Two centuries ago, most American magazine and newspaper editors professed Christian faith and wanted their publications to show it—but many lost their audiences when new publications offered street-level reporting that won more readers than literary essays.
That’s important history to understand, but you won’t read about it in Alex Wright’s new book Empire of Ink, a supposed history of American journalism through 1900. Wright amusingly describes antics of The Printers, Rogues, and Radicals Who Invented the American Newspaper, as the subtitle states, but he skips the Christians and in doing so misses the forest for trees, billions of which fell in the centuries when words on paper ruled.
But just as Wright overlooks something important, so did I—until my research for a history of abortion led me to what Wright rightly calls “racy papers … bearing names like The Flash, The Whip, The Rake, and The Libertine,” bearing “headings like Lives of the Nymphs.” They published detailed and prurient profiles of prostitutes, listing their addresses as a service to readers eager (as one critic wrote) to “fill the paths to perdition.”
Wright also describes how newspapers first celebrated Charles Dickens when the author came to the US in 1842, then called him “a literary bagman.” Dickens reciprocated, attacking “moral poison” and arguing that “the influence of the good, is powerless to counteract the moral poison of the bad.” My sense is that Wright overemphasizes the bad in early American journalism, but I may have underestimated it.
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