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Exploring Revolutionary American Journalism
Not-quite-reading-a-book assignment:
Preview Read a brief excerpt at Columbia Journalism Review: http://cjrarchives.org/issues/2006/2/passages.asp In the beginning... our paradoxical press 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; the two of them stood masthead to masthead, firing at each other, without ceasing, without blinking, without acknowledging the limitations of veracity. Philadelphia's Aurora was less a celestial radiance than a ground-level reek, guilty of "taking a line that would have been regarded as treasonable in any later international conflict." And Porcupine's Gazette, the Aurora's sworn foe, was as barbed as its namesake. See the book itself: Infamous Scribblers at Google Books Listen to these interviews From the NPR program On the Media: Brooke Gladstone's interview with Eric Burns, author of Infamous Scribblers (with transcript) http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2006/06/02/06 -- -- New York talk show host Leonard Lopate interviews Burns (24 minutes): http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/episodes/2006/03/29/segments/58561 -- -- A 21st century perspective: H-Net book review by Roger Mellen (New Mexico State University); note that this is an "academic" review, complete with footnotes and discussion of errors: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=12308 A book review with excerpts from Brothers Judd blog: http://brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/1570/Infamous%20Scr.htm "The Infamous Scribblers of the Founding Father Generation" -- History News Network article by Burns (about 1,000 words; some overlap with the radio interviews) http://hnn.us/articles/22903.html and don't miss the critical discussion of that article in its comments section. A review article by John Hood: "The Founding Fathers were bloggers." http://lincolntribune.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=5397 "Well, okay, let me rephrase that. Many of the Founders were the 18th-century equivalent of a certain category of modern-day bloggers [^] writers on political topics, typically using a pen name, who are also connected to formal journalism and simultaneously active in partisan politics.... much of what you read today about blogging's corrosive effects on public life mirrors what contemporaries thought about the aggressive political commentary of the Founding period. "
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