Mind-Munitions

The Press as an Agent of Liberty 131
the growth of newspapers as the principle medium of eighteenth
century propaganda.
Perhaps the best known example is The Craftsman, the principal
organ of the opposition to Robert Walpole, the popularity of which
in the 1720s and 1730s was unrivalled. One contemporary said
that this paper distributed ‘12-13,000 copies every week for undeceiving
the good people of Great Britain’. Less well known, but
almost as popular, was the Weekly Journal founded by Nathaniel
Mist in 1716 and described by one contemporary as ‘a scandal
shop ready to receive and vend sedition in, and will never be laid
down while there is an enemy to the British constitution capable of
writing scandal in English’. Denied the weapon of pre-censorship,
the government resorted to prosecutions under the libel laws and
even bully-boy tactics of sending in the King’s Messengers to smash
printing presses. And of course it established its own newspapers,
such as that founded by Robert Harley in 1704, the Review.
Harley has recently been described as a pioneer of British
government propaganda and counter-propaganda and he used
both Swift and Daniel Defoe as writers on his paper, which
attempted to serve as the voice of moderation in a period of
extreme viewpoints. Indeed Defoe, the greatest English journalist
of the age, was used secretly by the Whig government to write for
the opposition (including Mist’s Weekly Journal) so that criticism
would be moderated and toned down. When Defoe’s real position
was exposed, destroying his reputation, the government attempted
other tactics, such as buying opposition newspapers (the London
Journal being one example) and transforming them into effective
official organs. Robert Walpole in the 1730s and 1740s also took
particular care to manipulate public opinion through the press;
during the last decade of his administration, the secret service paid
£50,000 to pamphleteers and Treasury-run newspapers. Walpole
circulated free newspapers and pamphlets such as the London
Gazette to influential sections of the community, distributed
through the Post Office, which in turn attempted to block the
distribution of opposition propaganda. The London Gazette was
in the privileged position of enjoying a monopoly on the reporting
of official news, such as royal proclamations and the resolutions of
the privy council, and it was run directly by the government. Yet it
was not a popular success and went into decline after the fall of
Walpole in 1742.