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Journalism History: North America

Richard Kaplan

Newspapers emerged in colonial British North America in the early 1700s. By the time muskets were first fired in the North American revolt against King George III in 1775, a powerful new cultural imagining of the press's central role in the public debates of citizens and the functioning of modern democracy defined journalism. Newspapers were seen as essential to liberty, spreading information and opinion among “free-born citizens.” Indeed, in a republic that spread across an immense physical territory, the democratic deliberations and meetings of the mass citizenry could only be virtual. The new nation was necessarily an “imagined community,” one where citizens came together only in the pages of the press.

Journalism was essential to US democracy, and this notion of the press's service to a broad deliberating public would come to permanently inform and justify its public mission, its political rhetoric, and its claims to special authority (Kaplan, 2003; Schudson, 2002; Warner, 1990). Through all its permutations across three centuries – from partisan journals to independent, professional dailies, from small struggling print shops to giant media conglomerates, from a few pages of cotton rag to today's electronic websites – a public ethic of service to democracy has informed the North American press's proudest moments and rationalized its worst practices.

The first papers of British North America were modeled on the press in England, reflecting the colonies' close cultural affiliation with the mother country. Journals copied the format and indeed their months-old news from journals transported across the ocean. They offered highly abbreviated summaries of events in England and the European continent. They were published by small artisanal print shops seeking to gain additional revenues to prop up their businesses.

Colonial newspapers shared not only their form and content with journals of the mother country but also their overarching cultural understandings of the nature of public life. Traditionally, under the British monarchy, “public” meant the presentation of the king and the nobles before the populace. In these ritual ceremonies, the overwhelming power and majesty of the king was reiterated before an observing, deferential, silent audience (Peters, 1995, pp. 7–8). The general populace supposedly lacked the reasoning capabilities, much less the authority, to participate in political decisions. Information, it was believed, should not be distributed to the citizenry or else the king's proper rule would be disrupted. Newspapers in the early eighteenth century, thus, were understood as the official sanctioned voice of the English monarchy or colonial government and were still licensed. Journalism was often a compilation of official decrees, while the deliberations of parliament and the monarchy were by law secret. The right to publish was seen as a privilege that had to be controlled and licensed at the benevolent generosity of the royal government (Clark, 2007, p. 375).

The early efforts at journalism in Britain and the colonies were modeled on private correspondence known as “intelligences.” Dating back to the twelfth century, intelligences were handwritten newsletters addressed to elite individuals, not as citizens, but in their private capacities. The letter transmitted information on commercial, political, or diplomatic affairs that might serve their interests (Clark, 2007, p. 348). A second forerunner of the colonial press were the polemical political pamphlets that emerged out of the English Civil War and the early Restoration starting in the 1640s. These pamphlets implicitly and sometimes explicitly stressed the right of the public, or at least the aristocracy, to engage in governmental affairs and public deliberation (Clark, 1994).

The Boston News-Letter was the first continuously published paper, issued starting in 1704. The second, the Boston Gazette, began in 1719. The News-Letter never printed more than 300 copies of any edition and struggled to get advertisers and subscribers to pay their bills. Reflecting the monarchical conception of controlled publicity, both journals were licensed, both were officially sponsored and subsidized, and the publishers of both were brought before colonial legislatures to account for errors. This journalism made no pretense of being “free” (Modey, 2008, p. 305; Starr, 2004, p. 61).

Benjamin Franklin (1987, p. 15) details in his autobiography how his brother James, publisher of the New England Courant, confronted this controlled, privileged system of publicity. When he printed an article displeasing to the Massachusetts Assembly in 1723, “he was taken up censur'd and imprison'd for a month by the speaker's warrant.” Upon release, James was banned from publishing his paper.

During 1720–1723, however, British radicals John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, writing under the pseudonym of Cato, articulated an ideal of a free press as necessary for a free citizenry, one that possessed the right to political participation and needed information to hold the government accountable (Clark, 2007, pp. 349–350). Their 15th published letter boldly began, “Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as Public Liberty, without Freedom of Speech: Which is the Right of every Man, as far as by it he does not hurt and control the Right of another; and this is the only Check which it ought to suffer, the only Bounds which it ought to know.” Trenchard and Gordon advocated ideas of elite political representation in parliament and were informed by cultural traditions of republicanism. Such strands of political philosophy increasingly infused American thinking in the eighteenth century (Bailyn, 1967, pp. 35–36, 43–44; Brown, 2000, pp. 42–43).

The Cato letters were widely reprinted in British North America and cited in the 1735 trial of printer John Peter Zenger. In that court case, the governor of New York tried to suppress Zenger's paper on the grounds of seditious libel. Zenger's lawyer drew on the Cato letters, arguing that printing the truth could not be a libel, and that colonial Americans properly possessed “a right to liberty of both exposing and opposing arbitrary power (in these parts of the world at least) by speaking and writing truth” (Bailyn, 1967, pp. 43, 52). The Zenger case bolstered appreciation of a free press as an indispensable weapon against arbitrary rulers (Clark, 2007, p. 375).

North American exposure to Cato's letters occurred during 1700–1750, an era in which the colonial assemblies themselves gained strength due to Britain's “salutary neglect” (Henretta, Brody, & Ware, 1997, pp. 74, 86–87). With the 1765 Stamp Act, a new politics emerged in which conflicts in parliamentary assemblies and among local elites expanded beyond the confines of elite circles. As Richard Brown (2000, pp. 43–45) notes, “Opposition leaders in [. . .] the colonies turned to the people for support and sought to mobilize them with newspapers and pamphlets [. . .] The idea of an informed citizenry took on radical, even revolutionary, implications.”

This expanding realm and ideal of a free public and a free press reflected a peculiar constellation of power; government had only limited ability to control print addressed to a public beyond the confines of the bureaucracy. In British North America, as well as in Britain and Europe, “fragmentation among political élites and competition in the market contributed together to breaking up the monopoly of the court gazette and opening up public political debate” (Starr, 2004, p. 59).

The new politics was also guided by the positive political ideal of republicanism. As Sean Wilentz (1997, p. 71; Nerone, 1993) details, republicanism offered a powerful vision of politics to the North American colonists in revolt against England and the king. More than a liberal philosophy of the right to pursue private individual happiness, republicanism focused on politics as a properly collective concern of citizens with the common good realized through the active participation of independent, equal virtuous citizens in reasoned public debate. A drive for new profits, or what Benedict Anderson (1983) called “print capitalism,” guided by republican political ideals without the restrictions of normal governmental repression, enabled the nascent free press and public to flourish.

As local political contentions moved into the public sphere and into print, printers elaborated a conception of press freedom. Their notion, as Stephen Botein (1975) argues, emphasized neutrality and openness to all strands of opinion. Already in 1731, that notion of printer neutrality was manifest in Franklin's witty “Apology for Printers,” where he invoked a notion of printers serving as conduits for a broad array of opinion with which they did not necessarily agree, but which they left to the public to judge and filter. Franklin (1987) wrote:

This posture of the press as open to a variety of opinions with very limited gatekeeping or interpretation by the journalists was challenged during the revolution and again later with the emergence of a competitive party system. American newspapers moved from what John Nerone (2007) terms a “liberal” public sphere to a “mass partisan” one. The press shifted from functioning as a neutral, open forum for a pluralistic array of political opinion to an active, one-sided political advocate. Indeed, from the passage of the Stamp Act by the British Parliament in 1765 through the founding of the new nation, the colonies were riven by an angry spirit of rebellion then revolution. Amid the contentions and often violent pressures, printers found it difficult to maintain their neutrality and thus became in Botein's (1975) expression “reluctant partisans.”

With the revolt victorious, the new republic's media policy was guided by a strong belief in the press's fundamental role in democracy. Newspapers were not merely private commercial goods, but also recognized as public institutions crucial to the commonweal (John, 2000). Furthermore, communication was seen as necessary to bind North Americans, who were culturally divided and geographically dispersed, into a united nation (Howe, 2007, pp. 222–229). In addition to a democratic desire for a vibrant press transmitted into every nook and cranny of the nation, political parties were interested in legislation to support journalism. The early US “free press” was subsidized by government through reduced postal rates and the delivery of a postal service to all small towns and hamlets across the country.

Beyond a policy of “internal improvements,” America had been transfixed since before the revolution by the potential threat of corrupt, tyrannical government to the rights of citizens. The selections on the news imposed by commercial considerations and market trends toward concentration, along with the inequalities of class economic power, were not yet visible as threats to an open, participatory public sphere of free, equal citizens. Only in the late nineteenth century with the rise of the telegraph and the Associated Press news service, and then again in the Progressive Era and the 1930s' New Deal, would the United States reflect on the dangers that concentrated economic power posed for an independent and vigilant press.

Penny Press

Historians often describe the arrival of the “penny press” in the 1830s as a turning point in the early American press. These new cheap dailies expanded the topics considered newsworthy, embraced a new economic model for increasing revenues, and incorporated more Americans into the reading public. In many ways, this shift in the definition of the newspaper paralleled ongoing transformations of US society. In Michael Schudson's (1978) analysis, cheap mass newspapers emerged in tandem with a new “democratic market society,” that is, a novel egalitarian urban society, detached from political battles over the commonweal, pushed by a booming market economy and very much interested in narratives of violation of social norms along with “human interest” stories.

There is much to dispute in Schudson's classic account. The penny press, however, did reflect three revolutions in US society – a political revolution with the rise of mass democratic parties, an economic one with an expanding market, and a reading revolution as accelerating literacy along with pent-up social demand for reading material combined to fuel a market for news.

A reading revolution? Prior to the early nineteenth century, books and printed material of all sorts were “relatively scarce, literacy was uneven, and the circulation of information was slow.” At the turn of the nineteenth century, however, common schools expanded and, in turn, literacy rates skyrocketed, while the number of books and the speed of communication rose dramatically. Commerce, Carl Kaestle (1991, p. 52) says, was at the “root of the takeoff.” Literacy rates in colonial America had already surpassed most of northeastern Europe, reflecting a relatively egalitarian, individualistic Protestant society that emphasized reading and schooling as the path to the Bible and faith. Literacy continued to rise throughout the nineteenth century, incorporating women too (Kaestle 1991, p. 19; Burrows & Wallace, 1999, p. 522).

The United States evolved from a society of scarcity of reading material to one of abundance during the early 1800s (Hall, 1996, intro; Howe, 2007, pp. 231–235; Nord, 2004). In the process, the very notion of how to read and its social significance changed. Journalism and the penny press were marked by this transformation. The daily paper, by nature, seems a product of an age of reading abundance where each print product is nothing to be treasured and closely read for the wisdom contained within. Instead the paper furnishes only the most topical of information with little lasting social significance. Already out of date by the next day, news by nature seems to be a compilation of facts without any tradition, rituals, or even narrative tying it to the community, or so James Carey (1997, Ch. 9) and Walter Benjamin (1969, pp. 155–200) have argued.

Before the 1820s and 1830s, high cost and low availability frustrated a great American desire for reading material (Brown, 1983, p. 302). Journalism's audience, too, was limited by price and content to the commercial and political elite. At six cents a copy and sold only on a subscription basis, the existing daily papers were unaffordable to the general urban population. Furthermore, their stories focused on such economic information as the markets and ship departures and the circumscribed polemics of the politicians, while ignoring “the events of daily city life that might interest the general urban population” (Burrows & Wallace, 1999, p. 522). The populace reciprocated the six-cent papers' disdain. Circulation remained under 2,000 on average, with the leading New York paper, the Courier and Express, pulling in only 4,000 subscribers.

Already in the 1820s, printers were seeking new readers and proposing a different economic model. It was first the labor press, motivated by the political contentions of the urban working class, which probed whether lower- and middle-class readers could sustain another model of journalism. The new labor press proved ephemeral, but Benjamin Day, one of its prime movers, recognized the new potential market. Launching the New York Sun in 1833, he initiated a wave of one-penny papers. Just like the cheap evening press that began in the 1880s, the 1830s penny press radically reduced the cost of a newspaper to a single cent and slashed production costs just as severely. In contrast to the traditional expensive “blanket” papers, penny papers typically were much smaller at 8½ × 11 inches (Burrows & Wallace, 1999, p. 523; Saxton, 1991, pp. 96–97).

Unlike the six-cent papers, Day's New York Sun avoided expensive, long, and tedious news stories on world affairs or from the capitol. Instead, it focused on local news that would attract urban artisans (Burrows & Wallace, 1999, p. 524). Historians offer contrasting interpretations of this new form of the news. Certainly, all see the new daily penny press as introducing a more popular content focused on everyday life, reflecting a “democratization” of society and politics, although the press prior to the cheap dailies had also avidly sought the news and scoops.

The penny press, however, featured crime news. Early on, with the mysterious and grisly murder of New York prostitute Helen Jewett in 1836, it discovered new talents of in-depth investigation and titillating storytelling. Reporters stationed at the courts found a ready supply of news they could mold into gripping narratives. The populace pondered the subtle significance of Jewett's death for the social order and so have historians ever since.

The news, suggest such historians as Schudson (1978), Karen Halttunen (1998), and Dan Schiller (1981), refracted the new importance of everyday life, the vernacular or the “social.” In Schudson's accounting, politics lost pride of place in the journals' pages. For Schiller, in contrast, the penny press's news featured a sharp articulation of social tensions and fears. It attracted interest precisely from how it told the tale of society gone wrong. Crime and its subsequent probing in a court of law oft represented a story of social decay and elite corruption. In fact, nineteenth-century journalism in many ways adopted a quasi-judicial attitude. The news story presents an array of contending facts for the final arbitration and verdict of the reading public–jury (DeLombard, 2007).

Certainly since its origins, journalism has always functioned as an articulation of the “social.” Along with reporting the explicit conflicts and opposed perspectives of politics, the press reiterates the shared moral codes of society. Journalism takes up select, seemingly non-political daily events and weaves them into a narrative of shared social rules – a story aghast at the violation of those rules and applauding the machinery of justice that reestablishes social order.

Fact-centered narratives of topical events, argues Jean Chalaby (1996), increasingly defined US and British (in contrast to European) journalism in the last half of the nineteenth century. In this interpretation, US journalism, unlike European, was peculiarly detached from the closely related fields of political competition and literary production. In contrast, in France journalists were oriented by the values of partisan politics and also seeking to establish themselves as prominent literary personalities; unadorned fact-driven narratives fell into the background, displaced by advocacy and commentary filled with ornate language and personal judgments.

While Chalaby's interpretation provides illuminating insights into the rising value of news in the United States and the distance between news production and the weak US literary field, he is clearly mistaken about partisan journalism. Political parties continued to command the loyalties of the US populace throughout the nineteenth century, and in turn, party competition dominated the reporting and interpretive understandings of the US press.

A. J. Liebling (1960) once quipped that “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” But during the 1830s, the cost to enter the field of publishing was relatively low. Dozens of penny papers were launched in Eastern US cities (Burrows & Wallace, 1999, p. 525). Indeed, the 1830s represented a brief ideal moment, when the public sphere possessed a degree of openness, argues Saxton (1991, Ch. 4). Newspapers' prices were dropping, yet publishers did not require extensive capital to reach and hold a readership.

Recalling the early days of his penny paper, publisher Day remarked, “Capital! Bless you, I had not any capital” (Hall, 1996). Although the steam press had been invented along with Koenig rotary cylindrical presses in the 1810s, US newspapers had yet to deploy these technologies, in part because their circulations remained local and small (Nord, 2004, p. 68). Indeed, Day's journal, the Sun, was first issued on a hand-cranked flatbed press that could print 200 papers in an hour. After the 1830s, “technology, spurred by mass circulation, then escalated cost of entry” into the market (Saxton, 1991, p. 105). In John Nerone and Kevin Barnhurst's (2001) analysis, the 1830s represented a turning point in newspapers' “mode of production.” Journals shifted from an artisan-printer form of ownership and control to an industrialized economic model that relied on extensive capital investment and a strict division of labor between printers, editorial staff, and publisher-editor.

Partisan Press

The penny press spoke about its independence from parties and partly shifted its focus from the political to the social and even to the private and sensational. The first wave of cheap papers, however, largely participated in the Democratic Party's uprising against the earlier elite party journals. The new cheap papers at first disavowed political connections but such independence soon faded.

A “second wave” of more overtly political cheap dailies followed the first. They functioned in part as a Whig Party reply to the dominant Democratic alignments of the penny papers (Saxton, 1991, p. 102). In fact, the emergence of a mass press in the 1830s and 1840s was part and parcel of the democratization of the US political system. Newspapers were “the single most important connection between voters and party” (Baldasty, 1992, p. 14). The press supported the growth of the Whigs and the Democrats as they battled over the ideals and the spoils of US government, embroiling citizens in the passion of their conflicts. Throughout the nineteenth century, the vast majority of daily journals were firmly, publicly, emotionally aligned with one party or its opponent.

The demands of partisanship decisively affected journalism's economics, professional ethics, and news selections. As a loyal party organ, the newspaper accomplished a variety of political duties that demonstrated its commitment to the party (Kaplan, 2002, Ch. 1). First and foremost, a partisan journal must endorse the party's “men and measures” without expressing any doubts. When the party announced its slate of candidates, the journal naturally printed and endorsed the nominees. This published list, however, appeared not just once, but day in and day out for the entire election season.

Reporting too was colored by political preferences. The papers privileged the views and voices of the favored party while neglecting the plurality of views in civil society. Furthermore they reported events that supported the policy positions of their party while suppressing news of those that might weaken their party's electoral prospects. Journalism thus departed from such traditional ideals of the public sphere as equal and open access, reasoned debate, and the unbiased reporting of all relevant information.

The editorial page typically operated with a simple, enthusiastic categorization of friends and foes. For the education of the readers, it published extended defenses of party policy. For their entertainment, the paper jeered the missteps of its political opponent. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, the majority of US newspaper editorials, in election season and out, pleaded the party's cause and defended its policies (Kaplan, 1997).

The daily paper was far from being an independent producer of information. Instead, the partisan paper was part of a public political community. Rather than operating as neutral transmitters of information, journals labored to build a shared partisan identity, either through democratic communication or through expressive rites of group loyalty (McGerr, 1986, pp. 14–22).

Given the partisan press's emphatic, evaluative voice, the news of the Gilded Age appeared irredeemably particular, plural, and personal. It emerged from a specific political community and stood opposed to the news of its political foes. Under the partisan direction of the publisher-editor, it appeared to possess a strongly unified, emotional voice. Indeed, the journal seemed to be crafted by the force of the editor's personality. In nostalgic accounts of the era, this was the last flowering of a personal journalism, before the arrival of complex bureaucracies and commercialized news corporations (e.g., Leupp, 1918; Watterson, 1918). In reality, nineteenth-century news was a mass-produced affair, contrived under multiple constraints, most notably that of party interests.

Nineteenth-century American political culture with its emphatic ideal of partisanship offered little support for an independent, impartial journalism. The parties' need to have a voice in every town and hamlet pushed expansion in newspapers, supporting journals that were economically floundering and inundating the market. Partisan papers were organized into networks and hierarchies within each state and nationally. Newspapers that were located in the state capitol or major cities and spoke for the major factions typically provided the dominant interpretations to other party organs in the hinterlands. Articles were reprinted, excerpted, and quoted, thus producing a weave of news and interpretation that united the party across the land. National party battles and capillary networks of news distribution helped cement a national culture, beyond all regional and social divisions.

Other political voices were consequently neglected or derided. Papers suppressed issues that conflicted with the party's agenda or potentially divided its electoral base. In the late nineteenth century, Republican journals refused to publicize the views of alcohol prohibition; both parties ignored or co-opted labor's demands (Folkerts, 1985; Goodwyn, 1978). In fact, when a series of railroad strikes and riots erupted across the nation in 1877, papers and party elites closed ranks. Newspapers – tied to parties, owned by the wealthy, and with a circulation limited to the upper third of the population – tended to disregard the interests of the mass of workers, poor, and immigrants. The press uniformly reacted to the strikes with hysteria and calls for their violent suppression (Baehr, 1972, pp. 179–182; Kaplan, 1995; Nord, 1984; Slotkin, 1985, pp. 478–484). Until the arrival of Hearst, Pulitzer, and the cheap evening journals in the 1880s, the press was closed to the interests of the working classes.

As the century progressed, and party issues often faded into worn-out rhetoric, the press moderated its devotion to the affairs of parties. Newspapers juggled stories of a political character with those that were social or “human interest.” Politics, according to one measure, fell to 20% as a share of the leading stories (Baldasty, 1992, pp. 153–157; Rubin, 1981, pp. 58, 82). Even at century's end, however, the majority of daily papers maintained an ongoing formal affiliation, a fixed public identity as party advocates (McGerr, 1986, p. 120).

In the end and despite their pretensions, the dominant English-language daily partisan press could never fully monopolize democracy's public arena. A myriad of weeklies and monthlies, more or less ephemeral, publicized the concerns of African Americans, Native Americans, newly arriving immigrants, trade unions, women, and all shades and manner of protest movements. These journals stood as a constant reminder and rebuke to what was left out and ignored by the dailies.

Democratization of the Daily Press

Newspaper circulation into the 1870s hovered between three to four copies for every ten households. The press was purchased by a minority, read by the well-to-do, and largely directed toward the elite. In the waning years of the century, however, the press underwent a twofold revolution: first economic, then political. From 1870 to 1910, the daily press rapidly expanded to incorporate most US citizens into its audience. Journalism realized its long-cherished dream of circulating crucial political information to all citizens, encompassing everyone in a “republic of letters” (Leonard, 1995). Advertising and profits drove this media growth. By 1910, newspapers were full-scale incorporated companies, earning and expending thousands, even millions, paying dividends to stockholders, and just commencing their conglomeration into extended media chains (Smythe, 1993). Starting in the 1880s, cheap evening newspapers proliferated. These dailies targeted the urban working class and incorporated the mass of the population into the newspaper public.

The chief problem for any popular press, as publishing magnate Edward Scripps observed, was price. In the 1870s, Scripps noted, most newspapers still cost four or five cents, a hefty share of a worker's average wages of a dollar a day. “Newspapers were luxury items,” Scripps noted (Britt, 1960, pp. 29, 61; Scripps, 1966, pp. 316–317). A number of media scholars have described the dynamic media economics that supposedly overcame this barrier to newspaper expansion and profits in the late nineteenth century. Harry Baehr (1972, p. 234), for example, writes that the new journalism of Pulitzer and Hearst “was founded on cheap, mass circulation with advertising footing the bill.” Richard Ohmann (1980; Norris, 1990, pp. 31, 35–37) provides further details of this dynamic expansion in reference to the analogous 1893 revolution in magazine publishing. Three interlinked processes, Ohmann says, explain the explosive growth in the mass market for periodicals in the 1890s. First, lower magazine prices stimulated a growing readership. This burgeoning circulation, in turn, produced expanded advertising revenue. Magazines then employed the newly generated funds (along with a reduction of per unit costs of magazine production) to cut subscription prices further, which once again sparked a rise in circulation.

But in the 1870s and early 1880s, newspapers were blocked from adopting such a “dynamic” economic program by the high cost of newsprint paper and the relatively weak advertising market. According to James E. Scripps (1875), publisher of the Detroit Evening News, advertising demand “fell far short of the capacities of the papers to accommodate it.” Plenty of available newspaper space, but limited demand, resulted in a “demoralized” advertising market, where advertisers could dictate the terms of trade.

These obstacles were first circumvented, not by the giants of the New York publishing industry, but by small entrepreneurs in the Midwest. Publishers such as James E. Scripps and later his brother Edward Scripps proposed an all-around cutting of production costs. By implementing strict economies, publishers across the Midwest would launch a wave of cheap afternoon dailies and revolutionize the urban news market.

In 1873, Scripps launched the Detroit Evening News at two cents. Within three years, the News achieved financial success, and its circulation, although a mere 17,000 copies daily, overshadowed the circulation of all other Detroit journals. With its profitability assured, Scripps followed his Detroit venture with papers in Cleveland, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Buffalo. Meanwhile, other publishers such as Victor Lawson in Chicago and William Nelson in Kansas City established their own cheap afternoon sheets. In each case, the journal was a short, scrappy bulletin paper, supplying an abbreviated but complete news report, and distributed to the urban working populations. The wave of newspaper growth across the United States in 1880–1910 largely rested on the expansion in number and circulation of these afternoon publications. Between 1870 and 1910 (the high-water mark for US dailies), the number of sheets published jumped almost fourfold, from 574 to 2,600. By 1910, evening journals constituted 74% of the dailies and between 1880 and 1910 they made up 79% of the gain in papers (Lee, 1937; Smith, 1964, pp. 341–343).

In the largest US cities, circulation surged from about five copies per ten inhabitants to slightly more than one for every resident in 1910 (Lee, 1937). By the early twentieth century, taking the paper was a daily habit among workers. In the early 1920s, Robert and Helen Lynd (1959, p. 514) surveyed the consumption expenditures of blue-collar households in Middletown: 100% subscribed to a daily journal. Indeed, other studies in that decade report that “newspapers were by far the most common reading matter of young workers, followed by fiction magazines, the ‘pulps’” (Denning, 1987, pp. 220–221).

In the 1880s, newspaper economics were shaken once more by changes that rendered the penny-pinching ascetic model of the cheap dailies outmoded. Rocketing demand for advertising space and collapsing prices for paper stock compelled a reconstruction of the urban evening paper. These market conditions reflected more general transformations in the US economy, as it moved toward a mass-market, corporate-organized consumer society. Journalism acceded to a commercial logic of audience-maximizing and market concentration. Newspapers turned dynamic as they aggressively pursued advertising and audience with new contents, especially sensationalism. These economic shifts created essential preconditions, if not sufficient motive, for newspapers' later departure from their avid partisanship of the nineteenth century.

Advertising revenue at Scripps's News rose as a share of the paper's profits, rocketing from 38% of the gross profits in 1886 to 58% in 1889. US census data indicates that advertising as a proportion of both newspaper and magazine income mounted from 44% in 1879 to 49.6% in 1889 and continued in a steady upswing to 54.5% in 1899 and 60% in 1909 (Baker, 1994, pp. 14–16; Kaplan, 1995; Lee, 1937, pp. 748–749; Ohmann, 1980, p. 90). In the early twentieth century, journals across the nation reported a sudden influx of advertising revenue. Even country dailies in the heart of Kansas, such as William Allen White's Emporia Gazette, shared in the riches, as local merchants turned to advertising in their efforts to fend off the appeals of big-city retailers and mail-order catalogues (Griffith, 1989. pp. 78–91; White, 1946, pp. 377, 401). Throughout the twentieth century, advertising continued to make up 60–70% of all newspaper revenues.

This increase in ad linage rested on a massive rise in “display” advertising. Department stores in the 1880s, following the lead of Wanamakers in Philadelphia, began to use full-page ads to entice customers into their stores in large numbers. They strove to attract customers from throughout the streetcar city, creating high-volume sales (cf. Leach, 1993, Ch. 1, pp. 61–62, 123). Henceforth advertising copy should be changed daily and large enough to draw notice. In the 1890s, Ohmann (1980; Chandler, 1980) explains, this tactic of the retail trade was followed by a push for publicity by national brands. In fact, the United States was shifting from an era of family firms serving local markets with a highly segmented demand to an era of corporate mass production for mass national consumption. Corporations invested ever increasing amounts of capital in fixed productive facilities, capable of high-volume manufacturing cheap goods. In order to make a profit from these investments, firms needed to stabilize consumer demand and construct national markets. The advertising boom enriching newspapers emerged as a key part of their strategy.

In place of the cheap, self-sufficient bulletin sheets that aimed at a limited market niche, there flourished a new dynamic, expanding newspaper – hunting for ever more news, readers, and above all advertising. This burgeoning appetite for readers led to keen competition among journals and eventually a saturated market.

A surfeit of advertising not only enriched the daily paper, but induced a reconstruction of the reigning practices of journalism. Newspapers, in Scripps's words, needed to be “fashioned for advertisers.” Increasingly, the demands of commercial publicity infiltrated the press; the daily paper was transformed into a vehicle for the organization and administration of consumer markets. Newspapers packaged subscribers as much as they packaged news. In the process, the reader was no longer addressed only as citizen or engaged partisan, but also as a customer, consumer, and passive spectator (Given, 1912, p. 41; Seitz, 1916, p. 93).

First, advertising promoted an expanded, more variegated newspaper. Journals appended page after page in their hunt for customers and to clothe their added girth in paid publicity. In the course of the 1880s, Pulitzer's New York World jumped from four to eight to 14 pages, reaching 16 in the 1890s. More elite papers, for instance the New York Post and the New York Tribune, doubled their pages to eight just when they reduced their price to three cents in the early 1880s (Lee, 1937, pp. 322–326; Smith, 1964, pp. 342–343, 345). Following Pulitzer's lead, the press added sections that catered to an array of advertising interests and customers, most notably: sports, comics, and a woman's page (Baldasty, 1992, pp. 121–127; Griffith, 1989, pp. 215–216;). In 1927, as researchers catalogued the reading habits of passengers on New York subways, commuters seemed to prefer “sports, comics, photographs, and sensational stories of personal violence” (Gray & Munroe, 1930, pp. 43–44, 150, 179–180).

The needs of advertisers helped split big city journalism. In his popular 1904 manual, Walter Scott (1904, p. 382; Given, 1912) advised advertisers: “If [an advertiser] wanted to reach the better classes, he would use the morning papers; if he wanted to reach the laboring class, he would employ the evening papers.” In addition, advertising shifted the very size and definition of the audience to which a journal was responsive. With advertising's growth, readers' pennies no longer directly counted. The individual paper stopped emphasizing a core community of readers especially interested in the news or tied to a shared public identity. Instead, with their prices falling, “the media began to focus on the marginal customer, who, despite little interest in the news and little willingness to pay for it, was the building block of the ever-bigger audience sought – and paid for – by advertisers” (Weaver, 1994, p. 46). The increasingly disparate content helped free the journal from the political demands of its readers. If the daily offended a reader because of a divisive political position, then there existed other, perhaps more important, bases of subscriber loyalty.

The economic transformation of the daily paper – from a (class or partisan) niche publication to one aiming at a mass, general market – certainly influenced the press's partisanship. Baldasty (1992; Smith, 1977), among others, has argued that the press fundamentally shifted its political identity and rhetoric during the second half of the nineteenth century. Newspapers, no longer dependent upon party subsidies but instead driven by the profits to be gained from large circulations and advertising, supposedly avoided divisive content. Baldasty contends they dropped the partisanship that was sure to offend some readers and instead embraced political independence, even objectivity. Papers ceased to address their audience in political terms – neither as citizens, nor as fellow partisans – but instead as consumers.

In all, however, the economic shifts in the 1880s and 1890s constituted a series of forces weakening, not eliminating, the newspaper's public, formal links with parties. A transformation in US political institutions and political culture would be necessary before journalism could break free from the sway of partisan readers and partisan interpretations of the daily events. In the waning years of the century, journals still maintained a public party affiliation. US dailies, whether the elite New York Times or the popular New York World, found that their partisan identity continued to be economically advantageous. And to this day, even market-driven news continues to address its readers as citizens who are united and indeed captivated by stories of the nation in triumph and in tragedy.

Some historians contend that the growth of news transmitted by the telegraph along with syndicated content and the news wire services, most notably the Associated Press, undermined the partisan nature of the news, providing alternative models and inducements for impartial independent reporting (Carey, 1997; Chapman, 2005). A growing commercial news market required cheap sources of information and thus standardized content. This uniform news delivered by syndicated and wire news services, most notably the Associated Press (AP), supposedly weakened the plural partisan forms of political news. First known as the New York Associated Press, the AP dates back to 1848. It drew on member newspapers for its copy and its mission was to supply factual, non-controversial information at cheaper prices, ensuring that member papers could save money and avoid the risk of being scooped by rival papers.

From the start, the AP was mired in controversy. Begun by a coterie of New York papers, the news service was said to favor their interests. AP licenses were limited, and member papers used their control to excluded rivals, placing new publications at a disadvantage as they entered the market (Nerone, 2007; Starr, 2004, pp. 184–185). Further, in a sharply partisan political culture, charges of bias were inevitable, and indeed, the AP had notable links to the Republican Party. Such chargers found meat in the fallout over the controversial, contested 1876 presidential election (Nerone, 2007, p. 246; Starr, 2004, pp. 186–187). As a consequence, worries over concentrated economic power in the public sphere and control of public communication were first voiced in debates over the AP and the Western Union telegraph company. The two companies signed exclusive contracts in 1855, forming a mutually strengthening effort at monopoly control (Chapman, 2005, p. 62; Starr, 2004).

The political news from the Associated Press followed the journalistic conventions of the era. They provided long accounts of political events: meetings, marches, and speeches. The reports largely presented the words and chronology of the political event without interpretation and without partisan judgments or evaluation. In this sense, the wire reports were indeed neutral, but they also enabled the partisan press to persist with its traditional political biases. Each journal was free to publish the news reports that focused on the words and deeds of their favored party, while ignoring the wire reports that covered the opposed party.

Declarations of Press Independence

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the power of parties to dominate the US public sphere sharply declined. Two key episodes marked this toppling of parties: the critical election of 1896 and the anti-partisan reforms of the Progressive Era, 1904–1919. Against this political backdrop, newspapers broke from all party ties and reformulated their role in US public life. Early twentieth-century newspapers relinquished their long political heritage as noisy, argumentative, biased party organs. The US press declared itself independent of all political attachments. In this transformation, the news evolved from plural, politicized, competing perspectives to an impersonal, unified discourse. Modern journalism proclaimed it would supply an impartial, even “objective,” authoritative account of the United States' daily victories and defeats, and it would impartially arbitrate democracy's public debates. In this manner, supposedly standing outside of all politics, the twentieth-century press strove to enhance democracy's deliberations.

At first, the presidential campaign of 1896 seemed to signal an upsurge in partisan fervor. William Jennings Bryan and the Populist Party captured the Democratic presidential nomination and ushered new contentious issues into the political arena. Under the candidacy of Bryan, the Democratic Party emerged as the voice of protest and reform. However, the specific protest issues were quickly overwhelmed by widespread hysteria. The Nation declared, “Probably no man in civil life has succeeded in inspiring so much terror without taking life as Bryan.” Democratic papers deserted the party en masse. Conservative elite Democratic dailies like the New York Times and the Detroit Free Press issued “declarations of independence.” Even liberal, sensationalist journals such as Pulitzer's World and Scripps's Cincinnati Post dumped the party. In New York City, only the heretical Hearst trumpeted Bryan's candidacy.

The press's flight from the Democrats was reinforced by the fallout from the election. The emotional issues of the campaign fundamentally reshuffled the social coalitions underlying the two parties and, thus, disrupted long-standing ties of party loyalty. The election so weakened the Democrats that at both the national level and in the North and West they were demoted to a minority party. Elections became uncompetitive. Deprived of a significant choice, voter participation dropped from 84% in 1896 until it reached its nadir in 1920 at 53% (Burnham, 1970). From allabsorbing public drama, the fights and furies of the parties on Capitol Hill and in the pages of the press turned drab and unappealing.

In the early twentieth century, this explicit newspaper partisanship came to a permanent end. As party competition and polemics turned into an extraneous sideshow, the Progressive movement rose up to attack parties and their public legitimacy. In addition to vociferous criticisms of “corrupt party machines,” Progressives initiated reforms that undermined parties' central role in political life: primary elections, direct election of senators, non-partisan ballots, and civil service reform (Burnham, 1970, Ch. 4).

In this context of fading party power and an anti-partisan ideology purveyed by a movement of the middle classes (along with attenuated economic ties), newspapers severed their links to the Democrats and Republicans. Historians have long noted the ties between press and the Progressive movement (Gans, 1979; Nord, 1995). Publishers and editors drew upon the political rationales of Progressive reformers to reconstruct journalism's public role. Notions of “public service” and professional expertise became the rhetorical mainstay of journalism's occupational ideals and a defense against all external criticisms and pressures (Tuchman, 1972). In the American Society of Newspaper Editors' 1923 “Code of Ethics,” the key words were factuality, independence, impartiality, and public service (American Society of Newspaper Editors 1960). In the face of widespread fears over monopolies, the idea of public service denied that such concentrations of power advanced private interests (Leach, 1993, Ch. 5).

The press asserted that its control over extensive powers of publicity was not employed for private goals or partisan ends. Rather, journalism was purportedly devoted to the general community and earned its rewards only for serving that public good. Progressive Era publishers asserted that professional technical expertise would direct their news choices and interpretations, instead of personal judgments and political evaluations (Kaplan, 2002, Ch. 5). Gradually, the press developed a claim to be above the wrangling of the public-political sphere (Alexander, 1981, pp. 23–39).

In its new public impartiality, the press supposedly did not operate as a platform for one dominant public voice, but rather as a “channel” for a variety of speakers. Ideally, new voices could gain access to the press, and enter into democracy's public discussion. More often, guided by their technocratic ethic, the dailies did not so much expand their coverage of civil society's diverse opinions as continue to publicize the policies and pronouncements of “important,” legitimate speakers from formal political institutions. In contrast to the past, however, journals now balanced their coverage between the two legitimate parties. They no longer exhibited a preference for one party over the other. Wire service and hometown papers typically paired the statements of one party official with those of his opposite number (Kaplan, 1997).

Far from eliminating the influence of particular, class interests in politics and publicity, journalism's technocratic ideals took for granted the established hierarchy of power. Governmental and corporate power-holders were taken as the embodiment of modern industrial society's functional rationality. Their pronouncements should be reported, their decisions respected, not probed, much less challenged (Haber, 1964). In their 1920s study of Muncie, Indiana, the Lynds (1959, pp. 476–477) remarked, “It is usually safe to predict that in any given controversy the two leading papers may be expected to support the United States in any case, the business class rather than the working class, the Republican party against any other, but especially against any ‘radical party.’”

Consolidation

Throughout the twentieth century, newspapers underwent significant economic transformations. Consolidation and closure of papers marched forward at a steady pace. By the 1970s, most cities functioned with just one journal. Concentration was driven, in part, by the growth of newspaper chains, which bought up and consolidated rival papers in order to benefit from increased economies of scale and diminished competition. At the same time commencing in the 1950s, new rival media and alternative pastimes stole advertising and readers from the press. Journalism lost its central leading role in the average citizen's consumption of information and entertainment but continued to generate respectable profits.

By century's end, most newspapers were no longer family owned but instead publicly owned and traded on the stock exchange. Increasingly they were just one venture in a larger portfolio of media properties, while the parent company focused on recycling content among its synergistic “Information platforms.” These media companies often were committed to the traditional ideals of journalism only insofar as they strengthened their brand name.

By the 1890s, the newspaper industry had entered a “mature stage,” where the growth in readership was accompanied, not by the founding of new journals, but by rising circulation in existing papers. Publishers confronted heightened barriers to the founding of new journals. On one hand, the requisite start-up costs and capital investment skyrocketed. Increased competition for news entailed a multitude of expenditures: a larger editorial staff to cover local news and sports, and the purchase of wire services and syndicate features. Soaring circulation necessitated the purchase of the newly invented typesetting machines and the latest model of Hoe cylindrical printing press (Curl, 1980, pp. 91–92, 141; Salcetti, 1995, pp. 51, 53). With such large sums of capital potentially at risk, newspapers had to be treated as a serious business in their own right; a charity, a platform, a public service only secondarily. Market imperatives and the concerns of business managers for profit weighed ever more heavily on the conduct of journalism. On the other hand, the number of readers needed to break even at competitive prices increased. New publishers needed to battle against the entrenched position of established papers before they could secure a large enough share of the market to return a profit (Caves, 1977, pp. 24–28; Seymour-Ure, 1968, pp. 105–108, 114–115).

In the early twentieth century, papers faced heightened competition and rising production costs. They often struggled and failed but more typically were bought out by rival papers. Indeed, consolidation made increased economic sense once market barriers insured that the elimination of any individual paper would not spur the entrance of new ones. Between 1879 and 1909, the absolute number of US dailies continued its impressive climb to 2,600. But thereafter, newspapers dwindled to 2,441 dailies in 1919 and 2,080 by 1932. In the early 1900s, select metropolitan markets already saw a frenzy of consolidation, frequently initiated by cold-blooded businessmen. One of the most famous, Frank Munsey, had already accumulated a fortune in magazine publishing when in 1912 he “embarked on his career of cannibalizing the financially weaker New York newspapers” (O'Connor, 1975, p. 66). One after another, Munsey purchased then merged or folded the New York Herald, the Evening Telegram, the Morning and the Evening Sun, and the Globe and Commercial Advertiser.

Economic conditions disproportionately favored the leading paper in each marketplace. Advertisers time and again patronized the leader. Consolidation meant that production costs could be spread across a greater number of consumers. By the 1940s, in “the typical mid-size city publishers no longer had a competitor or a prospect of one [. . .] Big cities usually had two or more dailies, an evening and a morning rag, with publishers able to carve the market by class” (Baughman, 1992, p. 11). The survivors of this national bloodbath – that is, the leading papers in each city or town – were rewarded with a relatively secure market position and a steady, even rich, stream of profits. Not even the onslaught of television would disturb the press's financial complacency.

Until century's end, reasonably run papers in “small or midsize markets could achieve profit margins well in excess of 30%. In major metropolitan markets, even with higher labor and associated costs, on the one hand, and a variety of free or targeted local niche competitors, on the other, profit margins were comfortably and consistently above 20%” (Knee, Greenwald, & Seave, 2009, pp. 174–176, 87, 91). In their economic security, newspapers were content to speak as the voice of the mainstream. Their editorials and news supported a politics of growth that assumed a harmony of interests among business's desire for unimpeded commercial development, the paper's greed for rising advertising revenues, and the public good of the community (Booth, 1910; Kaniss, 1991, pp. 52–9).

Group ownership helped drive the decline in newspaper numbers. Large chains with ready investment cash to expand and consolidate gobbled up papers. At the beginning of the twentieth century, eight groups controlled just 27 journals. Led by Hearst and Edward Scripps that number climbed to 63 groups owning 328 papers by 1935. In the final decade of the century, 135 chains controlled 1,228 journals (Pfaff, 2005, p. 65).

Chain ownership, for example, entered into St. Louis's two-paper competition of morning and afternoon daily when Samuel Newhouse purchased the morning Globe Democrat in 1955. Newhouse had the financial weight and publishing skills to give the Globe Democrat a boost along with a reputation for turning financially distressed papers around and resuscitating them (Pfaff, 2005, p. 65). Instead of reinvigorated competition, the city's two papers secretly signed one of the first joint operating agreements (JOA). The agreement restricted competition and combined production to save on costs, with the Post-Dispatch taking over the printing of the Globe Democrat. For the next three decades, the newspapers remained in close, semi-secret alliance (Pfaff, 2005, pp. 121, 123). JOAs became an increasingly common business practice in the 1960s. Faced by rising costs and mutually disadvantageous competition, such papers as Detroit's Evening News and Free Press and San Francisco's Chronicle and Examiner merged production operations, limited competition, and split profits, while remaining ostensibly independent editorially.

St. Louis publisher Joseph Pulitzer III declared the JOA was simply “a sensible business arrangement which in no way injures the public” (Pfaff, 2005, p. 125). And in authorizing the St. Louis JOA, the Justice Department agreed, saying the two papers “could not exist separately.” Nor, apparently, could they survive together. By 1983, the Globe Democrat's publisher remarked, “impending increases in costs of newsprint and the impending increases in labor and the other cost factors associated with the paper, the fact that we had priced ourselves to the maximum acceptable to the advertiser [. . . All these factors] indicated that for us, not too far in the future, it would be uneconomic for two papers here.” The Globe Democrat was sold in 1983 then permanently shuttered in 1986 after continued financial stress (Pfaff, 2005, p. 129).

Newspaper publishing costs remained high despite wage freezes, automation, and cuts in staff. US publishers sought to rein in the costs of the skilled union labor of typographers and printers by utilizing new technologies, but printers still controlled the physical production of the paper. The conflict frequently led to strikes with production being interrupted for days, even months. Already in the 1960s, farsighted analysts recognized that the computer was going to revolutionize the industry by eliminating the need for typesetters and changing the way pages were laid out and stories edited (Solomon, 1995).

Cascading developments were thus weakening newspapers. The press was defined by its ability to capture both audience and advertising. Gradually, both streams were sheared off by new media outlets and rival print forms with more cost-effective, specialized advertising. Although a cause for concern, they did not challenge the continued existence of papers until the 1990s.

Paper closures disproportionately hit evening dailies and their working-class, immigrant audiences, just as in Europe newspaper closings most often struck social democratic papers (Hoyer, Hadenius, & Weibull 1975). Daily papers in the United States have always been, by and large, local affairs. Their economic well-being, Kaniss (1991, pp. 22–28) says, has been tightly tied to the health and growth of a specific locale, and the news is correspondingly often focused on the dramas and issues that unite a metropolitan audience. In fact, “newspapers needed to produce local identity as much as they produced news.” But in the immediate postwar era, families were moving from the densely populated cities to the suburbs. In the 1950s, the 20 largest US cities saw close to zero growth, but the suburbs surrounding those centers jumped by 45% (Baughman, 1992, pp. 61–62; Pfaff, 2005, p. 327). As the suburban communities bloomed and workers no longer made the commute to the city center, those urban identities faded and evening newspapers lost circulation.

However, it was not circulation declines, Kaniss (1991, p. 35) argues, that weakened the evening papers, but the relative unattractiveness of their blue- collar readers to suburban advertisers. Furthermore, big department stores that featured full- page display ads in the paper also departed to the suburbs. Suburban dailies fit better the new social identities and advertising needs.

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, readers remained faithful to their daily paper, notwithstanding the challenges of radio. In the 1950s, the share of the population purchasing a paper stood at 91%. But thereafter, readership commenced a long-term, persistent decline, falling to 57.6% in 1972. Kaestle (1991) partly explains, “The spreading influence of electronic media indeed reduced the public's use of newspapers” (p. 163). The decline was most severe among the younger and less wealthy population.

During the 1950s, advertising devoted to direct mail and television increased rapidly to equal that spent on papers, at the same time as the amount corporations spent on advertising in general skyrocketed (Auletta, 2003, p. 107; Schramm, 1960, p. 292) Having raised ads rates to a maximum through their tight control of the market, papers now saw new forms of advertising at a lower cost per thousand (cpm). Television was an important rival to newspapers in grabbing national advertising. In 1950, newspapers captured 25% of national consumer goods advertising, but by 1978, TV had become the dominant medium for national commercials, knocking papers down to 14% (Kaniss, 1991, p. 30).

The number of rival media for advertising escalated during the 1960s–1980s, including print and broadcasting. Some of those competitors, such as 31 free distribution suburban weeklies in the St. Louis metropolitan region, rivaled the average circulation of the daily urban press. When he shut down the Los Angeles Evening Mirror in 1963, Times publisher Norman Chandler testified before Congress that his papers had hemorrhaged advertising dollars to the accelerating competition of radio stations, television, and suburban newspapers along with community weeklies (Kaniss, 1991, pp. 31–32; Pfaff, 2005, Ch. 9, pp. 127, 260).

Media Corporations

Increasingly, newspaper corporations invested in a variety of media properties. The excellence of the St. Louis Post Dispatch, declared Pulitzer, was supported by the company's investments in diverse media properties. “We went deliberately into television and radio and bought the Arizona Daily Star to enlarge and diversify this company so that it would have sinews and the ability in event of a crisis to maintain the central structure” (Pfaff, 2005, p. 132). Indeed, Pulitzer estimated that large urban papers could persist and indeed prosper only with an array of more profitable investments.

The Chicago Tribune too pursued a diversification policy in the 1980s, aggressively expanding into the direct mail advertising and buying television properties, while establishing zoned suburban supplements to their paper and tightening the bottom line. The Tribune Company soon metamorphosed into a broad content company with its newspapers no longer at the center of attention or revenue. Frequently this diversifying strategy meant the flagship journal gave the brand prestige, while a perambula of media properties with lower journalistic standards fed off the reputation and content of the brand carrier and brought in advertising and circulation (Auletta, 2003, pp. 103, 106–108; Pfaff, 2005, p. 260).

Decline in family ownership also played a role in the shifting orientation of the late twentieth-century US press. As the years passed, subsequent generations of family ownership frequently turned to squabbling over profits and control. “It is common,” writes Daniel Pffaf (2005, p. 156; Auletta, 2003, p. 108; Baughman, 1992, p. 13), “after the third generation or so, for family members to choose other pursuits.” Typically, some heirs were given undivided control with others receiving just dividends. Quality newspaper management often meant lower dividends.

Inevitably, the development of diversified business strategies and the decline of the original family ownership, along with the paper's integration into a broader media company, weakened the firm's commitment to professional journalistic standards as well as the hunt for news. In their pursuit of investment and profits, family-owned papers often went public (Auletta, 2003, p. 104; Wendt, 1979). Increasingly newspapers responded to the demands of the stock market for high rates of return. Public ownership was concerned with dividends not quality journalism. The newspapers that most embraced this approach adopted innovations that challenged journalism's traditional ideals, especially as circulation and revenues weakened. The economics of all papers, however, forced a reworking of the standard model. Papers frequently experimented with reducing editorial costs and staff. Cutbacks meant fewer reporters to track down stories, but most especially cutbacks in national and foreign bureaus and increased reliance on syndicated material. The Tribune Company's non-Chicago journals gathered almost all of their national and international stories from the wire (Auletta, 2003, p. 79). Former Chicago Tribune editor James Squire bemoaned the takeover of “bean counters” at his paper: “What the Tribune is today is what every big newspaper is to its owners – a franchise. It's viewed differently than newspapers used to be viewed. We used to think of it as a quasi public service to inform people about what they need to know [. . .] Today the owners view it as an information franchise whose job it is to make money” (Auletta, 2003, p. 97).

The arrival of the Internet challenged the fortunes and prestige of the daily press like no medium had before. The Web threatened journalism's revenues, its audience, and even the press's traditional role as independent authoritative interpreter of the day's important events. The Web delivered a steady stream of news specialized to any interests or political viewpoint. It could even cover local news, the traditional competitive advantage of the local newspaper. From bloggers to such news aggregator sites as Yahoo, online outlets were usually parasitic off the print media's production of reports yet they offered advertisers more specialized audiences at a lower cpm. Adding injury to injury, the Web too grabbed local advertising in the form of classifieds, most notably with Craigslist. Newspaper revenue from classified ads plummeted from a high of $19.6 billion in 2000 to about half, taking in $9.9 billion in 2008 (Jones, 2009; Knee, Greenwald, & Seave, 2009, pp. 87–89).

The Republican Century

In the early twentieth century, newspapers were independent, but their editorials overwhelmingly endorsed Republican candidates. The electoral realignment in the election of 1896 had weakened the Democratic Party, regionalizing it to a power in the South but weak elsewhere. Newspaper publishers generally joined the upper class in its migration into the Republican Party.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt won the presidency in a Democratic Party avalanche in 1932, propelled by popular anger over the Depression, parties divided along class lines. Newspapers soon turned against the president, stridently raising their voices against Roosevelt's economic stabilization and social welfare measures. If one only read the pages of the daily papers in the run up to the 1936 election, then the entire country seemed to be in revolt against the president (Starr, 2004, p. 375; Wendt, 1979, Ch. 23).

To most everyone's surprise, however, Roosevelt won 60.8% of the vote in 1936, exposing how out of touch the papers were with public sentiment. Nevertheless angry reaction to FDR's social democratic policies continued to infuse parts of the country and newspapers in general. Such papers as the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Hearst chain were especially outspoken (Wendt, 1979, Ch. 23). Republicans, it seemed, owned the daily press, and in turn, Democratic voters listened to the radio airwaves to get their information (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet, 1960, pp. 521–523). Then as now, “partisans ascribed impartiality and veracity to the media which presented views similar to their own” (Lazarsfeld et al., 1960, p. 522). In 1939, 70% of the populace relied on radio for news, which 58% deemed more accurate. Only with the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the advent of global war did hostilities temporarily cease between press and presidency. World War II, notes James Baughman (1992, p. 1), boosted the interest in and sale of news, and at the same time, the press and other instruments of mass culture became “voluntary propagandists” for the government.

World War II also was a turning point for radio news and reinforced the public's reliance on radio, which in many ways forged the institutional patterns for television news. Radio as a mass medium first took off in the 1920s, but emphasized entertainment – music, sports, comedy, and serial dramas (Green, 1992). Appearing to offer little challenge to the daily press, radio's initial news broadcasts were a short recounting of the top headlines. In 1933, radio networks agreed to end a roiling conflict with daily papers by restricting broadcasts to two five-minute news segments each day and only reporting stories that were over 24 hours old. Instead, news commentators had a unique, national prominence (Fones-Wolf, 2006; Starr, 2004, p. 377).

The escalating military tensions in Europe during 1938–1939 captured the public's attention and gave radio news a distinctive opportunity. Offering interviews with European leaders or on-the-spot reports from the battlefield, such luminary reporters as H. V. Kaltenborn and Edward R. Murrow gave a powerful immediacy to the news in a direct personal voice. Their seemingly forthright speech, with its edge of urgency and danger, made the news more concrete and visceral than the daily press with its impersonal gray tones and gray type (Douglas, 2004). Statistics reveal the surging prominence of the airwaves as a source of information. By 1940, over 80% of the population owned at least one radio receiver, and US citizens increasingly said they trusted and preferred radio news to print (Starr, 2004, p. 377).

Despite the wartime reconciliation of press and Democratic Party, newspaper editorials overwhelmingly endorsed the Republican Party and its candidates until the 1980s, while news reports were usually even-handed between the parties, as “objective” journalists effaced their own viewpoints (Ansolabehere, Lessem, & Snyder, 2004). Shifts in newspaper ownership over time from family to public and the gradual acceptance of most of the achievements of Roosevelt's New Deal, along with a liberalization in the 1960s and the debacle of the Vietnam War, altered this alignment of press editorials and Republican Party. By century's end, dailies split their endorsements between the two parties. The Chicago Tribune, for example, had since the 1850s aggressively pushed a conservative Republican line. In the 1970s, with an increasingly professional management, the Tribune adopted a less partisan outlook, in line with other corporate journals (Auletta, 2003, p. 104; Wendt, 1979).

In general, twentieth-century journalism's embrace of objectivity weakened its capacity to interject its interpretations and perspective into news narratives. And, if ever the press stepped outside of the nation's two-party consensus, it faced accusations of bias (Bennett, 1990; Hallin, 1986, p. 10; Kaplan, 2002). Throughout the century, the US press typically adopted the perspective of political elites, while slighting the views of those who were marginal or dissenters. In war after war, the Washington Post confessed, the press “inevitably” functioned as the “mouthpiece” for the presidential administration (Kurtz, 2004), if only because the administration possessed a near monopoly of information and was buttressed by public belief in the rightness of the national security state.

In this sense, the US news agenda is not the product of newsworkers. Rather the selection the news and its framing typically reflected broader constellations of public authority and political culture. More specifically, in Todd Gitlin's accounting (1981, p. 271; Baughman, 1992, p. 112), the US press generally expresses the dominant hegemony, which in the twentieth century comprised the legitimacy of the national security state in the face of threatening enemies, the rightness of the market economy with its vastly unequal distribution of monetary rewards, the values of “free” individualism, consumerism, and private families as the foundation of the social order, and the ability of technical and managerial elites to manage social conflicts and make the necessary reforms.

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