The Transformation of the Standards of Credibility

The New Tydings Out of Italie Are Not Yet Come (2 December 1620) is the first English-language newspaper that survives. In this ‘coranto’, as these early newspapers were called, Englishmen read that ‘between the King of Bohemia & the Emperours folke hath beene a great Battel about Prage, but because there is different writing & speaking there uppon, so cannot for this time any certainety thereof be written, but must wayte for the next Post’. This passage was marvellously typical of early newspapers. The subject was a battle distant from England. The source of the news of battle was an anonymous newswriter in far-off Cologne. There were varying reports of the battle, whose conflicting testimony impugned the certainty of any one of them. For what it was worth – and what it was worth is a very interesting question – the reader could have read in the coranto reports from four different letters of a battle in Prague. Here at the birth of the modern newspaper, the credibility of the news was an essential issue.

In August 1622 one of Joseph Mead's London correspondents reported that ‘the Anwerp post now brings, that 4000 musquetiers coming to have joyned with Count Mansfeild & missing their way were set upon by the elector of Collen, & most slayne’. Another London correspondent reported that ‘a letter from Brussells by an expresse messenger to the king & but 4 days old relates the manner of the fight in this fashion’, that Mansfield's vanguard indeed was defeated, but that his main army ‘met & fought with Cordova & remained master of the feild’. Moreover, looking to Protestant sources in place of Catholic Antwerp and Brussels, the same correspondent cited ‘letters from Zeland [that] say that the Enimie lost 3000 & Mansfield 2000, but that the Enimie left behind him his ordnance & a great part of his ammunition’.