This chapter explores the range of essayistic writing in nineteenth-century newspapers: leaders (political and topical in focus and the principal genre of the Victorian daily and weekly press), middles (a shorter version of the leader and characteristic of some weeklies), correspondence columns from journalists at home and abroad, and reviews of both books and theatre. It charts the expansion of the press at mid-century following the abolition of the ‘Taxes on Knowledge’ and an influx of literary talent that raised the quality of newspapers, and it notes the transformation of newspapers at the end of the century with the creation of literary pages, supplements, and special features (following the demise of many quarterly reviews and monthly magazines). The second half of the chapter examines the newspaper writing of John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, and argues that each made a unique contribution to the newspapers of their day.

This chapter examines the British essay in the age of the Internet, a period which has radically reshaped literary culture. Online magazines and journals now outnumber their print precursors, vastly increasing the venues available to budding essayists. But this transformation was predated by a more pivotal online trend: blogging. Beginning in the early years of the new millennium, and ending, effectively, with the rise of social media, the golden age of blogging allowed a wave of self-published writers to revolutionise literary criticism and cultural theory. Free from professional aims and ambitions, experimental and avidly personal, their essays left a lasting impression on both literary journalism and the academy. This chapter explores the underacknowledged possibilities and legacies of blogging, surveying the ways in which prominent bloggers reimagined the essay form.

Augustus Hardin Beaumont has been acknowledged as a fleeting but important figure in British working-class radical literature during the reform agitation of the 1830s. Little consideration has been given, however, to Beaumont’s past as a Jamaican planter and defender of slavery. Formerly a slaveholder, magistrate, and member of the Jamaican Assembly, Beaumont fought in the French and Belgian revolutions of 1830 before organising a militia to put down the 1831−2 Jamaican Slave Revolt. Ostracised for proposing a gradual scheme of emancipation, Beaumont moved to Britain and became a radical abolitionist despite benefiting from the £20 million fund established to compensate former slaveowners. Far from aberrant, the apparent contradictions of Beaumont’s political career and literary output were underpinned by his admiration for America, the country of his birth, and the influence of Jeffersonian republicanism. He is, furthermore, illustrative of the broader ambiguity within British radicalism’s response to emancipation in the 1830s, which, although nominally anti-slavery, incorporated apologias for chattel slavery, especially in the United States.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon was one of the most prominent figures in the 1830s literary scene. She became known, and was often condemned, for a ‘fatal facility’: a tendency to write too easily and too frequently for a market that was itself so overproductive that its grasp on posterity’s regard has proved unstable. Landon’s work in the 1830s mirrors the decade in its variety, its speed of production, its dubiety about cultural status, and its self-conscious reflection on its own potential place in literary history. This chapter explores a wide range of Landon’s 1830s work, work that has typically been passed over by her critics. It explores her interactions with the market via such forms as Silver Fork fiction, short fiction, essays, literary criticism, and ‘hack’ journalism. Her work is shaped by her unstable place as both a literary celebrity and a worker for the press, a combination of identities that was especially difficult for a woman writer. She became the decade’s chronicler: her experiments in 1830s literary forms produce a mode of understanding the uncertain temporality of this unusually self-conscious decade.

Dean John Wade, who replaced the great torts scholar William Prosser on the Restatement (Second) of Torts, put the finishing touches on the defamation sections in 1977.1 Apple Computer had been founded a year before, and Microsoft two, but relatively few people owned computers yet. The twenty-four-hour news cycle was not yet a thing, and most Americans still trusted the press.2

This chapter addresses an underappreciated source of epistemic dysfunction in today’s media environment: true-but-unrepresentative information. Because media organizations are under tremendous competitive pressure to craft news that is in harmony with their audience’s preexisting beliefs, they have an incentive to accurately report on events and incidents that are selected, consciously or not, to support an impression that is exaggerated or ideologically convenient. Moreover, these organizations have to engage in this practice in order to survive in a hypercompetitive news environment.1

What is the role of “trusted communicators” in disseminating knowledge to the public? The trigger for this question, which is the topic of this set of chapters, is the widely shared belief that one of the most notable, and noted, consequences of the spread of the internet and social media is the collapse of sources of information that are broadly trusted across society, because the internet has eliminated the power of the traditional gatekeepers1 who identified and created trusted communicators for the public. Many commentators argue this is a troubling development because trusted communicators are needed for our society to create and maintain a common base of facts, accepted by the broader public, that is essential to a system of democratic self-governance. Absent such a common base or factual consensus, democratic politics will tend to collapse into polarized camps that cannot accept the possibility of electoral defeat (as they arguably have in recent years in the United States). I aim here to examine recent proposals to resurrect a set of trusted communicators and the gatekeeper function, and to critique them from both practical and theoretical perspectives. But before we can discuss possible “solutions” to the lack of gatekeepers and trusted communicators in the modern era, it is important to understand how those functions arose in the pre-internet era.

The commercial market for local news in the United States has collapsed. Many communities lack a local paper. These “news deserts,” comprising about two-thirds of the country, have lost a range of benefits that local newspapers once provided. Foremost among these benefits was investigative reporting – local newspapers at one time played a primary role in investigating local government and commerce and then reporting the facts to the public. It is rare for someone else to pick up the slack when the newspaper disappears.

In the spring of 2022, visitors to the Smoking Gun website would find a challenging “game, where [one’s] wasted time [was] well spent.”1

Coordinated campaigns of falsehoods are poisoning public discourse.1 Amidst a torrent of social-media conspiracy theories and lies – on topics as central to the nation’s wellbeing as elections and public health – scholars and jurists are turning their attention to the causes of this disinformation crisis and the potential solutions to it.

Political scientist and ethicist Russell Hardin observed that “trust depends on two quite different dimensions: the motivation of the potentially trusted person to attend to the truster’s interests and his or her competence to do so.”1 Our willingness to trust an actor thus generally turns on inductive reasoning: our perceptions of that actor’s motives and competence, based on our own experiences with that actor.2 Trust and distrust are also both episodic and comparative concepts, as whether we trust a particular actor depends in part on when we are asked – and to whom we are comparing them.3 And depending on our experience, distrust is sometimes wise: “[D]istrust is sometimes the only credible implication of the evidence. Indeed, distrust is sometimes not merely a rational assessment but it is also benign, in that it protects against harms rather than causing them.”4

In February 2021, the Australian federal government enacted the “News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code,” which requires Facebook and Google to pay domestic news outlets for linking to their websites. It was a first-of-its-kind mechanism for redistributing revenue from Big Tech platforms to legacy journalism, and it has attracted global attention from policymakers looking to halt the internet-fueled decline of the traditional news industry. Thus, the success or failure of what critics call Australia’s “link tax” has significant implications for the future of both the World Wide Web and the news industry writ large.

It was 1971 and Los Angeles Times editor Nick Williams had what he called a “terribly uneasy feeling.” In a letter to one of the paper’s Washington correspondents, he wrote of his suspicion that journalism had “lost credibility … with an alarming percentage of the people.” If the plummet continued, Williams fretted, journalists will have “destroyed or weakened a keystone of our Constitution.”1

The internet has remade both the media and the social institutions that surround the media. Speech was not cheap in the twentieth century. News organizations had to buy newsprint, paper, distribution networks, transmitters, spectrum licenses – all kinds of things that cost much more than a Facebook page – if they wished to reach an audience. But the few news organizations that could cover these costs held a safe market position, and from this perch, they wielded a great deal of epistemic and moral authority in their communities. They became “gatekeepers” with the power and the responsibility to decide what information, and what claims, were fit to print. Much of media law, and particularly First Amendment law, seems to have developed around the assumption that news organizations could and would play this gatekeeping role, and that the government should therefore rarely need to.

Despite the sharp decline in the number of local newspapers, it’s important to understand that other legacy news-delivery platforms – particularly local TV news – have not been suffering the same degree of loss. Pew Research Center found that local TV news actually saw its audience increase across the evening and late-night timeslots in 2020, and that local TV companies earned more revenue than the previous year.1 In fact, local TV was deemed to be on par with or outpacing cable and network TV. Pew survey data show more Americans still prefer to get their local news from television than from any other medium, including online. Even with an increasing preference for digital delivery, “local television stations have retained a strong hold in the local news ecosystem.”2

It is usually a mistake to suppose that a company is the best judge of how its business works.1 Or that an industry is the best judge of how the industry works. AT&T is a good example. When the Justice Department sat down with management in 1981 to negotiate a breakup of what was then a monopoly provider of telephone service, government lawyers asked which part of the company management wanted to keep after the breakup – the long-distance operations or the regional networks.2 The long-distance operations had long been the company’s most profitable, so management asked for those.3

Media have traditionally relied on a mix of advertising and subscription revenue to keep the lights on – and to produce a mix of high-quality, thoughtful, well researched, compelling news, information, educational, and other content that is necessary in a modern democracy. The internet has disrupted those revenue streams. And while some media outlets have shored themselves up on other sources of support – grants, government transfers and licensing fees, wealthy patrons, or the like – such funding is both the exception and de minimis in the overall operation of our media ecosystem.

Trust in media institutions has declined more or less apace with trust in every other kind of major institution in public life. Or perhaps it is more correct, as Ashutosh Bhagwat observes in his contribution to this project, to say that trust has declined in the types of media institutions, the proverbial Walter Cronkites, that dominated “the media” during the twentieth-century period when modern American ideals around free speech and journalistic value were still taking form.