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

cworrall1@sheffield.ac.uk

@ChrisDWorrall

THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME