Ben Jonson’s The Staple of News: Habermas’ Public Sphere and the Early Modern News Industry

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The Staple of News is Jonson’s proactive literary response to the emerging news industry of the early seventeenth century. This essay attempts to appreciate Jonson’s critical attitude to his contemporary journalism which has resonance for our own era as well. In analyzing the play, the essay carries out a tripartite dialogue between Jonson’s dramatic text, Habermas’s philosophical proposition of the public sphere and historians’ documentary evidence. By the public sphere Habermas means a realm of private people who engage themselves in a public debate over matters of general interests. The development of these debates in a large public body makes it prerequisite for specific means to make information widely accessible to the public. Such means were provided by advancing print culture which materialized itself into the first newspaper, namely corantos, in the early 1620s. In Jonson’s play, Cymbal claims that his news-office will launch responsible journalism operating on the principles of celerity, authenticity and impartiality. These principles support the enlightenment concept that the popular press in the early modern period was part of the movement towards modern democracy by contributing to the formation of the public sphere. Despite his claim for responsible journalism, however, Cymbal deludes the audience with the sensational news which capitalizes on the reading public’s idle curiosity: for example, the King of Spain’s being chosen Pope and Emperor, the discovery of an optic glass so powerful that it could set ships afire by moonlight, and so forth. These practices confirm Marx’s proposition that publicity is false consciousness promulgated for particular class interests rather than endorsing Kant’s theory that publicity allows private individuals to overcome their conflicting interests for public welfare. Jonsons trope of the news-office as a means of interrogating the politics of commodified journalism puts forward a satirical viewpoint which is indicative not only of his early modern period but also of our modern era. Despite the unprecedented proliferation of news sources driven by the development of Internet, our modern era experiences a sense of disillusionment because these news sources are increasingly sensationalized by commercial motives and consequently detrimental to democracy.