suggestion and contagion within the creative arts at the turn of the century clearly foreshadowed the development of Public Relations, which would make such an impact during World War I, and subsequent debate about the ability of mass media to manipulate audiences – whether it be the Hollywood dream industry criticised by exiled German academics from the Frankfurt School in the 1930s and 1940s or the cultural theorists of the post-World War II era.
But as the French newspaper headline ‘The Dangers of Hypnotism’ suggested, the tide was also turning against emotion to see it as a dangerous threat to social cohesion. Sociological and philosophical developments started to reflect more fully the scientific theories that had emerged from Newton and Darwin and placed an emphasis instead on empirical facts as the key to reality and truth (Boudana, 2011). This had been typified by the views of the English philosopher John Stuart Mill, who, in 1859, identified the capacity of news to whip up emotions, considering it a danger to democracy. Similar scepticism was voiced in France, where the physician Gustav Le Bon and sociologist Gabriel Tarde were formulating their theories on the crowd, publics, suggestibility and irrationality. Le Bon, who considered the late 19th century to be an ‘era of crowds’, saw individuals as losing their identity and ability to act responsibly in a crowd. Thus, an individual in a crowd was for him driven by suggestion and instinct rather than reason in a state he likened to hypnotism (Borch, 2006). Le Bon’s concept of the crowd clearly owed much to a contemporary fear of the 1789 French Revolution and represented the crowd in part as a destructive force that society’s elite had previously been able to direct (Muhlmann, 2010). Tarde, whose writings have recently been rediscovered by affect theorists, stood out in Europe as a relatively isolated voice against the trend to categorise emotion as a threat. He saw no such danger, and in many ways his theories foreshadowed the contagious nature of today’s social media, a topic discussed in detail in Chapter 5. But Tarde’s views were gradually marginalised in favour of arguments that equated irrationality with danger and rational thought with social progress. Borch (2006) argues that Le Bon and Tarde’s theories of the crowd, publics, suggestibility and irrationality were also fundamentally reworked and changed by American scholars such as Robert E. Park of the Chicago School, which rose to prominence in the United States in the 1920s. Borch argues (2006: 83):
The theoretical cornerstone of European semantics, the notion of suggestion, was severely challenged in the United States … This rejection of the suggestion doctrine paved the way for a distinctive American approach to crowds and collective behaviour in which the early European emphasis on irrationality was ignored and crowds were analysed as rational entities. This may have relieved the discomfort of irrationality but it also entirely disposed of what were in fact crucial sociological insights.
By the mid-1920s, the US academic and theoretical framework around suggestion had been fundamentally rewritten from its European heritage.
Emergence of the objectivity norm
When it came to the practice of journalism, a form of empiricism, stemming from the Enlightenment and reflecting, for example, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s primacy of reason over the senses (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2019: 23), had become evident several decades earlier. Schudson, for example, has categorised journalists at the turn of the century as ‘naïve empiricists’ who believed in facts as aspects of the world itself, rather than human statements about the world (1978).
It would be oversimplifying events, however, to ascribe the origins of Anglo-American journalism’s objectivity norm solely to the rise of rational thought. As Schudson has observed, the establishment of objectivity reflected a far broader confluence of factors at the end of the 19th century rather than being the product of one ‘magical moment’ (2001: 167). Such factors included the desire of journalists to create a profession that would stand out against the emerging discipline of Public Relations, pitting journalism directly against the very idea of suggestion and persuading the public. In addition, a series of commercial considerations and technological developments on both sides of the Atlantic played a key role in developing the objectivity norm. The expansion of mass printing led proprietors on both sides of the Atlantic to try to maximise their profits by appealing to a far wider audience of readers. As a consequence, a more balanced, impartial style of reporting was developed (e.g., to appeal to both Republican and Democrat readers in the United States). The emergence of the big news agencies, the Associated Press and Reuters, founded in 1846 and 1851 respectively, coincided with the invention of the telegraph and fostered a clipped factual style that is still known today in German as Telegrammenstil. As Maras has observed (2013: 2), the concept of objectivity has very much been the product of history, linked to particular cultural formulations and the professional aspirations of journalists themselves.
In the United States, the professionalisation of journalism gathered pace in the 1920s with the formation of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) in 1922 and a desire to distance journalism from the growing number of Public Relations experts and propagandists emerging around the time of World War I. Schudson (2001: 162) writes:
Journalists grew self-conscious about the manipulability of information in the propaganda age. They felt a need to close ranks and assert their collective integrity in the face of their close encounter with the publicity agents’ unembarrassed effort to use information (or misinformation) to promote special interests.
The influence of the Chicago School also extended into the world of journalism, in which the leading figure Park drew a distinction between news and sensationalist human interest stories (1938: 204):
Not everything printed in the newspapers is news. Much that is printed as news is read, at least, as if it were literature; read, that is to say, because it is thrilling and stirs the imagination and not because its message is urgent and demands action. Such, for example, are the ‘human interest’ stories, so called, which have been so influential in expanding and maintaining newspaper circulation. But human interest stories are not news. They are literature.
For Park, such sensationalism had no place in news, which required a form of objectivity to allow readers to make up their own minds about a story. Journalism still had a mission to entertain, but this had to be linked to a goal of informing the public (Muhlmann, 2010). A disciple of Park, Helen M. Hughes, whose classic examination of the US tabloid press News and the Human Interest Story was published in 1940, continued in this vein, insisting that such stories have to have a basis in the ‘truth’ in order to provide news. She thus sets up a divide between reality and fiction that is still key to understanding the basis of objective journalism.
Similarly, in the United Kingdom it has been argued that an increasing emphasis on ‘news’ and ‘facts’ emerged in the late 19th century, together with the development of professional standards of objectivity and a relative depoliticisation of the news (Hampton, 2001). In a parallel development to the United States, news agency copy, in this case from Reuters, began to be increasingly used as a source of content, reducing the opportunity for partisan comment. Robert Blackford, editor of the socialist weekly Clarion, underscored this growing trend towards facts when he wrote at the turn of the century (cited in Hampton, 2001: 218):
Figures are sacred emblems. They are the skeleton of thought. Lack of precision in figures, lack of reverence for the exactitudes in estimates, are intellectual immoralities of the deadliest kind.
Tellingly, there were already signs of a tabloid press, and its penchant for ‘stings’, in the emerging UK newspaper industry at this time. As Sparks notes (2000: 20), a culture of tabloid journalism, based on sensational coverage of controversial topics and associated with working-class readers, continued to flourish in what became known as the ‘new journalism’ of the London press. Örnebring and Jönsson (2004) cite the case of the Pall Mall Gazette and its sensationalist campaign against juvenile prostitution. Using methods akin to today’s London tabloid ‘stings’, the Gazette’s editor, W. T. Stead, posed as a
