Medieval: "...where truth competed with rumour, mishearing and misunderstanding. In some respects, it is to that world that we seem to be returning."

Newspapers: still the most important medium for understanding the world

Once new media themselves, newspapers have gone on to outlast cinema and television – but for how long?

BY PETER WILBY PUBLISHED 12 FEBRUARY 2014

The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know about Itself 
Andrew Pettegree
Yale University Press, 448pp, £25

The News: a User’s Manual 
Alain de Botton
Hamish Hamilton, 272pp, £18.99

"Yet few if any providers seem alive to the new medium’s full potential for spreading understanding and enlightenment.

The anxiety is always to be first with the news, to maximise reader comments, to create heat, sound and more fury and thus add to the sense of confusion. In the medieval world, news was usually exchanged amid the babble of the marketplace or the tavern, where truth competed with rumour, mishearing and misunderstanding. In some respects, it is to that world that we seem to be returning.

Newspapers, Pettegree speculates, may have become established only because, at some stage in the 18th century, they became a fashion accessory – a badge of status for the country squire in Somerset or physician in Montpelier, previously deprived of knowledge of what happened in circles of metropolitan power. But they have never been very good – or not as good as they ought to be – at telling us how the world works."