conference paper
Civil war via media: 19th century print publicity as a battlefield
Abstract
Late 19th century in Finland appears to have been a dress rehearsal period for modern-style media warfare. Enemy images broadcast by the media would soon include such allegedly most vicious antagonists as the Reds and Whites of the 1918 civil war, and Russians as The Arch Enemy Of Finland Throughout The Ages. The 19th century publicity practised with a little bit less hideous a monster: the old nobility as an Enemy of the People. Publishing and distributing information - facts, definitions, arguments, ideas, images, narratives, myths, fantasies - became an efficient tool of attaining hegemony in a society which operated on the so-called democratic principle. The bourgeois intelligentsia occupied the public sphere of those pioneer days: a university-educated, nationalistic-minded, middle-class-originated new elite, who worked through the other novelty of the period, the printing industry. The cadres of this intelligentsia used the print media apparently to promote its liberal, progressive ideology, but also to establish its own identity as the God-given leader, defender and educator of subordinate classes, and to champion its case of being the only decent elite, as opposed to the greedy, decadent, reactionary nobility - and to broadcast this benign definition to the society at large. By feeding the modernising reading habit of the modernising nation with carefully selected fodder it managed, for a while, to secure its position as the leading progressive group of the society. Newspapers provided the forum for political debate and straightforward propaganda. Fiction became the vessel of a more subtle emotional manipulation. Academic textbooks on social, political and historical sciences discussed the case more soberly, yet with an obvious bias. In my presentation I will discuss how the message was altered to suit different types of media and different audiences.
Author keywords
19th century, elites, enemy images, ideology, media history, propaganda