The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain: The Nineteenth Century - Hardcover

Koss, Stephen E.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807814830 ISBN 13: 9780807814833

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr, 1981

Synopsis

This book sets out to place the history of the modern British press in its political setting and, in the process, to unravel the Byzantine network of relationships that existed between newspapermen and politicians during the Victorian age.In the 1850s, with the repeal of the "taxes on knowledge", newspapers were liberated from the disabilities and restraints of official control. More cheaply priced, the immediately experienced a spectacular growth in numbers and circulation, which politicians of every persuasion were quick to exploit for personal and party advantage. Lord Palmerston led the way as the merry manipulator of the press. Cobden and Bright, Russell and Gladstone, Disraeli and Salisbury, Lord Randolph Churchill and Joseph Chamberlain, Balfour, Rosebery, and Lloyd George -- all were more intimately associated with the conduct of journalism than their contemporaries suspected.As the agents and accomplices of political leaders, newspapermen were generously rewarded with confidential information, financial subsidies, editorial prestige, preferments, titles, and in one case, the poet laureateship. In return, the press provided its political mentors with platforms for their policies and vehicles for their ambitions. Within the restricted confines of nineteenth-century political society, newspapers functioned as megaphones through which parliamentarians could broadcast their appeals to an expanding electorate, and also as ventriloquial devices through which hints could be dropped and dialogues could be conducted. At once the best available index to popular opinion and the single most convenient mechanism for guiding it, the press was ingeniously used to promote causes, to discredit opponents, and even occasionally to embarrass colleagues.Employing a wide range of manuscript sources, many previously untapped, Stephen Koss has investigated the influence of the press on shifting alignments at Westminster and in the country, and the various ways in which party allegiances determined newspaper comment and content.

Edition details

• Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr
• Publication date: 1981
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807814830
• ISBN 13: 9780807814833
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 464