NRJ Book Reviews: Scandal & Civility: Journalism and the Birth of American Democracy

Abstract

Marcus Daniel, Scandal & Civility: Journalism and Birth of American Democracy, (Oxford University Press, 2009) 386 pages, $28 (hardcover)There have been several key turning points in American journalism history but probably none as drastically reinterpreted as press of 1790s. The so-called partisan-press age was once described by that most influential of journalism historians, Frank Luther Mott, as a veritable dark age-a viewpoint, usually more implicit than overt, that long exemplified attitudes toward era and until recently dominated scholarship about it.Then during 1960s and 1970s undermined reverence toward objectivity, while researchers from Michael Schudson to Richard Kaplan have exposed its intellectual origins and development. The popular culture has been affected, too. In aftermath of McCarthyism or selling of Iraq War, people don't speak of impartiality or neutrality with same naivete they once did.Still, depiction of fin-de-siecle 18th-century journalism as nadir of press practice lives on. As author Eric Burns has written in Infamous Scribblers (2006):It was best of times, it was worst of journalism-and it is no small irony that former condition led directly to latter, that golden age of American's founding was also gutter age of American reporting, that most notorious of presses in our nation's history churned out its copy on foothills of Olympus.It is this facile characterization that historian Marcus Daniel challenges in Scandal & Civility. Rather than treat era's most infamous writers, men such as Benjamin Bache or William Cobbett, for example, as performers in a side show to main event-the establishment of fledgling Republic- Daniel argues that they were critical to political development of new nation. However embarrassing and outrageous their words sometimes seemed, they also mattered a lot. Their ideas and influence were consequential. As a group, these men were the other Founding Fathers (3), a phrase that serves as title of Daniel's introduction.Daniel says that the politics of character particularly infused journalism of that age but was hardly confined to world of printing: Far from being an age of classical virtue and republican self-restraint, political life in post revolutionary United States was tempestuous, fiercely partisan, and highly personal (5). Scandal and incivility were then, and perhaps still are, currency of political combat in this country.The heart of book is seven chapters about each of best-known partisan journalists of time: John Fenno, Philip Freneau, Benjamin Bache, Noah Webster, William Cobbett and William Duane. Each vignette provides not only a biographical summary but a lively intellectual analysis as well-a rich exploration of individual's political and ideological views.The latter are usually missing in historical accounts. Instead writers lunge lustfully for more lurid anecdotes (squabbles, duels, and money matters) and for more colorful quotes, most infamous being Bache's take on father of his country: If ever a nation has suffered from improper influence of a man, American nation has suffered from influence of Washington. …