The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications

The preliminaries

• How people communicated with each other in Europe and America radically transformed  in the 17th and 18th centuries.
  • During this time, the first forms of the postal service became available, as well as the first newspapers.
    • The two were linked, as the postal networks, stemming from newly formed trade routes, became a way to exchange economic and political intelligence across Europe.
  • The first publicly available reports of sundry recent events, printed on a regular weekly basis, appeared in Europe around the 17th century.
  • Publishing also kicked off during this time–it took considerable capital to finance a shop and equipment, and this drew publishing to cities, where finance was available.
    • The early book trade was divided between large volumes for the academics, and smaller literary works for the larger public.
• In the American colonies, people received most of their books, ideas, and news via London.
  • While the colonies originally had difficulty in publishing and circulation, by the mid-18th century, printing, the postal services, and newspapers began growing, which created the basis for a public sphere that emerged fully politicized during the Revolutionary War.
  • During this growth, in the face of economic and political pressures, most printers tried to remain neutral. (Bear in mind that, during the colonial era, there was no system of true partisan politics.)
  • But in March 1765, facing enormous debt from its war with France, Britain imposed a heavy stamp tax on the colonies.
    • The tax fell mostly on printers, lawyers, merchants, and college students; printers faced heavy duties on things like pamphlets and newspapers.
    • Instead of stifling the press, the Stamp Act politicized it.
    • Some newspapers reported protests and provided a forum for discussion, turning what would have been only chaos into a coherent opposition movement.
    • Ultimately, the Stamp Act led to the first intercolonial cooperation against the British, as well as the first newspaper campaign against the British.

The U.S.’s first information revolution

• Between 1790 and 1835, the U.S. population grew from 3.9 million to 15 million, and the number of newspapers climbed eleven-fold, from 106 to 1258.
• Democracy led to an abundance of newspapers; direct political participation incentivized people to be informed, so people created newspapers to build support and connection.
  • The government gave subsidies to all newspapers, and reduced the cost of buying newspapers. 
  • For example, by 1813, the federal government had built a comprehensive network for the postal service, and employed more than 8,700 postal workers.
    • By having control of postal routes, Congress opened a direct political channel for local demands. 
    • Because of its low-cost distribution, the postal service carried an incredible number of newspapers–by 1830, it circulated 2 million more newspapers than letters.

Capitalism and democracy in print

• As literacy and schooling increased, the market for reading material increased.
  • This happened alongside the rise of publishing things for mass entertainment and information.
  • The penny papers are often seen as the U.S.’s first popular commercial newspaper, independent of political party, and truly devoted to “news” in the modern sense.
    • They became the first papers in the U.S. to publish extensive coverage of local news, and turn news into entertainment. It included chronicles of deadly crimes and lurid stories of human depravity.
• Additionally, in the late 1700s, Congress approved copyright legislation, which had two major consequences:
  • It created private rights to published work, and provided a legal public domain of works where copyright either never applied or had expired.

The rise of technological networks

• The advent of the electric telegraph in the 1840s was the beginning of a new phase of communications–these new networks promised fast connections between people, governments, and markets.
  • The U.S. was a vast territory, which made the telegraph especially valuable.
• The federal government financed and owned the first telegraph line in the U.S. 
• By 1850 there were 12,000 miles of telegraph line in the U.S., and by 1853 there were 23,000.
  • Many state legislatures granted charters to telegraph companies, ceding them rights-of-way on public roads and canals, for free. Courts also sheltered the industry from liability.
  • The telegraph soon became an incredible medium of mass communication; it played a central role in disseminating commercial information, developing a national economy, and linking international markets.

The making of modern media

• In the 19th century, the government became deeply concerned with moral censorship, particularly regarding sex, popular culture, and protecting children.
• In 1866, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) decried the spread of obscenity as a terrible influence on single young men. They successfully lobbied to help pass NY’s first anti-obscenity legislation.
  • In 1871, Anthony Comstock, a dry-goods clerk, tried to enforce this law against a store that sold dirty books. The police helped him organize a raid. 
  • Afterwards, Comstock appealed to the YMCA for help with additional raids, and the YMCA’s new president, banker and industrialist Morris Jesup, gathered a group of wealthy men who immediately began underwriting Comstock’s enforcement work.
    • The role of wealthy men sponsoring moral regulation was part of a broader development in America during this period.
• Eventually, Congress passed what became known as the Comstock Act, which imposed severe imprisonment sentences for transporting through the mail any obscene “book, pamphlet, picture, paper, print, or other publication of indecent character, or any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of contraception or procuring of abortion.”

Newspapers and advertising

• The daily newspaper dominated the public sphere in this era.
  • Between 1870 and 1900, the number of dailies leapt from 574 to 2,226, and their average circulation increased from 2,600 to more than 15,000.
• As the number of publications and advertisers increased, the number of opportunities for facilitating business between the two also increased.
  • Although advertising agents existed by the mid-1850s, they increased significantly in number by the end of the 19th century.
  • Roughly 4,000 businesses tried to promote their products outside of their own localities, and needed help in choosing where to promote.
• In the 1880s, the biggest figure in new journalism was an immigrant named Joseph Pulitzer.
  • He made his fortune by buying and rebuilding the Post-Dispatch; he also paid Jay Gould the exorbitant price of $346,000 for the sinking New York World.
  • He cut the World’s price to a penny, adopted the practice of selling journalism to a wider market, and transformed the industry.
    • In two years, the World’s circulation jumped ten-fold to 153,000, and was the biggest in the city.
  • He invented the concept of attention-grabbing headliners, detailed and dramatic coverage of murders, and the use of line-cut illustrations.
• His chief rival, William Randolph Hearst, had built one of the most powerful newspaper chains, beginning with his father’s San Francisco Examiner.
  • After buying New York’s floundering Morning Journal in the 1890s, Hearst raided Pulitzer’s staff, adopted Pulitzer’s marketing strategy, and the Journal skyrocketed.
• Both Hearst and Pulitzer presented a new form of power available through journalism; they were unattached to a party, and the upper strata of society abhorred them.
  • They stood at the peak of the press when the press itself was at its peak. Both advocated for policies that were radical for the times–attacking corporate and governmental abuses–and gained a following among working-class readers.

The rediscovery of the First Amendment

• The rise of the modern liberal state is often cast as a shift between the relatively limited government of the 19th century, to an expanded government, with increased regulation and spending, in the 20th century.
  • But the 20th century liberal state also included new and stricter limits on its power to protect civil liberties.
  • These protected individual rights, and shielded public discussion, literature, and the arts from state control.
• In the early 20th century, there were two main problems confronting free expression:
  • First, moral censorship imposed significant limits on the creativity of literature, theater, visual arts, and public discussion.
  • Second, relatedly, when free expression was attacked, the judiciary usually failed to protect it.
    • During the 19th century and into the 20th, no federal court struck a law on the basis of the First Amendment’s free-speech protections.
    • It was only after the U.S. entered WWI, when the courts fully backed the government’s crackdown on the war’s opponents, that the legal insecurity of dissent became a salient public issue.
    • The war, and the red scare that followed, created the generative crisis of modern First Amendment law. The repression of dissenters forced leading legal figures, including members of the U.S. Supreme Court, to re-think the meaning of the freedom of speech.
• At the beginning of the 20th century, support for free speech came primarily from three sources:
  • Newspapers defending the tradition of a free press;
  • Conservative libertarian legal scholars; and
  • A small group of lawyers, journalists, and liberal activists who founded the Free Speech League, which was the first of the modern civil libertarian organizations.
    • The League was unique in that it did not limit itself to upholding a particular viewpoint; rather, it was a free-speech advocate for all. It opposed the censorship of allegedly immoral literature just as powerfully as it opposed the censorship of political dissent.
  • At this time, the National Civil Liberties Bureau, a civil rights organization that opposed WWI and assisted conscientious objectors, reorganized under a new name: the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) (many members of the Free Speech League eventually joined the ACLU).

The advent of the media

• By the late 1920s, the media was a new constellation of power.
• At its center was a range of large organizations that dominated communications in print, on the screen, and in the air. The constellation’s most brilliant stars–actors and actresses, radio personalities, and columnists and commentators, were visible to the national public.
• The media were becoming a great source of wealth, and power relations had shifted.
  • Commerce distorts and enlarges the public sphere–the desire to attract more readers, viewers, or listeners sometimes produces reckless sensationalism.
  • As newspapers became increasingly dependent on advertising, editors began to see their readers less as members of the general political population, and more as consumers.

• Why the constitutional and judicial protections of rights to free expression, access to information, privacy, and patent and copyright are as much of a “service” provided by states as welfare benefits or military defense
• How the tense dispute between the Federalists and the Republicans in the late 1700s demonstrated how a national network of newspapers could influence public opinion and win presidencies
• The rise of the telephone (which originated as an effort to improve the telegraph, not to replace it)
• The advent of movies and their cultural import
• The origins of broadcasting, and how its rise upset the technical assumptions and political balance of radio