But they were certainly not the first journalists to print rude, funny diatribes (or cartoons) against the establishment: the authors of the "Mazarinades" in mid-seventeenth-century France were as outrageous and one-sided in the expression of their disapproval of Cardinal Mazarin as any editorial in the Berkeley
Barb or
L. A. Free Press was of President Lyndon Johnson or Draft Board chief General Louis B. Hershey. More directly antecedent to the Alternative Press of the 1960s, the English Puritan pamphleteers of the 1640s were every bit as self-righteously insulting to the Anglican conformists—calling them the "agents of Rome"—as any underground paper of the 1960s calling a Fire Marshal a "fascist" (which is not to say, in either case, that the accusers were always, or even usually, mistaken). The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries abound with similar serials expressing the perspectives and prejudices of a self-conscious, ambitious minority, on its way either to becoming a majority or to disappearing.
In the late nineteenth century, however, the exponential growth of literacy provided the demographic base in Europe and America for the first truly popular press, and men like Lord Northcliffe in England became rich and powerful "press lords" by giving these newly-literate people news on subjects which interested them: sporting events, disasters, success stories, and scandals.
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