Letters to the Editor
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Damn tags
NT
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@Cocktail Hag, and for WT when he shows up later
For a long time I have wondered what has driven the media so far to the right, even under a despised, hostile buffoon like Bush.
The history of the press in America, and even the revolution and first amendment really starts with the John Peter Zenger case.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Peter_Zenger
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/zenger/zenger.html
In my continued googling on the early press, I came across this book review on William Duane and The Aurora. I think you'll get a kick out of this. It is a fact that some early papers were nothing more than mere organs of the political opposition or the adminsitration in power.
How a newspaper took on the Federalist Government in the 1790's
(...)
His method is applied to an appropriate historical episode: the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. The Aurora was the journal that the Federalists found most in need of suppressing, and its Irish and French writers and readers were prominent among the aliens who were, in the Federalists' view, most in need of deporting. These radicals kept taking positions (pro-French, anti-British; anti-John Adams; antiwar) that the Federalists found, to borrow a word from a later era resembling their time, ''subversive.''
(...)
But now comes another distinctive feature of this book, which may make some readers yearn for a certain amount of external, ''objective'' history after all. ''American Aurora'' is unequivocally, unambiguously, repetitiously and maybe even simple-mindedly one-sided. You may say: that's fine, surely one good way to deal with the outrageous Alien and Sedition Acts is to re-create the story through its chief journalistic victim. But this book is by no means confined to that one event; the 280-page Book 2 (of three) is an extended flashback, telling the story, from a Pennsylvania radical's point of view, of the American Revolution itself. And at that point one becomes particularly uneasy. Mr. Rosenfeld explains what he has done rather obscurely, in the tiny type of footnote 19: ''Because this history depicts a radical 1790's Democratic-Republican point of view, your author has declined to use the narrative voice of the traditional historian . . . and has instead posited the chooser-of-fact to be William Duane, as he might narrate his life and times 'with the advantage of these intervening years.' '' The real William Duane, during his actual 18th-century life, was an Irish radical who became the second editor of The Aurora (the first was Benjamin Franklin's grandson Benjamin Franklin Bache, whose life story is nicely woven into the book). The 18th-century Duane did write a history of the Revolution, which the 20th-century Richard Rosenfeld can sometimes use, but for the most part he must guess, even with all those footnotes, what Duane might have chosen and said. And there is a great deal of choosing. If you are yourself not exactly a 1790's Democratic-Republican Pennsylvania radical, you may mark so many things to challenge as to run far beyond my space here.
Are these chargeable to Mr. Rosenfeld's 20th-century self, or only to Mr. Rosenfeld imagining William Duane? Here are just a few of the points the chosen quotations (and narrator's interwoven comments) repetitiously and insistently make: (1) George Washington was an incompetent general, always complaining, who won no battles -- scarcely fought any -- and was secretly disdained by those who served under him. And cherry trees notwithstanding, he was a liar. (2) John Adams was a monarchist whose Massachusetts Constitution of 1779 was a mistake; he was insanely jealous of Benjamin Franklin, in Paris and everywhere else; his vanity and suspicion almost destroyed the good work Franklin did in Paris. Abigail was pretty bad, too. (3) The Federal Constitution of 1787 is a botch -- too complicated, too much an imitation of the English. The radical Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776, drawing on Benjamin Franklin and Tom Paine, was the ideal: simple, one house only, a plural executive, political equality. The French borrowed the Pennsylvania Constitution, not the Federal one, and thereby created a genuine republic. (4) Benjamin Franklin was the true ''father of his country,'' proposing the first union in Albany, inspiring that Pennsylvania Constitution, negotiating the French treaty that won American independence. (5) The American Army did not win independence; the French Army and Navy did, at Yorktown. And the French King lent the Americans the money without which their cause would have sunk. But the ungrateful Federalists turned against France.
Is your patriotic blood boiling yet? There is a great deal more like this. Here is just one more, of many such points: (6) All the truly tiptop democrats -- Franklin, Bache, Paine, Duane -- were printers. (And Mr. Rosenfeld, our 20th-century author, the flap copy tells us, is the son and grandson of printers.)
Do you think we should reinstate the Sedition Act to suppress a book like this? That probably won't be necessary, because it is too long and complicated to rouse the masses unduly, but if you have the time and patience to read it, it should rouse you, and send you to other books to learn the corrections to its heresies. (Just what is Duane/Rosenfeld's view of James Madison? In one astonishing paragraph he attributes the Federalist papers to the detestable Hamilton, assisted by the detestable Jay -- without a word about Madison.) At the very least one would insist that the early American story was more complicated than the simple melodrama presented here. But then radicals in all centuries have not had much taste for complexity.
William Lee Miller is the Thomas C. Sorensen Professor of Political and Social Thought at the University of Virginia. His most recent book is ''Arguing About Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress.''
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/970518.18millert.html
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Reading List
Thanks, LWM; I'll add it to my reading list. The Zenger case was a critical part of my journalism studies, and back then its lessons were considered important. That was 25 years ago; what in heaven's name do they consider important now?
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Anonymoose
"I'm speechless. Your parody is brilliant."
Actually, poor old anonymoose still fondles his shriveled nutsack every night amongst kissing his personally autographed framed Annie 'The Stick' Coulter (in black leather vest & Maybelline eye make-up) photo, listening to reruns of "Pearls Of Wisdom" as spake by Rush Limbaugh, reheating his Kraft Dinner and driving by Salon.com to fire off a few witty bon-mots . . .