Newspaper

C

20th Century

Newspapers across Canada remained strongly political into the 20th century. But while partisanship remained, fewer papers relied solely on the government or political parties for financing. Publishers turned increasingly to advertising as a revenue source, and by the close of the first decade of the 20th century, large city daily papers covered as much as 80 percent of their operating budgets with advertising revenue.

In 1873 there were 47 daily newspapers in Canada; by 1913 that number had increased to 113. Canadian newspaper publishers benefited from rising literacy rates. To attract new readers, Canadian newspapers emphasized local news and short human-interest stories. Sales grew even higher as Canada’s railway network expanded, enabling publishers to distribute newspapers across previously impractical distances.

After 1915, however, the number of daily newspapers in Canada dropped steadily. Competition for readers and advertising dollars was fierce, and many newspapers struggled to make ends meet. Publishers of failing newspapers merged operations with successful newspapers in their towns, a phenomenon that accelerated markedly as the century progressed. By 1950 the four largest publishing conglomerates controlled almost 40 percent of the newspapers circulated in Canada.

In Canada, as in the United States, the introduction of radio in the 1920s, then television in the 1950s, derailed newspapers from the dominant position in the news media. Newspapers responded by increasing analysis and historical background of the events that they covered. Many also decreased their coverage of national and international news and expanded their local news sections. Surveys show that Canadians prefer television for international and national news, but most rely on newspapers for coverage of local events. Circulation of small community newspapers grew substantially in the late 20th century. In 1971, 3.8 million Canadians read a community newspaper each week. In 1999, that number topped 10.6 million.

---

---

VIII

The Global Press

In modern times, newspapers that share a similar structure and function are published all over the world. This global press traces its origin to British papers of the 18th century. Though threatened by censorship in the years preceding, during, and following the world wars, the global press maintained the tradition of freedom of the press first established in London.

A

The British Model

The first recognizably modern papers—depending on advertising and newspaper sales for revenue and providing a mixture of political, economic, and social news and commentary—emerged in Britain in the mid-18th century. As the first country to undergo the Industrial Revolution, Britain was uniquely able to provide the complex system of distribution networks, large urban markets, and advertisers necessary to make newspapers profitable enterprises.

By the mid-19th century, newspapers based on the British model circulated in many large cities around the globe. Most of these papers were the products of an expanding British Empire. The Toronto Globe launched in Canada in 1844, for example, and the Melbourne Age started up in Australia in 1854. The British also exerted their newspaper influence on the Indian subcontinent. The first local-language newspaper, the Urdu Akhbar, was first printed in 1836 in what is now Pakistan. The British Empire in India sparked a range of English-language newspapers by the latter half of the century, including the Times of India in Bombay, the Statesman in Calcutta (now Kolkata), and the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore. The British model also spread to Latin America in the early 19th century. El Mercurio began circulation in Valparaiso, Chile, in 1827, and Peru’s El Comercio printed its first edition in 1839.

During the 19th century, the British model became far more than the technical process of printing, financing, and distributing newspapers; it evolved into a political presence. The Times of London set the standard for a global press. It defined the principle of freedom of the press—the right to criticize the government and to campaign vigorously for its own political views.

The spread of literacy and primary education promised a larger audience. In addition, the commercial success of the Times and its profits, essential to the maintenance of editorial independence, inspired competitors to seek even larger profits. In an effort to attract a broader audience, competitors of the Times featured brief stories written in a simple style, illustrations, and more coverage of sports and local affairs. They also moved interesting news stories to the front page of the paper. Most 20th-century general-circulation newspapers adopted these modifications.

B

Freedom of the Press Following World War I

After World War I ended in 1918, many governments sought to control or crush independent newspapers. As Italy fell under the Fascist rule of Benito Mussolini, Milan’s Corriere della Sera (Evening Courier) decried the dictator’s actions and policies. The paper launched a prolonged investigation of the murder of Socialist politician Giacomo Matteoti by Fascist thugs and eventually placed blame for the killing firmly on Mussolini himself. The paper’s offices were firebombed, and newsstands that sold the paper were attacked. Advertisers received warnings of official retaliation if they advertised in Corriere rather than in Mussolini’s newspaper Il Popolo d’Itlalia (The People of Italy). In 1925 Mussolini forced Corriere’s publisher to resign. The paper fell under the authority of Mussolini’s new press bureau, and like all the other Italian newspapers of the time, tamely adhered to the bureau’s restrictions on press freedom.

In Germany, Adolf Hitler, who assumed power in 1933, appointed Paul Joseph Goebbels as minister of propaganda and national enlightenment. In this capacity, Goebbels tightly controlled the dissemination of all news. The Nazi Party seized control of the once-independent Wolff news agency, renaming it the German Information Agency. Goebbels also ensured that the Nazi Party newspapers, Völkischer Beobachter (the People’s Observer) and Der Angriff (the Attack), and the virulently anti-Semitic journal Der Sturmer (the Stormer), received newsprint allocations and official advertising.

The new model of the press as a tool of ideology and government, in direct contrast to the independent tradition established by the Times of London, was perfected by Vladimir Lenin in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) following the Russian Revolution of 1917. As the first leader of the USSR, Lenin argued that Soviet newspapers should be tools for social control, and he strictly controlled the information they published.

C

Post-World War II

After World War II, the victorious Allies established several major papers in the occupied countries of Europe and Asia. To greater and lesser degrees, these papers became mouthpieces for opposing sides in the Cold War, the 40-year period of hostility between the United States and the USSR that followed World War II.

In Paris, after the Allies drove the Germans out in 1944, the new liberation government of General Charles de Gaulle established Le Monde (the World) as France’s primary newspaper. The French government supported the paper with generous subsidies of newsprint and advertising. The ambiguity of the paper’s role–the fact that it promised freedom from government control but also was the government-sponsored journal of France—raised serious issues about press independence.

In Italy, members of the British and American armies reestablished Corriere della Sera after the fall of Mussolini in 1943. The first editor of the new Corriere supported British interests in Italy to such an extent that he took his early news columns verbatim from the foreign broadcasts of the British Broadcasting Corporation.

In the aftermath of World War II, official news agencies—such as TASS in the USSR and the German News Service in East Germany—strictly controlled news material throughout the Communist world. The Soviet Army censored newspapers in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Rumania, and Bulgaria. Communist governments in these countries tolerated the publication of several small, alternative papers, so long as they echoed the views of the Communist party.

After the Communist armies under Mao Zedong won the Chinese civil war in 1949, the Communists imposed Soviet-style control over the press. In October 1949 all newspapers in China were required to register with the national information ministry, which shut down most of the papers. The few newspapers that survived this process did so with new editors appointed by the Communist Party. Their editorial policies came under the authority of the party's department of propaganda. Xinhua, the official news agency, provided their news. The one paper to survive the Communist victory with its name and independence intact was the Tianjin daily Ta Kung Pao, which specialized in financial news. Along with the party journal Renmin Ribao (People's Daily), it was one of the few publications licensed for sale outside China.