>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?
1816, 1817, 1826 for name changes. (Don't forget that old Republicans weren't the same as today. I know you know this, but for those who might not have it at the forefront.)
The source is Gerald Baldasty, _The Commercializaton of News in the Nineteenth Century_.
Newspapers shifted from partisanship, from treating their readers as citizens and workers, to conceiving of them as consumer, as they moved from the realm of politics to the realm of commerce and business. In this process, newspapers saw themselves as becoming more objective, detaching themselves from their political roots. It is here, in the late 1800s where we see the rise of the notion of journalistic objectivity.
In order to garner the biggest audiences, papers moved from controversy to bland stories they thought likely to attract (and not offend) the widest possible audience. They were also, of course, concerned with attracting (and not offending) advertisers. Their content focused on sports, fashion, recipes, entertainment. Just as today, these were placed near advertisements to bolster the product in the ad.
(As a related aside: Ruth Schwartz Cowen in _More Work for Mother_ has a nice, albeit brief, piece about how refined flour mills used recipes and related articles planted in newspapers to create a demand for their product. Masked as part of the push for "republican motherhood" (not party republican) in 1830ish-40ish newspapers, these plants ostensibly encouraged good "republican mothers" who cared for their men and children by baking marvelous baked goods that calmed their temperments excited by activities in the rancourous spheres of the forum and the market. Women, who not a century prior, were often depicted as child=like and immoral, the source of poor judgement, were now seen as the cultivators of republican vitue in the home.
For Cowan, the major story is that those recipes created more work since creating fancy white bread and cakes was a more difficult process than the kinds of quick breads and cakes made from less refined grains that were a staple of the Americans diet before revolutions in milling technologies.)
The big push for press objectivity came, as with many pushes for professionalization and scientization in the US, during the Progressive Era. As newspapers competed for circulation, some were learning that bland didn't seel as much as scandal, muck-raking, exposes, gossip, etc. Like physicians trying to distinguish themselves from midwives and quacks, newspapers sought the status of objective "observer" "independent" from the political fray as well as from the less competent fray.
When I wrote a piece on the first modern mass media hoaxes, by the way, one of the most interesting was the purposeful Great Moon Hoax of 1835:
"Benjamin Day, of The Sun newspaper in New York City, printed a series about the purported discovery of life on the moon. The Sun claimed the series was based on the writings of John Herschel. Herschel had been testing a news telescope. However, he never claimed he'd discovered human-like life on the moon. Nor did he publish his finding in the Edinburgh Journal of Science, as The Sun claimed. Indeed, the journal didn't even exist.
Still, the series was a hit! The Sun boasted a circulation of 15,000. The day the paper ran a description of the furry humanoids with bat-like wings, circulation jumped to 19,360. Rival papers soon followed with the same story, claiming that they had also obtained the original scientific papers upon which The Sun supposedly based its story.
It was eventually revealed the story was fabricated. Even so, The Sun and the other newspapers never suffered any negative repercussions for their lies. In fact, when people learned the truth, the were amused. Subsequently, newspapers perpetrated 1000s of similar hoaxes in the early to late 1800s and well-known authors such as Edgar Allen Poe and Samuel Clemens were connected with them."