Reviews for The press gang

The average rating for The press gang based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-05-28 00:00:00 Gary Armstrong In this book Mark Wahlgren Summers shows why he is America's pre-eminent historian of Gilded Age politics. For one, he does on just regurgitate the famous political battles of the era, say, on Andrew Johnson's impeachment, or the end of Ulysesses S. Grant's Whiskey Ring, but, instead, looks at politics in the era as a whole social world that needs to be infiltrated and understood. In this case, he looks at the "Press Gang," or the political press as it existed during Ulysses S. Grant administration. It was an entirely different world. Of course the press in that day was largely partisan, but the rise of "independents" during the Grant era, like John Gordon Bennett's New York Herald, Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, Murat Halstead's Cincinnati Commercial, and Horace White's Chicago Tribune, meant many pressmen began to search even their own party for scandal. Yet, except for the rare exception like Henry Van Ness Boynton of the Cincinnati Gazette, that did not mean sending investigative journalist out to search documents, but merely printing every rumor or second-hand report as gospel. The press still relied on many special government posts, from flagrantly overpriced advertisements (a dollar a line for NYC instead of the usual 40 cents) and government printing contracts (often, for instance, paying to print all of a state's legislative debates, which many papers did anyway without payment), government postmasterships, or, surprisingly frequently, clerkships in the House and the Senate or in local statehouses. Yet all this patronage did not always buy love, but instead often became a source for more leaks and accusations, occasionally traded by journalists with other, less politically aligned, presses. The Washington beat became especially important in this era. For one, the rules of the Associated Press required that all its members share news gathered, with the only two exceptions being Washington and Albany. So more and more papers sent special "correspondents" to Washington, with the understanding that they would not just report the news but establish a paper's "voice." The fall of telegraph rates by over 90% in the 20 years after the Civil War allowed them to keep the news coming home, but most correspondents, as opposed to reporters, wrote out their articles long-hand and sent them by mail, obviating the need to pay by the telegraphic word, in an era when telegraph expenses could be the greatest single line-item for many papers. The increase from 1 to 9 special trains a day moving between DC and NYC made sending distinctive correspondent mail even easier. "Interviews" only began shortly before the war, but took off afterwards, with President Andrew Johnson giving the first, disastrous, presidential one, in 1866. This was an era of flourishing local papers. New York had over 150 (albeit, most weeklies), even a city like Cincinnati featured 8 dailies and 40 (!) weekly newspapers. But most of these printed half a dozen columns of news at most, almost all of it national. For instance, the Arkansas Little Rock Gazette, on some days at 13 lines of state and local events, and often 0 lines about international. The rest was national. Many of these local 4-pagers relied on the burgeoning AP syndicated press reports, although these were often colored by the local agents which gathered the news, often only relaying Democratic news from teh South, for instance. In DC AP's Lawrence Gobright supposedly kept the syndicated news so unbiased and boring so people would have to buy AP's special reports at extra cost. In the end, when the "Quadrilateral" of four independent presses gathered in Cincinnati in 1872 to nominate one of their own, Editor Horace Greeley of the Tribune, for the "liberal Republican" new ticket, they showed the limits of their power. People were less likely to follow the independent papers then follow those that agreed with them, and the reform papers that tried to boost Greeley ended up losing subscribers, as well as the election. Eventually, after 1878 (when the House established the first self-directed rules for the press-gallery) the press became partisan again but also less sensationalistic and scandal-mongering. It established a new world that was only broken apart by the likes of the true independents of Hearts and Pulitzer at the turn of the century

Review # 2 was written on 2014-07-07 00:00:00 Kentrell Smith An excellent scholarly review of 19th century depictions of Native Americans in the American press. I came across this book when I wondered aloud to a friend whether the papers represented the Indians as an existential threat- one that was inherently savage, irrational, and absorbed by a monomaniacal obsession with exterminating civilized white people. This was certainly the case with Sitting Bull, though the overall picture is more complex.