In 1797, political opponents physically beat Benjamin Franklin Bache, grandson of Benjamin Franklin, and, a year later, ransacked the office of his newspaper. The trigger was the publisher’s deriding of George Washington for what he considered the then-president’s monarchial tendencies. The nation had been “debouched by George Washington,” Bauche wrote in The Aurora, his Philadelphia publication. Infuriated, Federalists opposed to his paper took up arms.
The response was extreme, but the partisan nature of his writing was not extraordinary. One-sided presses were standard fare from the earliest days of our country’s founding up until the Civil War. Newspapers and their reporting were aligned with one party or another and aimed at the affluent, educated, and powerful. “The typical 19th century newspaper was proudly and violently non-objective,” former Christian Science Monitor editor Erwin Canham once observed.
This history provides an important lesson for Americans today about the need for objective reporting that serves a broad American population. Our earliest days certainly did not meet that standard.
When colonists sought independence from the British, Tory papers sympathetic to the monarch championed the status quo. Whig papers appealed to the emerging business class. And Radicals published essays opposing the Crown.
The partisanship continued after we gained independence. The Gazette of the United States launched in 1789 to promote the Federalist cause. The New York Post, which remains the nation’s oldest newspaper, began to support the Federalists, too.
The Democratic-Republicans had their own publications. Bache’s paper was one. So was the National Gazette. And Thomas Jefferson persuaded Scottish immigrant James Callender to write for both papers, where he turned out screeds against Federalists like Alexander Hamilton.
The atmosphere was so toxic that Congress’ passage of the Sedition Act in 1798 led to journalists like Bache being prosecuted for criticism of the government.
At the same time, the number of newspapers expanded throughout this period. In a 1995 study of early American publications, journalism scholar Jeffrey Rutenbeck reported that 21 newspapers existed in 1763. By 1775, 42 were publishing.
Essayists like Tom Paine had used pamphlets as their platform, but newspapers became the primary way of communicating and debating political issues. Rutenbeck notes how the early colonial press became the means to express dissent against the Crown and that the papers moved colonists toward independence.
The Post Office Act of 1792 facilitated the expansion by providing newspapers government subsidies. That helped the number of newspapers expand by 600% between 1801-1833 to 1,200.
That same act awarded newspapers lucrative printing contracts and franking privileges. Troublingly, though, the contracts led to patronage networks. Friendly publishers won financial rewards for printing executive and congressional materials, like bills and reports.
These contracts sustained publishers and their operations. Between 1831 and 1841, the Washington Globe received more than $163,000 in executive patronage, reported Rutenbeck. The partisan quid-pro-quos did not phase out until the creation of the Government Printing Office in 1860.
The partisanship of publishers also spilled over into electoral politics. Publishers served on party committees and became instrumental in their work. “In many cases, newspaper editors were appointed to the central committee and were able not only to acquaint themselves with party goals, but also to conduct their newspaper in accordance with those goals,” Rutenbeck wrote.
Some publishers even ran for office. The most notable example came later when New York Tribune founder Horace Greeley ran for president in 1872.
Differing views over slavery showcased the partisan divide among newspaper publishers. The most obvious examples were the mob attacks on the offices of James Birney, publisher of the Cincinnati Philanthropist, and the fatal shooting of Elija Lovejoy, editor of the Alton Observer in Illinois. Both were abolitionists who drew the ire of anti-abolitionists, the most extreme of which acted violently against Birney and Lovejoy.
The slavery debate also highlighted how networks of similarly leaning publications would exchange stories about an event that may have happened in one’s town or region. This arrangement was similar to how wire services like the Associated Press later distributed stories nationally and internationally. The reports from like-minded papers served as a “public address system to their supporters,” one scholar observed.
In the case of the Birney attacks, Rutenbeck’s study notes how newspapers in the North, which often were Whig papers, largely decried the violence even if some of them did not weigh in on abolition. Conversely, Rutenbeck found, southern newspapers, which were largely Democratic publications, openly supported violence against Birney. And they were the least critical of anti-abolitionist violence in general.
During Andrew Jackson’s presidency, the Washington Globe played a prominent role in promoting his more populist policies. Its backing included support for his plans to dismantle the Second National Bank, a central bank that Jackson considered elitist. Objectivity and neutrality were not part of the equation when it came to reporting on the fierce, sometimes violent, debate over the bank.
What’s more, Francis Blair, the Globe’s editor, was a top Jackson ally from the time Blair was a Kentucky editor. A partisan Democrat at the time, he was a key member of Jackson’s kitchen cabinet. Blair later became a prominent Republican and an Abraham Lincoln supporter.
By the middle part of the 19th century, the partisan nature of newspapers began to change. As the late journalism professor Kenneth Rystrom noted in The Why, Who and How of the Editorial Page, populist “penny” presses largely replaced the partisan newspapers.
These publications were as advertised: Some only cost a penny; others two or three cents. They often came in the form of a tabloid with large, splashy headlines. The papers tended toward the sensational, especially reporting on crime and violence in the streets.
Their readers frequently were the rising number of urban working-class Americans or immigrants who were new to the country and less interested in party politics. The penny presses corresponded with the rise of an Industrial Age in the middle-to-late 1800s. Newspapers were no longer the province of the affluent, educated, and powerful.
Penny press publishers could get into high-profile newspaper wars, too. William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal battled it out with Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World for dominance on the streets of the city in the late 1800s.
In short, the owners of the newer presses wanted to appeal to as many people as possible. By contrast, partisan papers preferred speaking to the like-minded.
What do we want today?
Of course, journalism has evolved further since the days of the partisan and then penny presses. But the dichotomy between the two approaches points to a fundamental and still relevant question: Do news organizations want to appeal to the broad public or to readers or viewers with the same set of values?
Modern cable television news outlets have seized upon the similar-mind model. For the most part, Republicans go to Fox, Democrats turn to MSNBC. Tellingly, MSNBC drew the most eyeballs on November 5th’s primetime coverage, the night of the 2025 off-year elections that Democrats largely dominated.
News organizations are free to pursue the strategy that works for them. Our democracy, though, is best served through independent news organizations that serve the broad public.
Americans need information that has been gathered through reporters talking to multiple sources, editors checking for bias in the reporting, and executives willing to hold the leaders of their community, state, and nation accountable for their actions. Each task requires a commitment to providing accurate, reliable information. And no one news organization gets them right all the time.
But when news organizations see their mission as being devoted to the entire community and not just the like-minded, citizens receive information that helps them make knowledgeable decisions about local as well as national and international matters. The public, after all, has a right to be informed.
Fortunately, the evolution of American journalism over the last 250 years has led to a more public-focused institution that helps strengthen our democracy. But let us not forget the lessons from history about how a partisan press inflames tensions. The violence visited upon Benjamin Franklin Bache and others stands as an object lesson to avoid.
SMU Senior Samuel Rodick, a Tower Center Scholar, contributed to research for this essay.
