My slides from a departmental seminar delivered on 09/11/2016, during which I disucssed my research into the early British left's reactions to the initial rise of the mass media. All images used in this research were obtained, with permission, from the British Libray, Boston Spa and the Working Class Movement Library, Salford.

1. POPULISM
V
PURPOSE
THE NEW JOURNALISM & THE EARLY BRITISH
LEFT

2. 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).

3. 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

4. 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

5. THE “YELLOW” PRESS
• Hostile reactions from across the political left
• “Yellow”: Cheap, trashy, sensationalist.
• “Capitalist”: Greedy, the ‘enemy’.
• At odds with the ‘labour mission’.

7. A VOICE OF THEIR OWN
• Calls for a ‘daily’
• Letters to MPs
• Editorials
• A need to ‘fight back’

8. Labour’s daily, eight-page national newspaper (1912-1915)
THE DAILY CITIZEN

9. MIXED MESSAGES
• SPORT
• GOSSIP
• CRIME
• BETTING TIPS
• SENSATION
• LABOUR NEWS
• STRIKES
• GLOBAL
SOCIALISM
• LEFTIST
SCEPTICISMS

10. THEIR VIEWS AND OURS

11. 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).

12. ANY QUESTIONS?
Christopher Shoop-Worrall
cworrall1@sheffield.ac.uk
@ChrisDWorrall
THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME