ABSTRACT
The orthodox interpretation of the development of the British press has remained unchanged for over a century. ‘The British press,’ writes David Chaney, ‘is generally agreed to have attained its freedom around the middle of the nineteenth century.’1 This view, first advanced in pioneer Victorian histories of journalism, has been repeated uncritically ever since. The winning of press freedom is attributed in part to a heroic struggle
against state repression. The key events in this struggle are generally said to be the abolition of the Court of Star Chamber in 1641, the ending of press licensing in 1694, Fox’s Libel Act, 1792, and the repeal of press taxation – the so-called ‘taxes on knowledge’ – in the period 1853-61. Only with the last of these reforms, it is claimed, did the press become fully free. It is also argued that the market development of the press contributed to
its emancipation. Indeed, some researchers place greater emphasis on this than on the fight against restrictive laws. ‘The true censorship,’ John Roach writes of the late Georgian press, ‘lay in the fact that the newspaper had not yet reached financial independence, and consequently depended on the administration or the parties.’ The growth of newspaper profits, largely from advertising, supposedly rescued the press from its compromising dependence on state or party subsidies. This view of advertising as the midwife of press freedom is restated succinctly by Ivon Asquith in a scholarly study of the early nineteenth-century press. ‘Since sales were inadequate to cover the costs of producing a paper,’ he writes,
it was the growing income from advertising which provided the material base for the change of attitude from subservience to independence. It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that the growth of advertising revenue was the most important single factor in enabling the press to emerge as the Fourth Estate of the realm.
