86 | Mass Media and Historical Change
Tarbell’s spectacular articles denouncing Rockefeller’s oil trust and damaging
his reputation also had momentous consequences because they showed how
he had systematically ruined smaller businessmen.
During the Boer War there were even three British women who exerted
a definitive influence on both the interpretation and the course of the war:
Flora Shaw, the foreign correspondent of The Times, defended the govern-
ment position, in close alignment with Colonial Minister Joseph Chamber-
lain; Sarah Wilson provided the Daily Mail with exciting impressions from the
front lines; and the reports of the nurse Emily Hobhouse pilloried the British
‘concentration camps’. Thus female journalists not only demonstrated that
women were tough and resilient but also that they had the ability to influence
politics and society.
Mass Press and Politics
Politics, too, was transformed by mediaisation in the waning nineteenth
century. This was true not only of political institutions and political spheres
but of political communication as a whole. This is most evident in the case of
rulers. Although royal houses suffered losses of political power during the late
nineteenth century, there was a simultaneous increase of their public presence
in everyday life, which served to cement their social position. Queen Vic-
toria was in fact known as the ‘First Media Monarch’ (Plunkett 2002). The
German Kaiser Wilhelm II was not only titled as a ‘Media Monarch’ but as
‘First Film Star’ as well, whose ostentatious self-staging, magnificent uniforms
and journeys were extremely media-friendly (Loiperdinger 1993; Windt, Luh
and Dilba 2005). This popular staging of monarchs was a consequence of the
illustrated press and the popular mass media, which often printed daily bulle-
tins about the royal family. Although the media actively sought the proximity
of the monarchs, the monarchs themselves also consciously and deliberately
bowed to the logics of the media. Consequently, the royals deliberately pub-
lished family pictures that corresponded to the cosy middle-class paradigms
in illustrated reviews – for example, Queen Victoria as ‘mother’ and Kaiser
Wilhelm I as ‘spa guest’ (Plunkett 2002: 148; Geisthövel, in Knoch and Morat
2003). This promoted their ‘civic publicness’, and it was to a great extent
the photos of the royals that ushered in the triumph of public photography.
The media encouraged rulers to make spectacular public appearances – like
Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, or the commemoration of the
one-hundredth birthday of Kaiser Wilhelm I. Yet at the same time the omni-
presence of the media endangered the monarch’s position. In Great Britain,
King Edward VII (1901–1910) felt this while still Prince of Wales, when his
love affairs and gambling caused scandals that plunged the monarchy into a