Introduction

Information: the very term itself seems to suggest electronic blips on a computer screen rather than quill pens; or the soft click of fingers on a keyboard rather than the heavy pounding of the hand press. Instead of renouncing the term in this book, however, we surround it with qualifications. And we call political information whatever may be thought or said about events connected with the government of states and with cities and their peoples. The fresher it was, the more it deserved to be called ‘news.’ Can opinion be information? It can, no less than information may be opinion. The interchangeability of the terms is part of politics. And information concerning politics, politics concerning information: these expressions, in brief, define our subject matter. In bringing together a kaleidoscopic sampling of what recent scholarship has discovered about the first century of news, we hope to make a unique interdisciplinary contribution to a growing field.