"A cloak of apathy": political disengagement, popular politics and theDaily Mirror1940-1945

Abstract

This article re-examines the relationship between the Daily Mirror and popular politics in Britain during the Second World War. It outlines how traditional journalistic and academic analyses have located the period as a high-point of 20th-century radical journalism and political participation in Britain, usually in opposition to a depoliticised and disengaged contemporary news environment. It then re-assesses the Mirror's place in popular culture during this period to suggest an alternative and more complex interpretation of a paper's relationship with popular politics, political disengagement and participation. This differs from both traditional, largely positive accounts of the Mirror's relationship with political engagement and revisionist histories that emphasise its negative relationship with wartime "apathy". It explores firstly the predominantly negative role the paper played in the political mobilisation of a disengaged electorate, both in terms of its continued prioritisation of entertainment over "hard news" and its pioneering of new styles of negative and mediated political coverage. Yet it also examines how the paper's coverage advanced a new, more youth-based, consensual and cross-party alternative for an electorate that was politically disengaged but far from apathetic. This more complex interpretation of the paper's relationship with popular politics and political disengagement parallels current developments and debates around these areas.

Issues of gender and class in the Mirror newspapers' campaign for the release of Edith Chubb

“…However, another key part of the campaign was to evoke empathy for Edith as an overworked, exhausted working-class woman. This was in keeping with the papers' left-wing politics and their appeals to 'popular citizenship' (Thomas, 2004;Tulloch, 2007). It also refl ected mid 20th-century valorizations of the (white) British working class, which included a sentimental discourse of working-class motherhood (Wilson, 1980;Brooke, 2001).…”

British News Media and the Spanish Civil WarTomorrow May Be Too Late

“…The only exception was the Daily Mirror whose coverage of the war was four times less than that of the Daily Express (the paper with the second least number of items on the war). These unusually low levels of coverage were a clear product of the paper's distinct editorial strategy at this time (see Chapter 5) which had slashed foreign, political and economic coverage in the slavish pursuit of circulation (Curran and Seaton, 2003: 67;Thomas, 2004). Ninety per cent of the articles on Spain were news items -that is, they had a factual orientation and provided new or developing information about military, political and/or human-interest matters concerning Spain.…”