Download or read book Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850-1950 written by Mark Hampton and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 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. Hampton demonstrates that British theories of the press were intimately tied to definitions of the public and the emergence of mass democracy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.