Page 9 - Historical Dictionary of Political Communication in the United States

INTRODUCTION
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We hold these Truths to be self evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these rights are
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
But the next sentence shaped the political destiny of the United States.
That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just
Powers from the Consent of the Governed.
Strong words. A government rules by the consent of the people. There is no
divine right of kings, emperors, or presidents. The people will decide, and that
means they must be informed, that there must be political communication.
Eleven years later, as the Constitution was being written, Jefferson wrote:
The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full
information of their affairs thro' the channels of the public papers & to contrive that
those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people. The basis of our government
being the opinions of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and
were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers
or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter—
but I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading
them. 1
What Jefferson proposed, the First Amendment attempted to ensure. It read:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the
free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press; or the right of
people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Yet, only seven years later, freedom of the press was threatened with the
passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. They were used to suppress
criticism of government, and they became the central issue of the presidential
election of 1800. Jefferson's victory in that election meant that the Alien and
Sedition Acts would not be renewed. The way was opened for political com-
munication.
It was, however, a kind of political communication far different from what
we know today. Newspapers represented political factions and promoted those
factions. Truth was a lesser concern. It was an elitist press, but it served an
elitist electorate. In 1824, the first presidential election for which there are rec-
ords of the votes cast for each candidate, only 400,000 of the 10 million people
(4 percent) in the United States voted. Three times that many voted in the next
election, and participation in the political process has continued to expand.
The 1830s brought a press for the masses—the penny press of Ben Day and
James Gordon Bennett. It was a sensational press that was less political. In
response, Henry Raymond started the New York Times in 1851 with a goal of
providing objective coverage. There would be two more bursts of sensational-
ism—the yellow journalism of the 1890s and the tabloids of the 1920s. Yet
while the emphasis on politics was less, the newspaper remained the major