Here at the turn of the twenty-first century, it is common to observe that journalists have become more famous and powerful than the politicians they cover. It is much less well known that journalists once were politicians, some of them among the most prominent candidates, officeholders, and party operatives in the nation.

So begins The Tyranny of Printers: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (2003, University of Virginia Press), University of Missouri history professor Jeffrey Pasley's eye-opening examination of the critical role printers, editors, and their newspapers played in the political life of early America.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, Pasley writes, newspaper printers and their more collegial counterparts, editors, were as well represented in politics as lawyers are today. Their presses not only shaped every successful campaign, but also help create the major political parties. Printers and editors actively campaigned, for themselves and others, and every serious politician, from Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, fervently courted the press as the preeminent vehicle of partisan power.

"I think it is completely fair to say that multi-party democratic politics could not have developed or sunk roots without the partisan press," Pasley told SJR.

As political weapons, newspapers "came into their own during the controversies preceding the American revolution," Pasley writes. "The first governments under the Constitution expressed the revolutionary elite's close relationship with the press by conferring unequaled privileges on the American publishing industry," privileges that included unparalleled freedom, subsidized postage, and tax-exempt status.

Freedom of the press -- taken for granted today as an "inalienable" right, earlier served the pragmatic purpose of political patronage, and politicians supported it, not entirely through wisdom or idealism, but also out of necessity.

From the 1790's on, "no politician dreamed of mounting a campaign, launching a new movement, or winning over a new geographic area without a newspaper," Pasley explains.

For several decades, in fact, newspapers reproduced "four times faster than human beings," fed by the needs of the political fray.  In the middle of the 19th century, newspaper editors became the first civil rights advocates, actively campaigning to end slavery and building the foundations of the abolitionist movement.

Many of the leading abolitionists -- including Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison -- were "essentially newspaper editors by profession," Pasley writes. "It is hard to see the radical abolitionist movement becoming the lightning rod it did without its newspapers."

Radical Reconsideration

Understanding the partisan press of two centuries ago requires a "fairly radical shift in the typical late twentieth-century perspective on the subject of the press and politics," Pasley claims. That perspective, says Pasley, holds that journalists should "take no role as active political partisans except on editorial pages and talk shows."

In mid-nineteenth century America, when "prevailing political mores forbade candidates -- especially presidential candidates -- from campaigning for themselves," the newspaper press took the role of surrogate candidate so frequently it became "the political system's central institution, not simply a forum or atmosphere in which politics took place."

This circumstance provides an historical background for today's "spin doctor," a James Carville or Dick Morris who speaks for a president but ultimately finds his home in the press. Such "partisan indirection" as Pasley terms it -- "a respectable gentleman recruiting a mouthpiece from the ranks of the less respectable" -- would reappear as a "perennial theme in subsequent American political history."

Active gathering of news, contemporary American journalism's primary endeavor, "emerged very slowly and very late" in the early history of the American press, Pasley notes. This modern-day mission has long overshadowed the partisan press of old, consigning it to history's footnotes as "perhaps the one major institution in American society that goes virtually unmentioned" in history textbooks and historical scholarship -- with a few minor exceptions.

From Sycophantic to Sibilant

Abrupt and intriguing departures from tradition mark contemporary media's approach to today's politics -- a "take no prisoners" style that contrasts markedly with often obsequious coverage that gushed over a candidate -- and his oratory, for instance.

Pasley provides this example from the Baltimore Whig's daily accounts of U.S. Attorney General William Pinkney's election-eve speaking tour of 1813:

"At Middletown, Mr. Pinkney...transcended himself." Though he spoke for three hours, "the audience stood as if they were riveted to the ground," witness as they were to "such a display of powers as are unparalleled in the annals of oratory."

Any modern-day politician would be ecstatic with a fraction of the praise, but today's journalists don't rely on political purse strings as much as they did two hundred years ago, when printers became politicians often for lack of adequate pay.

Partisan to Popular

The partisan press eventually faded, as audiences changed and situations demanded.

"Big newspapers placed more and more emphasis on actively gathering news, and big national events such as the Civil War created a bigger demand for extensive factual information," Pasley told StLJR. "Some newspapers also became big businesses that no longer required the political money that had once been so important."

American culture, too, changed.

"Just about every aspect of American culture was being professionalized, including journalism," Pasley explained. "The operative theory of those early 'professionalizers' was that the world was best run and described by experts who applied scientific principles rather than ideology. Objectivity became everyone's ideal."

The Bias Bias

Most journalism and political historians "are aware that the press was partisan back in the old days, but very few people actually study it or factor it into their interpretations," Pasley explained. "The average citizen has no idea of any of this history. Every general discussion of the press starts with how biased it is, when by any reasonable measure the media is actually less partisan than it ever has been in history."

The idea of media bias "seems to be rooted in the desire to dismiss a lot of disturbing information," Pasley told StLJR.

"Americans are also very committed to 'naive empiricism,' which is the idea that the events of the world can be reduced to a set of simple facts that should merely be transmitted to the public without shaping, interpretation or comment."

American media consumers, Pasley explained, exhort the press to report "just the facts, which assumes that it is possible to identify 'just the facts,' something I very much doubt where politics and public policy are concerned."

Partisanship Returns

"Organized partisan journalism is on the rise again, having been used very successfully by the right in the last decade or so," Pasley explained. "Talk radio, the Washington Times, the cable 'shout show' format, the Fox News Channel, and armies of new conservative pundits," join Internet news services such as World Net Daily and CNS News as "media outlets or new genres that conservatives more or less openly dominate," Pasley said.

One interesting throwback to old times: blogs, "which often feature the closest thing I have seen to daily tit-for-tat squibs and harangues and long, involved rhetorical disputes between individual writers that were common in the old partisan press," Pasley told StLJR.

Historians looking back on 21st century America may draw some of the conclusions Pasley drew in his own retrospective -- that a partisan press can confer political power.

"I think the new conservative media have been a big factor in making the Republicans such an effective political force, and in shifting public debate on many issues in conservative-friendly directions," Pasley said. "I very much wish the left could develop something analogous, but somehow I don't think there is a liberal Rupert Murdoch waiting in the wings."

Does history have any lessons for today's journalists? Less balance may be better, Pasley answers.

"A style of political reporting that empowered journalists to ignore partisan lies rather balancing diametrically opposed viewpoints would be good," Pasley told StLJR. "We could also use more op-ed columnists and editorial pages that just openly announced themselves as unofficial agents of whatever parties and causes they happen to support."