The Coming of Age of American Journalism

Senior Honors Thesis

Presented to The Faculty of the School of Arts and Sciences Brandeis University

Undergraduate Program in American Studies Maura Farrelly, Advisor

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts

By Natalia Wiater May 2020

Committee Members Maura Farrelly Eileen McNamara Neil Swidey

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Professor Farrelly, who challenged me to become a better researcher, writer, and critical thinker. You knew what I was capable of and did not expect anything less. Thank you for your patience reading my plethora of drafts and providing me with the support I needed to complete this thesis.

Along with Professor Farrelly, I wish to express my appreciation for Professor

McNamara and Professor May. You have not only inspired a love and appreciation for the field of journalism, but reminded me to keep an independent mind and continuously strive for improvement.

I am particularly indebted to Tobias Reynolds and Amber Miles. Even in the midst of a pandemic, time is precious, and I cannot thank you enough for your meticulous, time-consuming edits (and amusing comments that put a much-needed smile on my face after hours of writing).

Tobias, I apologize for the 13 edits I did not accept; they will be dearly missed.

To all of my friends and loved ones whose unwavering support gave me the motivation I needed to finish this endeavor, thank you.

Most importantly, I could not have even dreamt of completing this thesis without my parents’ support. Thank you for your decades of sacrifice and hard work: you have given me free reign to pursue my interests and explore my passions, ever confident in my success.

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Table of Contents

Introduction 2

Chapter One: The Truth Will Set You Free 6

Chapter Two: The Business of News 37

Chapter Three: Buy Truth, and Do Not Sell It 62

Chapter Four: Flying Too Close to the Sun 85

Epilogue 107

Works Cited 111

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Introduction

Journalism: A profession defined by overcoming mistakes

The press I know today is not one I would have recognized at the start of my college career. Just four years ago, I thought journalists could do no wrong; they were my teachers, sifting through the news of the day and providing me with the necessary knowledge to be an informed member of society. Over time, I realized that journalists did not reside upon an unattainable pedestal of higher knowledge, but that they made mistakes, just like the rest of us.

Still, the majority of the vitriol surrounding the profession is unwarranted. Editors may publish a headline that lacks context, but they will also listen to their readers’ constructive criticism and strive to do better.1 A journalist’s job is becoming increasingly difficult these days, as she has to deal with not only polarized politics but also readers’ declining trust in news organizations. A newspaper’s role as an educator is put under scrutiny when its readers are divided on whether its motives are pure.

Partisanship does not solely apply to politics anymore; it has permeated the media landscape, dividing people by the way they consume their news. Certain news outlets, such Fox and its many talk shows, are clearly biased in favor of President Donald Trump, his administration, and the Republican Party in general. Then there is the “liberal media” — The

New York Times, CNN, etc. — that Trump incorrectly lambasts as “fake news.” Progressives, on the other hand, criticize those same outlets for being too centrist and objective. For some, the current method of reporting on the news by presenting facts and their context is not enough.

1 The New York Times published an Aug. 5, 2019 article on two mass shootings motivated by white supremacy with the print headline “Trump Urges Unity vs. Racism.” After the paper was met with criticism for ignoring the context of President Trump’s actions, it changed the headline to “Assailing Hate but Not Guns.”

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Instead, they claim news outlets do not go far enough in their political reporting; many of these outlets have been slow to report on Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegations against Vice

President Joe Biden, and only Fox News has reached out to her for an on-air interview as of May

3.2 It is clear that there is a double standard in the way news organizations handled other sexual assault allegations against politicians and the allegation against Trump’s challenger for the presidency.

During a time of increased scrutiny, it is imperative that journalists make an effort to learn from past mistakes and strive for transparency while using the tools at their disposal to serve as the public’s educators. The press has evolved to become an essential part of American democracy, informing the public and serving as its advocate, bringing to light the issues people care about. As the nation was still forming, newspapers were barely allowed to print unpleasant truths about the government; now, it is their responsibility to expose wrongdoing. Journalists seek the truth and report it, making use of objective methods that they developed over time in response to the evolving world around them. Throughout their journey to creating a respected profession, journalists have committed errors and learned from them, improving their profession by establishing new rules and ethical practices.

The profession of journalism we know today did not magically appear; it evolved. It grew and matured over the past two centuries by dealing with challenges that resulted in victories — and failures. It won freedoms, grappled with ethical dilemmas regarding profit, and regulated itself to attain the position of educator of the public. Newspapers provide the information people need to participate in their democracy, such as when they vote in elections. The source of that information evolved over time: The press first gained independence from the government, then

2 Smith, Ben. “Why Won't TV News Book Tara Reade?” The New York Times, The New York Times Company, 30 Apr. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/business/media/tara-reade-joe-biden-media.html.

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from the parties. It then took stock of the parties’ trustworthiness and improved upon it, gaining the respect of the people they served by identifying and overcoming their weaknesses. Then journalists flew too close to the sun: They reached the zenith when they helped remove a president from office, but they may never achieve that level of influence again. They tried but instead angered the very people they served. The press, through its many successes and failures, matured over time, constantly improving and trying to meet the needs of the people it serves.

And if there is one thing journalists can be confident of, it is that there will always be room for improvement.

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Chapter One

The Truth Will Set You Free: The press redefines libel

The press in the United States did not always have the same freedoms it enjoys today; in fact, it used to not have any freedoms at all. At the turn of the eighteenth century it initially served as the mouthpiece for colonial lawmakers who sought to protect their rule. Lawmakers at the time believed the best way to keep order in their new society and prevent harm from coming to the people was to control the information they were receiving, which would ensure that the public’s trust in the government remained steady. As time went on, printers started to make use of their power to disseminate information and began to publish information that did not present their representatives in a positive light. This was the beginning of a shift from approaching the press as an instrument of the government to approaching it as an instrument of the people. To understand this shift, we must understand how libel common laws impacted the printers’ ability to cover the facts and how the truth found its way into colonists’ relationship with the press.

Foundation of the common law

In England, Sir Edward Coke, a judge and politician at the turn of the seventeenth century, was the leading scholar on the issue of libel who established the foundation for prosecuting publishers for years to come. Generally, libel laws allow printers to be prosecuted for maliciously publishing information that is false, though back in Coke’s era, the laws operated slightly differently: Even if the information printed was true, it could still be considered libel as long as it was scandalous, insulting or harmful to a reputation. The truth would not matter; not only did it not count as a defense, most courts simply did not allow it as evidence. Libel charges were often used in relation to protect government officials against the spread of information that

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would place them in a bad light, even if that information was true. Many prosecutors and judges in America would reference Coke’s Laws during trials, and he enjoyed a large presence in the courts even after his death in 1634. His scholarship made its way to the colonies, where inhabitants acquired his school of thought and approach to freedom of speech.3

Coke recorded the cases he argued and presided over as a judge in the Star Chamber, the royal court of England. While serving as the Attorney General of England and Wales in 1605,

Coke spelled out the definition of libel and its applications during his Case De Libellis Famosis.

Coke prosecuted a man who published two poems that mocked two Archbishops of Canterbury.

In his report, Coke wrote that a person may commit a libel, which could come in the form of text or picture alike,4 against a private or public person, dead or alive, “by harming their reputation, even by saying things that are true.”5 Here, the truth was never even permitted as evidence, because it did not matter: the effect on the person libelled was the same.

A libel would be punished by fines, imprisonment or cutting off the libeller’s ears, and though Coke considered libelling a private person deserved a “severe punishment,” libelling a public person was an even graver offense.6 Coke argued that libels against private people incited people of the same family, kindred or society to enact revenge, and might cause quarrels and breach the peace, which in turn might result in bloodshed and violence. Libels against public people, such as government officials, had similar consequences, along with scandalizing the government. Libels gave the appearance that the King had appointed corrupt or wicked officials, and such a perception can prevent the King from being effective as a ruler. There is nothing

3 Duniway, C. A. (Clyde Augustus), The Development of Freedom of the Press In Massachusetts. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1906. (16) 4 Sir Edward Coke, The Selected Writings and Speeches of Sir Edward Coke, ed. Steve Sheppard (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003). Vol. 1. (529) 5 Coke (524) 6 Coke (525–526)

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worse than to have a corrupt person sitting in public office, according to Coke.7 A libel is a form of revenge, in Coke’s eyes, a subtle and sleazy way to harm someone that no one deserves.

People may kill in self-defense, but not poison another in revenge, as that is an act much more secret, making it much more grievous. Coke compared this to libel, writing both poisoning someone or libelling them is a secret action that robs a man of his good name, “which ought to be more precious to him than his life.”8

Through this case, Coke established the common law of prosecuting a libel, which the

British Parliament strengthened in 1662 by passing an Act that regulated printing presses, titled

“An Act for preventing the frequent Abuses in printing seditious treasonable and unlicensed

Bookes and Pamphlets and for regulating of Printing and Printing Presses.” Parliament supposed that the well-being of the government and the regulation of printers and printing presses was a matter of public care, as there had been many instances of people printing seditious and blasphemous pamphlets that dishonored God, the kingdom and the King. In order to regulate what was printed, Parliament created a system that provided licenses for printers, and no one was allowed to print anything that was contrary to the Christian faith, the teachings of the Church of

England, or the government. The law did have some protections for printers: it took steps to mitigate plagiarism and required attribution when reprinting content.9

In 1965, Parliament let the law expire, once again leaving the regulation of the press in the realm of common law..10 At the same time, the colonies were following in England’s

7 Ibid. 8 Coke (527–528) 9 “Charles II, 1662: An Act for preventing the frequent Abuses in printing seditious treasonable and unlicensed Bookes and Pamphlets and for regulating of Printing and Printing Presses.” Statutes of the Realm: Volume 5, 1628- 80. Ed. John Raithby. s.l: Great Britain Record Commission, 1819. 428-435. British History Online. Web. 11 November 2019. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/statutes-realm/vol5/pp428-435. 10 Parliament was divided between two main parties, the Whigs and Tories, causing deadlock and a lack of cooperation between the two.

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footsteps in the way they controlled the press. Governors provided licenses to colonial publishers who could print “By Authority,” a practice that effectively censored printers before they could publish anything in the first place. Because these laws were weakening in England due to the expiration of the Printing Act, the colonies did not have a strong foundation to draw upon to create their own licensing laws, and soon enough they were forced to rely on common law.11

In Massachusetts, residents purchased the first printing press to reach America. They saw a press as an “essential part” of their policy to maintain a religious and moral society that respected the authority of magistrates and elders and provided security against the “ever dreaded injury from the spread of dangerous ideas.”12 In order to keep this peace, ensure a strong government, and facilitate learning, the Massachusetts government brought over the first printing press in 1638 from England, to be placed under the stewardship of the president of Harvard.13

Colonial governments, like their mother country, saw the press as a way to maintain control over the people and to protect the message the public was receiving from being warped.

The governments at the time believed they could not lose the people’s trust in them, which could happen if the people were aware of wrongdoings, small levels of corruption, or criticisms leveled at officials. At the time, this information would be classified as a libel, true or not. Once people read information that led them to doubt their representatives, they argued, the government might cease to function properly. If the government controlled the press, however, officials would be able to ensure that the public was not receiving any information that might cause them to revolt; the colonies would then be able to carry on peacefully. The governments did not have enough

11 Nelson, Harold L. “Seditious Libel in Colonial America.” The American Journal of Legal History, vol. 3, no. 2, 1959, pp. 160–172. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/844283. (161) 12 Duniway (16) 13 Duniway (22)

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faith that the people would instead work to better the system they were in, so they decided to never even risk the possibility.

Libel laws in the colonies before the Zenger case

Though the libel common law remained firm, regulatory practices slowly eroded over time. It was not until the jury both allowed the truth into evidence to be accepted as a defense and broke with the common law when passing a sentence that the common law was severely weakened. Though this was not the first time either of these things happened, it was the first time both happened at the same time, and previous instances were instrumental in allowing this to occur.

Thomas Maule was the first person to be prosecuted for blasphemy in the province of

Massachusetts when he published a book on his theological opinions. He had received a license to print in New York, but when he circulated the book in Massachusetts, the government took notice. In 1695, the Massachusetts Council wrote that his books contained “many notorious, and wicked lies, and slanders” directed at both private people and the government, and that he had subverted faith in the colony.14 Though this case dealt with blasphemy, not libel, it is one of the first instances that the jury broke with the common law, allowing future juries to rule this way again — which they did in the Zenger case.

In his De Libellis report, Coke wrote that a libel is an “offence against the law of God,” and cited Exodus 22, verse 28 (“You shall not revile God, or curse a leader of your people”).15

The Massachusetts Council was focused on Maule’s inflammatory writings against the officials’ faith, and sought to shut that speech down. Maule was not indicted in the courts, however, at

14 Duniway (71) 15 Coke (530)

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least not until he cited Matthew xxvii. 7 and Acts i. 18 to argue that there “as great mistakes in the Bible as any in his book.” This resulted in an indictment on two counts: one for publishing the book without a license, and the other for denying the truthfulness of the Bible.

In his defense, Maule argued that “the printed book was no more to be received as good evidence of his guilt than ‘the spectre evidence is in law sufficient to prove a person accused by such evidence to be a witch,’” leading to his acquittal.16 This was an unexpected move by the jury, as their decision implied the Bible was inaccurate, therefore it was a valid defense on

Maule’s part — it directly contradicted the way the colony was run on a very short leash. The jury decided the law, not just the case; the Salem Witch Trials had recently occurred, and because the truth was not allowed in evidence at the time, the jury was not keen on deciding charges they could not fully prove.17

This case provides one of the first examples of the jury not fully complying with the common law. If it had, Maule would have been found guilty on the basis of publishing something that the government did not want him to publish: “Wicked lies and slanders” against the Bible, or blasphemy. Instead, the jury chose a different path, paving the way for the jury in the Zenger case to also take a stand against common law and rule in favor of the publisher, not the government. In this way, the government lost some of its power over the printers, reducing the amount of say it had over what was being printed by establishing legal precedent that shielded the publishers. This was the first step in establishing protections for publishers against being charged for printing information others did not approve of.

16 Duniway (73) 17 Nelson (166)

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Now that juries have precedence for breaking with common law, we turn to examine how juries began to have a precedent for accepting the truth in the courts. Author Larry Eldridge examined 1,244 seditious speech prosecutions from the court records of every British-American colony before 1700 and found three types of cases: words against government, false news, and scandalum magnatum, the most salient category. Scandalum magnatum means “slandering or scandalizing great men in the realm, including nobles, peers and judges” in English law.18 In the colonies, the law was generally applied to derision or criticism of high-level colonial officials.

These prosecutions can be placed into two more categories: insults and misprision, or unfairness or disloyalty.19 The former category, insults, can be seen in the case of Jeremiah

Jagger in Connecticut, who criticized the parliamentary commissioners, “saying they sat long, but what did they, he could have three of four-plow men should do as much in three or four days,” according to a March 22, 1653-54 court case. The New Haven colonial court fined him

£20 and admonished him for not maintaining “the foundations of government and the laws here established.”20

In such cases, Eldridge found, the defendant was allowed to make his case by providing evidence for the truth of what he had published, but that only had limited success. Though the truth was not recognized as a defense that would result in acquittal, the fact that it was still allowed to be submitted as evidence was a step forward at the time. The truth had no legal standing, but it could exist.In previous cases, judges often would not allow the truth to be heard in the first place. The truth managed to find its way into these cases anyway, which spurred the

18 Eldridge, Larry D. “Before Zenger: Truth and Seditious Speech in Colonial America, 1607-1700.” The American Journal of Legal History, vol. 39, no. 3, 1995, pp. 337–358. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/845791. (338) 19 Eldridge (339) 20 Eldridge (339–340)

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change that ultimately led to Zenger providing truth as a defense and the jury using the truth to make a decision.

For now, however, judges would pronounce that charges were simply “unproven,” and therefore false. This still meant that the accused would be punished, even though that person was able to provide the truth into evidence. The punishments were a blend of compensation for the falsely accused — a public pronouncement that the charges were false or unproven — and something that satisfied the state — a fine or behavior bond, for example. The higher up the official was, the higher the fine was to compensate for the greater damage to his reputation.21

Many scandalum magnatum prosecutions centered on misprision22 charges, as the truth was often not even allowed as evidence, making them easier to prosecute and punish.23 Prosecutors started to go after cases they would have more control over, such as those in which the truth was not allowed to be considered, but this was not a tactic that was successful for long.

The Zenger Case makes its stand

Juries started to stray further from the common law and started to accept the truth as part of the decision-making process, but the pivotal moment came at the hands of a German immigrant by the name of Peter Zenger. He came to America as a teenager and apprenticed under the aforementioned printer William Bradford. Zenger spent the next few years of his life in

Kent County working towards naturalization (which he received in 1720) and receiving printing licenses for Maryland’s laws. At the same time, lawyer Andrew Hamilton also resided in Kent

21 Eldridge (342) 22 Under English common law, misprision was the offense of deliberately concealing information. 23 Eldridge (356)

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County before moving to Pennsylvania in 1718. It is very likely that Zenger met Hamilton, the lawyer that won his acquittal in 1733, a decade earlier in Kent County.24

Zenger later moved to New York and established a newspaper. In 1733, he was charged with libel for insulting the dignity of the King’s government, a case he later documented. The court arrested him for printing seditious libels that raised factions and tumults and inflamed the minds of the people of this province with contempt of the government by insulting the Governor, the King’s representative, and “greatly disturbing the peace.”25 His lawyer, Andrew Hamilton, successfully toed the line between respecting the government and allowing the truth to be a defense against libel, resulting in a monumental transition in the way the British colonies viewed the truth.

The libels in question did not consist of Zenger’s own claims, but reports of other people’s insults. Zenger reported that some New Jersey residents tried to convince New York residents to move to their state, to which some residents replied, “That would be leaping out of the frying pan into the fire; for... we both are under the same Governour.” Others said that New

York residents would be glad to hear that their representatives in the State Assembly did not give in to private whims, nor be affected by the Governor’s “smiles or frowns,” implying that the state’s government did not then work in the interests of the people it presided over. Other

“libels” the prosecution took issue with included the claim that under this inept government, mens’ deeds were being destroyed, judges arbitrarily displaced, new courts erected without

24 Steiner, Bernard C. “Andrew Hamilton and John Peter Zenger.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 20, no. 3, 1896, pp. 405–408. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20085705. 25 Zenger, John Peter. The Trial of John Peter Zenger, of New-York, Printer. Who Was Lately Try'd and Acquitted for Printing and Publishing a Libel against the Government. With the Pleadings and Arguments on Both Sides. (1738). Web. (5)

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consent of the legislature, trials by jury were ended, and men were being denied their votes, all of which was the result of the Governor’s whims.26

The prosecution charged Zenger on two levels: first, to the claims themselves that the government did not work for the people. Second, to the fact that the people said these claims, which could be proven much more easily than the claims themselves. Hamilton focused on using the truth to support his case, arguing that it would not be proper to deny the publication of valid complaints from a free people who have the right to make them. Hamilton made it clear that he was arguing for the protection of Zenger’s right to publish the information, not necessarily for the protection of the information itself or what other people said. He knew that the court would not take well to the latter approach and that it was important to walk the line between fighting for the truth but respecting the government — otherwise he would win nothing.

As he was making his case, Hamilton created a road map for the jury to follow: Jurors first had to recognize that the common law was not the end-all-be-all, because it was founded upon the very idea that the truth did not protect speech. Then, Hamilton argued that Zenger’s actions only proved his love for his country, actions that were spurred on by a desire for that country’s betterment. Such actions should be protected by the truth, Hamilton continued, which ultimately meant that Zenger should not be punished for seeking a better society through honest and respectful means.

Under Coke’s definition, it did not matter what the publisher’s intent was or whether the words in question were true or false because they were still considered scandalous and revengeful. According to Hamilton, however, the existence of a newspaper should not determine a libel, but “the words themselves must be libelous, that is, false, scandalous, or seditious” to

26 Zenger (11)

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qualify as such. Under this definition, Hamilton was asking the jury to decide the judiciousness of the common law, not just the case. If the jury decided that the common law should allow the truth as a defense, it would result in Zenger’s acquittal.27 Hamilton believed it would be unwise nor practical to live in a society where the truth was inadmissible in courts. There had to be a certain level of protected speech that included the truth for society to function, or else that society would be operating under unjust standards.

William Bradford, the attorney general arguing the case, did not agree with Hamilton.

Bradford represented the old guard that still believed truth should not be a protection, for fear of disrupting the peace and order. He said that because the government protected the people’s lives, religion and properties, great care needed to be taken to prevent anything that may scandalize the magistrates, or government officials; such scandals could lead to a loss of faith in the government. Allowing the truth to be admitted as a defense would ruin such efforts. He then referenced Coke’s definition of libel, which included anything that was a malicious defamation of a person that destroys his reputation. A publisher who repeated such information was considered to repeat a libel as well, the attorney general argued, and it did not matter whether the information was true or not.

According to Bradford, there was nothing more scandalous that could be said than what

Zenger had published. He went on to say that the government has been “traduced and exposed” by Zenger, the key word being “exposed.”28 Officials were aware that their actions, if known, would not be appreciated by the people, who would demand change, which could destabilize the

27 Zenger (12) 28 Zenger (13)

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government. So the officials wanted to hide the truth and maintain the peace, even if that meant encroaching on the liberty of the press.

To this, Hamilton responded that the criticisms Zenger published came from an

“extraordinary zeal for liberty,” a sentiment that was later reflected in the Declaration of

Independence. Americans considered themselves oppressed under British rule, and used the power of the pen to showcase their own liberty by declaring themselves free of outside control.

In Zenger’s case, the printer was motivated by his love for his government and his desire to help improve it. “Without liberty, life is a misery,” Hamilton continued, adding that he and the rest of the colonial population were blessed to live under a government where people understood and enjoyed liberty, but that it was also the people’s responsibility to be “upon [their] guard against power.” He pointed out that men in power can injure those below them, and prevent them from speaking out, making those very complaints the foundation of further oppression.29

In the Zenger case, that meant explaining the people’s complaints against that government. Hamilton argued that Zenger appreciated the freedoms made possible by the British system, and sought to protect them, just in his own way — through the press. Both the printers and the government had the best interests of the people in mind, Hamilton said, they were just going about it in different, but still valid, ways. Hamilton argued that using the truth to bring to light problems did lead to a stable government, as it would induce motivation to fix those problems that were hurting the people. All men have the right to “publicly remonstrate the abuses of power” and “complain when they are hurt,” Hamilton claimed.30 He believed that the

29 Zenger (28–29) 30 Zenger (21)

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people were strong enough not to start the downfall of a nation if they knew it was not perfect — instead, they would use the truth to improve the weaknesses they found.

Hamilton qualified this argument by saying this would only work if the truth was presented in a respectful manner, not one that was maliciously tearing down the government and destabilizing society. For example, an official who brought his personal vices to work would alter the case at hand. If an official’s shortcomings did not affect the people’s liberties or properties, it was “unmanly and unmannerly” to bring them to light, but if they did affect liberties and properties, rendering them slaves — having taken away their freedom — then it became problematic.31 He stressed the importance of using the truth in a respectful manner, and only for an honest goal, claiming that was what Zenger did when he printed the information in question. An honest goal that was rooted in truth should be protection from a libel, Hamilton argued, and Zenger’s desire for stability and improvement of society was enough to protect him and his press.

At the time, the truth was not codified into law as a defense, a problem that Hamilton answered next in his arguments. The word “false” in Coke’s definition of libel stood in the way of Zenger’s freedom — though the common law had a history of being broken, Hamilton needed to make his case for why it should be broken in the context of libel laws and Zenger’s actions.

Bradford claimed the word “false” was redundant and already implied, so Hamilton asked the

Attorney General why it was included in his definition of libel in the first place, if its meaning did not matter. Hamilton challenged Bradford to prove that the information Zenger published was false; if he did, Hamilton would admit that the information was “scandalous, seditious and a

31 Zenger (20)

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libel.”32 Hamilton’s defense here rested on the claim of truth: if what Zenger printed was false, then it would be considered a libel. If it were true, it would not count as a libel, creating a legal approach that would work as a foundation for the press actively searching for the truth, even if it was unflattering.

But even though there was precedent for allowing the truth into the record, Chief Justice

James DeLancey denied Hamilton’s request to submit proof into evidence, claiming a libel cannot be justified, and that libels can still be true. Hamilton referenced Coke’s law that said the more truth there is to a claim, the more malicious the claim is, but he argued that this law has not been applied in recent cases and that the truth actually should be a justifiable defense against libel. Due to the constraints of not being able to submit the truth as proof, Hamilton made a direct case to the “honest and lawful men” of the jury to recognize this set back and rule that in such cases, “the suppressing of evidence ought always to be taken for the strongest evidence.”33

Suppressing evidence, especially the truth, is a sign that the evidence is important to the case, and may even decide it; otherwise, there was no reason to prevent it from being entered into the record.

This was important to this case specifically because Hamilton had just argued that Zenger was using the truth to seek improvement in the government and its approach to people’s rights and liberties. Therefore, the truth made a difference in the case: If Zenger was using falsehoods to attack the government, his speech should not be protected, but if he was motivated to better the government by using the truth to shed light on areas in need of improvement, his speech should have been protected. It was only just, Hamilton argued, for the jury to realize Zenger’s

32 Zenger (15) 33 Zenger (18)

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motivations were pure, and that the truth was the key to protecting him. Though officials required respect and trust from the people, they should still be kept accountable, Hamilton argued. “It is truth alone which can excuse or justify any man for complaining of a bad administration,” according to Hamilton, but those who complain using falsehoods have no excuse or justification for doing so.34

Hamilton turned to the jury to say they were the proper judges and it was their right to determine what is at least false, if not scandalous and seditious.35 Hamilton raised the point that everything can be considered libelous, or scandalous, seditious, or an innuendo for some other complaint, so he asked the jury where the truth comes in.36 After a certain point, Hamilton argued, the jury had to accept the truth as a defense. Libel that is scandalous and malicious can exist, but only when it is false or dishonest, otherwise people would not be able to speak out against the government, nor keep it accountable.

Hamilton won. The jury ruled that Zenger did not publish a libel, effectively setting a new standard for future libel cases. It was a standard that was not always maintained, but nonetheless continued to gain a stronger foothold in common law through the decades. Courts started to rule in favor of newspapers and publishers if they printed something that was true, or at least backed up by sources. Or they simply declined to pursue these cases, knowing their legal standing was shakier than it used to be. The Zenger case was a pronounced shift in legal attitudes toward prosecuting libels and admitting truth into the official record, a shift that expanded into the realm of press rights. This new approach claimed that not only did the press have the ability

34 Zenger (22) 35 Zenger (25) 36 Zenger (27)

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to publish the truth and not be penalized, it was its duty to publish the truth and hold officials to their word.

The turning point

The Zenger case marked a turning point in the history of sedition and libel law, as more cases were being dropped, not pursued in the first place, or lost by the prosecution, which was finding it increasingly difficult to take a stand against the truth. Doing so meant encroaching on the freedom of the people; if they were not allowed to criticize their representatives, their liberties were taken away, an action Hamilton compared to slavery. Though this approach was not standardized, juries increasingly became more accepting of this argument, thanks to the

Zenger case that combined a jury that was willing to ignore the common law and one that was interested in the truth.

This shift was seen in a number of smaller cases, none of which were as monumental as the Zenger case, but they each reflected how the new approach to press was taking hold in the

American consciousness. In 1742 publisher Thomas Fleet printed a naval officer’s statement that was corroborated by five others, even though the officer himself denied it. The Massachusetts

Council ordered the courts to open an inquiry but they declined to prosecute, most likely knowing that the jury would not be on their side. Sometime in the 1740s, printer William Parks reported that a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses was caught sheep-stealing. Though the House lobbied for a libel charge to be brought against him, Parks provided legal records of the sheep-stealing case, enough to clear him of any impending charges — the truth was admitted as a defense. Then, in a newspaper printed from 1770–1, Alexander McDougall criticized the

New York Assembly for supporting English troops, but the government realized they would not

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win a case against him and dropped the charges.37 As time passed, printers increasingly had more protections against being charged with libel for printing true information.

Now that governments knew that prosecuting printers for libel would not be easy after the

Zenger case, they had to come up with other ways to stifle speech. They were slowly recognizing the new normal: the press has a right to use the truth in order to keep a check on the government and keep the public informed.38 Since libel laws were based on common law, tradition, and precedent, there was some leeway in interpreting laws and administering legal recourse. There was no nationwide statute that governed libel cases, so state and local governments were still able to work in gray areas.

This was seen in the case of James Parker, New York’s official printer, who published an article detailing the “distressed condition” of residents in Orange and Ulster counties in 1756.

The phrase implied that these people were impoverished, painting the New York government in an unfavorable light as it meant the state was not taking care of its residents properly. In an effort to prevent the information from spreading to the public, the government claimed the article was published to “irritate the people of this colony against their representatives.” Though the court did not charge Parker with libel — knowing it would be difficult to fight the truth — it charged him with contempt of authority and found him guilty of a “high misdemeanor.”39

In this case, the charge was a watered down version of the charge of libel; whether it is true did not matter here, but whether it was seditious, malicious, or scandalous. According to the unhappy government, it was, and Parker was forced to apologize, deny “any intention of giving

37 Nelson (168–169) 38 This was the beginning of viewing the press as the fourth estate, a watchdog over the federal government, a view that will continue to expand over time. 39 Levy, Leonard W. “Did the Zenger Case Really Matter? Freedom of the Press in Colonial New York.” The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 17, no. 1, 1960, pp. 35–50. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1943478. (41)

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affront,” and give up the name of the person who wrote the article. This case proved that publishers could still be charged for printing “insults,” even though the charges were not based on libel common laws. Now that the Zenger case allowed for the truth to be admitted as a defense, prosecutors were not as keen to prosecute cases for libel, knowing their chances of winning had decreased.

Spurred on by the Zenger case, publishers sought to expand press rights, even in the midst of governments scrambling to figure out new ways to control them. Hamilton’s argument for a press that cared for people resonated with the printers who started to argue for their rights to print the truth and inform the public of all the government’s actions, not just the good ones.

Parker, for example, published an article in 1759 advocating against a stamp tax on newspapers, writing, “where Liberty truly reigns, every one hath a privilege of declaring his sentiments upon all topics with the utmost freedom, provided he does it with proper decency and a just regard to the laws.”40

There was a new way of thinking circulating among publishers: They had rights, and their rights included being able to print the truth, albeit in a respectful manner. Limitations could be debated, but at the very least printers should enjoy the basic freedom of publishing information that does not defy laws. Truth as a defense against libel was slowly but surely weaving its way into the public discourse, making its way into becoming an expectation, not a rarity. At the same time, people were warming up to the idea that the press cared about the government, and that the way it went about protecting it was different, but not malicious. The public started to accept the press’ new role as a watchdog, not a partisan mouthpiece, even if the law did not yet reflect this view..

40 Levy (44)

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The outdated laws did not stop the printers who started to use their new rights to explore ways in which they could keep the government in check, such as by publishing criticisms of laws it was passing or actions it took in international relations. Unlike government officials, these people wanted to protect their society by opening up wounds to let them heal properly. To them, the press was a tool to keep the government accountable, not to protect the status quo. Keeping the government accountable does still protect it; accountability is not the same thing as an attack, and publishers were aware of that.

This approach was catching on, and not just in America. In its May 26, 1755 issue, The

Boston Gazette quoted a London newspaper’s April 2 article, “An Apology for the Liberty of the

Press,” in which the anonymous author laid out a case for the importance of the freedom of the press. This freedom was the equivalent of the people communicating their thoughts with the public, an act that occurred by means of the press. The unknown author wrote that the wisest nations were those that contrive the most effective way of governing abuses; because it was impossible to do so through laws alone — increased power can lead to its abuse — the liberty of the press should become the way to govern these abuses.41

The author drew upon the practices of ancient Greeks and Romans, claiming that they enjoyed the liberty of “exposing their superiors” through speeches, writings and the like, in order to convey their sentiments to the public. This was applicable to the present day, and the author claimed that the freedom of the press is “necessary for preserving the liberties of people” under a system of government in which the people cannot directly make decisions for themselves, but rely on representatives, which was the case in England. The press informed the people of the

“fitness and unfitness of measures, approved or condemned by those whom they [the people]

41 Boston Gazette, no. 8, 26 May 1755. (1)

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have trusted, and whom they may trust again,” the author continued. Clearly, The Boston

Gazette’s publishers thought that this argument also applied to the colonies, where people were also unable to make decisions on their own.42 This lack of agency led to increased tensions between the colonies and their mother country, ultimately resulting in a war.

Free press in a new republic

The idea of a free press played a substantial role in the American Revolution; people needed to know that they could push back against terrible government, and they saw that it was possible through the examples of printers using the truth to keep the government in check. This view exploded during the Revolution, when people sought not to improve the English colonial rule, but completely overthrow it. Printers were not concerned with libel charges because they believed they were doing a service for the people: preventing a tyrannical government from bleeding them dry and not providing representation in the home country.

For example, in 1769, James Parker published the pamphlet “To the Betrayed Inhabitants of New York City,” written by a member of the Sons of Liberty in response to the Assembly providing more funds for the King’s troops.43 This was a piece that criticized the government published by the official printer of the state who was willing to publish information that did not look good for that same state. That was the freedom that Hamilton had argued for: the freedom to speak out against the government when it is infringing on other liberties.

Once the United States of America was formed, it was time for a new way of thinking to envelop the nation. Now that the idea of a free press existed, the states had different ways of approaching it and incorporating it into their legal processes. The whole time, the idea of truth

42 Ibid. 43 Jenkins, David. “The Sedition Act of 1798 and the Incorporation of Seditious Libel into First Amendment Jurisprudence.” The American Journal of Legal History, vol. 45, no. 2, 2001, pp. 154–213. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3185366. (167)

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being a defense against libel was not yet codified into a federal statute that provided a uniform basis for prosecution. During their ratifying convention of the Constitution, for example,

Maryland delegates proposed an amendment “that the freedom of the press be inviolably preserved” because in libel prosecutions in federal courts “the constitutional preservation of this great and fundamental right may prove invaluable.”44

In Pennsylvania, delegates spoke about the liberty of the press more than in other states.

Delegate James Wilson claimed that the Constitution did not give the federal government the power over the press, but he clarified that the liberty of the press only guaranteed “no antecedent restraint upon it” and believed that “every author [was] responsible when he [attacked] the security or welfare of the government,” supporting the view that censorship was only allowed after publication if the text in question is an insult to the government.45 This was essentially a distinction without a difference, as the punishment remained the same whether the printers had a right to publish certain pieces of information or if they did not have that right from the outset.

This approach was a farce, with the government pretending to be a supporter of a free press when it did not support any practical protections for it. The result was the same under this approach: printers were still punished for printing things that the government did not approve of and had the bandwidth to prosecute.

Pennsylvania’s original Constitution of 1776 stated that people have a right to freedom of speech “and of writing, and publishing their sentiments; therefore the freedom of the press ought not to be restrained.”46 But such a law was not clear enough, and in 1790, Pennsylvania revised its Constitution to clarify that printing presses were free to every person who examined a branch

44 Ibid. 45 Jenkins (168) 46 Jenkins (171)

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of government’s proceedings. It continued on to say “the free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the invaluable rights of man; and every citizen may freely speak, write and print on any subject, being responsible for the abuse of that liberty.” This is key — the people were allowed to express their opinions, but they had to accept responsibility for them, a clause that opened the door for libel prosecutions. The government, though feeling the pressure to ensure the freedom of the press, still wanted to control it.

The Pennsylvania 1776 Constitution did say that the truth may be provided as evidence in libel prosecutions and that that the jury has the right to determine the law, not just the facts. In prosecutions for the publication of papers, investigating the official conduct of officers, or men in a public capacity, or where the matter published is proper for public information, the truth thereof may be given in evidence. Additionally, in all indictments for libels, the jury had a right to determine the law and the facts, under the direction of the court, as in other cases.”47

The 1790 version was more aligned with the Zenger principles that allowed the truth as a defense, but it did not accept the truth as an automatic victory, as it was still a defense that had to be evaluated by the jury. Even still, this was just one state; each state had its own common law and Constitution through which it evaluated cases, ensuring there was no uniform way of approaching libel prosecutions. For example, Massachusetts had a free press clause in its 1780

Constitution, but also supported prosecution after the fact.48

In addition, the First Amendment was added to the United States Constitution in 1781, along with nine other amendments to make up the Bill of Rights. The First Amendment guaranteed that the federal government could not make any laws abridging the freedom of

47 Ibid. 48 Jenkins (172)

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speech, and its passage marked an official shift in government policy that accepted the idea that the press had some rights on a federal scale. The free speech clause was interpreted differently back then: The freedom of the press could not be abridged prior to publishing it was fair game after that. Under this approach, licensing laws were automatically out of the question, but publishers were still liable for the information they printed.

This challenge was seen in New York, where seditious libel was only tried under common law because the state did not have a free press law. In 1799, printer David Frothingham was indicted by the state at Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’s urging for accusing

Hamilton of abusing his position to make “corrupt financial speculations.” During the trial, the judge refused to let Hamilton testify regarding the truthfulness of the allegations and reminded the jury that they should prosecute under common law. Once it was proven that Frothingham published the information, the jury voted to convict on a charge of libel.49 Though the Zenger case allowed the truth to be a defense, it was a stepping stone, not the law of the land. Yet it existed, and both parties had to figure out a way to incorporate this precedent into their overarching approach of punishing speech they did not approve of — and that came in the form of the Sedition Act of 1798.

The Alien & Sedition Acts

The 1798 Sedition Act was one of the final nails in the coffin for the approach that truth was not a defense against libel. The Zenger case started the movement, but the Sedition Act made it applicable nationwide. At the time, the United States was in an undeclared war with

France and the Federalists felt that the Republican opposition was unwelcome and hindered their efforts, so they passed the Alien and Sedition Acts to gain leverage.

49 Jenkins (173)

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The Act, “An Act in Addition to the Act, Entitled ‘An Act for the Punishment of Certain

Crimes Against the United States,’” stated that people could not “write, print, utter, or publish” or aid someone in publishing “any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States,” stir contempt, oppose or resist laws, or encourage hostile foreign powers to interfere in U.S. matters. If they did, they would receive a fine of no more than

$2,000 and a maximum of two years in prison. The Act also stated that truth was permissible evidence and that the jury had the power to “try the law and the fact.”50 However, states still had a significant amount of history and their own common law that allowed them to interpret this in different ways — namely, just because there was an option to include truth as evidence, it did not mean it was an automatic and valid justification and defense against libel.

In 1800, James Callender published “The Prospect Before Us,” a pamphlet in which he supported Thomas Jefferson’s candidacy for president and launched a “vitriolic attack” against

President John Adams, a Federalist. Callender’s trial was determined under common law in

Pennsylvania, which supposed that libel automatically came from malicious intent.51 However, the Sedition Act, a federal statute, required that the publisher have specific intent to defame the government or ruin its reputation, but a rebuttal of such intent was impossible under common law that automatically inferred criminal intent from publication.

The judge presiding over the case, Federalist Samuel Chase, maintained that people’s opinions should “remain deferential” to government authority.52 He refused to admit the truth as a defense and cited the common law that declared all publications malicious. Chase refuted the idea that the information was not a libel, but a political opinion and claimed that “rather than

50 Fifth Congress of the United States. Transcript of Alien and Sedition Acts (1798). Our Documents, www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=16&page=transcript. 51 Jenkins (193) 52 Jenkins (192–193)

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agitate popular opposition to government policies, citizens should either petition their legislators or choose new ones by election.”53 For Chase, liberty of the press meant free discussion of opinion, but only if it was an opinion that did not stir up any trouble — not a definition that would have held up well among the patriots during the Revolution. Chase was able to use the common law for his own purposes, to create unnecessary nuances that allowed him to rule in his own favor. Needless to say, he was impeached by the House of Representatives for bias, in part for how he presided over the Callender trial, though he was acquitted by the Senate.54

The Sedition Act expired in 1801 and the Supreme Court never had a chance to rule on it.

At the time, only some people saw the First Amendment as having removed the limits seditious speech put on the free press, which was protected by the Amendment. The majority parties, however, claimed otherwise. Both Federalists and Republicans generally agreed that speech could be prosecuted post facto, and that the free speech clause only protected speech until it was published. They argued about the nuances for decades: English common law defined the freedom of the press as the “freedom from prior governmental restraint on publication” — but anything after publication was fair game, the Federalists claimed.55 On the other hand, Republicans said it depended on the state and its respective common laws.

Though the Zenger case did mark the beginning of the end of libel laws, the United States was still a nation greatly influenced by England. The Federalists wanted to apply English common law, not the newer and less uniform common law developed in individual colonies prior to the American Revolution. Republicans cared about states’ rights, and wanted the common law established in the colonies to influence current cases. Both Federalists and Republicans

53 Jenkins (194–195) 54 “Samuel Chase Impeached.” History of the Federal Judiciary, Federal Judicial Center, www.fjc.gov/history/timeline/samuel-chase-impeached. 55 Jenkins (161)

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ultimately wanted to control the press, but were trying to balance their desires and the harsh reality that their ability to do so was increasingly limited. Precedent was on neither side, with confusing and various laws in states that gave courts the ability to interpret federal statutes as they pleased.

Though the First Amendment and the Sedition Act aimed to bridge that gap between varied approaches to a free press, they still failed to cement the idea that the truth was a valid defense against libel. The Sedition Act, which permitted the truth to be used as a defense, did not say it was a defense, but it still codified the principles that came out of the Zenger trial that

Andrew Hamilton used when making his case before the jury.56 Just because these principles were codified, it did not mean they were not always applied, as proved by actions following the passage of the 1798 Sedition Act. The United States government was not in the business of denying freedoms, especially not after winning the Revolutionary War, but it was in the business of maintaining a message. This way, the government could still force people to answer for what they printed, at least on a state level, not letting them skate by if they insulted the government, all while maintaining the appearance of a free press.

But at the time, this was considered to be the norm. “A man was always answerable for the malicious publication of falsehood...,” Federalist John Allen said at one of the debates on the

Sedition Act in the House of Representatives.57 He claimed that the freedom of the press did not grant printers the right to publish falsehoods and slanders, nor to excite sedition, insurrection, and slaughter with impunity. This view continued under the Federalists and Republicans, one

56 Jenkins (166) 57 Jenkins (169)

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way or the other — until People v. Croswell finally cemented truth as a defense in the common law, and the eyes of the people and the government officials.

The final step towards truth as a valid defense

In 1804, Alexander Hamilton drew upon all the arguments that came before him to make the final case for the truth as a defense against libel: that a jury had the power to try the law; it was just to hear the truth out; and that a free press sought to better the government, not destroy it.

The Zenger case set up the foundation for his success and the Sedition Act provided the basis for accepting this new approach on a national level, finally removing any barriers to unanimous consent that a free press that relied on truth was essential to a democracy.

That year, the New York government charged Harry Croswell with sedition for republishing a claim in his paper The Wasp that President Thomas Jefferson paid a printer, James

Thompson Callender, to call President George Washington a “traitor, robber and a perjurer” and

President John Adams a “hoary-headed incendiary,” as well as “slandering the private characters of men who [Jefferson] knew to be virtuous.” This resulted in a scandal for Jefferson in the eyes of the people of New York, a disruption of the peace, and an “evil example,” according to the indictment.58

Prosecutor George Caines argued that when men entered civil communities, they gave up some of their natural liberties — in this case, full freedom of speech. “Calumny and slander, propagating injurious reports, whether true or false, keep alive the seeds of anger” which provoked violence, he claimed. The law was meant to punish, and if it did not have such a power, subordinates could go unprovoked, leading to the aforementioned situation: “For where law ends, tyranny begins,” Caines said, referencing the previous approach to the press that saw it

58 “People v. Croswell.” Amendment I (Speech and Press): People v. Croswell, The University of Chicago Press, press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_speechs28.html.

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as an instrument of the government to keep the peace and embody the message the government wanted the people to know. Still, this was not keeping with the changing times that dictated a new way of approaching the press: A way to keep the people aware of their government’s doings and allow them to make stronger arguments for their own liberties and freedoms, now that they had all the facts. And this new approach was seen in Croswell’s defense, which drew upon the

Zenger principles of the truth being instrumental to keeping a government free and democratic.

When Croswell asked Chief Justice Lewis for the ability to prove that Callender had been paid to print the information in the aforementioned "The Prospect Before Us" pamphlet, Lewis denied his request. Croswell’s defense attorney, William Van Ness, drew upon British statutes to make his argument and claimed that “to publish truth cannot be libelous in any country having a free and elective form of government.” Those British statutes were lauded by philosopher David

Hume, who wrote that Englishmen enjoy the “extreme liberty … of communicating whatever we please to the public and of openly censuring every measure entered into by the king or his ministers.” This was an ironic contrast to the Federalist approach of taking British common law and applying it in the states: Van Ness found his own British philosophy to use as a defense.

Another of Van Ness’ arguments was that of maintaining the accountability of elected representatives: If it was libelous to expose their wrongdoings, moral failures and depravities, it would be the equivalent of taking away the people’s right to choose their representatives, he said.

If truth is a libel, Van Ness continued, it would be the end of the press. Van Ness argued for the press’ right to use its reach and influence to inform the public of the government’s actions and keep that government in check. If the people knew what was going on — whether good or bad

— they would have the ability to speak up and choose their representatives after seeing the full

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picture of who they were choosing. Without the press, the public would not have access to this important information in the first place.

During the hearing, the Attorney General read sections of The Wasp and determined that

“the intent of the defendant was malicious” and found Croswell guilty of sedition. Croswell appealed for a new trial with the help of Alexander Hamilton, who argued on the grounds that

Croswell was never given an opportunity to prove what he printed, that what he printed is not what they are accusing him of, and that the jury should have not solely considered the facts of the case, but the law itself. Because the Sedition Act stated that truth was permissible evidence in such cases, and that the jury had the power to “try the law and the fact,” Hamilton leaned into this part of the law to make his argument. Hamilton wanted to make the possibility a uniform reality, a standard practice in the courts that would allow the press to maintain their freedom to publish the truth.

Hamilton said that the liberty of the press determined the ability to publish “with impunity truth with good motives, and for justifiable ends, whether it related to men or measures.” Exposing evil measures exposed evil men, allowing the people to remove them from office, he claimed, an action that preserved liberty and brought down a tyrannical faction. He drew upon Van Ness’s argument that if the people were not aware of their representatives’ wrongdoings, it was the equivalent of taking away their right to choose them. In addition,

Hamilton drew upon James Madison’s Federalist Paper #51, in which he argued that majorities were the cures for tyranny. Hamilton added to it by saying that the press was essential to this cure, as it used the truth to shed light on the shadows of democracy.

Hamilton also repeated the previously used argument that there were limits to this approach, and that the press had to be a respectful watchdog. An unchecked press “would

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encourage vice, compel the virtuous to retire, destroy confidence, and confound the innocent with the guilty,” he said. People should publish the truth with good intentions, according to

Hamilton, and those checks on the press should be placed in the hands of the jury, not the judges

— the people, not the government. People who were chosen by lot would not be as partial to the whims of the government and less inclined towards libel laws that did not take into account the truth, Hamilton said. Judges, on the other hand, were chosen by the executive and legislative branches, which are chosen by popular elections, making these judges susceptible to the influence of those branches. “Men are not to be implicitly trusted, in elevated stations,” he said.

Hamilton continued on to argue that truth was important when determining whether something was a libel, and that allowing truth into evidence did not go against Lord Coke’s laws; instead, intent should be examined. In addition, he argued that providing the truth is an essential liberty, saying, “truth is an ingredient in the eternal order of things, in judging the quality of acts.” Danger to America’s liberty, according to Hamilton, did not come in the form of troops.

Instead, he said, “the road to tyranny will be opened by making dependent judges, by packing juries, by stifling the press, by silencing leaders and patriots.” The truth set people free — it created accountability and provided an outlet for people to prevent tyranny. He concluded his speech by reiterating his belief that the right to publish the truth with good motives and for good ends is essential to preserving a free government; taking away this right would be a fatal blow.

Even though the justices were deadlocked and Croswell’s conviction stood, presiding

Justices Kent and Lewis agreed with Hamilton’s defense, writing that “the liberty of the press consists in the right to publish, with impunity, truth, with good motives, and for justifiable ends, whether it respects government, magistracy, or individuals.” If the press were to be wholly free, having the right to circulate falsehoods as well as truths, it would become “an engine for evil.”

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Hamilton wove an argument in favor of the press into the consciousness of the public, one that did not just allow truth into evidence, but rendered it the backbone of the free press.

Neither the Federalists nor Republicans could properly argue in favor of restraining the press if they did not approve of what it printed. This case was the turning point that finally bled into

America’s consciousness. The government’s ability to control the press had rested on the fact that there was no common view on libel and sedition laws, but this case gave teeth to the arguments put forth by the Zenger case, and it cemented a legal approach to the press that allowed it to publish the truth without repercussions. Instead of receding into the background, the case made waves. In 1805, the New York State legislature decreed it was lawful for a defendant in libel cases to provide the truth of what was published as evidence. The truth would be accepted as a justification if the information was published with good motives and justifiable ends — echoing Hamilton’s argument in People v. Croswell.59

From then on, courts, judges and juries supported the use of the truth as a defense, and the press was able to maintain its right to publish information that may criticize the government, and therefore keep it in check. The tide had turned in favor of a press that was able to use its power to enact change by bringing to light the actions of the government, good and bad. The

Zenger case made its mark by starting that shift, by allowing the truth to be a defense against a government that did not want its dirty laundry to be visible to the public. Instead, the press was finally able to give people the tools to make an informed decision and fully exercise their freedom to choose their representatives without being punished for it.

59 “Seditious Libel.” Columbia Law Review, vol. 17, no. 5, 1917, pp. 432–435. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1111626. (525)

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Chapter Two

The Business of News: How advertising created an independent press

A press that had the ability to print unflattering truths about government officials was a press that could be used as a political weapon. Burgeoning political parties saw this as an opportunity to unite people with similar ideologies but different geographical backgrounds, strengthening their numbers. These partisan papers also created divides by pitting public officials against each other, exacerbating partisanship, and even promoting ideological bubbles.

Independent papers — those without party backing — sought to bridge this schism by publishing non-partisan content that all sides of the political aisle could read. Instead of relying on parties for sponsorship, independent newspapers tapped into a new, sustainable source of revenue: advertisers. Independent publishers turned their backs on political parties and embraced their relationship with profits, transitioning into the world of sensationalism.

The rise of party sponsorship…

After the Revolutionary War, there was an uptick in printers moving around the country to set up print shops in search of economic and political opportunity.60 By supporting parties and forming communities around newspapers, publishers were able to unite people around common ideologies, which in turn influenced voters and their participation in politics. Newspapers gave parties the ability to localize national issues and make them pertinent to their readers. People in the growing United States were spread apart, and newspapers linked those geographical areas together through postage subsidies provided by the government as well as exchange agreements

60 Cotlar, Seth. “Imagining a Nation of Politicians: Political Printers and the Reader-Citizens of the 1790s.” Tom Paine's America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early Republic. University of Virginia Press, 2011, pp. 13–48. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt6wrmn6.5. (18)

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with other newspapers. The latter allowed a small newspaper in an Ohio town to print news from a neighboring state’s newspaper, bringing the communities — and the nation — closer.61

In this post-war period, newspapers quickly became the transmission belt for party politics. They were the method of communication that brought people together and disseminated information and propaganda, if need be. Newspapers popped up at the same time people did; as

President Andrew Jackson and Vice President John C. Calhoun parted in the 1830s, so did newspapers when Francis Preston Blair created The Washington Globe as a rival to Duff Green’s pro-Calhoun United States Telegraph.62 Newspapers served as the glue that held the parties together; since state and national political parties did not have symbolic buildings, permanent party chairs or spokespeople that represented them, they used newspapers instead. Only in 1848 did Democrats create the first continuing national party committee,63 followed by the Republican

Party in 1856, and even those were relatively weak.

By existing as the main providers of information, the newspapers could control what that information was. They decided which political stances qualified someone as a Whig or

Democratic-Republican64 or whether certain politicians met the standards of a party. The party system was still evolving at the time, with new parties rising and old ones declining. In the early

1790s, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison founded the Democratic-Republican Party, a group distrustful of the federal government. This party later branched off into the Democratic Party in

61 Pasley, Jeffrey. “The Newspaper-Based Political System of the Nineteenth-Century United States.” The Tyranny of Printers: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic. University of Virginia Press, 2001. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt6wrm5f.6. (8) 62 Pasley (9) 63 Though the Democratic Party’s policies and politics have significantly changed since then, the skeleton of the organization remained. 64 Often shortened to “Republican."

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1828, which was socially conservative and economically liberal.65 The Whigs, formed in 1830, served as the Democratic Party’s main competition once the Democratic-Republicans fell apart, supporting a strong legislative branch. The party fell into decline during the Civil War when anti- slavery Whigs joined the Republican Party, which was formed in 1854.66

Newspapers and subscriptions provided a sense of community, identity, and common cause among party members and activists.67 People read the same stories and had the same reference points to fall back on, providing strangers a commonality. Newspapers supported candidates and ideas, which their readers drew upon to make their own opinions and decisions.

At the time, there was no such thing as party registration, but people made their preferences known through newspaper subscriptions.68 Along with printing contracts, newspapers relied on subscriptions for their main source of revenue. If they ever needed more funding, wealthy party donors would prop them up.69

While newspapers were the links to parties, editors controlled those links. An editor was

“his party’s principal spokesman, supplier of ideology, and enforcer of discipline in the area and political level he served. In a very real sense, he was the party’s face and voice.”70 An editor’s cause was the newspaper’s cause; the newspaper was the tool used by an editor to define an issue. Some editors also served as middlemen between politicians and the public, pointing people in the right direction when they needed aid. Others acted like party bosses, regulating party nominations, policies, and patronage. Party conventions mirrored the decisions and views

65 The party ideology switched with the Republican Party’s during the election of 1812, when Woodrow Wilson became the first economically and socially liberal president. 66 “Formation of Political Parties.” Creating the United States, Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/exhibits/creating- the-united-states/formation-of-political-parties.html. 67 Pasley (11) 68 Pasley (12) 69 Pasley (15) 70 Pasley (13)

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already printed in newspapers; editors had the power to dictate the conversation, fulfilling the role of a communications liaison for the party.71

Partisan newspapers also swayed votes and started grassroots movements, such as the

Antimasonic Party that used the press in the 1820s and 30s to reach its audience, not having any other successful means of doing so.72 These partisan papers remained in “safe hands” when their aging editors and publishers sold them, going from one loyal party member to another, and newspaper editors that did not align themselves with their paper’s party were quickly fired.73

Many people who operated in the newspaper business of the early 1800s were even members of state legislatures, such as Gideon Beck and David Foster, publishers who presided over The New

Hampshire Gazette.74 Many other editors served as high-ranking members of their respective parties and were party spokespeople at the same time they were publishing a paper.75

Newspapers became symbols of party strength, especially on local and state levels.76

Rather than being mouthpieces of the government, as they had been in the early 1700s, they were now coming into their own. They still represented government officials, but they were tied to a specific ideology — the party — not the government as a whole. This allowed them to serve as checks on certain politicians and government officials, creating an environment in which people were not afraid to publicly criticize each other. Being tied to a party, however, caused tension and became an easy point of criticism and charges of bias

71 Pasley (14) 72 Baldasty, Gerald J.. The Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth Century, University of Wisconsin Press, 1992. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.resources.library.brandeis.edu/lib/brandeis- ebooks/detail.action?docID=3445126. (15) 73 Baldasty (18) 74 Hudson, Frederic. Journalism In the United States, From 1690-1872. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1873. (156) 75 Baldasty (14–15) 76 Baldasty (24)

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Phillip Freneau was at the center of this kind of controversy. He founded The National

Gazette in 1791 while serving as a clerk under Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson.77 His paper was an “organ” of the Democratic-Republican Party, attacking Federalists such as Alexander

Hamilton. Hamilton grew tired of the attacks and published a pseudonymous notice in The

Gazette, a pro-Federalist newspaper, announcing that the publisher of The National Gazette was receiving a government salary supposedly for providing translations, questioning whether the salary was actually for printing.78 This led to multiple back and forths between Freneau and

Hamilton to try to clear the air and convince readers that Freneau was not in the pocket of

Jefferson, though The Gazette of the United States continued to publish pieces of disbelief.79

Suspicions in the federal government also remained, and on several occasions Washington asked

Jefferson to keep the journalist in check.80

Even though they were not censored or controlled by the government itself, partisan presses were still partisan and remained beholden to parties. Party loyalty exacerbated partisanship and limited coverage to topics the parties were interested in, such as politics and the economy. And just like parties had strong relationships with newspapers, so did the readers;

Democrats tended to subscribe to Democratic papers because they did not want to fund rival parties’ operations. Though this did not matter as long as the Republican paper was receiving sufficient funding, the mutual relationship began to come apart after a while, when a new option arrived: the independent newspaper.

77 Hudson (185) 78 Pasley (75) 79 Pasley (76) 80 Hudson (185)

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… And its decline

In order to stay financially afloat in the early 1800s, newspapers heavily relied on subsidies from the government in the form of lower delivery costs. This was especially important considering subscribers did not always pay for the papers they were receiving — in non- metropolitan areas, some subscribers traded goods for newspapers, but goods did not pay for ink.

So newspapers turned to seek patronage from party members, in the form of relatively small cash payments in rural areas to large donations from wealthy party members in metropolitan ones.81

The federal government also provided a form of help by hiring printers to supply the government with brochures or to print the proceedings of Congress. Though the subsidies were provided by the government, this privilege was given to the printers that matched the party that was in charge of that government. These funds, which provided profit margins of 20 to 55%, were then able to be used for printing the newspapers themselves. In 1833, the executive branch spent $110,004.24 on printing, a number that rose to $174,244.00 in just eight years.82

In the late 1820s and 1830s, newspapers also had a different kind of financial help: The franking privilege, which allowed members of Congress to send newspapers and pamphlets for free through the United States Postal Service. This meant that politicians could choose to sponsor newspapers whose messages aligned with their own, which was highly beneficial to the newspapers who enjoyed shipping at no cost and a large reach.83 Additionally, the Post Office

Act of 1792 gave printers the ability to exchange papers with each other for free and kept the

81 Baldasty (19) 82 Bladasty (20) 83 Baldasty (20)

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prices of sending papers to non-printers low. Mailing one newspaper within 100 miles cost only one cent and one and a half cents for anything further.84

States also provided various forms of patronage or subsidies for newspapers in the form of printing contracts, appointing editors or printers to patronage jobs in the government, giving members of the legislature copies of newspapers, and publishing official notices and laws.

Levels of patronage varied; most ranged from $20 to $50 a year, with the highest reaching $150.

For contracts, some states split funding among various newspapers. Local governments also acted as sources of patronage for local newspapers, establishing a contract with the sheriff, for example.85 Partisan newspapers also enjoyed better access to information through connections with party members as well as increased access to state hearings and party caucuses. This was often problematic for independent papers, who did not have any party ties to rely on.86

As time went on, independent papers started to show up on the map with increased frequency. Independent newspapers were not sponsored by parties, so they were forced to rely on other means of funding, specifically advertising.87 Prior to this shift, many newspapers indicated their party affiliation — ie. “The Democrat __” or “The Republican __” in order to attract readers.88 People automatically knew which newspaper to pick up because the party affiliation matched, and they would be able to read about issues that concerned them the most. Independent

84 Cotlar (15) 85 Baldasty (21–22) 86 Petrova, Maria. “Newspapers and Parties: How Advertising Revenues Created an Independent Press.” The American Political Science Review, vol. 105, no. 4, 2011, pp. 790–808. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23275353. (790) 87 Hamilton, James T. “A Market for Press Independence: The Evolution of Nonpartisan Newspapers in the Nineteenth Century.” All the News That's Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 2004. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7smgs.6. (43) 88 Such political newspapers included The Springfield Republican (based in Illinois); The Baltimore Republican (based in Maryland); La Porte County Whig (based in Indiana); and The Delaware Democrat.

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papers, on the other hand, banked on the idea that readers would subscribe to their papers because they were not beholden not to a party, but to their own sound minds and reasoning.

Naturally, this appealed to advertisers who wanted a larger readership base to reach more consumers that would purchase their products and services. The current system was not working for them as it targeted certain groups, which meant advertisers had to make more deals with more newspapers to reach the consumers they needed. Other than being curated towards a certain political spectrum, some of these newspapers also appealed to different classes. For example, a newspaper for middle to upper-middle class people included information relevant to their status, such as trade-specific information targeted at merchants, and they cost more as a result. People effectively paid for the coverage that impacted them most, and some had to pay more than others. After all, a middle-class citizen was more likely to spend on products they saw in ads compared to a citizen with a smaller income, so those middle-class citizens had to pay more for their news and ads as well.89 An independent newspaper that had something for everyone, on the other hand, meant advertisers would be able to reach more consumers than before.

How was an independent paper different?

Independent newspapers meant a variety of things: They might not focus on politics at all, adopt neutrality, or support policies and candidates on principle rather than out of party loyalty.90 The generally accepted advent of independent newspapers came with the penny press newspapers, such as The Sun or The Herald in New York City, in the 1830s. In its first edition in

1835, The Herald’s founder James Bennett wrote that “we shall support no party—be the organ of no faction or coterie, and care nothing for any election or any candidate from president down

89 Hamilton (40) 90 Hamilton (45)

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to constable.” He later promised that The Herald would “give a correct picture of the world—in

Wall Street—in the Exchange—in the Police-Office—at the Theatre—in the Opera—in short, wherever human nature and real life best displays their freaks and vagaries.”91 A Sun advertisement from 1880 marketed the paper as covering subjects of “the greatest interest to the greatest number — that is the law controlling its daily makeup.”92

Horace Greeley, founder of The New York Tribune, argued that securing that independence not only allowed newspapers to break away from servility to the parties but also decried the idea of a completely neutral political stance. He argued that editors should have the option to critique certain actions or officials while praising others; nuance was important to

Greeley, who believed independence meant the ability to choose to support candidates rather than be forced to do so because of a previously ascribed political party.93 Similarly, Joseph

Pulitzer, owner of The New York World, another independent paper, did have political opinions.

As a Democrat, he even met with party leaders during intense periods of squabbles, seeking to bring them together. He believed the Republican party was a puppet in the hands of robber barons and monopolies and did not stand for the people Pulitzer wanted to support.94 Still, he was not in the pocket of the party, nor received its funding, and could safely say his paper remained independent.

Neutral papers, according to Greeley, could not be honest; once any sort of analysis or opinion was taken out of the equation, the paper cannot properly portray the issue at hand.

Leaning into total neutrality neutered the ability of the paper to effectively communicate

91 Hamilton (46) 92 Hamilton (51) 93 Hamilton (46) 94 Morris, James McGrath. “Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print and Power.” Key Readings in Journalism, edited by Elliot King and Jane Chapman, Routledge, 2012, pp. 179–188. (188)

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information. If an elected official was lying, Greeley argued that the newspaper should not print a transcript of the official’s speech but rather evaluate that official’s statement and tell its readers whether the official was lying or not.95

Newspapers increasingly started to embrace the beginnings of their role as the fourth estate, especially now that they did not have a party’s backing. A New York editor called independent journalism a “watchword of the future” — which could be compared to today’s watchdog label. The press should not work to conceal party mishaps, tell one side of the story that would only benefit one party, or be a tool in the world of partisan warfare, he continued. An independent press would be “an end of slanders that are known to be slanders;” if journalists presented information in a factual, well-reasoned manner, undermining what they printed would become difficult. Extreme defendants of a particular party may not necessarily have had boundaries in what they published, and could have used falsehoods to put forward their own narrative and debase the other side with slanders or libels. Independent papers, on the other hand, had a solid defense against such claims due to their objectivity standards.96

This is a continuation of the transition from a press that served as a political mouthpiece to one that started to become more confident in its own ability to be an efficient watchdog over the government and political actors. Instead of repeating the information one party was interested in having people read, editors came to believe that their role was to evaluate that information in an unrestricted manner, free of any undue influence. An editor based in New York wrote that this would usher in an era of fewer half truths, doctored reports of public opinion and a hesitation to print information that may hurt a political party. A Springfield Republican editor called this

95 Hamilton (46) 96 Ibid.

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transition period of independent newspapers dominating the markets as one of “emancipation;” independence was ceasing to be seen as irresponsible or indifferent, but as a reform.97

At the same time, all of these changes were transforming the newspaper industry from serving as an extension of a person or entity to becoming its own institution. For example, by the turn of the 20th century, papers were not called by their owner’s name, such as “Greeley’s paper” but by their actual name: The Tribune.98 The newspapers were not extensions of political parties or actors, but they were evolving into something else: distinct, independent institutions.

The proliferation of wire services such as the Associated Press also cut down on costs; for a fixed sum, newspapers could purchase pre-printed paper (“partials”) with national or international stories and add their own local stories to it, creating holistic coverage for a fraction of the cost. There was no need to employ editors or writers to cover news they can subscribe to.99

Cheap journalism

This “emancipation” was not simply a reform of the journalistic system — it was also much more profitable than its partisan counterparts. Advancements in printing technologies allowed independent papers to not only appeal to a wide variety of people but also become accessible through technological advancements. A Hoe double cylinder rotary printing press was capable of printing 8,000 sheets per hour in 1846 but 25,000 per hour in 1875. That number quadrupled to 96,000 in less than a decade. Though this technology increased profits, it also increased expenses: A press would go for $4,000-5,000 in the 1840s but $80,000 just forty years later.100

97 Hamilton (46) 98 Hamilton (48) 99 Hamilton (49) 100 Hamilton (48)

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These expenses were worthy investments for newspaper companies, as they were able to print more papers in the long run and use the increased demand for non-partisan coverage to their advantage and keep turning up a profit. It was an economy of scale that allowed investment to spur on growth and sensationalism that transformed the press world. It became a proper, profitable business that turned away from the increasingly insolvent partisan system, redefining the print and media landscape.

Author Richard Kaplan examined how The Detroit Evening News transitioned from an expensive, small newspaper to a cheaper one with a large circulation and high advertising revenues. Other than the politics of the papers, many of them found hardship in attracting customers due to high prices. In Detroit, only 30% of the English-speaking population regularly purchased a newspaper. At the time, papers such as The Detroit Evening News cost 5 or 6 cents, a significant portion of what used to be an average wage of $1 a day. Paper itself was the highest production cost newspapers faced, and to keep up with those costs, circulation revenues exceeded that of advertising revenues prior to 1889.101 Though there was plenty of space for advertisements in the papers, it was not always profitable for advertisers to pay for features as circulation was not that high, resulting in a “demoralized” advertising market.102

Owner of The Detroit Evening News James E. Scripps faced this exact problem. To turn it around, he proposed to cut production costs by making the paper size smaller. After the Civil

War, all Detroit publications consisted of four pages and expanded in size not by increasing the number of pages but the number of columns, creating “huge blanket sheets” that were from eight

101 Kaplan, Richard. "The Economics of Popular Journalism in the Gilded Age: The Detroit "Evening News" in 1873 and 1888." Journalism History, vol. 21, no. 2, 1995, pp. 65. ProQuest, http://resources.library.brandeis.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest- com.resources.library.brandeis.edu/docview/1300118846?accountid=9703. (66) 102 Kaplan (67)

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to 10 columns wide. Publishers sold space long after the ads were still relevant, just to scrape out some more money, but the stale advertisements made the newer ones look bad, leading to boring pages that people simply threw away.103 By contrast, Scripps published his daily paper in one- sixth the size of the other papers, even though it was still four pages long. Along with shortening columns widths to only two inches, Scripps managed to cut costs by 8%, condensing the paper and its articles. His paper was sold for only 2 cents and was a significantly cheaper option that more people could afford to buy.104

These advancements led to the era of the penny press that started to take over in the mid- nineteenth century. It began to cost less to produce more copies, so the newspapers sold them for cheaper, making them more accessible to low-income people. James Bennett’s New York Herald, established in 1835, enjoyed a circulation of 14,000 more than the average daily paper; 51,000

Heralds were circulating New York City each week. Bennett’s paper, like many other penny papers of his time, had four main characteristics: The paper cost one penny, generally avoided politics, served more as a news digest rather than commentary, and was “bright and loud,” attracting attention. Bennett was not a fan of politics and the press intertwining; he vowed to strip The Herald of “verbiage and coloring,” though of course he was referring to the political kind, not the run-of-the-mill, attention-grabbing kind. He knew how to find the news people were most interested in and present it in a concise way that appealed to his readers, even if this was not necessarily the information that was most important for the public to know.105

Now that the penny papers had great appeal and a low price tag, more people were able to purchase them. High circulation numbers were able to offset production costs and result in

103 Hudson (408) 104 Kaplan (67) 105 Baldasty (47)

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cheaper prices, allowing not just middle- and upper-class people to get the news. The penny press created one-cent papers that were much more easily attainable for low-income people who could not always afford the six-cent papers. These presses relied on advertising revenues rather than subscription revenues to turn a profit. As time went on, newspapers did not keep the one- cent price as they increased value and circulation but increased it to two or three cents, transitioning from the era of the penny press to the era of the cheap press.106

As time went on, it was easier for papers to set up shop as independent, cheap papers that were available to the masses. Now that almost everyone could afford a paper, they had to decide which one to purchase. In order to sustain the business, newspapers had to rely on advertisers, who wanted to reach the greatest number of people. Papers needed to market themselves to the widest audience possible, in order to attract advertisers and therefore earn larger profits. An urban newspaper’s business could often depend on its writers’ ability to tell a dramatic tale, blending together literature and journalism into something new: yellow journalism.107 Many focused the bulk of their stories not on government actions but rather on crime and other stories that were fail-safe ways to make people pick up copies of the paper. Since independent papers tended to be established in large cities — the more people there are, the more subscribers — that often meant that there were plenty of crimes and scandals to report on.

As a result, instead of independent papers populating the nation with their stories of government accountability, they populated the nation with sensationalism that was meant to simply sell more copies. In turn, advertisers filled papers’ pages with shiny products and

106 Hudson (418) 107 Roggenkamp, Karen. Narrating the News: New Journalism and Literary Genre in Late Nineteenth-Century American Newspapers and Fiction, The Kent State University Press, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.resources.library.brandeis.edu/lib/brandeis-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3118710. (xiv)

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glorified lifestyles. Instead of a symbiotic relationship between newspapers and parties, it was a symbiotic relationship between newspapers and advertisers. It was all about the money, for now.

Partisan presses at the time called these newspapers immoral, as they believed it was important to push for the policies that they believed would benefit people, not tell tales of dastardly crimes that riled people up.

Pulitzer’s The World was the perfect example of yellow journalism. The paper used an abundance of images and simple vocabulary to make the biggest impact and reach the most people, for not everyone had high literacy rates, especially immigrants.108 When a fire broke out in New Jersey that killed six people and destroyed thousands of oil barrels, the paper made use of headlines such as “THE DEADLY LIGHTNING,” a sensationalist practice that is considered tasteless today. Another column of that same paper featured a retelling of a murderer’s last hours, while another column detailed a mostly unsubstantiated report of terrorism in Haiti.109

Compared to The New York Times that published financial reports, presidential candidate announcements and state bills, The World filled its pages with reports of petty robberies, murders and outlaws on the same days.110

Even foreign language papers followed suit after the penny presses. Abraham Cahan, editor of The Jewish Daily Forward, a Yiddish paper, started a campaign to remove difficult expressions and add English expressions most immigrants would know. He made use of headline fonts as well as cartoons to make the paper visually more appealing and digestible.111 The practices of sensationalist papers permeated throughout the news landscape of the nation, as

108 Jeurgens, George. “Sensationalism.” Joseph Pulitzer and the New York World, Princeton University Press, 1966. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt183q2tb.6. (47) 109 Jeurgens, George. Joseph Pulitzer and the New York World, Princeton University Press, 1966. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt183q2tb.6. (51–52) 110 Juergens (68–69) 111 Schudson, Michael. Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers. Basic Books, 1981. (98)

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more papers saw the success of their predecessors and wanted a share of the circulation and profit.

Advertisers and their decisions

With the penny press as a tool to attract advertisers, independent newspapers took advantage of having a low-cost way to produce many copies, leading to increased circulation, then to an increased revenue stream from advertisers.112 With this money, independent newspapers were able to employ more reporters to cover politics, discussing a larger variety of subjects than a partisan press could, as the latter focused on the information that most directly pertained to it and its readers.113 Soon enough, not having insider access to a town hall meeting did not matter because there was a greater likelihood there was no partisan paper to compete with to gain that kind of access, having run out of business. With each independent paper, cities saw an addition of 25 journalists, compared to 21 for a Democratic paper.114 This checked off many more subject boxes than a partisan press would; the latter would focus on the information that most directly pertained to it and its readers, compared to an independent paper that had content for anyone and everyone.115

As these newspapers reached wider audiences, they acquired more leverage over the advertising agencies and therefore charged higher rates from advertisers while maintaining steady costs for their readers. At the end of the day, advertisers preferred to spend more per ad and reach a larger audience at once rather than create contracts with multiple smaller newspapers that only reach specific audiences.116 It also made more sense on the production side; costs to

112 Hamilton (44) 113 Hamilton (45) 114 Hamilton (69) 115 Hamilton (45) 116 Ibid.

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produce the ad remained the same no matter where the ad would be published, but once that ad reached a large number of consumers, it became much more worth the cost due to the resulting increased revenue.117

Instead of individual companies creating their own contracts with newspapers, many funneled their creative, financial, and demographic decisions through advertising agencies.118

These agencies examined not only circulation and demographics to determine which newspapers would be financially worth advertising in but also the newspapers’ contents. They then booked space in the newspapers which they later sold to advertisers, even offering creative services for companies that needed them.119 Advertising agents acted as brokers advocating on behalf of the advertisers, thinking about where the ads were placed and what the content surrounding the ads looked like. For example, some advertisers did not want their ads appearing next to competitors or even other ads of any kind.120

Due to the growth of large department stores and development of brand names and trademarks, advertising took a strong foothold in the newspaper industry, as companies needed to grow their business and appeal to people. They needed to make themselves known and their best bet was to simply remind people that they existed and what kinds of products and services they could provide, but that required visibility. This came in the form of images and text that appeared alongside news stories, without readers having to do anything except move their eyes a few centimeters to see the ad.121

117 Picard, Robert G. “Media, Advertisers, and Advertising.” The Economics and Financing of Media Companies: Second Edition, Fordham University, 2011. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13x0d0c.10. (140) 118 Baldasty (60) 119 Strasser, Susan. Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market. Random House, 1989. (93) 120 Baldasty (65) 121 Schudson (Discovering the News, 93)

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It was not always clear that something was paid for or not: Advertisers could purchase ads that did not actually look like ads but rather blended in with the articles surrounding them. In the late nineteenth century, this practice was commonly known by the term “reading notices” and appeared to be regular articles with no markings that identified them as advertiser content. These notices focused on celebrities and other eye-catching subjects while inserting mentions of products in the form of “news” about medicinal discoveries, railroads, real estate, and more.

Prominent independent newspapers such as The New York Tribune, The New York Post, and The

New York Times published these ads, undermining their journalistic integrity since the ads were unrecognizable from the content they themselves published.122

Some of these notices proved to be problematic. Newspapers printed ads that were political in nature, for example, and the fact that they could not be recognized as an advertisement further undermined the papers’ supposedly independent and neutral stance towards politics and parties. In Massachusetts, the United Shoe Machinery Corporation paid a number of daily newspapers in the state to publish a reading notice stating the company would leave the state if certain legislation was passed.123 But it was not just reading notices; some newspapers published “puffs,” or subtle references to products in regular articles. These could come in the form of mentioning the type of piano that was used at a concert, and they were quite popular to find.124 Some papers, such as The Boston Post, disapproved of such practices and published their refusals to print the notices, foiling these advertisers’ attempts to reach the public through those means.125

122 Baker, C. Edwin. “Advertising and a Democratic Press.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review, vol. 140, no. 6, 1992, pp. 2097–2243. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3312414. (2144) 123 Lawson, Linda. Truth in Publishing: Federal Regulation of the Press's Business Practices, 1880-1920. Southern Illinois University Press, 1993. (37) 124 Baldasty (70) 125 Baker (2145)

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Advertisers were left to seek other paths to reach their audience. Many provided guidelines for the type of content they would be willing to advertise around: A newspaper must lack political stances, particularly criticisms of public officials, so as to not alienate any supporters. Newspapers should also have a positive outlook on the world, because happy readers were more likely to be consumers. This fell in line with the penny press papers that sought vivid coverage that was “bright and loud.” And last but not least, the content should appeal to everyone, especially women, who were more likely to be consumers.126 Women tended to be in charge of managing the household, which meant supplying the house with necessary products and goods. The Cincinnati Post estimated that “eighty percent of all domestic buying is done by women of the household.”127 Right next to an 1870 ad for corsets in Harper’s Magazine was an ad for watches — something for the man and the woman, easy to see.128

This appeal was vital for companies. The nineteenth century saw not just an evolving press but also a modern American consumer culture. New inventions were spreading throughout the market, but it was not always easy for the producers, as they needed to convince the public that their products were valuable. People were not used to all the new options they were being presented with, and “people who had never bought corn flakes were taught to need them.”129 In order to do this, advertisers did not introduce new habits out of the blue but rather linked them to new behavior that kept up with the changing cultural times. Toothbrush companies such as

Colgate taught readers how to brush their teeth in an effort to sell toothbrushes.130

126 Baldasty (78) 127 Baldasty (117) 128 Strasser (90) 129 Strasser (89) 130 Strasser (95)

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In the early nineteenth century, companies conducted advertising campaigns to showcase new packaging, such as cardboard that still protected the contents, to dispel fears of dust reaching the food inside.131 Consumers were wary of packaged goods at the time and needed to be convinced otherwise. Canned and boxed goods “concealed” contents and smells, so packaging evolved to include see-through material, such as “covered glass-front” tins that allowed consumers to see what was inside the can. Coupling this with the creation of branding, companies were able to convince consumers that their packaged products were safe and healthy, and then they used their brand power and newly acquired trust to continue innovating — and selling.132

Companies also had to innovate to create new advertising methods that would sell their products. To sell their new $5 razor,133 Gillete advertised in upscale magazines such as Town and Country; the company knew that only members of the upper-class would be able to afford such products, so they advertised accordingly, producing ads that taught men how to shave with their new razor and encouraging them to do so everyday.134 Other companies focused on people with less money. If someone saved Wrigley’s gum wrappers for example, they could redeem them for coupons at certain redemption stations,135 while the American Cereal Company packaged anything from “free” trinkets to collectible china in some of their products to encourage purchases. In order to collect a whole set of china, for example, consumers were

131 Strasser (32) 132 Strasser (35) 133 Equivalent to $138.93 in 2019. 134 Strasser (97–100) 135 Strasser (172)

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encouraged to only buy a certain brand of cereal that had these extra products, as they wouldn’t find them elsewhere.136

Advertisers also paid mind to non-white America, which amounted to about a third of the population in 1900.137 Some Chinese salesmen asked to not use red in advertisements as the color indicated a time of mourning, for example.138 In this “cafeteria of information,” there had to be something for everyone, so that if a random person would pick up the newspaper, they would be able to find something they were interested in. In one 1898 edition of the Pittsburgh

Leader, the paper had articles on learning to use chopsticks, spring fashion, gold investments, and gossip, among other topics.139 Wherever someone looked in a newspaper, there was some kind of ad — disguised or not — that appealed to them.

How advertising revenue transformed a partisan press

In a study of the 50 largest cities in the United States from 1870 to 1890,140 James

Hamilton found that in 1870, most newspapers identified with a political party: 54% were

Republican, 33% Democratic, and only 13% were independent, which at the time had 26% circulation, which jumped to 47% in 1900.141 Independence was clearly profitable: Because independent newspapers were read by a variety of people from both sides of the political aisle, advertisers spent less to reach more people. This led to newspapers increasingly seeking to remain non-partisan in order to attract more money from advertisers in the form of ads and

136 Strasser (168) 137 One-third of the population was foreign-born or of foreign-born parentage. 138 Strasser (143) 139 Baldasty (122) 140 In 1870, the largest city in the United States, New York City, NT had a population of about 940,000. This increased to approximately 1.5 million in 1890, allowing it to remain in first place. Fall River, MA, was the 50th largest city in the U.S. in 1870 with a population of almost 30,000; its place was taken by Trenton, NJ, in 1890, which had a population of 60,000 at the time. 141 Hamilton (38)

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therefore a higher circulation and more revenue. In addition, this meant more newspapers were being created: In 1870, 0.25 daily papers per person circulated in the fifty largest cities, a number that increased to 0.55 by 1900.142

By 1899, advertising made up 54.5% of newspapers’ revenue, and they sought after advertising content that appealed to the greatest number of people. In 1901, food and drink advertising made up 14.8% of ad content, followed by fuel (11.2%), and tobacco (10.9%).143

Much of the advertising was geared towards women, who were the primary caretakers of the household.144 In 1880, independent outlets charged a mean of $18.85 for ten lines of advertising each month, compared to $12.24 for Democratic papers and $12.23 for Republican papers.

Though it was more expensive for advertisers, it was also worth reaching a wider audience, increasing the likelihood of readers making a purchase and making the advertisements worth it for the ad companies.145

Additionally, independent newspapers tended to be established in larger cities due to a greater likelihood that they would find a significant enough number of readers which would translate into an attractive option for advertisers.146 Cities with higher advertising rates had more independent papers with higher circulation numbers, a greater chance of entering the market as an independent newspaper and a higher chance of switching from a partisan to independent paper.147 Advertisers sought to get their money’s worth, doing business with papers that had high circulations that appealed to the most number of people. At the same time, political groups

142 Hamilton (39) 143 Hamilton (49) 144 Hamilton (50) 145 Hamilton (58) 146 Hamilton (43) 147 Petrova (799)

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became less likely to fund their own partisan papers, also seeking to reach more people. If they focused on like-minded audiences, they would not receive any additional votes from the ones they had already accumulated. This meant they were less inclined to spend money to shore up a base they already had but were unable to grow.148

Yet the partisan press was still far from gone, and there were a few caveats that prevented the independent press from fully taking over. Newspapers in county seats tended to be less independent, as there were more options for parties to influence the papers. In these areas, which tended to have large populations and high advertising rates, there were few independent papers, likely due to the concentration of power that allowed local parties to influence the media and more easily subsidize newspapers.149 There were also fewer independent papers entering the market during presidential election years, such as 1880 and 1884, signaling a time of increased party control.150 In the same vein, in places with higher vote margins, or gaps between the winning party in elections, there were more partisan papers than independent ones.151 This goes to show that even though the economic factors such as high advertising rates might have been similar in other parts of the country, political factors still played a major role in the media system during this shift towards an independent press.

In addition, the cost of running a newspaper was going up as newspapers had to constantly evolve to keep up with changes in technology and demand. Partisan papers were seeking to find as much funding as possible in order to stay afloat, which had come in the form of tailoring content to a specific, loyal audience, but the aforementioned factors were making this

148 Hamilton (40) 149 Petrova (791) 150 Petrova (804) 151 Ibid.

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harder to successfully accomplish. As parties were less keen on spending money to fund newspapers, their major source of revenue was being depleted. Government subsidies, contracts, and patronage jobs were all decreasing along with this trend, posing additional problems for partisan presses.152

On the other hand, independent newspapers flourished because they were able to attract large amounts of advertisers, which meant larger circulation to a variety of audiences and therefore increased revenue. They were able to sustain themselves more easily than the partisan presses that made decisions based on demographics and already established competitors.153

Previously, Democratically oriented newspapers tended to open up shop in cities with significant numbers of Democrats, in order to have an assured readership base; the same principle applied to

Republican newspapers.154

Competition was mostly a factor on the city level, as only 5% of cities had five or more newspapers in their markets, researcher Maria Petrova found.155 In this system of little intra-city competition, only a few papers headquartered in the largest cities (Boston, New York, and

Washington) were distributed on an inter-city scale. Petrova cited a study that claims the main role of the media is to reinforce predisposed beliefs and preferences, and it would make sense for partisan newspapers to follow that logic by setting up in like-minded areas where they would have easy access to sponsors. Once a Republican newspaper found a city with people who identified with Republican ideals and had sponsors from the Republican party, it was able to affect policy through agenda setting and influencing public opinion, either by cementing pre-

152 Hamilton (41) 153 Ibid. 154 Hamilton (43) 155 Petrova (792)

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existing beliefs or convincing others to join the cause.156 In order to keep the partisan presses running, some parties increased subsidies so that the papers would remain competitive in the market, but this was a hard practice to sustain over time, and local advertising revenues were more profitable.157

In the end, parties across the board lost much of their power over newspapers as advertisers were enough to sustain the independent papers. Instead, independent presses enjoyed the mutually beneficial relationship with advertisers that increased the papers’ readership bases as well as the advertisers’ reach; both saw increased profits. Through political neutrality and the beginnings of objectivity, journalism saw another transformation in its relationship with the public by appealing to the masses, not to the few. At the same time, that appeal was rooted in sensationalist language that focused on grabbing readers’ attention, not educating them. This led to yet another transformation in favor of reliability, accuracy, and honesty.

156 Ibid. 157 Petrova (794)

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Chapter Three

Buy Truth, and Do Not Sell It: The journalist becomes a teacher

At the turn of the nineteenth century, journalists started to reflect on what they had been publishing and reevaluate what kind of content their readers were receiving. As journalists were becoming more educated, standards within the industry rose; reporters did not want to simply shock news consumers with the latest details of a grisly murder, but inform them of the pressing issues of the day, be it war or economic collapse. Reporters and publishers alike slowly realized that they needed to change to continue serving their readers well. Sensationalism sold copies but did not educate the public. The shift away from sensationalism occurred on many levels, from publishers who realized their empires were built on greed to reporters who felt they had a higher calling.

Change from the top down

Publishers such as Joseph Pulitzer started to re-think the newspaper empires they had built and wanted to leave a legacy that was not centered on sensationalist practices, but on educating readers. Pulitzer’s newspaper, The New York World, was emblematic of the independent paper that shunned partisanship in favor of journalism for the people, not the parties.

From the start, Pulitzer believed in the paper’s independence. He wrote in his first ever editorial that “[the paper] must not be indifferent or neutral on any question involving the public interest.”

He pledged that The World would rail against monopolies, corrupt politicians, privilege, and any

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other threats to democracy. Pulitzer wanted his paper to be “dedicated to the cause of the people rather than that of purse-potentates.”158

But dedication to a cause can be shown in a myriad of ways. The World proved that its devotion was not just to the people, but to money as well. Its attention-grabbing headlines did not present the readers with a calm, collected take on the intricate tax policies of a state government, but with shocking tales of crime. Pulitzer developed the “Pulitzer formula,” which held that all articles should be written in a simple yet colorful way so that anyone and everyone would be able to parse them. In only six months, Pulitzer managed to triple The World’s circulation to

45,000 copies a day, and he was well on his way to making that number even higher.159 The readers Pulitzer sought were more than happy to engage with his newspaper; his paper told stories that were reflections of their lives.160

Readers saw themselves in the stories The World told, whether it was dealing with the rising streetcar fares, a neglected baby falling from a rooftop, or police beating up a homeless man. These were stories that mattered to them, giving them a sense of value. The World’s writing even helped teach immigrants English with its prose and simple diction. The World wrote articles that served as reminders of the poor conditions (such as tenement housing)161 and oppression many of the people below them had to live under.162 Even with its shock value, Pulitzer’s World did manage to shine a light on issues underrepresented people cared about, giving them a place in society.

158 Morris (183) 159 Morris (185) 160 Morris (186) 161 Juergens (267) 162 Morris (186)

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Even as he extolled the virtues of public-mindedness, Pulitzer never lost sight of the numbers.. Individual issues of The World boasted of the paper’s high circulation and sought-after advertising space, popularizing the notion of self-advertisement.163 In March 1885, for example,

The World published three years’ worth of circulation numbers in March to highlight its own success. On March 1, 1883, The World had a circulation of 20,000; two years later that number had increased to 130,000.164 The World wanted to attract readers, and writing about how popular it was became an easy way to encourage others to engage with its content.

Though Pulitzer’s influence and reach was increasing, competition with other sensationalist newspapers — for both readers and advertisers — took its toll. He was stuck trying to grab as much attention as he could, sell as many copies as possible and reach the most people.

This was not enough for Pulitzer to feel fulfilled with his life’s accomplishments. Toward the end of his life he felt he had made no lasting impact. Coverage that focused on murders, kidnappings and other crimes did not fulfil Pulitzer’s need to help people; it only taught readers about the different ways others committed crimes. Yellow journalism sold, but it generally did not educate.

Pulitzer tried to mitigate this difference using his editorial pages to educate his readers.165

He wanted his paper to be both a teacher and a tribune, providing space to learn and engage with interesting ideas.166 His support for simple diction in the papers had not only helped him expand his readership through yellow journalism, but it also helped the average person understand his editorials and the lessons that came from them. “Editorials must be written for the people, not the

163 Schudson (Discovering the News, 95) 164 The New York World, “Phenomenal Success and the Figures to Prove It,” Columbia University Libraries Online Exhibitions 165 Juergens (50) 166 Schudson (Discovering the News, 98)

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few,” Pulitzer told his writers.167 The catchy headlines were a means of attracting readers in the first place, enticing them with shocking news only to bring them closer to the real meat of the story; he argued that “scandal and sentimentality were necessary to attract readers to serious matters.”168

A December 1884 World editorial railed against the terrible conditions in tenement housing that had led to hundreds of deaths in just a year, declaring, "Sooner or later, the sanitary safety of a great community will have to ignore the greed and parsimony of the owners of these houses, as well as the temporary inconvenience of the inmates, and insist upon the eradication of the structures."169 News articles were gathering shocking information, but Pulitzer’s editorial pages were using it as a weapon against corruption. They pointed people in the right direction, telling them exactly what was wrong and where to go to fix it, whether it was a call for citizens to talk to their representatives or a call for representatives to listen to them. The editorial pages gave people something to talk about and provided them with the information to do so.

His efforts were still insufficient: Whatever gains Pulitzer made with his editorials, the news articles cast a shadow over them. One honorable section out of many did not make a newspaper respectable. Pulitzer then tried a different tack: taking advantage of his wealth. In

1892 he endeavored to fund the creation of the nation’s first journalism school at Columbia

University, though his request was initially denied by the trustees. Pulitzer then turned to the

University of Missouri and successfully convinced its trustees to found the first school of journalism in the country in 1908. Pulitzer was not finished with Columbia, though, and he

167 Juergens (Sensationalism, 58) 168 Boylan, James. Pulitzer's School : Columbia University's School of Journalism, 1903-2003, Columbia University Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/brandeis- ebooks/detail.action?docID=909176. (4) 169 The New York World, 18 Dec. 1884, pg. 4

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resurrected his proposal in 1903 under the school’s president, Nicholas Butler. The Columbia

School of Journalism finally opened in 1912, for which Pulitzer bequeathed $2 million.170

Pulitzer’s goal of building a journalism school built upon the idea of journalism as a public good; he became a strong advocate for founding such a school, saying that journalists needed a “class feeling” based upon morals, not money, that would raise journalism to the level of a “ranked profession.”171

By founding not one, but two journalism schools, Pulitzer tried to make up for his support of sensationalist journalism. His legacy would not consist solely of his newspaper’s shock value, but an institution that sought to better journalists as well. Though Pulitzer did not develop the curriculum himself — that was not his area of expertise, after all — he recognized that there was a need for an institution that would bring journalists together and teach them shared values and skills that did not revolve around making a profit or selling the most amount of newspapers. In addition, founding a newspaper most likely alleviated some of Pulitzer’s guilt for forming a newspaper empire built on selling copies, not educating readers.

Leaving sensationalism behind

A school can only succeed if there is a demand for the education it provides, and luckily, there was plenty of demand for education in journalism. Pulitzer was not the only one who recognized the need for change; readers did too. As the number of college-educated people increased,172 so did their need for alternatives to sensationalist coverage. These readers were a

170 “Joseph Pulitzer Offers to Found the First School of Journalism at Columbia University, But the Journalism School at the University of Missouri Precedes It.” Edited by Leslie Prothero, History of Information, Jeremy & Co., Inc., 2020, historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=4693. 171 Ladd, Jonathan M. “The Emergence of the Institutional News Media in an Era of Decreasing Political Polarization.” Why Americans Hate the Media and How It Matters, Princeton University Press, Princeton; Oxford, 2012. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7spr6.7. (43) 172 In 1891, 5,273 people reported graduating from college, compared to 8,003 people reporting in 1900.

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part of a rising constituency that decried partisan papers that prevented them from making up their own minds.173 Wire services also departed from producing partisan news; catering to one side would completely remove their reach into a different market with opposite political opinions. Non-partisan news stories fit into partisan and independent newspapers alike, which made more sense for wire services.174 But simply reading non-partisan newspapers was not enough for this growing constituency: they did not want to read about the world of crime, but about how The Great War impacted the economy.

The New York Times was at the forefront of this shift away from sensationalism toward a higher standard for its readers. The Times wanted to distinguish itself from its yellow counterparts at the turn of the 20th century, shrugging off their shock-inducing tactics. When

Adolph Ochs bought The New York Times in 1895, he decided to focus on just the facts, not exaggerated stories.175 He was not solely interested in publishing articles that entertained and readers enjoyed consuming; he also wanted to keep a written record of the world. Detailing the election results was more important to Ochs than detailing how a specific policy on crime allowed a murder to go loose and kill a family in New Jersey — those stories were for The World to cover.

The Times did not completely avoid all sensationalist practices; like Pulitzer’s World, it published self-advertisements. In 1890, after its front page coverage of a historian’s essay on the

Monroe Doctrine made news itself, the Times published reactions to that coverage the next day, including remarks from important politicians praising it.176 While The World was praising itself

173 Nelson, Michael.. “Evaluative Journalism: A New Synthesis.” The Virginia Quarterly Review, vol. 58, no. 3, 1982, pp. 419–434. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26436918. (420) 174 Nelson (Evaluative Journalism, 421) 175 Schudson (Discovering the News, 89) 176 Schudson (Discovering the News, 96–97)

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for its high demand in its own self advertisements, The Times was praising itself for its information-focused coverage. This approach was seen in its editorial pages, as well: The Times published an editorial in 1897 declaring public consumption of yellow journalism “a social offense punishable with scorn and contempt.”177

Still, self-advertisements aside, The Times was successful in becoming the founder of a new era of journalism, one that served to educate the educated in both news and editorial coverage. Other newspapers such as The Journalist praised The Times for embodying a successful newspaper that served accurate and sufficient information to a growing clientele.178 In

1911, a reporter and critic called The Times the paper that came the closest to portraying New

York accurately, and another reporter wrote in 1926 that Ochs should be praised for defying the view that only sensationalist newspapers could be successful.179

The New York Times catered to the upper class, filling its pages with “conservatism, decency and accuracy.”180 The Times did not publish headlines such as “How Babies are

Baked”181 or “Lines of Little Hearses,”182 like those in The World, even if those stories were true.

Though it did not have as high a circulation as sensationalist papers did, its readers were wealthier, and advertisers appreciated that. Ochs knew this, and when he took over, he introduced topics such as real estate transactions, created financial news roundups, and expanded financial coverage overall; at one point, The Times was called the “Business Bible.” But Ochs also wanted the paper to be accessible to others, and once circulation increased a bit, he lowered

177 “Views of New Journalism.” The New York Times, 4 Mar. 1897, p. 3. 178 Schudson (Discovering the News, 106) 179 Schudson (Discovering the News, 107) 180 Ibid. 181 “How Babies are Baked.” The New York World, 6 July 1883 182 “Lines of Little Hearses” The New York World, 3 July 1883

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the cost of the papers from three cents to one. This was soon followed by a threefold increase in circulation within a year. Though The Times had not reached the popularity of the sensationalist papers, the surge in sales showed a demand for accuracy and decency that The Times provided.183

In his announcement of policies, printed when he took over the paper, Ochs stressed the importance of honesty and accuracy in reporting. He wanted The Times to provide all the news to

“thoughtful, pure-minded people” in a concise manner using diction that they either already knew or could easily learn.184 Ochs was not interested in gathering readers who only cared about shocking news about crime, but those who were eager to learn about the world they lived in through newspapers. His news was to be impartial, not favoring any party or interest, and the columns were to invite opinions from all parts of the spectrum. Ochs also declared that the paper’s goal would include maintaining the lowest taxes possible to get government initiatives done, and to see that the government does not have any more power than absolutely necessary to protect the people and maintain individual rights.185

Ochs wanted The Times to be seen as a respectable source of news, leading to the slogan

“All the News That’s Fit to Print.”186 The slogan epitomized the paper’s goals of decency, accuracy, and aversion to sensational shock-value while highlighting the company’s role as a

“foil” to the sensationalist papers that relied on shocking news. Ochs believed that people bought sensationalist papers because they were cheap, not because they were good, and when The Times lowered its price, he was pleased to see its circulation go up, supporting his theory. If people

183 Schudson (Discovering the News, 119) 184 Schudson (Discovering the News, 110) 185 Schudson (Discovering the News, 111) 186 To this day, it remains on the masthead of The Times’ print edition.

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could afford it, Ochs believed that they would choose a “clean newspaper of high and honorable aims.”187

Straight from the horse’s mouth

The Times’ increased circulation clearly proved that there was a demand among readers for an antidote to sensationalism, and luckily for papers like itself, many reporters were more than willing to become a part of this cause. Journalists began to agree that the purpose of newspapers was to provide knowledge to those who needed it, and that the “lack of journalism

[was] a lack of understanding.”188 The average person did not have the time to sift through all the information available, so it was up to journalists to do it for them, with each reporter finding his own expertise, or “beat,” and sharing his it with his readers. They wanted to become the public’s educators, having experts sort all the information available, condense the important parts, and present it to the people so that they could learn and form opinions.

Reporters such as H. L. Mencken believed that the ideal press was a patriotic institution that used intelligence to serve the “long-term health” of the country, instead of universally celebrating it. Rather than serving as the government’s — or a party’s — mouthpiece, Mencken believed that the press served to criticize the government.189 Mencken was not a fan of the government, specifically President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, claiming it created too much uniformity. He believed that the lack of an established aristocracy that was confident in its superiority was actually a problem for the United States.190 In the case of journalism, Mencken

187 Schudson (Discovering the News, 115) 188 Steffens, Lincoln. "The New School of Journalism." The Bookman; a Review of Books and Life (1895-1933), vol. 18, no. 2, 10, 1903, pp. 173. ProQuest, http://resources.library.brandeis.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest- com.resources.library.brandeis.edu/docview/124745368?accountid=9703. (2) 189 Fussell, Paul. “H. L. Mencken: Writer.” Menckeniana, no. 143, 1997, pp. 1–7. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26484447. (1) 190 Fussell (2)

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advocated for a higher class of people that would take it upon themselves to present information to the public and serve as a critical eye of the government.

Like Mencken, journalist Walter Lippmann thought that the best society would be led by a special class of people, as the public did not know enough to make important decisions themselves. Lippmann believed that freedom depended on access to news, and in his eyes the press had a great weight on its shoulders, as it was responsible for providing that news to the public. The news is difficult to comprehend, Lippmann said, because it comes from a distance.

The journalists understand what they are reporting on but do not properly distill it for readers to understand.191 Much of the information readers receive went through a process: Reporters use experts, eyewitnesses, and other interviews to get the foundation of their reporting, and often do not experience the events they report on firsthand. Then, that information reaches an editor, who is even more removed from the situation.192

There were problems with this “medley” of information being presented to the public, according to Lippmann. Journalists are presented with “fact, propaganda, rumor, suspicion, clues, hopes, and fears” and must distill that information for their readers to comprehend.193 If reporters catered to certain parties and took officials’ words for granted, they would not be fulfilling their roles correctly; they would not be distilling information, but parroting it.

Lippmann disdained partisan papers for not presenting readers with an unbiased view of the world that allowed them to form their own opinions. Once a reader knows a newspaper’s party or

191 Lippmann, Walter. Liberty and the News. Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920. (38) 192 Lippmann (46) 193 Lippmann (47)

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social leanings, they can predict the perspective the paper will present, even if that perspective was not a conscious choice, Lippmann wrote.194

Lippmann demanded that papers go further than independence. According to him, the newspaper is “the bible of democracy,” and a journalists’ role is “one of the truly sacred and priestly offices in a democracy.”195 This is why their actions should be constantly evaluated,

Lippmann believed, and wrote that “the philosophy of the work itself needs to be discussed; the news about the news needs to be told.”196 If politicians spouted propaganda and journalists simply repeated what those politicians said, the public will not trust what they write.

If people only read propaganda or assertions without proof, they would “believe whatever fits most comfortably with their prepossessions.” A good journalist avoided this mistake; he would not be cynical, but patient and skeptical in his pursuit of the truth. He would not believe everything he heard, be reasonable in his predictions and know what is most important for people to know, according to Lippmann. A good journalist would not be “slick,” constantly trying to get the scoop, Lippmann wrote, referencing yellow journalists who focused on sensationalist stories.197 A good journalist would be humble, knowing how to seek the truth and ask for help while doing so.198

If people do not have the tools to tell fact from fiction, they live in a community with no liberty — and therefore no freedom, and a lack of democracy.199 Liberty, according to

Lippmann, is the “name we give to measures by which we protect and increase the veracity of

194 Lippmann (48) 195 Lippmann (47) 196 Lippmann (16) 197 Lippmann (87) 198 Lippmann (104) 199 Lippmann (64)

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the information upon which we act.”200 When newspapers were struggling to free themselves from serving as the government’s mouthpiece in the 1700s, their case also included a need to present the public with all the information necessary to make informed decisions about their leaders. A responsible press would not only be removed from the government’s reach, but the reach of any one party as well. It would stand on its own, serving as a separate entity that protected democracy in its own way.

Society could not depend on untrained journalists to perform such a task. Lippmann argued that at the time, reporters were men of “[small] caliber” in an undignified profession for which it did not make sense to invest in an education only to be underpaid, insecure and feel as though they are not valued. This needed to be rectified, Lippmann believed, and no amount of money or time should be wasted on such an important task, because “the health of society depends upon the quality of the information it receives.”201 Lippmann argued that the best way to professionalize journalism was to support “a generation of men who will by full superiority, drive the incompetents out of business.”

Once dignified and competent journalists entered the workforce, Lippmann believed they would earn the public’s respect for a career in journalism, which would then be codified by professional training, or journalism schools.202 Journalists would be partners, working together to educate the public, instead of competitors who sought to attain the highest circulation levels and make the largest profit. The public would look up to journalists, respecting them and trusting their judgement and words. As a profession, journalism would elevate its members who would teach, not sell.

200 Lippmann (68) 201 Lippmann (60) 202 Lippmann (82)

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Journalists self-evaluate

While journalists were calling for a school to codify a new approach to their trade, they also worked to better it from the inside. As journalists increasingly saw themselves as serving their readers — the community — and not parties, advertisers or other special interests, they also began to follow journalistic rules more often, creating standards and ethical codes. Freeing themselves of partisan roots was not enough for newspapers: they wanted to free themselves from bias, too.

First, newspapers realized that they needed to square their ideals of educating the public with their source of revenue, which came in the form of close connections to the advertisers.

They had to look past profits and embrace more control over the advertising content that was sitting right next to their news articles, sometimes barely distinguishable from them, such as the aforementioned reading notices. How could readers trust the articles they were reading if they could not tell it was educational news or a money-seeking advertisement? As the relationship between advertisers and newspapers strengthened, the formation of the American Newspaper

Publishers Association in 1887 marked a concern for the increased overlap in business. The

Association regulated commissions paid to advertising agencies, standardized advertising rates and even started to publish a list of approved advertising agencies in 1889.203

Journalists started to expect more from themselves now that they made their own decisions without pressure from parties or profit. A new standard materialized: objectivity.

Journalists had a duty to provide their readers with the truth, and the way they achieved that truth was through a methodical, diligent process — one that could be taught to others.204 If a reporter

203 Schudson (Discovering the News, 94) 204 Schudson, Michael. “The Emergence of the Objectivity Norms in American Journalism.” Social Norms, edited by Michael Hechter and Karl-Dieter Opp, Russell Sage Foundation, 2001, pp. 165–185. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.7758/9781610442800.10. (178)

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refrained from letting bias color his reporting and fact-gathering, that brought him one step closer to objectivity. Kent Cooper, the general manager of the Associated Press expressed this change in mind-set in 1925 when he wrote that a journalist who “deals in facts diligently developed and intelligently presented exalts his profession…”205 The term “objectivity” was not as ubiquitous in the 1800s as it came to be in the 1900s, when it superseded terms such as

“unbiased,” “uncolored,” and “realist,” a shift helped along by the first journalism textbook,

“The Ethics of Journalism,” printed in 1924.206

Verifying facts also became an undeniably important part of practicing objectivity — taking someone at his or her word does not always lead to the truth. When verification through normal means, such as using statistics, official documents, etc., did not work, reporters relied on other methods to present truthful accounts. For example, in the year 1919, a politician claimed that prohibiting the sale of alcohol would lower the death rate in the United States. However, there was no data available to support this claim, as such an experiment had not been carried out yet. To balance out the coverage, a reporter turned to a politician with a different view who claims that banning alcohol will actually lead to more violence and deaths.207 Providing both perspectives effectively cleared the reporter of any charge of lack of objectivity (or at least according to its definition at the time), as he had informed the public of both sides of the argument.208 Though just how objective this process actually is may be up for debate, considering the truth has still not been proven, it does technically clear journalists of bias — and that can be enough for some of them. At the time, objectivity was still a work in progress, as

205 Schudson (Emergence of the Objectivity Norm, 177) 206 Ladd (43–44) 207 The 18th Amendment went into effect in 1920, but was overturned by the 21st Amendment in 1933. The homicide rate increased by 78% over the 1920s as alcohol became more dangerous to consume and obtain. 208 Tuchmann (667)

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journalists made — and always will make — errors and learn from them. Having standards was better than not having them, and this version of objectivity was still an improvement over the previous sensationalist practices.

Some journalists did not approve of maintaining objectivity solely through reporting opinions on both sides of an issue, and modified this approach by making use of experts. Walter

Lippmann, for example, was well aware that all news articles feature some level of interpretation of the facts by their writers, as all journalists had to choose which sources to contact, which information to present and how to present it. Lippman thus advocated for these writers to be experts on the information they presented to the public. A journalist needed to be a professional whose job it was to independently sift through information and present the most important pieces to the public.209 Due to the “complex and slippery” nature of the news, it was of the utmost importance that the professional journalist be able to “exercise the highest scientific virtues.”210

The best practice for portraying information in an accurate manner is to find supporting evidence.211 Inserting quotation marks when discussing witness accounts is a form of supporting evidence as well; the reporter ensures that his own words regarding what happened are not being mixed in with eyewitnesses’, for example, which “removes [the reporter] from participation in the story.”212 Adding more quotes and eyewitness accounts helps corroborate a story, and if the witnesses are not lying, brings the story closer to the truth.213

Objectivity became an “industrial discipline,” a standard held throughout the journalism industry that allowed editors to keep their writers in check; it was efficient and factual, and

209 Ladd (44) 210 Ibid. 211 Tuchmann (667) 212 Tuchmann (668) 213 Of course, truth is in the eye of the beholder, and many people can see the same event and remember it differently. There is however, a common thread that a journalist can find to increase the accuracy of the report.

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became a cherished quality in journalists’ work.214 Though objectivity gave editors some protection from libel suits — as well as control over staff by making clear what their expectations were, making it easier to regulate and edit their work — it became more than that, evolving into a moral code and ethical approach to the job. Once the majority of reporters followed the same guidelines and adhered to a foundation ethics code, the public’s respect for journalism grew. By gaining the trust of their readers, journalists grew into the role of educators that they had been aiming to achieve.

Based on a clear ethics code, readers would know the general guidelines for how reporters were gathering their information and presenting it. Ideally, to be truly objective, a reporter did not select pieces of information that he gathered that fit his own narrative; instead, he selected information that presented an unbiased and comprehensive — but concise — picture.

This approach was increasingly standardized through both practice in papers themselves and journalism schools that taught the scientific principles and empirical methods that were the foundation of the objectivity standard.215

Tackling subjectivity and implementing solutions

The Times, along with other papers, faced an ethical foil: publicity agents. In order to retain its status as a respectable source of news, The Times sought to distinguish itself from its public relations counterparts, whose jobs entailed convincing the public of something by putting out information in the form of news. These agents were not seeking to educate their readers but to gain them as supporters or customers. Publicists served as distributors of “news” that would have normally been sold to newspapers as advertisements, while journalists mourned the loss of

214 Schudson (Emergence of the Objectivity Norm, 177) 215 Ladd (45)

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revenue. World War I especially triggered a number of independent propaganda campaigns that ranged from promotions of war bonds to stories about government officials doing the best they could.

These methods used by public relations agents presented the war and the people behind it in a positive light, making the general public more supportive of the cause.216 Reporters, on the other hand, were not in the business of shoring up support for the war, but relaying information about it, no matter if that information was good or bad. The Times did not want to be compared to publicists that sold propaganda because it considered itself to be a reputable source that was free of bias. A comparison to publicists derailed that notion, because it undermined the very foundation of objectivity that reporters prided themselves on. The newspaper claimed to be above all that; it was above using sensationalism to attract viewers, and it was above being paid to present advertisements or one-sided perspectives as fact.

As journalists were accepting new standards en masse, seeking to distinguish themselves as educators and thought leaders that served as gatekeepers of the news, they frowned upon publishing articles that verged on propaganda. By the early 1930s, the 5,000 New York public relations agents outnumbered journalists, who were now being presented with press releases, prepared statements and “handouts” they would have to cover as news.217 Public relations agents created the news. They were neither news themselves nor did they cover news, the two options available before the creation of public relations. On December 29, 1926, 147 of the 255 articles

The Times put out stemmed from the work of press agents.218 An entire front page article was

216 Schudson (Emergence of the Objectivity Norm, 177) 217 Schudson (Discovering the News, 137–138) 218 Schudson (Discovering the News, 144)

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dedicated to debunking a premature report that the New York City government had awarded a bus franchise contract even though negotiations were still taking place.219

To combat the increased unreliability in information that was being put out into the world, The Times implemented a number of reforms. Bylines, which had not been in use at the start of the 1920s, became commonplace a decade later. This practice tied a reporter to an article, holding them more accountable for what they wrote and any subjectivity that went along with it.

Journalists increasingly specialized in certain topics, allowing them to provide more context for their coverage and be of better service to their readers.220

Some papers also started to embrace the inevitable subjectivity and produced weekly news reports that reviewed the news; this was called “interpretive reporting,” and it focused on background information and sorted through complex issues readers wanted to know more about.

Labelling articles as “news analysis,” rather than only “news,” helped readers understand what kind of content they were reading: This label clearly showed that the reporter’s interpretation was interspersed within its news coverage.221 Curtis MacDougall wrote a 1938 textbook that dealt with this approach, claiming it was not inconsistent with objectivity. Explaining what events meant and why they happened did not mean that the reporter was biased, he wrote; instead, the reporter was simply doing their job of presenting information to people in a way the readers could comprehend. The public wanted to know why something was happening, not just a direct retelling of events. This was particularly tied to World War I’s coverage, during which

219 “FIGHT ON BUS AWARD SEEN AS LINES OFFERS BETTER BID TO CITY.” The New York Times, 29 December, 1926. 220 Schudson (Discovering the News, 145) 221 Tuchmann (671)

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MacDougall claimed journalists were unprepared to properly describe what was happening “in anything but a factual manner.”222

The idea that explanatory journalism not equivalent to bias began to take hold. In 1933, the American Society of Newspaper Editors endorsed interpretive reporting by decreeing journalists should devote more space to explanatory and interpretive news that presented ample context in times of rapidly evolving news that was significant to the public. Editors advocated for interpretive news as a result of an increasingly complex world — they had just lived through The

Great War and the Roaring Twenties, and had plunged headlong into an economic depression, and news was only travelling faster still.223 There remained plenty of daily coverage that focused on the facts, it was just being supplemented with interpretive articles that condensed certain events and explained to readers why they were happening and what they meant.224

The objectivity standard came to the point where journalists took it as a given, and some

“interpretive journalism” started to resemble op-eds today. Reporters such as Lippmann, Frank

Kent and Mark Sullivan wrote political columns that sought to help readers understand what was going on, not just be somewhat aware of it. These columns were still objective in the sense that they were not beholden to any party, but they did not shy away from presenting opinions.225

They went a step further than interpretive news articles, as they clearly had a perspective, but still had evidence backing up those claims. Like news analysis, these columns had special labels, and by the 1930s editorial pages became increasingly separated from the news pages.226

222 Schudson (Discovering the News, 147) 223 Schudson (Discovering the News, 148) 224 Schudson (Discovering the News, 151) 225 Schudson (Emergence of the Objectivity Norm, 179) 226 Ladd (45)

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There were still some widely-accepted deviations from pure objectivity. The journalism community inherently treated international reporters as experts who were adding some of their own analysis into their reporting, considering national news tended to be more popular and digestible, being closer to home. Readers may not have had the time to learn all about international politics and conflicts, so they relied on the reporters to present the information in a way they could understand. Sports journalists also tended to adhere to different standards because, for many years, they worked exclusively for newspapers that catered to specific locations, like a state-wide or city-based paper.227 Local sports reporters were often sympathetic to the home teams and used language that indicates support, focusing on the “home” team.228

The art of self-regulation

Objectivity itself is subjective, and journalists did not always agree with each other or their readers on whether something was truly objective or not. Different standards did not always align, and reporters often found themselves in ethically grey areas. The journalism industry needed to implement some form of regulation in order to achieve its goals of educating the public and gaining its trust. Lippmann himself argued that journalists needed to self-govern in order to prevent a society in which people are misled and do not receive the truth and its resulting freedoms. Lippman warned fellow journalists that “if publishers and authors themselves do not face the facts and attempt to deal with them, some day Congress, in a fit of temper, egged on by an outraged public opinion, will operate on the press with an ax.”229 In order to solve this

227 Schudson (Emergence of the Objectivity Norm, 179) 228 The first “national” newspaper, USA Today, emerged in 1980. Its headline for the 2020 Super Bowl was “Kansas City Chiefs use stunning rally to beat San Francisco 49ers for first title in 50 years.” In comparison, The San Francisco Chronicle, which is based in the home city of the 49ers, printed the headline, “SHORT OF SUPER: With a fourth quarter lead, a sixth title was in sight — but 49ers couldn’t stop Chiefs’ quarterback and offense.” Hometown papers are more likely to make the resident team the subject of their coverage, not the indirect object. 229 Lippmann (76)

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problem, journalists banded together to create a society and official code of ethics that would help them navigate a world of grey areas while protecting their First Amendment rights.

Organizations that dealt with the issues of objectivity and freedoms of press rights began to pop up in the early 20th century. The first organization to represent journalists was founded in

1909 by a group of 10 aspiring journalists at DePauw University who called themselves Sigma

Delta Chi. Originally a fraternity with the motto “Talent, Truth and Energy,” it opened up new chapters across the nation in the next few years.230 In 1973, Sigma Delta Chi changed its name to the Society of Professional Journalists and created a code of ethics that has been revised over the years since, and is the predominant code of ethics used by journalists today.231

Before writing its own code of ethics, the SPJ had been using the code of ethics called

“Canons of Journalism” of a different organization, the aforementioned American Society of

Newspaper Editors. The ASNE was founded in 1922, along with its “Canons.”232 In this code, the ASNE defined the primary function of newspapers was to “communicate to the human race what its members do, feel and think.” Therefore, it continued, journalists must have a high caliber of intelligence and reasoning that stretches across a wide variety of disciplines, leading them to serve as “teachers” and “interpreters.”233

In order to justly fulfill their roles, journalists needed to abide by the canons set forth by the ASNE, the first and foremost of which was being held responsible to their readers.

Newspapers were not to use their power for selfish means, only for the public good. Their “vital” right to do this was protected by the First Amendment, and journalists were allowed to write

230 “Historic Moments: A Timeline of SPJ's Development.” Edited by Jennifer Peebles, History of the Society, Society of Professional Journalists, 2020, www.spj.org/spjhistory.asp. 231 SPJ Code of Ethics. Society of Professional Journalists, www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp. 232 “Canons” was written in 1922 but officially approved a year later. 233 “Code of Ethics or Canons of Journalism (1923).” Ethics Codes Collection, Illinois Institute of Technology, 2011, ethics.iit.edu/ecodes/node/4457.

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about anything that is not forbidden by law, a canon keeping with the then-current interpretation of libel. Journalists were also independent actors, only beholden to the public, whom they served.

The Canons expressly prohibited partisanship, calling it “subversive of the fundamental principle of the profession” that does “violence to the best spirit of American journalism.”

Instead, journalists had to focus on the truth, or else they would not be trusted by their readers; in that same vein, they also had to practice impartiality — objectivity by another name — unless it was specifically written that the article contained opinions. Lastly, journalists were to practice decency and fair play by allowing defamed characters to speak in their own defense, not violating peoples’ privacy, promptly correcting their mistakes, and only publishing information that helped the public good.

In 1930, the Associated Press Media Editors group was formed. It began out of a desire to

“foster journalistic excellence,” which remains in its mission statement today.234 Editors from all over the nation came together to discuss the Associated Press’s coverage and incidentally divulged plenty of criticisms during their meetings. Based upon subject — domestic news, photography, business, etc. — respective committees wrote annual reports that were later used during conventions, creating a “useful, professional scrutiny” that the AP could use to better itself.

These societies also collaborated with the journalism schools, strengthening the idea that journalism was on its way to becoming a full profession. The American Society of Newspaper

Editors created a Committee on Schools of Journalism to regulate the quality of the schools’ education. It sought to create rankings for schools, standardize curricula and decide whether the

234 Haiman, Bob. History. Associated Press Media Editors, www.apme.com/page/apmeHistory.

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studies should be on the undergraduate or graduate levels, or both.235 A 1931 ASNE Committee of Schools of Journalism report stated that newspapers needed to play a larger role in the journalism schools, as the schools were “auxiliary agencies to make better newspapers.” Instead of schools dictating what newspapers needed, the newspapers should be the ones to tell the schools what their needs were, according to the report.236 Schools conducted research that benefited the papers, such as analyzing advertising content, and newspapers fought for the success of journalism schools’ existence.237

Journalism, through its schools and new standards, consolidated its presence as an educator and its status as a profession. Its members were now qualified, having received an education. They were generally trustworthy, and they had a code of ethics to show for it.

Organizations kept journalists and newspapers in check, reminding the public that journalists took their responsibility to provide the news seriously. The industry shed the trappings of yellow journalism, moving away from simply seeking profits to actually educating the public, using rigorous standards to keep itself in check. In 1931, Lippmann wrote that the most impressive event of the last decade was a shift from the “dramatic disorderly, episodic type” that came with yellow journalism to the “objective, orderly and comprehensive” approach to presenting the news.238 Independence was not just a mark of distance from a political party, but a mark of pride in keeping tabs on the world around them, giving the public all the information it needed to know.

235 Folkerts (235) 236 Folkerts (241) 237 In 1933, Eric Allen reported that reporters in his state “saved” the school of journalism when the Great Depression threatened to shut it down. 238 Ladd (46)

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Chapter Four

Flying Too Close to the Sun: The public grows tired of its heroes

Journalists had finally achieved their goal of serving as the public’s educator and defender of democracy — or did they? They certainly secured the public’s trust by reporting the news in a clear and objective manner, but this soon was not enough. Journalists realized that their treasured standard of objectivity needed an update. Simply repeating what politicians said proved to be problematic in the long run as politicians could state falsehoods. Without providing context or fact-checking statements, journalists risked being stuck with printing false information simply because a politician lied or misspoke.

Journalists needed to do more, to be more; providing information so that people could make informed decisions in a democracy was one thing, but actively seeking out corruption was another. So they reignited their muckraker roots and systematically overhauled how they approached their jobs, transitioning away from being unbiased messengers between the government and the public to serving as the government’s watchdog. Yet the narrative of journalists as “heroes” that protect American democracy is more complex than it may seem — an issue that is best understood through the lens of Watergate. Watergate did not create journalistic heroes; those already existed, and so did their general skepticism of the government.

Instead, Watergate exacerbated that skepticism, transforming it into a cynicism that ultimately led to a loss of respect and trust in journalists.

The “myth” of Watergate

Watergate had a lasting impact in American culture, serving as a point of comparison for later scandals as well as a metric for how well journalists do their jobs. Political scientist Larry

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Sabato said that Watergate, which “overwhelms modern American journalism,” had the “most profound impact of any modern event on the manner and substance of the press’s conduct.” The

Washington Posts’ coverage of Watergate and the New York Times’ publishing of the Pentagon

Papers “inspired a whole generation of young journalists to dig below the surface of events,”

Karen Rothmeyer wrote.239 The press was a prominent aspect of the story: It was the hero that uncovered secrets the government was keeping from the people. The Washington Post reporters

Carl Bernstein and Robert (Bob) Woodward became household names, famous for saving the soul of a nation that did not realize it needed saving. They became bestsellers, Pulitzer Prize winners, subjects of films and documentaries, and idols of a new generation of investigative reporters.240

The Watergate story, however, is a myth. It is a “David and Goliath story” that asserts that two journalists brought down the powerful president of the United States. It is the mythology of a valiant press that saved the day with only the truth as a weapon. Even though Watergate holds plenty of real estate in people’s minds when they think about the mark journalism has had on the world, it was not the start of a new era of heroes. The trend of reporters leaning into the role of being a government watchdog was happening for years and continued after Watergate as well. If anything, Watergate exacerbated tensions that already existed between the government and the press due to its fame and turned the public against journalists that seemed to be constantly on the lookout for a scandal.

239 Schudson, Michael. Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past. BasicBooks, 1993. (103) 240 Schudson (Watergate, 104)

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The rise of investigative reporting

According to the myth, Watergate supposedly did a number of things. It led to an increased interest among young people in journalism careers, increased tensions between the press corps and the White House, turned journalists into celebrities, and increased investigative reporting. In reality, not all of this was true. First of all, interest in majoring in journalism and other communication fields had already been increasing in the late 1960s and continued to do so at the same pace through the 1970s.241 President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 and many conspiracies and investigations appeared when journalists such as Dorothy Kilgallen made it their mission to discover the truth. That event, along with many others, very well could have been the spike in interest in journalism, not necessarily Watergate.

The truth is, investigative reporting has a long history in the United States, and Watergate was by no means the start of its golden years. Author Jon Marshall acknowledged that in the view of some journalists, all journalism was investigative, but for the purposes of his book — and this thesis — he proposed a different definition: reporting with initiative on matters that some people or organizations wished to keep secret.242 It started long ago with Benjamin Harris, a Massachusetts printer who, in 1690, printed damaging information about colonial armed forces that lacked supplies, treated prisoners cruelly, and failed to win the support of supposed allies.

Marshall wrote that Harris “embraced… ‘the essential qualities of investigative journalism — revelation of public wrongdoing, documentation of evidence, a challenge to established public policy, and an appeal to public opinion for reform.’”243 Four days after Harris set up shop and

241 Schudson (Watergate, 109–110) 242 Marshall, Jon. Watergate's Legacy and the Press: The Investigative Impulse. Northwestern University Press, 2011. (xv) 243 Here, Harris is quoting historian James Aucoin.

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started printing, the colonial government shut him down because it disapproved of how he was portraying it.244

William Randolph Hearst, owner of The San Francisco Examiner, continued to pursue investigative tactics as he practiced yellow journalism in the late 1800s, boasting that he published “the journalism that acts.” Though this often led to publicity stunts and articles that were the epitome of sensationalism, Hearst’s paper did manage to take on large companies that profited off of poor people who did not stand a chance, exposing their actions.245 His rival,

Joseph Pulitzer, also hired investigators for his paper, The New York World, most notably

Elizabeth Cochrane who wrote under the alias Nellie Bly. She spent time undercover at asylum institutions as a prostitute, maid, and countless other positions to write exposés that shocked The

World’s readers and encouraged them to buy the paper en masse.246

Then there was President Theodore Roosevelt, who at first appreciated reporters who were interested in his reform agenda, but once they started digging deeper and questioning his policies, he changed his mind. Roosevelt called these reporters “muckrakers” after a character in

John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” who scrapes filth off floors for a living, implying these reporters were doing the same with information — dredging up dirt and inciting evil. The journalists actually took this as a compliment and wore the label proudly, continuing to publish exposes on the dangerous conditions workers faced.247 Upton Sinclair, author of “The Jungle,” for example, exposed the terrible conditions in which food was being processed, leading to the

244 Marshall (5) 245 Marshall (14) 246 Marshall (16–17) 247 Marshall (17)

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passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906; photographer Jacob Riis shone a light on the abysmal living conditions the poor lived in, crammed into tenement housing.

Not only were Bernstein and Woodward not the first investigative journalists to make a name for themselves but also they were not the first to distrust and investigate the government.

Distrust of the government among journalists increased significantly during the Vietnam War.

As reporters stopped relying solely on press briefings and instead went into the field with the soldiers themselves, they realized that the government’s version of the truth was incomplete.

Americans soon learned that their own troops were bombing civilians, even though the Pentagon claimed it was only hitting military targets.248 Television also played a role, bringing the war directly into Americans’ living rooms and letting them see the destruction for themselves.

In a study of presidential press conferences from 1953 through 2000, researchers found that reporters grew more assertive and adversarial over time, asking multiple questions in a single turn, taking initiative by framing their questions with context, and asking for responses to criticism.249 The length of news stories also grew longer in order to add the necessary context.

Analysis and investigations need space, and stories that focus on “the big picture” — such as

“what Hitler represents” — increased in number as well as occupation of space.

Reporters’ use of “contextual journalism” paved the way for their in-depth coverage of the Vietnam War and subsequent investigations. It represented a third of front-page stories from

1979 onwards, presenting a clear shift from “he said, she said” objectivity journalism used in the past. Contextual information and impartial analysis became the new norm, making it easier for readers to better understand the world around them.250 During the Vietnam War and

248 Marshall (44–45) 249 Schudson (Right to Know, 153) 250 Schudson (Right to Know, 61)

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counterculture era of the sixties, journalism moved away from their “establishment” roots of being political insiders and toward a watchdog role. It evolved to be an independent outsider, seeking accountability. A dividing line between politicians and journalists became clearer, and the latter leaned into its role as a trusted, powerful, prosperous and public-spirited entity that educated the public on the workings — and misdeeds — of the government.251

Becoming the fourth estate

This new “contextual journalism” drew up on a new form of objectivity that was based upon “radical suspicion of authority” and “watchdog journalism.”252 Journalists felt it was their duty to go above and beyond to get at the truth, which at the time meant not trusting anything that came out of a politician’s mouth. They were not simply going to report what the politicians were saying, but explain why they said it and whether they were being truthful. And because journalism as a whole was still impartial, reporters interrogated people on both sides of the political aisle.

The press leaned into the independent label, establishing itself as the fourth estate, a watchdog over a government that did not want to be watched. The idea of the press being the

“fourth estate”253 gained prominence in the second half of the 20th century. Supreme Court

Justice Potter Stewart often visited his alma mater, Yale Law School, and at one of his

Commencement addresses, he delivered a speech that “defined and legitimized” the fourth estate model of the press. 254 It framed the press as a “fourth institution outside the government to

251 Schudson (Right to Know, 62) 252 Schudson (Right to Know, 63) 253 The first three estates being the clergy, nobility and commoners, as derived from the traditional European estate concept. Today, it is used more often to refer to the three branches of government (Executive, Legislative, Judicial). 254 Powe, Lucas A. The Fourth Estate and the Constitution: Freedom of the Press in America. University of California Press, 1992. (260)

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check the potential excesses of the other three branches.”255 Though the three branches were developed with the idea of a system of checks and balances keeping it in place, Stewart saw the press as an independent check on the power of government as whole, when its own system failed.

But part of the press being the independent watchdog also meant keeping its own reputation relatively unblemished. The New York Times, for example, announced in 1970 that it would open up its op-ed pages to people outside of the journalism industry to give more voices a platform. In its editorial announcing this new policy, The Times wrote that it “hoped to afford greater opportunity for exploration of issues and presentation of new insights and new ideas” by people with no connection to the paper and “whose views will very frequently be completely divergent from our own.” In this way, The Times showed that it did not have a complete monopoly on the ideological part of the content it was producing. It did not shut down discussions or different perspectives than the ones most often printed in its forum pages. Instead,

The Times tried to prove it was not going to use its influence without some kind of ideological check, which in this case was printing information that presented a different perspective.256

Other papers followed in The Times’ example, not just opening up their op-ed pages, but also creating an ombudsman position and publishing more letters to the editor. Of course, all of these papers were still in charge of determining what content was going to be published and were still in the business of saying no to some people, but they were not turned away on ideological differences only. There is no perfect response to making sure that various voices are heard and different issues addressed, but that did not stop the papers from trying. They needed to retain all

255 Powe (261) 256 Powe (285)

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their freedoms while appearing fair, trying to get the best of both worlds by presenting themselves as independent, unbiased watchdogs as much as they could. If they could remain in that elevated position, they would have more of a mandate to be a check on the government and other institutions.

Journalists’ presence on the nation’s stage became pronounced in the 1960s as they familiarized themselves with the fact that they had influence. They were not directly involved in government decisions by any means, but politicians were aware that the media was “alert, powerful, and by no means sympathetic.”257 Their coverage made a difference, and the soft power they wielded did not go unnoticed. Their contextual coverage allowed their readers to better understand the news and therefore participate in society in a greater capacity, such as by protesting a war for which they saw no use. The rise of investigative reporting was another important part of journalism’s shift in power. Through research, tenacity, and skepticism, newspapers could hold elected officials accountable. By focusing on contextual and investigative reporting, journalism held a “more assertive presence in American public life.”258

News organizations were publishing investigations left and right, uncovering one problem after another, even before Watergate. Investigative news teams were already being created: The AP and Newsday each founded one in 1967, and The Boston Globe followed suit a year later. Other newspapers increasingly started to devote more funding toward such projects, and organizations such as the Fund for Investigative Journalism (founded in 1969) awarded grants to reporters who were conducting investigative work.259 In 1971, CBS aired a

257 Schudson, Michael. The Rise of the Right to Know: Politics and the Culture of Transparency, 1945–1975. Harvard University Press, 2015. (145) 258 Schudson (Right to Know, 45) 259 Schudson (Watergate, 118)

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documentary that detailed how the government was using taxpayer money to inflate the

Pentagon’s reputation using movies, air shows and parades.260

A couple months later, The New York Times published the Pentagon Papers, a

Department of Defense study of the United States’ disastrous involvement in the Vietnam War.

After the courts prevented The Times from further publishing the information, The Washington

Post took the mantle, and this time, a court order did not stop the newspapers in their coverage.

The public finally saw that the government had been lying to them the whole time, presenting the

Vietnam War’s efforts as a success, when in reality soldiers were committing atrocities such as rape, and the war was nowhere near being over.

For a democracy to function properly, people needed to trust their representatives in the government. Once people voted a representative into office, they expected that representative to serve in their best interests, not hide the truth from them. This was especially important during the Vietnam War when young men were drafted and then killed in a fight that lasted for two decades. Almost 60,000 Americans died, only for their friends and family to find out they did so mostly to prevent U.S. humiliation on the world stage.261 Some felt that their government, whose role was to protect its people, actually allowed thousands to die for its reputation. Two-thirds of

Americans did not, and the 1960s saw a growing social movement opposing the war.262

Journalists saw the effects of their investigations and wanted to build on that success. The

Pentagon Papers “convinced [newspapers] that we could do this kind of reporting,” The Post’s

Executive Editor Ben Bradlee said. This new mandate “encouraged reporters to more

260 Marshall (62) 261 Correll, John T. “The Pentagon Papers.” Air Force Association, Air Force Magazine, 6 May 2008, www.airforcemag.com/article/0207pentagon/. 262 Carroll, Joseph. “The Iraq-Vietnam Comparison.” Gallup News, Gallup, 15 June 2004, news.gallup.com/poll/11998/iraqvietnam-comparison.aspx.

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aggressively expose what happens behind government’s closed doors,” Marshall wrote.263

Watergate “galvanized the journalistic imagination,”264 but it was by no means the beginning of journalism’s role as the fourth estate. For years journalists were growing uncomfortable with the government not providing the full story, reaching back even to President Eisenhower’s lies about a U-2 spy plane being downed over Russian airspace. His administration first said the plane served a weather purpose, only to backtrack and admit it had been illegally surveying Russian land. The culture of journalism was changing far before President Richard Nixon committed any crimes during Watergate, but his lies were by far the most memorable.265

Journalists naturally responded to the government’s expansion of power and responsibility by looking closer at its actions. Their coverage was “more probing, more analytical” and even blurred the lines between public and private lives.266 Journalists felt it was their duty to provide this information to the public; they were cynical, used to the government lying for years and catching it in the act did not improve morale. Journalists believed that the government was not capable of regulating itself and that the responsibility fell to them instead.

As a result of increased probing into politicians’ lives, it was only a matter of time that the relationship between them and the press turned sour. The rise of confidential sources proved to be another problematic point. Government officials felt that they could be protected if they said anything negative about the administration. A 1978 survey of Washington reporters found that

28% of interviews they conducted were either off the record or on background, protecting the

263 Marshall (64) 264 Schudson (Right to Know, 141) 265 Schudson (Right to Know, 143) 266 Schudson (Right to Know, 144)

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identity of the source. This was also seen in Bernstein and Woodward’s reporting, as they did not name any sources in the first 100 articles on the scandal.267

Since 1960, members of Congress and Congressional staffers believed that the media became “harder, tougher, more cynical.” Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart observed that until Watergate, though people were already aware that the press was adversarial to the executive branch, they had not yet comprehended what exactly that could mean.268 A president resigning was eye-opening for them, as the public tied investigative reporting to the downfall of the most powerful man in the country. The event was more pronounced than previous coverage of the

Vietnam War, Pentagon Papers, and other stories the government was uncomfortable seeing in the papers, so it naturally stood out in the public’s mind when they reviewed their history. The

“credibility gap” that made the press wary of the information put out by the government existed before Watergate; the scandal only exacerbated what was already there.

The narrative of a constant scandal

The press achieved a powerful status within society, with parts of the American public seeing it as a coequal branch of government and some even trusting the press more than

Congress itself and nearly as much as the Supreme Court.269 It appealed to journalists to become undercover crusaders of morality, exposing wrongdoing. The press supported the Freedom of

Information Act’s passage, as biased as that may sound. It ensured public access to federal executive agencies through documents, reports, manuals and the like, an appealing prospect for journalists who were covering the government. Even though some journalists “felt uncomfortable” supporting the legislation, they did so anyway, praising it in editorials and

267 Marshall (65) 268 Schudson (Right to Know, 146) 269 Marshall (109)

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providing extensive coverage of its creation and passage. The press was worried about the “rise of an administrative state” that shifted power from elected officials to appointed bureaucrats, and the FOIA presented transparency and accountability.270

At first, it seemed as though government officials were willing to cooperate with the press, maintaining an effort to remain transparent and not recreate a Nixonian downfall. In 1974,

Congress strengthened the Freedom of Information Act to ensure that federal agencies respond to requests for information within ten days. State governments passed laws to hold elected officials’ deliberations public throughout the 1970s, and in 1978, Congress passed a law protecting whistleblowers from being fired.271

This era of cooperation did not last. When President Jimmy Carter assumed office in

1977, he pledged to have a more open relationship with the press than Nixon did but grew tired of increasingly common leaks as government officials were more inclined to speak. Drawing upon Bernstein and Woodward’s unwillingness to name sources, officials were reassured that their identities would be kept secret by other reporters as well. This produced a number of negative stories about the president and his administration, leading Carter to evade the press, backtracking on his initial promise.272

Each new scandal also came with a new suffix: “-gate,” reminding the public of all the secrets and scandals the government was hiding from them. Carter’s budget director, Bert Lance, was accused of engaging in suspicious activities in the Georgia bank he managed, a “scandal” that was deemed “Lancegate” at the time. New York Times columnist William Safire won a

Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the affair, coverage that made common use of terms such as

270 Schudson (Right to Know, 56) 271 Marshall (110) 272 Marshall (118)

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“smoking gun,” “cover-up,” and “stonewalling,” terms that originated from Watergate coverage.

Lance was later indicted but never found guilty. Allegations of criminal activity at a peanut warehouse Carter owned was called “Peanutgate;” Carter’s brother, Billy Carter, made dealings with a Libyan dictator that resulted in “Billygate.”273

Rather than approaching the government and the news with a healthy dose of skepticism, some journalists ventured into cynical territory. Instead of weeding out a few bad apples, it began to appear that reporters thought the whole orchard was rotting. The skepticism allowed journalists to uncover the lies surrounding the Vietnam War and Nixon’s shady actions, but the cynicism resulted in unnecessarily tarnished reputations. Once the president of the United States was found to be corrupt, some reporters assumed everyone under him was too — even though that was far from the truth.

Scandals seemed to multiply by the month, but like Lancegate, not all of them were proven. Allegations that Carter’s chief of staff snorted cocaine in a nightclub were proven false, even though the story remained in the news for months.274 Reporters were turning into bloodhounds, and even some journalists joined the backlash from the public who was growing tired of reporters’ constant pursuit of scandals.275 Columnist Joseph Kraft wrote that the zeal of investigative journalists was actually weakening government institutions through

“indiscriminate” attacks. The Associated Press’ president said that the investigative reporting binge caused readers to see journalists as “nitpicking through the debris of government decisions for scandals not solutions.”276

273 Marshall (118–119) 274 Marshall (119) 275 Marshall (110) 276 Marshall (120)

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In 1977, The Chicago Sun-Times teamed up ith 60 Minutes to produce a documentary about corruption in the city. It became a Pulitzer Prize finalist but was ultimately passed over due to the methods used to obtain the information. The reporters set up a tavern — fittingly called the

Mirage — and used hidden cameras to record health inspectors demanding bribes to ignore code violations. The documentary resulted in revisions to codes, new inspection procedures, and the indictment of many city officials, but it also showed the public what lengths these journalists would go to in order to obtain information.277 A trustworthy journalist should not impersonate other people but always identify herself as a reporter — otherwise, she would be lying to the people she comes into contact with, which does not instill trust in his reporting. Today, the

Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics explicitly tells journalists to avoid undercover methods of obtaining information.278

After a certain point, journalists became liars themselves, omitting identifying information and not fact-checking their sources. The foundation for journalists to consider themselves educators was their relationship with the truth, but that relationship was now eroding.

Once a reporter lost a reader’s trust, it was hard to regain it. Without trust, that reporter could not properly fulfill his role of serving as a check on government officials’ power. Instead, government officials started to look more trustworthy than the journalists that were supposedly their watchdog.

Public support started to fade, and instead of being portrayed as heroes on the big screen, the profession of journalism was used to highlight the art of lying. Woodward and Bernstein enjoyed the height of heroism: Their book, “All the President’s Men,” saw its paperback rights

277 Marshall (121) 278 SPJ Code of Ethics.

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auctioned off for $1.5 million and was topping bestseller lists. The accompanying film turned guessing Deep Throat’s identity279 into a national pastime, his alias on the tip of their tongues.280

The movie about their investigation made a mark, enshrining them in cultural history, pushing their fame to a new height, squeezing out the David and Goliath story as much as it could.

Journalists were seen as heroes, but that image came crashing down. A 1981 movie, “Absence of

Malice,” portrayed a young female reporter writing damaging and untrue stories about a warehouse owner, which ultimately caused the owner to commit suicide. The reporter’s digging and relentless pursuit of the story was shown in a negative light, instead making audiences sympathize with the defamed victim.281

There was also unease among editors regarding the increased interest in adversarial coverage that leveled out the star power of journalists with government officials. The Associated

Press’ general manager, Wes Gallagher, said the reporters were now using the First Amendment as a “hunting license,” and the American Newspaper Publishers Association chairman, Harold

W. Anderson, said they were “almost joyously” presenting themselves as the adversaries of the government. Going back to Watergate, reviewers of Woodward and Bernstein’s book and film, such as CBS news commentator Eric Sevareid, criticized the two reporters for echoing Nixon’s failure to know when to stop: For Nixon, it was lying and covering up his deeds, but for

Woodward and Bernstein, it was capitalizing on their newfound fame.282

Journalism was reaching new heights to its power during Watergate, but this trend did not last. Steve Hess claims that investigative work was only popular “for a relatively short time,” and

279 Deep Throat was the pseudonym of the anonymous source that spurred on Bernstein and Woodward’s reporting. He was later uncovered as Mark Felt, former associate director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. 280 Schudson (Watergate, 113) 281 Marshall (136) 282 Schudson (Watergate, 114)

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that while journalists take pride in investigative work, that did not make up the bulk of their work. Former Washington Post editor Barry Sussman told author Michael Schudson that newspaper editors were “not crusaders.” So while some reporters wanted to go full on Knights

Templar, editors saw themselves as the voices of reason. A New York Times reporter once said of

Hamilton Jordan’s alleged cocaine use that he believed Jordan was guilty because “in every case

I can remember, the politician turned out to be lying.” Yet there were no other massive scandals uncovered in the years after Watergate, and by the Reagan years, things seemed to settle down.283

Editors, along with other members of the old guard, felt that some reporters were getting ahead of themselves. In 1974, Executive Director of the National News Council William Arthur expressed worry about the future of reporting, saying “the press must be wary of overkill.” The

Post’s publisher, Katherine Graham, was uncomfortable about the direction journalism was taking, too. She said that Watergate brought about a “new and rather indiscriminate emphasis on disclosure as the index of fitness in public office.”284 The political landscape was seeing a shift from a focus on policy to ensuring candidates were making their tax returns public, placing an emphasis on the latter, even though it was not actually a sound judge of character or competency.

Lasting effects of an “untrustworthy” press

The constant investigations unnerved presidents and their administrations. When Ronald

Reagan assumed the presidency, he destroyed whatever legal gains the press achieved after

Watergate. Reagan interpreted the Freedom of Information Act as narrowly as he could and made fewer government documents accessible, undoing Carter’s steps towards transparency.

283 Schudson (Watergate, 120) 284 Schudson, Michael. The Power of News. Harvard University Press, 2003. (153)

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Government officials could now classify documents as “top secret” without regard towards the public’s need to know.

Though Reagan substantially contributed to the deterioration of press rights, he was building upon his predecessor’s work.Nixon illegally wiretapped several journalists, fearing that they were receiving leaks from his administration. He prosecuted The Times for printing the

Pentagon Papers, seeking to silence them. It was a tactic that worked, at least until The Post made it clear it was not afraid of the president. Nixon felt that the press did not like him, and acted accordingly. In a memoir, he wrote that he “considered the influential majority of the news media to be my political opposition.”285 He had his staff prepare summaries of news coverage every day with notes on which stories were favorable and which ones were not. His press secretary tried to keep reporters away from the president and often relied on prepared statements that presented Nixon in a positive light.286 Gerald Warren, editor of The San Diego Union in

1992,287 said that he saw a “sharp decline in civility” in private press briefings at both the White and the State Department, where reporters tended to be “more diplomatic than the diplomats.”288

Nixon renamed the press conference a “news conference” to imply anything he told the press was inherently true, and that he was the harbinger of news, not the press.

Nixon believed that the press — which he called “the media” to make it sound less favorable — did not represent the people and was an irresponsible and independent group instead.289 The term implied less respect and more self-interest. Washington-based British journalist Henry Farlie commented on this term, saying the media was not “just an extension of

285 Marshall (55) 286 Marshall (54) 287 Warren was also the deputy press secretary for Richard Nixon from 1969 to 1972. 288 Schudson (Watergate, 112) 289 Marshall (55)

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journalism” but “dangerous insects who infest Washington.” The “insatiable” media “[stripped] bare all that is green and healthy” and was never at a loss for words.290 He mostly directed his attention at journalists on screen, but the term caught on to apply to all forms of news dissemination. Farlie complained that people in the media cared only for “advancing themselves on television and the lecture circuit” but had the audacity to complain about a dysfunctional government.291

Nixon’s speechwriter, William Safire, recalled how he took part in the transition from using “the press” to using “the media.” The latter has a “manipulative, Madison Avenue, all- encompassing connotation, and the press hated it,” he said. “The press” was a term filled with respect, knowledge, power and First Amendment privilege, which the Nixon administration did not like. Seeing some reporters turn into celebrities did not help journalists’ cause to portray themselves in a respectable manner, either. Farlie continued on to claim that due to the media’s rise, the government was forced to stop actually governing and focus on controlling its image of good governance instead.292 Though this is not entirely true, Farlie was correct in that the media started to play a larger role in Washington, forcing the government to adapt; this is in part because of journalists’ desire to fulfill their role as an independent watchdog that called for transparency.

Feeling threatened, the Nixon administration attacked journalists. Nixon tasked his Vice

President, Spiro Agnew, to give a speech attacking the press after the 1968 election, painting the network news as “a tiny fraternity of privileged men, elected by no one, and enjoying a

290 Schudson (Right to Know, 135) 291 Schudson (Right to Know, 136) 292 Ibid.

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monopoly sanctioned and licensed by the government.”293 The president of CBS at the time called Agnew’s attack an “unprecedented attempt” to intimidate a news medium that depends on government licenses, which had spurred an influx of calls, letters and telegraphs to the networks calling for more positive coverage of the president and his administration.294 As Agnew’s attacks increased and conservative advocacy groups jumped on the bandwagon, some news outlets stopped analyzing Nixon’s speeches and summarized them instead.295

The press also faced restrictions on reporting on events that made the president look bad; when American forces invaded Grenada, a small nation in the Caribbean, Reagan’s administration successfully prevented the press from reporting on civilian casualties at the time.

Reagan earned the name of “Teflon President” for his successful efforts in tamping down on negative press, showing that even the most diligent investigative reports were not able to repeat

Bernstein and Woodward’s takedown of a president. A report that claimed Nixon’s national security advisor took a bribe from Japanese journalists to arrange an interview with the president’s wife led to the advisor’s resignation, but was ultimately unproven and failed to hurt

Nixon himself.296

Even large stories that stayed in the news for months did not have the effect reporters saw during Watergate. The Iran-Contra affair, for example, saw journalists focus on who was winning the publicity war, rather than uncovering new information that would have turned the tide. Politicians became more adept at reframing conversations and news stories from revolving around the problems themselves to the discussions surrounding the arguments. Coverage about

293 Marshall (58) 294 Marshall (59) 295 Marshall (60) 296 Marshall (140–141)

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CBS anchor Dan Rather’s interview with Vice President George H. W. Bush focused on the confrontation between the reporter and the politician, rather than Bush’s evasive answers.297

Today’s equivalent would be news stories focusing on horse races rather than policy proposals during presidential elections.

The increased tensions were not necessarily a direct result of Watergate but a brewing problem due to reporters’ tenacity and administrations’ indignation at constantly being accused of wrongdoing. Leonard Downie, who succeeded Bradlee as The Post’s executive editor, said that many journalists “lost their perspective” after Watergate because they “got caught in the thrill of the chase, and it is a very, very dangerous period when a lot of people get burned.”298

Bush even wrote to Woodward that he thought Watergate and the Vietnam War brought

“Beltway journalism into this aggressive, intrusive, ‘take no prisoners’ kind of reporting that I can now say I find offensive.”299 Scholar Suzanne Garment published a book, “Scandal,” in 1991 that examined the press’ relationship with politicians’ scandals, finding that the press has accused more than 400 senior government officials and candidates for federal office of wrongdoing since Watergate.300

Drawing upon a study of select newspapers from 1998–1999 and 1963–1964, Michael

Schudson found that the time shift saw a “cultural loss of idealism” and newspapers became a lot less trusting of the government, instead celebrating their watchdog role and critical judgement.

297 Marshall (145) 298 Schudson (Watergate, 109) 299 Marshall (146) 300 Marshall (147)

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News coverage of political campaigns became increasingly negative and cynical over that same period of time, focusing on horse-race journalism301 rather than policy issues.302

This was too much for the public, which, by the late 20th century, grew tired of the mistrust that was present at every corner. Compared to 1972 when three-fourths of the public expressed “either a great deal or fair amount of confidence” in government to solve problems, only 42% said so in 1993. Phrases such as “a high White House official” also did not do anything to alleviate those perceptions. Since the 1960s, there has been a drop in people’s engagement in democracy. Political scientist Robert Putnam found that by the turn of the century, the percentage of people voting dropped by a quarter, and they stopped participating in civic or political groups by about 40%.303

A profession meant to protect democracy ended up eroding trust in it. With so many examples of government officials and reporters alike lying and betraying the public’s trust, it was no wonder people were not sure who to believe. Such a negative climate could lead to an unwillingness to participate in it. Why would anyone want to be a part of a society that seems to consist of dishonest people? For some, it was simply better to stay away. Slowly, though, the mass media was getting the hint, and news coverage in the form of watchdog stories dropped in the last quarter of the century. Between 1977 and 1997, stories about government fell 38% and international affairs-related coverage fell 25% in the major networks’ newscasts, The New York

Times and The Los Angeles Times front pages, and covers of Time and Newsweek.304

301 A focus on strategy and tactics of campaigning. 302 Schudson (Right to Know, 151) 303 Marshall (147–148) 304 Marshall (149)

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The two reporters at the center of the Watergate investigation also had a rocky ending.

Woodward became an editor at The Post but faced criticism over his books that published unattributed quotations, unnamed sources, and reconstructed dialogue of events Woodward did not attend. Woodward was also the editor of a book about a child heroin addict that won a

Pulitzer Prize in 1980, only to lose it after the child was found to be fictional. Even Bernstein said in 1989 that Watergate “has not had the effect one would have hoped it would have… we haven't seen any truly significant breakthroughs in journalism” since Nixon’s resignation.305

Though Watergate did not directly impact journalism more than the muckrakers or the

Vietnam War did, it still did so indirectly by promoting the idea of journalists as heroes. The way the public views the press is important too, as its view impacts how people interact with journalism as a whole: Do they trust what newspapers are publishing? Watergate was not special in the sense that it revolutionized journalism; instead, it made a mark because it resulted in a president’s resignation. Journalists were leaning into their role as the fourth estate no matter what, and that was what led to a damaged relationship between them and government officials.

Watergate exacerbated tensions and gave journalists more confidence in pursuing stories, but it would have happened eventually without it.

305 Schudson (Watergate, 121)

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Epilogue

A New Day

It is safe to say that the press is failing to meet the educational goals it has set for itself — or which a healthy democracy needs it to meet. While it is not the case for all Americans, many do not trust the media or only trust certain news outlets but not others. Unfortunately, the public does not trust the government, either. The four estates are under scrutiny without a clear path to gain back the public’s trust. Tensions between the government and the press have only increased over time, degrading both their relationship with each other and with the people they were supposed to serve. This time, however, the cynicism journalists have toward the government is warranted, though that is not a view not shared by all Americans, some of whom are themselves cynical of journalists. Journalists lost the trust of their readers, just as the government lost the trust of the journalists just decades prior.

A newspaper cannot educate its readers on what is happening in the world around them if the readers lack confidence in its fair and accurate reporting. In 1974, near the end of the

Watergate scandal, Gallup found that 69% of Americans trusted the media, a number that decreased to only 41% in September 2019, right as President Donald Trump’s Impeachment began. Since Gallup started measuring the public’s confidence in the media, 2016 was the lowest year on record, when only 32% of Americans reported a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in mass media. That same year, only 14% Republicans reported the same amount of trust,306 a sign of the exacerbated partisanship during the presidential election.

306 Brenan, Megan. Americans' Trust in Mass Media Edges Down to 41%. Gallup, 26 Sept. 2019, news.gallup.com/poll/267047/americans-trust-mass-media-edges-down.aspx.

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Though a majority of Americans agree that the media’s role as the government’s watchdog is “important,” they are divided on how well it is fulfilling that role.307 Split equally between thinking journalists were “going too far,” “getting it just right” and “not going far enough,” the public clearly cannot make up its collective mind. Then, of course, we learn that

Republicans are more likely to think that journalists go too far, compared to Democrats who think they do not go far enough.308 The American people do not trust the organizations that provide them with information, but it goes deeper than that: There is a divide between the two major parties, with Democrats being more favorable to the press.

With 80% of both Democrats and Republicans fact-checking news stories (or thinking that they are fact-checking stories when they go to websites with dubious origins),309 journalism is losing its status as a trusted profession. It used to be a reporter’s duty to verify facts, yet people today feel the need to take this responsibility upon themselves. Then there is the question of whether readers have the ability to fact check news in the first place. They may think that they found a corroborating source, but not all news outlets publish accurate information. In 2019, about 60% of Americans reported sharing false information they found on social media, with

15% of total respondents knowing the information was inaccurate at the time they shared it.

None of these statistics instil much hope in the future of our democracy, especially since there is no clear path forward to mend the broken faith.

307 Jurkowitz, Mark, and Amy Mitchell. “Most Say Journalists Should Be Watchdogs, but Views of How Well They Fill This Role Vary by Party, Media Diet.” Pew Research Center's Journalism Project, Pew Research Center, 26 Feb. 2020, www.journalism.org/2020/02/26/most-say-journalists-should-be-watchdogs-but-views-of-how-well- they-fill-this-role-vary-by-party-media-diet/. 308 Ibid. 309 Graham, David A. “Some Real News About Fake News.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 7 June 2019, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/fake-news-republicans-democrats/591211/.

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Americans claim that politicians are to blame for the rise in fake news310 but also expect journalists to solve the problem,311 creating an ironic paradox because many Americans neither trust the press nor approve of its performance. Journalists have made mistakes and will continue to do so, but they have also proven their ability to improve. The current partisan climate makes it difficult for people to believe the press is working for them, rather than against them. Even though reporters prove time and time again that the president and his cabinet members constantly lie, his supporters do not agree, calling the newspapers that publish this information “fake news.”

Instead, they turn to an outlet such as Fox News to reaffirm their belief that the mainstream media is behind a “witch hunt” to topple the President (à la Watergate) because they are part of the “liberal media.”

The lack of media literacy is highly problematic in a climate such as the one we currently live in. Understanding the media we consume as well as the messages that it conveys is an essential part of being an informed citizen. By thinking critically, readers can discern which sources are reliable, recognize any bias a news organization may have, and grasp why the news is important in the first place. A person who is not media literate will not see the difference between a partisan paper and a non-partisan one, as they would not be able distinguish the bias present in that paper’s reporting. A newspaper that tries to present information accurately and without partiality fulfills its role as a tribune, but a newspaper that does the opposite most likely seeks to convince its readers of a certain perspective without being transparent about that goal.

The rub, however, is that newspapers cannot teach media literacy, as that is the role of the education system, a job that must be supplemented with a desire to learn. That desire will often

310 In 2019, only 17% of Americans said they trust the government, compared to 73% in 1958 and 36% in 1974. 311 Wong, Queenie. Fake News Is Thriving Thanks to Social Media Users, Study Finds. CNET, 5 June 2019, www.cnet.com/news/fake-news-more-likely-to-spread-on-social-media-study-finds/.

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complement a desire to be an informed citizen, which is accomplished by reading the news. In the current state of affairs, media illiteracy prevents people from appreciating the news organizations that strive to educate them, which results in a lack of support for those organizations. Though newspapers rely on advertising, they rely on subscriptions as well.

Without financial support, journalists will not have the resources needed to gather the news that is necessary for people to stay informed.

All of this breeds a broken democracy, one in which neither the press nor the government is trusted, and the rampant partisanship only continues to deteriorate it. In an ideal world, people would come together with open minds to reset their democracy, examine which parts of the

Constitution are outdated, and work together to fix them. Even if Joe Biden is elected president later this year, the partisanship and distrust will not vanish. Maybe over time Americans will engage in media literacy on a large scale and learn to trust each other and their institutions again.

The press will once more be their educator, helping keep democracy intact. For now, I am not sure that journalists can fix a democracy that lacks its citizens’ trust; I am not sure anyone can, unless everyone agrees to start over.

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