Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850-1950 »

"Historians recognize the cultural centrality of the newspaper press in Britain, yet very little has been published regarding competing conceptions of the press and its proper role in British society." "In Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850-1950, Mark Hampton analyzes the various historical conceptions of the British press that helped to create its modern role and demonstrates that these conceptions were intimately involved in the emergence of mass democracy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries." Mark Hampton surveys a diversity of sources - parliamentary speeches and commissions, books, pamphlets, periodicals and select private correspondence - in order to identify how governmental elites, the educated public, professional journalists, and industry moguls characterized the political and cultural function of the press.