Abstract
When we pick up a newspaper we bring to the task of reading it a series of habitualised assumptions — that the events it describes will have actually occurred, that those to which it ascribes the greatest importance are likely to commend themselves to us as being worthy of priority, that information concerning goods for sale will be presented differently from other information, that information placed in specific categories will indeed belong to them (sports, business, entertainment, stock prices) and that the whole of what appears will have passed through a process of collection, checking, arrangement and general consideration consistent with the previous practice of the paper. In other words we approach the newspaper product having absorbed certain routines of comprehension, accepting the special codes of the newspaper genre; these are presumed to follow the routines and codes used by the journalists and compositors who create the paper. This might make the newspaper sound a very settled product, unchanging in its intentions and presuppositions; in fact, it is in a permanent state of flux, its working practices and controlling mechanisms constantly shifting with the altering varieties of news demanded of it, the altering fashions and interests (which it seeks both to record and foster) of its audience, and the altering techniques and sub-departments of the profession of journalism itself.
Published originally as chapter 1 in James Curran (ed.), Newspaper History: studies in the evolution of the British Press (London: Constable, 1978). ©Acton Society Press Group.
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Notes and References
Gaye Tuchman, ‘Objectivity as a Strategic Ritual: an Examination of Newsmen’s Notions of Objectivity’, American Journal of Sociology, 78 (Jan 1972 ) pp. 660–70.
John Donne,Collected Poems ed. Sir Herbert Grierson(Oxford University Press, 1933) p. 69.
Richard Atkyns, The Original and Growth of Printing (London April 1664) title page.
John Milton, Areopagitica vol. II (Yale University Press edition, 1959) p. 561.
See Peter Fraser, The Intelligence of Secretaries of State (Cambridge University Press, 1956) pp. 9–34.
G. A. Cranfield, The Development of the Provincial Newspapers 1700–1760 ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962 ) p. 28.
Rev. George Crabbe, ‘The Newspaper’ in Collected Works, vol. II ( London: John Murray, 1834 ) p. 135.
See A. Aspinall, ‘The Reporting and Publishing of the House of Commons Debates 1771–1834’ in Essays Presented to Sir Lewis Namier (eds Richard Pares and Alan Taylor (Oxford University Press, 1956) pp. 233–8.
See D. Ayerst, The Guardian — Biography of a Newspaper (London:Collins, 1971 ).
See Leslie Stephen, ‘The Evolution of Editors’, Studies of a Biographer vol. I, 3 (London: Duckworth, 1898) pp. 37–73.
Walter Besant, ‘Journalism’, The Pen and the Book(London: Thomas Burleigh, 1899) ch 3 p. 248.
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© 1978 Anthony Smith
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Smith, A. (1978). The Long Road to Objectivity and Back Again — the Kinds of Truth We Get in Journalism. In: The Politics of Information. Communications and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15896-6_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15896-6_13
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