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PRINT MEDIUM
IN THE RISE OF
DEMOCRACY
To understand the role of the print medium in the rise of democracy, we
have to look at the history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries –
periods the historian Eric Hobsbawm calls “the Age of Revolution” and “the
Age of Capital”. Beginning with the French Revolution in 1789, in which
the monarchy was overthrown and the First Republic installed, democracy –
at least as a concept – grew rapidly in popularity, aided by the parallel rise in
the sophistication and spread of the print medium, particularly in the form of
the daily newspaper. This occurred against the background of industrial
capitalism – the culmination of a fusion between the Industrial Revolution
and the capitalist economic system, which was centred in Britain but spread
throughout most of the European continent. Eric Hobsbawm writes that the
history of the nineteenth century is “primarily that of the massive advance of
the world economy of industrial capitalism, of the social order it represented,
of the ideas and beliefs which seemed to legitimatize and ratify it: in reason,
science, progress, and liberalism.”
One of the many things affected by the Industrial Revolution was the
medium of print. In 1804 a German printer, Konig, figured out how to use
the steam engine to power the press, allowing him to print 400 pages per
hour. The London Times asked Konig to invent a double press, and by 1827
the paper was printing 4 000 sheets per hour on both sides. In 1886 Ottmar
Mergenthaller perfected a linotype machine that could do the work of seven
to eight hand compositors, the result being an explosion of literary and
graphic material as the number of pages in newspapers rose and circulation
soared. Book publishing also expanded, with fiction, biographies, technical
books and histories being published alongside educational texts and literary
classics. These books not only spread new ideas of religion and classical
humanist values, but also ideas about democracy and nationalism, scientific
discovery, collected facts (as in dictionaries and encyclopedias) and political
propaganda.
Although aided by these printing technologies of the nineteenth
century, the advent of the press actually began at the dawn of the eighteenth
century. In London, the first daily paper, the Daily Courant, appeared in
1702. The Evening Post followed in 1706, the London Journal in 1725 and
The Craftsman in 1727. Within the next forty years the Daily Advertizer, the
Westminster Journal, Lloyd’s Evening Post, the St James’s Chronicle, the
Middlesex Journal and the Morning Chronicle had all been launched. In
1771, the London Press won its right to publish Parliamentary proceedings
and debates, and after this time the Morning Post appeared in 1780, the
Times in 1785 and the Sunday Observer in 1791.
In ‘The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere’, Jurgen
Habermas connects the growth of the press with the development of public
political dialogue. In industrializing countries, a new political order was
coming to life, one in which the bourgeoisie sought to control public policy.
The emergent press provided a means of articulating the bourgeoisie’s
political views, resulting in the creation of ‘public opinion’ – that is, the
construction of views which had legitimacy through the fact that they were
held by ‘the people’. The newspaper was praised as “the great medium of
communication”, and it was “on the basis of the information which it
supplies that a public opinion rests.” It was during this time that newspapers
took on what journalist and academic Julianne Schultz calls “a central and
enduring role in public life.” It was a crucial role in the promotion of a
democratic system – as Harold Evans, former editor of the Sunday Times,
stated in a 1974 address:
In summary, there were a number of factors that led to the rise of democracy
through the medium of print. The first is the technologies of the Industrial
Revolution, such as the steam-powered printing press invented by Konig. As
John Street, author of ‘Mass Media, Politics And Democracy’ writes, “The
move from the hand-operated press to the production-line system allowed
for a greatly increased circulation, and with this the possibility of a mass
readership, ‘popular’ press.” The second factor is the blooming of coffee-
house culture, tied in with the rise of the bourgeoisie and the consequent
advent of public political dialogue, which the open, political nature of
coffee-house culture complimented. Coffee-houses served democracy not
only by giving everyone access to newspapers and encouraging open
political discussion; its disregard of social divisions was also highly
democratic in nature – as Margaret Wertheim writes, the coffee-house was
“a place where, as one seventeenth-century polemicist put it, ‘a worthy
Lawyer and an errant Pickpocket’ could meet on equal footing.” These
factors, together with intellectual movements and uprisings by the lower
classes, helped spread and in some cases realize democratic ideals. Ideas
such as political accountability and elected Heads of State could only be
realized through the daily newspaper, and as people’s literacy improved, and
the circulation of daily newspapers increased (the circulation of the London
Times, for example, moved between 50 000 and 60 000 in the 1850s and
1860s), so the soil of Europe became properly fertile for the seeds of
democracy to grow.