The American Press

The first American newspapers were a subsidiary. The men who printed them were tradesmen who took whatever work paid: almanacs, sermons, legal notices. A newspaper was just one more product they sold. The first to survive was the Boston News-Letter in 1704; an earlier attempt, Publick Occurrences, had been shut down by colonial authorities after a single issue in 1690. A paper lasted only as long as the authorities allowed it, the license could be revoked at any time, and almost no one read it outside the business class.

The press gained its standing first by defying authority. In 1735 a New York printer named John Peter Zenger was tried for criticizing the royal governor. Under the law of the day, attacking the government was a crime even when the criticism was true, but the jury acquitted him regardless. The verdict changed no law, but it established something that outlasted the laws: a printer could tell the truth about the powerful, and a jury might refuse to punish him for it. The Revolution then showed how far print could reach, when in 1776 Thomas Paine's Common Sense sold in numbers no newspaper had seen and demonstrated that the printed word could move a whole population, not merely inform a handful of businessmen.

What this press was not was neutral, because the men running the new country owned it. Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists bankrolled John Fenno's Gazette of the United States. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison answered with Philip Freneau's National Gazette, and Jefferson handed Freneau a clerkship at the State Department that existed mainly to keep the opposition paper alive. These were not unbiased observers of the government. They were its warring factions, fighting in print and paid for by the officials they wrote about.

The penny press revolutionized the newspaper business. In September 1833 a printer named Benjamin Day put out the New York Sun for a penny, a sixth of what other papers charged, and sold it one copy at a time through newsboys on the street. Readers no longer paid the real cost of the paper; advertising covered the difference, and what advertisers bought was the size of the audience. The paper no longer sold news to readers. It sold readers to advertisers, and a larger audience was worth more.

The new economics changed the content. A paper living on mass sales and advertising had every reason to run whatever the most people would buy, and that proved to be crime, courtroom drama, accidents, and scandal rather than news or party doctrine. The Sun showed where this led in 1835, when it ran an invented series about life on the moon, supposedly observed through a giant telescope that did not exist. Sales rose, and the hoax was forgiven as good for business. Sensation was not a defect of the penny press but the predictable result of chasing the largest possible audience.

The same pressure also built real journalism. James Gordon Bennett launched the New York Herald in 1835 and turned news-gathering into a full-time operation, covering finance, crime, and events abroad. Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, started in 1841, used its large readership to push politics and reform and made the editorial page a force in public life. Henry Raymond founded the New York Times in 1851 as a calmer, steadier paper in the same penny market. The commercial press lowered the bar for what counted as news and, at the same time, vastly expanded the machinery for gathering it.

The competition for readers narrowed to a contest between two wealthy men. Joseph Pulitzer had bought the New York World in 1883 and made it the country's largest paper with crime, scandal, crusades, and bold illustrations. In 1895 William Randolph Hearst, recently arrived from California, bought the rival New York Journal and set out to outspend and outsell him. Both papers competed on sensationalism.

The methods of that competition defined the era. Headlines grew into banners that ran the full width of the page. Stories were embellished, exaggerated, and at times completely fabricated. The papers staged stunts, ran lurid illustrations, and filled their Sunday editions with comics and supplements to draw casual readers. One such comic, a slum character called the Yellow Kid, ran in both titles as they poached each other's staff and gave the style its name, yellow journalism.

The consequences of this competition were largest in Cuba. As Cubans revolted against Spanish rule, the World and the Journal ran stories of atrocity and pressed for American intervention. When the battleship Maine exploded in Havana harbor in February 1898, both papers attributed it to Spanish sabotage before any evidence was available and sustained the story for weeks. The Spanish-American War that followed had causes well beyond the press, but the papers did as much as any institution to build public support for it.

The American press spent the first half of the twentieth century reinventing itself. In reaction to the excesses of the yellow press years, a generation of editors set out to make journalism respectable. Adolph Ochs had bought the New York Times in 1896 and rebuilt it as the sober paper of record, promising the news without fear or favor. Universities opened schools of journalism, the Pulitzer Prizes began honoring the best of the craft in 1917, and editors wrote formal codes of ethics. Reporting was becoming a profession, with rules.

The central idea of that profession was objectivity, and its clearest advocate was the writer Walter Lippmann. Just after the First World War, Lippmann argued that reporters should adopt something like a scientific method: not the pretense of having no opinions, but a discipline of testing claims, weighing evidence, and keeping personal bias out of the account. Objectivity in this sense was not a feeling but a procedure, a way of reporting a reader could trust no matter who held the pen.

Then broadcasting gathered the whole country into a single, national audience. Radio, and after it television, reached almost every home, and a handful of networks supplied the news to all of them. The people who delivered it became national authorities. Edward R. Murrow reported the London Blitz live by radio and later used television to confront Senator Joseph McCarthy at the height of his power. Walter Cronkite anchored the evening news for two decades and was, by common description, the most trusted man in America. For the first time, tens of millions of people watched the same events described by the same voices at the same hour.

This unity was not a coincidence; there was a structure beneath it. Newspapers had mostly settled into local monopolies, flush with advertising and classified listings, which paid for large newsrooms and bureaus overseas. Broadcasting was shaped by a different force. Because the spectrum was scarce, only a few networks could exist, and they held their licenses on the condition of serving the public interest. Under the Fairness Doctrine, any station that aired one side of a controversial issue was obliged to give airtime to opposing views. The rule was meant to guarantee balance, but its practical effect ran the other way. Rather than shoulder the burden of finding and airing every counterargument, many broadcasters simply steered clear of controversial subjects. When the FCC reviewed the policy in 1985, it concluded that the doctrine had cooled the very debate it was supposed to encourage. Between abundant advertising, little competition, and a regulatory tilt toward caution, the press of this era could afford to be thorough and had little incentive to be sharply partisan.

The consensus came apart as its supports were removed one by one. Cable television went first. When CNN launched in 1980 and dozens of channels followed, the scarcity that had held the country to three networks was gone. In 1987 the FCC repealed the Fairness Doctrine, and the effect was almost immediate. Freed of any duty to balance, opinionated talk radio expanded sharply, the number of talk stations rising roughly fifteenfold over the next decade and a half. Rush Limbaugh went national in 1988 and demonstrated a large, profitable audience for one controversial political voice rather than a careful balance of them.

Then the internet destroyed the funding apparatus. The local monopolies of the previous era had run on advertising, and their richest channel was the classified listings: jobs, cars, apartments, things for sale. Within a decade Craigslist made classifieds free, and Google and Facebook absorbed most of the display advertising that was left. The revenue that had paid for reporters, photographers, and overseas bureaus did not follow the papers onto their own websites. It went to technology companies that employed no journalists at all.

The result has been the steady destruction of local journalism. Since 2005 the United States has lost close to 3,500 newspapers, roughly a third of all it had, and they keep closing at more than two a week. Two hundred and thirteen counties now have no local news outlet of any kind, and another 1,524 have just one, usually a lone weekly. Together, about 50 million Americans live with little or no access to local news. The reporter who used to sit through the school-board meeting and the zoning hearing, the plainest form of accountability the press ever offered, has simply disappeared from much of the country.

At the national level the press did not vanish, it fissured. Cable news divided into partisan channels, Fox News and MSNBC both arriving in 1996, each offering its audience a reliably comfortable version of events. Then social media came, and with it a feed run by algorithms that reward whatever holds attention, which tends to be outrage and confirmation rather than accuracy. Americans increasingly chose, or were handed, separate streams of information, and those streams described different countries.