Still, there is no doubt that "the people" and "the media" are going through a bit of a rough patch. Only 32% of Americans--and a meager 16% of Republicans--trust the mass media to fully, accurately, and fairly report the news. That is down from a high of 72% in 1976, when journalists were still riding a wave of popularity after their work on the Vietnam War and Watergate scandal.
The unpopularity of the mass media helps to explain why Americans have not universally condemned the scuffles between their elected representatives and the press. When Trump insults the media, his supporters applaud. Constituents of Montana's Glen Gianforte didn't seem to mind that he body-slammed a reporter in May; they elected him to Congress the following day.
Americans have long had a strained relationship with the media. On the one hand, we have enshrined freedom of the press with protection under our nation's highest law. On the other hand, newspapers have always been America's least favorite troublemakers. Teddy Roosevelt famously coined the term "muckracker" to describe pessimistic investigative journalists. Richard Nixon gave the chairman of his Joint Chiefs of Staff a very Trump-esque warning: "The press is your enemy. Enemies. Understand that? . . . Because they're trying to stick the knife right in our groin." Lyndon Johnson, upset at Vietnam War coverage, privately complained that the newspapers were being run by "a bunch of commies."
In the 1800s, hostility to the press was even more widespread--and more violent. Abolitionist printers like Maine's Elijah Parish Lovejoy were frequent targets. Lovejoy had three printing presses destroyed in St. Louis before he relocated to Illinois. He fared worse there. In 1837, a mob killed him in 1837 and, for good measure, threw his press into the Mississippi River. Two years earlier another prominent abolitionist printer, William Lloyd Garrison, narrowly escaped death-by-riot when the mayor of Boston threw him in jail (on a charge of rioting).
But abolitionists weren't the only victims of anti-press sentiment. Joseph Smith and his Mormon followers found themselves on both the giving and receiving end of press hostility. When Mormon settlers established a newspaper in Jackson County, Missouri, an angry mob rode into town and demanded that the Mormons close it down. When they refused, the mob scattered their type into the streets and forced over a thousand Mormons from their homes.
Meanwhile, anti-Mormon newspapers seemed to follow the Mormons--and fuel persecution--wherever they settled. In Illinois, Smith's frustrations finally got the better of him. When the Nauvoo Expositor, an especially hostile anti-Mormon paper, set up shop in the Mormons' home city, the city council resolved that it was inciting persecution and therefore a public nuisance. Smith, as city mayor, ordered the paper's destruction.
Predictably, the move backfired. The anti-Mormon Warsaw Signal, as if to prove that it, in fact, was a threat to public safety, wrote: "War and extermination is inevitable! Citizens ARISE, ONE and ALL!!! . . . We have no time for comment, every man will make his own. LET IT BE MADE WITH POWDER AND BALL!!!"
Anti-Mormon vigilantes answered the call to arms less than two weeks later. On June 27, 1844, an armed mob stormed Carthage Jail, killing Smith and his brother. Within two years, Mormons were on the move to the Salt Lake Valley. But anti-Mormon newspapers found them there. When Brigham Young, successor to Joseph Smith, died in August, 1877, The Salt Lake Tribune couldn't resist a parting shot. "[W]e believe," it wrote, "that the most graceful act of his life was his death." With no one to lead Young's "defrauded followers," the disintegration of "the whole decaying structure" of the Mormon church was inevitable.
Though their methods could be extreme, the early 19th-century public had legitimate reasons to hate their newspapers. By today's standards, the quality of reporting at that time was downright horrendous. Newspaper publishers had neither the time nor the resources to do the investigation and fact-checking that today we call "journalism." They were first and foremost craftsman. Their days were consumed by the tedious and dirty job of running a small printing press: setting their type letter by letter, spreading ink, hanging sheets of paper to dry, finding supplies of ink and paper.
They were passive news gatherers and generally had no qualms about publishing whatever rumor would sell. They ran local enterprises without the benefit of full-time reporters or correspondents, yet their readers wanted news on far-flung events from the Lewis and Clark Expedition in the far west to the French Revolution across the Atlantic. Printers thus had little choice but to publish whatever news they could pull from other newspapers or gossip from those who dropped by the print shop to chat.
They were passive news gatherers and generally had no qualms about publishing whatever rumor would sell. They ran local enterprises without the benefit of full-time reporters or correspondents, yet their readers wanted news on far-flung events from the Lewis and Clark Expedition in the far west to the French Revolution across the Atlantic. Printers thus had little choice but to publish whatever news they could pull from other newspapers or gossip from those who dropped by the print shop to chat.
Not surprisingly, newspapers were poor sources of information. Even Thomas Jefferson, who once said that he would rather have newspapers without government than government without newspapers, lost his patience with inaccurate reporting:
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle . . . . I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors . . . . Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this. Divide his paper into 4 chapters, heading the 1st, Truths. 2d, Probabilities. 3d, Possibilities. 4th Lies. The first chapter would be very short.Early American newspapers were not only inaccurate, they were also unapologetically biased and their writing style did little to conceal it. Before Joseph Smith even had a chance to publish The Book of Mormon, a local paper picked up the story and dismissed the "golden bible" as "the greatest piece of superstition that has ever come within our knowledge." When Smith organized an 1834 expedition to return Mormon settlers from their Jackson County exile, newspapers as far east as Hallowell, Maine sensationalized it as a revolutionary crusade. Smith, the paper wrote, was leading an "invasion force" and vowing to "cast out the infidels" of Missouri.
Much of the bias can be explained by following the flow of money. Conflicts of interest were not just common in the 19th century, they were part of the business model. Printers helped pet politicians win elections by giving them favorable coverage and, when elected, the politicians rewarded their pet printers with lucrative government contracts. This mutual backscratching ensured that reports of political events were comically skewed. In her book, Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin described the absurd newspaper coverage of the debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas:
At the end of the first debate, the Republican Chicago Press and Tribune reported that "when Mr. Lincoln walked down from the platform, he was seized by the multitude and borne off on their shoulders, in the center of a crowd of five thousand shouting Republicans, with a band of music in front." Observing the same occasion, the Democratic Chicago Times claimed that when it was over, Douglas's "excoriation of Lincoln" had been so successful and "so severe, that the republicans hung their heads in shame."The quality of journalism in the United States has vastly improved since those humble origins. New technology, especially the telegraph, drove the modernization. The Associated Press used the telegraph to pioneer a new business model. Instead of distributing a publication of its own, the AP sent reporters to news hot spots, then sold reports to various newspapers, thus giving locally-based newspapers easy access to firsthand accounts of distant events. The AP's model lent itself to a more modern style of news writing; to ensure their articles appealed to papers of all political stripes, their correspondents wrote in a "just the facts" style that became standard. The AP showed that impartiality could be profitable.
In time, journalism became a profession. Accuracy and independence became the newspapers' stock-in-trade. They distanced themselves from politicians, and built firewalls between their business and editorial branches to avoid conflicts of interest. Though they never became apolitical--newspapers often endorse political candidates to this day--modern papers are nothing like the tools of propaganda that they were in the 19th century.
That is not to say that today's media doesn't deserve criticism. The stress of new competition brought about by the proliferation of new media has led to a relaxation of the old guard's self-imposed ethical standards. Revenue-starved outlets have essentially lent their letterhead to "advertorials" which deliberately obscure the line between news and sales pitch. Meanwhile, cable news outlets have led a regression toward the hyper-partisan newspapers of old. The line between reporting and editorializing is blurring. Web pages can make fake news, once clearly identified by its place in checkout-aisle tabloids, look like newspapers of record.
Still, Americans are far better equipped to combat biased and inaccurate reporting. A generation that can research any topic and check any fact with a few thumb-taps has no excuse for being misinformed. Indeed, if Americans are misinformed, it is because we are misusing the tools at our disposal. The web browser that could lend itself to depths of understanding and appreciation of nuance is too often used for selective exposure, headline grazing, and a superficial familiarity with current affairs.
As much as we complain about the media, our power to discern food from poison has been diminished by a generation of spoon-feeding from the relatively good news sources of the late 20th century. In the short-term, fake news and partisan reporting will find fertile ground where confirmation bias is high and media literacy is wanting. False claims from birthers, antivaxers and their kin will gain too much traction. Reliable news from outlets that maintain high levels of journalistic integrity will receive too little credit.
We can only hope that every fraud will make us savvier, and that, in time, Americans will learn who to trust.
Further Reading:
Salon has a quick article on how to distinguish fake from real news.
Jacob Soll, a U.S.C. historian, wrote an article for Politico on the long history of fake news.
Journalist/historian Christopher Daly wrote a very interesting book on the history of journalism in America.
