The News under Russia's Old Regime: The Development of a Mass-Circulation Press
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The News under Russia's Old Regime: The Development of a Mass-Circulation Press
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Overview
Originally published in 1991.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691607283 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1219 |
| Pages: | 328 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d) |
Read an Excerpt
The News Under Russia's Old Regime
The Development of a Mass-Circulation Press
By Louise McReynolds
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1991 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-03180-4
CHAPTER 1
The Origins of the Mass-Circulation Press
Surveying the historical sweep of the daily newspaper, Walter Lippmann, one of the most influential figures in communications theory, believed himself to have identified the historical logic that determined the evolution of the modern press. He focused his argument on the relationship between the changes in dominant political structures and the appearance of new types of newspapers that took correspondingly different political roles. He isolated a pattern: at first, under autocracies, governments controlled communications by publishing information that they wanted circulated. As social estates began demanding rights of representation and displacing autocrats, organized political interest groups began to dominate published communications; the British, French, and American Revolutions all witnessed great flowerings of political journalism. Journalists began to refer to themselves as the "Fourth Estate" to denote their place in the political process. In the nineteenth century, electoral rights filtered down to larger sections of the populace at the same time that commercially subsidized mass-circulation newspapers began to prosper. According to Lippmann's reasoning, these papers linked the independent consumer-cum-voter to the political system constructed by liberal capitalism. Lippmann's line of thought connected economics to politics through the medium of the newspaper, which communicated political information to the voting consumer.
Although one can be caught short looking for the particulars of Lippmann's argument because his theoretical framework fits so unevenly over history's variations of time and place, the eminent journalist provided historians with an origin from which to explore the parallel changes of the daily newspaper and politics that define the manifest, but poorly understood, relationship between information and power. Even a cursory survey of the industrializing West shows a correlation between widespread newspaper reading and increased opportunities to participate in the electoral process. Lippmann's paradigm intrinsically made liberal capitalism the necessary basis for political progress, insinuating that popular commercial newspapers were mandatory for the development of genuine democracy. These two preconceptions, which had characterized most thinking about politics and journalism before World War I, fell on hard times when social theorists, watching the rise of communism and fascism, expressed reservations about the role of communications in the emergence of undemocratic mass societies. The most articulate challenge to the assumption that liberalism, capitalism, and a commercial press were the necessary prerequisites to democracy came from the Marxist-oriented Frankfurt School; Jürgen Habermas, heir to that intellectual tradition, has been the most influential theorist of mass communications since Lippmann.
Observing the same structural correspondence between changes in politics and journalism, Habermas gave greater weight to the precommercial political press as the more potent democratizing medium. Originating as a political domain carved out for itself by the liberal bourgeoisie, where traditional rule blocked their admittance to government, the public sphere opened by the political journals allowed readers to observe and discuss the formation of official policy; the ultimate objective of this function was to transform the nature of power. A phenomenon of the developing capitalist system, whose economies of exchange were refashioning social relationships, the public sphere provided a place where private individuals could collect against the state and claim authority for themselves, "a space where citizenship can be negotiated."
According to Habermas, however, when newspaper journalism became fully commercialized in the mass-circulation dailies, the influx of private values consistently eroded this press's value as a public institution. He argued for the superiority of the political press, Lippmann's second stage, because it provided a medium through which readers could engage in critical debates. The mass-circulation newspapers, developing from the competition of private commercial interests, conflated "public" and "private," which robbed newspapers of their legitimacy as genuinely public institutions. The consumer of the fully commercialized newspaper was a passive being, a mirror rather than a critic of his or her society. Even when these newspapers engaged public officials in debates over policy issues, their editors were not challenging the status quo as the political journals had. On the contrary, these papers facilitated psychological acceptance of the liberal capitalist state, with its attendant inequities.
This study of Russian journalism is equally informed by the ideas of Lippmann and Habermas. For all the thrashing that Lippmann has suffered, he still surfaces as more than a straw man for revisionists; the difficulty of separating freedom of the press from freedom of the market has proved to be one of the recurring problematics in effecting glasnost' and perestroika. Moreover, for all of the strengths of Habermas's insights, he exaggerated the capability of the popular press to privatize public values. Reading the histories of the mass-circulation presses of France, England, and the United States, the relationship between the positivistic view of progress and the popular newspapers voicing that idea is unmistakable, as are the problems with commercialism that blurred differences between private and public. Integrating the Russian newspapers into journalism's history, with their host of differences from and similarities to their Western counterparts, will expand both theoretical arguments.
The Mass-Circulation Press Develops in the West
Capsule histories of the development of commercial journalism in the three Western countries selected for comparison will establish the context within which to analyze the Russian press. The United States, England, and France all adhered roughly to Lippmann's paradigm characterizing the relationship between politics and the economic foundations of publishing newspapers, giving way to the forces of commercialization throughout the nineteenth century. But their newspaper journalisms did not evolve either in unison or in direct proportion to the level of industrialization that made the commercial press both feasible and desirable; national politics and the nature of their respective market economies affected the course of each press's development.
The Western newspapers did, however, share important commonalities of organization and purpose. Technology, for example, helped to give the newspapers definition, just as it would govern the uses of radio and television communications in the twentieth century. German printer Frederick Koenig had already connected steam power to the printing press by 1810. His basic design was improved upon by American inventor Richard Hoe, whose presses could run off four thousand double-sided sheets per hour; thirteen years later his rotary press tripled that output. New Yorker Samuel F. B. Morse had tested his telegraph successfully in 1844, at last making it possible for newspapers to disconnect communications from transportation. Londoner James Dellagana's advancements in stereotyping further improved production so that by the Crimean War New York, London, and Paris were all served by high-speed presses.
The popularity of newspapers in turn stimulated further technological developments. The Linotype, perfected in 1886, increased the speed with which printers could compose and remake pages, allowing for larger runs of papers produced more swiftly. Front pages could now be redone quickly to feature the latest news. Although the halftone effect, which made it possible to reprint photographs from rotary presses, was not commercially viable until 1897, the experiments leading up to proficiency would register refinements along the way. By century's end the telephone and the typewriter had improved communications in newspaper offices.
As technology expedited the collection and dissemination of information, news became an increasingly precious commodity. The value of facts proved pivotal in the separation of the newspaper from its financial basis in politics, whether party or autocratic, because it lessened the importance of the editorials written to persuade. Turning information into merchandise, however, allowed market mechanisms to mediate communications and brought into question the fundamental role of the newspaper in society. Since readers depended upon information to understand politics and to make personal decisions, did newspapers, as business enterprises, operate primarily for public or private interests? The contradiction inherent in a private enterprise functioning as a public institution continues to plague understanding of commercial communications. For example, the notion that a newspaper or a journalist would be deemed "corrupt" for misrepresenting information to make the paper sell better implied that, as a consumer product, news had a unique political value; news belonged to the community at large.
The newly appreciated value of information surfaced first in the American press, which also fit Lippmann's paradigm most closely. A revolutionary nation founded on principles that theoretically denied hereditary social standing a determining role in politics, the United States produced the archetypal commercial mass-circulation press. The politicized forerunners of America's popular newspapers could be traced back to the talents of rebellious exiles from the mother country in the persons of Benjamin Harris, Thomas Paine, and the Franklin brothers, James and Benjamin. These first journalists borrowed ideas extensively from flourishing British publications, and they used the press to fight the political controls exercised by the Crown. Following the achievement of independence, the infant republic's first newspapers pitted Federalists against Republicans in the struggle for votes.
In 1835, however, when James Gordon Bennett introduced his New York Herald, priced at a penny and subsidized by advertising, he restyled print communications. As Michael Schudson has cogently argued, America's penny papers became the prototypes of modern journalism because they acted as "spokesmen for egalitarian ideals in politics, economic life, and social life through their organization of sales, their solicitation of advertising, their emphasis on news, their catering to a large audience, their decreasing concern with the editorial." When more serious, higher-priced dailies began to appear, such as the New York Tribune, their publishers copied much of what had made Bennett so successful.
On the Continent, though, political interest groups maintained greater influence over a longer period in the publication of newspapers. Great Britain, the seedbed of the Industrial Revolution, was comparatively slow to develop a commercial press. The politically oriented London Times, founded by John Walter as a private business in 1771, reached educated readers through its national circulation. However, the Stamp Act of 1765, which had applied the so-called taxes on knowledge by adding duties to newspapers and advertisements that would help to underwrite costs, made even lower-priced newspapers cost-prohibitive for mass consumption. An unstamped press surfaced illegally in times of political stress; England had an impressive history of radical working-class journalism. The repeal of the tax on advertising in 1853, which predated by two years the revocation of the Stamp Act, paved the economic way for a commercial press. The Daily Telegraph, founded in 1855, became England's first fully commercialized daily.
The English press's coupling of commerce and liberal politics appeared by the end of the next decade in papers oriented toward the lower classes, which subverted the radical tradition of the unstamped press. Passage of the Education Act of 1870, which ordained universal primary education, enlarged the pool of ordinary readers and had a favorable impact on the growth of the popular press. Alfred Harmsworth (later, Lord Northcliffe) founded his Daily Mail in 1896, followed by his more infamous Daily Mirror, which reproduced the successful formula of the American urban press. England could then boast a thriving newspaper industry, headquartered along the euphonious Fleet and Grub Streets, that represented its diverse reading public.
France, like England, had a rich tradition of political journalism and was also quicker to develop a commercial press. Emile Girardin, described as "perhaps the most influential figure in the history of the modern French press," founded his La Presse, the first French mass-circulation daily, in 1836. The appearance of Le Petit Journal in 1863 gave Paris its first mass-oriented press, which combined serial adventure novels with faits divers (human interest stories) and, selling for five centimes, greatly expanded the base of newspaper readership. Jean Dupuy took over the small, political Le Petit Parisien in the 1880s, and, spicing it up with human interest and entertainment, he made it the largest newspaper in the world by 1900, the first to circulate above one million.
Despite these popular sensational periodicals, however, politics colored French journalistic traditions more deeply than they did British or American ones in the sense that editorial commentary lasted longer as a selling point over news. France's political turbulence throughout the nineteenth century helps to explain the directions its press took. The century witnessed a succession of imperial and republican governments, and even a flicker of socialism with the Paris Commune of 1871. Although France did not have England's taxes on knowledge, both its imperial and republican governments maintained censorship until reforms in 1881 allowed for expression of political differences. As New York Evening Post editor E. L. Godkin observed, as late as the 1890s Parisian journalists bragged about "the sensation they have made and the increase in circulation they have achieved by some sort of editorial comment or critique" instead of about scooping each other on the hard news stories in which American reporters took such pride.
It was not simply French political and literary traditions that upheld the importance of newspaper commentaries. The means by which news had become a commodity in France had undermined its value as an independent item. From the origins of their commercial newspapers, the French had considerable difficulty trying to separate the public from the private value of information. In England and the United States advertising agencies had sprouted in the business atmosphere engendered by commercial journalism; these agencies operated as brokers between businessmen and publishers, directing publicity about a product to its probable users. From their inception, though, French agencies operated differently. Charles Duveyrier set up the first advertising office in 1845, the Societe des Annonces. A fascinating entrepreneur, Duveyrier had entered the world of political economics as a "missionary" of socialism, preaching the gospel of Saint-Simon. He lost his socialist sympathies to capitalism, though, when he discovered he could turn a profit for himself by "renting" the back pages of major newspapers and then "subleasing" occupancy to advertisers. Instead of fighting Duveyrier's quasi monopoly, French publishers responded by selling news space to middlemen, who peddled publicity items as newsworthy stories.
British and American publishers, too, complained about this dilemma, and not all remained unblemished by corruption. But others responded by creatively rearranging the terms and placement of ads, for example, by breaking up static columns and offering discounts to regular patrons. Graft in the French press became legendary, and local businessmen rightly feared the blackmailers who sat in editorial offices threatening negative publicity. Russia's government was not the only one that maintained a slush fund for French publishers; France's own Ministry of Internal Affairs kept one, too. The corruption had an adverse effect on French commerce as well as journalism, and in 1911 French newspapers contained proportionally only half as much ad space as American papers.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The News Under Russia's Old Regime by Louise McReynolds. Copyright © 1991 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. v
- Illustrations, pg. vii
- Tables, pg. ix
- Acknowledgments, pg. xi
- Abbreviations Used in Footnotes and Tables, pg. xiii
- Introduction, pg. 3
- 1. The Origins of the Mass-Circulation Press, pg. 11
- 2. The Transition to Commercial Independence, 1863-1876, pg. 30
- 3. The Newspaper from the Boulevard, 1864-1876, pg. 52
- 4. The News Shapes the Medium: War and Assassination, 1876-1881, pg. 73
- 5. The Newspaper in Battle with the "Thick" Journal: Commercialization and Objectivity in the 1880s, pg. 97
- 6. The Grounding of a Public Institution in the 1890s, pg. 123
- 7. The Newspaper Reporter, pg. 145
- 8. The Journalism of Imperialism: The Russo-Japanese War, pg. 168
- 9. Russian Newspapers in Revolution, 1905-1907, pg. 198
- 10. The Newspaper Between Revolution and War, 1907-1914, pg. 223
- 11. The Newspaper in World War and Revolution, 1914-1917, pg. 253
- Conclusion, pg. 282
- Appendix A. Numbers, Circulations, and Street Sales of Newspapers, pg. 293
- Appendix B. Statistics on Punishment by the Censorship, pg. 300
- Appendix C. Content Analyses of Major Newspapers, pg. 305
- Index, pg. 311