(Everyone That Owns A Computer Owns ” A Press” )
Worse Back Then
As we commence the new year, the increasing crescendo of criticism and arguments between candidates (all offices) and exponents of each and every governmental (all levels) position – healthcare, troop deployment, state and federal budgets, bank bailouts, global warming, you name it, is becoming amplified. If you are perturbed over some or all of the missiles being lobbed between adherents, I can only say it’s a good thing you were not around some 200 + years ago. For newspapers, pamphleteers, candidates and their spokesmen fully and vigorously exercised their newly won freedoms of speech and the press.
In 1800, America had some 200 newspapers, including 24 dailies. In general, however, these publications were primarily mouthpieces for political parties rather than independent, objective entities. The Gazette of the United States, for example, promoted the ideas of Alexander Hamilton and the other Federalists, while the National Gazette and the American Aurora (edited by Ben Franklin’s nephew, Benjamin Franklin Bache) spoke for Thomas Jefferson and his Democratic-Republicans.
A typical newspaper published between 1784 and 1830 was filled with harsh, satirical, and sometimes false recriminations. Considering that libel laws then were based on English common law by which one needed only to prove that he was aggrieved, those editors and publishers took notable financial and personal risks.
In those years the framers of the Constitution were not expected to campaign for the presidency. The public, after consideration of their merits, was supposed to “invite” them to the office (oh, if it only continued). Jefferson, however, from his secluded Monticello haven, unknown to the general public, ran an aggressively vicious if not libelous campaign in those newspapers, particularly in the Aurora and the Boston News Letter against John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, his nemesis, and even George Washington. He accused Washington of senility and of being manipulated and under the control of Hamilton.
“If ever a nation was debauched by a man,” the Aurora editorialized about the country’s first president, “the American nation has been debauched by Washington”.
The attacks became so virulent that Adams, much to the detriment of his historical position among the founders, was persuaded to sign the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 which resulted in the imprisonment of many who published these scurrilous (to the Federalists) pieces. To Jefferson’s credit one of his first acts after being elected in 1800 was having the Alien and Sedition Acts repealed.
A.J. Liebling, one of the great American newspaper columnists, once said that freedom of the press belongs to those who own a press. Now that most of us own a “press” (you may call it the Internet), you aint heard nothin’ yet.
Arnie Silverman
Laguna Niguel
