Winston Churchill A Life In The News Richard Toye by Richard Toye 9780192526038, 9780198803980, 0192526030, 0198803982 instant download after payment.

Churchill was a master of publicity who cultivated a new form of political celebrity. There were precursors: Palmerston, Gladstone, and Disraeli had all had their personal cults. What was new was the sheer scale of Churchill’s coverage and its transmission across the world. Churchill’s longevity as an object of public discussion (including posthumously) is one of the things that make him special if not absolutely unique. Moreover, although the media did become more intrusive and in some ways more challenging of politicians over the course of his life, Churchill (in the various stages of his career) had many routes to informal influence over what was printed. He was a public political personality, who brought elements of his private life into the public sphere but in a way that he was generally able to control.

Churchill, then, was a politician who courted the media, albeit during his final period in office he seemed to be losing his touch. At the same time, as will be seen throughout these pages, he often showed bitter resentment of the press, and also of the BBC. Of course, some of the treatment he received was deeply unfair. In the search for circulation some newspapers often played fast and loose with the facts and made spurious allegations. Others displayed blatant ideological bias. But even making all due allowance for the frustrations that politicians typically meet, and indeed for the extreme stress that he experienced during both world wars, Churchill’s profound sensitivity is notable. Throughout this book we will see both how he nonetheless thrived in the heat of the media battle and how, in part because of robust institutional constraints, his autocratic and repressive instincts against journalistic freedom were successfully contained.