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âPRINCIPLES, OPINIONS, SENTIMENTS, AND AFFECTIONSâ
The Journalism Out of Which the United States Was Born
Perhaps because journalists are so focused on the here and now, they tend to avail themselves less of the lessons of their forbearers than do presidents, say, or painters. But if in their current crisis they were disposed to consult history, our journalists might discover that âexperienced reporters going placesâ was not always considered to be at the heart of American journalism.
Bill Keller insists that this kind of âquality journalismâ provides âthe information you need to be an engaged citizen.â1 The founders of this country certainly did agree that the citizenry requires a free press. âWere it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government,â wrote Thomas Jefferson in an oft-quoted but still grand line from a 1787 letter, âI should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.â2
Jefferson spoke in that letter of the importance of giving the people âfull information of their affairs throâ the channel of the public papers.â But it is hard to see how, for Jefferson as for Keller, supplying that information might have involved reporters âbearing witness, digging into records, developing sources, checking and double-checking.â3 For in Jeffersonâs America, in James Madisonâs America, in Benjamin Franklinâs America, there werenât any reporters.4
All the worldâs newspapers today can trace their ancestry, if you look back far enough, to Europe. And the earliest printed newspapers in Europe, which appeared in the first decades of the seventeenth century, were mostly collections of short, paragraph-length news items.5 The oldest surviving weekly newssheet written in English and distributed in London was printed (in freer and more precocious Amsterdam) on December 2, 1620. Its first item concerned Bethlen GĂĄbor, who led a revolt against Habsburg rule in Hungaryâan early battle in the Thirty Years War. The style of this item is typical of the genre:
Out of Weenen, the 6 November
The French Ambassadour hath caused the Earle of Dampier to be buried stately at Presburg. In the meane vvile hath Bethlem Gabor cited all the Hungerish States, to com together at Presburg the 5. of this present, to discourse aboute the Crovvning & other causes concerning the fame Kingdom.6
According to Carlota Smithâs linguistic analysis of âmodes of discourse,â this article qualifies, as would most such early newspaper items, as a âreport.â It doesnâtâto oversimplify her multifaceted analysisâadvance in temporal sequence as a ânarrativeâ might. Time is not âstatic,â as in a âdescription.â The itemâs account is not general and atemporal, as is an âinformation.â Instead, specific âsituations are related to the time of the reportâââthis present,â âthe 6 November.â And, of most significance for our purposes, this item is not making a âclaimâ or âcomment,â as an âargumentâ might. It is not composed of âpropositionsâ as an argument would be.7
I donât want to lean too heavily on these categoriesâor on the others it will prove interesting to trot out in succeeding pages. Despite the linguistsâ best efforts at precision, reports, narratives, descriptions, informations, and even arguments do have a way of blending into each other. Human language resists categorization. When Bill Keller or Jill Abramson are talking about journalism, they certainly do not mean to exclude narrative, description, or information. Yet they are usually talking of kinds of discourse that are most comfortably designated âreports.â So it is significant to see a report atop the first English-language newspaper.
But it is also important to note that this first English-language newspaper report is not the product of behaviors Keller or Abramson might recognize as reporting. Because such newssheets were too slow to keep up with local news and too cautious, given the danger of annoying the authorities, to cover national news, these earliest European printed newspapers discussed almost exclusively events that had taken place in other countries. (Major events in London may have been discussed in letters out of London and therefore may have appeared in newspapers all across Europe, with one copying the other, but they normally did not appear in newspapers in London.)
The short items from afar that filled the columns of these early printed newssheets arrived almost exclusively via the mail or via other newspapers. Indeed, at the very top of page one of that first newspaper published in Englishâwhich makes do without a nameâis a telling apology: âThe new tydings out of Italie are not yet com.â There is no evidence that those who produced such newspapers made significant efforts to seek out âtydingsâ on their own. They waited for them to âcom.â News of that burial and assembly in Pressburg (now Bratislava), which appears right after that apology, must have arrived in a letter or newssheet originally from Vienna, perhaps having passed through some other letters or newssheets along the way.
America gained its first regularly published newspaper, the Boston News-Letter, in 1704. Back in England by that time, those short bits of foreign news were being supplemented and even nudged aside by disquisitionsâon contemporary manners and mores, on society, on literature, on philosophy, on religion, or on politics, even British politics. The first issue of the News-Letter, for example, borrowed from a London paper a summary of a âletterâ warning of a âdangerâ to âthe Protestant Religionâ because Catholics had begun to âswarmâ in Scotland.8 Most of these longer, more pointed writings Carlota Smith would label âarguments.â
This change is a fateful one, according to the German political philosopher JĂźrgen Habermas. In the eighteenth century, he observes, the newspaper becameâin âbourgeoisâ societies, with âliberalâ politicsââno longer a mere organ for the spreading of news.â Habermas quotes the German economist and early journalism scholar Karl BĂźcher: ââNewspapers changed from mere institutions for the publication of news into bearers and leaders of public opinion.â â For Habermas, the consequence of this vigorous circulation of opinionâeven though it might upon occasion descend to warnings about swarming Catholicsâwas nothing less than the creation of his treasured âpublic sphere.â9
We can watch this sphere expand in 1721 in Boston, where a debate broke out about the merits of smallpox inoculation. That debateâand therefore this nascent public sphereâwas very much aided and abetted by the arrival of Bostonâs third and Americaâs fourth regularly published newspaper. For in its initial issue, James Franklinâs New-England Courant launched what probably qualifies as Americaâs first anti-authoritarian newspaper crusade on this new strategy for protecting against smallpox.10
The unsuccessful prosecution of John Peter Zenger fourteen years later for publishing criticism of the governor of New York would open the door to more such newspaper crusades in Britainâs American colonies. Indeed, America in the decades leading up to its revolution is, perhaps, the textbook example of the power of an opinion-wielding press not just in toppling a system of authority, but in creating a space for public discourse and therefore for democracy. Let the record show, however, that James Franklinâs New-England Courantâamong the earliest megaphones in this world-changing effort to allow a public to be heardâwas crusading against what it called âthe dubious, dangerous Practice of Inoculation.â11
Benjamin Franklin was working as an apprentice on his much older brotherâs newspaper. Soon he himself began contributing to this still relatively new phenomenon: the public discussion of issues in print. Sixteen-year-old Ben Franklin, writing under the name âSilence Dogoodâ and in the voice of a rural widow, began sneaking essays into the New-England Courant. Here is âMrs. Dogoodâ attacking something young Ben was making do without: higher education (that is, Harvard):
I reflected in my Mind on the extream Folly of those Parents, who, blind to their Childrens Dulness, and insensible of the Solidity of their Skulls, because they think their Purses can afford it, will needs send them to the Temple of Learning, where, for want of a suitable Genius, they learn little more than how to carry themselves handsomely, and enter a Room genteely, (which might as well be acquirâd at a Dancing-School,) and from whence they return, after Abundance of Trouble and Charge, as great Blockheads as ever, only more proud and self-conceited.12
Although the debate over a college education was not a matter of life and death like the debate over smallpox inoculation, it was no doubt a matter of public concern. And this apprentice printer was helping open space for discussion of such concerns. He accomplished this, as aspiring âbearers and leaders of public opinionâ usually do, by expressing and defending an opinionâin his case, with characteristic humor. Ben Franklin, to return to Carlota Smithâs categories, had composed an âargumentââreplete with claims, comments, propositions.
Smith has a formula, too, for determining whether a particular discourse qualifies as âsubjective,â a different distinction in her view than that between argument and report. She looks for evidence that it presents a âperspective,â performs an âevaluation,â or shares the âcontents of [a] mind.â Smith is alert to the fact that such subjectivity can be found in all her âmodes of discourseâ13âpresumably including upon occasion even those brief reports that more discursive arguments were beginning to overshadow in colonial Americaâs press. A positive perspective on or evaluation of the anti-Catholic Hungarian leader Bethlen GĂĄbor can, for example, be discerned even in that fifty-five word report that led off the first English-language newspaperâsold in Protestant England, printed in Protestant Amsterdam.
Nevertheless, Smithâs indicators of subjectivity run thick in Franklinâs argument against higher educationââI reflected in my Mind on the extream Follyââas they run thick in his brother Jamesâs paper in general and in arguments in general. The public sphere in eighteenth-century America was being established by unabashedly subjective arguments.
Benjamin Franklinâs Silence Dogood letters borrowed some of their style from Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, who had commented on the behavior of their contemporaries with subtle wit and sharp insights earlier in the century in their London daily the Spectator.14
Collections of the Spectator were prized in Britainâs American colonies; young Franklin had secured one. And he had begun disassembling Addison and Steeleâs prose: jotting down the points made by each sentence, putting those sentences aside for a few days, then trying to re-create their wordings. âBy comparing my work afterwards with the original,â Franklin writes in his Autobiography, âI discovered many faults and corrected them; but sometimes had the pleasure of fancying that in certain particulars of small import I had been lucky enough to improve the method or the language.â15
Franklin, in other words, had not trained himself for newspaper work by showing up at local fires or meetings, notebook in hand, and distilling out the who, what, when, and where. That was not considered newspaper work in America in the eighteenth century. He had learned the printerâs trade, but Ben Franklin also trained himself by learning how to write clearly, cleverly, attractively, and insightfully by studying the work of the essayists Addison and S...