So to Speak Podcast Transcript: News and misinformation in early America

Note: This is an unedited rush transcript. Please check any quotations against the audio recording.

Jordan Taylor: The number of laws that exist in the 17th century and are carried forward into the 18th century that outlaw just lying, or printing lies is actually pretty stunning, and defines really what newspapers are able to be for decades and decades.

Recording: Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. You’re listening to So to Speak, the free speech podcast, brought to you by FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

Nico Perrino: Welcome back to So to Speak, the free speech podcast where every week we take an uncensored look at the world of free expression through the law, philosophy, and stories that define your right to free speech. I’m your host, Nico Perrino. Thomas Payne described the late 18th century as an “age of revolutions,” where he said, “Nothing aught to be hold improbable.” It was a time when outcomes were uncertain, and people sought to make sense of their rapidly changing world.

In early America, news traveled slowly across the Atlantic. It arrived inconsistently, and often second-hand, forcing colonists to piece together events from incomplete, and sometimes conflicting accounts. Newspapers reflected that reality. Printers compiled foreign reports, private letters, and local hearsay with little ability to verify what they were publishing. Readers faced multiple versions of reality, and were left to decide for themselves what to believe.

So, in a world educated by unverifiable news cycles, how did misinformation shape early American life? As part of our 250th anniversary series, we’re revisiting how news, rumor, and misrepresentation influenced the course of the American Revolution, and the nation that followed. Helping us to do so is Jordan Taylor, a historian of American history, and the author of Misinformation Nation: Foreign News and the Politics of Truth in Revolutionary America. Jordan, welcome onto the show.

Jordan Taylor: Thank you for having me, what a pleasure to be here.

Nico Perrino: So, I think we have a vague or general understanding of how we today consume news, but how did colonists and early Americans consume news? What was their relationship to the news?

Jordan Taylor: So, for most people in 18th century North America, the main way that they consumed news is by talking to other people. Conversation is the most democratic news medium around because everyone can do it, and an individual can only have so much leverage over the larger circulation of rumors, of gossip, and news through conversation. Newspapers are a disruptive medium. It allows for the circulation of more detailed accounts of events; it allows for the circulation of more news from farther away.

As newspapers take in and copy and paste the news from places like London, sometimes from newspapers in continental Europe at this time. A newspaper doesn’t do its own reporting; it more or less just copies what other newspapers have produced about their own local news. And so, there’s an unevenness. A lot of people are still getting their news through rumor, through gossip, through conversation. An increasing number of people, especially those who can afford it, are subscribing to newspapers and in some cases, becoming rather obsessed.

Nico Perrino: So, did they have any reporters, then, or was it mainly just a copy and pasting enterprise? A curation enterprise, kind of like The Drudge Report?

Jordan Taylor: The Drudge Report, that’s an interesting metaphor. It’s not too far from the Drudge Report in that it is sort of an aggregation service in some ways. But the closest thing that probably exists to a reporter is that newspaper printers will get a hold of letters. Letters written from Europe in a lot of cases, but also from other cities, and people aren’t necessarily writing these letters for publication in a newspaper, but when they share something interesting in a letter, it’s pretty well understood that the letter will be seen by more than just the recipient.

Whether that’s the family of the recipient, the friends of the recipient, or sometimes they’ll just take it down to the newspaper printers office, or the post office, and just show people. And chunks of it, paragraphs will end up in the newspaper. There are some folks who take this up as a regular practice, and take it upon themselves to report on events for a newspaper. In some cases, these are friends or business associates of the newspaper printer. A lot of newspaper printers are also postmasters, which means that they have these far-flung correspondences that allow them to communicate with people really across the world, in some cases.

So, often these correspondences, the closest thing again that you have to a reporter, often they’re merchants, often they’re elite gentlemen, that kind of thing, who are most likely to have these far-flung correspondences. And so, their view of events tends to reflect their own social standing as well.

Nico Perrino: And how many newspapers are we talking about here? If you’re a colonist in the city of Philadelphia, are you just looking at one or two newspapers like we are today, with the Philadelphia Enquirer and The Daily News? Or do you have more to subscribe to, or more options to look at?

Jordan Taylor: In Philadelphia, there are four or five.

Nico Perrino: Okay.

Jordan Taylor: It fluctuates. Sometimes as few as three, I think, but usually not more than that in a city. And Philadelphia was quite unusual in that regard. Most cities have one or two newspapers, and again, they might only have a few hundred subscribers, which is perhaps a little bit surprising.

But we also have to remember that these cities are quite small by today’s standards. Philadelphia has during the Revolutionary Era, maybe 50,000 or more citizens. A place like the city of Williamsburg has maybe 1,500 residents, but also three newspapers. So, they’re serving residents of the city, but also typically of the larger colony or state. So, it grows over time.

There are not very many newspapers at the beginning of the 18th century. There were around 30 or so across the 13 colonies or states during the Revolutionary Era. And that number doesn’t grow as much as you might think, in large part because paper gets very expensive once they can’t import it from Brittian, and they have all kinds of production issues, and it just becomes more expensive. But after the war is over, the numbers keep growing.

There are around 100 newspapers by 1790, and by the end of the century, there are several hundred, maybe around 300 or so across the United States. So, it grows pretty quickly once the war is over, but for a long, long, time it is quite a limited number serving quite a small proportion of the population, directly at least.

Nico Perrino: At the top I had mentioned that Thomas Payne had described the 18th century as “age of revolutions.” Of course, you had the revolution in America, but you also had the French Revolution, and other revolutions. One of the things that I found most fascinating about your book was how the people who subscribed to these newspapers were most interested in foreign news, and much of what these newspapers published was foreign news. The idea being that local news travelled faster through word of mouth, and so they didn’t need to subscribe to these newspapers in order to learn about what was happening locally.

Can you talk about that? how did newspapers respond to this? Even down to how they were laid out, it seemed, was based on how quickly, or the time intervals that they would get this foreign news through incoming ships, for example.

Jordan Taylor: So, if you go to an archive, or a university special collections today, you could probably get your hands on an old newspaper. Sometimes, you can even buy them, they’re not that expensive.

Nico Perrino: You also said they’re more durable than newspapers today.

Jordan Taylor: They’re very durable, because they’re made from rag fiber, and so they’ll outlast a lot of newspapers that are being printed today. So, they’re actually incredible to hold, and to look, they have a completely different feel to them. But if you pick one up, one of the things that you notice as soon as you start to read them is that it’s full of European news. Particularly Europe, because that’s where most of the newspapers in the world are being printed at this point.

So, absolutely, that’s a huge fixation of residents of North America. We have to remember at this time; North America is sort of people who live there know that they’re not at the center of the world’s events. It’s sort of a backwater from the perspective of these settlers that belong to European empires. And so, when they see things like the French Revolution erupting, they see that as a world historical event.

One that outshines – even in the eyes of many Americans – the American revolution. And so, yes, the newspapers reflect that. they’re full of what is sometimes called foreign news. A lot of the newspaper’s mottos, the most popular model is “Freshest advices, foreign and domestic.” If you see a newspaper that doesn’t print foreign news, often because it’s winter, and there aren’t ships coming in, readers actually start to write in and complain about it, and they’ll say, “We haven’t had any good advices from Europe in a little while, what’s going on?”

And the printers often are just stuck printing boring 18th century poems, which if you have read 18th century poetry, you know why people would be complaining to the newspaper about an absence of news. And as you referred to, the newspapers are very much laid out to reflect the fact that the news that comes in, least of all, least commonly, is news from abroad because it relies on the movement of ships, which don’t always come in every day. So, a newspaper printer will start to lay out their newspaper with advertisements, and with foreign news with the idea that if they wait until the very last minute to print some local news.

Then it might not be completely out of date by the time that it gets into the hands of its readers. But often that’s not even really the case because it takes so long to print, and dry, and deliver these newspapers.

Nico Perrino: No, obviously, the title of your book is “misinformation,” so that suggests there might be something about the news industry, and the information ecosystem during this time that made it perhaps not very reliable.

Jordan Taylor: Yeah.

Nico Perrino: And you can’t blame them. If you’re a printer in Philadelphia, and the only source of news you have is a letter from someone abroad, it’s not easy to fact check.

Jordan Taylor: No.

Nico Perrino: So, can you talk about how newspapers at this time reported, and what if any systems there were to verify the news that they were reporting on?

Jordan Taylor: The newspapers at this time are absolutely unable to determine what’s true or false through the methods of verification that we would expect a newspaper to follow today. So, they have certain methods that they develop, and none of them are really very good at identifying what’s true and what’s false. The most prominent and familiar probably to us – and also in my opinion probably the most destructive method – that is adopted during the Revolutionary Era is really to just assess the political biases of newspapers in Europe. So, during the 1770s, the patriot presses in North America will start to reprint more and more material that comes from friendly opposition newspapers in England.

So, they’ll reprint things from the radical press of John Wilkes’s newspaper, The North Britian. Some of these other London daily newspapers or weekly newspapers, that are aligned with the political opposition, whereas the loyalist newspapers will take a lot more material from the official, like London Gazette, which is printed by the leadership of London’s parlement. During the 1790s, you see some similar dynamics in play where Federalist newspapers – the first two political parties in the United States were the Federalists and the Republicans. The Federalists are the more sympathetic party towards Great Britian, whereas the Republicans tend to favor the culture and politics of France, especially during its revolution.

And the Federalist newspapers in the 1790s are very keen to report Britian’s side of the French Revolution, whereas the Republican newspapers go to a lot of trouble to try to get a hold of newspapers from France to translate them, and reprint them for American readers so that they have a different view of what’s going on in France. Republicans also are less trusting of other kinds of news, like news from sea captains, who they accuse of bias toward Britian and against France. So, there are these perceptions of who can be trusted that people follow through, and the problem with that is that none of these information mediums are offering Americans a really terribly reliable view of these events.

So, during the 1760s and 1770s, Americans who are relying on opposition newspapers in London for their understanding of parliamentary politics are misled into some serious misperceptions about the extent to which parlement is going to be willing to cave to their demands. And the impact of their boycotts, and things like that. During the 1790s, the Federalist reliance on British newspapers paints this really radical and outlandish portrait of revolutionary France. To the extent that it develops into these really lurid conspiracy theories including the idea that the Illuminati had plotted the French Revolution. So, that has deep roots in revolutionary America, the Illuminati conspiracy theory.

Nico Perrino: If you have this conception that the information that you’re gathering, or you’re using to inform how you go about your life is wrong, you could see how there would be misunderstandings among the various sides of any conflict. So, one of the things that I pulled out of your book was that misrepresentation led to misrule. That’s how the colonists, before the revolution, saw some the disagreements between the parlement and the king, is that the parlement and the king were not getting accurate information about what was happening in the colonies. And that’s why The Stamp Act was as oppressive as it was. That’s why they didn’t quite understand the Boston Massacre in 1770.

They were worried, these colonists, about misrepresentation by the colonial governor, and that’s why Boston appointed a committee to produce a “full and just representation” of the events for British readers. And I’m assuming on the other side you can have parlement not quite sure that it is getting an accurate representation of what’s happening in the colonies as well. So, how did if at all false or intermediated information from the colonies, or from parlement contribute to the revolution itself?

Jordan Taylor: If you read the accounts of many of the leading revolutionaries in the 1760s and the 1770s, early 1770s, their entire explanation for the escalation of the imperial conflict boils down, in a lot of cases, to this idea that colonial officials are exaggerating the extent of colonial disobedience, and misbehavior, and things like that. There’s one of my favorite anecdotes from the book is about this barrel of tar that someone sets up in Boston Harbor in the 1760s, late 1760s. And the idea is that when British troops land, someone will light this barrel of tar, and the people will assemble to oppose the arrival of these ships.

But it’s not a barrel of tar, it was actually an empty barrel that might have been used to store nails, or turpentine, and it’s taken down and it’s not really that big of a deal. But the Lieutenant Governor at the time, Thomas Hutchinson passes along this account of this barrel being a signal for the assembly of a mob to his authorities in London, and then eventually the letter that he sends to London gets back to Boston. It’s published, and people go into this incredibly minute investigation of this barrel to prove that it could not have been a tar barrel. It was only an empty barrel.

And it couldn’t have been a beacon for an arrival of a mob. And so Hutchenson is making this up on it’s on the basis of these kind of lies that British troops are being sent to Boston, and that parliamentary leaders are passing these oppressive acts of legislation. So, that kind of back and forth over these bizarre, small details that no one takes about or cares about today were part of the everyday hum of politics. I think, during the Revolutionary Era, and is part of how colonists explained to themselves both why things seemed to be escalating contentiously, but also why it seems like it’s impossible for the leadership in London to just come to what they see as a completely reasonable path of reconciliation.

Because, as they see it, those leaders are being continually misled by colonial governors, and customs officials, and things like that. So, you see that all over the writings of this period until the Americans, the revolutionary American colonists start to become more inclined to think about independence.

Nico Perrino: Yeah.

Jordan Taylor: Because, that explanation doesn’t necessarily justify that level of a response. And so, they turned to more, I don’t know, grander principals, and they leave behind this almost petty squabbling that characterizes so much of the newspaper discourse of this era, and occupies these colonial assemblies continuously in the leadup to the mid-1770s.

Nico Perrino: Well, another thing that I found fascinating from your book is that King George III also blamed false reports from Britian on the revolution. You’re right, in his 1775 proclamation declaring the colonies to be in rebellion, King George III insisted the rebellion had taken place because the colonists had been seduced into disobedience by false reports from Britian. So, here you have the colonists saying, “If only the king and parlement knew what was going on with us, they would fix this, they would recognize our rights as British men.” And here, you have the king saying, “If only the colonists knew how we were trying to address their concerns, they would not be in a rebellion.

And so, you could argue that the revolution began because there was not effective communication, and the two sides were not understanding each other. And maybe it is it true, or maybe it’s not true that there was false intermediaries here, and misinformation. It does seem like it’s a communication breakdown, at least that’s how it’s perceived by both sides.

Jordan Taylor: Absolutely, and for a long time, people like Benjamin Franklin are just referring to this as just a great big misunderstanding. What at one point looked like a fairly minor conflict over taxes and stamps and things like that, what helped to aggravate it was the difficulty of communicating across this huge ocean. And the difficulty of leaders in London knowing what the temper of people they claimed to virtually represent was. And you see some of the colonist allies in parlement, men like Issac Barre, Wilkes, The Earl of Chatham, John Pitt, those kinds of folks who are associated with the revolutionary cause.

A lot of them are making this case that “Actually, it’s not fair for us to tax these people when we don’t really understand the nature of their economy. We don’t understand how they’re reacting to things like this.” And this in a lot of ways strikes at the very heart of the system of representation that the British constitution claimed to embody, and kicks up all of this argument about whether it’s really possible to represent people that you barely know, barely interact with. There’s an emerging novel theory that really, you do need to be in constant interaction with the people that you’re claiming to represent.

If the combined knowledge and information streams across the empire were to result in a well-informed parlement that can make decisions that reflect the overall knowledge and intelligence of the people.

Nico Perrino: Well, this understanding of misinformation, and that it existed was recognized as early as the 17th century. You talk in your book about how one of the only filters for falsehoods were those created by colonial administrators who would police it, but would define falsehoods selfishly. And so, when there was criticism, they went after their critics pretty ruthlessly. And you talk about how the Massachusetts colonial governor shut down the operation of – I think it was called Public Occurrences, which was the first newspaper founded in North America.

Founded in 1698 by Benjamin Harris and this colonial governor prohibited all unlicensed publications. So, if you have the government stepping in here to try to police misinformation, there’s this incentive to do it selfishly.

Jordan Taylor: Yeah, absolutely. The number of laws that exist in the 17th century and are carried forward into the 18th century that outlaw just lying, or printing lies is actually pretty stunning, and defines really what newspapers are able to be for decades and decades. So, you’re right, the first newspapers is very swiftly shit down. Some of the early newspapers, including one published by Benjamin Franklin’s brother are shut down on the basis of seditious libel, or really, whatever the governor, or the government wanted to claim was a lie.

Nico Perrino: And in this case, you have lying, defamation as we might understand it today, and then you have this concept of seditious libel which can be just mere criticism of a public official. Even if what you are saying about them in true. In fact, there’s this line, “The greater the truth, the greater the libel.” And so, that’s how you get the trial of Peter Zenger in the 1730s criticizing the colonial governor of New York.

Now, he wasn’t convicted because it was a case of jury nullification, but if both lies and truthful criticism of colonial governors can be prohibited, you can see how that might shape the coverage that you’re gonna provide of what’s happening domestically.

Jordan Taylor: Yeah, absolutely. And so, for a long time, these newspapers are really trying to reflect the will of the governor, of the colonial government. Some newspaper printers, including John Campbell who is the printer of the Boston Newsletter, and one of the first – it is really the first long-running American newspaper. He directly takes the copy that he’s going to typeset to the governor’s office to approve it before he starts publishing it.

And it’s really not until the 1760s when the widespread anger at the stamp act and other pieces of legislation start to erupt across the colonies that the printers really start to feel comfortable speaking what they would say is truth to power, and challenging the existing political orthodoxies. In the 1770s, Thomas Hutchinson as he’s facing all of this criticism, some of which I referred to earlier. He tries to shut down some newspapers, he takes it to the colony’s counsel and they say it’s just not feasible at this point. It wouldn’t be possible for us to exercise the will of the state in this way.

Because, it would result in a rebellion, an uprising, at this point to shut down the levers of an increasingly assertive political press.

Nico Perrino: You had written in your book that misinformation, or allegations of misinformation might have contributed to the passage of the Sedition Act of 1798 – which we’ve covered on this podcast before – really stemmed over a concern of war with France and the XYZ Affair. So, can you talk about that affair, the events that were happening at that time that led to the Sedition Act of 1798, and how those may or may not have been informed by misinformation?

Jordan Taylor: Absolutely. I love this topic; it’s one of my favorite things to talk about. The 1790s I talked a bit about how there’s this division between whether you are more supportive of revolutionary France, or more supportive of Britian’s view of what’s happening in revolutionary France. And how this becomes a political issue among the two political parties, the Federalists, and the Republicans.

During the 1790s, there’s initially a huge amount of support for France across the United States, but then things change within France. There’s a Reign of Terror for one thing, which some people dismiss as exaggerations of British newspapers. And then, France really takes umbrae, takes offence when the United States passes a treaty with Britian, the Jay Treaty which brings it closer commercially with Great Britian. And France ends up engaging in naval warfare, sort of an undeclared naval war with the United States.

So, the XYZ Affair happens after President John Adams sends three American commissioners to Paris to try to fix what’s happening with this naval warfare that’s preying on American commerce. While these three American commissioners are in Paris, they are treated very disrespectfully, and there’s an attempt to bribe them.

Nico Perrino: And they’re the X, Y, and Z in XYZ Affair because their names are redacted?

Jordan Taylor: Well, X, Y, and Z are actually the French ministers whose names are redacted in the dispatches that are sent to the American congress. So, they’re three figures who come and negotiate unofficially, or quasi-officially on behalf of the French directory. And initially, their names are redacted as X and then Y, and then Z. So, these dispatches, these reports get back to the United States, and there’s this incredible uproar.

So, a lot of people who had spent years defending revolutionary France are suddenly experiencing some whiplash as they see this once ally of the United States becoming more and more hostile. And there appears to be this definitive proof of this. After years and years of back and forth where one side is saying that revolutionary France is evil, and it’s practicing these horrible things on its citizens, and another side is disputing that. Suddenly, there’s this really definitive proof in these dispatches.

But, some opposition newspaper printers, including Benjamin Franklin Bache who publishes the Philadelphia General Advertiser or Aurora General Advertiser. He disputes the authenticity of these dispatches. He publishes a letter from a French leader [inaudible] [00:34:09], and some other news that the administration, the John Adams administration takes umbrage to. And Abigail Adams is watching all of this, and she’s urging John Adams to take action, she’s urging congress to take action.

Federalists in congress are so eager to basically silence the opposition press that they arrest Benjamin Franklin Beche on common law sedition charges before the sedition act is even passed. But then, they pass the Sedition Act, and then they arrest a number of critical newspaper printers who are publishing news that they claim to be false, especially as it relates to revolutionary France, and to the negotiations between France and the Americans. And so, that’s really the spark that lights the fuse of the Sedition Act.

Nico Perrino: So, if I’m simplifying it, or perhaps oversimplifying it, you had these Republican publishers like Benjamin Franklin Bache publishing how of Philadelphia who are more or less partisans for France. And then, you have John Adams and the Federalists who are more critical, concerned about the situation developing with France, and as a result, they’re concerned about these Republican publishers. They try and control the information ecosystem by passing the Sedition Act of 1798 which forbade criticism of the president and the congress. And one of the things I find most fascinating about the Sedition Act of 1798 is that it only forbade criticism of the Federalist president and the Federalist congress.

It did not forbid criticism of the Republican vice president, in this case, Thomas Jefferson. And the legislation sunset with the next election, which was the next opportunity to have a Republican president and a Republican congress. And you write that with Thomas Jefferson’s victory in the 1800 election; it was more or less a public rejection of Federalist information control.

Jordan Taylor: Yeah.

Nico Perrino: Or I mean, you could see it that way because one of the first things he does, is he pardons a lot of the people convicted under the Sedition Act. Later, congress repays their fines, and it’s viewed almost – and then the Federalist party just disappears. It just goes away.

Jordan Taylor: Well, but then Jefferson does some of his own prosecution of [inaudible – crosstalk] [00:37:10] printers as well. So, they’re –

Nico Perrino: Power corrupts, of course.

Jordan Taylor: It does seem to. And one of the things that’s important to bear in mind with this is that the proponents, the supporters of the Sedition Act are drawing on these decades of precedence. Centuries, really, of precedence that we alluded to earlier that states would outlaw especially seditious libel. And it was understood to be a foundation of the state that if you allowed people to lie in ways that destabilized the state then you would have chaos.

You would have anarchy. You would have disorder, constantly. And so, as misguided as I think we see the Sedition act as today, and I’m not a supporter of the sedition Act, it isn’t really quite as radical or an abrupt reversal from revolutionary ideas as we might think. Because, it’s really drawing on these deep currents in English law that hadn’t really been tested fully during the revolution and there was no way that the government could really shut these things down, and had to be tested in the early republic.

And in a lot of ways, the libertarian speech culture that the United States has today, I think, owes a lot to this moment of clarification in the 1790s and very early 19th century when a lot of folks are starting to find ways to articulate a new vision for speech and for free press that they hadn’t before. And so, this crisis gives them an opportunity, gives them a moment to start to think more expansively, more broadly about what free speech means.

Nico Perrino: I’d love to get your thoughts on this question. As we continue to have this originalist supreme court that is trying to look at the text, history, and tradition of the constitution and interpreting it, one of the questions that inevitably comes up was, “What was the original intent of the First Amendment?” We can maybe focus this on the free speech and the free press clause of the First Amendment. One of the things that’s challenging in trying to understand that original meaning is that there’s not much documentation about what the founders meant when they put, “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speed.”

And you can see that materialize with the controversy surrounding the Sedition Act of 1798. It seemed like they were almost trying to figure out what those words meant in real time. How do you see it? What do you think they meant? What does the documentary evidence say to you, if we were trying to find an original meaning of the speech and press clauses?

Jordan Taylor: Yeah, I would hesitate to claim that I understood the original intent behind that. I think when many of the founders write that down, whether that’s in the Bill of Rights, or in the state Bills of Rights that preceded them, or in other documents. In a lot of cases, they’re drawing on the English Bill of Rights. They’re drawing on other European precedents, sometimes colonial precedents, and those aren’t part of a culture with a really expansive view of free speech.

But I think you’re absolutely right that the point is that during the revolution, and in the very first years of the American Republic, there’s a lot of disagreement about what it means to have a free press, or to have free speech. Naturally, the printers, they want a pretty broad and expansive vision of that, and the party in power tends to prefer a more limited view of these things. And in the 1770s, and the 1760s as they’re using the newspaper press as a tool of mobilization, American patriots or protesting colonists are really quite excited about the possibility of a mass media that is relatively unregulated.

Thomas Jefferson famously says that if he was given the choice between a government with no newspapers, or newspapers with no government, he would prefer to have newspapers, but no government. He says that in the 1780s, but then the trials and tribulations of actually having to govern everyone becomes really difficult, and people become a lot more pessimistic toward the idea of an unregulated news media. I think there are some similarities to what we see today, where we saw a lot of optimism, I guess, about the possibilities of social media, for instance, to liberate. To allow previously marginalized groups to express themselves, and to challenge structures of authority.

Now, I think the tendency in the way that we talk about new media is a lot more pessimistic. And not without reason, because of some of the things that we’re talking about today. The expansion of misinformation along these platforms. And really, the recognition these platforms are so determinative of our conception of reality that it seems foolhardy, or irresponsible to place them in the hands of private companies. Or of individuals whose ideas, whose whims, whose politics can have such powerful downstream effects in shaping the consciousness of individuals far from them.

And so, whereas, as I said, conversation, oral communication is a highly democratic medium because anyone can do it, there’s a growing recognition in the early American republic that newspapers are actually having something of a reverse effect, I should say. They are having the effect of concentrating the power to shape really the reality that people are experiencing, and that can be really quite a dangerous thing if it’s in the wrong hands.

Nico Perrino: Well, the question that I have, and I know this isn’t in your book, but it’s something we can speculate about, is whose hands do you trust information in? So, one of the reasons I think you get the Trump administration come in, and the control over congress and the executive branch is the response to what people perceive to be misinformation, over misinformation policing surrounding COVID and the election. Now, whether you agree or disagree, you can put that to the side, I think that did motivate some voters here. And so, they think they’re bringing Trump in, and he’s gonna get rid of this misinformation disinformation policing.

But then, you have Trump come into the office, and his administration is policing it as well, but from a different political perspective. You get Brendan Carr at the FCC telling broadcasters that they might be subject to news distortion complaints and investigations and risk their broadcast license if they say certain things on air. So, we don’t trust the platforms to do it right. We’ve tried to have the government do it right, but that creates all sorts of political consequences, just as it did in Massachusetts in 1690, for example.

What are we left to do?

Jordan Taylor: The founders didn’t have a good set of ideas, in my opinion. They tried things like as you say, you’re trying to regulate the news media. They tried to ignore it. George Washington was really great at ignoring misinformation about him.

They tried to create alternative news media that they thought would support the cause of truth. Often, those were usually just ended up being partisan newspapers that polluted the information ecosystem. So, if we’re looking to the past for models, there aren’t that many good ones. When you look at some of the major rebellions or political events in this era that political leaders ascribe to misinformation – things like Shays’ Rebellion in Western Massachusetts in the 1780s, or the Whiskey Rebellion in 1790 in Pennsylvania.

Elites look at these and they say, “These are the product of people being deceived by duplicitous demagogues who are mobilizing the people for their own advantage, but not to serve the common interests of everyone.” There are a few ways that people can respond to that. In the 1780s, one of the responses to that was basically the constitution. The constitution as an attempt to reign in some of the worst excesses of the people who could so easily be deceived by corrupt demagogues.

There’s all kinds of discourse about that at the Constitutional Convention. In the Federalist essays that Jay and Hamilton write, and elsewhere. But one of the other things that comes out of these kind of moments of disruption and disorder like the Whiskey Rebellion is people start to say, “Maybe we should be educating our population.”

Nico Perrino: Yeah.

Jordan Taylor: “Maybe we should be setting aside more funds for free public education.” Thomas Jefferson says, he’s campaigning, he has this bill in 1779 for the diffusion of knowledge. And he wants Virginia to create a three-part grammar school, secondary school, and public university system. It takes decades before even one of those is created, the University of Virginia.

And he’s complaining all the while that he says, “The tax of the people of Virginia will have to bear to support these kinds of institutions is only a thousandth of the cost they will have to pay if nobles and kings rise up among them and take control of the government.” So, from his perspective, and from the perspective of a small but vocal number of leaders during the founding generation, education is the only investment that they can make that can, in the long term, sustain the health of the republic by ensuring that the people are well informed. That the news media is not the way to ensure that people are informed.

But rather that teaching people how to think, how to ride beyond the tussles and scraps of everyday politics, and learn things that have a wider context, I guess, for understanding that news is one of the most important things you can do.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, well the news can inform, as Thomas Jefferson understood in saying that he would rather have a newspaper than a government, than a government without a newspaper. The problem is, newspapers, and the people who publish them can be just as biased, just as partisan as anyone else. So, you need to have –

Jordan Taylor: As he found out.

Nico Perrino: So, you need to have a society with a degree of media literacy that’s not super credulous, or is educated to not be super credulous to sort truth from fiction. Now, that’s not gonna happen with 100% fidelity. We don’t live in a utopia, people are still tribal by nature, and they’re gonna believe what they wanna believe, but it seems better than the alternatives where we’re just leaves in the wind being blown whichever way partisan press wants to blow us. Or it is better than having the government determine for us what is true and false, because we know they will often, in almost every case, do that in selfish ways.

And it also just betrays of course the principals of liberty that this county was founded on, to have such a paternalistic treatment of the media ecosystem.

Jordan Taylor: Yeah.

Nico Perrino: Last question here for you. I studied history at Indiana University as well. It was Renaissance and ancient history, so not your area of history, but I do love debates among historians that fall into different camps. And in your book, you say that historians have long acknowledged that revolutionary American’s understanding of the world often misaligned with reality, and you say that there are two camps here. There’s a group of progressive historians who argue that a small number of patriot elites during the revolution intentionally spread untruthful propaganda to mobilize the public.

And then, there are some consensus historians as well who rejected this interpretation and claim that the revolutionary generation embraced falsehoods because of their sincere attachment to deep-seated ideologies, and that had caused them to become prone to conspiratorial paranoia. So, my question to you is, do you fall into one of these camps? Can both of these be true? Where does the debate stand currently?

Jordan Taylor: I think that for the most part historians have moved on to other pressing questions, so I’m not sure it’s as much of a live debate as it once was. But I think that my work is suggesting that yes, it’s true that some patriot propagandists are spreading false news. That’s undeniable, as a tool to mobilize political action [inaudible -crosstalk] [00:52:24]. Of course not, but just look at anything Samuel Adams ever wrote, it’s full of exaggerations.

So, that’s undeniable. And it’s also true that revolutionaries were very deeply tied up in a set of political ideologies that led them to become fixated on the difference between representation and reality. On conspiracy theories, and a theory of power, really, that assumed that power seeks to grow. And it does that through mechanisms that resemble conspiracies.

So, those things are true. I think that that’s what’s also true is that the mechanisms by which people just tried to understand the world, especially the world outside of their immediate prevue, their immediate experience were broken in this time. Because, people were still adjusting to a new media form. The newspaper had been around for many decades by the American revolution, but the political newspaper, a newspaper as a tool for political advocacy, that was quite new, and quite disruptive to society.

And it took a long, long time for Americans to figure out a way to adjust to that. The great Lou Reed once sang, “I do believe you are what you perceive,” and American’s, it took them a long while to come along to that truth that the revolution had been partly premised on this highly mediated experience of reality. And so, I think that if we’re going to understand the origins of revolutionary politics, we really do need to understand the media that people were engaging with, as well as the news that they were reading. The only trouble with it is that there’s so much of it, and so much of it is terribly dull.

I think it’s been hard for historians at this point to get their arms around it. One of the reasons that we can start to ask different kinds of questions than previous generations of historians have done is that these newspapers are digitized in a way that previous generations couldn’t benefit from. And so, we can look for patterns in – for instance, my book does a lot with citations of one newspaper to another one. And so, looking for those patterns, you can start to see things that earlier historians of newspapers and the American Revolution couldn’t see.

Nico Perrino: Well, Jordan, I think we’ll leave it there. Thanks for coming on the show.

Jordan Taylor: Thank you very much for having me, this has been fun.

Nico Perrino: A reminder, the book is Misinformation Nation: Foreign News and the Politics of Truth in Revolutionary America. This conversation is part of our series marking America’s 250th anniversary where we’re looking at how expression helped create the nation, and how it’s been challenged ever since. I am Nico Perrino, and this podcast is recorded and edited by a rotating roster of my FIRE colleagues, including Bruce Jones, Ronald Baez, Jackson Fleagle and Scott Rogers. The podcast is produced by Emily Beaman.

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