The first American newspaper was published in Boston on September 25, 1690. The opening editorial of Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick outlined the newspaper’s aims, which included helping people “better understand the Circumstances of Public Affairs” and doing “something towards the Curing, or at least the Charming, of that Spirit of Lying, which prevails amongst us.”
The first issue included reports on a local suicide, a bountiful harvest, and a range of military troubles with the Indians and with the French colony in Canada. No doubt it was the military news that alarmed the British colonial authorities in Boston. Finding Publick Occurrences full of “reflections of a very high nature” and “sundry doubtful and uncertain reports,” they banned it after one issue and decreed that all future newspapers would require a government license.
The colony’s first attempt at a free press was undoubtedly “a tiny and timid affair conducted by a handful of people in a remote backwater of the great British Empire” (Christopher B. Daly in Covering America). Fourteen years later, when that Empire thought its colonists were ready for the news they deemed appropriate to share, they authorized and subsidized The Boston News-Letter, generally regarded as the first successful American newspaper. It published from 1704 until 1776 — a year in which the colonists had some news of their own for the Empire. By 1791 the First Amendment would enshrine the principle of a free press, reflecting Thomas Jefferson’s opinion that good government required that its citizens get, and be capable of grasping, “full information of their affairs thro’ the channel of the public papers”:
The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.
The enduring significance of Jefferson’s comment, reapplied to our multimedia era, is noted in Andrew Pettegree’s The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself. But Pettegree also notes the significance of a contemporaneous comment by Benjamin Franklin about the power and the potential abuse of the printed word:
The facility with which the same truths may be repeatedly enforced by placing them daily in different lights in newspapers which are everywhere read, gives a great chance of establishing them. And we now find it is not only right to strike when the iron is hot, it may be very practicable to heat it by continually striking.
In Blur: How to Know What’s True in the Age of Information Overload, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosensteil say that the power of today’s media conglomerates, and the hot-iron reach of today’s digital technologies, threaten to take us from “the age of information to the age of affirmation,” the free press envisioned by the Founding Fathers having been hijacked by a free-for-all of belief-driven claims and counterclaims. Given that the informational gates are all but kicked in, making journalism’s traditional “gatekeeper” role problematic or obsolete, Kovach and Rosensteil argue that reporters must hone their skills — as sense makers, witness bearers, investigators — to create a “next journalism” that “joins journalists and citizens in a journey of mutual discovery.”
There is undoubtedly no going back, but two recent books, Peter Rader’s biography Mike Wallace and Dan Rather’s memoir Rather Outspoken, suggest that we may not yet have the consensus needed for finding a way forward. Rader praises Wallace for being “decades ahead of his peers in realizing that in order to sell the news, you have to sex it up.” In contrast, Rather laments that his career witnessed (and fell victim to) the increasing corporatization, politicization and trivialization of the news, and reminds us of another Jeffersonian caution:
In 1823 Thomas Jefferson put it succinctly: “The only security of all is in a free press.” Alas, when you have a press that has become compliant to politicians, owned by corporations and staffed by people who only want to entertain and obey their corporate masters, the plan fails. The “free press” is no longer a check on power. It has instead become part of the power apparatus itself.
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Sig Nordal 