Thurlow Weed and William Randolph Hearst were Unavailable for Comment
Yesterday the New York Times ran a piece about the U-T San Diego (formerly the San Diego Union-Tribune), the southern California daily owned by hotel magnate Douglas Manchester.* The paper, according to media reporter David Carr, may be part of a “future” in which “moneyed interests buy papers and use them to prosecute a political and commercial agenda. ” The piece led me to two thoughts, one on the history and one on the future.
The history is easy: Manchester’s move to simply take over a journalistic enterprise to promote his commercial and political interests is classic nineteenth-century journalism. In fact, as most journalism historians would argue (I think, anyway), the ideal of “objectivity” has a much shorter lived history in journalism than does the partisan nature of the press. It’s how Weed and Hearst made their money, how Andrew Jackson controlled the narrative of his Presidency, and the reason why there are two sets of “official” transcripts of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
That’s not to say that during this period no one claimed to be impartial. On the contrary. In my own work [ed.: shameless plug alert!] I’m trying to show that paeans to impartiality were a self-negating means of producing politically pointed news. Or to put it another way, and to paraphrase the movie musical 1776 (itself ripping off Franklin): impartiality is only visible in the first person: I’m impartial!, and partiality only in the third: he’s biased!
That media analysts like Carr fail to acknowledge this history in writing the narrative of the changes in journalism over the past few years is disappointing. Instead we get treated to Golden Age pablum:
Many of us grew up in towns where the daily paper was in bed with civic leaders, but the shared interest was generally expressed on the editorial page. Occasionally, appropriate lines of inquiry would be suspiciously ignored in coverage, but the news pages were just that, news.
I’ll take my bias the old-fashioned way, thank you very much.
As for the future, I must admit that I’m still trying to sort out how to interpret this through a historical lens. In many regards, I want to be cautious. The nineteenth century was a Golden Age for partisan journalism (whether party- or business-based), but an awful lot has happened since then. We live now in a cultural milieu that seeks unbiased news, whatever that means, and a move towards more partisan-oriented journalism has consequences.
On the other hand, as media critic Jay Rosen has argued for several years, the “View from Nowhere” no longer serves even the function it once purported to serve. Saying where one stands as a journalist may eventually prove far more effective at communicating information and the contours of a debate than the weak-kneed “he said, she said” journalism we’re frequently presented today. But doing so means that Manchester gets to own a newspaper that proclaims a viewpoint, and if he’s going to do those things, it’s to the good that he say so, as Rosen noted on Twitter.
In any case, combined with last week’s discussion of movie mash-ups involving Lincoln and vigilante freedmen and the news that gonorrhea is making an antibiotic-resistant comeback, the nineteenth century is having quite a run.
* If his name sounds familiar to the historians out there, Manchester was locked in a labor dispute with several unions at hotels that were used for the 2010 AHA convention.
John Fea shared this interview today:
http://www.georgescialabba.net/mtgs/2012/05/generalists-specialists-and-ot/print/
In it, George Scialabba argues that in the nineteenth century, “Because government and business propagandists were basically amateurs, their critics could be amateurs.”
While I think a partisan press might be more honest than what we have now, several issues would arise: 1) in a “free market” of ideas, what happens when media conglomerates feel no compunction to incorporate more critical ideas at all?, 2) given the parlous state of education, will the average reader be sufficiently able to filter out partisan bias and arrive at the truth, and 3) what will democracy look like when everyone only reads media that confirms his/her own biases?
Of course, we’re already confronting those questions–so it remains to be seen what difference a further nudge will make. I started reading blogs in 2001, so I’m already quite familiar with the counter-narrative that “Golden Age” media (of Lewinsky and Gary Condit fame) long ago planted the seeds of their own destruction.
Comment by Benjamin Carp — June 11, 2012 @ 9:29 am
I sure Joe will be shocked, shocked to find that I am in full agreement with this post. The “View from Nowhere” (or the Disappearing Subject as I call it)is proving to be an artifact of 20th-century market conditions. Journalism from a partisan or some other viewpoint will look more like the norm once the monopoly newspapers are gone.
Comment by Jeffrey L. Pasley — June 11, 2012 @ 7:38 pm
Twitter comment on this post came to me. My answers should be up in the tweet box at right, but I am going to see I can figure out how to embed them here.
Comment by Jeffrey L. Pasley — June 12, 2012 @ 9:47 am
Yup. @jmadelman: “objectivity” has a much shorter lived history in journalism than does the partisan [press] http://t.co/VXMpOq2e #history
Comment by John S. Forrester (@JohnSForrester) — June 24, 2012 @ 7:16 pm
@hbriscoebook I think they reflect 19c values with 21c technology more than people realize (see, e.g., http://t.co/A5vLvsZY). #140limit
Comment by (@jmadelman) (@jmadelman) — July 3, 2012 @ 11:37 am
[...] few weeks ago, we had a discussion here about where the new partisan media of recent times (Fox News and the blogosphere, especially) fit [...]
Pingback by Publick Occurrences 2.0 » Fox News: An American Tradition — July 6, 2012 @ 6:33 pm
[...] hadn’t been invented yet. (Neither, by the way, had “journalism” itself, nor for that matter objectivity.) Treating the practices of the eighteenth century as if they were aware of twenty-first-century [...]
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