Making Headlines represents the product of an enormous archival effort. Bickham must have spent months at the British Library's newspaper annex in Colindale – a bleak and inhospitable archive – trawling through countless editions of the forty-six newspapers cited in the bibliography. Even without consulting every issue of every paper published between April 1775 and September 1783, this was a task of Herculean proportions. To this is added an impressive survey of the secondary literature, and the incorporation of such novel sources as the senior common room “betting books” of Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

Bickham's research shows that the British press was not simply a vehicle of party propaganda, and that newspapers should not be viewed merely as “party bugles operated by corrupt editors in search of bribes or satisfying personal vendettas” (9). In his 1967 study The American Revolution and the British Press, Soloman Lutnick suggested that both the government and the opposition Whigs subvented newspapers to ensure complimentary coverage. In contrast, Bickham paints a picture of a relatively free and market-driven medium. The newspapers of the late eighteenth century, he argues, were large financial concerns, whose profits came primarily from sales and advertising revenue, not from bribes. As a consequence, they were more responsive to the opinions of the reading public than to those of the government or the opposition.

The notion that the press reflected public opinion is central to Bickham's contention that the distribution of press opinion should be taken to equate, however roughly, with the distribution of public opinion. In support of this argument, he offers an array of statistics on press circulation and readership, estimating that around one-third of the London population and one-fifth of the provincial population either regularly read a paper or had one read to them. The sheer size of the newspaper industry and the existence of rival newspapers not only in London but in many provincial centres is taken to prove that papers could not print news and views that would antagonize too many of their potential readers. Perhaps. But then, perhaps not. Media studies scholars are divided over the extent to which newspaper content is subject to consumer or producer sovereignty. Advocates of the former view, amongst which Bickham would presumably count himself, argue that, in a market economy, press content broadly reflects public opinion. On the other hand, advocates of a theory of producer sovereignty, many of whom are influenced by Marxism and the writings of the Frankfurt school, would argue that editors and proprietors act largely independently of public opinion, and are, moreover, frequently architects of that opinion. Given the contested state of the debate over press influence, Bickham would perhaps have done better either to curb his claims for the link between press and public opinion, or to engage more directly with these debates.

Yet even if press coverage is not a clear key to public opinion, it is nonetheless interesting. Bickham links the vicissitudes of press opinion to military developments, showing that the press was initially fatalistic about Britain's potential to resolve the conflict in its favour and consequently argued for compromise, and that once the war broke out that pessimism turned in many cases to calls for a negotiated settlement, despite the brief flourish of optimism after the British victory in New York. Significantly, however, press opinion became much more pro-government after the entrance of the French and Spanish into the conflict, as the American war was recast in the mould of earlier Continental conflicts between Protestant Britain and Catholic France. Finally, Bickham shows how Britain's eleventh-hour victories against the French in the East and West Indies allowed the press to proclaim that the conflict had not been a total disaster, despite the loss of the thirteen colonies.

One of the attractions of the book is its use of visual material, specifically engravings from magazines and newspapers and images from artists such as James Gillray, which were sold independently by booksellers. Several of these, such as The Country Politicians (1784) and Apothecaries – Taylors, &c Conquering France and Spain (1779), poke fun at the armchair generals who debated strategy and criticized the government from the peace and quiet of home or pub, armed with news and analysis gleaned from the press. Communal reading and heated discussion of the press was apparently a familiar enough image to be parodied by engravers. More interesting, however, are the allegorical depictions of the colonial conflict, in which the Americans are often represented by the figure of an American Indian. An analysis of these images and what they implied about British attitudes both towards colonials and towards Native Americans would have added considerably to their interest as illustrations in the text. As Bickham's first book dealt with the representation of American Indians in eighteenth-century Britain, he presumably could have said much on this theme, and the omission of any discussion of the images is a shame. That said, it would be petty to criticize this rich and ambitious study for not taking on even more than it has.