The Courant contained political essays, opinion, satire, and some word of goings on. Franklin was the first newspaperman in the world to report the results of a legislative vote count. Franklin had a different editorial policy: "I hereby invite all Men, who have Leisure, Inclination and Ability, to speak their Minds with Freedom, Sense and Moderation, and their Pieces shall be welcome to a Place in my Paper."
Whether or not James Franklin was a hard master, he was, as a printer, bold unto recklessness. He set as his task the toppling of the Puritan theocracy, and nearly managed it. A fuming Cotton Mather dubbed Franklin and his writers the Hell-Fire Club and called his newspaper "A Wickedness never parallel'd any where upon the Face of the Earth!" Undeterred - more likely, spurred on - Franklin printed, in the pages of his paper, essay after essay about the freedom of the press.
Authorities ordered Franklin to submit the Courant to review or stop printing it. But no one said that someone else couldn't print it. A notice in the next issue claimed that the paper was "Printed and Sold by BENJAMIN FRANKLIN in Queen Street." As Benjamin Franklin later fondly recalled, "I had the Management of the Paper, and I made bold to give our Rulers some Rubs in it."
"The Business of Printing has chiefly to do with Men's Opinions," Benjamin Franklin wrote, in his "Apology for Printers," in 1731, after he started printing the Pennsylvania Gazette, in Philadelphia.
(Franklin proposed printing a one-size-fits-all "Apology" annually, to save himself the labor of apologizing every time he offended someone.) Franklin's job, as he saw it, wasn't to find out facts. It was to publish a sufficient range of opinion: "Printers are educated in the Belief, that when Men differ in Opinion, both Sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Publick; and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter."
John Peter Zenger, the German-immigrant printer of the New-York Weekly Journal, was jailed for printing essays that smeared the character of New York's governor, William Cosby. Zenger didn't write those essays; he just printed them. He was later acquitted by arguing that what he printed was true - Cosby really was a blackguard - even though truth, before the Zenger case, had never been allowed as a defense against libel.
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.
rinters, better than anybody, could fight back. In the words of David Ramsay, a South Carolina delegate to the Continental Congress who wrote, in 1789, the first American history of the Revolution, "It was fortunate for the liberties of America, that newspapers were the subject of a heavy stamp duty. Printers, when uninfluenced by government, have generally arranged themselves on the side of liberty, nor are they less remarkable for attention to the profits of their profession." You don't mess with the men who work the presses. After all, the motto "Don't Tread on Me" was made famous by a man who wanted his gravestone to read "B. Franklin Printer."
In Boston, Benjamin Edes refused to buy stamps and, at John Adams's suggestion, changed the Gazette's motto to "A free press maintains the majesty of the people."
On November 1, 1765, that Black Day, Bostonians staged a funeral for Liberty, beneath the Liberty Tree. Edes's Gazette reported on similar funerals held all over the colonies. Everywhere, the story ended the same way. In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a coffin was "prepared and neatly ornamented, on the Lid of which was wrote LIBERTY, aged 145, STAMP'D, computing from the Era of our Forefathers landing at Plymouth." But then, lo, a reprieve, otherworldly! The eulogy "was hardly ended before the Corps was taken up, it having been perceived that some Remains of Life were left." Liberty stirs!
In 1766, Parliament, blindsided by the fervor of the Colonial opposition, repealed the Stamp Act. GAZETTE, like his sister, LIBERTY, woke from the dead."The newspaper is dead, long live the newspaper!" has lately become the incantation of advocates of e-journalism, who argue that the twenty-first-century death of the newspaper hardly merits a moment's mourning, since it is no death at all but, rather, a rebirth. Even if that turns out to be true - and you have to hope it is true - the digital newspaper could do with a better slogan.
it's not the newspaper that's forever at risk of dying and needing to be raised from the grave. It's the freedom of the press.
Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated on March 4, 1801, the day after the Sedition Act expired. In his Inaugural Address, Jefferson talked about "the contest of opinion," a contest waged, in his lifetime, in the pages of the newspaper. Without partisan and even scurrilous printers pushing the limits of a free press in the seventeen-nineties, Marcus Daniel argues, the legitimacy of a loyal opposition never would have been established and the new nation, with its vigorous and democratizing political culture, might never have found its feet.
- Authors: Lepore, Jill
- Source: New Yorker; 1/26/2009, Vol. 84 Issue 46, p68-73, 6p, 1 color, 1 bw
