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Betto van Waarden, "Politicians and Mass Media in the Age of Empire" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
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B
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Beddo Van Warden about his book titled Politicians and Mass Media in the Age of Empire, published by Cambridge University Press in 2025. Now, this book helps us understand something that I think is really interesting and kind of shows up a lot in popular culture, for instance, but without necessarily analysing or historicising it properly, which is the idea that if we go back, you know, a good few hundred years, there are recognizable politicians, but there isn't really like, any sort of mass media, right? They're operating in pretty small confines of like, for example, a royal court. And we do get to a point where it's not just the king or queen making all the decisions. There are politicians involved kind of at a level below them, but we don't really see the people involved, we don't really see mass media involved. And then, of course, today it's a very different situation. Politicians are like, all over the media all the time, and that's like a huge part, in some cases, like the biggest part of what their job is. So obviously something changed. And we often come across it, I think, in novels or films or period dramas kind of Politicians and the media being an increasingly big deal. But when does that actually happen? How does that actually happen? Like, that's not inevitable. That's something we can investigate and analyze. And that's exactly what this book helps us do, is look at that transition period where we have politicians, but the tech of communication is changing really, really fast, kind of like today. And politicians are doing a variety of things in response to that, obviously some successful, some, some less so. And this book helps us make sense of that transformation. So, Beto, thank you so much for coming onto the podcast to tell us about it.
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C
Yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
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B
Starting then with introductions, could you tell us a bit about yourself and why you decided to write this book?
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C
Yes. I'm a professor of history at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. I'm currently working in a national research program on disinformation and democracy initiated by the Dutch government. So I'm working with colleagues from law, economics, psychology from different universities. We're all trying to look at this issue of disinformation from different angles. Why did I write this book? As you mentioned in the introduction, we see a lot of media and politics around us in society today. There is clearly a sort of close relationship there, and I was very interested to understand the history of that relationship. Does it come from. How did it evolve?
- [03:58]
B
Yeah, I mean, those are some very clearly relevant questions to where we're at now, as you and I have both highlighted already. But of course, that's a really big question too. So once one has a big question in mind, you go into the archive, you start investigating of what the specifics might be, and we tend to kind of end up with more particular questions to then investigate in a book like this. So can you tell us a bit about that process for you, of how you went from this initial interest and what sorts of more specific questions you ended up with in the book?
- [04:27]
C
Yeah, I mean, in a way, I actually tried to also keep the question quite broad because I wanted to remain open to really seeing a lot of dynamics that I wouldn't also expect. Also, when we think of mass media, what does that mean? Often nowadays we think of social media or also AI and of course, television. And so. But mass media can mean a lot of things, and I wanted to also be open to that and to seeing what people considered mass media in the 19th century. So I actually went in with this sort of main question of how did politics change with the emergence of the first form of mass media? And here I mostly focused on the mass press and also sort of the visual revolution, which took place both at the end of the 19th century. But I combined that by looking at other forms of media at that time, and it's this question I kind of divided into two parts in a way. So how did politicians try to shape the media, which is also called the politicization of media, and also the flip side of the coin, right. How did media try to shape politics, the so called mediatization of politics? And in a way, that's also a bit of a chronological thing. Right. So first politicians try to shape the media and then media become more powerful in this time period and they kind of take the upper hand and politicians start needing to adjust. Right. Something I discovered in my way in these archives. But I also think in the end, you cannot separate these two questions. So in the end, it's really about how did all of this come together to create a type of new system of media politics, which is what I explore in the book.
- [06:09]
B
Yeah, that kind of reaction and counter reaction sounds very familiar. And it's definitely helpful to kind of understand how that develops within those big questions. Then can you tell us a bit about one of the ways you go about answering them? Obviously, one of them is coming up with the system that you've mentioned. We're going to go into that in more detail, but you also focus on some individuals to kind of trace these changes during this period. So can you tell us who the figures are that you focus on and how and why you chose them?
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C
Yeah, I wanted to basically look at, well, how can I indeed find the answer to this big question? How do I find media and politics? So I, in a sense started by looking at the most visible part of it, which was this kind of vanguard, this sort of most visible tip of the iceberg, if you will, which were these particularly media savvy, mediagenic politicians, Right. Who were more striking, more visible in the media at that time, so the period sort of between 1880 and the First World War, than a lot of their contemporaries and also more than some of their successors. So you had a number of these figures who really understood, sort of were the first to understand how to kind of leverage these new mass media. And I wanted to kind of illustrate these sort of media political points by, yeah, looking at them. Right. Because they show it most vividly, in a sense. And so the figures I looked at were the German emperor Kaiser Wilhelm ii, as well as his imperial chancellor, Bernhard von Brlow, who was the Chancellor from 1900 to 1909. And then on the British side, the colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, and also Cecil Rhodes, this mining magnate who went to southern Africa from Britain and who also became the prime minister of the Cape Colony there. Then I also look at Leopold ii, King of the Belgians, but also notorious for sort of amassing this private colony of the Congo Free State. And also Theodore Roosevelt, the American president, who is, of course, also very involved in expanding imperialism. And I think these figures, yeah, they fall into different categories in a certain way. Right. So you had the media manipulators, if you will, which was very much Brillo and Leopold II kind of acting behind the scenes and trying to steer media. And then you had the more. Yeah, visible celebrities. So the Kaiser, Right. As we also still know him today. He's still celebrity today. This kind of quirky German emperor from around 1900 with his spiky helmet. And also Cecil Rhodes was a very visible celebrity at the time. And then you also had a combination. So Chamberlain and Roosevelt, they were both, in a certain way, media manipulators and visible celebrities. And I think by zooming in on these six key figures, these sort of masculine, imperialist politicians, I also want to kind of highlight the similarities and differences across four different empires. And also to show how different types of political leaders, so ranging from a prime minister, but also to a constitutional monarch with a private colony. Like how they used media in different ways. And I think, as I sort of alluded to, what was a sort of common ground amongst all of them was that they all had this interest in imperialism, which, as I'm sure we'll explore that, we'll also explore this in later questions in terms of thinking about the development of the transnational media. And I think the interesting thing about these characters is that they're all sort of much studied, very notorious figures in history. Right. Many people have very strong opinions about these figures, but I really tried to kind of zoom out and really focus on the role that the media played in their politics, which also helps to actually explain a lot of their fame or also infamy. And also try to show the relevance of these politicians by also comparing them to some other politicians throughout the book to kind of show like, okay, it's not just these six figures, but this was a very widespread phenomenon across countries, across empires. They just happen to be the most visible, striking examples here.
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B
Yeah, no, that's definitely helpful to highlight the kind of point across empires aspect, because the examples you use in the book really show that in many cases, it's the sort of. Of style of what they're doing and how they're manipulating it. It's not that one of them is American or one of them is British. Like there are so many commonalities across what they're doing and how people and the media are responding to them. But of course, this is all happening in a wider context. So can we now pick up please, on that comment about the system you've come up with to understand what is happening? You call it a hybrid system of media politics. Can you describe this for us?
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C
Yeah, in a certain way. This very encompassing global system of media politics that comes into being in this time period, I argue. And to understand this, I think it's maybe good to think of it in different ways. Right, so one aspect is sort of the mixed media, also the global communication infrastructure that comes into being and then as a result, a sort of global public sphere that emerges. So I'll try to kind of answer on these in turn. So, yeah, when you think of media, I guess the dominant one in the late 19th century becomes the mass press, right? So newspapers. And just to give you a sense of this, because it can sound a bit abstract or what are we talking about? So if you look at the 19th century, so the circulation of the eight main dailies in Britain, it increased from 2000 in 1800 to 200,000 copies by 1900, right? So if you look at the London newspaper, specifically in 1800 there are about 50 London newspapers. A century later there are 400 London newspapers. And the provincial press in this period increases from 100 to 1500. So incredible increase. And you see also sort of acceleration. And around the turn of the 20th century, right, when things shift into a new gear, you see this especially in countries like the U.S. germany, which are just sort of these emerging powers at the time. So in the US, right, in 1880 you had 10,000 newspapers in the US and by 1900 you had more than 21,000. And also the overall monthly circulation of periodicals in the US went from 18 million to 64 million in the period just between 1890 and 1905. So just in a 15 year time, Spanish Germany was a very fast growing press landscape. So there, the total newspaper circulation also increased from 8 million in 1885 to 36 million by the start of the First World War. And also newspapers themselves grew, right? So like you had the Frankfurter Zeitung. Frankfurter Zeitung, it printed five times as many pages by 1900 as it had done half a century earlier. And it published 19 editions per week. I mean, you cannot imagine this nowadays. But also in Other countries, right? So if you think of Paris, like the circulation in Paris of the Parisian press, it tripled between 1880 and the First World War. And just to look at the big zoom out and look at the big picture again, right? Globally, you had about 3,000 newspapers in the early 19th century. And this becomes 30,000 newspapers over the course of the 19th century. And this is really not also a European story, right? So, for example, in Kolkata, you had higher print circulations than you had in St. Petersburg in the earlier 19th century. Also, Ottoman newspapers rivaled the British. And it's really a mix of local newspapers, regional newspapers, national newspapers, the international press. So you have these different layers of this media system sort of developing. And this also mixes, right, with magazines becoming vogue. You have this sort of visual revolution. So you get these illustrated newspapers, illustrated magazines, which also combine with early film. So you could see your politicians now, you could see them on the pages in the daily press, but you could also go and see them on the screen. And I think it's important here to also highlight that this is not sort of a media revolution. It's not one medium overtaking the next, right? So like if, right, radio didn't replace the printing press, television didn't replace radio. And it's the same in the 19th century, right? So you had older forms of media which start interacting with these newer visual media, right? You still had pamphlets, caricatures, posters, lantern shows, right? Novels, of course, travelogues. And these all interact with this new mass press. And also media, we need to understand this in a broader sense, it's also consumer goods. Through goods, material objects, you also communicate certain messages or images of politics. They are also a medium in that sense. So you can think of a variety of things. Cigarettes would print political figures on them. So hamster ham that you would go and buy at the butchery, they would have an imprint of like a Kaiser mark or something. Also silverware that people would use in their homes. And not just silverware, but even underwear, right? So they really capitalized on the sort of increasing celebrity of these political figures to also sell products, basically, which increased then also the celebrity of these politicians. And I think what's really key here is this commercialization taking place in the late 19th century. So before that, the press was more, yeah, in a way, you could say idealistic or political, right? Like different political groups or movements would print their own newspapers and would fund it themselves. Or you would have papers funded by subscriptions. And now it really becomes about selling to mass audiences. Right? Advertising comes into being now Newspapers need to reach as many readers as possible to. For their advertisers. So media logic really comes to dominate, particularly commercial logic. And you see this even in political party newspapers, in religious newspapers, that they become more commercial in how they pitch themselves and how they have big headlines and nice images. So this is this sort of mixed media system that comes into being. But this combines with the growth of a kind of global communication network. Right? You need to get news from somewhere. And also if your ability to get news from further away, you will have more news. You have exciting news from foreign lands, right, which will appeal to your readers. And steam shipping played a big role here, simply the ability to convey news through steam ships and then later, also in the later 19th century, telegraphy. So also when you think of how this really increased the speed of news in this news, global news cycle. So to have a news travel by steamship from the US to Europe took 10 days. But then when you had telegraphy, it took one day. And in the case of Australia, it's even more extreme. So around 1850 would take three months for news from Australia to reach Europe, or vice versa. Then 1860s becomes 45 days with steam ships, and by the end of the century it only takes six hours. So you get this really sort of constant news bubble, in a sense, globally. Also 1904, you have the invention of telephotography, so basically telegraphing photographs, which also creates a global visual news culture for the first time. And of course there's so much news to gather. So how do you do that? Then you also have the emergence of these press agencies like Havas, the French one, the German Wolf, British Reuters, American apart, they start gathering news from around the world for their newspapers. And of course, railways also play a role in distributing the news, right? Like you can gather it through your telegraphs, but how do you get it to the people? You need to get your newspapers to your customers, to your readers. And therefore you need this expansion of railway networks in the late 19th century. And there you see also that now London, you know, Paris, Berlin, they can start delivering papers to readers across the country, which really centralizes power also in the cities. And you have an increase, yeah, capitals with, with governments become more powerful as a result of this. Right. They come to dominate the news landscape and they become these sort of cosmopolitan urban scapes. And just also illustrate how international this was. Like when you take an example, like the French illustration, this illustrated magazine, they exported more than 55% of their print run to subscribers around the world. And this also creates then this is the third part. Right. So after sort of mixed media and global communication infrastructure, you also get this global public sphere because people are reading news from around the world, so they start sharing, they start being informed about the same things. Right? So you get a sort of global reading public that readers in Europe, North America, Japan, Southern Africa, Australia, they're reading the same types of news stories, so they're sharing a similar experiences, in a sense. And again, this is really also highlighted in the urban areas, right? This is. Urbanization is really taking off at this time. So London has 6.6 million people. New York has about three and a half million people. Tokyo has almost 2 million people. And the city with the highest growing or the highest press density in the world is actually Berlin. Right. So really, you have this, again, cosmopolitan readership in these big cities in the world. Now, reading news from around the world and also reading about the same politicians, Right. In Germany, they're reading about British and American politicians and vice versa. So this sort of shared cast of characters that we can talk about later. Yeah. And I think. And then I think here it's also important to highlight the interaction between these different layers, Right? So it's not like with a transnational hybrid media system, you suddenly. The local press is gone. No, they interact. Right. So you. When you think of caricatures, for example, right, first it was Birmingham, right? Like the Birmingham Satiricals, they would make fun of Chamberlain, Chamberlain's politician from Birmingham, Right. This is where he kind of became big and where his electorate was. So the Birmingham Satiricals would depict Chamberlain in certain ways, but this caricaturization would be picked up by the national press in Britain, which would then be picked up by the international press. Right. So the same images of Chamberlain would start going around the world because they would be the sort of local, regional, national and international news would be connected. They would be reading each other. And in that sense, it also, I mean, it's a time of nationalism or hyper nationalism. But interestingly, because of these media, you also get a sense that this people are transcending nationalism, Right. You get these sort of global consumer citizens. And I think this. This is also here important to understand that all of this is very much tied in with these empires at the time. So, Dana, on the one hand, like I said, the nationalism was rampant, but nationalism manifested itself in its internationalism, in a sense, right. In trying to expand across the world. So it also meant that politically, you had these spaces that crossed continents. So the British Empire, of course, controlled large parts of the world by 1900, which also meant that at this time it controlled half of the world's telegraphy lines. The British Empire also particularly powerful, and London really became the world's news hub because all the telegraphy lines from around the world, they went to London. This is where the news would be kind of. Yeah. Put together in a way and then it would be distributed again across the world. So really it was a centralized place for world news. But of course it was also exchanged between empires. Right. A lot of imperialism was also about trade, business. And here you see the formation of the first multinationals and they're operating across borders. So they also need to do business in imperial times. You need also news from other empires and what's happening elsewhere. An interesting thing of colonialism in itself, despite of course, all its problems and its injustices at the time, is that for the media, it. It had a lot of commercial value. Right. Whatever you think of it, in a sense. So colonialism for journalism, it was a sort of adventurous venture that was far enough from people's daily lives to not feel threatening or scary, but it was kind of sensational. So it worked very good from a media perspective. And I guess maybe to round this up, all of this is in a certain way a sort of historical window of opportunity. Right. So again, between 1880 and the First World War, you have this sort of transnational media system, but it also. And this would not have been possible in earlier decades, Right. Politicians could not have been omnipresent in the mid 19th century or earlier because you simply did not have this global infrastructure yet. You didn't have the visual daily press yet to make politicians visible. But also later, after this, you get two world wars, you get decolonization. So this sort of inherently transnational sphere of these empires collapses. So only by the 1970s do you get again, this sort of transnational global interconnectedness that you have around 1900. And also later, of course, power devolves into bureaucracies, international organizations. Media attention goes to a broader range of media celebrities. So really around 1900, there's this historical high point of these kind of political media celebrities.
- [24:48]
B
This is so fascinating for you to describe all these different pieces and how they interact, because I think most of the time, when we think about today's media landscape and kind of where it came from, we might point to, I don't know, Maybe World War II, probably the post war order, maybe even later developments in terms of ads and that sort of thing. And yet what you're describing sounds incredibly familiar.
- [25:10]
C
Right.
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B
And yet it's much Earlier, I think, than we might expect. But these ideas, as you said, of kind of photographs being immediately apparent, kind of immediately sendable in all sorts of places, and the dominance of cities like that is very much the media system in many ways that we have now. So what were politicians doing within it? Like, for example, the figures you focus on, how did they see this system and sort of the role of the press in politics or the role of politics in the press, did they like this kind of developing idea of the global public opinion or were they sort of trying to pretend this all wasn't happening? Like, how did they engage with this system you've just described?
- [25:55]
C
Yeah, good question. And I think it very much depends on who you would ask. Right, so the kind of old style politicians, the traditional aristocratic politicians, they were very upset in a way, right? Like their old world, the sort of political world that they had known, that they felt comfortable with, that they had a clear position of power in, that was not questioned. This was crumbling, this was falling apart. Right. This kind of more and more politics behind closed doors that you also alluded to in your own introduction earlier. So. So they're having a rough time, but they also feel like they need to adjust. And then you have the newcomers, the outsiders, and for them this is also, yeah, a new path to power. Right. This is an opportunity. Like if you were not an aristocrat, you can set, like politics was closed off for you in earlier times, but now you have the media, you have public opinion. Like there's an outside political force that's being kind of weaponized that you can. And you can sort of jump on this bandwagon and mobilize to gain a position of power that would have been completely impossible for you in earlier history. And I think indeed, public opinion is really a key concept here that you mentioned in the question that of course, public opinion is a notoriously vague concept. Like what is the public opinion? I mean, even today we don't really know this. We try to gauge it with polling, but of course it always remains a bit vague. Right. But the interesting thing is, okay, who tries to claim public opinion or how do politicians try to gauge public opinion? So I think this is really a sort of 2.2 part answer here. So first, right, in terms of who's claiming it. Yeah. Interestingly is both the press and the politicians at the time, right. Both claim that they are now the new representatives of the mass public. Democratizing mass public voting rights are being extended in this period of time, of course, still imperfectly, not everybody had the Right. To vote, but gradually sort of the franchise of males and then eventually females expand. So to claim public opinion, public opinion really brought legitimacy. Right. If public opinion was behind you, you were legitimated to be in a position of power. And of course, this goes for elected politicians, but also, interestingly, for unelected politicians. The German Chancellor Bulow, he was appointed by the Emperor, but yeah, you need public support in a way, like if you want to run, if you want to govern a new large empire like the German Empire, which had been founded only a few decades earlier in 1871, if you want to govern this, you need broad support. Right. And because he was actually appointed by the Emperor, he didn't come from a political party like you would have in Britain. Right. Where the political party, the Liberals, the Conservatives, they would have their own newspapers, they would basically have their own little propaganda machine in a sense. But he didn't have a party, he didn't have its own propaganda machine through the party mechanisms. So he actually depended even more on public opinion from sort of the. Yeah. Through the broader press and also the Emperor himself. Right. In a way, he also needed to now justify himself in new ways and gain support through the mass pressure. So in that sense, it really was also, like I said, an opportunity for outsiders. Right. So Brillo was, I mean, he came from sort of lower ranking nobility, so he was in the system in a certain way. But for him, it really paved the way to get to sort of the chancellorship, which otherwise would have been impossible. Right. He really put himself in the spotlight by orchestrating favorable media coverage of himself. Same happens with Chamberlain in Britain, partly with Rhodes in southern Africa. They are outsiders, but because they manage to kind of mobilize public opinion by influencing the press, this creates. This gives them a new type of position of power in politics. And interestingly, the press was claiming even more legitimacy at this point than Parliament. Right. Because it really felt like, okay, we are the voice of the people, we are directly in contact with the people. Parliament is already, I mean, Parliament's mostly gained power in the 19th century, but they were seen now as outdated already. Right. They didn't represent the people on a sort of daily basis as the press did. Right. Every day the press would come out again and say what the opinion of the public was. And so the press also pressured politicians, they pressured Chamberlain into kind of resolving crises in southern Africa. They pressured Leopold II to kind of try to resolve these atrocities in the Congo. They also tried to pressure the Kaiser in Germany to contain himself, to not involve himself too much. In controversial policies. And the Kaiser here is also an interesting case because you think, yeah, why would a monarch care about public opinion? Right? Like he has a position for life. But of course, this idea that a monarch is sort of a God given, right, that you have this royal position, this was becoming anachronistic. This was outdated. So monarchs needed to reinvent themselves in new ways. They needed to claim legitimacy in new ways by appealing to the public opinion. And interestingly there they also claimed to be more legitimate than elected politicians because elected politicians only represented one party or one faction, whereas the monarch represented all of public opinion. Right. And in that sense, it also even foreshadows fascism and populism. Right. The idea that, oh, the great leader is sort of embodying the real people rather than these sort of factional party interests. So this is the legitimacy side, right. Everyone's claiming public opinion, but of course, okay, how do you gauge public opinion when there are polls? Right. How do these politicians try to kind of have a be aware of what the public opinion was and how did they try to align themselves with the people? So the way to do this was to really kind of scrupulously, incessantly read all of these newspapers. Right. So Bruno claimed that he read newspapers from all across Europe, from all the different major European powers. And his boss, the Kaiser, also formed his opinion on most policy areas by reading the press, which also meant that Bulow and the other advisors often only learned the Kaiser's opinion by reading the marginal notes that the Kaiser would kind of scribble on the side of an article, of a newspaper article. And this also meant in turn that Bulow, emulating the earlier sort of famous first Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, that Brillow would show the Kaiser specific newspaper articles in order to influence his opinion and also to win his favor. And the Kaiser would also respond to what he read. Right. So he would complain, for example, to the British ambassador in Germany of the hostile attitude of the British press towards Germany and towards himself. And he did really understand, seem to understand that the British government could not steer the British press as much as the German government was trying to steer the German press. Although funnily enough, that misunderstanding also happened the other way around. Right. That the German government ultimately also could not fully control the German press. So if there was Anglophobia in the German press, the British government would be upset and think that the German government approved. But it simply meant like, yeah, the German government also cannot control German newspapers. Yeah. Also the other figures I'm studying, right, they're all really sort of obsessively reading the news. And also Leopold II also consumed a lot of international newspapers. And once the Times. The Times in London was a very influential international newspaper at the time that also diplomats, politicians across countries would read. And the Times started reporting more and more on these atrocity stories, right, that these cut off hands in the Congo, right. These abuses in the Congo, in this. This rubber exploitation, right? Rubber became. They found rubber. And rubber, of course, boomed because of tires, because of cars, bicycles. Suddenly there was a global demand for. For rubber. And one of the main places in the world where this came from was the Congo, this private colony of the Belgian king. But the Times started criticizing this. And so in protest, Leopold cancelled his time subscription. But then every day he had one of his aides go to the kiosk at a railway station near the palace and go and buy the Times anyway, because he wanted to read it. He needed to know what. What the British were thinking. It's an interesting story also of roads, where during the Boer war, right, the sort of Southern. The Second South African War Between 1899 and 1902, the war between the British and. And the South African republics. And roads would pay large sums of money to get newspapers through the Boer lines, right. He was in besieged Kimberley, in the besieged city of Kimberley himself. But he wanted to know what public opinion was out there. So he paid enormous amounts of money to get. Smuggle these newspapers in. And even at some point, he gave one of his newspapers to a journalist who was also in the besieged city and also didn't have information from the outside and trying to write his own newspaper. So this journalist caught up a copy of a newspaper that Rhodes had smuggled in. And then Rhodes got all upset because they said, yeah, Look, I paid £200 for this one newspaper, right. Just because he was so desperate for to know what public opinion was. This also means that these politicians were all very sensitive to public opinion. And a lot of the traditional politicians I mentioned at the beginning, they would kind of ridicule and also, yeah, criticize these new style politicians like Chamberlain for being oversensitive to public opinion. Although interestingly, these traditional politicians, they were quite sensitive as well. They just pretended like they were calm aristocrats who didn't care. But really behind closed doors, they were also really going through all these newspapers. And of course, what would you see that because these politicians become more attuned to or engage more with public opinion, also because they need to care more because of voting rights people now voting them in and out of office, partially that the question of which newspapers does our political leader consume becomes a political question in itself. And this is actually discussed in the press. Right. So there is all these pundits and also readers expressing their opinions in the newspapers about arguing which newspapers the Emperor of Germany should or should not be reading. Right. Because it's. It seemed to influence him negatively or positively and that in the end commentators kind of agree. Okay, it's okay. If the Kaiser gets a collection of newspaper cuttings, he cannot read all the newspapers in the world every day there's a total information overload. So you have these news cutting agencies which can provide you with cuttings on a topic you're interested in. So they say, okay, if the cutting agencies provide our Emperor with a diversity of views, it's okay. Right. It's a sort of triangulation. The Emperor will at least get more than one source of information. And I think to again round up this question, I think you really see an interesting dynamic taking place in this period because of this. On the one hand, there's a strong democratization where politicians pay or try to pay attention to what the public thinks, try to kind of represent the opinions of the public by reading these newspapers. It's democratic in a new way. It's a new information exchange between the people and their representatives. On the other hand, you see early forms of de. Democratization or of democratic backsliding. Right. Of these politicians like the Kaiser, claiming that they represent the public opinion, the people. Right. And that the Parliament, which is actually the elected. Which are the elected representatives. That they. Yeah, that they. They are sort of should be bypassed. Right. They are no longer relevant. They're not in a direct democratic connection with the people like the Emperor himself, which is, of course, a dangerous dynamic which we'll see also in later times.
- [38:57]
B
Yeah, that's really interesting to see this kind of mixture of responses and also the sort of ways in which there's attempts to kind of control the press, but no one's really sure exactly how that works and what the sort of cause and effect are and who has which levers of power. So is there anything further we want to discuss on the ways in which politicians tried to influence the media, either using traditional means that would have worked before this new system or kind of coming up with new methods given the different contexts they were now in.
- [39:29]
C
Yeah, it's very much a transitional phase there as well, because like you say, they had these more tried and tested methods of trying to steer the press, which had been around for a few centuries, essentially. And they need to Innovate and deal with the new realities of this public opinion of a changing global communication infrastructure. So on the traditional side, what did they used to do? I think there you have three big ones, which is censorship. Also writing and editing themselves and also subsidizing newspapers and news agencies. But these are all indeed losing effectiveness. So you think of censorship. You used to have these pre publication censorship. You were simply not allowed to print something. And then in the mid 19th century, many countries moved to post publication censorship. So you can print, but afterwards it can still be confiscated or you can be persecuted for what you read. Another sort of more informal form of censorship would be simply buying up all the copies if you don't agree with something. So there was one controversial interview that the Kaiser had with, with this American journalist, Hale, he was called. Yeah. After a series of earlier scandals in, in Germany with Kaiser interviews, his advisors thought, okay, it's, it's, it's not a good idea if another interview with him comes out where he says even more bombastic things and upsets international relations once again. So we're just going to pay £10,000 to basically buy up all the copies of this interview. And so it's also a form of censorship. Then you had these politicians who were writing and editing themselves. So Blow, for example, wrote a book, Deutsche Politik, where he set out his ideas for German politics. So that's of course he's writing and publishing himself. But also to promote this book, he and two, three of his advisors were heavily involved in really kind of hyping this book in the press ahead of publication. Right. So they really, you can see this in the correspondence. It's really fascinating in the archives, right. Like you have all these letters exchanged between them where they really meticulously plan, like which newspapers they're going to approach in which order. So they have this list of 30 to 40 newspapers. They all send them extracts of Bulow's book and they all do it in a particular order. And they also discuss like, we cannot exclude certain newspapers because then they would be upset and feel excluded and then they would be critical of the book. So they bring out their own publications. They also do editing. Leopold is a nice example there where he actually personally went through the entire manuscript of Henry Morton Stanley's international bestseller on the Congo. So Stanley was this explorer, this sort of infamous colonial adventurer who went up to the. Yeah. Into the Congo territory, kind of mapping the land in a certain way. And he wrote his travels up in this international bestseller. But Leopold went through it and edited all these different bits to kind of frame it so that he would be seen as the legitimate authority over the Congo. Politicians also subsidized newspapers and also newspaper agencies, right? Going higher up in the information stream for these agencies. If you control what the agencies are distributing, then all the newspapers downstream will also copy that news. So a very effective way to try to steer the broader public. Or to kind of create public opinion artificially. And when you think of subsidizing newspapers, this was really widespread. So I think also some nice examples here. When you think of roads, I mean, Rhodes had a controlling interest in the newspaper, the Cape Argus, but also with a group of capitalists. He held these majority shares in the Argus Printing and Publishing Company. Which was in charge of the Cape Times, the Johannesburg Star, and also other South African newspapers. And Rhodes and his associates, they even owned multiple newspapers in France. And also Leopold, right? Leopold, like I said at the beginning, he was a bit more of this backstage manipulator. So he spent a lot of money bribing newspapers. So he paid money to the Journal de Bruxel, to the Patrie, the Petit Bleu, the Reform, the Matin, the Vintieme Siecle. So these are all Belgian newspapers. And one of his critics even claimed. I mean, it's hard to verify, but claimed that Leopold openly bought three quarters of the Belgian press, also in Belgium. He would pay correspondence of foreign newspapers. So of the Times of the. And also abroad. So he paid money to the National Zeitung, the Michelange in Germany, but also to let on in in France. And interestingly, that was again monitored by other politicians abroad. So Brillo and Kaiser. You see their correspondence where Brillo is explaining to the Kaiser how much other governments are spending on the press. Subsidizing the press, they call it, but effectively bribing the press in other countries. And one German diplomat even informed Bulow that on a trip to Paris, he had witnessed Leopold II giving Congo gold to journalists. This is not a minor issue in the sense that the whole reason that the Congo became this private colony of Leopold II was because he had managed to persuade the American government that he should be the one in charge of this huge colony in the middle of Africa. Kind of also to keep it out of the hands of the British and the French and the Germans, right? So it was also kind of a strategic thing. But Leopold managed to do this one by lobbying paying lobbyists, lobby the US Government. But also by bribing the American press. So American newspapers would promote Leopold and his Congo issuff, quote, unquote philanthropic work in the Congo so that American policies, policymakers would be convinced of. Of the legitimacy of this. And then the American government recognized this Congo colony, and then European powers followed. So it's a very odd story, actually, of how one man actually amassed a personal enormous colony at this time.
- [45:53]
B
Yeah, the media is a big part of that, clearly.
- [45:56]
C
Yeah, yeah. But indeed, like you hinted at, right. Like, this also loses effectiveness. So these were the old methods in a certain way. But do you see that it becomes a kind of. Yeah, almost like a type of arms race to the bottom. Right. So Germany realizes that they're really struggling to match the financing of other countries. So they. You see it in their. Their. This is secret archives at the. At the Foreign Office that you can still see today. Right. Like, if you go to these archives, you have all these overviews of how much governments were spending on bribing. And you. Yeah, you see in their correspondence, they're struggling to match, for example, how much France was spending. But the bigger point is this commercialization that I talked about earlier, that the press is getting a new logic, right? It's no longer like, newspapers are paid for by subscribers or party loyalists or people interested in this or who founded it. It becomes a commercial logic. And so newspapers become much bigger, much higher circulations. They become much more financially powerful, and that's also much more independent. So they're no longer susceptible to a small bribe from a politician. This is a drop in the ocean. And so even if you manage to bribe one newspaper, the reporting of that newspaper has a sort of limited impact in a sort of mass press landscape where you now have thousands of newspapers. And interestingly, also the prosecution, it also starts backfiring. So you have this. This German journalist, Maximilian Harden, who edits this German kind of more intellectual publication called the Zukunft and is very critical of the Kaiser. So they prosecute him. But then they realize, no, actually, that these prosecutions, the court cases against Harden, they're only increasing the publicity for these critical stories he's writing about the Kaiser. So we need to stop prosecuting. And you even have a British journalist at the time who kind of reasons that newspapers usually lost libel cases because the juries would just assume that the newspapers would compensate the libel damages with the extra sales they would be making that would result from the court case publicity. And ultimately also, it's a matter of this public opinion that we discussed that you can try to manipulate a newspaper, but you cannot. But public opinion, at the end of the day, still sets these sort of Parameters of maneuverability. Like there's an example of sort of anti roads paper in Cape Town that really tries to criticize roads, but its manager eventually also admits, like, yeah, public opinion was just too strong for us. Right. Like it didn't work. Like, you cannot as a newspaper go too far outside the bandwidth of public opinion.
- [48:55]
B
Yeah, that's helpful to understand kind of where the boundaries are. Obviously none of these techniques are kind of perfect, but it's really interesting to see kind of the attempts and when it does work and when it doesn't, so that we can sort of compare them. Thinking then about kind of what is being reported. Right. Especially now that you've given us the helpful context of like just how closely the politicians are following what is being reported. Like they care what is being discussed. We've discussed some kind of key political topics. Right. Obviously the Boer War War always makes headlines. The Congo, really controversial, as you've described. There's also some aspects very specific to these figures that are in the newspapers. It's not just the policy decisions of someone like Leopold that are discussed. I mean, their ideas are covered. But you also talk in the book that like their bodies are talked about sometimes their sort of personal lives are covered too. Again, something we might think of as being more modern perhaps than it. What was the journalistic interest in this aspect of what was considered news at this point?
- [49:58]
C
Yeah, good question. And I think, indeed I realize I kind of forgot to actually now sort of explain how these newer methods came into being, which is very relevant for understanding also why indeed the political figures became central to this. So maybe I'll first answer that in a way, the second part of your earlier question, because it will help us explain why these politicians became so prominent in the news themselves. So I mentioned how these old methods of influencing were losing their effectiveness. So politicians needed new ways to kind of shape public opinion. And in that sense they didn't. Politics no longer just required a will to power, but really a will to publicity, to kind of go out into the open to be seen. So no longer just this backstage manipulating like Leopold was doing, but really to put themselves out there. And they did that through mediated speeches, through interviews, and also through events. Right. So when you think of speeches, this was in a certain way a key feature of doing politics in the late 19th century, that it just sort of provided a kind of direct communication between you as a politician and the public that you were trying to reach. Right. In a certain way circumventing the interpretations of journalists. Right. You don't want a Journalist just reporting on what you're doing, but you want to make a speech, and then your speech is simply reported verbatim so that your words are uncut. And this worked very well for kind of setting the political agenda, for also establishing a sort of relationship with the people, with your voters. Also, like I said, with this extension of franchise, although it also had downsides, right? There were also risks. So sometimes you also needed to start managing the damage. A good example is always the Kaiser, where also In, I think, 1902, the leader of the Social Democratic Party in Germany said that, yeah, basically every. Every Kaiser. Every kaiser speech against us gains us about 100,000 votes because he says such scandalous things and then people just flock to our side. And there's a very big example of this where the Kaiser gave this speech in Bremerhaven to this group of soldiers embarking to China where they would suppress the Boxer Rebellion in China. And, yeah, basically the Kaiser was trying to give his soldiers a kind of pep talk locally. So he said, yeah, just like the Huns, the name of Attila the Hunter has sort of instilled terror in people for a thousand years. So you need to go to China and instill terror in the Chinese and that the name of the German will sort of stick in the Chinese mind for the next thousand years. And it was sort of this bombastic speech. And his advisors, and Brillo was also there, they realized, like, oh, this is a bit over the top, right? Like, you can say this to soldiers here in Bremerhaven in Germany, but when the international press gets a hold of this, like, it's going to cause a storm internationally and it can really do damage in international relations. So they told all the reporters who were there, like, you're not allowed to report this speech. You can only report an edited and approved version that we will provide you with, right? And initially this actually worked. Sort of only the edited version went in. Went around in the press. But there was one local journalist who actually climbed on a. On a. On a. On a rooftop to hear the speech, and he had taken his own notes and he reported it in the local newspaper. And here you see this interaction between local, regional, national, international. That this then got picked up by the national newspapers and eventually the international newspapers. So it kind of spiraled. And interestingly also then Bulow's efforts to edit and censor that speech also became revealed in the press, right? So it led to this sort of downward spiral where the government efforts to censor and edit also kind of backfired. But anyway, these speeches also suffered as a result of this commercialization because newspapers are no longer interested in publishing verbatim these very long speeches. So, so this, this also lost some effectiveness. Then you got interviews. This was a new innovation, a sort of journalistic innovation. And it was symbiotic for, for both journalists and politicians because both could portray themselves in a more personal way to the public. It allowed, it was a sort of longer format. It was easier to win the sympathy of the public through a sort of in depth interview. And so figures like Bulow would, would frequently invite journalists in for interviews at his home. And also then you had events, right? You needed to, to be, to gain publicity, you need to provide news, basically. And what is news? Well, events. So as a politician you needed to go and do these things in the world and then bring a lot of the reporters along with it. So you had these military naval parades, especially in Germany. The German Navy was one of the first institutions in government that really understood how modern propaganda worked. So even though the Kaiser himself didn't really necessarily get it in a theoretical way, like how he could play the media, the Navy basically used him and his portrayals to propagandize. Right. Also royal celebrations, of course, think of royal weddings, royal funerals. They're really big media events also today and also travel. So the Kaiser would go in these Nordlandreis and basically these cruises to Norway. He would travel through the Middle east and you get all this reporting also of him and depictions of him being surrounded by these mosques and a whole. Yeah, this whole hybrid media system that we talked about. So you'll be surrounded by journalists, photographers, painters. The same with roosevelt in the U.S. right? When of course, the U.S. really lent itself to this type of publicized events where you had the American west, this was adventurous in itself. So you'd see Roosevelt on the COVID of a magazine, you know, getting out of a train in the west, or riding a horse as a sort of cowboy. Or he would be depicted shooting wild game in South America or in Africa, or riding the camels in front of the pyramids in Egypt. He was always doing adventurous things that worked really well from sort of media perspective. And then also Chamberlain. Chamberlain was the first colonial secretary to actually visit the colonies. And this became a huge media event in itself. So his departure, first from his hometown, Birmingham, then from London with the ship just became a sensation, or people waving him goodbye. And then he did this sort of nine week tour, 5,000 miles throughout Southern Africa with a sort of luxury train. And on this train he Even had with him 40 correspondents from both Britain and sort of British Empire reporting everything he did day to day. And it really became this kind of a royal tour. He was also depicted as a monarch in a sense. So in a way you have monarchs like the Kaiser trying to act more like a politician intervening in policies in Germany. But you also had politicians in Britain acting like monarchs in the media in terms of. Of the sensationalism they created. Yeah. Even the press on the South African journey became kind of a sensational topic in itself. And that their press wagon almost fell off a bridge in some ravine in southern Africa. It didn't in the end, but it created this sort of sensation. So this is a bit, these new strategies that they were trying to use then. Yeah, sir, go ahead. Yeah. So that then gets to this second part that you were asking about, right. Sort of what aspects of their ideas, bodies, lives. How did journalists kind of report on this? What did they focus on? And this is also a new development. So you really see that journalists focus on sort of the psychology of political leaders. This is also an age of anxiety. We have this urbanization that we talked about. People live in these kind of anonymous urban cities. You don't know your neighbors. Who can you trust? Who can you not trust? It's all about like having an intimacy with people. You trust people that you're intimate with, that you're familiar with. And magazines would kind of create this familiarity with politicians by kind of showing their psychology, their personalities, but also simply visually, these politicians would be striking, right? They would, they're, they're. The way they dressed, the way their bodies were. So the Kaiser had this striking helmet with this pointy thing on it. He had this very pronounced W. Mustache, the Wilhelm mustache. That became sort of a fashion also in Germany with young German boys copying this. He always had these striking boots and Chamberlain always wore this monocle and this orchid in his buttonhole. And he seemed to be very well aware that this was. Worked well to kind of make himself stand out in the media. There's also a nice quote from the time, right. To be it that to be a great politician was to be caricatured. And to be caricatured, yeah, you needed to be recognizable. So you needed to have these kind of odd props like an orchid or a monocle. And they also, the, the press would then depict also politicians lives. So you have this sort of privatization of politics. So they would depict their families also. Chamberlain's wife got a lot of attention in this South African tour. What she was wearing what she was doing, how she was taking family pictures with her own camera, like these holiday pictures. But also sometimes when a politician wouldn't be so famous or so media savvy himself, sometimes the family could help out, right? So there you have an interesting counter example of Franz Joseph ii, right? The, sorry, Francis of the First. He, the Emperor of Austria, Hungary, right? He was kind of this very traditional politician. But his wife, of course, Empress Sisi, she was this glamorous, charismatic, media cult figure, in a sense. So she actually popularized the monarchy in Austria, Hungary. And so these politicians would be also depicted in family scenes, although often this was actually montaged. So Sisi also, she was not in pictures with her kids or something, but this was photo montage later by journalists. And the same with the Kaiser, that the Kaiser actually liked to kind of portray himself in this authoritative, strong way, right, as this sort of masculine figure. But then, yeah, the journalists understood that the public, they want these kind of intimate family scenes. This is what people consume, this is what they relate to. So they would basically pirate his images and then kind of Photoshop them together so that he would be in. In a scene with his grandchildren and his family. And they really played also on these types of family sentiments. So even when Chamberlain passed away, there would be these big headlines, right? Like a big image of Chamberlain's grandson with his little wheelbarrow. And then it would have these huge captions. Lost his grandfather, right? Really playing into family sentimentality. And also the homes would starve very prominently in this. The home was also kind of seen as this last refuge from modernity, like life. The speed of life was picking up this fast urban life that we've been discussing. So the only safe place from this, the only harbor, was the home. So if you really do want to get to know someone and then trust them, you needed to kind of see their home. So these politicians would invite these journalists in a certain way on these tours of their homes, right? So, for example, Chamberlain would show his Highbury estate and where he would show his gardens with the orchids, at the orchids that he always wore in his buttonhole, saying how he loved gardening. And it gave him this really sympathetic image. Even the first campaign film was a film of William McKinley in the US in the 1890s, which was also filmed at his own home. And also holidays, right? So not just the own home, but also holiday homes. Widow always went to Northern Eye, this island just north of Germany, where he always kind of walked, did his beach walks. It's a bit like Angela Merkel on Later times, she would always go to the Alps. Right. This was kind of. This also a recognizable imagery about the German leader taking their leisure time in the German world amongst the German people.
- [63:17]
B
Yeah, no, lots of similarities to things that we still see today. So that's really helpful to understand kind of, again, where we get some of the things we see now. Right now, of course, we have things like YouTube interviews of welcome to my house. But understanding why this became popular and seeing the ways in which it shows up here, I mean, even just the link you made between, oh, you should be caricatured, because that means people pay attention. Here's my orchid, here's my garden where I grow the orchids. Like, these links are coming through so clearly in these different aspects of media use and portrayal. So then zooming out from these particular examples, what further can we understand about how this changed politics? Not just sort of individual politicians, but I suppose the sphere overall, obviously, both then and any other connections we want to make to now as well. Like, let's throw them in.
- [64:07]
C
Yeah, it's a good question, a relevant question, of course. And I think this sort of transnational media politics, they both transcended and transformed national politics. So it also really expanded the political sphere in itself. So like you said in your own introduction, politics used to be, for centuries, this kind of elite insider affair like the Royal Court. And then there you had these kind of scheming politicians behind closed doors, but here it really becomes a much broader range of politicians that participate in politics. So it becomes kind of expanded beyond aristocracy. So a much wider range of people participate in politics itself. Where Chamberlain was a screw manufacturer, he was not a politician originally. But also politics expands beyond this strictly political domain. So it becomes much more ingrained or much more sort of intertwined with the broader cultural domain. Right. So in that sense, I think this is a period of colonization we've been talking about. And when we think of colonization, we also often think of physical space, Right? Like these European powers, they would take physical land and occupy it. But there's also colonization of the public sphere, of the media sphere. That's. That's happening here where you have this kind of these political figures. And this is what we also see today, right? Like these political figures monopolizing attention in the mass media with a type of Matthew effect, right? So once you get publicity, it's easier to get more publicity because you've gotten more well known and this will get you more attention. So they start kind of hogging media attention and also thereby politics expands into other Spheres, right. Like also when you look at a newspaper or you watch television, suddenly you see politicians popping up in cultural sections or programs, in sports sections or programs. So they kind of expand across the newspaper and also at the expense of other political movements. So in a sense it privileges the top still. So the political movements that are at the bottom, the bottom up, right, they are having a tough time also today in trying to get to kind of break through to really get enough media traction to stay relevant in the news cycle. So social movements at the time, like when you think of labor movement, women's rights movement, also colonized people, right? Like they were starting to protest against this colonization. It was very difficult for them to gain attention in this international media where you had these celebrity figures like the Kaiser also, I think this, the way we saw it, kind of created like people like the Kaiser, Chamberlain. They created a space for these sort of larger than life political leaders. And you see that also after the First World War, you had this enormous figure of the Kaiser always. And then at the end of the world, World War I, he. He flees to the Netherlands and lives in exile. So then in Germany, during the Weimar Republic, you have in a certain way a vacuum. Like there used to be this central media leader in a way of your national space. And this is missing now. So you also see commentaries like, hey, we need a new Fuhrer, we need a sort of leader. Right. And Hitler in a sense, steps into that vacuum. And it also, in a much broader sense, it kind of foreshadowed or created the space for these personality cults that you see in the 20th century, also with figures like Stalin, Mao, but also in democracies. Right. Basically like political figures which became really central to kind of the nation and national identity. And I think in that sense it also changes politics. And the politics is not just about if it ever was about policies or something. Right. It's about stories about. How do you narrate as a journalist also the complexities of international politics, industrialization, globalization. Well, you do that by kind of telling a story about a couple of key protagonists, these key personalities, and they're interacting. Right. So you narrate industrial imperial competition by talking about the interactions between the Kaiser and Chamberlain and Leopold. And we see the same thing today in the way that international relations is portrayed or how our current globalization is talked about. Media focus on certain tech bros or certain industrial leaders, political figures, personalities and their interactions and they snubbing each other or getting along with each other. And that's sort of representative for how politics is moving and in that sense, how does it also help us make sense of how politicians use the media today? I think you really see the kind of how this journalistic instinct really enters politics in the late 19th century. And this is what we really have also today that every decision is based on, how will this look in the media, or how can we prepare the public through the media for this policy that we want to implement with a very strong emphasis on visuals, on narratives. And in that sense, it's also not. I think it really shows us, this period that politics, sort of modern media politics, it's not about style versus substance, but it's really about style, packaging the substance, right? So in that sense, it's also no surprise that in more recent history, we've had a lot of media performers or entertainers who have become prominent politicians. I mean, this started a bit with, in our more recent decades, right, with Ronald Reagan in the US with Arnold Schwarzenegger, right, who became the governor of California, of course. But also when you think of, like, a football star like Romario in Brazil who entered politics, and also right now, right, Bobby Wine in Uganda is a media entertainer. And of course, the key political issue of the moment with Zelensky, Trump, Zelensky, he was a comedian, he was a television entertainer, right? He played in the series Servant of the People, where he played a fictional Ukrainian president. This is a very nice case of fake it till you make it. He had this media standing. People in Ukraine kind of were used to seeing him on television portrayed as a president, and that's what he became. And the same goes for Trump, right? People have seen him in mass media for decades. Also with this Apprentice show gained him, of course, enormous audience, primetime audience. So people were used to seeing him. And this then kind of easily translates into politics. And I think to kind of round off there, you really see both from then and now, these sort of opportunities and pitfalls. So on the opportunity side, you really have, on the one hand, this direct communication using media, so bypassing institutions like parliaments, even bypassing journalists. So in the past, they did this with these mediated speeches, often through their own newspapers that would report their own speech. And now you have it with own social media channels that politicians tweet or send messages on their own channel, bypassing the traditional legacy media so that there's no risk of journalists kind of tweaking their words or interpreting them and critiquing them, so building kind of this parasocial relationship of trust between the politician and the public and the pitfalls, the pitfalls, you Come with this increase in speed, in scale and scandals. So you see already in the late 19th century that because of the speed of this global communication network, messages become shortened, become simplified. I mean, today we talk about tweets, but at the time you had telegrams, you had to condense your political messages to few words. And this caused a lot of confusion, a lot of misunderstandings, potential conflicts. There's no time to censor information. Right. Like if a scandal breaks out, there's no time to suppress it, often because it just spirals, it kind of goes viral. They didn't use that term at the time, but of course, this is how we. How we know it today, in a sense that you also must respond immediately as a politician all the time. And these politicians complain about this in 1900 and politicians complain about this today. And with the scale, you also see this problem of conflicting audiences that it becomes impossible to kind of limit yourself to a local audience. Right. Like this was the example with this Kaiser and these soldiers. You can give a speech to a local crowd, but you can no longer separate this crowd from a global audience that will read about it in the newspapers the next day. And this becomes very difficult, therefore, to kind of have separate messages for separate sort of niche audiences. And in these scandals, like, the moment you do something wrong, the moment you make a mistake, I mean, the world will know it. And these politicians in 1900 faced the repercussions of this. Right. It was. Was very, very tough for them in that. In that sense. And. And politicians today are even. You see the same dynamic, but even magnified. And I think the key point here is this. Yeah, this tension between democratization and de. Democratization. So on the one hand, yeah, people are more informed about their political leaders. Political leaders can, in a sense, talk to their voters. So there is a democratization. There is a connection like political participation happening. On the other hand, also this de. Democratization. So democratic backsliding with politicians, bypassing democratic institutions, bypassing bureaucracies, trying to rule directly by appealing to the people through mass media.
- [74:08]
B
Yeah, a lot of similarities too today, definitely. And some interesting links as well to your current work. You mentioned at the beginning a tiny bit about what you're working on now that this book is done, but did you want to conclude our conversation with a brief sneak peek of what that is?
- [74:25]
C
Yeah, yeah, great. Yes, I'm working on the overall theme of disinformation and democracy, but within that, I'm trying to start two new projects. So one is on truth and time in politics with the idea that truth is not something static, but it's a process. You need fact finding. So we need investigative journalism, parliamentary inquiries, democratic deliberation takes place over time, right? You need to discuss in a democracy, but also timing. So in a certain way, with all these statistical agencies today, with all sort of mass surveillance, we have more also true facts than ever in history. But it's not reaching policymakers and citizens at the right moments in the political process. But it matters if the results of a sort of parliamentary inquiry are published before or after an election, so people can use it in their decision making, in their voting. So I think this project is really about how can we think about the political and media time schedules to bring more truth into politics. And the second project is a history of truth in Dutch democracy, where I find it interesting that within disinformation research also there's a lot of emphasis on fact checking and also sort of countering fake, fake news by Russian bots or so trying to interfere in elections abroad. But it's often sort of assumed or this implicit assumption that yeah, once we just fact check everything, we will arrive at an objective truth and democracy will function smoothly. But of course, democracy is about inherently about the fact that we have different groups of people, have conflicting worldviews, they have conflicting truths, right? That's why we have a democracy to discuss how can we live together despite having different truths? Otherwise we could have a sort of pure technocracy, right? If we only had objective facts. And I want to study this by looking at three media revolutions. So like the mass press that we just discussed, but then also later, the radio revolution, the television revolution, and really asking two questions. So how did the emergence of a new form of a new communication technology, how did this change what politicians perceive to be truth? Right. When you have radio television come around, how do politicians think in a new way about what is actually truth in democracy or what should be the role of truth? And also how do they try to protect this truth? So when you have television come around, there's a big fear that, okay, this could also lead to mass indoctrination. Suddenly you can reach tens of millions of people simultaneously and kind of top down manipulate them through television. So we need to regulate this, right? So they regulate to create public broadcasting. Also they create rules mandating both sideism that you show different perspectives on political debates. And I'm using specifically the Dutch case study in this research because you had this history of what's called pillarization, where basically different socio political groups in Dutch society had their own sort of media and political institutions, their own associations, their own clubs. So you had sort of Catholic, Protestant, socialist, liberal radio stations, television stations, but also sports clubs, right? Certain they had their own churches. So this is called pillarization. And interestingly, this is an implicit. Implicitly, this is kind of admitting that there are conflicting truths in society, right? That every social group has their own truth and they can have their own sub institutions to kind of live by their own truth. But then democracy at the top becomes about. Okay, discussing how do we still live together, how do we have an education system, a defense, etc. Given that on a layer below that people have conflicting worldviews.
- [78:28]
B
Well, those both sound like very interesting projects with a lot of threads to the book we've been discussing. So while you are working on those two next things, of course listeners can read the book we've been talking about titled Politicians and Mass Media in the Age of Empire, published by Cambridge University Press in 2025. Beto, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [78:48]
C
Yeah, thank you so much for having me.