This article examines how three elite newspapers – the Daily Telegraph, The Times, and the Manchester Guardian – used correspondence columns to promote informed and balanced public debate, showing how this was independent of editorial arguments as part of extended commitment to conceptions of the ‘educational ideal’. It focuses on the campaign of the Women’s Social and Political Union, and particularly hunger strikes and the government’s response of forcible feeding, to evaluate how public figures with authority and institutional credibility engaged with each other in the press. With regard to the work of Jürgen Habermas, the article also considers how an effective public sphere was framed and maintained in elite newspapers, but also how access was partially circumscribed based on expertise and social status in line with the wider nature of Edwardian democracy.

本文考察了三个精英报纸——《每日电讯报》、《泰晤士报》和《曼彻斯特卫报》——如何使用通信专栏来促进知情和平衡的公共辩论，展示这如何独立于编辑论点，作为对“教育”概念的延伸承诺的一部分。理想的'。它侧重于妇女社会和政治联盟的运动，特别是绝食抗议和政府对强制喂食的反应，以评估具有权威和机构信誉的公众人物如何在新闻界相互交流。关于 Jürgen Habermas 的工作，文章还考虑了精英报纸如何构建和维护有效的公共领域，