The Media and the Road to Modernity | 63A characteristic of media content was that exaggerated descriptions of indi-
vidual conflicts were published in order to stir up sentiment. The ‘Boston Mas-
sacre’ of 1770 gives proof of this by its very name. Many newspapers printed
melodramatic reports that the British had opened fire on a group of innocent
civilians, killing five people. In the same vein, journalists stirred up sentiment
by means of symbols. One key symbol of the struggle was a snake set above the
slogan ‘Join or Die’, that first appeared in Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania
Gazette in 1754 and was regularly published in numerous newspapers after
1765 (Frasca 2006: 148f.). The individual segments of the snake symbolised
the nine colonies thus called to unite against the French and British lust for
power.
In like manner editorial offices formed the nucleus for protests in various
revolutionary actions. Thus the famous ‘Boston Tea Party’, in which Boston
burghers disguised as Indians boarded English ships and threw tea overboard
to protest against taxes and customs duties, was essentially planned in the edi-
torial rooms of the Boston Gazette (Burns 2006: 159–62). Many of America’s
Founding Fathers had previously been active as journalists or publicists: Ben-
jamin Franklin, for example, was one of the most important newspapermen
in the Colonies, and Samuel Adams and Alexander Hamilton also launched
newspapers (Frasca 2006). Their work made them famous and facilitated their
populist agitation during the war.
Even debates about the Articles of the Constitution were largely carried
out in the newspapers. Most notably, the eighty-five newspaper articles that
appeared in various New York publications in 1787–88, and are now known
as ‘The Federalist Papers’, were written by the Founding Fathers of the United
States. Moreover, newspapers were instrumental in the formation of political
parties. Beginning in the 1770s, newspapers aligned themselves more closely
with the parties then in process of formation, so that by 1808 three-quar-
ters of all newspapers were affiliated with one party or another (Copeland, in
Barker and Burrows 2002: 149). Papers often enjoyed the patronage of ‘their’
parties in the form of emoluments, appointments or printing privileges, or
had actually been founded by the party in question (Burns 2006: 241, 262–
92). However, this period was not just a ‘dark age of partisan journalism’ but
rather the manifestation of a productive culture of debate that contributed to
the shaping of a nation. It was precisely because of the central role played by
the press that freedom of expression in North America was explicitly granted
at a very early date. The Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776 was the first to
provide for freedom of the press, basing its arguments on principles of natural
and human rights. The Constitution of 1791 went even further by forbidding
any law that might restrict it.
Freedom of the press and the debates that took place in the newspapers
about the new political system unquestionably boosted circulation, which by