partisan press
The term partisan press refers to journalism practiced within a political sphere, as opposed to a more independent profession. Partisan journalism is connected with democracy, a form of government that has contested political leadership. In the United States, the partisan press era began after the Revolutionary War and lasted until the Civil War. During that period of time, the majority of American journalists worked for newspapers with definite political leanings, and many newspapers were started by the parties themselves. After the Civil War, the American press gradually moved away from its partisan roots and became more independent, although newspapers retained an editorial page where partisan perspectives remained on display. This entry first discusses the partisan press era in colonial America and the early United States and its decline by the end of the 19th century. It then looks at present-day partisan news media in the United States and Europe.
Partisan Press in Colonial America and Early United States
In the colonial period, Benjamin Franklin played a key role in the distribution of newspapers. As first postmaster of Philadelphia and then of all of the colonies, Franklin provided some newspapers with reduced postage for circulation in the colonies. Franklin eventually decided to let all newspapers be dispersed by the postal system for a very small fee. By the time of the revolution, newspapers in the North American colonies were divided between those that were loyal to the British government (Tories) and those who supported independence (Patriots). Very few newspapers were independent at this time.
When the Continental Congress began to convene, it turned to editors to record what transpired. In turn, editors shared this information with the public. Later, President George Washington signed the Post Office Act of 1792, providing for delivery of a newspaper for one cent of postage up to 100 miles and one and a half cents for more than 100 miles. The postal subsidy helped enhance paper circulation both in the colonial and postcolonial periods.
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The heyday of the American partisan press came in the half century from 1783 until 1833. This period is when news editors received significant patronage from political parties, often via government printing contracts. Editors often turned to parties for financial resources in order to start and maintain a newspaper. In return, the editors would endorse the political party’s candidates and provide commentary favorable to its principles and positions on the issues of the day. The journalists’ main job was to develop and motivate the party base. In turn, parties supported editors by asking their members to subscribe to those newspapers. This arrangement gave an editor, who also served as printer, writer, and business manager, a level of prestige and influence in society, and political patronage was critical to the newspaper’s long-term financial stability.
During President Thomas Jefferson’s administration, Samuel Harrison Smith, founder and editor of the National Intelligencer in Washington, D.C., received thousands of dollars each year from the State Department for publishing its official documents. Smith’s favorable treatment was because of his loyalty to both Jefferson and the Democratic-Republican Party. He was eventually named as acting secretary of the treasury. Similarly, Philip Freneau launched the National Gazette and Benjamin Bache the Aurora as newspapers that opposed John Adams and the Federalists. Jefferson, who favored a weak centralized government, was a major supporter of the Gazette. On the other side of the spectrum, John Fenno published the pro-Federalist Gazette of the United States and William Cobbett, closely aligned with Alexander Hamilton, who favored a powerful federal government, edited Porcupine’s Gazette.
In the first decade of the partisan press in the United States, newspapers had to survive the Sedition Act of 1798, passed by Congress during the presidency of John Adams, a Federalist. The law was part of two congressional bills that attempted to squelch printed sentiment for France, which was in the midst of a revolution. It also was an attempt to silence the journalistic supporters of Jefferson, then the vice president and a friend of France. Jefferson financed several Democratic-Republican newspapers, while rival Hamilton did the same for Federalist journals.
The Sedition Act was supported by Hamilton-leaning papers and opposed by Jefferson-leaning organs. The bill criminalized seditious libel. If convicted of criticizing the federal government, a journalist could face 2 years in jail and a fine of up to $2,000. The Federalists claimed they were trying to rid the nation of false and malicious news. Republicans countered that the law made it illegal to write about political issues. They argued the law made is impossible for citizens to obtain information and opinion that would help them make rational decisions at the ballot box.
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Several Democratic-Republican editors, many of them directly linked to Jefferson, were prosecuted under the Sedition Act, but Jefferson, after narrowly defeating Adams in the election of 1800, let the renewable law expire. Jefferson believed written criticism of the government did not necessarily lead to revolution and that the press could serve as a check on the abuse of power. The weakness of such hyperpolitical journalism is that there rarely was any moderate ground for readers to consider. The rhetoric was vitriolic and often more about the man than the ideas or principles behind a particular political issue.
The partisan press era coincided with extensive growth in American journalism. In 1783, the newly independent nation had only 35 newspapers. In those days, it was not unusual for those newspapers to be shared several times, especially in taverns, creating a large but unaccounted for secondary circulation. Fifty years later, the United States had 1,200 newspapers. The nonadvertising content of the partisan press era was primarily political news, interpretation, and stories about key politicians. This included editorials that urged readers to support candidates from the newspaper’s party. The newspapers of that era also included lively and even abusive rhetoric slung at political opponents. Those personal attacks could be vicious, and they were often entertaining. During the election season, newspapers prominently displayed the names of a party’s ticket, starting at the national level and working down through state and local races. Editors also printed speeches of major national and state political leaders as well as significant government documents, including sessions of state legislatures and governors’ decrees. In the first half century of American journalism, most editors exchanged their newspapers with other editors because of a break in postage costs for printed material. This led to the cutting and pasting practice whereby smaller rural or town newspapers borrowed from the larger newspapers in urban centers.
The concept of having a press representing multiple political parties derived from the Enlightenment, particularly the political philosophy of John Locke and Thomas Paine. Locke believed that individuals should have the right to speak and write freely and that government should not interfere with public discourse. Locke, who was hopeful about human potential, also held that an open exchange of ideas would lead to political harmony—that it would unite rather than divide. Paine’s writings, both pamphlets and broadsides published during the Revolution, were highly influential. Paine was a republican who wanted the Americans to break free from the political bounds of Great Britain, from the tyranny of the monarchy. That Paine wrote passionate pleas of independence was an active example of free expression. By having the temerity to urge Americans to break away from London, Paine was making the case of open and independent discourse and freedom of the press.
The ideas of Locke and Paine were filtered through the Founding Fathers, especially James Madison. His understanding of individual rights was expressed best in the First Amendment, which guarantees no interference from Congress regarding freedom of the press—that right to publish as one pleases. This meant that there would be no official newspaper of the federal government. Not having an official government journal was parallel to the idea of not having a single state religion.
The first 50 years of partisan journalism in the United States coincided with the first two party systems in the United States. First came the contest between the Democratic-Republicans and Federalists, followed by the battle between Democrats and Whigs. Editors, many of them politicians themselves, lined up on each side of these political divides and interpreted events of the day within the ideology of a particular party. Politicians frequently owned newspapers, and editors sometimes became politicians. Alexander Hamilton printed the pro-Federalist Gazette of the United States. In addition to their political experiences, Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Adams also were known as printers.
With the formation of the Whig and Democratic parties in the 1820s, editors continued to be major political players. No politician in the first 75 years of the nation’s history was more reliant upon partisan editors than President Andrew Jackson, who bestowed federal jobs on at least 40 journalists during his administration. In the middle of the 19th century, Henry J. Raymond served in the New York legislature before founding The New York Times, and New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley would run for president after the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln was involved in a newspaper, a German-language organ that supported the Republicans.
During the Nullification Crisis of 1831–1833, partisan journalists had a major role in framing the issue and were bitterly opposed to one another, especially in South Carolina. In the Palmetto State, the newspapers did not necessarily align as Whig versus Democratic. Rather, the battle was over protectionism against free trade. On the side of protective tariffs for American goods were the so-called Unionists. On the other side, favoring free international trade was the Nullification Party. The latter believed South Carolina had the right as a state to opt out of federal laws that were not in its vested interest. Hence, federal laws could be nullified at the state level. Newspapers on both sides of this divide fashioned the arguments for their side and rallied their followers to vote accordingly.
The Charleston Mercury claimed the tariffs in effect enslaved South Carolinians to a policy that went against their economic interests, particularly because the tariffs had an adverse effect on the state’s main commodity, cotton. If the federal government would not provide tariff relief, then it was the right of South Carolina to ignore the federal law. The pro-nullification editors often argued that their side in the tariff crisis had a precedent: The Revolution of 1776. Like the Patriots, the Nullification Party members said they faced a tyrannical oppressor and therefore had a right to interpose a state’s right to void a federal law.
In the 1850s and 1860s, the partisan press in the United States helped stoke the political convulsions that led to the Civil War. Editors were not aligned in simple camps in either the North or the South. The parties began to splinter apart, and candidates representing four different parties ran for president in 1860. In the South, newspapers were not all supportive of conservative, pro-secession Democrats. There were old-line Whigs who preferred some sort of compromise, and in the upper South, there were those who thought the Union was indivisible. In the North, the Republicans were split between moderates and radicals, while the Democrats were split between loyal Unionists and conservatives who preferred peace to a bloody war that pivoted on abolition. The partisan press of the antebellum and Civil War period tended to conserve the views of these factions.
The political-oriented newspapers of the era were now joined by the advocacy press. The leading advocacy group of this era was the abolitionist press, led by such editors as William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and Gamaliel Bailey. In this period, partisan editors, both Democratic and Whig-Republican, considered the abolitionist press to be too radical, too fanatical, and too politically naive, and argued that abolitionism was a disease that would deepen the nation’s sectional divide and make civil war all but inevitable. At this time, the partisan press was the mainstream press of the nation, and its reaction to the abolitionist editors tended to be critical. Few partisan editors in the antebellum condemned mob violence against abolitionist journalists, such as the murder of Elijah P. Lovejoy in Alton, Illinois, in 1837. At least until 1860, this was due in no small part to the fact that both major parties had to have some support from the opposition to win national elections.
Decline of the American Partisan Press
The American partisan press began to die out in part because of the power of the telegraph, which could churn out vast sums of information over long distances. It became more important to get the facts out first, and lots of them, as the United States grew internally and became more influential globally. News, not political interpretation, became the centerpiece of the journalistic enterprise. Increased emphasis on news in the latter half of the 19th century was coupled to an expansion in the size of newspapers from four to eight to 16 pages.
Publishers also began to move away from the partisan business model, as advertising became the new economic engine for newspapers and magazines. Likewise, the press in the United States became more industrial and could crank out more and more copies of a newspaper because of improvements in the printing press, which meant readership increased dramatically. Hand in hand with that was the rise of literacy and the universal common school movement. In the last few decades of the 19th century, sensationalism took the place of partisan politics as the salient feature of American newspapers. There was a political dimension to the sensationalism—often toward progressivism—and yet the emphasis was on information for an increasingly urban and industrial population. Readers wanted unfiltered news to navigate their everyday lives. Politics still mattered, but not as much as accidents, crime, health issues, and train schedules.
Partisan Media in the 21st Century
Outside of the United States, there is a somewhat different understanding of the press. For example, in Great Britain, the practice has long been that newspapers have definite political stripes and that such identity has an effect on the entire newspaper. Such is also the case in French journalism, where readers tend to be loyal to newspapers based on their political leanings. This is not to say the European models do not give readers information that helps them surveil their everyday environments. Rather, that model takes it as a given that the editorial leadership matters the most.
Partisanship subsided by the mid-20th century in U.S. news media, though it continued in political magazines such as The Nation on the left and the National Review on the right. It began to make a return in the late 20th century with the proliferation of conservative talk radio shows and the launch of Fox News on the right, followed later by the formation of partisan websites on both the left and right as well as a move toward left-leaning programming on MSNBC.
The original version of this article was published by SAGE Publications in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Journalism.