Covering America: A Narrative History of a Nation's Journalism

Conclusion

[ 455 ] Conclusion In recent years, the economic problems facing most of the mainstream news media grew so severe that many people began to ask, Does journalism have a future? Were we seeing the “end of news”?1 Beneath the “froth and scum” of each hour’s headlines about the news field—the latest merger or bankruptcy, the freshest outrage over partisanship, the newest online startup—there ran deeper currents and tidal movements. If we look at the history over a long enough stretch of time, we can see some of these larger patterns. In my view, the three hundred years and more of human struggle to build, define, and control the news media in America can be thought of in terms of fairly coherent phases—substantial periods of time when a particular pattern or problem predominates. Throughout this lengthy narrative I have maintained that, despite the historical constraints of their times, a series of innovators have changed journalism in profound ways. Their innovations define the contours of those historical periods. Thus far there have been five major eras in the history of journalism in America (see the Appendix for a summary). Each one is marked by efforts to reconcile a philosophy of journalism (that is, a set of operating principles) with the emerging or dominant economic model of the time. In each of those episodes of convulsive change, significant innovations can be seen occurring across all the major indexes of change—economic, technological , political, sociological, and philosophical—at about the same time. Not all of these periods have a clear starting bell or finale. In fact, in many instances a [ 456 ] CONClUsION given technology or ideology persists long after a new one has arrived. The story contained in this book is not one of an orderly succession. Instead it is the tale of an often messy proliferation of ideas, tools, and business models. Even so, amid all the details and individual stories, patterns are visible. Journalism in America began as a tiny and timid affair conducted by a handful of people in a remote backwater of the great British Empire. The first period in that history can be said to have started in 1704 with the founding of the first successful newspaper (see chapter 1). The colonists had had ways of gathering and disseminating news before then, but news in the sense of regular communications to a substantial audience really got under way with John Campbell’s Boston NewsLetter . In the following decades, while individual newspapers came and went, the industry as a whole flourished as papers grew larger, appeared more frequently, and spread to more and more cities and towns. Still operating along the lines of the shop, with hand-powered presses of limited speed, printers like Ben Franklin who launched newspapers in the American colonies faced a number of problems. Chafing under the practice of censorship and the law of sedition, they articulated a philosophy of press freedom, then challenged authority in order to enlarge the “public sphere” in which their traffic in ideas could take place. Under pressure from their readers (sometimes in the form of mobs), colonial editors found that they had to abandon their original stance of neutrality and move to one side or the other in the great argument over the proper relation between colonies and Crown (see chapter 2). In fighting for their economic survival, they turned to politics. In the process, the pages of newspapers became increasingly bold and increasingly polarized. Whigs read Whig papers, and Tories read Tory papers. As the conflict sharpened, pamphleteers like Thomas Paine joined the debate and pushed journalism to new polemical heights. In the aftermath of the Revolution, printers continued their central role in politics by helping to organize the original political parties. They also found themselves in a newly advantageous social role—as constitutionally favored catalysts in the great experiment in self-government and as economically privileged players enjoying government subsidies such as free postage and lucrative printing contracts. They had solved their financial problems by embracing politics and thereby taking on a central role in the new party system. The next major period in journalism history began in the 1830s and played out over the rest of the nineteenth century in a trend that has been called “the commercialization of news” (see chapters 3 and 4). In this era the key driver of change was, once again, primarily economic. The basic business model changed from the shop to the factory, as printers took a...