A Narrative History of the American Press

Gregory Borchard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317331728
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Beginning with the American Revolution and spanning over two hundred years of American journalism, A Narrative History of the American Press provides an overview of the events, institutions, and people who have shaped the press, from the creation of the First Amendment to today. Gregory A. Borchard's introductory text helps readers develop an understanding of the role of the press in both the U.S. and world history, and how American culture has shaped—and been shaped by—the role of journalism in everyday life. The text, along with a rich array of supplemental materials available online, provides students with the tools used by both reporters and historians to understand the present through the past, allowing readers to use the history of journalism as a lens for implementing their own storytelling, reporting, and critical analysis skills.

1
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Pre-Revolution Print

The Colonial Origins of the American Press

This chapter explains the role of the press in the American Revolution, focusing on the ways particular colonists used newspapers as a tool to call for a political separation from Britain.

• Among these printers, the chapter features Benjamin Franklin’s work as illustrative of a publishing style that reached a wide audience, noting how diverse content and contributors fueled news literacy in the decades preceding the Revolution;
• and the chapter features the way Samuel Adams used his Boston Gazette to propagandize the colonists’ move toward independence, as his print accounts of events swayed ambivalent readers to oppose British rule.

Using materials from this chapter, students should be able to explain why those in the press still practice Franklin’s approach to publishing as a way to maximize profits.

• Conversely, they should also be able to describe how the press and popular publications—sometimes by publishing only one side of the story—persuaded readers at the time to increasingly support calls for independence from Britain;
• and they should differentiate between the notion of balanced reporting (or “objective reporting”) with efforts to attract advertisers, or Franklin’s approach to sustaining a profitable enterprise.

Key words, names, and phrases associated with Chapter 1 include:

• Postmasters, the postal exchange;
• Benjamin Franklin, Apology for Printers, Elizabeth Timothy;
• the radical press;
• and Samuel Adams, Boston Gazette, the Boston Massacre.

The transition from the press of America’s colonial days to the one we find familiar today did not happen overnight. It evolved over centuries, growing from movements that set different standards for understanding the purpose and the utility of the printed press, first, and later of media we now commonly use. To grasp the roots of contemporary standards, we can begin by looking at the colonial era, keeping in mind—as the rest of this book illustrates—that both storytelling and history is a process, one that unfolds over time. And as each subsequent generation in American history has learned (and sometimes forgotten) lessons from the experiences of our past, the press of today has an indelible link to the contributions of the people and practices preceding it.

Although the development of the colonial press itself had antecedents in the contributions of previous generations, the years between the trial of John Peter Zenger and the outbreak of the American Revolution marks an extraordinary moment for study. Colonists had established a network of postmasters who received copies of foreign publications and distributed them to a wide range of readers. The postmaster accordingly assumed responsibility for not only delivering news but also establishing newspapers in towns emerging up and down the East Coast. Postmasters filled publications with news gleaned from journals across the Atlantic and from other postmasters and printers in the colonies. This network provided colonists with information that contributed to the formation of a unique social consciousness, creating an identity separate from their ancestral roots, which for many of them would entail a breaking of ties with the governing political system imposed by England.

Two major types of print—newspapers and pamphlets—addressed colonial politics in the years leading to the American Revolution. Often written by elites under pseudonyms and published by booksellers, newspapers served as messengers of these ideas, carrying commercial information for a wide range of readers. With roots in the popularization of contested ideas during the English Civil War, pamphlets also contributed in a large way to the dissemination of the revolutionary ideas in the colonies (see this book’s Introduction).

By the 1770s, dozens of newspaper printers functioned in the American mainland, each producing a four-page issue every week. These weekly papers sometimes reached the public as one-sheet broadsides, a large sheet of paper printed on one side only as a poster for reading in town squares. Because of the structure of the newspaper business in the eighteenth century, the stories that appeared in each paper were “exchanged” from other papers in different cities, creating a uniform effect akin to a modern news wire. With no copyright fees, required permissions, or even rules for giving credit for the use of previously published material in newspapers, the exchange system allowed publishers to reproduce stories, providing Revolutionaries a way to develop a sense of unity among colonists.

The Culture of Colonial Printers

The major source of income for publishers came from political contributors, which included subscriptions and advertisements bought by supporters and partisans who subsidized like-minded content. Partisans in the government rewarded publishers for their affiliations and loyalty by providing them with printing contracts.

At the same time, in the years preceding the American Revolution, newspapers matured as venues through which publishers could promote their own particular opinions. Historians have since recognized that the ability of printers to express themselves individually and as a group separate from English control played a role in the outbreak of the Revolution itself. Beginning in the 1760s and into the period in which the most vocal calls for independence would erupt, the number of newspapers in the colonies more than doubled, with major publishing centers emerging in Annapolis, Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Williamsburg.

During this era preceding the Revolution, social class depended on a combination of appearance, demeanor, personal habits, education, and occupation, and while those who paid for newspapers often enjoyed an elevated class status, those who printed the materials tended to do worse. Printing demanded long hours and sleepless nights. Type was set by hand, a letter at a time, in a hand-held composing stick, locked into a frame and placed on a press. Before each impression, type had ink applied to it, and the press produced prints one sheet at a time. Even though the process of printing at the time required extensive labor, those who did it often received little pay. In public, a printer might have revealed himself with physical deformities that resulted from pulling on a hand press over time, which included an elongated right arm, a limp, or back injuries. Printing office culture also tended to revolve around on-the-job drinking as a way to relieve both boredom and pain, contributing to alcoholism and other health issues.

Yet, this culture—or subculture, as it were—built a community among colonists that began to act more independently by the mid-eighteenth century, with colonial printers exercising voices that spoke for particular audiences, increasingly without regard to the dictates of a British Crown thousands of miles away. In 1754, for example, during the French and Indian War, publishers included the first cartoon in American newspapers, which called for colonial unity. The picture showed a snake cut into sections with each part representing a colony, and accompanying it, the caption: “Join or Die.” Symbolically, the cartoon not only represented the creator’s ability to create new forms of imagery with the newspaper industry but also reflected the growing sense of loyalty among colonists to one another. The creator’s name was Benjamin Franklin.

Benjamin Franklin and Elizabeth Timothy

Often heralded as an American renaissance man, Benjamin Franklin exercised many talents, perhaps none more effectively than as a printer, a skill he gleaned at an early age while apprenticing for his brother James. Even though subsequent generations later knew him for a host of achievements—as an author, political theorist, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, and diplomat—he identified himself in his Autobiography primarily as a printer, which in fact was among his most lucrative pursuits.

Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin was born January 17, 1706, in Boston, Massachusetts. He contributed directly to the language in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, but he identified chiefly as a printer and a publisher, setting the course of journalism on a path still traveled today. As a boy, Franklin enjoyed reading books. He followed the career of his brother James Franklin, a printer, and when Benjamin turned 15, he joined James in printing the New England Courant, the first newspaper in Boston. Under the pseudonym “Silence DoGood,” Benjamin started his career as a journalist and later left for Philadelphia to start on his own. During his time in Philadelphia, he established himself with enough money to run his own printer shop as well as a regular shop with his wife, Deborah Read. He then started a newspaper that set a business precedent for modern journalism. Buying the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1729, he funded and contributed to the paper as a journalist where his work gained financial support. In 1733, Franklin began producing Poor Richard’s Almanack under the pseudonym Richard Saunders. In 1737, the British Crown Post appointed him postmaster of Philadelphia, a position that helped a publisher gather and distribute news. As postmaster, Franklin could decide what newspapers could travel inexpensively or at no cost in the mail—or in the mail at all. Franklin surveyed post roads and post offices. He introduced a simple accounting method for postmasters and had riders carry mail both night and day. Having a news background himself, Franklin mandated delivery of all newspapers for a small fee, a practice instrumental in later legislation that encouraged the circulation of information as essential to the republic.

Franklin’s career—as was his approach to almost every facet of life—took an innovative approach to the industry. His model for publishing set a template for future generations, as he linked print shops and post offices in a coastal chain, spreading news throughout the colonies.

Franklin also had a knack for making money, and in doing so, he became a powerful voice for colonial interests. The Pennsylvania Gazette and Poor Richard’s Almanack, likely his most famous publications, demonstrated his adeptness at the business of publishing, with the Gazette achieving a commercial success more than virtually any other colonial newspaper and the Almanack wielding wide cultural significance. As newspapers founded under Franklin’s supervision generally prospered and as troubles with Great Britain mounted, Franklin himself emerged as among the leading voices that posed an increasing threat to English dominance over the internal affairs of its subjects.

Still in his twenties and only a few years after launching the Pennsylvania Gazette, a remarkable incident involving advertisers led him to write a classic series of articles still cited today on the necessity of running a newspaper both wisely and profitably, which in Franklin’s estimation were one and the same. At the time, a group of the newspapers’ readers—specifically, clergy—had taken offense to words used in an advertisement that they felt had discriminated against them. These particular readers were angry with the publisher and the newspaper itself for having referred to them as “Sea Hens” and “Black Gowns” and therefore decided to organize a boycott.

In addressing the complaints of the clergy and others offended by the contents of the ad, Franklin explained that he published a wide range of content, and even though derogatory phrases might from time to time appear in print, just as much content reflected positively on the same subjects. The newspaper, Franklin wrote, depended on publishing whatever content could create revenue. The publication of his “An Apology for Printers” appeared in the Pennsylvania Gazette, June 19, 1731, explaining his rationale. “Being frequently censur’d and condemn’d by different Persons for printing Things which they say ought not to be printed,” Franklin wrote, “I have sometimes thought it might be necessary to make a standing Apology for my self, and publish it once a Year, to be read upon all Occasions of that Nature.”

Printers are educated in the belief, that when men differ in opinion, both sides ought equally to have the advantage of being heard by the publick; and that when truth and error have fair play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter: Hence they cheerfully serve all contending writers that pay them well, without regarding on which side they are of the question in dispute.¹

“If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody,” Franklin concluded, “there would be very little printed.”

While media professionals today describe this style of publishing as telling “both sides of a story” (or, in other respects, being fair and objective), Franklin had advanced the approach for slightly different reasons. While he recognized that there is indeed more than one side of any story, he looked to attract various voices because—from a business standpoint—it just made good economic sense to welcome all readers as potential subscribers and, even more importantly, to attract a diverse and voluminous range of advertisers. In other words, if publishers—or any other practitioners of news for that matter—want to survive, they should include as much content as possible from a diverse range of sources.

The talent for business Franklin displayed with the Pennsylvania Gazette shined in another famous publication, Poor Richard’s Almanack, first published not long after his “Apology.” Franklin, who adopted the pseudonym of “Poor Richard” or “Richard Saunders,” published the Almanack annually from 1732 to 1758 and did so with remarkable success, printing 10,000 copies per year. The content published offered a mixture of seasonal weather forecasts, practical household hints, puzzles, and other amusements, with most or nearly all entries offering financial advice to readers.

To this day, we find sayings from the Almanack repeated as witty phrases, as readers took to heart, among many others, the following sayings.

• As Pride increases, Fortune declines.
• Drive thy Business, or it will drive thee.
• Great spenders are bad lenders.
• Haste makes waste.
• Having been poor is no shame, but being ashamed of it, is.
• If you know how to spend less than you get, you have the philosopher’s stone.
• Keep thy shop, and thy shop will keep thee.
• No gains without pains.
• Nothing but money, is sweeter than honey.
• Patience in market, is worth pounds in a year.²

It should come as no surprise—with one of his most famous sayings being “a penny saved is a penny earned”—that his portrait was later sele...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Pre-Revolution Print: The Colonial Origins of the American Press
• 2 Thomas Paine, the Partisan Press, and “The Dark Ages of American Journalism”
• 3 The Penny Press: Sensationalism, Populism, and Progress
• 4 Nineteenth-Century Publishing Innovations in Content and Technology
• 5 The Press in the Civil War Era: Pioneers in Print and Photography
• 6 The Press in Transition: From Reconstruction to the Gilded Age
• 7 Muckraking: Reporters and Reform
• 8 Yellow Journalism: Pulitzer and Hearst Battle for Readers
• 9 Public Relations: How the Press Launched an Agency of Its Own
• 10 Early Infotainment in Broadcast and Film
• 11 The Press at War: Propaganda in Print and Film
• 12 The Press in the Cold War: Murrow, McCarthy, and Shakespeare
• 13 New Journalism and the Counterculture: Watchdogs and Watergate
• 14 The Press and the Making of Modern Media
• Conclusion
• Afterword
• Glossary
• Index