The commercial popular press absorbed and displaced an earlier radical working-class press.

Evidence

Think, in relation to the question of popular imperialism, of the history and relations between the people and one of the major means of cultural expression: the press. To go back to displacement and superimposition—we can see clearly how the liberal middle-class press of the mid-nineteenth century was constructed on the back of the active destruction and marginalization of the indigenous radical and working-class press. But, on top of that process, something qualitatively new occurs toward the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century in this area: the active, mass insertion of a developed and mature working-class audience into a new kind of popular , commercial press. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 998

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Gramsci’s hegemony and to this reader’s ongoing thread on how dominant classes contain popular democracy.