When the news makes you lose your head, think of poor King Charles I
Today’s news is a bewildering cacophony of competing voices coming from tabloid newspapers, Tweeters, live feeds, the blogosphere and any man and his dog on Youtube. The internet is great for giving everyone a way to voice their opinion, yet in all the hubbub, getting to the simple truth of a matter becomes nigh on impossible. It’s like pushing a giant bag of all the world’s Scrabble pieces up a hill. Sooner or later you’ll hit a snag and end up drowning in a sorry pile of clacking nonsense words.
Perhaps not surprisingly, our modern day media political squabbles were born of war. In the 1640s, as the pro-parliament Roundheads battled the royalist Cavaliers, earlier censorship on what could be printed became unenforceable, and England saw the birth of the free political press as we know it. Amid all the gun smoke and cavalry charges, the royalists and parliamentarians waged war with ink and paper.
For some this was great news. A-level student bullyer John Milton gushed that thanks to new freedom of political news, the public were ‘more than at any other time’ committed to ‘disputing, reasoning, reading, inventing, and discoursing’. Yet not all that news reporting was quite so serious. Mocking the roundhead’s bafflement as to Prince Rupert’s good luck in battle, the Cavaliers wrote a spoof spy’s report on how the prince ‘s dog was in fact a witch from Lapland who could catch bullets in her mouth.
When King Charles claimed he was the father of the English people, he was lampooned mercilessly in print, and reimagined as a Robinson Crusoe figure, marooned on an island and producing thousands of bratty kids. They gave him such a headache, he resolved to quit his tropical paradise on the next ship passing.
Even at the birth of political press freedom, newspapers had the capacity for the absurd, yet it also gave a whole new voice to those previously marginalised. And it is a proud tradition of sensationalism which has been expanded by social media and the internet today. So next time you’re reading an ill-founded Twitter hate campaign, just be glad it’s not literally an actual witch hunt.