The Press The First Draft of History?

Burns Lecture, 19 November 2014

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.1

I read in the Boston Globe the other day of what might be construed as an ill omen for this lecture. A time capsule
entombed in one of this citys public buildings had just been opened after a century, and its contents examined. One
of the items was an envelope which had been deposited as part of the collection by some Bostonian journalists in
1914. When it was opened, it was found to be empty. Make of that what you will.
The relationship between journalism and history, as is not only a complex one; it is also a contested one.
My friend and colleage Dermot Keogh, a former Burns Scholar, had a first hand experience of this when, in the
early 1960s, he was interviewed by a panel of University College Dublin historians about his proposed choice of
topics for his MA. After he had told them that he would rather like to study the Irish Civil War that of 1922-23, for
the avoidance of doubt the chairman of the panel, the redoubtable Robin Dudley Edwards, looked at him severely
over his half-glasses and pronounced his verdict.
Young man,, he said. We dont do journalism.
None of this, I am glad to say, impeded Dermots later progress from the inky recesses of the Irish Press on
Dublins Burgh Quay to the groves of academe; and others, including Robert Kee, Robert Fisk and John Bowman,
have shown that the skills of journalism and historiography are not mutually exclusive, as have writers like David
Halberstam and Peter Hennessy. For all that, there is still much antipathy between journalists and
historians.Britains military historian Anthony Beevor described journalism as the enemy of history, the
proponents of history on the hoof. Others have damned them with faint praise as historians of the present ,
producing work whose shallowness is dictated by editorial ressures, technological capacities, deadlines and audience
expectataions.
Professor Joe Lee has spoken in withering terms of the quality of Irish journalism, and there is plenty of
evidence to support his critique. Much journalism has been and a lot of it still is today little more than
stenography for the powerful. My thesis, however, is not to contend, against this verdict, that all journalists are
historians manqu, but that some journalism, at least, deserves to be considered not merely as a secondary sources of
limited or doubtful value as in many instances it undoubtedly is but as a cultural artefact in its own right and, as
such, an essential component of, and a worthy object of study in relation to, history generally, and perhaps also in
some senses that have yet to be fully explored. For some commentators, the boundaries between historians and
journalists are actually eroding, at least insofar as a commitment to facts, a responsibility to objectivity, an emphasis

1
Joan Didion, 1979.

1
on documentation, archive and personal accounts and a focus on key actors and critical events appear to be shared.2
It is hardly accidental that the British television Journalist Jon Snow entitled his autobiography Shooting History.
The role of journalism in seventeenth century England in publicising the proceedings of Parliament before
the civil war is only one early example of the close, and sometimes symbiotic, relationship between journalism and
history. Another is the way in which the early journalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth century newsbooks
contributed, as nothing else really could, to the internationalisation of politically significant information. In more
modern times, there is a realisation that journalism can contribute in significant ways to history because of the
changes that have been taking place in historiography since the late 1970s. This is a period which has seeen a change
from the traditional studies focusing on national political, diplomatic and constitutional history to social history,
broadly conceived as history from below, focusing on class, race [and] gender.3 It is certainly a change which has
been facilitated by good journalism, and in which some journalists have fully participated.
Not even the best history, of any kind, can ever entirely escape the charge that it is viewing the past
however much it tries to avoid this trap to some extent through the prism of subsequent events, or even of the
present. By contrast, the value of even the worst of journalism, however infected it may be by commercial and
political pressures, by too little time or too much alcohol, is that it is, willy-nilly, chained to the dynamic present.
Unlike historians, journalists do not know what happened next.4 Unlike journalists, historians have not except very
rarely- been present at many of the events they record and whose significance they assess. The historical value of
journalism lies at least partly in the apparent handicap I have already mentioned - that they do not know what
happened next - in ways that I hope to explain.
The value of journalism is also because it is unapologetic about the marriage of form and function which is
its modus operandi: the narrative. Our brains are hot-wired for narrative. Before newspapers, books, or libraries let
alone the web there was speech, and memory. Stories are easier to remember than facts, and the more relevant they
are to the hearers context and condition, the easier they are to memorise. The telling and re-telling, over time, could
and did distort the narrative, falsify it, or call on it too readily to fill the gaps in memory or to explain what memory
had failed to clarify. The narrative mode, and the human response to it, remains constant. We live our lives, as one
contemporary writer about journalism noted, by entering the narratives open to us. 5 It can, in certain
circumstances, become part of the definition of history as, in E.H. Carrs phrase, a discourse about the past rather
than a reflection of it, a perpetual dialogue between the present and the past.
In relation to journalism generally, of course, a certain caution is always appropriate. Herodotus, who in a
sense deserves an accolade as the first journalist as well as the first historian, put it pithily: I am obliged to record

2
Williams, Kevin (2012), War Correspondents as Sources for History, pp. 341-360 in Media History 18 (3-4).
3
OMalley, Tom (2012), History, Historians and the writing of print and newspaper history in the UK c. 1945-
1962, in Media History 18 (3-4), p. 289.
4
I have shamelessly borrowed and adapted this lapidary insight from an informal remark by Professor Joe Lee, who
used it once to describe the rewards to be garnered from teaching Irish history to American students.
5
Fred Inglis (2007), Peoples Witness: The Journalist in Modern Politics, Yale), p. x

2
things I am told, but I am certainly not required to believe them. 6 Many of the matters recorded by journalists as
fact may be irrelevant to history: some of them may not be facts at all. A couple of millennia after Herodotus, The
USs A.J. Liebling, a mordant critic of the press of his country and era, had his own riff on the same topic, when he
distinguished between the reporter, who writes what he sees; the interpretive reporter, who writes what he sees and
what he construes to be its meaning; and the expert, who writes what he construes to be the meaning of what he
hasnt seen.7 Douglas Gageby, a great editor of the Irish Times, put it even more pungently when I once asked him
to define the word journalist. He paused briefly before replying: A journalist is a reporter whos out of work.
The function of journalism which has emerged as part of this process I prefer to think of it as a craft
rather than, or at least as much as, a profession - has always been notoriously difficult to define, and this difficulty
has become even more pronounced in the internet era. Part of this difficulty relates to the fact that important
distinctions that need to be made are often not made, or are not made with much clarity: the distinction between
editor and reporter, for instance (not to mention the distinction between owner and editor), and the related tension
between audience and voice.
An understanding of the relationship between audience and voice in particular is, I believe, critical for an
understanding of the utility of journalism to history. It is always subtle, and indeed not always unambiguous.
Another reason is that, in our age, which is awash with sources of information, much of it rubbish, good journalism
not only incorporates as does good history an element of interpretation, hidden or overt, but also invites a
journey of the imagination. In many cases, such journalistic narratives would have been read, in the immediate or
proximate aftermath of the events described, by people to whom the information they contained was entirely new, or
who were eagerly awaiting confirmation or refutation of rumour. Re-read today, they constitute an invitation to
readers to learn, in another informal phrase of Professor Joe Lees, how to be the contemporaries of the writers.
This involves the acceptance of a certain idea, which may appear controversial but which I hope is not as
controversial as it sounds, that good history is always, in part, not only the outcome of the harvesting and
interpretation of historical facts, but of the disciplined exercise of imagination if only for the reason that we cannot
possible recuperate all the relevant historical facts. As E.H. Carr - a journalist before he beame a historian - put it:
history is an enormous jigsaw, wth lots of missing parts. He also invited the historian to rely on whathe called the
auxiliary sciences of history archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics, chronology and so forth. Journalism, as I am
sure he would have agreed, is at the very least a handmaiden to the auxiliary science of chronology; and can, on
occasion, help to supply linkages between events and personalities that are not readily available elsewhere.
The emergence of digital technology and the ease with which newspaper archives can be searched digitally
has improved the accessibility of the journalistic record in ways unimainable by an earlier generation of historians.
And yet there is a drawback to digitisation. It can foreshorten historical research into newspaper content in ways
that earlier generations of historians would have considered unimaginable. Put the name of any historical actor into
the search engine of any of the titles now so generously made available to us in the digital Irish Newspaper Archive,

6
Herodotus, Book 7.
7
A.J. Liebling (1975), The Press, p. 318. New York, Ballantine Books.

3
for example, and stand back in amazement at the cornucopia of information offered for our attention and enjoyment.
But digitisation, while it helps us to find what we are looking for, does not help us, and in particular historians, in
another way. This is the fact that if I can for a moment take a leaf out of Donald Rumsfelds book it does not
help us to find those unknown unknowns, to find what we did not know we were not looking for. These are the
seemingly insignificant piece of information in a newspaper archive than can turn out to be a small but essential
component of that historical jig-saw that we are trying to consruct, and of which we will forever remain unaware
unless we can actually turn those yellowing pages for ourselves and let the human brain and eye do the work that
even the most powerful computer cannot.
It was serendipity like this that led me, while I was looking for something else, to the edition of the
Waterford News on the morning in June 1867 when the news was breaking of the Fenian revolutionaries who had
sailed from America and who had disembarked near Helvick, in Co. Waterford. On its surface, this relates solely to
an identifiable historical event, the capture of these revolutionaries who had arrived in Ireland too late to take part in
the abortive revolution of the Young Irelanders. I do not intend to subject you to a line by line analysis, but would
like to point out to you some of the subtleties of journalism that are too often ignored in the historical narrative.
Take, for instance, the first paragraph:
Since the landing of the French at Killala, nothing created for the moment greater consternation
than the announcement made to the bench of magistrates, in petty sessions assembled at
Dungarvan on Saturday last, that a large number of supposed Fenians had landed at Ballinagoul,
outside of the harbor, from a fishing boat, which had got her previous freight from a suspicious-
looking vessel, name, destination and object unknown. When this announcement had been
privately made, and that the mysterious square-toed strangers had separated and were making their
way rapidly, in different directions throughout the country, the consternation was great indeed, and
with the exaggeration and contradictory statements which were momentarily being dinned into
their ears, it was not be wondered at the authorities were terribly perplexed and bewildered, and it
is said that the messages which were flashed along the wires to the head seat of Government in
Ireland were something marvelously astounding.

This is an authority-conditioned narrative, with its obligatory salute to the wielders of state power, and is reinforced,
to some extent, by phrases which highlight the otherness of the captives, the mysterious, square-toed strangers.
Now contrast this with any the last two paragraphs:
The prisoners are a very respectable-looking class of young men, well dressed, and apparently
foreigners of the Yankee type. They seemed to be in high spirits, laughed, joked, and smoked their
pipes and cigars, and bowed repeatedly too the ladies who occupied the windows in front of them.
The people generally commiserated the position of these young men, on beholding them placed in
the centre of dark and red coats and glittering steel reflecting the rays of a warm sun at the time.
At the command of the parting words, move on, the enthusiastic shouting of the hundred
assembled, in which the prisoners themselves joined, baffles all description; hats were raised,
handkerchiefs waved, and old caubeens were let fly into the air, this being again and again
repeated until the procession had driven out of sight.

4
 The sight was most affecting, the women wringing their hands and bursting into torrents of tears.
Whatever fate betides these young men, I am sure the scene never will be forgotten by them. They
in the most graceful manner returned thanks repeatedly, previous to their departure, to the ladies
that filled the windows in front of their prison, and who had shown to them acts of humanity,
kindness and generosity to the hour of their departure. Great credit is due to the constabulary and
military for the quiet and conciliatory manner in which they acted upon the occasion towards the
people, never interfering with them in the slightest.8

By the end, not only has the reporter become a participant, but the empathetic nature of his account is only
marginally qualified by the insurance policy he takes out in referring, in appropriately stilted language, to the
restrained behaviour of the police and the military. The reader, like the historian, is invited to simultaneously inhabit
at least three historically distinct but equally valuable imaginations: those of the authorities, those of the
revolutionaries, and those of the patriotic onlookers.
It is, in fact, I would argue, impossible to read this kind of journalistic narrative without becoming
immediately aware of more complex political and social aspects of late nineteenth century Ireland than one would
get from an orthodox historical approach based primarily on the picture painted by official archives.
Journalism itself, of course, an also be a battleground, particularly in divided societies, as Ireland has
frequently been. And, while the utility of journalism as a surce for information about conflicted societies can
sometimes be undermined by contemporary conventions or political loyalties, there are often occasions in which
differing journalistic accounts of the same event can be useful in triangulating a public mood and enlightening the
historian. In the late 1880s, for example, evictions during the Plan of Campaign were regularily reported in the
Nation, but often from a partisan or Parnellite point of view. One brief reference in that newspaper to a disturbance
that took place at an eviction, and which involved a newspaper reporter, was subsequently reported in the Freemans
Journal as if the treatment given to that reporter a Unionist - was of no real significance. The reporter concerned,
Andrew Dunlop of the Irish Times, was so enraged by this that he wrote at length to the Nation which, happily,
printed his letter in full detailing his treatment at the hands of William OBrien and the mob which OBrien had
encouraged to attack him. That reporters own account of the events though unsigned, it would have been evident
to many readers that Dunlop was the author9 - provides an unusually vivid illustration of the actual conduct of the
Plan of Campaign at that time which would not have been readily apparent from the other accounts, by Dunlop
himself and others. These accounts were more constrained by the conventions of a journalistic calling that had not
yet found a more independent voice, but, even where journalism was constrained by these factors, a number of
missing pieces in the historical jigsaw can be identified because there was also competition among journalists to
contribute what they considered to be acounts of significant events.
Some of these were replete with irony, often unconscious. Notes from Ireland, for example, is a significant
Irish unionist publication from the late 19th and early 20th century. I found it here in Burns in a context which helped
me to realise that this great library is indeed in some respects like a great newspaper itself a treasure trove in which

8
The Waterford News and General Advertiser, June 7, 1867
9
Letter from The Reporter of the Irish Times to the Freemans Journal, 21st April 1887.

5
you will find things that you did not know you were looking for. Notes from Ireland, in this context, is a journalstic
enterprise that is also an extraordinarily useful guide to a perhaps under-researched area of Irish history Irish
Unionism south of what became the border with Northern Ireland. The Notes strove, might and main, to combat the
Plan of Campaign, and in particular nationalist attempts to capitalise on evictions. It did so, counter-intuitively, by
actually publicizing accounts of evictions, and of court cases about evictions, many of them culled from other
newspapers more sympathetic to the Plan of Campaign. It highlghted the accounts, many of them from nationalist
papers, which showed the instigators of the Campaign in a less than flattering light. Its reports also harped
continually particularly after the papal rescript condemning the agrarian outrages - on the presence of Catholic
notables among opponents of the Campaign, helpfully identifying many of them by name. Its highly politicised use
of accurate extracts from papers of an entirely different political persuasion is of particular utility to historians and in
fact presaged similar tactics four decades later, for instance in Arthur Griffiths Scissors and Paste.
Journalists sometimes plainly chafed at the conventions governing their craft, and sought to escape from
them, often by writing memoirs which are also of use to historians. Many of these memoirs are self-justificatory,
part of the great enterprise of improving the social status of journalism itself, and are of limited value to historians.
But even though they were rarely contemporaneous with the events they described, they can be of significant value
for the history of journalism itself, which is rapidly becoming a recognised historical discipline, and one which can
also contribute to history in the wider sense, either as secondary source or as primary sources for understanding the
cultural role of journalism in contemporary society..
Dunlop himself, in his own memoir, not published until after Parnells death, wrote wryly about the great
mans media management techniques, which were at least the equal of those practices by our contemporary scribes.
(Detail in here is of historical value). And James M. Tuohy, who was a friend of Joseph Pulitzer and the
Westminster correspondent of the Freemans Journal as well as of the New York World, similarily restrained
himself before publishing his vivid account of Parnell, waiting in the Freemans London offices in his odd-looking
cap for the final stage of the OShea divorce action. Dont , Parnell wired him from Brighton the same evening,
say anything actionable, as it would be undesirable to produce documents to substantiate the statements.10 And
there is more than a hint of irony in Tuohys account of Parnells response to a question about whether he would
allow the anticipated verdict to affect his public opinion: No, I shall not permit the result to affect my public
position in any way.11
Tuohys account, however, was not published until some years after Parnells death. It is, still, a matter of
some regret that, then and now, journalism itself, which sets such store by making transparent the actions and the
motives of others, should continue to maintain, even into our own day, a studied opacity about its own operations,
values, techiques and about the implicit or explicit bargains it makes with many of the subjects of its reports. This
would greatly enhance its value, not only to its imemdiate audiences, but to historians who are understandably keen

10
Ref.
11
Tuohy, J.M. (1898), Parnell at Bay, Freemans Journal, 11 November 1898

6
to relate journalism history more directly to history generally, and to explore the often symbiotic relationship
between the two.
Luckily, not all journalists, particularly those from abroad, were not so constrained. These included the
German writer Jakob Venedy, whose account of some of the events involving Daniel OConnell, while not entirely
free of admiration verging on awe, eschewed the hagiography so sedulously engineered by OConnell himelf in the
nationalist press. Venedy, writing about the OConnell monster meeting in Athlone, notes the Liberator saying
with a quiet smileto some of those standing next to him: You have to give them something to laugh about in
order to carry them away. This, Venedy observes, came one second after he had driven the crowd wild with his
rousing words, indeed his whole persoality demonstrated so much self-control that the whole thig seemed like a
brillantly played comedy and the main actor a comedian. 12 It is not, one imagines, a descrition of which OConnell
would have particularly approved. Add detail.
The constraints were also less evident in the work of Irish journalists abroad. There were many Irish
journalists, in particular, who, from the end of the nineteenth century onwards, not only found journalism a useful
ladder of social mobility, but who engaged in journalism at the highest political level internationally, and who
operated as international information brokers, often in close conjunction with major historical figures.
One of them, Francis McCullagh, was the son of a Tyrone publican who achieved international fame as a
correspondent of the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the London Daily News, and a host of other papers.
A contemporary of hs described him in terms which - even allowing for the journalistic hyperbole of the 1930s
indicates the historical and political dimensions of his work.

Trotsky of Russia knows Francis McCullagh. So does President Calles of Mexico. Peter, the King of
Serbia, was McCullaghs friend. The head hunters of the upper Amazon list Francis McCullagh as one of
their principal deities. The warring tribes of Morocco call him blood brother. A room is always ready for
him in the imperial palace of Siam. The latchstrings of hundreds of Siberian peasant huts are out in
2
anticipation of his coming.

And yet, behind the overblown rhetoric, there lay an extraordinary career which offers a fascinating case history of
the style and development of early twentieth century international journalism, and also of the interface between
journalism, politics and the cultural and religious issues that featured so dramatically in that era on several
continents. McCullagh himself played a key role in the talks organized by President Theodore Roosevelt to end the
Russo-Japanese war, not least by publishing details of a briefing he had received from the Russian envoy, Count
Witte, which almost torpedoed the negotiations before they had even begun.

McCullagh was only one of an elite group of Irish journalists who flourished in the generation after Irish-born
William Howard of The Times, whose Crimean despatches were historically significant not least because, for the
first time in the history of campaigns, civilians at home were given a vivid eye-witness account of conditions at the

12
Ref.

7
front.13 This generation of Iish journalists made a global reputation for themselves as foreign correspondents in the
English-language press of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. They included, in addition to McCullagh,
the Limerick-born James David Bourchier (1850-1920), who was a confidant of both the Greek and Turkish rulers
in the battle over Crete, who acted as correspondent for The Times in Bulgaria from 1888, who died and was buried
3
in that country, and has a street named after him in that countrys capital; Emile Joseph Dillon (1854-1933) was a
Dublin- born scholar who abandoned his studies for the priesthood and became the respected correspondent of the
Daily Telegraph in Moscow from the mid-1880s until 1903, when he became a special adviser to the senior Russian
4
politicians; Stephen MacKenna, who was appointed by Joseph Pulitzer as head of the Paris Office of the New York
World in the 1920s; and there was also David McGowan, who became doyen of the foreign correspondents in
Russia in 1906 but of whom, regrettably, little else is currently known except that he was, in the intriguing words of
5
one academic authority, a glorious mixture of Abraham Lincoln and Mr Micawber.

In more modern times, the role of the reasonably dispassionate outside journalist is also of interest and
possibly even of historical significance. The French journalist Simone Trys account of her peregrinations across an
Ireland convlsed by revolution and civil war in the early 1920s is particularly vivid. So is the American journalist
Ruth Russells 1920 account among other chapters detailing her interviews with Eamon de Valera and Harry
Boland of her visit to the famed Limerick Soviet in 1919. She included in her reports for the Chicago newspaper
for which she worked an account of her interview with Bishop ODwer of Limerick, whom she informed that the
Roman Catholic hurch had spread in eight dioceses in Russia under that countrys new Soviet government.
The bishop, she reported, nodded his head. The Church, he said, had nothing to fear from the soviet.
Certainly not from the Limerick soviet, I suggested. Wasnt it there that I saw a red-badged guard rise to
say the Angelus.
Isnt it well, smiled the bishop, that communism is to be christianized?
Much of the recent analysis of journalism borrows usefully from political economy the role of
the powerful in the ownership and control of media, for example and it can reasonably be argued that the ways in
which media shape and are shaped by complex social divisions and inequalities in society cannot be studied without
a close study of the media themselves. In the same context, also, the rise of journalism itself has also often been and,
with luck, will contine to be, a continual reminder to elites that they are not omnipotent. In 1835 the London Review
complained that the conduct of our journals falls too much into the hands of men of obscure birth, imperfect
education, blunt feelings and coarse manners. 14 Who better to examine the actions, the motives, and the credibility
of the rich and powerful, than those born without riches or power, who have escaped the kind of education that
limits their horizons, and who are strangers to the kind of deference that corrodes the critical faculty? The history of
Irish-America could hardly have been written without the the copious evidence from men of obscure birth like

13
Ryan, A.P. (1954), The Journalist as Historian in History Today 4 (12), p. 818.
14
Cited in Are You a Gentleman or a Player, Iain Hollingshead, The Guardian, 7 April 2008, p. 3.

8
Patrick Ford of the Irish World, and John Boyle of the Boston Pilot, and without the invention of the submarine
cable that fostered both journalism and revolution on both sides of the Atlantic. 15 And American journalismm in the
twentieth century is full of examples of this, from Mother Jones through Sinclair Lewis to I.F. Stone and right up to
our own day. Historians of a more recent era have played little attention to the role played by the popular press in
Britain, particularly in the aftermath of World War 11, in awakening and energising political consciousness among
working-class people.
The utility to history of journalists and journalism can hardly be over-stated. How can the history of US
involvement in Vietnam be written without reference to the Pentagon Papers, or more generally to the change of
consciousness among American elites fuelled by eye-witness journalistic accounts of that war? How can the history
of national security be written without reference to the work of the New York Times and the Guardian journalists
who curated the relevations of Edward Snowden, and their assiduity in following up the consequences. It is also, I
think, indisputable, that in this sense journalism has also played, and with luck will continue to play, a vital role in
the emergence of the public into political life, and of public participation in the political sphere.
In this context, the role of editors and reporters is particularly important in the area of determining what
material is significant enough to warrant publication, and what is not. Most editors, and indeed journalists, pushed
on this point, become defensively self-referential: the very fact that something is reported means that it is
significant; decisions that one event has news value and another has not, are in fact value judgments that are
rarely probed.
It is part of my argument that this nexus of decision-making, the process of journalism, is in fact at least as
significant, historically speaking, as the journalistic product, the published content of the newspaper or broadcast.
This is because theres no point of having a voice if nobody is listening. This in turn suggests that the significance of
events that the media choose to report is not really related to self-referential and unexamined concepts of
newsworthiness, but to certain, purposeful journalistic assumptions about audience. These assumptions can, in
turn, give historians insights into the political and social realities of the era in which these assumptions were formed,
and into the degree to which such assumptions and potential choices were shared not only by journalsts but by the
historical actors who were also members of the intellectual and ideological communities for which they wrote. The
environment in which journalism takes shape is one which helps to shape not only the production but also the
reception of the product itself.
This news agenda, to put it more directly, actually presupposes not only a particular audience, but a
particular relationship between the journalist or editor and that audience, a sort of community that is characterised
by shared values, assumptions, and even political objectives. The American sociologist, Richard Kaplen has put it
cogently:
As modern narratives, news and history are the accounts of the problems confronted and surmounted by
individuals or society and its governmental representatives. The difference, then, between journalism and

15
Cf. Philip H. Bagenal (1882), The American Irish and their influence on Irish politics, London, Kegan Paul,
Trench and Co, pp. 110 ff.

9
 history proper, between the first and second drafts of history, is that modern objective news suppresses
any explicit recognition of how a (national) protagonist and (national) ideals determines the selection of
the news event and its proper interpretation. Claiming that they are merely topical occurrences, journalists
actually report events because they are implicitly understood as important societal problems. Furthermore,
news reports tacitly address the audience not as a miscellany of individuals but as members of a shared
political community, united in their concerns and tied together by fate.16

For this reason it is, I would suggest, particularly important to reverse engineer, as it were, the more commplace
analysis of media and its possible role in historiography, so that historical actions can be more accurately assessed,
not just in the light of historical outcomes, which is an exercise largely based on hindsight, but in by identifying and
interrogating the actual objectives towards which historical actors strove, and which may in many cases have been
quite different from the eventual outcomes. These objectives, and the motivations which drove them, are often
hidden from history, but can on occasion be usefully identified and interrogated by reference to contemporary
journalism The fact that the only part of Ireland to experience Home Rule in the early twentieth century was the only
part of Ireland which had campaigned with might and main against it is only a particularly dramatic illustration of
the fact that it is often unwise to judge historical actors and their motivation and actions by their consequences. In
this sense, the study of the journalistic record can illuminate the issues of historical motivation and actions in some
cases more sharply than an over-simpified causality model. For example, who can with certainty proclaim that the
outcome of 1916 was exactly as predicted or planned for by those who participated in it? And the relevance of
contemporary journalism in helping us to assess these events and the motivation of their participants in their totality
is, I suspect, one which has still to be adequately explored.

Journalism is also important in the study of the history of ideas. Alvar Elegard, the Swedish scholar, argued
very persuasively that the books, diaries, newspapers and periodicals are essential source material for the history of
ideas. His book Darwin and the General Reader (1958), was a detailed study of the changes in British public
opinion which took place following the 1859 publication of The Origin of Species, and was largely based on an
analysis of the periodical press of the period. Not the first draft of history, perhaps, but a primary, rather than a
secondary source for this particular historical exercise.

In the context suggested by the title of this lecture, however, I would like to suggest that journalism has at
least two other dimensions which can, betimes, be of more than marginal significance and utility for historians.
The first is that journalism is a form of communication that is distinguished from many other forms of
communication in that it is, or professes to be, communication in the public interest. Most other forms of
communication are moderated primarily by self-interest, whether benign or otherwise; and journalism itself is not
immune from the kind of self-interest generated by its need to make a commercial living in order to survive, and
therefore to record not only what is in the public interest but what the public is interested in and sometimes to blur

16
Kaplan, Richard J (2004) American Journalism Goes to War, in Media History, 9:3, 209-219, p 215.

10
the necessary distincion between the two. But its self-justification in terms of the public interest, as articulated by
scholars like the late James Carey of Columbia,,17 continues to offer at least the possibility that, unlike the wilder
shores of the internet, it can offer information for people who are parched for meaning but are drowning in an
undifferentiated and uncurated, unedited ocean of comment and fact. The fact that meaning or interpretation can be
contestable does not, of itself, deprive it of significance for an understanding of what happened, why it happened:
and of , again, supports Carrs conviction that that interpretation is a core element of historical writing. Journalism
which can escape from the strait-jacket of unadorned fact and offer interpretation or even significant context,
which is in itself a form of interpretation can I think be of considerable value, and not only as historical source
material.
The second major dimension in which I believe that journalism has some claim to more than marginal
utility to history is because journalists also have a value as witnesses, and because their careful balancing act
between audience and voice can be illuminated by significant detail. Many of the early chroniclers were as
conscious as A.J. Liebling of the value of what Richard Stanihurst, a sixteenth century chronicler of Irish life, called
eyesight over the claims of what he spurned as hearsay and flim-flam surprises.18
The best reportage, and journalism based on first-hand experience in particular, offers us transections of
history, slices of life, and small spotlights that throw the big picture into sharp relief in ways that can only enhance
the historical discourse.
John Carey begins his magisterial Faber Book of Reportage19 with a long excerpt from Thucydides about
the plague in Athens in 430 BC. Such narratives are often a combination of both direct witnessing and indirect
reporting. But it is a combination that is, in our era, becoming increasingly, and regrettably, displaced by pre-
mediated or re-purposed communication. This is content that has been reworked sometimes several times, by
different hands, and in different combinations and aggregated before it is presented to the reader, listener or
viewer. It is also multiply sourced: propaganda, public relations, citizen journalism, blogs (and indeed even
personal observation) can all be thrown into the mix, the sources acknowledged or unacknowledged. The function of
sifting, weighing, assembling and styling all this multi-sourced material into a coherent narrative leads in turn, and
too often, to what has been described as the Voice of God syndrome. The depersonalised prose, although it has
many and varied nodal points (many of them disguised, undeclared or concealed) is presented, not as a version of
events, but as the definitive and unchallengeable version of events. Provisionality, uncertainty, and incompleteness
are discounted, and passivity and lack of imagination on the part of the reader are assumed. This short-changes the
reader and, in the final analysis, probaby short-changes history too.

17
See for instance James Carey (1995), The Press, Public Opinion and Public Discourse: on the Edge of the
Postmodern, in James Carey, A Critical Reader, (Eve Stryker Munson and Catherine A. Warren. Eds.)
Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, pp. 228-257.
18
Colm Lennon (1981), Richard Stanihurst, The Dubliner, p. 74. Dublin, The Irish Academic Press.
19
Ref:

11
 Journalism properly understood, although it contains a number of different genres of narrative reportage, is
largely a home for the element of reportage that is increasingly, and lemantably, regarded as redundant, or has been
squeezed, almost mercilessly, out of existence: this is the first person, frequently eye-witness, usually
contemporaneous narrative, to which I have just referred.
A few examples can perhaps give you a sense of the impact it can have when it is done properly.

Here is an eye-witness account of 1916, from the unlikely pages of the Impartial Reporter of Enniskillen known
to this day by its readers, Nationalist or Unionist, as the Partial. It is important as an eye-witness account
precisely because eye-witness journalistic accounts of 1916 are rare: the Dublin newspapers were either censored,
as in the case of the Irish Times, or suspended publication because of their proximity to the GPO, as was the case
of the Irish Independent. Into this political and military maelstrom strode, purposefully and unafraid, the Unionist
the proprietor and editor of the Partial, Egerton Trimble, who not only reported for his readers the discomfiture of
Dublin Unionists whose social activities had been so rudely interrupted, but even travelled as far as Cork, where he
gained access to a bulding that had been fortified by the rebels, but which had not seen any military action.
Their leader, Trimble reported he carefully did not identify him by name, but the evidence suggests
strongly that it must have been Terence McSwiney, was unarmed, save for a slim volume of Sophocles he carried
in his white, ladylike fingers, and spoke in a soft, cultured voice.
If they come to demand our arms, McSwiney said wearily, we shall shoot them. And, as to
your second question, I very much reget to say that something has gone wrong with the arrngements We
might have been in ossession of the Post Office he is evidently referring to the Cork Post Offie but for
the fact that the military got there first. They are there now, in strong force in all the upstairs rooms where,
I understand, they have the consoling companionship of a machine-gin.
All things considered, I dont think we shall rise in Cork. When the news of the Dublin rising
trickled through to Cork on Monday afternoon we all retired here into our barracks, loaded our rifles,
polished our bayonets, set in stores of provisions, and prepared for anything. At midnight the bishop of
Cork and the Lord Mayor came here and demanded admission. They were refused at first, but after
considerable parley we admitted them. They implored us tolay down our arms, and nt to resort to physical
force of any kind. Wecrefused, absolutely. Sorrowfully the bishop bowed his head. Then I leave you to
your fate, he said.
We do not fear our fate, we declared.
But this fate you will fear, said he. I will excommunicate any man of the Sinn Feiners who
resort a ths critical juncture of our national history either to arms, or to any amnner of physical force. And
so saying he departed.

Here is Francis McCullagh, whom I mentioned earlier, writing in the Los Angeles Times about the chaotic
conditions he witnessed in Moscow after the Soviet revolution in 1920:

12
 The collection of hopes, panics, greeds, secrecies, cunnings, tereacheries and idealisms which jostled one
another in those amazing guest houses of the societs transcended in inerest anything I read, saw or imagines.
Secret agens of foreign powers who posed as Bolsheviks jostled open agents f foreign powers who really
leaned towards Communism. Quakers who did not believe in war at all defended militarism against Italian
naval officers who, after fighting for three years, had become pacifists. Korean Buddhists, who thought it a
sin to kill a rattlensnake, advocated the assassination of the Mikado. Mahommedans, whose religion is the
sword, tried to prove that their prophert was really a man of peace. Financiers wanted the abolition of
finance. Respectable married men suddenly remembered that they had got married again that afternoon
under soviet law, having duly divorced that morning before a Bolshevik commissar their lawful wives
beyond the sea. Diplomatists, who knew nothing, fished for information from labour journalists who, having
just dined with Trotsky, knew everything.

The small print of big events as here, can frequently have an historical value that not only illuminates the
event itself but can convey something of the culture of the society in which they occurred that adds to the texture of
history itself. This is particularly true of journalism by people who are also writers in the larger sense, just as the
best of journalism can achieve heights that are normally scaled only by novelists or even poets. Here is a
contemporary description of the return of W.B. Yeatss body to Sligo in 1949:

In the afternoon the rain fell as we turned northward for Drumcliffe. Ben Bulben was draped I cold rain,
and the long quays and drained-out waters of Sligo Harbour recalled us to thoughts of his later work, of its
unsparing, iron relentlessness that stern colour and that delicate line, that are our secret dsciplines.
Rain or no rain, the streets and the roads, the grassy banks and hillocks all the way were crowded. There
seemed to be children in thousands watching him go past; peering through hazel branches or over wet
stone walls one saw the faces of Cazy Jane and Tom ORoughley and Red Hanahan and Dervorgilla.
Kate OBrien, The Spectator, 1949.

Here is John F. Kennedy in Ireland in 1963, in an account that cuts through the shamrockery, maintaining that vital
distance between observer and event:

Someone else said: Isnt it terrible hard on John Fitzgerald Kennedy that he has to be tethered all the time
to the telephone? Even up there in his helicopter sittin at his walnut writing desk. But thats the American
constitution. Suppose now some place like Alabama was to forget itself? Wherever he was, say at his
cousin Ms Ryans in Dunganstown, hed have to quell the problem from there.
Louis MacNeice, New Statesman, 1963.

Here is the Curragh racecourse in 1978, in an account that exposes the Irish attitude to social class with scalpel-like
precision:

13
 Those who want it - the Curragh event - to be the sort of occasion which would ratify their own sense of
social importance have no ultimate inner galaxies, circles and sars to revolve around. In order t be a
successful snob you have to have someone above you as well as below. You have to have someone to give
the accolade, a Queen Mum or a Queen Bee, and we have no-one, with the result that the bourgeoisie is
left, at times like Derby day, milling around looking at its own membership with wild surmse. Their
backs may not exactly be, as Yeats said, aching for the lash, but they are aching for the not, the gracious
inclination of the aristocratic neck. Alas, there is no-one to give it. The notion that there is an inner circle
of horsey, aristocatic people present on such ocasions to confer anything on anybody is largely a figment
of their own imagination.The kind is dead; and long lives the likes of you and me, however much
money they have, just will not do.
Anthony Cronin, Magill, 1978.

Here is Gerry Adams on his way to his first election victory in Belfast in 1983.
The security presence is heavy. Up in Ballymurphy the army outnumbers the voters. Adams drives up and
gets out, grinning to his entourage: watch me get rid of the Brits. At a nod from Gerry, a photographer
from An Phoblacht kneels, aims and shoots. The Brits melt away and Adams, the magician, laughs. The
next day, at about the same time, one of the soldiers will be dead, his head blown off in a booby-trap
explosion. A dog will come and lick the blood o the footpath and the kids will laugh as another British
soldier tries to pull the dog away.
Emily OReilly, the Sunday Tribune, 1983.

Here is a reporter describing en encounter with a rough-hewn Irish entrepreneur in a small Border village who
would later became famous, or infamous, as a key figure in the 2008 collapse of the Irish banks and the Irish
economy:

The phone on his desk rang. He picked it up and ad a log cnversation with a man who had a strong British
accent. He was dour and asua, ringig off withot any salutation, and rying to pick up the thread of what we
were saying when the phone rang. I interrupted him to ask what he was talking about on the phone. Stocks
and shares, he said.He had started, six months before, to play the stock market. He showed me the list of
the items he dealt with gold, oil, the Swiss franc against the dllar, aluminium. His broker, he said,
phoned him two or three times a day and he told him what to do. A salesman brought him out the
Financial imes fromm Enniskillen, so that he could read about his investments. It was interesting, e said,
suggesting thatplaying the stock market was a form f amsement, implyig somehow tat it was a commmon
pastime aroud Derrylin and Teemore.
Colm Toibin, Bad Blood Along the Irish Border, 1987.

14
And here is another close-up of the Northern Ireland conflict in 1988, five years after the earlier account of Gerry
Adamss election day. The context is the funeral of a number of people who had been shot dead by a loyalist in a
Belfast cemetary at a Republican funeral.An unmarked car drives up, trying unavailingly to make its way through
the crowds milling around the hearse. The occupants of the car are British soldiers, one of them wearing a green
army jumper, and a ripple of fear spreads unstoppably through the crowd of mourners. Some IRA men arrive, pull
the soldiers out of the car, and bundle them away to their deaths, almost close enogh to the reporter to be touched.
The reporter, an Englishwoman, writes:

How did we let it happen? He passed within a few feet of myself and dozens of other journalists. He
didnt cry out, just looked at us with terrified eyes as we were all enemes in a foreign country who
wouldnt have understood what language he was speaking if he called out for help. Later, it seemed like
hours but was in fact minutes, I found myself in the bookmakers shop phoning for an ambulance.
Someone in the shop said to me: If anyone had ried to stop it, theyd have been killed too. Now, several
days later, I wonder.
Mary Holland, Irish Times, 1988.

That last extract may illuminate for you, as it does for me, a sense of how far Ireland has come in the last couple of
decades from its past and the burden of its history. Contemporary journalism can providemany examples also of
how far it still has to travel.

Good journalism, like the examples I have used, is not to answer my original question the first draft of history.
It is more like history shot on the wing. Sometime you get little more than a few feathers in the wind; sometimes
the prize is more substantial. In this sense, however, journalism can often shine a light into some dark historical
corners. While it can never replace history, at its best it echoes the work of historians who conceive their task as
painting, in both words and facts, pictures for the imagination of their readers. It will continue, I hope, to bear
witness to the fact that no historical narrative is ever final, and to be a constant companion of historians whose
willingness to be surprised and enlightened will continue to enrich their ongoing dialogue with the past.
It will only do so, however, if it resists the siren song of the internet, in the sense that this technology,
while it is of immense srength and utility as a resource for journalism (and indeed for academia also) is still some
distance from being able to supply us with information that is as cogently and authoritatively presented, and as
eloquently parsed, as the traditional or legacy media in its best manifestations can provide. The financial whirlwind
that is tearing through the economic model of traditional journalism, threatening as it does the socially and
historically essential task of gathering and presenting the kind of information and context without which
democracy itself is at risk, should remind us that good journalism cannot continue to exist without adequate
resources. But I hope that a way will be found, before too long, to ensure that newspapers, and media generally,
will continue to supply that combination of information, surprise and enlightenment that mirrors and sometimes
informs, in a modest, subaltern way, good history.

15
 This has been well described by the American writer Nicholson Baker:

Old newspaper pages, for the most part, live out their long lives in the dark, keeping hidden what inky
burdens they bear, pressed tightly against their neighbours, communicating nothing, until suddenly, like the
light-bulb in the refrigerator that seems to be always on but almost never is, one of them is called upon to
speak. And it does.
Nicholson Baker, The Way The World Works (2012)

16