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The July 20 Plot: Reading News As Myth in the Imagining of the British Nation

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The July 20 Plot: Reading News As Myth in the Imagining of the British Nation The July 20 plot: reading news as myth in the imagining of the British nation Eloise Florence (RMIT University) Abstract This paper analyses foreign news articles that appeared in three London newspapers during the Second World War, covering ‘The July 20 Plot’, an assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler in 1944. The analysis is supported by reading the news articles as an ‘other world’ myth, through which characteristics of their own nation, imagined by Britons, was observed as existing in opposition to that of the Germany portrayed. International news is thus solidified as a source of historical enquiry, as well as a site of discourse that can be examined as the expression of mythological knowledge that typifies an imagined national community. Keywords: news, myth, Second World War, July 20 Plot, wartime Britain, national identity, imagined communities Introduction The “father of history”, Greek chronicler Herodotus, offers an unlikely opportunity to re-examine the co-constitutive relationship between news and nation. From an academic standpoint, Herodotus’ eminent text The Histories, a sprawling and digressive account of the Greco-Persian War and the surrounding geographies, people and cultures, is often considered unreliable in its lack of focus, objectivity, and thoroughness (Mendelsohn 2008). Herodotus was chiefly concerned with the customs, superstitions, beliefs, emotions, and drama surrounding the events and people on which he reported. Historians often pass over Herodotus, preferring the more reliable writings of Thucydides, who “set the methodological standard for historical writing for the next thousand years” (Mendelsohn 2008). But Herodotus is often revisited as an early example of documentation that has a social role through narrative and storytelling. Copyright © 2016 (Eloise Florence). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs (CC BY_ND) Licence. For information on use, visit www.creativecommons.org/licenses. Cite as Florence, E. (2016), The July 20 plot: reading news as myth in the imagining of the British nation, Communication, Politics and Culture, 49(2), 111-132. COMMUNICATION, POLITICS & CULTURE – VOL. 49 (2) (2016) While it lacks in academic rigour, The Histories can be seen as a source of cultural discourse. Applying a rhetorical analysis to the intriguing (if often inaccurate) accounts of Herodotus’ surroundings reveals the kind of information with which his readers were constructing their reality. The prose of Herodotus, steeped in the Greek tradition of dramatic oral storytelling, is an early example of using narrative “formulas” that audiences of the time used to make sense of the information provided (Knight & Dean, 1982, p. 146-147). A revisiting of The Histories can provide an approach to news as both a source of fact and of social and cultural influences. When employed in a historical context, analyses of news that take a rhetorical approach can reveal underlying value systems and beliefs that are at work in what Benedict Anderson (1991) terms the ‘imagining of national community’. This article examines news content from Britain in 1944 as a form of myth that was involved in the creation of British national identity, specifically in relation to wartime Germany. Through textual analysis of British news articles covering the July 20 assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler, I aim to show that these texts constructed a myth of Nazi Germany as an ‘other world’, when characterising the relationship between the two nations. In the articles, I found several themes in the characterization of Germany that can be read as existing in opposition to core, underlying beliefs that distinguish British national imaginings. This study aims to further promote an approach to news that asks similar questions as those asked of myths, as it gains a better understanding of the kind of community being imagined by Britons in 1944. International news and the imagined community Benedict Anderson’s celebrated characterisation of nation as imagined, limited and sovereign is central to understanding the discursive function of news in national groups. The birth of the modern nation aligned with the definite decline of the notion of temporality in which cosmology and history were intrinsically linked1 (Anderson 2006, p. 36). Once citizens moved beyond the idea of future, present, and past occurring instantaneously, events could be seen as “moving calendrically through secular time” (p. 26). Events occurred simultaneously, linked only by coincidence. “Nations given 112 COMMUNICATION, POLITICS & CULTURE – VOL. 49 (2) (2016) political expression always loom out of an immemorial past and…glide into a limitless future.” (pp. 11-12) Anderson argues the front page of a newspaper is a site of a nation imagining itself because it aligns with the idea of a group of citizens existing within a nation at once: The newspaper reader, observing exact replicas of his own being consumed by his subway, barbershop, or residential neighbours, is continually reassured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life (pp. 35-36). Widespread and simultaneous consumption establishes a newspaper as a prime site for the imagining of a community. A ‘confidence in shared anonymity’ promoted through newspapers is what Anderson identifies as the ‘hallmark of the modern nation’ (p. 36). Thus, the newspaper is an integral part of modern conceptualisations of nation. Anderson’s work is an example of a rhetorical approach to news content that identifies its discursive impact. News has long been widely acknowledged to have a socially constructive role that is morally loaded and often ideological, occurring through a naturalisation of particular belief systems2. Schudson (1982) states that while ‘news isn’t fictional... it is conventional’ (p. 98). Schudson is one of many whose approaches to news favour a rhetorical, rather than transmission, model of communication (Knight & Dean 1982; Bennett & Edelman 1985), building on Carey's (1989) ideas of communication as ritual (p. 15). These approaches evaluate the cultural and moral potency of news as reaffirming underlying knowledge systems and norms. News content is seen to be transcending the reporting and documenting role assigned to it in a transmission approach. Bird and Dardenne (1997) also call for an analysis of news as a social construct, one that avoids the dichotomy of fact and fiction and identifies assumptions that are inherently embedded in news conventions. They assert: ‘while news is not fiction, it is a story about reality, not reality itself’ (p. 346). Rhetorical approaches to communication position news as playing a central part in the character of a particular societal group through the enacting and documenting of social drama (Lule, 2001, p. 33). This process involves active engagement and resistance, and is a fluid and dynamic construction and reconstruction of social reality. 113 COMMUNICATION, POLITICS & CULTURE – VOL. 49 (2) (2016) In a rhetorical approach to news, ‘power’ is regarded in the Foucauldian sense of the word: Power must be analysed as something which circulates, or rather as something which only functions in the form of chain....Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organisation. (Foucault 1980, p. 98) Foucault therefore insists that an analysis of power must start from the mechanisms of power, not the centre, or the base of power (p. 99). As discourse, news content is one of these mechanisms of power, one of the systems through which power circulates. An analysis of news’ socially formative impact must therefore start with news as a technology of power (Foucault 1980 [1977], p. 99). Taking a rhetorical approach to British wartime news allows us to see the subject articles as sites of networked power relationships, where audiences engaged with news in imagining their own national community. Discussion of press freedom during the 1940s was largely based around the idea that lowering citizen morale was equal to aiding and abetting the enemy. Supporting the war at home was generally conceived to be supporting troops fighting abroad3. Both legislation and ensuing debate cultivated solidarity and loyalty through news coverage, the ‘fourth front’ of the war (Knightley 1975, p. 240). However, in contrast to Goebbels’ finely tuned propaganda machine, the British press was subject to a censorship that was mostly self-enforced, especially in the later years of the war. The ‘old boys club’ relationship between Fleet Street and Westminster has been scorned by some analysts attempting to glean an objective and completely unbiased version of events from newspapers of the time. ‘Nearly every journalist packed away his principles “for the duration”,’ write Moorcraft and Taylor (2008), claiming that ‘London censors were already writing the first draft of history’ (pp. 57- 58). A rhetorical approach to these ‘first drafts’ however, is concerned with the 114 COMMUNICATION, POLITICS & CULTURE – VOL. 49 (2) (2016) knowledge that can be gleaned about British national imagining evident in this discourse. News values in international news—particularly mid-century Europe—were central to a citizen’s notion of place in a world relative to other nations beyond sovereign borders (Rantanen 2003, pp. 447-48). Europe in the middle of the 20th century existed as a synergetic point for the realising of national audiences. Given the steady rise in newspaper circulation and dissemination, national imagining often occurred through the press. Urban-dwelling Britons, in
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