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

Introduction

[ 1 ] Introduction Journalism is the first rough draft of history. —Philip Graham, 1963 On an early spring night in 1722, a young man hurried along the narrow streets of Boston, trying not to be seen. He was not a spy or a thief. He only wanted to be a writer. Just sixteen years old, Ben Franklin was hoping to get his writing published for the first time, and he had chosen a risky, roundabout route to do so. He had waited until dark, and it was darker still in the shadows of the close-set shops, sheds, barns, and houses along Milk Street. Young Ben was skulking around the shop of the New-England Courant, one of several newspapers that had sprung to life in the previous two decades or so in Boston, then the biggest city and busiest port among England’s colonies in North America. The newspaper was printed and edited by Ben’s older brother James, who would certainly not publish anything that he knew came from the pen of such a youngster. So Ben took his manuscript and slid it under the door, anonymously. With that furtive gesture, Ben Franklin launched a career—one that would shape not only his own astonishing life but also the direction of one of the central institutions in American life, the newspaper. In that moment Ben Franklin took a step out of provincial obscurity and began to let loose a torrent of words and ideas that would help mold journalism and, in the process, America itself.1 In his own telling of the tale many years later, Franklin recalled that while he was still a young and unhappy apprentice in his brother’s print shop, he had been in the habit of eavesdropping on the literary men who would stop by and praise James INTRODUCTION [ 2 ] Franklin for the clever things that were appearing in the Courant. “Hearing their Conversations,” Ben later wrote, “I was excited to try my Hand among them. But being still a Boy, & suspecting that my Brother would object to printing any Thing of mine in his Paper if he knew it to be mine, I contriv’d to disguise my Hand.”2 The next morning Ben got to work early. He made sure he was already in the shop when his brother showed up and discovered the unsolicited submission. Soon the shop filled with James’s friends, and the printer showed them the new manuscript while Ben worked nearby, awaiting their judgment on his work. “They read it,” he recollected, “commented on it in my hearing, and I had the exquisite Pleasure, of finding it met with their Approbation.” At this very moment of blissful discovery, several of the defining characteristics of American journalism are evident. To begin with, there is the setting itself— a print shop. Printing was already a business in colonial days, organized along the lines of any other town-based, moneymaking enterprise. Although closely regulated by the Crown and its agents, printing was always separate from the British government and operated as a business in private hands. Second, Franklin was entering the field under typical circumstances: he was very young, and he had virtually no training. For better or worse, journalism has always been a field open to youth and raw talent. Finally, Franklin himself noted the “exquisite Pleasure” he felt at having his work accepted for publication. That pleasure is real. It is a feeling that, I trust, all published authors will recognize, and it remains a driving force behind the practice of journalism today as much as it was three hundred years ago. It is the same allure that would propel so many of the journalists who followed Franklin to great heights of self-sacrifice, enterprise, and genius, as well as to occasional depths of depravity and deceit. At the time Ben Franklin was launching his first career, the practices now commonly referred to as journalism rested on certain assumptions—at least in the English-speaking colonies of North America.3 Paramount among these was the economic idea that journals carrying news would be produced mainly by printers . These printers were masters of a traditional craft based on hand power whose technology had not changed much since the invention of movable type in the fifteenth century. Printers worked in a stable form of enterprise known as the shop, which was the most common way of organizing the kinds of trades that took place in cities and towns. In a...