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

by Andrew Pettegree

  This is the part of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century news world that must seem to us most foreign. We are hard put to believe that women gave birth to animals, or that the inhabitants of Sussex had been terrified by a dragon; yet such reports were published in pamphlets and newspapers right up to the eighteenth century.19 Sudden calamities and afflictions prompted particular reflection: in this era all news had a moral shape. Victims of misfortune, particularly collective misfortune, were always invited to look to themselves for causes.

  12.1 The comet of 1577. A frequent subject for representation, and feverish interpretation.

  The sense that calamitous events represented the working out of God's purpose was still unflinchingly believed throughout this period. We see it in the Protestant reporting of the sack of Magdeburg, which highlighted both the horror and the need for God's people to turn back to Him with a humble spirit.20 Incidences of plague, a recurring terror of these centuries, prompted a similar call for amendment of life. This was an affliction that seemed to defy both treatment and cure, striking indifferently at rich and poor. A stunned sense of powerlessness is as evident in pamphlets written at the time of the London plague in 1665 as it had been a century before. Plague was, in the Dutch expression, God's gift, beyond the fathoming of medical science.21

  The plague was beginning to recede when in 1666 London was consumed by a devastating fire. In this case renewed reflections on God's dreadful justice were mixed with more prosaic analysis: rumours quickly circulated that the fire had been deliberately started by the Catholics.22 This shift in emphasis, certainly encouraged by the increased level of news reporting, marks a trend towards a more rationalistic turn to the reporting of natural and man-made disasters. It coincides with the increased dissemination of empirical observation in the natural sciences. Scholars were encouraged, and encouraged each other, to gather and interpret empirical evidence, and be less respectful of inherited wisdom; as science advanced, so God's domain would contract.23 Applied to the world of news reporting this shift in emphasis certainly had a darker side. For as news men gradually abandoned the pious calls for self-amendment, they focused instead on a new avenue of causality: if they were not to blame themselves, then blame must lie elsewhere. A ravenous news press fed and encouraged the search for scapegoats, and a heightened adversarial tone to political debate. In this respect, at least, news reporting became recognisably more modern.

  News Well Buttered

  The question of how much credit should be given to news reports was of course as old as news itself. It underlay all the calculations of rulers of medieval societies, as they weighed the value of the limited and incomplete sources of information at their disposal. But at least in earlier generations these problems had been relatively well defined: How much could one trust a messenger? Was the bringer of news an interested party? How much weight to put on a rumour? Necessarily, until recipients of news could obtain corroboration, much consideration was given to the credit of the bearer, who might be a trusted subordinate, a well-informed source who had provided good information before, or a correspondent whose integrity guaranteed straight dealing. News reposed on the same bedrock of trust and honour that in principle underpinned all relationships among those of a certain social standing.24

  This comparatively intimate circle of news exchange was significantly disrupted by the birth of a commercial news market. The market for news spread beyond those for whom it was a professional necessity to be informed, to new, more naïve and inexperienced consumers. The intensification of pamphlet publication and the first generation of newspapers also coincided with a series of complex international conflicts which generated a large but dispersed audience eager for the latest intelligence. It was inevitable that this new hunger for news and the commercial pressures to satisfy it led to the reporting of much that could not be verified, and some downright invention. In 1624 the young dramatist James Shirley wrote scathingly of the trade in fabricated tales from the battlefield, penned by men who had never been near the front. ‘They will write you a battle in any part of Europe at an hour's warning, and yet never set foot out of a tavern.’25 If there was money to be made, Shirley implied, the newspapers would print it.

  This was not altogether fair. Shirley's observations were made at the height of the Thirty Years War, a critical but difficult era for news reporting. People all over Europe were desperate for the latest intelligence; but as we have seen the destruction caused by the fighting created severe disruption to the channels of information flow. Partisan hopes and fears made for additional distortions. The new generation of serials during the English Civil War faced similar problems with their domestic reporting, as William Collings, editor of the Kingdom's Weekly Intelligencer, wearily acknowledged in 1644. ‘There were never more pretenders to the truth than in this age, nor ever fewer that obtained it.’26

  As this example makes clear, news men were very conscious of the difficulties they faced in getting true reports. Thomas Gainsford was one of several who used his columns to urge readers to be less impatient: news could not be printed if there were none to be had. News men had no wish to be bounced into publishing information that turned out not to be true, not least because their livelihood depended on a reputation for reliability. William Watts was badly wrong-footed when after the battle of Breitenfeld in 1631 he reported the death of the Catholic general Tilly, and held to this even when reports emerged to the contrary. We can appreciate, though, that his reasoning did reflect a careful attempt to balance conflicting information. Watts just guessed wrong:

  Indifferent reader, we promised you (in the front of our last Aviso) the death and internment of Monsieur Tilly, which we now perform: notwithstanding the last Antwerpian post hath rumoured the contrary, against which you may balance each other, and accordingly believe. Only we will propose one question unto all gainsayers, let them demonstrate where Tilly is, and that great formidable army which he has raised, and we will all be of the Catholic faith.27

  12.2 Unquiet skies. Here Butter has both armies battling in the sky and clouds dripping blood. A strange apparition indeed.

  In fact, instances where a news man would go out on a limb with an unconfirmed rumour were rare (and there is no evidence that Watts followed through on his pledge to turn Catholic). Seventeenth-century newspapers were on the whole characterised more by caution than risk-taking. Many news men were at pains to point out when foreign news was as yet unverified. Gainsford's judicious formula could stand for many: ‘I would rather write true tidings only to be rumoured, when I am not full sure of them, than to write false tidings to be true, which will afterwards prove otherwise.’28

  This professionalism was seldom credited by the critics of news men. Much of the criticism of newspapers, it must be said, emanated from privileged members of existing circles of news exchange, like James Shirley, and the proprietors of manuscript news services who had a financial interest in emphasising the superiority of their own sources. The ridicule heaped on the newspapers and their readers also reflected a decree of social contempt for neophyte consumers. Nowhere was this more evident than on the London stage, where dramatists made the newspapers a regular butt of their humour. The unfortunate Nathaniel Butter came in for particular ridicule, as his name proved an irresistible target for puns. In A Game of Chess, Thomas Middleton made great play of Butter, presumably knowing that for his audiences Butter was the public face of news. Abraham Holland concluded a more general assault on the news men with a memorable couplet:

  To see such Butter every week besmear

  Each public post and church door!29

  The news men's principal persecutor was Ben Jonson, the first to make the newspaper press the subject of their own play, A Staple of News. Here the target was as much the credulous purchasers of news as the news men, like the countrywoman whom Jonson imagines wandering into the staple office to ask for ‘any news, a groat's worth’.30 Such simpletons, he implied, were easily manipulated. The criticism was probably wide
of the mark. Although in principle a single issue of the news serial was well affordable for many of very limited income, these were not the typical consumers of news serials. The news men aimed their productions at a subscription market: and subscribers were likely to have been wealthier (a shilling a month was a significant outlay) and more sophisticated readers; they would need to be, to make sense of the elliptical, staccato reports that were the newspaper style.

  One should also keep in mind that sceptical commentators usually had an axe to grind, and the London playwrights were no exception. To some extent the newspapers threatened the theatre's role in contemporary news commentary. Ben Jonson was a representative of the established media, enjoying the access of the privileged to information and backstairs gossip. He had smoothly mastered the theatre's arch references to contemporary events for an informed and knowing clientele. He also disapproved of the news-papers’ editorial line: he was no supporter of the policy of intervention in the Thirty Years War. He resented the papers’ political role, which by raising consciousness of the plight of Protestants abroad piled pressure on the reluctant king to intervene.

  So Jonson, like many representatives of the established media, was never likely to give the newspapers a fair hearing. Even so, his criticism does reflect a wider dissatisfaction with the serial form itself – and here there were fair points to be made.31 Until this point the pamphlet had been the normative printed form of news delivery. Although news pamphlets and serials shared many points of similarity (the serials were closely modelled on the pamphlets in physical terms), their relationship with the potential audience was fundamentally different. Non-serial pamphlets were very much superior as conduits of information. Because they only appeared when there were important events to publicise, they did not have to deal with uncertain or unresolved issues: they were published after the event. On the whole they had much more space (on average four times as much text as early newspapers) and dealt with a single issue rather than the newspapers’ frantic miscellany. Because non-serial pamphlets were one-off publications they did not assume prior knowledge; they took time to explain context and consequences. The news events recorded in pamphlets often preserved their interest for some time. Many were published or reprinted a long while after the events described. They did not need to be rushed out; they left time for reflection and judgement.

  The news serials were invariably more hectic. They described events still unfolding, and not yet fully known. They were forced to include much information that seemed portentous at the time, but in retrospect was utterly trivial. The news men, whose major editorial task was to choose what threads of news to print from a larger heap, were not particularly well qualified to make such judgements. Often this was just one of many tasks in a busy print shop. No sooner was one issue on sale than news men were gathering copy for the next. There was little mental space for reflection and explanation, even if the style adopted in the newspapers (inherited from the manuscript newsletters) had allowed for this, which it did not.

  News pamphlets could adopt a very different approach. Most pamphlets would appear only at the conclusion of a siege or campaign, when the outcome was known (a luxury not available to a weekly publication). In a pamphlet facts could be marshalled and shaped towards this known outcome. For those wanting to make sense of troubled times this must have seemed a much more logical form of news reporting. Pamphlets also offered more opportunity for erudite and fine writing, for commitment and advocacy.

  So there were good reasons, quite apart from professional competition, why many regarded the newspapers as a fad, and a retrograde step for news publication. But when Ben Jonson took aim at the new naïve readers, he need not have worried, because these were hardly the intended audience: these neophyte consumers were far more likely to buy, if anything, a pamphlet which gave them a complete view of a single subject. An individual issue of a newspaper would always be like coming into a room in the middle of a conversation; it was hard to pick up the thread, and the terse factual style offered little help. This was not how they were intended to be read, or collected: most newspaper issues passed safely into the hands of more sophisticated readers, who followed events on a regular basis.

  The Scourge of Opinion

  The rising tide of criticism reflected the fact that by the late seventeenth century a serial press was a fixed and unavoidable feature of the commerce of news. While the lands in northern Europe had taken most enthusiastically to the newspapers, by late in the century Italian cities also had a decent scattering of papers, and the form was even beginning to establish a foothold in Spain. Germany, with its patchwork of independent jurisdictions, achieved by far the best coverage, and it was here too that the critics of newspapers made their voices heard. In the third quarter of the seventeenth century a number of writers articulated their disquiet at the proliferation of the serial press, and the dangers to society if newspapers fell into the wrong hands. In 1676 the court official Ahasver Fritsch published a brief pamphlet on the use and abuse of newspapers.32 Fritsch was a firm supporter of princely power, and was strongly of the view that the circulation of newspapers should be confined to public persons who had an occupational need to remain informed (that is, the traditional readers of avvisi). The fact that he published his tract in Latin indicates that these were very much his intended audience.

  Fritsch's theme was taken up a few years later by Johann Ludwig Hartman, a Lutheran pastor and prolific author. Hartman had developed a line in sermons denouncing the sins of dancing, gambling, drinking and idleness; to these he added, in a trenchant discourse of 1679, the sin of newspaper reading.33 Hartman was prepared to concede that merchants needed to read newspapers; but otherwise they should be forbidden to the general public. Fritsch and Hartman set the tone for a debate that focused on defining which social groups could safely be entrusted with political news. Daniel Hartnack, a skilled and imaginative publisher, also tried to draw a distinction between useful reading and mere curiosity. In normal times, Hartnack agreed, reading of newspapers should be restricted to the informed who could apply proper critical judgement. Only in time of war should everyone read papers.34

  12.3 The world ruled and governed by opinion. Opinion is represented as a blindfolded woman, crowned with the Tower of Babel. The fruits of the tree are pamphlets.

  This sense of social exclusivity is a warning against overestimating the reach of the first generations of newspapers. Those in the circles of power, with access to good sources of news, were deeply sceptical as to whether much good would come of extending these privileges to untrained minds. It was only at the very end of the seventeenth century that a German author would join the debate with an unambiguous statement in favour of reading newspapers. Kaspar Stieler's Zeitungs Lust und Nutz (The Pleasure and Utility of Newspapers) was a ringing endorsement of the right to follow the news:

  We who live in this world, must know the present world; we get no help here from Alexander, Caesar or Mohammed if we wish to be wise. Whoever seeks this wisdom and wishes to partake in society must follow the papers: must read and understand them.35

  Stieler had no patience with the attempt to limit access. All people, he believed, had the natural instinct to learn, and this extended to the latest current events. By enumerating the groups that would profit from newspaper reading, Stieler answered critics of the press directly. Teachers and professors needed to follow the news to stay up to date. Clergymen could incorporate material from the papers into their sermons (and find in them instances of God's interventions in human affairs). Merchants and itinerant workmen would be informed of the conditions on Europe's hazardous roads. Country nobles read newspapers to ward off boredom, and their ladies should read them too: better they prepared themselves to discuss serious subjects than waste time on gossip. Those who objected that newspapers were full of material unsuited to gentle eyes should remember that the Bible was also ‘full of examples of murder, of adultery, of theft and many other sins’.36

  Stieler's
broadside was timely, because at the beginning of the eighteenth century the virtues of news reading were far from universally acknowledged. On the contrary, the intensification of participatory politics brought a host of new anxieties that called into question the value – and the values – of the serial press. Critics of the newspapers focused on three main issues which they felt compromised the media contribution to public debate. They complained of information overload: that there was simply too much news, much of it contradictory. They worried that the old tradition of straight reporting was being contaminated by opinion. This they believed, not without reason, was because statesmen were seeking to manipulate the news for their own purposes. All of these factors were likely to distort or obscure the truth, and leave readers confused and bamboozled.

  The complaint that good sense was being drowned in a torrent of print was not entirely new at this time. Since the first decades of the sixteenth century, and the surge of pamphlets that accompanied the Reformation, contemporaries had been startled and unsettled by the pamphlet warfare stimulated by successive crises of European affairs. To apply the same criticism to the newspapers at the beginning of the eighteenth century may seem wide of the mark. In most parts of Europe a single newspaper still enjoyed a local monopoly. Only in London and a few German cities (notably Hamburg) was a larger number of regular serials in direct competition. Here rivalry could bring damaging consequences.37 Papers were all too gleefully eager to point up each other's errors. It seems not to have occurred to them that by impugning their rivals they damaged the credibility of the genre as a whole. Daniel Defoe, who was hardly innocent of hyperbole or partisan exaggeration, at one time or another attacked the truthfulness or integrity of most of his competitors, including The Daily Courant, The English Post, The London Gazette, The Post Boy and The Post Man.38 The Tatler sneered intermittently at the contradictions and exaggerations of the press, concluding, with lofty hyperbole, that ‘the newspapers of this island are as pernicious to weak heads in England as ever books of chivalry to Spain’.39