In case you missed Fresh Air yesterday, you can listen online about the early days of American media.
A new book details the scandalous, sensational and partisan press — of the 1700s. Fox News journalist Eric Burns’s Infamous Scribblers details how Alexander Hamilton, Sam Adams and other figures were integral in shaping not only America’s political system but its journalistic one, as well.
An excerpt from the book:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of journalism — and it is no small irony that the former condition led directly to the latter, that the golden age of America’s founding was also the gutter age of American reporting, that the most notorious of presses in our nation’s history churned out its copy on the foothills of Olympus.
The Declaration of Independence was literature, but the New England Courant talked trash. The Constitution of the United States was philosophy; the Boston Gazette slung mud. The Gazette of the United States and the National Gazette were conceived as weapons, not chronicles of daily events, and as soon as the latter came into being, the two of them stood masthead to masthead and fired at each other without either ceasing or blinking or acknowledging the limitations of veracity.
