Newspaper tax
The newspaper tax was a tax , which in different ways to newspapers , magazines or on printed paper in the form of advertisements was charged.
history
With the emergence of printed news papers with political content in the early 17th century, which are already to be understood as newspapers in today's sense, the desire of the authorities and the state to levy taxes on these newspapers grew and at the same time the lower and lower access to the new medium grew To make it difficult or even impossible for middle classes of the population .
In order to be able to control the collection of the tax, the newspaper stamp was invented, which had to be applied by hand to each copy.
What worked in the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands with the Dagbladzegel since 1674, in the Kingdom of Great Britain with the Stamp Tax since 1712, in France since 1787 and in the Archduchy of Austria with the decree of Emperor Joseph II since 1789, became in the Kingdom of Prussia Introduced with the Newspaper Tax Act on June 2, 1852.
Since the content of the emerging newspapers at that time was mostly political in nature, the rulers tried to suppress and forbid critical contributions. Before the introduction of the newspaper tax , the control instruments were: licensing , mandatory bail , submission of specimen copies to the local police authority before the newspaper was distributed and direct censorship . With the advancing democratization and well-informedness of the population, this could no longer be maintained to this extent and the newspapers could be kept more subtly and better away from the masses by means of a tax.
But the newspaper tax could not be maintained for long either. In the course of the extensive freedom of the press that was achieved after the revolutionary year of 1848, it fell successively in Belgium in 1848, in what was now the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1855, in the Netherlands in 1869, in the Kingdom of Prussia in 1874, in France in 1881 and in Austria in 1899.
After the newspaper tax was abolished, the newspaper market exploded. In the Netherlands, for example, when the tax was abolished in 1894, 62 newspapers could already be counted on the market, whereas in 1869 only 9 managed to exist. Developments were no different in the other countries. So-called " groschen leaves " came on the market. One of them was the Daily Telegraph in England, which was launched just 14 days after the newspaper tax was abolished. In Germany , the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung was the first to make it with a foundation in 1891 and in 1914 had a circulation of 1 million. The mass dissemination of information and manipulation of opinion could begin.
The government of Zimbabwe in Africa shows us that the idea of newspaper taxation is still practiced today . In order to restrict and hinder the circulation of foreign newspapers before the runoff election to the controversial March presidential election in June, the government there imposed a luxury tax on all newspapers coming from abroad. The World Association of Newspapers called the tax a punitive tax and demanded its abolition immediately because it violated the right to information , which is anchored in Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights .
See also
- Newspaper stamp
- Press freedom # Press freedom in international comparison
- Press Act, 7 May 1874 version
literature
- Konrad Dussel: German daily press in the 19th and 20th centuries . LIT Verlag, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-8258-6811-7 .
- Meyers Konversationslexikon . 4th edition. Volume: Uralsk - Zz.Brockhaus, Leipzig 1885.
- Brockhaus Konversationslexikon . 14th edition. Turkestan - Zz.LIT Verlag, Berlin 1894.
Further literature
- Georg Elkan: The Prussian newspaper tax . A contribution to the history of press policy using files from Bismarck and the Prussian ministries. Fischer, Jena 1922 (72 pp., A treatise from the seminar for newspaper studies and newspaper practice in Berlin).
Web links
- Newspaper fee stamps as cancellation stamps for fiscal stamps. Arbeitsgemeinschaft Fiskalphilatelie eV, accessed on March 9, 2011 .
- The newspaper stamp - also a stamp tax. Wolfgang Morscheck, Baden Württemberg, accessed on March 9, 2011 (Illustrative examples of newspaper stamps).
Individual evidence
- ^ A b André Krause: The media system of the Netherlands. In: NetherlandsNet. Westfalische Wilhelms Universität Münster, August 2015, accessed on May 31, 2016 .
- ^ Ralf Hecht: The modern media of the Weimar Republic . University of Marburg, Marburg 1995 ( uni-heidelberg.de [PDF; 316 kB ; accessed on May 31, 2016] housework).
- ↑ Newspaper publishers protest against newspaper tax in Zimbabwe. Klein Report, Switzerland, July 8, 2008, accessed January 13, 2016 .