Identificación de fuentes y procesos responsables de la composición del agua

A final question to debate about the discourse between

newspapers and their audience is: did the British public believe what they read in their newspapers in 1940 and 1941? The answer is, almost certainly not. Mass Observation reported that, in the early weeks of the war, people said it was ‘useless to buy newspapers since all the front pages were identical and could not be trusted,’ a sentiment underlined by Home

Intelligence in May 1940 when it reported: ‘The general curve of distrust of the news has been rising during the last year.’²²⁸ Hylton wrote that the Ministry of Information tried to stem the flow of rumours but were not wholly successful and one explanation for their proliferation (and for the initial high audience figures for Lord Haw-Haw) was that ‘the public did not believe what they were being told by the official media’.²²⁹

An erosion of trust in newspapers began in the First World War when the troops in the trenches could read what was being written in the press and could compare it to their own experience. Knightley observed:

The effect of this distortion was immense. The average Englishman had been accepting all his life that if something was printed in the

newspapers, then it was true. Now, in the biggest event of his life, he was able to check what the press said against what he knew to be the truth. He felt he had found the press out, and as a result he lost confidence in his newspapers, a confidence to this day never entirely recovered.²³⁰

Yet newspaper circulations rose dramatically between the wars (and during the Second World War) and, as noted earlier, Gannon argued that foreign correspondents assumed a glamorous image akin to secret agents in the 1920s and 1930s, a role that suggested they were believed by some if not all

228 Hylton, Darkest Hour, p. 151; Mass Observation, FR 126.

229 Mass Observation, FR 126.

230 Knightley, First Casualty, p. 105.

their readers. Perhaps the most compelling evidence that newspapers had an influence on their audience is that the government spent so much effort to control what appeared in print.

Bingham wrote that the rise in circulation showed that newspapers were satisfying a need, but with a qualification: ‘The journalist did not necessarily believe what he or she wrote, just as the reader did not necessarily believe what he or she read.’²³¹ This echoed a contemporary report on the press by Home Intelligence that stated: ‘In war-time when there is open censorship, everybody accepts that the government can choose what news about the war shall be published.’²³² This thesis will show that many of the reports that appeared in newspapers in the Second World War were written with morale in mind and often amounted to little more than propaganda. Yet the rising circulations would suggest that this, and the entertainment newspapers brought, was what the readers wanted at times other than in the immediate aftermath of serious bombing raids. When they were victims of a Blitz, readers wanted the truth so that others could bear witness to their suffering; at other times reports of resilience and quiet courage were exactly what they required. Ascension Andina-Diaz, citing Lazarsfeld et al, argued: ‘Most individuals expose themselves most of the time to the kind of material with which they agree to begin with.’ ²³³

231 Adrian Bingham, Gender, Modernity and the Popular Press in Inter-War Britain (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004), p. 11.

232 Mass Observation, FR 126.

233 Lazarsfeld, P.F. and others, ‘The Psychology of Voting: An Analysis of Political Behavior’ in Handbook of Social Psychology, II, ed, by G. Lindzey (Cambridge: Addison-Wesley, 1954), cited by Ascension Andina-Dıaz, ‘Reinforcement vs. Change: The Political Influence of the Media’ in Public Choice ,131, 1-2 (2007), 65-81, (p. 67).

5. Conclusion

The concept of hegemony is normally understood to describe the way in which dominant social groups achieve leadership and control by way of social cohesion and consensus. Jonathan Joseph wrote: ‘It argues that the position of the ruling group is not automatically given, but rather that it requires the ruling group to attain consent for its leadership through the construction of political projects and social alliances.’²³⁴ Gramsci, as was seen earlier, asserted that the media play a central role in creating an

‘acceptable’ consensus, an important concept for this thesis in which newspapers were seen to promote the government’s position during the Second World War.²³⁵

The above, however, appears to complicate this theory that news is not merely an instrument of control but a constant negotiation between internalised and normative experience and the hegemonic imperatives of political elites.This negotiation can break down, but in war, as this chapter has examined, the need to over-ride these tensions becomes imperative.

Bingham summed up the general mood in the Second World War thus: ‘The idealistic nationalism of 1914 had been rewritten as a cheerfully cynical spirit of defiance against Hitler’s attempted domination of Europe’ and, as a consequence, Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and the Blitz became

mythologised stories that were embellished by the press with the seeming consent of the readers.²³⁶ Newspapers had not told the truth in the First World War, and they carefully manipulated the facts between 1939 and 1945. In short, for whatever the good reasons for doing so, they gave only

234 Jonathan Joseph, Hegemony: A Realist Analysis (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 1.

235 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, pp. 21-43.

236 Bingham, Gender, pp. 184-85.

one side of the story. With little or no attempt to properly inform the public of an alternative, the myth of resilience was created.

Part II: Methodology