The Invention of News
These days I’m spending a lot of time thinking about the news: how it is shaped, who controls the story, how we receive it.* These questions are not only an important part of the political dialogue today, but an important part of the book I’m working on. In search of a dimly remembered idea, I recently pulled a book off my shelf that is at least in part about the growth of newspapers. I didn’t find what I was looking for, but I was sucked into a fascinating account of how the news as we know it came to be.
At a time when digital media is transforming the way news is delivered–and by whom– Andrew Pettegree offers a reminder that newspapers too were once a revolutionary form of delivering information. In The Invention of News: How The World Came To Know About Itself, Pettegree looks at the changing definition, use, control, and distribution of the news from the medieval world to the age of revolution.
Building on his previous work in the ground-breaking The Book in the Renaissance,** Pettegree demonstrates how access to news became increasingly widespread, moving from private information networks run by medieval elites, through sixteenth century news pamphlets and news singers, to the newspapers of the eighteenth century. He looks at the development of postal systems, private couriers and the printing press. He considers the importance of the introduction of paper, the rise of coffee shops and the growth of a literate middle class. He discusses the roles played by news pamphlets in the Reformation and by newspapers in the American and French Revolutions.
Some of the most interesting sections of The Invention of News deal not with the development of new media, but the creation of new audiences. Technology often outpaced demand. Early printers, finding the traditional market for large books would not keep them solvent, created new markets for more ephemeral products. The leap from broadsheets to newspapers presented a similar challenge: the first newspapers were bewildering to audiences accustomed to news pamphlets that told a single story from beginning to end. Perhaps, at some level, the medium is the message.
*I must admit that I am more plugged in than I was in the past thanks to Twitter. Embarrassing, but true.
**Also well worth reading. Printing and the Protestant Reformation are more closely linked than you might think.
A version of this review appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers a million years ago.
In Which a Reader Asks a Question, and I Go Searching for the Answer
One of the delights of writing this blog is correspondence with like-minded people who have questions or thoughts about my posts. It is always a treat.
In response to my last post, a reader with whom I often correspond asked a question I had never even considered: If Jewish American or Jewish British or Jewish French soldiers were captured by the Germans, were they sent to a concentration camp for extermination or to a regular POW camp? *
I did a quick check through my usual sources. Nothing. I asked My Own True Love if he had knew.** He didn’t—though he agreed that it was a great question. Finally, I turned to a source that hasn’t failed me yet: the reference librarians at the Pritzker Military Library.*** They had an answer for me in an hour and a half.
Sadly, the answer is that the Nazis did single out Jewish soldiers. The United States Army made it easy to identify Jewish soldiers by marking a solder’s religious preference on his dog tag: C for Catholic, H for Hebrew,**** P for Protestant. According to an oral history in the Pritzker collection, the Nazis didn’t bother checking dog tags. They simply asked Jewish soldiers to identify themselves.
Soldiers identified as Jewish, or even potentially Jewish, were separated from other America prisoners and sent to the slave labor camp at Berga, which had the highest death rate of any of the POW camps, or to the extermination camps.
More information is available in a book titled Forgotten Victims: The Abandonment of Americans in Hitler’s Camps. I haven’t read it, but it has good reviews.
Thanks to Dr. Gene for a great question. And to Pritzker librarian Leah Cohen for the sobering answer.
*You people are smart!
**He knows a lot more about World War II than I do. Or at least different things.
***If you are interested in military history, you should be aware of the Pritzker. They have interesting exhibits (the current exhibits are on women’s service organizations in WWII and WWI posters-both subjects dear to my heart), a solid research collection, an enormous collection of war posters, and kick-ass reference librarians. They collect veteran’s stories in an oral history program, Stories of Service. They also host excellent speakers. Even before the current troubles, they streamed many of their programs live. I have spent many a happy evening in front of my computer with my knitting and a notebook, listening to experts talk about their passions.
****Obviously problematic
Beyond Belief
I am currently taking notes on a pile of secondary source that I read over the last few months. I stuffed them full of sticky tabs as I went and moved on. On the surface, it’s not the most efficient way to do research, and I don’t always have the time to do it. But when time allows, I find it tremendously valuable. Coming back to the material a second time with a fresh eye and more information allows me to make connections that I didn’t make the first time. Re-reading is like re-writing as far as I’m concerned. It’s where the magic happens.
I just finished my second pass on Deborah Lipstadt’s Beyond Belief: the American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933-1945. The first time through it didn’t even occur to me share it with you.* And yet, and yet: it is important, not only for understanding how Americans could have remained ignorant of the Holocaust at the time, but also as a starting point for the mindset that makes today’s charges and counter-charges of “fake news” possible.
The work had its roots in the classroom. After Lipstadt told her class that detailed information about the Nazi attempt to exterminate European Jews had been available to the Allies very early in the war, one of her students angrily responded “But what did the public—not just the people in high places—know? How much of this information reached them? Could my parents, who read the paper every day, have known?”
Lipstadt argued that a great deal of information was available. American reporters who were stationed in Germany until the United States entered the war had reported on the Nazis in detail, including information about Germany’s persecution of the Jews.
The student wasn’t convinced. “No,” he said. “I can’t believe people could have read about all this in their daily papers.”
Beyond Belief began as Lipstadt’s attempt to prove that she was right. Her final conclusion, which she offers to the student in her acknowledgements: “I was right, but so were you.”
The book consists of a detailed look at who reported what and when, what their editors did with it after they reported it,** and how readers responded. Some of the most powerful portions of the book, and the ones that I think are most important for us today, discuss what Lipstadt describes as “the barriers to belief.” The most critical of these was a legacy from World War I. Stories of German atrocities were reported in the first World War that later proved to be false. The result was an attitude of what journalist and historian William Shirer called “supercynicism and superskepticism” about reports of atrocities. As a group, Americans said “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” unfortunately, this time the stories were true.
Be warned, Beyond Belief is not an easy read. Lipstadt’s style is clear, but her work is dense with data. Nonetheless, I found it a worthwhile read for reasons well beyond my current research.
*I don’t normally discuss purely academic works of history here in the Margins. They have a different purpose and a different audience and occasionally just plain hard to read.
**Important stories often got buried deep in newspapers. Editors (and sometimes reporters) added seeds of doubt to the reported stories. And some papers didn’t run the stories at all.