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MIKE MARTIN
 nyone who thinks the press is biased--either toward the right or left--should read historian Jeffrey Pasley's carefully crafted and lucidly written The Tyranny of Printers: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic. Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, and National Public Radio have nothing on the journalist politicians of colonial America, who openly proclaimed their partisanship, tyrannized opposition candidates, and insisted on the freedom of speech we take for granted today.
"The average citizen has no idea of any of this history," said Pasley, a former New Republic staff writer who now teaches history at the University of Missouri, in a recent interview. "Every general discussion of the press starts with how biased it is, when by any reasonable measure the media are actually less partisan than they ever have been in history." Understanding the partisan press of two centuries ago, Pasley writes, requires a "fairly radical shift in the typical contemporary perspective on the subject of the press and politics." Standards of impartiality restrain modern-day journalists from taking a role as "active political partisans, except on editorial pages and talk shows," Pasley claims. This perspective stands in marked contrast to the days when "journalists once were politicians, some of them among the most prominent candidates, officeholders, and party operatives in the nation." At the turn of the nineteenth century, we learn, newspaper printers and their more collegial counterparts, editors, populated and controlled politics the way lawyers do today. They actively campaigned, for themselves and others, and every serious politician, from Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, fervently courted the press as the preeminent vehicle of partisan power."I think it is completely fair to say that multiparty democratic politics could not have developed or sunk roots without the partisan press," said Pasley. "Driven by the needs of the political fray, early American newspapers reproduced "four times faster than human beings." Freedom of the press  ise men, legend holds, created the U.S. Constitution, and freedom of the press flowed from their pens as a constitutional given. Hard-fought battles win freedom, however, not the wisdom of the ruling class. The printing press became a weapon in the freedom fight, Pasley tells us, by becoming indispensable to the politicians who needed it to secure their power and position.
So closely intertwined were politicians and newspapers that freedom of the press "was necessary for the protection of the first partisan political activists," writes Pasley. Freedom at the turn of the nineteenth century was also a privilege in a basket of related benefits the rulers granted to an institution--the press--they considered an important arm. "The first governments under the Constitution expressed the revolutionary elite's close relationship with the press by conferring unequaled privileges on the American publishing industry," Pasley explains in his book. These privileges included unparalleled freedom, subsidized postage, and tax-exempt status. Often criticized today for their left-leaning politics, newspapers tended to support the Democratic Party even in the eighteenth century. Then known as the "Democratic Republicans," today's liberals were yesterday's rebels, members of the party that emerged in opposition to the Whigs and the Federalists. "The modern Republican Party evolved
The editor-politician Prominent examples of editor-politicians who had an enormous but largely unsung influence on early American politics are William Duane and Benjamin Franklin Bache. Bache, "the favorite grandson of his namesake" Benjamin Franklin, founded Philadelphia's Aurora General Advertiser, so named because it was "stuffed with advertising," Pasley explains in his book. Despite the ads, "it became the most important political journal in the nation and remained so throughout the 1790s." By the time of his death in 1798, Bache had become a full-time Republican Party spokesperson and activist, though in so doing he lost most of the prosperity and social position his grandfather had bequeathed him. A few weeks before he died, Bache took on an assistant, the fiery and outspoken 38-year-old William Duane. "William Duane provides the ultimate example of an editor whose presence helped transform the early American public sphere," writes Pasley. Armed with Bache's legal will, Duane inherited a paper so "distressing in its disorder" that he had to shutter it for a time. With help from wealthy Republicans, Duane reopened the Aurora as a more fervently committed political organ than it had been under Bache. Duane had a "particular talent for sensing the political possibilities of whatever documents or incidents came to his attention and then exploiting them for Republican advantage," according to Pasley. "Though little known among nonhistorians, Duane was, by the end of 1800, one of the most prominent political figures in the country." Working-class roots  ewspapers have a long tradition of upholding the values and dignity of the working person. Many an editorial page passionately supports the modern-day labor movement. Scholars have traced this press-labor connection to early journalistic muckrakers such as Jacob Riis and Upton Sinclair, who found meaty and engaging news in the shoddy and dangerous working and living conditions of America's early factory workers.
Pasley, however, traces the tradition farther back, to the fundamental composition of the early newsroom and the titles of "printer" and "editor." Where the first designation evokes a typesetter carefully placing metal letters on an ink-stained printing press, the second seems more refined. Certain presumptions attach to an editor: education, literacy, the ability to opine clearly and forcefully, the power of the pen, and a less physical occupation. Such a clear distinction between printer and editor, however, "often did not exist in the early newspapers," Pasley explained in an interview. "What I found is that a large number of the Jeffersonian opposition newspapers of the 1790s were run by editors who had been trained as printers, meaning they were artisans or craftsmen who had served as apprentices and journeyman, and actually set type and operated the presses." While political power such as that cultivated by Bache and Duane "came with being an editor," writes Pasley, "the printing background was significant in that it was a working-class occupation." Today, the title editor or journalist has little to do with the apprentice-journeyman-master path. These titles are conferred by college degrees, for instance, in English, journalism, literature, and science writing, both undergraduate and graduate. The rise of college-educated professionalism has made journalism's early working-class roots almost unrecognizable. During the Progressive Era of the 1920s, "just about every aspect of American culture was being professionalized, including history and journalism," said Pasley. "The operative theory of those early professionalizers was that the world was best run and described by experts who applied scientific principles rather than ideology." The press and abolition ext to labor, civil and minority rights have found welcoming editorial arms in the American media. The early abolitionist movement, Pasley explains in The Tyranny of Printers, helped to give birth to this close relationship between newspapers and human rights. "Abolitionism was like almost all other nineteenth-century political movements in needing newspapers to define their 'line' and get the message out," according to Pasley.
Words, which had separated illiterate blacks from educated whites, became swords of emancipation in the hands of mid-nineteenth-century newspaper editors such as Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. These editor-abolitionists became the first civil rights advocates, building the movement to abolish slavery. The emergence of the radical abolitionist movement is usually dated to the founding of Garrison's newspaper the Liberator in 1830. Garrison's paper gave voice to the New England Antislavery Society and the American
Beyond Garrison, many of the other outstanding or famous figures in the radical abolitionist movement were full- or part-time newspaper editors. In 1837, an Alton, Illinois, mob murdered abolitionist-editor Elijah P. Lovejoy in the act of defending his newspaper office. Frederick Douglass, Pasley tells us, edited a series of publications, beginning with the Rochester, New York, North Star in 1847. "It is hard to see the radical abolitionist movement becoming the lightning rod it did without its newspapers," he said. The rise of reportage  volving tastes and economics eventually pushed aside the partisan press in favor of the objective, "balanced" journalistic agenda familiar to most Americans. Contemporary American journalism's prime directive, reporting, "actually emerged very slowly and very late" in the early history of the American press, as Pasley notes. "Big newspapers placed more and more emphasis on actively gathering news, and big national events such as the Civil War created a bigger demand for extensive factual information." A general "elite rejection of nineteenth-century-style politics" during the Progressive Era regarded the partisan press as something "old-fashioned, distasteful, and dangerous," he explained. "Objectivity became everyone's ideal, including the media."
Economic concerns also weighed on the partisan journalist's pen. "Starting with the New York Herald of the 1830s, newspapers that aimed for mass circulation--circulation in the hundreds of thousands as opposed to the thousands--were self-conscious about adopting the imagined viewpoint of the mass audience," said Pasley. By this time, papers sought "vast audiences of everybody rather than the committed ideological segments addressed by the partisan press." Many newspapers became big businesses that no longer required the political money that had once been so important; generally, they found it more profitable to stray from direct party affiliations. "Objective journalism was not really the norm until the 1920s," he said, "and even then you would find a lot of major publications unspeakably and brazenly partisan compared to today." Return to partisan journalism  he Internet and conservative news channels may be resurrecting vestiges of the partisan press today. In our interview, Pasley explained that organized partisan journalism "is very much on the rise again, having been used very successfully by the Right in the last decade or so." He cited "talk radio, the Washington Times, the cable 'shout show' format, Fox News Channel, and armies of new conservative pundits" as old media contributions to the new partisan press. "It's the very partisanship of these outlets that makes them popular," he said. New media partisans include "the 'blog' movement" and right-biased Internet news sites such as World Net Daily, CNS News, and Front Page Magazine. "The Internet has seen a return of small-scale, highly opinionated publications with small but highly motivated and specific audiences and strong editorial lines," Pasley told me.
Conservatives claim they dominate twenty-first-century political discourse because they are more popular. "In fact, no left-leaning counterparts to Fox News or Rush Limbaugh have ever received widespread exposure," he added, noting that "the recent experiment with tired 1970s retread Phil Donahue doesn't count." Today's partisan press, like yesterday's, may also be politically potent. "I think the new conservative media have been a big factor in making the Republicans such an effective political force, and in shifting public debate on many issues in conservative-friendly directions," said Pasley. The transmission fallacy  f The Tyranny of Printers is guilty of a scholarly sin, it may be adherence to the so-called transmission fallacy--the idea that as the media transmit information, the public acts and reacts to the information without discernment. The transmission fallacy assigns an undeserved influence to the press. This criticism may be ironic; but for the early politicians' belief in such a fallacy, the partisan press would never have emerged to become such a force in early American politics.
"The Founding Fathers did ascribe a great deal of power to the press," Pasley told me. Uncertainty surrounds most attempts to measure media influence and either banish or substantiate the transmission fallacy. "It is very hard to measure the media's impact statistically, and most modern studies of 'media effects' have found less impact than might be expected," he explained. For his review of early American media, "I more or less punted the effect question--which cannot be answered definitively for the period I was studying--in favor of measuring the huge presence of journalists in the nineteenth-century political system." Historical perspective he Tyranny of Printers may seem revelatory because "very few journalism and political historians actually study the old partisan press or factor it into their historical interpretations," said Pasley. "Journalism historians mostly teach in journalism schools, so their focus is much more on the development of the modern media industry." People rooted in modern media are "uncomfortable with the whole notion of direct media involvement in politics. They like to downplay its existence, and downplay its impact if they have to admit its existence, shunning any notion that the media might be responsible for the outcomes of the political process." The journalist-as-reporter did eventually overshadow the journalist-politician, consigning the partisan press to history's footnotes, Pasley writes, as "perhaps the one major institution in American society that goes virtually unmentioned" in history textbooks and historical scholarship.
By carefully examining and documenting the early roots of American journalism, The Tyranny of Printers eradicates naive yet widespread conspiratorial notions that label the press a tool of the liberal triumvirate--the labor leader, the lawyer, and the Democrat--for purely ideological reasons. Contemporary pundits trace the connection between the press and traditionally liberal causes back to the heady and radical days of the 1960s. Journalism schools, Vietnam, the sexual revolution, and left-leaning politics, these pundits claim, brought editors into the liberal fold, where they have stayed since, raising conservative hackles on the editorial pages of most major American newspapers. From Pasley's investigations, however, we discover a much cleaner, more natural connection--historical tradition--between the press and various vocations that would only later be termed liberal causes. Journalists once were the very people they often support today--lawmakers, laborers, civil rights advocates, and the rebellious leaders of an opposition political party now two centuries old--the Democratic Party. Antiestablishment muckrakers with seditious left-wing leanings may exist, but Pasley's scholarly treatise on journalistic history debunks any notion of their role in some vast left-wing conspiracy. What emerges in The Tyranny of Printers is a more complete picture of the press as a fluid institution that started on the left, moved to the center, and is now bearing right. The media are dynamic, Pasley shows us. They change with prevailing politics, public voices, and the onward advance of technology. They are, in short, typically American.  Mike Martin is a legal, business, and science journalist for United Press International and such publications as the Medical Post, Journal of the National Cancer Institute, NewsFactor, and National Law Journal. | |||||
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