Reporting Realities: Henry Noel Brailsford

This chapter gives an account of the journalism of Henry Noel Brailsford who travelled extensively in the collapsed Austro-Hungarian Empire, where he met with Béla Kun, leader of the short-lived Hungarian Socialist Republic; and in the newly formed Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, where he was able to report in detail the working of a sovietised factory. The chapter unpacks Brailsford’s highly critical accounts of the Treaty of Versailles and the formation of the League of Nations, and offers a theoretical account of the ontology of journalism based on practical language acquisition and movement through the world, as an alternative to high theory and its emphasis on language-as-such.