Development of the Newspaper in America
The modern newspaper is a European invention. The oldest direct ancestor of the
modern newspaper appears to have been the handwritten news sheets that circulated
widely in the sixteenth century in Venice, which was a center for trade and, therefore, for
information. With very few exceptions, the early newspapers never reported any news about
the country in which they were printed. Print shops were tightly regulated; Europe’s rulers
allowed them to print newspapers as long as these papers did not discuss any local or
national issues or events.
Britain’s American colonies entered the world of the newspaper relatively late. It was
not until 1690 that the first American newssheet—Boston’s Publick Occurrences published
by Benjamin Harris—made its debut. The Massachusetts authorities, in high resentment
towards that Harris dared to report that English military forces had allied themselves with
“miserable” savages, put him out of business four days later, so the first issue of America’s
first newspaper was also the last. The Boston News-Letter, America’s second printed
newspaper, published fourteen years later, was a much tamer affair than Harris’s paper. In
the following years, newspapers appeared successively in almost every colony. By ?7??,
all but two of the colonies, Delaware and New Jersey, had weekly newspapers. These early
papers were careful not to offend colonial authorities, and were filled primarily with short
news items, documents and essays mostly taken from other newspapers, particularly British
and European papers.
The major limitation on press freedom was the stamp tax passed by the British
Parliament in ?7??, which had the effect of raising the price of newspapers to the point where
the poorer classes could not afford to buy them. As Americans were not represented in this
Parliament, American newspapers rebelled against the new tax. Similar protests reverberated
through these colonial newspapers when the British Parliament approved the Townshend
Acts in ?7?7, which imposed taxes on American imports of glass, lead, paint, tea, and, significantly, paper. Though not all the colonial newspapers were on the anti-British side,
most of them, in the years leading up to the American Revolution, represented something the
world had never before seen: a bold press committed to challenging, even overthrowing,
governmental authorities. These newspapers were, in a sense, loyal to the new authorities
who had appeared on the continent: the Sons of Liberty. During the Revolution, these
newspapers were also an effective force working towards the unification of sentiment, the
awakening of a consciousness with common purpose, interest, and destiny among the
separate colonies, and of a determination to see the war through to a success. They were
more single-minded than the people themselves, and bore no small share of the undertaking
of arousing and supporting the often discouraged and indifferent public spirit.
In the unsettled years after the Revolution, American newspapers remained filled
with arguments and anger—now directed not against the British but against their political
opponents. Each of the two parties that formed, the Federalists and the Republicans, had
their newspapers and these papers had little sympathy for representatives of the other side.
Federalist Party leaders, increasingly uncomfortable with the criticism they were taking from
Republican editors, signed the Sedition Act in ?798 to protect the government from the libels
of editors. The result was a dozen convictions and a storm of outraged public opinions that
threw the party from power, and led the Republicans to take control of the government in the
?800.
After ?800, the presses began to have their views expressed in a much freer manner
than ever before and newspapers became a form of public property, freely available in
reading rooms, barbershops, taverns, hotels, and coffeehouses. 〇1 The editor, usually
reflecting the sentiment of a group or a faction, began to emerge as a distinct power,
closely following the drift of events and expressing vigorous opinions. The years of violence
also witnessed a development in both the quality and the power of newspapers, with the
press in the United States eventually demonstrating a compatibility with the maintenance
of orderly government. Also, news reporting was extended to new fields of local affairs, and
the intense rivalry from numerous competitors initiate the rush for the earliest reports, which
was to become the dominant trait in American journalism.
——2011 年 03 月 19 日北美考试机经
What can be inferred from Paragraph 5 about the news reporting before 1800?
A. They were not a public property.
B. They usually reflect the sentiment of a group.
C. They mainly focused on national affairs.
D. They didn’t have too much competition.
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