Populism v Purpose
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Transcript of Populism v Purpose
POPULISM V
PURPOSETHE NEW JOURNALISM & THE EARLY BRITISH LEFT
PRESS FOR THE PEOPLE• The New Journalism: An
‘Americanized’ Revolution in Newspaper Language, Style and Subject Matter (Wiener, 2011).
• Defined by hugely popular new dailies – the Mail, Express and Mirror.
• Unprecedented success of newspapers “produced by (and) for office boys”.
• A press that offered vibrant, diverse content that mass readerships wanted to read (Conboy, 2002; Bingham and Conboy, 2015).
POLITICS FOR THE PEOPLE • Labour: 42 MPs
and over 400,000 votes by 1910.
• Policies: Welfare; “assaults on feudalism”; Taff Vale reversal.
• Mindsets: Mass-public interests moving to the heart of politics
HISTORICALLY SEPARATE• New Journalism: Wider Media Narratives
• Early Labour: Political Histories
• Reality: Two, different phenomena keenly
interested in gaining mass support
• Similar aims & audiences; different
messages & intentions
THE “YELLOW” PRESS• Hostile reactions from across the political left
• “Yellow”: Cheap, trashy, sensationalist.
• “Capitalist”: Greedy, the ‘enemy’.
• At odds with the ‘labour mission’.
A VOICE OF THEIR OWN• Calls for a ‘daily’
• Letters to MPs
• Editorials
• A need to ‘fight back’
Labour’s daily, eight-page national newspaper (1912-1915)
THE DAILY CITIZEN
MIXED MESSAGES• SPORT• GOSSIP• CRIME• BETTING TIPS• SENSATION
• LABOUR NEWS• STRIKES• GLOBAL
SOCIALISM• LEFTIST
SCEPTICISMS
THEIR VIEWS AND OURS
WHAT IS A WORKER?• Pages of the Citizen played out a wider ideological divide
within the early Labour movement.
• ‘Yellow’ Press = rival educator
• Success of dailies clashed with existing leftist understandings
of how to speak to, and understand, the mass working public.
• Citizen and other leftist press reactions inform history of a
party, and movement, struggling towards acceptance of mass
political communication (Beers, 2010).
ANY QUESTIONS?Christopher Shoop-Worrall
@ChrisDWorrall
THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME