Chapter Nineteen - Commenting and Reflecting on the News

Summary

Comment on the news – opinion and analysis about news events, topical publications, policy, political or religious ideas, political figures or groups, or ‘the times’ in general – had an ambiguous place in the early modern British press. Many publications disavowed comment as a source of fiction, partiality or meddling in state affairs that ran counter to ideals of truthful and respectable news. The Kingdomes Weekly Post (1643–44), for example, aimed to pro-vide ‘newes … without any gilded glosings, invented fixions, or flattering Commentaries’ (1, 9 November 1643, 1–2), while the British Mercury (1710–16) sought to avoid ‘All Partiality … nor shall political Reflexions be allow’d any Room, the Design of this Mercury being to give a fair and equal Account of such Facts and Incidents as come within its Sphere’ (369, 2 August 1712, 3). However, the vehemence of such denials, which were a commonplace in newspapers, was a reaction to comment's regular appearance in the serial press rather than a reflection of its absence. Many serials throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did provide comment for their readers, and often in ample quantities. Indeed, the place of serials in the wider ‘comment media landscape’ – the mixture of printed, manuscript and oral media through which comment was published and circulated – gradually shifted from marginal to central, and by 1800 was matching or even surpassing the primary medium of early modern comment, the printed pamphlet.

The simplest way comment was included in serials was within news discourse: interpolating individual words, sentences or paragraphs of comment into news narratives to inflect them with analysis or opinion. This was a regular feature of newspapers – for example, there were significant concentrations of comment-heavy, partisan news in Civil War newsbooks, Exclusion Crisis newspapers, post-1712 weekly journals, and newspapers in the era of the American and French revolutions. Comment-heavy news was a deliberate newswriting strategy rather than a universal phenomenon, as many newspapers were essentially plain in style, including surprising cases such as the main thrice-weekly newspapers during the ‘rage of party’ under Queen Anne, the Post Boy (1695–1736?), Post Man (1695–1730) and Flying Post (1695–1733).