"Two hundred years ago in 1815, London had more than 50 newspapers – morning papers, evening papers, Sundays, weeklies and twice-weeklies. And that spring, we may assume, the editors of those papers were preparing to deal with news on the grandest scale. Only a year earlier, a vast alliance of European kingdoms and empires had, after enormous effort, defeated Napoleon Bonaparte and packed him off into exile. But now, like some monster in a Hollywood blockbuster sequel, the French emperor was back, and threatening to do his worst.
The great alliance had to be revived, Bonaparte was declared an outlaw and armies were reassembled all over the continent to take him on again. By late April, there was little doubt that the first shots of the new war would be fired on France's northern front, its border with Belgium, and it was there that the Duke of Wellington was mustering his forces.
News stories do not come much bigger, you might think. Yet here is a curious fact: not one of the editors of those 50-odd London newspapers sent a journalist to Belgium with a brief to send home timely reports of what happened. So when Napoleon suffered his crushing defeat on 18 June, not a single British newspaper representative was on the battlefield, or even at the allied headquarters in Brussels.
What were the editors thinking? Looking back across the centuries, it is hard to conceive of a world in which newspapers operating in a competitive market could fail to do something so obvious. In fact, so closely do we associate the business of reporting events – bearing witness – with the very idea of journalism that it seems a dereliction of duty when journalists don't do it…"
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