis, readers may raise the following sorts of questions: Who controls the newspaper? Is it owned by the local community or the state, a family, private company or public investors? Is it affiliated with a political party, religious group, trade group, advocacy group or is it independent? Is it national, regional or local in its reach? How regularly is the newspaper published? Are its revenues derived primarily from street sales, subscriptions or advertising? Who are its advertisers and what kinds of products or services do they market to readers? For what socio-economic class are they appropriate? What is the ratio of news content to advertising in column inches?

Take, for example, the Washington Post. It is itself a corporation, owned by a

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larger media parent company that is traded on the public stock exchange. As a business, this national newspaper sells a product to a market. Publishers earn relatively little income from newspaper sales; its owners and shareholders would lose money if they relied solely on street purchases or subscriptions for revenue. Its product is therefore not its latest edition; that is but a vehicle for its real product: readers. In particular, its product is a readership of relatively privileged, educated professionals in decision-making positions within society. This product is sold to a market: advertisers (largely other businesses), who pay for the opportunity to attract those privileged readers to buying or investing in their products or services. The Washington Post, then, in a purely business sense, is a corporation that sells readers (consumers with buying power and social influence) to other corporations. What can one predict about this newspaper’s content, given just that set of circumstances? What is the null hypothesis: assuming nothing further, what conjectures could one make? The obvious assumption is that the media content (what appears, what does not appear, the way the news is framed, etc.), will reflect the values, priorities and interests of the buyers, the sellers, the product and the professionals that serve them.28 Unless the newspaper were dysfunctional, any other outcome would be surprising.

When evaluating the visual context of a given newspaper edition, its layout, graphics, images, font size and type style all matter. Design affects reception, and does so with intent. The visual sophistication of newspapers grew enormously over the course of the twentieth century as technological changes and the concentration of media ownership accelerated. In this connection, readers may ask what newspapers do to attract the eye to particular bits of the page, or to move it in a particular direction. Is the news article in question on the front page or buried deep inside the paper? Historians that rely upon newspaper clippings in their research can easily lose this context of spatial placement. Does it make use of photographs, sketches, charts and maps? How are advertisements placed in relation to news? How does the ad shape our perception of the news? Does it create a certain mood? Does the news influence the context for the ad? Does it seem ‘natural’ for advertisements to be published alongside news or do the juxtapositions create a sense of friction?

Finally, the reader arrives at the textual content of the article itself. When addressing the text, one may put to it the following questions: Is the author named? Where and when was the article written? What is the writer’s tone, vocabulary, choice of metaphors or mode of address? What are the denotation and contemporary connotation of its key terms? Who is the implied reader? Does the content cater to a niche audience or to a local, regional or national audience? Is there an implicit ‘us’ and ‘them’ voiced? What are the report’s sources? (Government officials, opposition party members, experts, eye-witnesses, dissenters, victims, anonymous sources, etc.) Can you articulate any assumptions behind the point of view expressed? Are they stated explicitly or implicitly? What knowledge is the author assuming that the audience shares? How does the author use these assumptions to make his or her point persuasive? To what emotions does it seem to appeal? Does it position itself against another point of view? What other relevant information does the author leave out? Are there ideological limits beyond which the article does not