If anyone doubts the power of the press, think again.<\/p>\n
Liberal newspapers were the main driver of Toronto\u2019s street development during the turn of the 20th<\/sup> century, says Brock University Associate Professor of Geography Phillip Mackintosh.<\/p>\n \u201cThey had an agenda to create public opinion around, and then generate capitalist interest in infrastructure,\u201d says Mackintosh when describing the book he published earlier this year.<\/p>\n In the book, Newspaper City: Toronto\u2019s Street Surfaces and the Liberal Press, 1860-1935,<\/em> Mackintosh argues that the Toronto Globe<\/em> and Toronto Daily Star<\/em> campaigned heavily for streets to be paved in downtown Toronto, mainly to increase business for their advertisers, who had shops and factories along those roads.<\/p>\n \u201cThe newspaper industry made more money through advertising than it did through subscriptions, and that advertising enabled them to pay journalists more to get involved in muckraking,\u201d explains Mackintosh.<\/p>\n On a broader scale, city expansion would presumably lead to more newspaper subscriptions and better subscription rates, he says.<\/p>\n The campaign to pave was a tough sell. Many people during the Victorian, Edwardian and interwar periods resisted the idea of having to pay to develop these streets through the local improvements by-law. The majority were okay with wood and gravel roads, the book argues.<\/p>\n \u201cThe city was made up of a cross-section of people, most of them being middle class and under,\u201d says Mackintosh. \u201cTheir ability to tolerate inconvenience was remarkable, so the liberal papers had to create pictures in peoples\u2019 heads of a progressive city.\u201d<\/p>\n These \u2018pictures\u2019 included articles that presented two scenarios: \u201cOne depicted the status quo, with dirty, dangerous streets overrun with animals and unsavoury people; the other envisioned progress, with clean, civilized modern thoroughfare suitable for bourgeois society,\u201d says the book.<\/p>\n While the campaign resulted in the construction of asphalt roads, concrete sidewalks and regulated traffic in downtown Toronto, it also laid the groundwork for the press to become the liberal \u201cfourth estate,\u201d championing democracy and growth while making a profit, says Mackintosh.<\/p>\n That part of Toronto\u2019s history highlights newspapers\u2019 strong influence in molding readers\u2019 perceptions of the city as a whole and especially certain neighbourhoods.<\/p>\n Mackintosh gives the example of reporters going into the \u201cWard,\u201d which at that time, was the poorest part of the inner city. The neighbourhood is located in the area now bordered by Yonge, University, Queen and College streets.<\/p>\n They would write about the squalor, crime, dirt and bad environment of that part of town, even though \u201cthere were all kinds of hard-working people and shop owners, but that\u2019s not how the reporters saw it.<\/p>\n \u201cThey reproduced the city in text for the readers, and the readers used their geographical imaginations to reproduce that city in their own heads. Suddenly the city was not the city they thought they lived in,\u201d explains Mackintosh.<\/p>\n He says Newspaper City<\/em> provides another way to think of present-day \u201cfake news\u201d discussions and certain media whose sole purpose is to make a profit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If anyone doubts the power of the press, think again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":45654,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1,4,5,38],"tags":[5547,5546],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45653"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45653\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}