Mark Andrew Hampton

Journalists and the ‘Professional Ideal’ in Britain: the Institute of Journalists, 1884-1907

This article examines the early history of the Institute of Journalists as a case study of occupational development in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. It argues that disagreements over the putative meaning of ‘professional’ led to widespread belief that journalists’ interests were best served by organizing as a trade union rather than as a ‘professional organization’. Drawing on trade periodicals, memoirs and journalism handbooks, this article illustrates the complexities of the ‘professional ideal’ and underscores the ambiguous position of the ‘mental labourer’ in British society.

Defining Journalists in Late-Nineteenth Century Britain

This article uses journalists’ memoirs, professional publications, and handbooks to show how British journalists projected images of themselves in the late nineteenth century. In a period of professional and social insecurity, journalists employed such self-presentations as a way of legitimizing their “title to be heard” in the public sphere. Rather than demand that journalism be converted into a closed profession comparable to law or medicine, journalists presented theirs as an “open profession” in which ability and hard work automatically led to success. Although such self-projections legitimized the status of elite journalists, they hampered attempts to improve journalists’ working conditions.

Media Studies and the Mainstreaming of Media History

Michael Schudson and James Curran have recently pointed out that media history has not developed as a major, mainstream scholarly field. According to Schudson, ‘few historians or political and social theorists have reflected at length on news as an institution. . . . [j]ournalism simply never became a major topic of study among historians or social scientists’ [1]. Similarly, while identifying six distinct approaches to analysing the role of the media in the making of modern British society, Curran asserts that ‘if media historians labour in the shadows, they are themselves partly to blame’ because of their often narrowly specialized scholarship [2]. In the British case, part of the difficulty is a paucity of synthetic works. From a specialist historian’s perspective, it is not always clear what the terms of debate are. An article in Media History is just as likely to engage with a political or social historiography as any bigpicture media history debates*/in itself, not an undesirable development, but also not conducive to creating a sense of what, exactly, ‘media history’ is. For a ‘mainstream’ political or social historian, the field of media history can only be bewildering; at least until recently, a historian of, say, nineteenth-century British

Journalists' histories of journalism : Britain since the 1950s

Journalism history, like media history, is an impressively interdisciplinary field in which historians, literary critics, sociologists, philosophers, and communication scholars regularly engage each others 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 journalisms ever-changing material context.

Early Hong Kong Television, 1950s - 1970s: Commercialisation, Public Service, and Britishness

This article argues that the development of television in Hong Kong should be viewed as a part of British media history. Yet within this context, it is striking that the Hong Kong Government did not follow the public ownership model of the BBC (even though it had followed a similar model with radio broadcasting), nor did the Government make significant efforts to use television as a vehicle for promoting British culture within Hong Kong. Instead, Hong Kong television was commercial from the beginning, with Government regulation and Government-produced content emerging only in response to political crisis in the late 1960s—and even then, only to a very limited extent. I argue that this early television history reflects both the increasing autonomy of the Hong Kong Government from London in the post-war period, and the development of a distinct Hong Kong Britishness that favoured minimal regulation of oligopolistic commercial interests.

The Dawn of the Cheap Press in Victorian Britain: The End of the ‘Taxes on Knowledge’, 1849–1869/British Political Culture and the Idea of ‘Public Opinion’, 1867–1914

Martin Hewitt’s study is a meticulously researched account of the mid-Victorian phase of the campaigns against press taxes. It spans the formation of a minority pressure group, the Association for the Promotion of the Repeal of the Taxes on Knowledge in 1849; the key developments in the removal of the taxes on advertising, newspapers and paper; and culminates in a discussion of the often overlooked legislation that removed the registration and securities requirements on newspapers in 1869.

Book review : East wind : China and the British left, 1925-1976

uniforms during World War II, which had a knock-on effect on non-uniform dress. Howell weaves together official records with other evidence to interesting effect. Using statistics gathered by local authority medical officers and Mass Observation accounts of what children wore as they were evacuated, for example, Howell shows how people’s clothing was an accurate way of highlighting the social disadvantage and inequality in the population. She describes children arriving with new families wearing nothing but a piece of calico sewn around them. Indeed, through the process of evacuation, the profound poverty of a whole section of society was highlighted to the government. At times, the book provides an almost visceral account of how difficult it was to keep up appearances during the harshest periods of privation, when clothes rationing combined with fuel shortages restricting hot water for bathing and with soap rationing for bathing and laundry. The many different voices add an enjoyable texture: of magazine columnists, of Board of Trade politicians and policy-makers and designers. The success ofHowell’s account is inmarrying statistical evidence, governmentminutes and official reports, with accounts in popular magazines and personal diaries. In an account of Utility clothing, for example, she describes the economic case, people’s access to the scheme, the effects it had on consumption of clothing, as well as the way in which designers came to work on it. These accounts are occasionally interjected with observations of some of the more eccentric turns of wartime dress; the trend towards wearing fashionable co-ordinates and accessories for blackouts, towards stylish customized gas mark containers and air raid shelter fashion: the ‘Siren suit’. These are illustrated with a number of well-reproduced black and white images. Wartime Fashion builds on the work of dress historians who have pioneered methodologies for examining histories of dress within wider social and economic histories such as Lou Taylor, Barbara Burman and Rebecca Arnold. It extends our knowledge of the British government’s raft of wartime initiatives for alleviating austerity, of the challenges of wartime industry, of the so-called ‘people’s war’ and of 1940s fashion. The result is both enlightening and enjoyable.

Laura Beers, Your Britain: Media and the Making of the Labour Party

One of the main goals of Media History, for more than a decade, has been to promote historical scholarship that examines media from a broad perspective, firmly situating them within wider cultural, social, and political contexts. The journal has, in other words, encouraged a movement away from what James Curran, in a 2002 article, called a ‘media-centric’ approach to media history (135). At the same time, it has welcomed signs that a media history more thoroughly grounded in its wider historical contexts has begun to penetrate what might be called (for lack of a better term) ‘mainstream’ historiographies. In this regard, Laura Beers’s Your Britain is very welcome, both for its contribution to British historiography and as a useful model to media historians of other countries. It is a significant work of political history that establishes Beers as a rising star among British political historians. It offers a valuable new perspective on topics that have engaged several of the leading British political historians of the past generation: the relationships between the expansion of the British electorate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, new forms of political participation, and the remaking of the party system (e.g., Clarke; McKibbin; Tanner; Green; Lawrence). Above all, it illuminates the problem of the less than straightforward path from universal suffrage to the 1945 election of a Labour government that Reform opponent Robert Lowe had predicted as early as 1867. Many leftists in the interwar period blamed their lack of success on working-class false consciousness, attributable in part to the unwillingness of the capitalist-controlled press to give Labour a fair chance; political historians since the 1970s have tended to emphasize the way that the Conservative and (initially) Liberal parties reinvented themselves in order to appeal to the new electorate. Yet, whatever the cause, few have disputed Paul Addison’s conclusion that it was the particular circumstances of World War II that made possible an electoral shift to the left and the Labour landslide of 1945. In particular, few have challenged the interwar orthodoxy that the capitalist press remained an intractable enemy of any sort of labour party, or that the interwar Labour Party was amateurish and unsophisticated in its attempts to attract votes. Beers does not disagree with Addison’s broad thesis. She does, though, convincingly show that the interwar Labour Party gradually accommodated itself to the mass electorate and the mass media, became increasingly sophisticated in its use of media, and in doing

The Cultural British World: Asia in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

This issue focuses on the British world and Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing most prominently on cultural dimensions. It takes as its starting point two prominent emphases in the recent historical scholarship on the British Empire. First, historians such as Catherine Hall and John MacKenzie, among many others, have made a strong case that the empire played a significant role in shaping domestic British culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Far from being simply a remote collection of overseas possessions, of interest only to traders and aristocratic second sons, Empire formed the subject of such metropolitan cultural products as advertisements, popular imagery of monarchy and boys’ story papers. London was experienced not only as the capital of the United Kingdom but also as an imperial centre, and colonial scandal helped to shape British legal culture. This ‘maximalist’ assessment of imperial influence on

Book review : The changing faces of journalism : tabloidization, technology and truthiness

be manipulated to forget just as much as to remember; and this, as Ðerić observes, is a tendency common for both the war’s winners and losers. The last chapter of the book, in which Nedin Mutić examines representations of Self and Other in selected works of Balkan postwar cinematography, offers an insight into the issue of identity construction during the Yugoslav conflicts from the perspective of film studies. Although refreshing and informative, this text is clearly an outlier from the overall concept of the book, focusing on the particular film narratives instead of the broader discourse which these films are anchored in, and raises questions as to whether it would perhaps better fit in a volume focused predominantly on cinematographic production. Leaving this chapter aside, it is undoubtedly the conceptual and methodological unity (howsoever imperfect in details) of the individual contributions which represents one of the most noteworthy assets of this volume. The decision always to analyse the texts produced by media from both (or more) sides of the conflicts enables the authors not only to search for similarities and differences between the media discourses, but also broadens their research perspective in general and reduces the risk of simplification in their interpretations. Collectively, the authors put together a balanced, wellinformed and intellectually stimulating book which adds to a better understanding of both the Yugoslav conflict and the role of media in it. The latter is, however, limited by the fact that with the exception of the second and last chapters, all the authors have used as their analytical material articles in the daily press; the importance of other media, which have undoubtedly also become platforms for ethno-nationalizing discourses during the conflicts, remains thereby practically untouched. This is particularly a pity in respect of the radio, whose role in stirring ethnic violence has been only too well documented, most recently in Rwanda (see Thompson, 2007). Since the book has a potential to address not just the experts on this particular field but also a more wide-ranging area of disciplines encompassing conflict/peace studies, sociology and media studies, the reader could have benefited from a brief overview of all the partial wars and conflicts analysed here, and from a chronological list of key events marking the history of the disintegration of the Yugoslav federation. This could make the study of an otherwise clearly structured and readable volume even easier.