JOURNALISM

Thomas Cragin

Europe did not see anything resembling modern journalism, the serial publication of news, until the seventeenth century. However, if the definition of journalism is expanded to include the regular printing of news and political, religious, and philosophical opinion, then journalism was born with the printing press in the middle of the fifteenth century. From the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries most printed news catered to religious and sensational interests rooted in the popular oral culture that preceded print. After the invention of the printing press, journalists introduced radically new ideas and challenged the growing numbers of readers to rethink old assumptions. Religious dogma, the organization of the universe, and the legitimacy of constituted authority became issues for debate. Early journalists improved the communication of news and had a momentous impact on European society through their diffusion of the ideas of the Protestant and Catholic Reformation, the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution.

However, until the nineteenth century in western Europe and the twentieth century in eastern Europe illiteracy, poverty, and geographic isolation kept most Europeans from regular access to print journalism. All that changed in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, the newspaper's golden age. In that era mass-circulation dailies popularized the modern newspaper's blend of political, business, sports, and sensational news with special interest sections, reviews, and advertising. Accuracy, detail, speed, and investigation became ideals for the new professional journalist. In the twentieth century electronic media simplified journalistic style and greatly expanded its audience.

THE COMING OF PRINT

Before the invention of the printing press, most Europeans received news verbally from peddlers, travelers, soldiers, and beggars wandering through villages and towns. News of important international events could take years to reach peasant ears and would be greatly distorted when it arrived. False news could have serious effects, as when false reports of new taxes caused peasant revolts in the fourteenth century. Distortions of oral communication invested the written word with greater respect both for its authenticity and for its authority since it was the product of the learned elite.

In the mid-fifteenth century monarchs were among the first to use the printing press to communicate news. By the end of the fifteenth century kings often employed printers to publish their decrees for distribution to officials throughout their kingdoms. Especially in times of crisis, rulers used print to gain popular support. At the end of the War of the Roses, a struggle between rival factions for the English throne, the victorious king Henry VII printed and circulated the papal bull confirming his claim to the throne. Similarly King Charles VIII of France launched a major press campaign in the late fifteenth century to garner support for his invasion of Italy. Monarchs' use of print was quickly imitated by judicial, city, town, and church authorities. These publications usually were written by servants of the king, bishop, or mayor and were printed by royal or ecclesiastical printing houses or printers with royal privileges. Royal or ecclesiastic patrons exercised enormous direct influence over these writers and publishers. However, not all journalists wrote in the service of the church or the Crown.

Before the end of the Renaissance new kinds of journalism developed to serve the needs of commoners. The most important to the development of modern journalism were news books. Merchants' livelihoods depended on quick and accurate news of wars, plagues, famines, shipping disasters, and weather that would greatly increase or contract competition in the market. By the sixteenth century a number of individuals in Italy, Germany, and Holland capitalized on bankers' and merchants' need for quick and reliable news by selling handwritten newssheets reporting important business, military, and political events. These newssheets were destined for only a small readership, however, since the high costs of maintaining correspondents and couriers to collect and carry the latest news kept subscriptions beyond the means of most of the middle classes. But in the sixteenth century the printing press enabled news to reach a much larger audience.

THE REFORMATION AND THE POPULAR PRESS

By the early sixteenth century a popular printed journalism flourished throughout Europe. A great variety of popular prints circulated in urban Europe at the end of the fifteenth century, and they were increasingly available to peasants in the countryside during the next century. Four hundred years before the advent of the mass newspaper press, these prints were produced by the tens and hundreds of thousands.

The popular journalists of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries ranged from great poets to lowly peddlers who produced and sold a broad range of literature to rich and poor alike. Their prints appeared in several sizes and formats, most combining text, song, and picture. Poster-sized broadsheets or broadsides, printed on one side for mounting on walls, were very popular in urban settings. More portable, small pamphlets were sold widely in cities and villages. The broadsides and pamphlets most commonly contained sensationalist news and information on religious debates and changes taking place in sixteenth-century Europe.

The Protestant Reformation initiated a war of words that greatly expanded the circulation of vernacular literature. Broadsides and pamphlets spread the ideas of the Protestant and Catholic Reformation in their most abbreviated forms. Martin Luther became one of Germany's best-selling authors through the circulation of hundreds of thousands of copies of his devotionals. While Luther's publications urged readers to decide theological questions for themselves, papal defenders circulated treatises demanding the complacence of "the ignorant and rebellious commoners." By 1521 official Catholic prints had done as much as Luther's to promote popular dissatisfaction with Catholic authorities, turning Luther's revolt into a mass movement. Though he was the most read Protestant journalist in Reformation Germany, Luther was by no means alone. Many of his followers published prints for mass audiences, sometimes in conflict with his views. In central and southern Germany, Protestant propagandists turned Luther's message into a call for social equality and political freedom, initiating the German Peasants' War of 1525. Afterward Luther, his princes, and their Catholic counterparts became increasingly aware of the dangers as well as the advantages of popular journalism.

Most of the Reformation broadsides and pamphlets were published in the vernacular language to reach the widest possible readership. In 1534 French Protestants touched off a dramatic conflict in Paris, known as the "affaire des placards," by posting anti-Catholic propaganda throughout the city. Millions of religious prints were circulated by both Protestants and Catholics in their struggle against one another. More than merely communicating the controversial issues relating to church doctrine, these prints reported miracles, detailed the stories of local saints, and described the actions of witches and demons. During the wars of religion spanning the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they heightened Europeans' fears of heresy, contributing to the violence of religious conflict and the persecution of so-called witches. Popular journalists in mid-seventeenth-century England, for example, reported miracles, monstrosities, and omens that fostered support for the reestablishment of monarchy.

Since church and state were united in Europe at this time, the religious conflict of the Reformation era was very much a conflict of states. Martin Luther won crucial support for his revolt against the Catholic Church through his printed appeals to the German princes. In England, Henry VIII distributed prints throughout Britain justifying his break with the Catholic Church. In France, Francis I issued prints defending the alliance he made between Catholic France and the Protestants in wars against the Spanish Catholics. In addition to using print to promote their interests, both Protestant and Catholic states fought the war of words by banning and burning their opponents' prints. This action, however, could have the opposite effect. As Elizabeth Eisenstein points out, inclusion in the Index of Forbidden Books often promoted the sale of a work that otherwise might have garnered little attention. Thus, to identify and prevent the circulation of banned works, nearly every government instituted elaborate controls over the press. Over time states made political and religious censorship more thorough and more repressive.

However, these controls were unnecessary for most popular journalism. Popular political news nearly always promoted the interests of the state and its established church. When reporting politics, journalists most often announced new laws and regulations, alliances, wars, battles, and peace treaties. They also made regular reports on the major political figures of the day, noting all royal births, deaths, processions, and weddings. Coercion by the state was seldom applied and usually unnecessary to gain good press for the government. In fact most popular political news was adamantly xenophobic and patriotic.

The vast majority of popular news, however, ignored government and politics in favor of sensational news stories. Lacking a loyal clientele, each print had to sell itself with attention-grabbing news. Violence sold best, especially reports of murders, trials, and executions. News of natural disasters was also popular, especially when detailing mass fatalities. Reports of ghosts and monsters did not merely serve to inspire fiction, as they would in the nineteenth century, since early modern readers considered such reports to be factual. In addition to sensational reports, a large part of popular news related practical information. In town and country, newssheets announced the dates and locations of local fairs, festivals, and pilgrimages. Peasants prized the almanac above all other prints since they found so much use for its calendars, forecasts, horoscopes, and religious iconography. Such contents might be used to time planting and harvesting and to secure the protection of the saints for the year's crops.

Social historians look at the early modern popular press to expose the era's values and beliefs. Popular religious prints provide invaluable insight into the nature of religious belief and the early modern worldview. Miraculous divine interventions and satanic rites were not only reported as factual but were also pointed to as explanations for crime and injustice, acts of state, and natural calamities. Early modern journalism suggests that Europeans saw their world as the plaything of supernatural forces. Reports of violent crimes and punishments reveal the consistent affirmation of paternal authority, the vilification of independence in women and servants, and a widespread fascination with the grotesque. Read by elites as well as by the lower classes, these reports, especially those describing fantastical beasts and satanic monsters, suggest the distance between early modern and modern readers' acceptance of and belief in the marvelous.

Until the nineteenth century, broadsides and pamphlets were the most plentiful forms of printed news. But in the seventeenth century many of these prints lost their appeal for rich and poor alike. The upper classes began to disparage many popular genres as beneath their dignity. Scholars are uncertain as to how widespread this rejection of popular literature by elites was. A number of studies suggest that elites continued to buy certain popular pamphlets in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Nevertheless, a new periodical journalism aimed at elite readers emerged in the seventeenth century.

THE BIRTH OF THE PERIODICAL PRESS IN THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT

The first printed periodical appeared in Europe during the seventeenth century. In 1605 Abraham Berhoeven introduced Nieuwe Tindinghe, the first periodical newssheet. The Antwerp paper began as a weekly, but demand soon prompted three printings a week. By the middle of the seventeenth century weekly newssheets were printed in Holland, Germany, Austria, France, Italy, and Spain. While they had neither the format nor the content of the modern newspaper, these weeklies did provide subscribers with a regular source of news. The historian Henri-Jean Martin describes their proliferation as the birth of modern journalism. The speedier collection and publication of news in the early eighteenth century facilitated the introduction of dailies in Europe. The Daily Courant, Europe's first daily, appeared in London in 1702, building its initial success on its updates on the progress of the War of Spanish Succession. England's first professional newspaper editor, Thomas Gainsford, adopted the popular pamphlets' narrative style to make newspaper reporting more engaging for the reader. The result was a hybrid journalism, more factual than before but still sensational.

While popular newssheets were notorious for distorting and falsifying information, newspapers achieved a better reputation among elites in the seventeenth century. Newspaper publishers earned a measure of respect by occasionally correcting errors from an earlier issue, creating the impression that journalists strove for accuracy. The Spanish Gaceta de Zaragoza (Gazette of Zaragoza) explained in a May 1688 report that it was "impossible always to satisfy quickly the public curiosity without sometimes making mistakes" but assured readers that its use of diverse sources that confirmed one another would guarantee accuracy. Yet the impressions these techniques gave were deceiving. Most reports were based on second- and third-hand information relayed from witnesses to foreign correspondents and then from couriers to the papers' publishers, distorted in each transmission. In the eighteenth century some newspapers addressed this problem by offering readers more direct information. The Spectator, a successful London daily, took its name from its reporters' and correspondents' first-hand accounts. Nevertheless, journalism was not yet investigative.

Early newspaper readers subscribed to the new weeklies and dailies to gain access to news critical for business, especially international news that they could not easily obtain otherwise. These texts provided readers with the latest details of European wars and equally important news on trade and conflict in America, Africa, and Asia. Though they reported on the great political and economic events of their day, the weeklies were by no means a medium for the spread of the most important ideas of their time. Few of them printed the scientific discoveries of the seventeenth century that revolutionized astronomy and physics. When discoveries were occasionally described, they were presented in the briefest and most simplistic terms. The early newspapers, like the news pamphlets, gave far more attention to sensations. The seventeenth-century newspaper subscriber could read more about strange births and monsters than about the scientific breakthroughs of Galileo and Johannes Kepler.

To read about the latest ideas relating to science, philosophy, and politics, readers could turn to periodical literary reviews that appeared in Europe in the late seventeenth century. Two of the most important, Journal des savants and Philosophical Transactions, appeared in Paris and London respectively in 1665. Philosophical Transactions published numerous articles on Isaac Newton's breakthroughs in physics, and both journals reviewed his Philosophiae naturalis Principia mathematica (1687). By the mid-eighteenth century dozens of new scientific, philosophical, literary, and professional journals spread the ideas of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment. The dramatic change in Europeans' worldview during the eighteenth century is reflected in journalists' new explanations of events, attributing them to human and natural causes rather than to supernatural forces.

Journalists had established their influence over politics in the Reformation but wielded even greater power as a political force in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Factions in the English government mobilized political writers to win popular support for their causes during the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Party leaders issued regular statements to their followers through printed pamphlets. By the early eighteenth century Grubb Street, the booksellers' street in London, was a center for the creation of political pamphlet propaganda purchased by rival factions in Parliament, and by the second half of the eighteenth century printers set up press shops in many of the smaller cities and towns of Britain. As a result the political pamphlet press made thousands of readers aware of the great debates of political philosophy and public policy.

While some early journalists, such as Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), enjoyed stable and profitable careers through service to the Crown, many were critical of their governments in a manner that appealed to a growing number of readers. As patronage shifted from the courts to the aristocratic salon, journalists became the tools of the nobility's attacks on absolutism. Moreover, coffeehouses and cafés provided these authors with a growing audience of middle-class readers, many of whom favored a more open society and polity. Pornographic libelles (lampoons) describing lurid details of the private lives of well-known personages, especially in royal courts, became the mid-eighteenth-century's best-sellers in many parts of Europe. Dressed up as philosophical treatises, they gave rise to a vast number of authors whom the historian Robert Darnton describes as "gutter Rousseaus." Throughout eighteenth-century Europe philosophes, radicals, and politically minded pornographers posed serious challenges to the authority and respect commanded by governments, earning those writers the reputation of constituting a separate and dangerous "republic of letters."

European monarchs attempted to counteract the threat by increasing controls over the press. Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister of French King Louis XIII, attempted to promote the development of royal absolutism in France by establishing in 1634 the Académie Française (French Academy), a formal body of writers with control of French printing. Governments throughout Europe attempted to buy off influential journalists with pensions and sinecures. Richelieu rewarded Théophraste Renaudot, editor of France's most important weekly newspaper, La Gazette de France, with a handsome salary, the exclusive privilege to print weekly news in Paris, and news updates from royal dispatches. In turn, La Gazette de France remained a firm ally of church and state, supporting, for example, the church's condemnation of Galileo for his heretical assertion that the earth revolved around the sun. Since newspapers and journals had to meet their subscribers' expectations for regular and timely installments, the threat of imprisonment kept most periodical journalists loyal to the Crown.

Though the periodical press grew throughout the eighteenth century and exerted great influence over its readers, it catered mainly to an elite audience of aristocrats and the upper-middle classes. Stamp taxes and censorship kept newspapers from reaching middle- and lower-class readers, who continued to depend on the cheaper broadsides and pamphlets instead. Journalism was deeply influenced by this situation. In describing the effects of censorship under the Old Regime, Martin asserts that the press was denied "the margin of liberty indispensable for it to flourish and treat the weightier topics" (Martin, 1994, p. 414). But in 1789 the Old Regime and its controls over the press came crashing down, granting the press a whole new political freedom and power.

THE RISE OF THE POLITICAL PRESS IN THE AGE OF REVOLUTIONS

Britain was among the first of the European states to grant the press limited political freedom. In 1771 Parliament granted the press the right to report parliamentary debates. In the two decades preceding the French Revolution, Britain was a refuge for Europe's most liberal critics of the church and absolutist monarchies. The English press became the most radical in Europe. The political power of the British press prompted the English statesman Edmund Burke to describe the journalists present in Parliament as "the fourth estate." America's war for independence, the radicalism of John Wilkes and his followers at home, and the French Revolution and its wars fueled the dramatic growth of newspaper and pamphlet circulation. The annual circulation of London papers alone grew from nearly 10 million copies in 1760 to over 25 million in 1815. At the same time the provincial papers throughout urban Britain grew and exercised increasing influence on elections.

A great variety of political journalists, defenders and critics of the government alike, competed for the reading public's attention. By the early nineteenth century nearly every political party published its own newspaper. In Spain many newspapers were founded by sociedades patrióticas, political groups growing out of the informal discussion groups of Madrid cafés. Though no more numerous than conservative and nonpolitical writers, radical journalists inspired by Enlightenment ideas played a crucial role in bringing about a series of liberal revolutions in Europe, none more important than the French Revolution of 1789.

The French Revolution diminished censorship and generated a flood of new newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, and almanacs. The power and radicalism of French revolutionary journalism surpassed monarchs' worst fears. Liberal nobles used the press in 1788 to undermine absolute monarchy in France, and the nobles' revolt was itself undermined by an even larger pamphlet campaign. Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès wrote What Is the Third Estate? in 1789 and inspired the French to create a liberal constitutional and representative government. Politicians became journalists, and journalists such as Camille Desmoulins, Jean-Paul Marat, and Jacques Hébert became politicians who radicalized the revolution. Their role was significant because Parisian workers looked to them for insight and information. Because of the power they exercised and the fear they inspired in their political opponents, many journalists were murdered or executed at the height of the Revolution.

After 1793 French governments imposed strict censorship on political printing. Throughout Europe censorship was redoubled in the early nineteenth century to silence the political and social radicalism of journalists. Even Spain's brief moderate consitutional monarchy passed a law in 1822 that outlawed subversive prints that "injure the sacred and inviolable person of the King," warned against any attempt to stir rebellion, and even banned political allegory. But such strategies did not long stave off European liberals' demand for a free press. Increased censorship touched off revolution in France again in 1830, and journalists were crucial in the creation of a liberal monarchy. Journalists played an equally important role in the Chartist movement in England and in the 1848 revolutions on the Continent. While these were mainly urban revolutions in which journalists mobilized workers, democratic socialist pamphleteers created a peasant movement in France between 1849 and 1851 that demanded the liberalization of France's Second Republic. These peasants rose in revolt against Louis Napoleon's coup d'etat at the end of 1851, prompting his brutal repression of their democratic socialist movement and his reintroduction of severe press censorship. Though none of these revolutions succeeded in creating a lasting radical republic, the power of the press to mobilize the lower classes toward political ends encouraged journalists and politicians to expand the political press while governments made greater efforts to suppress it.

Among political periodicals, the socialist press has been of particular interest to social historians. Political repression and weak demand curtailed its success until nearly the beginning of the nineteenth century. Karl Marx's paper Neue Rheinische Zeitung (1848) could be considered exceptionally successful with only six thousand subscribers during the 1848 revolution, when the Prussian press was freed of political repression. By the end of the century, however, socialist editors such as Jean Jaurès, theorists such as Jules Guesde, and writers such as Anatole France reached a large and sympathetic audience through socialist newspapers. Studies of the socialist press suggest the gradual development of working-class consciousness and illustrate the transformation of socialist thinking over time.

The nature of journalism changed in the era of European revolutions. In the last decade of the eighteenth century three London papers, the nonpartisan Times, the Whig Morning Chronicle, and the Tory Morning Post, began a fierce competition to be the first to print the latest news during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Couriers rushed the news, collected by domestic reporters and foreign correspondents, to waiting editors. The Times owners also invested in new techniques that decreased the time required to print a new edition. These papers assigned reporters to specific "beats," where they gained greater expertise and connections, enabling regular and more extensive reports. By the mid-nineteenth century readers showed a growing preference for fact over polemic, promoting a more factual journalistic style. Newspapers also encouraged reporters to move beyond mere description to investigate cause and effect. Taking advantage of the growing number of newspapers demanding the latest news, enterprising businesspeople, such as Charles Havas in Paris, Bernard Wolff in Berlin, and Paul Julius von Reuter in London, created agencies that collected news from foreign papers and correspondents and communicated it to their subscribers by courier, carrier pigeons, and eventually telegraph.

Although the speed of communicating news accelerated, the effect in Europe was limited to the few who could afford high subscription prices. Fearful of the political challenges of printed matter, governments prevented public sales and imposed stamp taxes sufficient to preclude middle- and lower-class subscriptions. In the early nineteenth century lower-middle-class readers accessed political papers by purchasing memberships in private libraries. Both middle- and working-class readers also found newspapers at subscribing bars and cafés. Few workers, however, read the political press through any means.

A few journalistic pioneers attempted to expand readership through three innovations. First, a number of French and British newspapers reduced the price of subscriptions by selling advertising space to the consumer industries of the industrial revolution. But even in 1846, after a decade of this practice, all the Parisian dailies combined could claim less than 200,000 subscribers throughout France. Though advertising did not create a mass audience for most European journals, it became a staple feature that manufacturers and sellers used to reach potential customers and that influenced marketing, business, and consumerism. Second, newspapers serialized popular novels. French newspapers printed great works by Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Alphonse-Marie-Louis de Prat de Lamartine, and Eugène Sue. Literature did indeed expand circulation among those who could afford subscriptions, but, more importantly, when newspapers eventually reached much larger audiences, the serialized novel greatly expanded fiction reading. Last, a number of magazine and newspaper editors applied new techniques of lithography to illustrate their serials. The English Penny Magazine, founded in 1830, and the German Pfennig Magazin (Penny magazine), begun in 1833, both featured woodcut illustrations. By mid-century more European publishers adopted the modern form of newspapers, offering the latest news, illustrations, and serial novels at prices reduced by extensive advertising.

Before the advent of mass circulation newspapers, journalism's greatest expansion resulted from the creation of countless professional journals, illustrated magazines, political newspapers, and provincial dailies that met the specialized interests of smaller readerships. While most of these publications remained prohibitively expensive for lower- and middle-class readers and none reached a large market, globally they brought variety to journalism. A truly mass newspaper press soon appeared.

THE MASS-CIRCULATION PRESS

After the mid-nineteenth century on the Continent, but earlier in Britain, a number of changes in the newspaper business converged with socioeconomic transformations to create a mass press in Europe. Growing disposable incomes and literacy in turn increased demand for the press. An important relationship existed between the expansion of literacy and the reciprocal growth of the press. Literacy rates from 60 to 80 percent in Britain, Germany, and France spurred the development of mass-circulation newspapers at mid-century, while low literacy postponed the expansion of the press until the late nineteenth century in southern and eastern Europe and the early twentieth century in Russia.

The development of mass presses also derived from changes in the newspaper business that increased supply and augmented demand. New printing technologies developed at mid-century made giant press-runs possible. More importantly mass-circulation newspapers increased consumer demand by downplaying politics and emphasizing sensationalism. After 1815 the Times of London outstripped its competitors in a climate of heavy censorship by remaining nonpartisan. John Walter, its founder, argued that a newspaper "should contain something suited to every palate . . . and by steering clear of extremes, hit the happy medium." The English "pauper press" began a newspaper revolution in the 1830s in part by de-emphasizing politics and refusing to pay the stamp tax. Halfhearted attempts to enforce the tax only generated publicity that boosted sales. In 1836 Parliament reduced the stamp tax to one penny and in 1855 abolished it, facilitating the dramatic rise in newspaper circulation. The "pauper press" also owed its success to its sensationalism. Henry Hetherington, publisher of The Twopenny Dispatch, emphasized crimes, fires, spectacles, and sports to make his paper one of the most popular in London by the mid-1830s.

In 1863 Polydore Milhaud's Petit journal (Small journal) touched off a similar newspaper explosion in France. The nonpolitical daily escaped the tax on political prints and sold at one-third the price of its competitors. Like its English counterparts, it published serialized novels and sensational news. By the 1880s Petit journal boasted over a million subscribers and soon had imitators. The illustrated mass-circulation dailies eventually replaced the news broadsides and pamphlets as the principal source of news for the lower classes.

Many social historians, anthropologists, folklorists, and sociologists have viewed the transition from the popular pamphlet and broadsheet press to the mass-circulation newspaper as a veritable cultural revolution. Eugen Weber describes it as the replacement of an oral culture in rural France with an urban-based written culture. While some historians have argued that these assertions overstate the differences between newspapers and their pamphlet and broadside predecessors, the mass-circulation newspaper did place newsmaking in the hands of more educated writers and editors and commercially oriented publishers. As popular news became the product of urban elites, their ideas gained broader acceptance. In dramatic reports of foreign massacres, vicious battles, heinous crimes, sensational trials, and executions, the newspapers addressed the topics traditional to broadside and pamphlet presses. Yet they did so in a manner that promoted new bourgeois ideas about nationalism and imperialism, social justice, moral order, masculinity, and femininity. The modern newspapers adopted traditional foci to gain a mass audience and spread elite ideas.

As newspapers reached a larger audience, journalists became more powerful. Reporters and editors gained notoriety through controversial press campaigns. William Howard Russell, a foreign correspondent for the Times, was famous for his scathing criticism of the mismanagement of the Crimean War. In the 1870s the passion and satire of two editors at Petit journal made their pseudonym, Timothy Trimm, a household word in Paris and provincial cities. French and German journalists fueled public support for the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, and western European journalists significantly promoted empire building in subsequent decades. Without doubt the most dramatic journalistic act of the century was Émile Zola's 1898 editorial "J'accuse!" decrying the army's scandalous injustice against Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who was falsely accused of passing military secrets to the Germans. Affirming what Edmund Burke had said a century before about the power of journalists, Zola and journalists like him brought down the French government. Moreover, Georges Clemenceau, who published Zola's article in L'Aurore, used the press to build his own political career and eventually became France's president.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND ELECTRONIC MEDIA

In the first decades of the twentieth century the sales of many mass-circulation dailies began to plateau in western Europe but continued to spread throughout southern and eastern Europe. Such dailies had already appeared in Italy at the end of the previous century, in Russia before World War I, and in Spain soon after the war. In content newspapers continued to appeal to the largest possible audience by emphasizing sensational news and avoiding political partisanship. Even as the press increasingly escaped from government censorship in western and central Europe, political content undermined sales if the editors took a stance unpopular with a portion of their readers. This is not to say that newspapers ignored important political issues. On the contrary, they emphasized domestic and international politics heavily, but papers toned down their partisanship, even those papers serving as the mouthpieces of specific parties and political organizations. As they spread throughout Europe, mass-circulation dailies more than ever before shaped public responses to major issues, political and otherwise. As a result, businessmen and politicians hired professional "public relations" specialists to win them favorable press coverage.

In the twentieth century many dailies adopted new forms and content that improved sales and altered modern journalism. Editors added large headlines to front page articles to attract buyers and titled each story to facilitate selective reading. In content they won additional readers by covering sports, greatly extending that coverage after World War I. Indeed sports journalism became so important to working-class readers that Socialist and Communist Party papers featured it as well. Though satirical drawings had been a staple of many newspapers since the mid-nineteenth century, twentieth-century papers gave greater attention to comic drawings that eventually became comic strips. Also in the early twentieth century newspapers began to replace illustrations with photographic images, and those quick to adopt the new technology, such as Paris-Soir, won larger readerships. Moreover the photograph gave rise to an entirely new medium, the photomagazine. Photojournalism in the first half of the twentieth century shifted the attention of its largely middle-class readers away from the harsh realities of the post–World War I and Great Depression era to a glamorous material culture.

Journalism also changed as a business. Newspapers employed large staffs of editors, reporters, photographers, and correspondents, who pursued journalism educations. During the interwar years many journalists formed organizations to promote professional interests and standards. Expanding news agencies, such as Havas and Reuters, provided their subscribers with fully written news stories, background material, photographs, and illustrations. A complex variety of distribution agencies that circulated papers through retailers, wholesalers, and delivery services replaced postal subscriptions and street peddlers.

State control greatly altered journalism in many parts of Europe. The Russian tsar Nicholas II tried to increase state influence over the press by making the St. Petersburg Telegraph Agency, a government authority, a major source of information for Russian newspapers. After the Russian Revolution the Communist government successfully put all periodicals under state control.

At the same time it increased newspaper circulation to over three times that of the pre-Revolution level. Through the press the Soviet government promoted the spread of literacy, which jumped from 20 percent at the end of the nineteenth century to over 80 percent on the eve of World War II. The professionalism of early Soviet journalists gave way under Joseph Stalin to a political cadre that made the major media, such as the Soviet newspaper Pravda, into propaganda disseminators. Scholars debate whether Stalinist journalists exercised a degree of autonomy in the construction of state journalism or were merely puppets of the government. The willing duplicity of Nazi and Fascist journalists is debated less. The Nazis effectively used newspapers, magazines, radio, and films to promote state propaganda both in and outside of Germany. In the Stalinist Soviet Union and Nazi Germany thousands of journalists were willing government tools, hiding atrocities, promoting government policies, and distorting the public's perception of their state and society. So significant was their role in bringing about a world war that between 1944 and 1945 the victorious Allies abolished many of Europe's fascist and collaborationist newspapers and replaced them with new ones more suited to postwar politics. The war, however, did not end governments' control over the press. In Spain, Francisco Franco's government maintained strict controls over the press for thirty years. Even the more democratic states of postwar Western Europe applied numerous controls, especially on new media. Swedish political parties, for example, controlled radio and television news until the late 1960s.

Not only a tool of government, journalism also continued to play a decisive role in the changing of governments. Polish journalists promoted the Solidarity movement's opposition to Communist rule in the 1980s. After 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost allowed journalists to criticize Communist governments in the USSR and Eastern Europe and undermined the governments' popular support.

The new electronic media of the twentieth century transformed journalism. In 1922 Radiola, France's first radio station, initiated a partial return to the tradition of spoken news. Subscribing to Havas news agency and reading reports from national daily newspapers, radio did not at first challenge the preeminence of the newspaper. Within a decade, however, radio stations throughout Europe employed their own reporters and correspondents and subscribed to news services catering exclusively to radio, making them the most up-to-the-minute news source. Realizing the importance of radio, both Stalin and Adolf Hitler used it effectively in the 1930s to extend their control over their states and their neighbors. Radio altered the style of news writing. As radio news reporting became simpler and more concise, newspapers also adopted the style, which quickly became the norm for modern journalism. To compete with radio, newspapers became larger and diversified their content to satisfy more tastes, producing the modern comic strip, weather forecast, and horoscope.

Journalists also communicated the news through film and television. The interwar years were the golden age of newsreel photography in Europe. Newsreels featured films of significant events and personalities and after 1927 included a narrator explaining the images. Shown in movie theaters, they made moviegoers witnesses to events, but weeks and months afterward. In this capacity newsreels played a crucial role in exposing Nazi atrocities in images that words could not. In the 1950s television further revolutionized journalism by adding video to the up-to-the-minute reporting offered by radio. Constrained at first by its own novelty and by the weight and bulk of cameras, television initially relied on newsreels for its images. However, television stations soon employed their own staffs of reporters and foreign correspondents. In 1949 France's first television news program aired coverage of a balloon race that ended with the destruction of the television cameramen's balloon and created an immediate sensation. In 1951 television news began to air twice a day in France, and by 1961 these telecasts reached nearly every part of the country. In contrast to the United States, European television stations have been under the direct control of the government. In England, the British Broadcasting Corporation controlled television in the postwar period. Italian political parties directed all of Italy's national television networks until the late twentieth century. After the 1970s the proliferation of private cable and satellite stations distanced television from government control and promoted the development of stations specializing in television journalism.

Television accelerated the changes in journalism initiated by early twentieth-century media, continuing the trend toward shortened length and simplified content of reports. These techniques have influenced political campaigning, as politicians endeavor to present a pleasing image and to adopt an intimate tone for viewers. By adding the visual to radio's audio communication, television in a sense restored the audiovisual communication of news that preceded the spread of print. Yet television also continued the trend of the modern media to make news less interactive and less responsive to individual and small community needs and interests. By serving national publics, television, radio, and national newspapers have increased the distance between the event and the public.

The twentieth century closed with the spread of computer communications throughout Europe. Europeans began to rely on computer networks for communication and news in the late 1970s. Between 1978 and 1981 the French introduced TRANSPAC and TELETEL, public computer communication networks. Computer communications were not used widely because computers remained very expensive, however, Western European governments began to provide every home with access to national computer networks in the early 1980s. News, weather, transportation information, and a variety of other services became available through television sets or through small computer terminals, such as the French Minitel introduced in the 1980s. By 1988, 4 million French homes used Minitel, and computer communications increased fivefold. The Internet initiated the most dramatic transition by empowering the "Web surfer" to find news of particular interest. News agencies, television news networks, governments, corporations, and millions of other World Wide Web users offer a dizzying array of information. Print, audio, and video formats have become available at once, and the user can print a hard copy in seconds. The Internet has given Europeans a means to interact with news makers. While modern communications create easier access to more kinds of information, the overwhelming volume of available data gives greater significance than ever to the subjects chosen and judgments drawn by journalists. In the twenty-first century, journalists continue to shape public opinion and public policy. Despite the greater variety of information available to journalists, however, their foci and assessments remain very much informed by professional traditions.

See alsoProfessionals and Professionalization; Revolutions; New Social Movements (volume 3);Pornography (volume 4); and other articles in this section.

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