Information And Communication

With the stated or unstated assumption that the mass audience has a peculiar taste for the gruesome, many historians trace sensationalism to the penny papers of the 1830s, which they treat as the first mass-circulation press. But the theory that sensationalism originated in the days of Jacksonian democracy can be disproved with a glance further back. In fact, the first newspaper printed in America — Publick Occurrences, which appeared in 1690 — discussed a report that the king of France "used to lie with" his "Sons Wife" and told the story of an unfortunate "Water-town" man who, in despair, hanged himself in the "Cow-house." Colonial authorities reacted with more than a snicker. They shut the paper down.

Sensationalism was, if anything, more prevalent in the publications that preceded the newspaper in Europe. In England, these early printed broadsides and newsbooks specialized in reporting criminals' woeful pleas. According to a 1605 newsbook, the "pittilesse" Sir John Fites, "thirstie of bloud," had just finished killing a man and stabbing that man's wife when he ran upon his own bloody sword. "Proude heart, Wilt thou not yielde?" Sir John is then quoted as declaiming. "Split, split, and in this onely wound die: That I thy owner may not live, to heare the honour of my credite stayned with these odious actes."

The news was no less grisly on the Continent. French news publications of this period are known for their recherche systematique into the horribles detailes. The trail of sensationalism can even be followed back to a news organ that was published (made public) more than thirteen hundred years before the invention of the printing press. In Rome, at the end of the first century A.D., newssheets posted in the Forum are said to have devoted space to two favorite topics of the sensationalist — crime and divorce. A satire of these newssheets included in Petronius' Satyricon features reports on a fire and the crucifixion of a slave.

Sensationalism appears to be a technique or style that is rooted somehow in the nature of the news. News obviously can do much more than merely sensationalize, but most news is, in an important sense, sensational: it is intended, in part, to arouse, to excite, often — whether the subject is a political scandal or a double murder — to shock. Newspapers like the New York Post or the New York Times may overplay or underplay the maudlin and the shocking; they may choose different strategies for thrilling their audiences — strategies that reflect more or less noble attitudes toward their audiences and their missions. But it is important to remember, as we distribute praise and blame, that these news organizations are all playing at a very old game. Too often those who criticize the less socially redeeming forms of sensationalism, those who snicker, weaken their arguments by failing to take into account the inherent rules of this game. And this is but one example of a larger problem: too often we are entranced by variations in journalism over years and decades, but blind to its constancies over centuries.

Certainly, our society pays enough attention to the news. We watch news, read news, debate news, marvel at, puzzle over and curse news. The news stream runs fast enough for all of us to feel its rush. We are alert to the movements of the politicians and celebrities, the criminals and dictators, who pass before us. But our understanding of the substance in which we are immersed is incomplete. The news itself is too pervasive; it seems too transparent. Those who speculate on its flavor, its nature, too often are wrong.

How is it possible to gain perspective on a substance that is all around us? Critics and scholars squint; they sight against their thumbs. But how is it possible to determine whether sensationalism is an aberration or is inescapable simply by staring at headlines announcing that a criminal is crying out for death? History should be able to speak to such questions, but the history of journalism we have is not adequate to the task. It is too often shortsighted.

Those who study journalism history, like scholars in most disciplines, have as of late been pursuing tightly limited and increasingly esoteric research topics. But, unlike historians of literature or drama, for example, they do not have access to a shelf full of older, more ambitious works. Consequently, while we are aware of inadequacies in press coverage of Watergate or the Vietnam War, we have difficulty determining to what extent such inadequacies are endemic to reporting; while we are familiar, for another example, with the political views of the American editor Horace Greeley before, during and after the Civil War, we do not understand the larger political role the spread of news tends to play in any era, in any society.

Journalism historians too easily get lost among the trees. They are often so eager to praise innovators and proclaim firsts that they see innovations and firsts where they should be seeing connections and continuities. According to one widely cited book on journalism history, for example, "the idea of 'news' itself" was invented in the Jacksonian era, and "reporting was an invention of the end of the nineteenth century." A similar shortsightedness can be seen when a seemingly exhaustive history of war reporting does not begin its discussion until the Crimean War in 1854 or when the author of a history of the newspaper concludes that the notions of a "crisis" and a "horror," along with the division of reality into stories, entered journalism only in the late nineteenth century.

Perhaps the history of news has been neglected because many journalists themselves lack a sense of history. News hounds, after all, are trained to point only in the direction of the last bird to drop from the sky. For the journalist the previous week is history; the previous century sometimes seems not to have existed.

Or perhaps the problem is that historians tend to underestimate the news. From their perspective, news — excitable, immature, so often wrong—is difficult to take seriously. The historian Elizabeth Eisenstein, for instance, includes in her two-volume study of the transformations worked by the printing press only a handful of minor references to its journalistic uses, although the meaning we have attached to the word press indicates that those uses have proved rather significant.

And news may also get slighted because those who sift through remnants of past cultures tend to overemphasize the elements of those cultures — history, art, literature — that have shown an ability to last. News — condemned to inevitable, if not planned, obsolescence (each new installment outdates its predecessor) — does not speak to future generations and therefore tends to be overlooked by future generations.

Whatever the explanation, the centuries, even millennia, of journalism that preceded the birth of the American newspaper are commonly ignored in the United States. (This history, to be fair, is not often explored in Europe either, though that is where much of it unfolded.) And without the long view of history that is taken for granted in so many other disciplines, those who study journalism risk falling into error.

Sometimes journalism critics seem like drama critics who have never read Shakespeare or Sophocles. Without the perspective of an extended history of news, the journalist's "often mindless readiness to seek out conflict," for example, can be attributed to the 1960s — as if before that agitated decade journalists routinely looked away from conflict; or it can be suggested that journalists might present more searching perspectives and air more diverse points of view if only they would drop their emphasis on "novelty" — as if news could simply switch its emphasis to the dated, the already familiar.

Journalism has changed. Without a familiarity with larger patterns, however, it is not only difficult to distinguish significant trends from short-term deviations, but it is difficult to analyze the implications of those changes. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us global reporting systems. Clearly, the information they collect has affected our view of events. But how? How did the world look to its residents before reporters were stationed in all the major capitals? Are we indeed uniquely well informed on all aspects of our world? The arrival of broadcast news has had significant journalistic and political consequences, consequences that are endlessly debated. But the debates proceed without the benefit of obvious comparisons — to the consequences of the introduction of the newspaper, for example.

More pervasive misunderstandings also result from the holes that exist in journalism history: Free of an extended view of the history of press-government relations, it is easy to maintain a romantic image of the journalist, when unchained by repressive regulation, as a staunch adversary of government; it is easy to overlook the basic pro-authoritarian role that has been played by those who spread news: their success in occupying the minds of the governed with a belief in the importance, if not the inevitability, of a system of government.

The misunderstandings extend beyond issues in journalism and mass communication: without an understanding of the flow of news through different societies, understanding of the life of those societies is impoverished. The exchange of news has filled many hours of the days that compose history — conversations have been dominated by news, excursions motivated by the search for news, actions stimulated by the receipt of news. Historical inquiries into everyday life must consider time spent collecting and disseminating news. In fact, news linked the peasants and artisans modern historians have rediscovered with the generals and kings of the old history. The charm and wit exhibited in so much antique journalism — the regular work of regular minds — also serves as a reminder that the past was not a desert spotted by the occasional oasis of literary genius, but a forest of intelligences perhaps as lush and as variegated as those of our own era.

Moreover, without a fuller understanding of the history of news, the larger contribution that news has made to history is easily overlooked. That contribution may be crucial. Societies may be uplifted by the art they create, anchored by the history they preserve; but societies are, in some sense, sustained by the news they share. News has a political impact even when it is merely exchanged, not proclaimed. Indeed, the stability of political groupings may depend, to some extent, on their ability to circulate current information.

Finally, without a fuller understanding of the history of news, it is difficult to determine just how the boundaries and shadings of this window through which we view our social and political world limit and distort our view of that world. Without that history it is almost impossible to gain sufficient perspective.

The news a particular society exchanges obviously will reflect the specific cultural and political concerns of that society. (Some early English journalists, for instance, earned their livings catering to interest in dragons or "Popish plots"; and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a murder story was incomplete without evidence of the murderer's vanity and a detailed statement of repentance, preferably in verse.) Treatments of news, attitudes toward news, understandings of news, have clearly varied over the centuries. Nonetheless, the extent of these variations has frequently been exaggerated by theorists eager to credit changes in a society with revolutions in the nature of news — revolutions that, when examined from a broader perspective, turn out not to have taken place. (After all, the distance between Popish plots and Communist plots, or dragons and UFOs, is not that great.)

A particularly lively forum for the exchange of news by word of mouth — the coffeehouse — flourished in England well after the development of the newspaper, and in some countries the coffeehouse has survived even the introduction of television. Some news media are also more likely than others to leave behind records of their existence. Evidence of the workings of the oldest news medium — word of mouth — is the least likely to be preserved.

Unlike words such as information and communication, which seem to have gained their current meanings only in the second half of the nineteenth century, the English word news has been used in roughly the same way for at least five hundred years. And its synonym tidings can be traced back to Old English. In fact, most languages appear to have a term for this category of information.

In refining news as a commodity, the elaborate mechanisms for its collection and distribution created in the last two centuries have made it easier to see news as a substance independent of moralizing and polemic. "Newspapers," the Times Literary Supplement suggested in an editorial in 1955, "should outgrow the phase of knight-errantry and concentrate . . . on performing a function as useful to society as the daily delivery of milk." Most journalists today demonstrate some ability to separate this news-delivery function from the goals of uplifting or persuading, which seemed so important to so many of their predecessors. (Of course, shared values and selective perceptions continue to taint the supply of news, despite the great show made of eradicating subjectivity.)

News is, in effect, what is on a society's mind. Has a bill been passed? Has anyone been hurt? Is a star in love? Through the news, groups of people glance at aspects of the world around them. Which of the infinite number of possible new occurrences these groups are able to see, and which they choose to look at, will help determine their politics and their philosophies.

Through our newspapers, magazines and newscasts we see a world of wiggling economic curves, incessant crime, dancing superstars and spectacular catches. Is that view inevitable or arbitrary? What are the strengths and limitations of that particular selection of reality? What else might we be seeing? These questions are best answered by examining what societies in other eras have seen through their news.

Mitchell Stephens. . Viking Penguin. 1988.

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