need 200 words annotated bib in next half hour

Media History, Vol. 10, No. 1, 2004

Censors and Stereotypes: Kingsley Martin theorizes the press*

MARK HAMPTON, Wesleyan College

The career of Kingsley Martin, long-time editor of the New Statesman and Nation, offers a valuable window into leftist perspectives on democracy, citizenship and the press in the inter-war and post-war periods [1]. Besides being one of the most prominent journalists of the 1930s–1950s, he deserves particular attention for articulating a wide-ranging critical and historical understanding of the press at a time when, as Tom O’Malley argues, such understandings were in short supply. By 1945, O’Malley writes, there were

histories of the press, but little sense of the press being a central part of history broadly conceived, nor of their being a wider set of important concerns about the historical influence of the media or communications on social and political development. [2]

As true as this is, Martin offers a partial counterpoint. Indeed, he articulated themes that continue to preoccupy media scholars, including the concentration of press ownership and the use of manipulative images as propaganda. In the 1930s and 1940s, like today, democracy was too easily equated with the market, citizenship with consumerism, and patriotism with passive consent. Martin, like many of today’s most prominent media scholars, resisted these equations.

As with many other leading journalists of his period, it was Martin’s political interests that drew him into his profession. To a much greater extent than most, however, he also reflected in print on the theory and practice of journalism, and with considerable sophistication. In this, moreover, Martin’s contribution was less notable for originality than for depth of development; his works were often derivative yet were masterpieces of synthesis. To Martin, it was important to think about the meaning and role of the press, for the press was a crucial arena in the creation of citizenship and democracy, a media that made possible his vision of politics. Martin would have agreed with his one-time employer, Manchester Guardian editor C.P. Scott, that ‘getting our man in’ was not good enough; it was crucial to win consensus through rational persuasion [3]. Functioning properly, the press could help to create this sort of politics by public discussion [4]. It was Martin’s fear, however, that the concentration of press ownership and the increasing appeal to readers’ baser motives were effectively undermining the possibilities for such a democratic politics. Martin developed this theme in writings on the press throughout the inter-war period and into the immediate post-war period; these writings reached a crescendo during the controversies surrounding the 1947–1949 Royal Commission on the Press. In addition to numerous shorter pieces, published mostly in the New Statesman and Nation, Martin developed his argument at greater length in several longer articles and pamphlets. The present paper will chiefly consider two such works, a 1938 pamphlet entitled Fascism, Democracy and the Press, and a longer 1947 book entitled The Press the Public Wants [5].

ISSN 1368-8804 print/ISSN 1469-9729 online/04/010017-12  2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/13688800410001673716

18 M. Hampton

This paper focuses on Martin’s understandings of the press as a window into the prehistory of contemporary media studies. There is considerable irony that a journalist so frequently one-sided as Martin would demand truthful reporting. To be sure, British journalism has never gone so far as its American counterpart in divorcing objectivity from partisanship; in the British context, Martin could plausibly defend his socialist politics as flowing from a commitment to ‘truth’ (as he saw it). More to the point, though, he was known for his imperious behaviour, for example, in refusing for seemingly partisan reasons to publish George Orwell’s now legendary reports from the Spanish Civil War [6]. Yet whatever his professional and personal limitations, his own journalistic writings, particularly in his ‘London Diary’ column, display a rhetorical commitment to the same rationalistic model developed in his meta-journalistic writings. That is, whether or not they were actually fair or told the ‘truth’, their tone generally suggested nuance and a commitment to persuasion. He wrote with an air of exposing the manipulative language of the powerful; where they obscured, he clarified, revealing the hidden truth. It must be emphasized that this does not suggest either exceptional scruples or an unbiased vision on Martin’s part. Rather, his tone flattered his readers’ self-image and reflected the New Statesman and Nation’s marketing niche as much as any particular understanding of journalism [7].

Martin’s writings on the press showed an impressive historical sophistication, no doubt in part a result of his academic training. Indeed, before he became a journalist and turned his scholarly attention to the problems of journalism, he published a study of Lord Palmerston that gave significant attention to the role of newspapers in manufacturing consent [8]. Moreover, his interest in the social role of the press did not emerge in an intellectual vacuum. Journalists and politicians had debated the press’s political and social role at least since the early nineteenth century [9]. Although much of this debate was carried out by slogan and assertion, writers such as R.A. Scott-James and George Binney Dibblee wrote insightful and comprehensive accounts of the press on the eve of the Great War, and writers such as Norman Angell and Walter Lippmann wrote important studies of the press in the 1920s [10]. Furthermore, the press had become a key topic of discussion among both Labour activists and leftist intellectuals, who often discussed the press in quasi-Gramscian terms as part of the capitalist ruling class’s means of rule [11]. By the time Martin wrote his most extensive studies of the press, then, there already existed a rich tradition of discussion of the press’s role in society.

The inter-war period marked a decisive break in this intellectual history of journalism. For much of the nineteenth century, observers had heralded the press as an educational arena in which writers could ‘influence’ or ‘persuade’ readers, and in which a politics by public discussion could take place. This view declined, but did not disappear, during the period of the ‘new journalism’ at the end of the nineteenth century [12]. During the inter-war period, however, the very idea of ‘influence’ took on sinister connotations, as that concept became associated with mass manipulation. The earlier optimism about the educational press gave way to increased fears of mind control in the face of several different developments: the emergence of British government propaganda during the Great War, the development of ‘scientific’ advertising, the emergence of Nazi Germany, the press’s ongoing concentration into fewer and fewer hands and its consequent increased commercialization, all in the context of a thoroughgoing elite ambivalence about an ever-growing mass society [13]. In this environment, concerns about press ‘bias’ became more pronounced than ever before, particularly among the left, as the press began to look like a potential instrument of tyranny. In this context, Martin continued guardedly to defend the educational vision of the press, even while elaborating

Censors and Stereotypes 19

on the structural changes in journalism and the wider economy that made this nineteenth- century ideal increasingly difficult to practice.

To Martin, the role of the press was bound up with the construction of citizenship. Historians studying British citizenship have often focused on the dichotomy between insiders and outsiders: for example, has citizenship been constructed primarily in terms of race or gender? Other scholars have equated citizenship with workplace rights and ‘fuller participation in the consumer society visibly growing up all around the workers’ [14]. For many on the left during the early twentieth century and inter-war period, enamoured with Fabianism or the ‘professional ideal’, the idea of citizenship as active participation in political decision-making was problematic. Not only did many on the left believe in the need for a more ‘efficient’, professionally managed state, but faith in the working classes was seriously compromised by the jingoism displayed in the Boer War. For observers such as J.A. Hobson and Norman Angell, the ‘image of the “public mind” with all its unpredictable instincts replaced the figure of the rational electorate within the left’s vocabulary during the 1900s’ [15]. The irrationality of ‘patriotism’ was a key component of this perspective; by the 1930s ‘patriotism’ appeared to embody a natural segue between jingoism and fascism [16]. In this atmosphere, many on the left, including communists and socialists, believed that a democratic politics ‘was much too important to be entrusted to the masses’ [17].

Yet some leftist leaders continued to defend a more active political citizenship. Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald opposed the referendum, for example, on the grounds that it was ‘the grave of an active democracy’, creating a ‘spurious involvement of the citizen in state decision-making’. For MacDonald, a democratic state was one ‘where the democracy does the thinking as well as the electing’ [18]. In the liberal and socialist imaginations, the press had long been a key location for such democratic thinking; it is thus significant that part of MacDonald’s opposition to the referendum stemmed from its putting power into the hands of the press [19].

How could one square the belief in active political citizenship with growing distrust of the masses, prevailing belief in professionalization, and the apparently unstoppable march of the capitalist press? These are the questions that animated Martin’s long engagement with questions of the press, society, and politics.

As mentioned earlier, this paper primarily considers two specific texts: one from 1938, in an increasingly testy international environment that would shortly lead to war, and the other from 1947, following the Second World War and during the heart of the debates surrounding the Royal Commission on the Press. Both texts reveal Martin’s desire to maintain a free press as the buttress of a democratic polity. These texts reveal different emphases, however. The 1938 text overwhelmingly (though not exclusively) focused on the threat of state censorship, whereas the 1947 text focused more on the threat posed by an increasingly concentrated press ownership. In this contrast, Martin mirrored the concerns of his fellow socialists, though he was one of the writers who developed these critiques to the greatest lengths. In both texts, Martin concentrated on the necessity of a free press to an active citizenship; freedom of the press was a means to an end.

In the late 1930s, as Hitler’s intentions aroused increasing suspicion on the left, the British ideal of liberty of the press became a prominent theme for many writers, including Kingsley Martin. During this period, Martin most frequently argued on behalf of press freedom from government restrictions, rather than from the influence of the press barons; in this, his work differed from his earlier writing as well as his post-war writings. In his 1938 pamphlet, Fascism, Democracy and the Press, Martin argued that most of Germany’s neighbouring nations had already been intimidated into restricting

20 M. Hampton

press freedom in order to appease Hitler: ‘In one country after another we read that political parties opposed to Fascism have been suppressed in the hope of buying Hitler’s goodwill’ [20]. Although Britain had not yet reached that point, Martin wrote, ‘the same tendencies are at work’ [21]. That is, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had publicly expressed his displeasure with press criticism, and his government had repeatedly attempted to suppress dissent through informal measures. Martin carefully disavowed the suggestion that Chamberlain ‘likes or approves of Fascist methods’, but saw signs ‘that he envies the advantages, from a Government’s point of view, of not being subjected to criticism, and that he may fall into an easy acceptance of the Fascist doctrine that the Government and nation are identical’ [22]. Martin argued that ‘To object to criticism on the ground that it is damaging to the nation is to jump the chasm that divides Democracy from Fascism.’ He invoked seventeenth-century British history in order to attack the notion that ‘criticism is treason’, and argued that the ultimate tendency of Chamberlain’s attack on criticism was for Parliament to exist ‘for the same purpose as the Reichstag— to register approval of the fait accompli’ [23]. Martin’s attack on Chamberlain involved a rhetorical flourish; a British government did not need the fascist example in order to equate patriotism with its own immunity to criticism, as C.P. Scott’s experiences during the Boer War had made clear [24]. Still, it is significant here that even one of the most prominent critics of press concentration as a threat to liberty of the press could easily shift his attention to the state’s interferences, if sufficiently provoked.

Indeed, this short pamphlet was primarily concerned with the state’s threat to the freedom of the press; it only briefly acknowledged the problems of concentration. According to Martin, the freedom of the press ‘is a technical term. It means that the Englishman is free at Common Law to print what he wishes without prior censorship, prohibition or restriction by the Government’ [25]. Admittedly, concentration had proceeded apace during the past generation:

Forty years ago we had innumerable newspapers primarily concerned with politics; their circulations were limited and their contents, by modern stan- dards, deplorably dull; to-day we have a few vast commercial enterprises owned by a handful of millionaires, and greatly influenced by the commercial needs of their advertisers.

Martin continued, acknowledging that:

In such circumstances the average man to-day may be inclined to scoff at the liberty his grandfather extolled.… In short the liberty to start a paper sounds rather like the legal liberty which even the unemployed enjoy to live at the Ritz. [26]

Despite these practical constraints to press freedom, however, Martin defended the existing British press. Asking whether it mattered whether Britain had a state controlled press or one dominated by a few individuals, Martin concluded that ‘it matters a great deal to the citizen, who must in a democratic country have access to news not exclusively selected from one point of view’. Despite the concentration, the British press continued to provide a ‘considerable variety of views and a choice between different treatments of news’ [27]. In short, the threat of state interference in the press exposed for Martin the limitations of the threat by the ‘monopoly press’. Martin continued, arguing that:

There is a world of difference between a country where plutocracy only controls most of the big papers, while non-commercial papers continue to

Censors and Stereotypes 21

appear, and a country, such as Germany, where all the propaganda is under a single control, so that even those who do not believe what they read cannot find any alternative source of information. In a Fascist country the press and the wireless all speak all the time with a single voice. In a demoplutocracy the fact that independent newspapers appear and a variety of opinions are freely expressed means that there is continuous controversy. Conflict of opinion is the stuff of political life. [28]

The balance of the pamphlet addressed the threat to British press freedom posed by backstairs government influence, for example, through selectively inviting journalists to press conferences, and the abuse of legal restrictions such as libel laws and the Official Secrets Act.

While Martin was publishing this pamphlet, his journal, the New Statesman and Nation, echoed this same theme. Again, the focus was on Chamberlain’s expressing that one advantage of totalitarianism was the government’s exemption from criticism. Again, Martin’s journal saw potential government threats to press freedom in the context of both Hitler’s Germany and England’s seventeenth-century absolute monarchy. Chamberlain, claimed the New Statesman and Nation,

seems, like Hitler, to identify the Premier with the nation and thus to cross at a bound the chasm that divides the democratic and totalitarian ideas of society. We in England fought a war, beheaded one king and drove another from the throne in order to vindicate the opposite principle—that the Government is the servant, not the master of the people, and that free and frank criticism is the proper duty of an Opposition, since the nation lives and may live more healthily even when the Government of the moment is killed by attacks upon its policy and administration. [29]

Compared with Martin’s pamphlet, the much shorter article in the New Statesman and Nation focused more on the Government’s informal or ‘indirect’ methods of ‘influence’, rather than on heavy-handed legal measures. Indeed, it was at this point that the traditional concept of press freedom, as freedom from state repression, merged with the critique of press concentration: ‘“influence” is often enough, where you have a press predominantly in the hands of a few rich men’ [30]. In addition to holding press conferences open to selective audiences, wrote the New Statesman and Nation, Chamber- lain’s Government held the threat of war over the heads of the British people, ‘so that we shall be intimidated into giving up those very rights of free speech and publication which are of the essence of the democracy we are supposed to be defending’ [31].

One month later, in responding to these Government threats, Aylmer Vallance wrote, again in the New Statesman and Nation, that ‘When Thomas Jefferson declared that it would be better to have newspapers without a Government than a Government without newspapers, he was only exaggerating a sentiment which is deeply rooted in the minds of the British people.’ Like Martin, Vallance saw Britain’s ‘mass-circulation capitalist press’ as better and more free than a state-dominated press would be:

there remains, as between rival ownerships, a vigorous individuality of opinion, an eagerness to be ‘first with the news,’ whose consequence is that a proportion of the reading public—one day in this paper, another day in that—is given an approximation to the truth, no matter how distasteful to the Govern- ment. [32]

22 M. Hampton

Given the real threat posed by fascism in 1938, it is not surprising that Martin and his New Statesman and Nation colleagues would have focused on the threat of state censorship rather than the threat posed by the capitalist press. Although their reaction may appear excessive and resulted largely from leftist partisanship, it was not wholly unreasonable. Subsequent historians have demonstrated a significant level of media censorship and pressure leading to self-censorship as the Government steered through the Munich crisis [33]. In addition, the Anglo-American press’s general independence could not be taken for granted during a century in which, as Tunstall and Machin point out, virtually every other nation saw its press fall under government domination at some point [34]. Beyond this domestic and international context, however, Martin’s 1938 pamphlet also gives testimony to the British tradition of seeing liberty of the press almost entirely in terms of freedom from overt state censorship. All of the classic defences of liberty of the press, from John Milton to James Mill to the arguments on behalf of ending the ‘taxes on knowledge’ during the 1850s, had posited the state as the leading threat to press freedom. This inherited tradition led to a striking reticence of proposals for the state to regulate the industry in defence of press freedom. Although critics at least as early as J.A. Hobson at the turn of the century had identified the threat of press concentration, any critic who sought protections of press freedom from the state was easily manoeuvred into a position of appearing as an enemy to Britain’s long-standing liberty of the press [35].

Let us skip to 1947, as the inquiry was launched that would become the Royal Commission on the Press [36]. Here we see Martin, like much of the left, wholeheartedly embracing the state as an ally in defence of press freedom. This shift of emphasis seems ironic in that the intervening years had, if anything, validated Martin’s 1938 focus on state censorship. The communist press had been subjected to wartime suppression (and this would be repeated between 1950 and 1951 as the Korean War began) [37]. True, Hitler had been defeated, but the threat of state censorship in Britain remained as real as it had been in 1938. In both years, that is, the threat was genuine but, in retrospect, not severe, and changing press–state relations cannot adequately account for Martin’s shift. What had changed, however, was that in 1947 Labour was in power. In predicting in 1922 that any Labour government could be undermined by the ongoing monopoly of the capitalist press, Norman Angell had articulated a long-standing radical suspicion [38]. It seems likely that the press’s frequently critical response to early Labour programmes played an important role in stimulating the Royal Commission and in helping prod leftist writers such as Martin to rediscover their emphasis on the danger posed by the capitalist press [39].

In his 1947 study, The Press the Public Wants, Martin developed the relationship between the concentration of the press and mass manipulation [40]. He argued exten- sively that the commercialized press supported a political agenda favourable to capitalist society, and suggested that this should by no means come as a surprise. To be sure, advertisers funded newspapers, and one might expect this to give them leverage. He argued, however, that the prevailing debate on whether or not advertisers influenced the press missed a fundamental point:

It assumes a conflict of interest where no conflict exists. If the proprietor of a newspaper with a million circulation does not offend his advertisers it is not because he cannot afford to, but because he does not wish to do so. The big advertisers are his friends; they have a common interest in the success of his newspaper, a common social and political outlook, and a common approach to the public. They are both advertisers, one of goods, the other of news, and

Censors and Stereotypes 23

there is no conflict of interest between them. Why should anyone try to bribe a millionaire in order to make him a capitalist? [41]

In developing the connection between concentration of ownership and manipulative news, Martin clearly drew on Walter Lippmann’s 1922 book, Public Opinion [42]. Unlike Lippmann’s book, however, in which the press surfaced as a leading site of the creation of public opinions and the pseudo-environment, Martin’s book focused widely on diverse aspects of press history, economy, and politics. Martin, like most commenta- tors of left and right, saw a large disjunction between the Victorian press and its twentieth-century counterpart; in his own era, the press was highly commercialized, and he had no illusions that ‘education’ could ever triumph over such commercialization. As Martin wrote:

Naturally we get recreation for which we are prepared to pay rather than instruction which we think we ought to get free. We put into the hands of the people most clever at entertaining us the enormous weapon of propaganda. [43]

In the present context, what stands out is Martin’s use of Lippmann’s concept of ‘stereotypes’. Martin did not believe that the public was infinitely malleable in the realm of domestic news: according to Martin, the newspaper reader

forms his political outlook from his environment; he may vote Conservative or Liberal or Labour because his father did before him or, perhaps equally frequently, because his father voted the opposite way. He takes his politics from the company he keeps; his opinions reflect the gossip of his club or the political affiliation of his trade union; he hears speeches, talks in trains, likes or dislikes the personality of the candidate and to-day takes good account of things said on the wireless. He cannot picture the country as a whole nor completely understand the political or economic situation, but he has personal knowledge of a random sample which is generally some guide to a domestic issue. [44]

This quotation anticipates more recent studies of the ‘influence of the media’, which downplay the media’s influence in areas in which the reader, listener, or viewer has independent knowledge, and which highlight the greater influence of friends and acquaintances [45]. As such, it gave the common people more credit than did F.R. Leavis or the Frankfurt School critics. The problem was not mass ignorance, but the complexity of the modern world. Lippmann argued that for most people, much of the world constituted an environment beyond their experience; he thus called for a greater role for non-partisan expertise. By contrast, Martin preferred a more localized society, for

the smaller the area in which an individual participates actively, the more free he will be from the menace of second-hand information and valueless news, and the better chance he will have to know what he is doing, to judge honestly and to live creatively. [46]

Although his proposals differed from Lippmann’s, we see the same emphasis on an environment mediated for most people by stereotypes. While people remained relatively immune to press manipulation in domestic affairs, international affairs were another matter entirely. Even in domestic affairs, people relied to a great extent on symbols and stereotypes in order to make sense of reality; ‘But in home affairs we accept this symbol critically’ [47]. By contrast, in international affairs, ‘comparatively few people have the knowledge or the critical training to free them from the tyranny of symbols. Nations

24 M. Hampton

become good or bad, gangsters or saints.’ Martin elaborated by showing the uses of stereotypes historically in promoting wars [48].

Martin was, to be sure, not the first press critic to discern the power of stereotypes. At least since George Binney Dibblee and R.A. Scott-James on the eve of the Great War, critics had noted the power of smuggling ‘views’ into ‘news’ [49]. During the war, Wellington House propagandist Sir Gilbert Parker had noted the efficacy of using dispassionate, seemingly ‘objective’ language to persuade readers; in his view, the Germans had alienated American opinion by insufficiently disguising their propaganda [50]. The perceived effectiveness of British wartime propaganda made an impression on inter-war critics. Former Nation editor H.W. Massingham wrote, on Northcliffe’s death in 1922, that in the journalism of this ‘destroying angel’ there was ‘No need to argue or state; a nickname—“Huns,” “Cuthberts,” “Wait and See”—would do as well, or a catchword, such as “Kitchener Must Go,” yield the derisive or pictorial effect which was required’ [51]. The following year, Norman Angell wrote that:

Every story about the wickedness of Germans, every picture showing Mon- sieur Poincaré being cheered by the French crowds, every cartoon revealing the Hun as a sly and fraudulent debtor, means crystallizing certain opinions, the stiffening of a certain attitude on social questions. [52]

Harold Laski wrote in his 1931 book, Politics, that:

Events like the Russian Revolution, a great strike, the operation of a national- ized industry, are distorted so as to produce an unfavourable impression of their nature upon the citizen who learns of their character from his newspaper. He gets his facts as through a mirror in which their perspective is out of proportion to suit a special interest. [53]

As with his discussion of ownership concentration, in Martin’s discussion of stereo- types his contribution was more in the depth of discussion than in the originality of the idea. For Martin, like Lippmann, the basic problem of modern democracy, and a direct cause of the power of stereotypes, was the scale of the modern world:

Politics were less and less about what ordinary people understood, and more and more about a world too complex to understand and too big to imagine. The citizen grew up in an artificial, second- or tenth-hand world, reacting not to facts which he had experienced, but to a picture of those facts painted for him by people who might or might not have an interest in presenting them fairly, but who in any case had to make them intelligible and interesting by tricks of simplification, by symbols, catch-phrases, and dramatisation. [54]

Martin offered no convincing escape from this pseudo-environment, though he main- tained an almost wilful optimism.

In analysing Jürgen Habermas’s concept of the public sphere, Craig Calhoun has stated that ‘a public sphere adequate to a democratic polity depends upon both quality of discourse and quantity of participation’. This observation is equally applicable to Kingsley Martin’s vision of the press’s role in promoting active citizenship through a politics by public discussion. By the inter-war period, Britain’s press had attained a mass circulation, and this was enforced by the circulation wars of the 1930s. Yet for Martin, this newspaper saturation did not support an active public sphere. Rather, the press was becoming an agent of propaganda, as the controllers both restricted information and employed manipulative language.

Censors and Stereotypes 25

The two publications considered here, a brief pamphlet and a more substantial study, published on either side of the Second World War, highlight the range of leftist debate on the press in the 1930s and 1940s. By the 1930s, the critique of monopolistic concentration was already well developed, yet even one of its leading spokesmen could write a pamphlet mostly devoted to the danger posed by the state. This emphasis in 1938 can easily be seen as the response to the Nazi menace, but it also shows the persistence of the ideal of press freedom as freedom from state censorship. By 1947, Martin would return to the monopoly critique, and support those calling for the state to check the power of the press barons. Martin’s argument underscored the necessity to democratic citizenship of a truthful press representing a diversity of views.

The very limited recommendations of the Royal Commission demonstrate the difficulty of breaking the predominant equation of press liberty with non-interference by the state. In effect, the Royal Commission’s opponents were able to position themselves as the defenders of liberty against those who would fetter the press with the state’s power. Aside from this simplistic equation, owners of the press often obscured the meaning of ‘liberty’, so that while Martin and other critics focused on liberty of expression, they focused more on commercial liberty, or the freedom to manage their commercial property as they saw fit. In addition, Martin’s insistence on readers’ needs rather than their desires (or, as he would put it, their untutored and unthinking desires), rendered him susceptible to charges of elitism by press owners claiming the mantle of democracy. If citizenship really is equal to consumerism, then their claims were accurate.

Martin’s critiques, and their difficulty negotiating the prevailing understandings of press freedom, belong to a particular era in which political stakes were obviously high and the press enjoyed a clear ascendancy as a medium of political communication (though an ascendancy challenged by the BBC during the Second World War). Martin’s views on the press, at least those expressed in 1947, clearly did not win acceptance in the political arena. As numerous scholars have shown, media concentration today, and the ascendancy of private owners’ interests over conceptions of the public good, surpasses that of Martin’s era, and the equation of the market with democracy remains difficult to counter [55]. Moreover, manipulative stereotypes have by no means disap- peared from Western media, particularly in wartime [56]. Yet it is clear that if Martin’s ideals did not triumph politically, Martin’s vision of an active citizenship, and his diagnosis of a press in which the foundations for an active citizenship were increasingly threatened, continue to animate media scholarship.

Correspondence: Mark Hampton, Assistant Professor of History, Wesleyan College, 4760 Forsyth Road, Macon, GA 31210, USA. E-mail: mhampton@wesleyancollege.edu

NOTES

* An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2002 meeting of the North American Conference on British Studies. I am grateful to Peter Mandler, Tom O’Malley and an anonymous reviewer for Media History for their generous and valuable suggestions.

[1] Martin’s career has been largely neglected by historians. Those few studies that exist have tended to focus on British and international politics rather than on journalism per se, and have emphasized the ambivalence of Martin and his journal toward the Soviet Union. See F.W. Leventhal, ‘Leonard Woolf and Kingsley Martin: creative tension on the left’, Albion, 24 (1992), 279–94; Charles Keserich, ‘The British Labour Press and Italian Fascism’, Journal of Contemporary History, 579–90; Peter Deli, ‘The Image of the Russian Purges in the Daily Herald and the New Statesman’, Journal of Contemporary History, 20 (1985), 261–82; Deli, ‘The Quality Press and the Soviet Union: a case study of the reactions of the

26 M. Hampton

Manchester Guardian, the New Statesman and The Times to Stalin’s Great Purges, 1936–38’, Media History, 5 (1999), 159–80. In addition, some broader studies shed valuable light on Martin’s activities at the New Statesman and Nation. See, for example, Edward Hyams often celebratory official history, The New Statesman: the history of the first fifty years 1913–1963 (London: Longmans, 1963); Adrian Smith, The New Statesman: portrait of a political weekly, 1913–1931 (London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1996), 245–60.

[2] Tom O’Malley, ‘Media History and Media Studies: aspects of the development of the study of media history in the UK 1945–2000’, Media History, 8 (2002), 155–73 (quotation p. 155).

[3] The Manchester Guardian was Martin’s first employer in journalism, following a brief academic career at the London School of Economics. See Martin, Father Figures: the evolution of an editor, 1897–1931 (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1966), 165–87. When Scott offered Martin a position as political leader-writer, despite Martin’s complete lack of journalistic experience, he cited two of Martin’s books, one on the general strike, and a historical work, The Triumph of Lord Palmerston, as grounds for confidence in his abilities. Scott to Martin, 15 March 1927, Martin Papers 15/1, University of Sussex. In 1942, he wrote to Lord Vansittart affirming his historical training and apprenticeship in the journalistic tradition of Massingham and C.P. Scott. Martin to Vansittart, 19 September 1942, Martin Papers 15/3, University of Sussex.

[4] Martin’s commitment to freedom of inquiry was likely stimulated by his upbringing as the son of a dissenting minister, as well as his study of the French Enlightenment, French Liberal Thought in the Eighteenth Century (London: Ernest Benn, 1929). In addition, in an instructive passage in his diary in 1922, when he was 25 years old, he lamented that he was so ‘broadminded’ and unwittingly relativistic as to be unable to accomplish anything worthwhile. Diary, 15 December 1922, Martin Papers 7/11, University of Sussex.

[5] Many of his pamphlets and articles were repetitive. They include such titles as ‘The Educational Role of the Press’, in Henry de Jouvenel, Kingsley Martin, Paul Scott Mowrer, Sanin Cano and Friedrich Sieburg, The Educational Role of the Press (Paris: League of Nations, International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, 1934); ‘Freedom of the Press’, The Political Quarterly, 9 (1938), 973–88; ‘Public Opinion: censorship during the crisis’, The Political Quarterly, 10 (1939), 128–34; Propaganda’s Harvest (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd, 1941); Truth and the Public (London: Watts and Company, 1945).

[6] For a sympathetic account that, nonetheless, broadly confirms Martin’s choosing Republican partisanship over honesty, see Edward Hyams, The New Statesman, 198–99.

[7] For a selection of Martin’s journalistic writings, see Kingsley Martin, Critic’s London Diary: from the New Statesman 1931–1956 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1960). In addition, these comments are based in part on an unpublished study of Martin’s paper during the formative years of the cold war, Mark Hampton, ‘The New Statesman and Nation and “Third Way” Politics in the Early Cold War, 1945–1950’.

[8] B. Kingsley Martin, The Triumph of Lord Palmerston: a study of public opinion in England before the Crimean War (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1924).

[9] Aled Jones, Powers of the Press: newspapers, power and the public in nineteenth century England (Hants: Scolar, 1996); Tom O’Malley, ‘The History of Self-Regulation’, in Tom O’Malley and Clive Soley, Regulating the Press (London: Pluto Press, 2000), 7–35.

[10] See George Binney Dibblee, The Newspaper (London: Williams & Norgate, 1913); R.A. Scott-James, The Influence of the Press (London: Partridge and Company, 1913); Norman Angell, The Press and the Organisation of Society (London: Labour Publishing Company, Ltd, 1922); Walter Lippmann, Liberty and the News (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Howe, 1920); Lippmann, Public Opinion (1922) (New York: Free Press, 1997). Indeed, although Lippmann was an American, his writings were very much a part of the British discussion. Not only did his British professor, Graham Wallas, influence him considerably but his own arguments in turn were echoed in the writings of both Angell and Martin.

[11] For this context, see Mark Hampton, Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), ch. 5.

[12] See Hampton, Visions of the Press, chs 2–4. [13] For this intellectual context, see John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: pride and prejudice

among the literary intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 2002); Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 393–438; D.L. LeMahieu, A Culture for Democracy: mass communication and the cultivated mind in Britain between the wars (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), esp. 103–37.

[14] James E. Cronin, ‘Class, Citizenship and Party Allegiance: the Labour Party and class formation in twentieth-century Britain’, Studies in Political Economy, 21 (1986), 107–35, esp. 130. See also Kathleen

Censors and Stereotypes 27

Paul, Whitewashing Britain: race and citizenship in the postwar era (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), 9–24; Keith Faulks, Citizenship in Modern Britain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 9–30; Matthew Hendley, ‘Constructing the Citizen: the Primrose League and the definition of citizenship in the age of mass democracy in Britain, 1918–1928’, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 7 (1996), 125–51; Eugenia Low, ‘Class and the Conceptualization of Citizenship in Twentieth-Century Britain’, History of Political Thought, 21 (2000), 114–31.

[15] Miles Taylor, ‘Patriotism, History and the Left in Twentieth-Century Britain’, Historical Journal, 33 (1990), 976.

[16] Ibid., 980. [17] Ibid., 978. [18] Duncan Tanner, ‘The Development of British Socialism, 1900–1918’, Parliamentary History, 16 (1997),

61. See Tanner, n. 66, for further citations. [19] Ibid. [20] Kingsley Martin, Fascism, Democracy and the Press, 3. [21] Ibid. [22] Ibid., 5. [23] Ibid., 5–6. [24] Hampton, ‘The Press, Patriotism, and Public Discussion: C.P. Scott, the Manchester Guardian, and the

Boer War, 1899–1902’, Historical Journal, 44 (2001), 177–97. [25] Martin, Fascism, Democracy and the Press, 8. [26] Ibid., 9. [27] Ibid. [28] Ibid., 10. [29] ‘Muzzled Britain’, New Statesman and Nation (12 November 1938), 756. [30] Ibid. [31] Ibid., 757. [32] Vallance, ‘Muzzling Democracy’, 958–59. [33] Anthony Adamthwaite, ‘The British Government and the Media, 1937–1938’, Journal of Contemporary

History, 18 (1983), 281–97; Richard Cockett, Twilight of Truth: Chamberlain, appeasement and the manipulation of the press (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1989). In addition, see Franklin Reid Gannon, The British Press and Germany 1936–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); Benny Morris, The Roots of Appeasement: the British weekly press and Nazi Germany during the 1930s (London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1991).

[34] Jeremy Tunstall and David Machin, The Anglo-American Media Connection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 73.

[35] As Tom O’Malley has written, ‘One consequence of the Liberal theory was that it could have the effect of equating all forms of government involvement in the press with actual or potential interference with press freedom.’ O’Malley, ‘Labour and the 1947–9 Royal Commission on the Press’, in Michael Bromley and Tom O’Malley, eds, A Journalism Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 128.

[36] For assessments of the Royal Commission, see Tom O’Malley, ‘Labour and the 1947–9 Royal Commission on the Press’; James Curran, ‘The Liberal Theory of Press Freedom’, in Curran and Seaton, Power Without Responsibility, 5th edn, 287–301.

[37] James Curran, ‘The Press Under Public Regulation’, in James Curran and Jean Seaton, Power Without Responsibility, 5th edn (London: Routledge, 1997), 59–70; John Jenks, ‘The Enemy Within: journalism, the State, and the limits of dissent in cold war Britain, 1950–1951’, American Journalism, 18 (2001), 33–52.

[38] Angell, The Press and the Organisation of Society, 12. [39] With such mass publications as the Daily Herald and, especially, the Daily Mirror largely sympathetic

to the Labour programme, it was of course not entirely fair to blame Labour’s difficulties on a hostile press. In Huw Richards’ words, for example, the Herald’s coverage of Attlee’s Government was ‘proudly proprietorial’. See Richards, The Bloody Circus: the Daily Herald and the Left (London: Pluto, 1997), 163.

[40] He had discussed the theme somewhat more briefly, but in many of the same words and with many of the same examples, in his 1945 Truth and the Public.

[41] Martin, The Press the Public Wants, 45–46. Norman Angell had already developed this argument in 1922. See Angell, The Press and the Organisation of Society, 51–52.

28 M. Hampton

[42] Martin had met Lippmann during a fellowship year at Princeton, in 1922–1923; in Martin’s words, ‘I lunched with Herbert Croly and the brilliant staff of the New Republic, and discussed my thesis about newspapers and public opinion with Walter Lippmann, already one of America’s outstanding publicists.’ See Martin, Father Figures, 138. By that time, incidentally, Lippmann had already (just) published Public Opinion, as well as his earlier Liberty and the News.

[43] Kingsley Martin, The Press the Public Wants (London: Hogarth Press, 1947), 93. [44] Ibid., 76–77. [45] See Jean Seaton, ‘The Sociology of the Mass Media’, in Curran and Seaton, Power Without Responsi-

bility, 264–86; John Corner, ‘“Influence”: the contested core of media research’, in James Curran and Michael Gurevitch, eds, Mass Media and Society, 3rd edn (London: Arnold, 2000). Martin had developed this point several years earlier, in 1941, in the context of discussing wartime propaganda. It was imperative, he argued, that the Ministry of Information match its propaganda toward Germans with policy, because propaganda that did not mirror experienced reality would be hopelessly ineffective. See Martin, Propaganda’s Harvest (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd, 1941), 18, 21, 51–52.

[46] Kingsley Martin, The Press the Public Wants, 18. [47] Ibid., 80. [48] Ibid., 81. [49] George Binney Dibblee, The Newspaper (London: Williams & Norgate, 1913); R.A. Scott-James, The

Influence of the Press (London: Partridge and Company, 1913). [50] Sir Gilbert Parker, ‘The United States’, in Second Report on the Work Conducted for the Government at

Wellington House (1 February 1916), 23. INF 4/5, Public Records Office, London. [51] Massingham, ‘The Journalism of Lord Northcliffe’, The Nation and the Athenaeum (19 August 1922),

674. [52] Angell, ‘The Commercialization of Demagogy’, The Nation and the Athenaeum, 33 (15 September 1923),

181. [53] Laski, Politics (Philadelphia and London: J.B. Lippincott, 1931), 126. [54] Martin, Press and Public, 28–29. [55] O’Malley and Soley, Regulating the Press; Robert Waterman McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy:

communication politics in dubious times (New Press, 2000); Jeremy Tunstall, Newspaper Power: the new national press in Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Bob Franklin, Newszak and News Media (London: Arnold, 1997); Steven Barnett and Ivor Gaber, Westminster Tales: the twenty-first century crisis in political journalism (London and New York: Continuum, 2001). For the equation of the market with democracy in American and global contexts, see Thomas Frank, One Market Under God: extreme capitalism, market populism, and the end of economic democracy (New York: Anchor Books, 2000).

[56] Ian I. Mitroff and Warren Bennis, The Unreality Industry: the deliberate manufacturing of falsehood and what it is doing to our lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), esp. 127; Edward Said, Covering Islam: how the media and the experts determine how we see the rest of the world (New York: Vintage, 1997). For a topical example, see Geoffrey Wheatcroft, ‘Weapons of Mass Distortion’, The Guardian (2 May 2003), available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,947852,00.html (5 January 2004).

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