Page 115 - Historical Dictionary of Political Communication in the United States

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demonized
as a simple contest of wills between President George Bush THE PARTISAN PRESS
and the
strongman Noriega. Underlying issues were ignored, such as Noriega's increas-
ing resistance to control by U.S. intelligence services and Bush's insistence on
renegotiating the 1977 treaty agreed to by then-president Jimmy Carter, which
ceded U.S. control of the Panama Canal in 1999. The absence of reporters also
meant that there was no accurate account of casualties.
SOURCE: Christian Jacqueline Johns and P. Ward Johnson, State Crime, the Media and
the Invasion of Panama, 1994.
Marc Edge

THE PARTISAN PRESS (also called the Party Press) referred to an era in
American journalism when newspapers were openly partisan organs that es-
poused the views of the political parties that funded them. The era of the com-
mercial and ostensibly nonpartisan Penny Press, usually attributed to the
establishment of Ben Day's New York Sun in 1833, eclipsed the Partisan Press.
Nevertheless, a partisan press remained active until 1860, when the creation of
the Government Printing Office largely did away with the administration's abil-
ity to award lucrative printing contracts to sympathetic partisan publishers. The
early partisan newspapers in particular carried little, if any, of what today we
call "news" and "reporting." Instead, a publisher on the payroll of a candidate
or political party edited party documents for inclusion in the newspaper and
wrote opinion pieces reflective of party positions. The typical Partisan Press
newspaper cost about six cents, more than the average citizen could afford. The
readership consisted of a largely elite, politically active audience. The main
function of the partisan newspapers was to preach to the converted and furnish
them with ammunition for political debates. Many of the founders of the Amer-
ican republic were directly or indirectly involved in the editorial operations of
partisan newspapers. Journalism scholar J. Herbert Altschull wrote that "the
goal of 'objectivity' was one that did not even occur to the founders, for there
did not exist in the press of their era any publisher or editor who did not see
his journal as an instrument for spreading good, or truth, and not merely a
catalog of point of view." In the Miltonian tradition of "marketplace of ideas,"
the founders believed the readers became informed about political issues by
exposing themselves to all political viewpoints, including partisan viewpoints.
The partisan newspapers were not above reporting scurrilous attacks on oppo-
sition figures.

SOURCES: Bernard Roshco, Newsmaking, 1975; W. D. Sloan, ''Scurrility and the Party
Press 1789-1816," American Journalism 5, No. 2, 1988.
Michael B. Salwen

PENNY PRESS was the nickname for the newspaper revolution in American
history. In the first third of the nineteenth century, newspapers were aimed at
mercantile and political interests and reached small audiences. The penny press,