ABSTRACT
The remarkably resilient Whig interpretation of press history is sustained by focusing attention upon mainstream commercial newspapers, while ignoring or downplaying the development of the radical press. Only if this selective perspective is maintained does the conventional view of the rise of a free press appear plausible. During the second half of the eighteenth century and in the early nine-
teenth century, a section of the commercial press did indeed become more politically independent, partly as a consequence of the growth of advertising. This additional revenue reduced dependence on political subsidies; encouraged papers to reject covert secret service grants (the last English newspaper to receive a clandestine government grant was the Observer in 1840); improved the wages and security of employment of journalists so that they became less biddable; and, above all, financed greater expenditure on news gathering so that newspapers became less reliant on official sources and more reluctant to trade their independence in return for obtaining ‘prior intelligence’ from the government. This shift was symbolized by The Times’s magisterial declaration on Boxing Day 1834 that it would no longer accept early information from government offices since this was inconsistent with ‘the pride and independence of our journal’, and anyway its ‘own information was earlier and surer’. However, the growth of advertising did not transform the commercial
press into an ‘independent fourth estate’. On the contrary, the development of modern political parties from the 1860s onward encouraged a closer interpenetration of party politics and commercial journalism. A number of leading proprietors in Victorian and Edwardian Britain were Members of Parliament, while some national newspapers were subsidized by party loyalists or from party funds until well into the twentieth century. This continuing party involvement belied the often-repeated claim that the press was an independent check on Parliament and the executive; in reality, newspapers long remained an extension of the party system.1
