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| James Calender |
Mr. Pesci,
I am interested in exploring with you an answer to the
question: How have changes in news reporting affected political campaigning?
You say that in forty years of reporting on campaigns you
have never endorsed a candidate. I can’t imagine why. Everybody these days
seems to do it, and not always in editorial pages. The editorial page in some
printed papers, you tell us, has been shown the door. While we were recovering
from this shock, you tell us that printed copy may be out the door, along with
newspaper stands and, of course, paperboys and papergirls.
Thank you in advance,
A Reader
Mr. Reader,
None of this is shocking. The price of a daily newspaper
here in Connecticut is running about $4.00. Add 50 cents to the price for
weekend papers. The print media is putting itself out of business. Paywalls are
everywhere, and the political internet is no longer free. Very few papers print
on site these days. No doubt, part of the increased cost of a daily paper is
due to inflation, and there are hints in many Connecticut left-of-center
newspapers that inflation has become a national and state Republican Party
hobgoblin. There’s really nothing to it at all, we are told by Democrats. It
will disappear in time, like the snows of April. In time, everything disappears
– including Republics.
The printed message, we are told, has yielded to
technological improvements. Granddad might still buy a printed paper, but his
son and his son’s son get their news from the internet on iPhones. Just as the
horse and buggy has been replaced by the car, so now the hardcopy printed paper
is to be replaced by a non-printed internet facsimile. One expensive delivery
system is being replaced with a less expensive and, so it is thought, more cost
efficient model. Then too, 24/7 journalism has increased the velocity of
news. Print is slower and – less newsy than the internet. If previously we had
been given the news daily, now we are given it hourly. Such is progress. Change
is creative destruction – nothing to worry about here.
These changes have affected political campaigning.
One of the reasons U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal regularly
pops up on every street corner in Connecticut during the campaign season is
that he wants to get in front of 24/7 journalism. The more often
Blumenthal appears – as he once joked “at garage door openings” – the greater
the chance he will be able to make a more than fleeting impression on the wandering
minds of his constituents and the party tribe to which he has belonged for his
entire political life, while at the same time occupying media space that, like
the expanding universe, is constantly pushed outward.
The media generously appreciates attentions of this sort. If
the media is not covering Blumenthal’s garage door openings, it might find
itself doing some hard thinking about, say, Kantian
ethics, or our porous southern border, or profligate spending, a
contributing factor in our runaway inflation. And then, where would we all be?
Some people have suggested that, in our whirlwind of extreme
partisanship, the media has also become hyper-partisan. I’d doff my hat
to those people, if I wore a hat. But newspapers were far more partisan in the
past.
It is the pretense of a passionless objectivity that is the
exception to the rule. Newspapers during the Adams-Jefferson race, and long
afterwards, were robustly partisan, partly because front-porch politics was
conducted through intermediaries, some of them pamphleteers such as James
Callender, an important political operative during the first real two party
clash in American politics, the 1800 John Adams-Thomas Jefferson presidential
race.
Callender at first sidled up to Jefferson, writing in a
pamphlet titled The Prospect Before Us, “Take your choice, between
Adams, war and beggary, and Jefferson, peace, and competency.” Adams was held
up in Callender’s publication as slightly fey. In other publications, he was
styled a “hermaphrodite.” Callender was equally critical of Jefferson later on,
and as intemperate.
During the Adams administration, Callender was convicted
under the Alien and Sedition Acts and sentenced to nine month confinement. He
wrote a second treatise while cooling his heels in jail in which he held his
prosecutors up to ridicule. One chapter was titled, provocatively, More
Sedition.
Jefferson was inwardly thrilled with The Prospect
Before Us. “Such papers cannot fail to have the best effect,” he wrote
at the time.
Callender went on to ruin Alexander Hamilton’s political
career, poisoning his marriage by exposing an adulterous affair. Then in 1802,
likely resenting Jefferson for failing to appreciate his efforts, Callender
published in the Richmond Recorder an article that retailed
long-circulating rumors that Jefferson “keeps, and for many years past has
kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is sally (sic).”
In December 1802, a friend of both Jefferson and Callender,
Meriwether Jones, published an open letter to Callender: “The James River you
tell us, has suffered to cleanse your body; is there any menstrum capable
of cleansing your mind... Oh! could a dose of James river, like Lethe, have
blessed you with forgetfulness, for once you would have neglected your
whiskey.”
On July 17, 1803, Callender drowned in three feet of water
in the James River. It was reported he was too drunk to save himself.
There is no suspicion that Callender had been murdered by
aggrieved readers, but forensic science had not entered the stage until
centuries had rolled over Callender’s whiskey soddened body. Callender is
celebrated today in some corners as an early apostle of our free press.
I like to think Joseph Pulitzer’s dictum, “A good newspaper
should have no friends,” applies with special force to the irascible, tipsy
Callender.
Thanking you in advance,
Don Pesci
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