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A blogger ahead of his time

But there is a paradox here. This is a high-tech library filled with old books. Because of copyright restrictions, it’s rare to find a publication date much later than the mid-1920s. Nowhere else that I know of can you feel as clearly the difference between the protected waters of copyright and the open sea of the public domain.

Most days, I just scan the titles. I have not yet plunged into the pages of "Stories of the Gorilla Country, Narrated for Young People" or "A Young Macedonian in the Army of Alexander the Great." But the other day, the new listing was "The Free Press," by Hilaire Belloc, published in 1918. Belloc, who died in 1953, is well represented online. Project Gutenberg has published 10 of his books, which seems like a lot until you consider how many books Belloc published in his lifetime —nearly 150. Belloc was wide of range, certain of opinion and unstinting in effort.

"The Free Press" is an extended essay examining the history of what Belloc calls the "Official Press" in England and the emergence of a rival "Free Press" in the form of small, often short-lived journals.

The Official Press, Belloc argues, is centralised and Capitalist (he always capitalises Capitalist), and its owners are "the true governing power in the political machinery of the state, superior to the officials in the state, nominating ministers and dismissing them, imposing policies, and, in general, usurping sovereignty —all this secretly and without responsibility."

It is a delicate historical task to transplant Belloc’s argument from his era to our own. Perhaps nothing else distances his essay so much as his assumption that major newspapers actually shaped the political power of the nation —that politicians governed at the sufferance of newspaper owners.

No newspaper, or TV network, of our own day can stand in for Lord Northcliffe’s dominant suite of newspapers, including The Times of London, which embodied Belloc’s notion of the Official Press. The balance of power has shifted, and many of the ideals implicit in the free or independent press, as Belloc describes it, have been absorbed by modern newspapers.

But "The Free Press" is still worth reading, for it describes, with some important adjustments, the evolving relationship between political bloggers and the mainstream media.

The Free Press that Belloc describes was a horde of small, highly opinionated, sometimes propagandistic papers that arose in reaction to "the official press of Capitalism." What characterised the Free Press, Belloc wrote, was "disparate particularism."

As he says, "the Free Press gives you the truth; but only in disjointed sections, for it is disparate and it is particularist." (For "particularism," Belloc offers the synonym "crankiness"). To get at the truth by reading the organs of the Free Press, you have to "add it all up and cancel out one exaggerated statement against another." But his point is that you can get at the truth.

There are whole paragraphs in Belloc’s essay where, if you substitute "blogs" for "the Free Press," you will be struck by the parallels. He notes that the journals of the Free Press seldom pay their way and that they often suffer from the impediment of "imperfect information," simply because it is not in the politicians’ interests to speak to them. They tend to preach to the converted. And they are limited by the founder’s vision. "It is difficult," Belloc writes, "to see how any of the papers I have named would long survive a loss of their present editorship."

Belloc’s point is not to expose the limitations of bloggers —excuse me, the Free Press. It is to show how, imperfect as they are, they can contribute enormously to our ability to learn what’s going on. Anyone who spends time reading political blogs will hear a familiar note —in far greater prose —among Belloc’s certainties. He writes, in short, as a blogger of his own time.