“Amongst the Most Desirable Reading”: Advertising and the Fetters of the Newspaper Press in Britain, c. 1848–1914

Abstract

What is the difference between advertising and news? This essay examines the rise of this dilemma and its precarious resolution in the formative era of modern advertising and press commercialization in Britain, c. 1848–1914, with particular attention to legal powers mobilized in the process. The essay traces a dialectical process, which began with the midcentury campaign to repeal taxes on the press, one of which was the advertisement duty. The campaign framed advertising as a communication of essential information. Its success gave full reign to advertising in the newspaper press, but also triggered a readjustment: Newspaper owners soon faced a threat to their effective control of the medium; their proprietary power to differentiate advertising from their self-proclaimed business - news - was put to the test. Owners' responses established a hierarchic distinction between news and advertising, along an informational metric: advertising was framed as an inferior kind of information, more biased than news. The hierarchy became embedded as a common sense to the point that the process of historical creation has been forgotten; yet, it asserted a difference between news and ads which had little to hang on in theory and practice, giving rise to challenges which still resonate today.

Ways of Seeing Advertising: Law and the Making of Visual Commercial Culture

“…29 The aesthetic charge was one facet of a broader-ranging set of concerns about advertising in this period, which arguably gave impetus to aesthetic critics. The same decades saw heated debates about the threat that press advertisers posed to the information value of news (Rosenberg 2019). They also saw a lively controversy about the compromise of scientific truth under the pressure of so-called quack advertising of proprietary medicines and foods (Rosenberg 2021;forthcoming).…”

“…Meanwhile, political advertising was central to political conflict in the early twentieth century and was another source of tension (Thompson 2007). Law had a role to play in boundary work in other debates too, and, here too, a dual process of legitimation and inferiorization of advertising could be found, although the conceptual focus was differently structured because each case involved a different set of actors, interests, cultural values at the center of contestation, and legal routes (Rosenberg 2019(Rosenberg , 2021. In the case of outdoor advertising, aesthetic criticism developed its own language and conceptual apparatus, which were principled and focused on media and location rather than on advertised content, even if individual complaints occasionally referred to specific contents.…”