Reading the news can often be disappointing, particularly when the mainstream press seem obsessed with the seeming minutiae of popular culture and politics and so often miss the real, history making events, that are often relegated to the inside pages between stories about deformed pets and alcohol induced centurions.
But it wasn’t always like this, as the following front-page from the Sydney Morning Herald, published on June 12, 1959 shows, there was actually a time when affairs of state, geopolitics, and chest beating appeals to the military industrial complex were commonplace. Indeed, on this one page we see reports on secret US-Russia talks, Urban regeneration, a British missile test as well as reports on domestic opposition party machinations, a local abduction and an intriguing suggestion that Russian industrial production may draw level with the United States in 25 years!
While the likely veracity of newspaper stories appears to have changed little, the reality of today’s press is that it increasingly has to respond to popular sentiment, or else face irrelevance by way of alternate news outlets. Their increasingly tenuous connection to events may ultimately suggest that the newspaper, as historical record, a phenomenon which has grown exponentially with the digitisation of archives, may be both over-exaggerated and short lived. Which may lead us to question for what purpose might the front-pages of today ultimately benefit the historian of tomorrow? No-longer as an account of the affairs of state, of geopolitics, of diplomacy and as evidence to the wheel of progress within society, but rather as a morose indictment to the irrelevance of the press and to the decay of an internecine culture.
Frontpage News, Sydney Morning Herald, Friday, June 12, 1959 (Courtesy of the National Archives of Australia)
© Commonwealth of Australia (National Archives of Australia) 2013
For us, now, history remains our witness.
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