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In April 2002 the 'Daily Mirror' re-launched itself as an apparently more serious newspaper. The paper's editor, Piers Morgan evoked the memory of the Daily Mirror of the 1950s and 60s in his high-minded ambition of preaching more serious journalism to his readers. Morgan's embrace of the Mirror's heritage and the praise the post-September 11th paper attracted for returning to the paper's old campaigning roots offered a new twist to a well-documented story.

The career of Kingsley Martin, long-time editor of the journal "New Statesman and Nation," offers a valuable window into leftist perspectives on democracy, citizenship and the press in the inter-war and post-war periods. Besides being one of the most prominent journalists of the 1930s-1950s, he deserves particular attention for articulating a wide-ranging critical and historical understanding of the press. This paper focuses on Martin's understanding of the press as a window into the prehistory of contemporary media studies. There is considerable irony that a journalist so frequently one-sided as Martin would demand truthful reporting. In the British context, Martin could plausibly defend his socialist politics as flowing from a commitment to "truth." More to the point, though, he was known for his imperious behavior, for instance, in refusing for seemingly partisan reasons to publish George Orwell's now legendary reports from the Spanish Civil War. Yet whatever his professional and personal limitations, his own journalistic writings display a rhetorical commitment to the same rationalistic model developed in his meta-journalistic writings.