oa Een duffen politieken strijd

A dull political battle. An analysis of the political news coverage in De Telegraaf, 1902-1914

In 1893, De Telegraaf was founded as a response to the ‘boring news coverage of the bourgeois press’. As a self-declared neutral newspaper, inspired on the emerging Anglo-American mass press, the young daily was the odd one out in the Dutch bourgeois-journalistic landscape. This contribution shows how De Telegraaf, as one of the largest newspapers of this period, reported about Dutch politics in the first decades of the twentieth century. Its reporting shows that the newspaper considered politics with a certain distance: as a game with accompanying rules. The most effective political strategy was that of authenticity: sincere politicians who sought to connect with their voters were praised by the newspaper. This contribution shows that research on the crossroads of political culture and media can shed a new light on the political form changes around the turn of the century. The popular press played a crucial role in shaping the new politics.