56 | Mass Media and Historical Change
inquisitiveness inherent to man. Contemporary critics of the newspaper ques-
tioned whether its usage could lead to addiction. Fritsch brought forward the
argument that newspapers were read in offices and even during church services
as proof of ‘newspaper addiction’ in society. Inasmuch as this is a classical
topos of media criticism, Fritsch also warned that early newspapers were not
solely an expression of rationality.
Thirdly, contemporary papers questioned especially whether the informa-
tion printed in newspapers was actually true. There seems to have been a fairly
high level of distrust. Calvinist theologian Erich Behringer warned in 1614
that it was unwise to place trust in newspaper reports (Behringer 2003: 372),
and even Christian Weise, who himself defended the usefulness of newspapers,
criticised false reporting and admonished readers to be discriminating (printed
in Blühm and Engelsing 1967: 56). Most contemporaries also censured the
fact that papers voiced their opinions and that their criticism was partisan
(Berns 1976: 207; Adrians 1999: 40). This concomitantly underlines the neg-
ative image against which early newspaper editors had to struggle.
Researchers attribute the same societal and cultural effects to newspapers
as to printing: they contributed to the standardisation of language, the genera-
tion and archiving of knowledge, and the establishment of permanent spheres
of communication. What is more, they transformed news into a universal cur-
rency of social relations (Raymond 2001: 1; Wilke 2008: 40). As diaries and
letters indicate, the reading of newspapers had the power to change people’s
mapping of the world, even as early as the seventeenth century. Occurrences
which had previously seemed distant were now becoming an inherent part of
people’s private thoughts. Periodical reports on distant events which included
date and place thus shifted the relation between space and time (see Behringer
1999: 69f., 81).
Similarly, newspapers, periodicals and pamphlets influenced political com-
munication and ruling practice. They published dossiers, documents and the
authorities’ war commentaries, and achieved increased public legitimacy for
their actions through their regular reporting (Repgen 1997: 48f., 83; Haks, in
Koopmans 2005: 181). Broadsides remained central to these developments,
as the Seven Years’ War illustrates. Even absolutist governments adjusted to
the expansion of the media and systematically legitimised their doings in the
press, be it in the context of declarations of war, responses to reports from
abroad or entertaining topics from the court or diplomacy (Gestrich 1994:
12, 17, 26, 85; Schultheiß-Heinz 2004: 64). This even applied to the Tsars in
eighteenth-century Russia (Plambeck 1982: 41). Newspapers thus became an
integral part of foreign affairs, a state of affairs substantiated by the fact that
diplomats and sovereigns officially rejected news from other countries. ‘News-
paper diplomacy’ did not merely encompass petitions and semi-official news-
papers within the borders of a specific country, but also included newspapers