An Imperial Ideology of News: News Values and Reporting about Japan in Colonial India

This piece uses newspapers published in nineteenth-century India and Japan as a case-study to examine how networks of telegraph technology shaped the circulation of international news around British colonial spaces. It also explores how the use of technology was itself influenced by the local socio-economic and political contexts in which journalism was practiced. To this end, it examines the news reporting practices of newspapers published in both India and Japan, including the Times of India, the Englishman, the Japan Gazette, the Japan Herald and the Japan Times. In doing so, the case study identifies certain patterns and trends in the content and form of news reporting, and uses them to argue that the ideological structures of British imperialism shaped news values in the second half of the nineteenth century.