Go Biased, Young Man?

(CBS/AP)

Early American newspaper publishers scoffed at the idea that they should hide their political prejudices under a cloak of objectivity. "To profess impartiality here," wrote William Cobbett in his Federalist newspaper, Porcupine's Gazette, "would be as absurd as to profess it in a war between virtue and vice, good and evil, happiness and misery." The motto of the Gazette of the United States, which began publication in 1789, was "He that is not for us is against us."

And a New Jersey printer wrote in 1798, "The times demand decision; there is a right and a wrong, and the printer, who under the specious name of impartiality jumbles both truth and falsehood into the same paper, is either doubtful of his own judgment or is governed by ulterior motives."

If ulterior motives played a part, however, it was to encourage early newspaper publishers to become deeply entrenched in politics. Circulation and advertising revenue couldn't support a newspaper, but government jobs or printing contracts could. When the political candidates they supported were elected, loyal editors expected pork or patronage, and their journals became "virtual branches of the government," wrote Eric Burns, author of "Infamous Scribblers."

The news pages -- there was no such thing as an editorial -- were unapologetically partisan, disdaining what Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune called "gagged, mincing neutrality."

Indeed, editors who tried to remain relatively detached were mocked by their competitors. One newspaper, the National Intelligencer, whose editor, Samuel Smith, was deemed to be insufficiently combative, was dismissed as "Mr. Silky Milky Smith's National Smoothing Plane."