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  • Politics and the American Press: The Rise of Objectivity, 1865–1920
  • Merrill Morris
Politics and the American Press: The Rise of Objectivity, 1865–1920. By Richard L. Kaplan. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002; pp viii + 224. $22.99.

Scholars have long tried to explain the change from partisanship to objectivity in the American press in the 1800s. Conventional wisdom, along with some journalism history texts, holds that the partisan press died out quickly [End Page 358] sometime in the 1800s with the rise of technological changes, such as the steam-driven press and the telegraph, and economic changes, such as a move to private instead of party ownership and a reliance on advertising for revenue. However, Richard Kaplan's book, Politics and the American Press: The Rise of Objectivity, 1865–1920, shows how gradual the change really was. Kaplan traces the economic, social, and cultural history of Detroit newspapers as they move from the partisan press era into the objective era, using the newspapers themselves and personal letters and documents from the newspaper owners. This approach yields fascinating insights into how newspapers transformed themselves from partisan journals supported, in large part, by parties and government, to an entirely different economic model based on advertising and consumerism. Kaplan connects the changes to the larger issue of the public sphere in the nineteenth century, a connection that has sometimes been ignored in other journalism histories.

Kaplan contends that the rise of a neutral press was inextricably linked to the decline of the parties and the rise of the Progressives. As the parties' power in American politics subsided, journalists were free to define themselves in the spirit of the Progressive reform movement, Kaplan says, "as impartial technical experts . . . serving the public interest, and above the contamination of politics" (16). However, the story is not complete, Kaplan contends, without a close consideration of the changing public sphere. Kaplan's aim with the book is to "demonstrate how the press expressed, reinforced, and defined the central institutional and cultural dimensions of democracy's public sphere" (26). This book would be a fine addition to a graduate-level course in American newspaper history.

Partisanship died hard, Kaplan shows. His first chapter examines the portrayals of African Americans in Reconstruction-era Detroit newspapers, finding that sometimes savage parodies of blacks in the press allowed first the Democrats and later both parties to get votes by maintaining racism. The press in this era, Kaplan argues, needed the parties as much as the parties needed the press, and they worked in concert to set the boundaries of public discourse.

In chapter 2, he expands his analysis to the question of why partisanship persisted throughout the 1800s. Focusing on several political crises in Detroit papers between 1866 and 1900, he concludes that the economics of competing for audiences in a city that was growing more and more diverse required papers to pursue niche markets. Competition among political elites, who wanted control of newspapers, also added to the tendency for papers to be partisan. Readers also expected partisanship from papers. Kaplan recounts a crisis at the Detroit Free Press over the selection of Horace Greeley as the Democratic presidential candidate in 1872 to oppose Grant. Two of the owners of the Free Press, a Democratic paper, would not endorse [End Page 359] Greeley, a newspaperman who had been an outspoken abolitionist and Republican. As Kaplan points out, the Free Press was beset by a wave of criticism from readers, political bosses, and other newspapers, until the editor bought out the other owners and endorsed Greeley. The editor had learned that Democrats were planning a rival paper that could take over the Free Press's lock on the local party market.

In chapter 3, Kaplan shows how the Detroit papers were able to strengthen their ties to parties in the Gilded Age. Newspapers "turned to the ritual production of popular political identities" (97), and in so doing, they reinforced the two-party system and weakened public debate. This situation was to change, however, as he outlines in chapter 4, as Detroit's population exploded, the price of newsprint fell, and papers' reliance on advertising for revenue instead of circulation...

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