For the 141st episode of the Journalism History podcast, Author Jordan Taylor examines a “post-truth” era that long predated misleading social media posts and unscrupulous twenty-first-century politicians, stretching back to when colonial newspapers printed false accounts of battles and beheadings.
Jordan E. Taylor is a historian of media and politics during the American Revolution interested in how people navigated the media environment of the eighteenth century. He holds a Ph.D. in U.S. History from Indiana University.
Transcript
Jordan Taylor: We have these tools available to us that people in the late 18th century, and newspaper printers especially, would’ve killed for. The ability to verify news, the ability to follow the research of others on topics that are disputed.
Nick Hirshon: Welcome to Journalism History, a podcast that rips out the pages of your history books to re-examine the stories you thought you knew and the ones you were never told.
Teri Finneman: I’m Teri Finneman, and I research media coverage of women in politics.
Ken Ward: And I’m Ken Ward, and I research the journalism history of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains.
Nick Hirshon: And I’m Nick Hirshon, and I research the history of New York sports. And together, we are professional media historians guiding you through our own drafts of history.
This episode is sponsored by Lehigh University’s Department of Journalism and Communication, inspiring the future-makers. Transcripts of the show are available [00:01:00] online at journalism-history.org/podcast.
Pundits have characterized the last several years as the dawn of a post-truth era in the United States. In 2016, the New York Times lamented that objective facts—the basis of news reporting, built on statistics and expert testimony—no longer led to public consensus on issues. Discourse on the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s statements during his first presidential campaign were layered with untruths. This seemed to be a new problem, born out of 21st century media—unscrupulous social media accounts, made-for-TV politicians. The overabundance of information had overwhelmed our ability to sort out what was credible.
But misinformation long predated the digital age. Centuries ago, Americans relied [00:02:00] on fragile chains of communication to learn about the revolutions of the late 18th century—scribbled letters, whispered rumors, newspapers that relied on a combination of both. The growth of the periodical press produced conflicting accounts of battles and beheadings. Readers sought out and shared news that reinforced their narratives about the world. John Adams deemed this, quote, “Anything but the Age of Reason.”
On this episode of the Journalism History podcast, we review the false premises and misperceptions of revolutionary America with Jordan Taylor, the digital projects editor for the Colonial Williamsburg Innovation Studios, and the author of Misinformation Nation: Foreign News and the Politics of Truth in Revolutionary America.
Jordan, thank you for joining us today to talk about your book. I was going through the pages and thinking there are so [00:03:00] many parallels with today’s news cycle and some of the concerns that a lot of consumers, observers have about the way news is reported and trusted, maybe when it shouldn’t be. You mention in the book the growth of the periodical press accelerated the production and distribution of news, and the revolutions of the late 18th century intensified interest in news from across the world.
This seemed to me to be a bit of a parallel between the proliferation of social media, the number of streaming networks, the podcasts, everything that we have out there that’s inundating us. And I imagine a few centuries ago, that’s what people were worried about. “The world is going to pot. There’s too many newspapers out there now of information that’s—and who knows where they’re getting it all from?” So what do you see as some of the parallels, even though we’re a few centuries apart, from how we’re getting our news these days?
Jordan Taylor: Yeah, absolutely. You know, thanks for, thanks for having me and for asking me about that. That’s something [00:04:00] I love to talk (laughs) about.
I think, you know, like folks were in the late 18th century, we are living through revolutionary times in a lot of ways. And one of the things that can cause a revolution, one of the things that can spark political change, in my opinion, is the spread of information that’s not necessarily grounded in reality.
The American Revolution, we tend to think of as being this extraordinarily rational event, right? Which is debated through reference to Enlightenment thinkers and things like that. But what I’m trying to show in my book in a lot of cases is that these events that we’re so familiar with are rooted in these irrational processes of information distribution. And just the ways that that news flows around the world in an unverified way that’s [00:05:00] really tied in a lot of ways to something that we’re seeing today, right? Which is what you referred to: this overload of information that happens as a result of the development of new media forms.
In the late 18th century, we have to remember the periodical press as a political tool and as something that’s just barely starting to approach a mass medium. That’s new. That’s fresh. Um, the newspaper itself has obviously been around for longer by the late 18th century, but the way that it functions as a tool for amplifying this diverse, unverified, and often contradictory stream of information, that’s new.
And that’s a challenge I think that we’re facing today in the early 21st century (laughs) as we have new digital media that’s challenging our ability to make some coherence out of what a lot of folks have referred to as a [00:06:00] firehose of information. So, I think we do face a lot of the same challenges as folks did in the late 18th century with the rise of periodical press.
Um, how we respond to that, how we how we can address that is, is a more (laughs) challenging question perhaps but one that I think, you know, in my opinion, ought to be rooted in an understanding of some of the parallels between American democracy that we’re experiencing today and the moment in the late 18th century when American democracy was first developed.
Nick Hirshon: I’m also wondering what you learned in your research about public interest in news, because we hear so much today about the public just is disengaged. People don’t vote as much. They don’t follow what’s happening. Um, and you’re talking in your book about a time when there were [00:07:00] major milestone events happening across the world, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and it’s not like we haven’t had major events happening in the last several years in the world, too. I mean COVID pandemic, the election of Donald Trump, the [Jan. 6] insurrection. I mean, there’s lots of events that are happening all the time.
And yet we kind of hear that maybe the public is just self-centered and really cares more about what affects their day-to-day life and sometimes doesn’t see that connection the way it seems like the audiences of centuries ago really cared about these uprisings and these movements that might be happening across the sea. So, what do you think about the difference there in public interest in all the news that’s happening?
Jordan Taylor: Yeah, I mean, so my book is all about news that’s coming into North America, especially across the Atlantic or from the Caribbeans, news from far away. And you know if you talk to a journalist today, there’s a good chance that they’ll tell you that it’s pretty difficult to get Americans (laughs)to care [00:08:00] about things that aren’t happening in the United States.
Foreign news today just doesn’t grab the interest of mass audiences in the way that national politics or culture or pop culture or something like that, that is rooted in a national identity does. That wasn’t the case (laughs) in the late 18th century. That’s one of the main arguments in my book, that in fact, foreign news was vibrant and essential and important to people in a way that, you know, isn’t necessarily familiar to us today.
Um, you know, and one reason for that is that compared to today, a lot of folks who were living in the 18th century thought of, you know, the American colonies or the United States, depending on what period you’re looking at. They thought of it as essentially, I mean, it’s harsh to say it this way, but sort of a dull backwater in the great stage of world events where you know, Europe, Britain, France, the German states, [00:09:00] Spain, Portugal, these great empires were setting the agenda for what they understood to be sort of world history.
Whether that’s correct or not, we can argue about, but it was certainly a perception that folks had at that time. And so there was an extraordinarily lively interest in news from abroad in a way that isn’t necessarily the case today. But I don’t want to overstate my case too much, right? There were a lot of folks who argued that after the American Revolution, after independence was secured, that it was maybe a little bit silly (laughs) for Americans to continue to care about things that, you know, pertained to the old British Empire.
There are people who are arguing that if you picked up an American newspaper after the American Revolution, it would look like it did before the American Revolution [00:10:00] because there was still so much investment in news that’s coming from Europe, and it takes an awfully long time for Americans to start to change their view that their news should be should be focused on events in Europe.
That’s not really something that starts to happen, in my view, at least until the early 19th century. And so, those decades between that transformation and the end of the American Revolutionary War are a really fascinating transitional time because Americans are forced to reconcile the fact that most of the news that they care the most about, the news that seems most urgent and vibrant to them, is coming from mediators in foreign countries that they have absolutely no control over. (laughs)
This is something that’s very frustrating, [00:11:00] right? They are highly suspicious of Britain, its politics, its leaders. But British leaders are exercising an extraordinary amount of control over the stories, the news, the information that Americans are experiencing post-1783. The same is true of France, and that’s one reason why news becomes highly politicized in the aftermath of the American Revolution, to the extent that partisans are starting to develop (laughs) their own sort of information bubbles that are dependent in part on what they think of these foreign mediators, you know?
Do they think that the French news sources, for instance, of the French Revolution are more trustworthy, or do they think that the British sources are more trustworthy? Um, and so they start to develop something that, again, might be (laughs) fairly familiar to folks today, which [00:12:00] is, you know, what we sometimes call filter bubbles or information silos.
There’s a way in which in the late 18th century, especially in the 1770s and the 1790s, Americans start to develop these coherent, internally coherent, I should say, (laughs) information systems that legitimize and find ways of lending credit to information that aligns with their prior conceptions of how the world ought to work, of what should be happening in their view based on their understanding of the arc of history.
And so, you know, if that starts to sound familiar, I think that it is a dynamic that plays out still today in obviously different ways, [00:13:00] which are less connected but not entirely (laughs)disconnected from concerns about Russian interference, right? They didn’t have Russian trolls purportedly influencing elections, but they did have French mediators. (laughs) They had French ambassadors, British ambassadors who were disrupting the flow of information.
And there was a lot of concern about that as you can imagine. So, yeah, there are all kinds of ways in which this concern about foreign news and its impact on American perceptions played out on the ground for Americans.
Nick Hirshon: I suppose it’s natural also that the new Americans there are now focusing more on internal politics and what they need to do to start a country and focusing a little bit [00:14:00] less on what might be happening abroad because we got our own problems here. Um, also, there might just be a natural ebb and flow of periods of intense interest in certain types of news. And then eventually it wanes because there’s only so much the attention span will allow.
Or I feel, I certainly spoke to a lot of people who, in the early stages of the pandemic, for example, said, “I was glued to the TV, couldn’t stop watching. And then after a few days, it got depressing. The information wasn’t really that new. So, I decided to go all in on entertainment and I was watching things that might perk me up a little bit as opposed to focusing on the latest reports of, you know, who’s getting sick and dying,” because that just plays on our psyches as well.
Jordan Taylor: Yeah. I mean, I was one of those people, so I (laughs) completely understand that impulse. But you know, one of the things that’s interesting to me is that after the American Revolution there are folks [00:15:00] who say, “All right, we can just, we can stop doing this. We can stop caring about what’s going on elsewhere.” Um, there are some people who propose that their newspapers start to turn into, you know, more domestic matters.
But particularly with the French Revolution, that doesn’t really (laughs) become an option because that’s the greatest news story of its day. And it’s one of those news stories that continually renews itself with battles and legislative debates and people getting beheaded and stuff like that. So there’s no chance of it getting dry.
But even immediately after the Revolutionary War officially ends in 1783, some printers are suggesting that they’ll start to focus on foreign events, or foreign events a bit less, and that doesn’t happen because I think they get some feedback from their readers that, first of all, there’s just not enough happening in the new United States to be of [00:16:00] great interest. Um, and because the sort of nature of communications in this era meant that local politics, which were of great interest, would tend to become known locally before they could become known before they could get into a newspaper.
Um, in other words, you were more likely to hear about the things that you really cared about on a local or regional level, you know, in a tavern, on the street, talking to someone, than you were to read about it in a newspaper. And so the newspapers, they do lose some subscribers after the American Revolutionary War. A lot of them reach their highest extent of subscription during the period leading up to the war. They lose some subscribers partly because of paper shortages (laughs)and cost increases and things like that.
Then the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, [00:17:00] these great events of the 1790s when world history seemed to be verging on, like, some vital outcome, right? Um, that revives interest in newspapers. So, there is, like you said, sort of an ebb and flow of interest in global news that’s reflected in subscription numbers, that’s reflected in just the vibrancy of these newspapers as organs of information distribution.
Nick Hirshon: And it sounds like history repeats itself. We know that cliche. I often like when historians say, “It doesn’t always repeat itself, but it rhymes.” And so, we’ll see things that are parallels. But you mentioned in the book, I found this really fascinating again, looking at parallels to today, this exchange system where printers would share whatever they happen to come across. And you just talked about word of mouth.
You hear a rumor in the street. “Let’s go back and put it into the paper.” You mentioned how a lot of these printers, they did not have reporters per se. They are just [00:18:00] hearing what is the hubbub, you know, whatever is being discussed. And then they are swapping copies of their newspapers for those of other printing offices that might be further away trying to get bits of new information out there.
Uh, and then this interested me because it seems so similar to today, that newspapers were filled with, you write little more than reprints from other newspapers. And scholars have called this passive news gathering and regurgitated journalism. Reading that reminded me so much of criticism today of aggregators like Google, social media sites, they’re not really having, maybe, employing reporters. They’re not finding new information. They’re just, like, repurposing it, rewriting it. We’re hearing that with artificial intelligence now.
So it seems like some of the criticisms or the mistrust, the questions that people had about journalism of the 18th century are not all that [00:19:00] dissimilar from what people might say today about just your regurgitating other people’s work.
Jordan Taylor: Yeah, I mean, that’s interesting. I like that idea. I think the idea of news newspapers in the late 18th century of, as regurgitated journalism, does a little bit of a disservice to them in some cases, but it’s certainly the case that it was, (laughs) it was a criticism that some folks leveled at newspaper printers.
On the other hand, when they exercised too heavy of a hand editorially, which they came in for criticism too, right? They’re criticized if they’re making selections that reflect sort of an editorial policy, what we might today call an algorithm, right? A process of discernment that chooses between reprinting, you know, this account or this account.
Uh, most readers, most newspaper consumers in the late 18th century tended to say, “Well, just, just give me both, right? [00:20:00] Um, give me both accounts, even if they are contradictory and let me decide for myself. Um, you report, I decide.” When a newspaper printer would withhold accounts that he or she didn’t think were correct, or when they sort of chose one kind of set of accounts they would be criticized for that, too.
So, in a lot of ways, it was sort of a situation where they couldn’t really win (laughs) because they would be criticized either way. And I think that’s also probably something that journalists would find familiar today.
Nick Hirshon: Sure. I always like—when we hear so much about the polarization of media and partisan politics filtering into media, I like to remind people that so much of what was the early journalism in American history was [00:21:00] clearly partisan. And it was people, our founding fathers, getting involved and advocating for certain causes, and as we look throughout history, for example the Black press, these journalists playing very important roles in moving forward certain social movements.
Um, and whether or not you agree that that’s what journalists should do, the idea that it is something brand new in our society obviously is not based in historical fact. Uh, that this has been happening for quite a long time.
Jordan Taylor: Yeah, absolutely. And in the late 18th century, there (laughs) was this odd sort of moment where some newspaper printers were quite upfront about their politics, but others were trying to hide it, right? They would attempt to claim that they were uninfluenced by any party or that they were impartial but would still pretty consistently be printing things that supported one political cause [00:22:00] or another.
And so, the political press was starting to come into its own. Um, but for a lot of folks, the idea that a newspaper should be an organ of a faction, as they might have called it, or a political party, would have been very dangerous, right?
Um, the idea that that the authority that’s able to distribute information to potentially thousands of people at a time should be in the hands of a group that’s organized to benefit from particular perceptions of reality (laughs) is one that didn’t really agree with the political sensibilities of folks who had overturned British rule, partly on the basis of the idea that [00:23:00] British authority about knowledge, epistemological authority, was corrupted and inaccurate.
Um for a lot of folks, it seemed like they were going from one corrupt set of mediators to another. When you move from British domination of British colonial, you know, government domination, I should say, of institutions of information distribution to party-dominated presses.
Nick Hirshon: And so your book covers a lot of ground that I think the average American might not realize or could use this refresher on. We’ve talked about a lot of things that I certainly thought stood out. What else do you think would be most surprising to the modern audience to learn about the way journalism was reported or lack of reporting as you described sometimes of how they were getting this information in a kind of a very unsophisticated [00:24:00] way of just what they heard out on the street and then they rushed back to write it. That doesn’t seem very ethical sometimes.
Very little fact-checking was going into that, I imagine. Um, or as you say, maybe even hiding some of their loyalties. They’re not transparent about, “Well, I’m really reporting from this side because I want you to vote this way or think this way about the Tory cause and the fight for patriotism and all that.” Um, so anything else do you think that the audience would find particularly surprising?
Jordan Taylor: I mean, what I would say, I don’t know if this is surprising or not. You’ll have to tell me. (laughs)But I think that what I would want to sort of linger on for a moment is not so much a difference between then and now, but something that I don’t know, I sort of, I think sort of speaks to one of the challenges [00:25:00] we have today. Which is, you know, we have such extraordinary mechanisms of fact-checking.
And we have so many extraordinary institutions of knowledge production. We have journalists, thank God. We didn’t have any of those things in the late 18th century. We have, you know, academic researchers, we have pollsters, we have scientists. We have literally millions of people who work in professions that are designed by the folks who set standards for their professions to penalize misrepresentation and to advocate to be truthful, right?
There are professional ethics that restrain our ability to fabricate things in those institutions. [00:26:00] None of those things existed in the late 18th century. So as much as it’s easy to sort of draw apart this, this history of news in revolutionary America, think about the similarities between the past and the present, I think one of the things that we can do better today is appreciate how different things are in this disregard, do a better job of appreciating that we have these tools available to us that people in the late 18th century, a newspaper printer especially, (laughs) would have killed for, you know? The ability to verify news, the ability to follow the research of others on topics that are disputed.
So my thinking, my belief is that the best way to appreciate that is to support it, right? Um, and to provide resources [00:27:00] to those institutions of knowledge production and dissemination that make us so distinctive from Americans in the revolutionary era.
Nick Hirshon: And I think your answer got into this final question that we ask everybody on the podcast, which is, why does journalism history matter? And as you say, we see some similarities. I think we can maybe be a little too quick to say everything is exactly like it was back then. And we know that that’s not true either, but you put together Misinformation Nation during a period when a lot of folks are questioning their news sources, are concerned about the future of journalism.
Uh, it seems like every generation does have a bit of that worrying feeling that everything is going to pot and it’ll never be like it once was in some fictional glory days of yore. Uh, but why do you think journalism history matters?
Jordan Taylor: [00:28:00] Yeah, I mean, I think that we have to demystify some of the narratives that we encounter popularly about sort of where truth comes from, where it ought to come from. You mentioned sort of this idea of a golden age of truth. I sort of tend to think of it as, like, the Walter Cronkite fallacy, right? That if you start from this, you know, sort of mid-20th century vantage point of thinking about a time when American journalism was, you know, maybe a little bit less partisan (laughs)than it was now.
And you think about the subsequent history, it looks like a declension story. It looks like a story of a functional arrangement of media and truth giving way to [00:29:00] a more fragmented and ultimately false set of media institutions. But I think that when we use journalism history to set that story in a larger framework, we can see that there’s the moment when we might think of American history as existing in a glory age or a high point of truth is really quite aberrant and was the result of very unusual and specific, like, concatenation of circumstances.
In fact, American democracy began in a condition surrounded by mistrust of the media and quite a lot of misrepresentation and falsehood. Um, and so once we recognize that that’s been a problem since the beginning of American democracy, [00:30:00] you know, we can take the pessimistic view that we haven’t solved that in more than 300 years of trying. So maybe it’s, you know, not worth trying to solve that. Or we can build from those insights and, and think about how we’ve muddled through these challenges in the past, how we’ve addressed them, what mistakes we’ve made and maybe how we can use that knowledge to survive the renewed misinformation crisis of today.
Nick Hirshon: Another [00:30:30] great perspective on the news industry, how it’s remained similar in some ways, but has changed so significantly. We’ve been speaking with Jordan E. Taylor, the author of Misinformation Nation: Foreign News and the Politics of Truth in Revolutionary America. This book came out in 2022 from Johns Hopkins University Press, available wherever fine books are sold. Uh, thanks again, Jordan, for coming on to talk to us on the Journalism History podcast.
Jordan Taylor: Thank you, Nick.
Nick Hirshon: Thanks for tuning in, and [00:31:00] additional thanks to our sponsor, Lehigh University. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast. Until next time, I’m your host, Nick Hirshon, signing off with the words of Edward R. Murrow: “Good night, and good luck.”
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