On Fri, 21 Feb 2003, kelley wrote:
> Newspapers were originally funded by political parties, politicians, and
> partisan orgs and unabashed about naming themsleves The Standard or The
> Criterion. In NYS those names were historically proceeded by the names
> of political parties. My hometown paper was The [City] Republican
> Standard. In Ithaca, the first newspaper for the county was the Seneca
> Republican. They changed it to The Ithaca Journal a year later.
What year was that? And was this part of a general trend to drop overt party affiliation from papers?
I know tight party/paper connections were and in part still are the norm in Europe. But I thought most America papers have always been dominated by our weird and almost unique ideology of nonpartisanship. Not that they weren't very partisan, and usually republican (following the lead of their rich owners) underneath. Just that they weren't overt, for all the reasons outlined in Richard Hofstaedter's _The Idea of a Party-System_.
This is all untrue? Most papers were once party-aligned? Whence then (and when) came our peculiar notion of journalistic objectivity?
Michael