Mass Western news coverage of the Middle East began with the Crimean War

Evidence

After the trader and the diplomat, the third in chronological sequence among major travellers from the West to the East is the journalist. In a sense, journalism first appeared as a concomitant rather than a successor of commerce and govern­ ment. In the 1790s the French Embassy in Istanbul published a newsletter, which in time became a newspaper, to bring the message of revolution to any who could read French. General Bonaparte set up a kind of newspaper in Egypt, and in the years that followed, missionaries, merchants and governments established newspapers of various kinds, first in foreign, then in Middle Eastern languages. Foreign journalists did not come to the Middle East in significant numbers or report in significant detail until the Crimean War, in which Britain and France fought on the side of the Ottoman Empire against Russia. Both Western coun­ tries already had an important daily press, and a wide range of readers who wanted daily reports from the battlefronts. This brought two important and related innovations to the Middle East. The first was the telegraph, extended from Western Europe to Istanbul, and the second, inevitably following, was the war correspondent. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 773

Categorization

• XREF: The Crimean War as the hinge that wired the region into European daily press and readers connects directly to Orientalism’s claim that war and imperial crisis drove Western representation.
• SEED: An article angle: the war correspondent as a Mideast genre origin — the region’s legibility to mass Western publics was born from battlefield dispatches and telegraph, not from travelers.