High Expectations, Hostile Perception, and Biased Coverage? The Labour Movement and the Press Coverage of the Paris Commune, 1871

In the nineteenth century, representatives of the socialist labour movement leveraged public communications to pursue their goal of overcoming class inequality. They expressed high expectations for media outlets and were consistently disappointed by the coverage of a hegemonic bourgeois press they regarded as biased. Demands for fair reporting tied in with the emerging self-image of the bourgeois press as news providers in the nineteenth century. Drawing on the concepts of hostile media perception and media bias, this paper examines whether the labour movement’s perception of the dominant press corresponded to the reporting of the leading newspapers. The study is based on content analysis of 1,092 articles from The Times and Kölnische Zeitung covering the Paris Commune in 1871. The analysis reveals that representatives of the Commune had their say in principle, but to a relatively small extent, and that the newspapers mainly used neutral language. However, measuring coverage against the emerging norms of journalism resulted in a perceived inequality for the labour movement.