A partisan press and a nation’s founding

IN 1860, historians tell us, Americans were the greatest per capita newspaper readers in the world.

A year later, they began killing one another by the tens of thousands in a blood-drenched civil war.

In recent days, several commentators weighing the possibility of such a conflict in Iraq have cited Abraham Lincoln’s melancholy recollection of being at the edge of the abyss: “All dreaded it, all sought to avert it.... And the war came.”

Why war came to a highly literate society up to its waist in newspapers is a question that should haunt everyone who practices journalism or believes that a free press and a free society are inextricably linked. Broadcast journalist Eric Burns doesn’t pose that question in his entertaining new book, “Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism,” but his evocation of an earlier period suggests issues relevant to the Civil War era -- and to ours.

An award-winning television news writer, Burns hosts “Fox News Watch,” that cable network’s weekly assessment of the news media’s performance. He’s also the author of well-regarded social histories of alcohol and tobacco. “Infamous Scribblers” is an extremely readable account of the role that a bitterly partisan and alternately scurrilous and fawning press played in our founding era. Burns’ vigorous narrative is rich in genuinely engaging anecdote and in all those names -- Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Paine -- that never fail to stir us.

It’s also oddly wan in spots. In his introduction, Burns worries over the discrepancy between the Framers’ ideals of reasoned civility and the vile newspapers they accepted and, more to the point, used for their own ends. “Perhaps Americans found in journalism a release from the amenities that bound them in other circumstances,” he muses. “Perhaps those amenities were, at least to some extent, a veneer. And perhaps, and most likely, the colonists concluded that there was simply too much at stake in those days for the luxury of restraint.”

It’s curious to find somebody of Burns’ experience perplexed that expediency has a handmaid called hypocrisy. It’s equally curious that he avoids the obvious temptation to note the key role that the necessity-in-perilous-times argument plays in ideological criticisms of the news media’s standards today.

It’s unfair to tax an author for the book he didn’t write, but one of the reasons you wish Burns had projected his subject forward is because he so clearly appreciates history’s sweep. He correctly situates the Colonial press’ origins in the European broadside tradition -- single, folio-sized printed sheets initially devoted to a single topic that quickly developed into what we would recognize today as an “items column.”

To the consternation of the self-satisfied and pompous who now ply the media trade -- the sort who refer to journalism as “a profession” -- the “world’s first broadside to relate events of the day seems to have been the work of a ‘Renaissance blackmailer and pornographer,’ the Italian Pietro Aretina .... He ‘produced a regular series of anticlerical obscenities, libelous stories, public accusations, and personal opinion.’ The opinion was boldly and often vulgarly expressed. It was also for sale.” (I think I once worked for him.)

Burns also has an adroit television news writer’s sense of what makes a good walk-off line. Thus, a very nicely constructed and judicious account of the Alien and Sedition Act ends: “When the press goes too far, reaction against it goes too far as well.” That’s a great aphoristic lead-in to a chilling account of what enforcement of the act actually entailed in human and social terms -- and how it fed the poisonous climate surrounding America’s first truly contested election between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in 1800.

Burns’ analytic observations, though necessarily glancing for the sake of pace, often are sufficiently thought-provoking so that one wishes he’d made more of them. He notes, for example, that what we recognize as journalism didn’t take hold until the Founders’ era because, until then, people “led the kinds of lives even a greed-besotted, hedge fund-managing workaholic of the early 21st century would have found punishing.... And journalism, which requires an appreciation of events beyond the personal, the easily observable, is to some extent a function of leisure.... In the New World, leisure would not make an appearance until the 18th century, and then for only a few: the more successful manufacturers and shopkeepers, the wealthier men of trade and the owners and managers of large farms and plantations.... They were not only the first Americans to have time for journalism; they were the first to sense that knowledge might be power or profit.”

It’s fun to point out that this is a perfectly sensible Marxist interpretation of American journalism’s origins -- and not just because Burns’ day job is at Fox News. (Note to Fox’s Roger Ailes: Put down the phone; there’s no need for alarm. In some sense, we’re all Marxists these days, not because we subscribe to Marx’s prescriptive “ism” but because some of his basic insights are true. One of those is that people’s consciousness is deeply influenced -- he would have said “determined,” but that’s his problem -- by their relationship to the means of production.)

Embedded in Burns’ observation about leisure and profit is what could have been a useful jumping-off point into a discussion of the contemporary American news media’s paradoxical situation: Our culture is saturated by the media, yet serious journalism is increasingly insecure. How much of that is attributable to economic and technological shifts that are depriving more people of more intellectual leisure time? Is it our iPod-wearing, wireless, multi-tasking fate to be the hardest working and most ignorant advanced society on Earth? In that case, what precisely does “advanced” mean?

Circling back to the historical moment with which we began, American journalism did nothing to impede the terrible civil strife that engulfed the Founders’ country. This is largely because newspapers remained as the Founders left them: faction-ridden, partisan, governed by an overriding belief that the desired end justified any means. In his conclusion, Burns pays the obligatory obeisance to the Founders and Framers but notes that “we have not adopted their style of journalism.... It is a rare example of turning our backs on the Founding Fathers, finding them unworthy, rejecting their legacy.”

That’s the moment when you want Burns to combine his historical research with his experience and tell us what he thinks it might mean -- if our newspapers and broadcast networks should yield to critics demanding that notions of dispassionate, unbiased reporting be abandoned as unworkable. Bias and partisanship, they argue, are inevitable and ought to be forthrightly displayed, though perhaps set off by opposing examples of bias and partisanship.

Somebody, however, needs to tell us why that wouldn’t produce the kind of journalism Burns describes, the sort that paved the road from Independence Hall to Appomattox.