There has long been a historical deficit in media studies and political communication. Most university programmes assume that only the television age and what has come after is important. So, what happened before the 1930s is seen as unimportant. This may be about to change. The British Library has put 49 newspapers between 1800 and 1900 online. Some are free, some cost. But for anyone who has ever struggled with motion sickness while trying to read newspaper articles on microfiche it will be a relief. The time period is significant in the history of British newspapers. Ed King’s brief synopsis of newspaper history argues it marked the rise of the professional journalist in Britain and the emergence of specialist City, parliamentary and foreign correspondents. He traces the significance of political, economic and demographic change in driving demand for news; the significance of technology and improved infrastructure in the ability to supply this; and the impact of taxes on the affordability of newspapers.
King writes about the significance of big public events such as the Great Exhibition in fostering a public awareness of technology. What would be interesting is to see what role newspaper coverage of these events helped foster what Anderson calls an “imagined community. Or we could do an event construction comparing newspaper coverage of the Exhibition with the forthcoming Olympics to find out how constructions of national identity and national pride may have changed. Or we could consider a comparison of coverage of the Crimean War in the 19th century and the Iraq War in the 20th century to see how perceptions of the mishandling of war have changed.
I can already anticipate colleagues saying there would be problems doing these comparisons. Yes, any such study would have to include a contextual account of different times in history; different social, economic and political conditions; different assumptions about what news is, etc. It won’t be easy. But for too long media studies and political communication studies have adopted a-historical approaches. This gives rise to a pretty limited notion of continuity and change. For instance, if we want to consider how current conceptions of news are changing in the age of blogs, twitter, etc wouldn’t it be helpful to understand the roots of the original conceptions? Surely, questions of change cannot only be about the new possibilities of new technologies but also how and in what ways the roots of the original conceptions have changed. Possibly to the point where they are no longer relevant.
