For those who decry the media’s harsh tone and yearn for a bygone age when civility ruled the land, it is useful to look at the 1888 debut edition of The Financial Times, reprinted today to mark the newspaper’s 125th anniversary. There, in a front-page article, the FT skewers its biggest rival to an extent we almost never see today.
The piece seems innocent enough, about a “temporary rupture of negotiations” concerning the Southern Railways. But its text is merciless:
It must have been somewhat mortifying to our contemporary, the Financial News, to find that the negotiations are broken off. This was within a day or two of the day on which the News said that the thing had been “done” the day before. Its next prophecy was that when the agreement did come it would “bear a strong family likeness” to the apocryphal agreement which our contemporary produced on Saturday week as having been “finally settled” on the previous day. One thing that appears to have helped to mislead our contemporary was the idea that the second ten years of the working agreement expired this month, whereas it has yet a whole year to run, ending with February 1889.”
It continues on for several paragraphs more, and with a sharply personal tone:
“What puzzles us is that a financial journalist should write so flippantly on such a subject, and treat it with as much levity as if it were merely the purchase of a house or of a horse.”
No, you don’t see this sort of thing very much these days in the FT or any other newspaper, for that matter. The Financial News merged with the Financial Times several years later, no doubt weary from all the fighting.