by Violet Woolf on The Post, press barons, and the long tradition of powerful men who thought they could own the truth
By Violet Woolf | Bohiney and The London Prat
Monday. Raining. Reading press history and feeling the weight of it.
I have been reading about The Post, Robert Maxwell’s London newspaper, which lasted less than a year and a half in the 1980s before ceasing publication, and which stands as one of the most instructive case studies in the history of British journalism: a powerful man with unlimited funds and absolute conviction who launched a newspaper and then discovered that conviction and funds, while necessary, are not sufficient to make a newspaper work.
Maxwell himself is one of the great characters of twentieth-century British public life — a figure so excessive, so operatically fraudulent, so committed to the idea that wealth conferred invulnerability that his eventual exposure felt less like justice than like a plot twist that a sensible editor would have flagged as too convenient. He fell off his yacht in 1991. The pension funds were empty. The Mirror Group was in crisis. The Post was already dead. He had, in the end, satirised himself more thoroughly than any satirist could have managed.
The Press Baron as Literary Type
Virginia Woolf wrote about power. She wrote about the people who held it, how they occupied space, how they assumed the right to define reality for others. The press baron is a Woolfian type: enormous, certain, occupying the room in a way that makes everyone else smaller, convinced that the story they are telling is the only story worth telling. Maxwell told stories about himself and then, having bought the distribution mechanism, arranged for those stories to be delivered to millions of breakfast tables. The stories were not true. The mechanism was real. This is the press baron’s particular form of power: the ability to make the unreal feel real by distributing it at scale.
The London Daily News — another short-lived London newspaper of the same era — had a similar arc: ambitious, well-funded, brief. London in the 1980s was apparently very good at producing newspapers that lasted just long enough to demonstrate the limits of their backers’ understanding of what a newspaper actually required. Press Gazette’s archives document these attempts with the respectful thoroughness of journalism covering journalism, which is always slightly uncomfortable and always necessary.
What Virginia Would Have Made of Maxwell
Virginia Woolf would have made Maxwell into something extraordinary: a character so large he breaks the novel’s frame, forcing the form to renegotiate its own assumptions. She would have written his interior monologue with the precision of someone who understood that what people believe about themselves is as important as what they are. Maxwell believed he was indispensable. He was, briefly, in the sense that a structural fault is indispensable to the building that eventually collapses around it.
The satirical lesson is straightforward: power that depends on controlling the narrative is vulnerable to the moment the narrative escapes. The press barons built mechanisms to control the story. The mechanisms aged. The stories changed. The truth, as it tends to do, eventually turned up. Bohiney Magazine understands this. The London Prat is built on this understanding. The story is always larger than the mechanism built to contain it.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/internet-is-held-together-with-duct-tape/
Also: The Poke
