COMM 209: Of freedom of the press and 18th-century "Weekly Dung Barges'

COMM 209 (semi-optional). If you're planning to major in mass communications, you want to skim this to get the flavor of how the news business got started in America. Even if you're not a major, you still want to skim it. Hint: It wasn't about news, it was about opinion. Now we do things differently. If the required course in media law and ethics (COMM 317) hadn't been canceled, I would have definitely assigned it for students in that class. Since it has, I'll assign it for journalism majors in COMM 209 but make it optional. A lot of the 18th-century quotes are hard to follow, but if we don't know where we come from, we don't know where we're going.

In this week's New Yorker, an article on how the newspaper business got started in the British colonies before the American revolution.

Some background:

Newspapers date to the sixteenth century; they started as newsletters and news books, sometimes printed, sometimes copied by hand, and sent from one place to another, carrying word of trade and politics. The word “newspaper” didn’t enter the English language until the sixteen-sixties. Venetians sold news for a coin called a gazzetta. The Germans read Zeitungen; the French nouvelles; the English intelligencers. The London Gazette began in 1665. Its news was mostly old, foreign, and unreliable.

Because early newspapers tended to take aim at people in power, they were sometimes called “paper bullets.” Newspapers have long done battle with the church and the state while courting the market. This game can get dangerous. The first newspaper in the British American colonies, Publick Occurrences, printed in Boston in 1690, was shut down after just one issue for reporting, among other things, that the king of France had cuckolded his own son. ...

You get the idea. (If you don't know what "cuckolded" meant, by the way, look it up. Celebrity gossip is nothing new.) As you read the rest of the New Yorker article, you'll get an idea what scandal sheets the early newspapers were. You'll also learn how long it took to set the type for a four-page broadsheet, or standard-size paper; I will create opportunities for you to demonstrate this hard-earned knowledge in the future. One paper, the Boston Gazette published by Benjamin Edes during the 1760s and 1770s, is credited with helping incite the American Revolution. Money graf:

John and Samuel Adams, James Otis, Jr., Joseph Warren—Boston’s self-styled Sons of Liberty—all wrote for Edes’s paper; Paul Revere engraved its masthead. Edes wrote for the Gazette, too, though his prose flickered but dimly. But Edes, like all his writers, knew how to sling mud, especially at royally appointed governors, British soldiers, and tax collectors. Tory printers took to calling the Gazette the “Weekly Dung Barge.”

This charge wasn’t entirely without foundation. Early American newspapers tend to look like one long and uninterrupted invective, a ragged fleet of dung barges. In a way, they were. Plenty of that nose thumbing was mere gimmickry and gambolling. Some of it was capricious, and much of it was just plain malicious. But much of it was more. All that invective, taken together, really does add up to a long and revolutionary argument against tyranny, against arbitrary authority—against, that is, the rule of men above law.

The New Yorker's article, by history professor Jill Lepore of Harvard University, suggests, "Maybe if we knew more about the founding hacks, we’d have a better idea of what we will have lost when the last newspaper rolls off the presses." That day, she says, is surely coming. "If the newspaper, at least as a thing printed on paper and delivered to your door, has a doomsday, it may be coming soon. Not so soon as weeks or months, but not so far off as decades, either. The end, apparently, really is near."

I'm not sure I buy that, and you don't have to buy it either. (You also don't have to buy it that I don't buy it. You're in this class to help develop your own opinions, not parrot mine.) Anyway, Lapore is talking about some important things here.

Maybe especially this: She suggests the 18th-century newspapers changed after the Revolutionary War. Some newspapermen of the day thought that meant the DEATH of LIBERTY, but the papers changed as circumstances changed. Lapore doesn't come right out and say it, but I think she's suggesting the same thing will happen again as print newspapers morph into an electronic delivery system. Or is she? You read it. You decide.