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Abstract
Journalism history, like media history, is an impressively interdisciplinary field in which historians, literary critics, sociologists, philosophers, and communication scholars regularly engage each other's work. Yet journalism is also rare in the extent to which practitioners have written far-ranging histories of their own profession. Examining five well-known histories written by journalists practicing in Britain—Francis Williams, Phillip Knightley, Hugh Cudlipp, Matthew Engel, and Andrew Marr—it argues that even if their methodologies differ from those of academics, their contributions should be taken seriously both as secondary literature and as primary sources for our understanding of the changing culture of journalism in modern Britain. In particular, they give us insight into journalists’ ongoing attempts to define their own profession and genre against the backdrop of journalism's ever-changing material context.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the audience at the summer 2010 King's College symposium on ‘The Historiography of the UK Media from the 17th to the 20th Century,’ and especially Simon Potter, for asking challenging questions. In addition, I am grateful to Adrian Bingham for sharing his expertise, and to Aled Jones for inspiration.
Notes
1. To name just two authors of deeply informative, reflective and analytically perceptive memoirs, several decades apart: Kingsley Martin (Father Figures; Editor) and Harold Evans. Two of the journalist-historians considered in the present article also wrote significant memoirs: Cudlipp, Walking on the Water and Knightley, A Hack's Progress. On journalists’ use of memoirs as a way of attempting to shape their profession's public image, see Hampton, ‘Defining.’
2. The list of such books is enormous; for just a flavor of what I mean, see Harris; Cudlipp, Publish; Bainbridge and Stockdill; Chippindale and Horrie.
3. For Knightley's own account of these episodes, see Knightley, A Hack's Progress, chapters 9–10.
4. This somewhat impressionistic argument was broadly confirmed a few years later by Hallin's pathbreaking study, which argues that rather than influencing opinion against the Vietnam War, mainstream media turned against the war only after elite opinion became divided.
5. For a more recent restatement of this point, see Kaplan.
6. As Cudlipp told a correspondent, the emphasis on personal vendettas drove his selection process, explaining, for example, why Lord Camrose, despite his papers’ Conservative biases, did not receive a chapter in the book. Cudlipp to Mrs. Ian Wilson-Young, October 17, 1980, HC 3/8 R, Hugh Cudlipp Papers, University of Cardiff.
7. He refers to Hearst's claim of ‘official Spanish guilt’ in the explosion on the Maine as ‘evil’ (p. 44), and asks whether the Spanish–American War was ‘the starkest manifestation of his predilection for evil’ (78).
8. ‘As an intellectual he was usually susceptible to argument if not to persuasion; over China his judgement was awry and his balance thrown’ (202).
9. Recent scholarship has essentially confirmed Cudlipp's portrayal of Luce's myopia concerning China. See Baughman; Brinkley; Herzstein.
10. By the early 1960s, the Daily Mirror Newspapers group had expanded through acquisition into the International Publishing Corporation; it was from the position of Chairman of the latter corporation that Cudlipp had ousted King. This is described in Edwards 355–93; Cudlipp, Walking 348–82;
11. And yet he does say that, because of the changes in newspaper layout, a Martian, glancing at newspapers over the past century, ‘would conclude that human beings have been becoming quite rapidly stupider’ (245).
12. Much the same could be said about Roy Greenslade's Press Gang, albeit in a narrower time frame of just over half a century.
13. An example of trenchant micro-analysis is Marr's examination of the difference between radio and television news (260–8).
14. When sociologist Jean Chalaby refers to the period after 1855 as witnessing ‘The Invention of Journalism,’ he makes such an argument: the ideal type to which pre- and post-1855 ‘journalists’ aspired was sufficiently different that they deserve to be seen as two distinct phenomena, which he calls, respectively, ‘publicity’ and ‘journalism.’ The question I am raising here is whether there are other such breaking points such that our use of the word ‘journalism’ to describe both ‘before’ and ‘after’ masks changes that are sufficiently foundational that we are not really talking about the same phenomenon.