Readers were treated to Gil Smart’s “Just a different flavor of spin” across the Perspective section from Charles Krauthammer’s “A news Fox among hens.” Smart rose to the occasion.
WATCHDOG: The more things change….
From Ron Chernow’s “Alexander Hamilton”, Pages 395 and 396:
“How could Jefferson hound Hamilton from office without tipping his hand? A proficient political ventriloquist, Jefferson was skilled at using proxies while keeping his own lips tightly sealed. The mouthpiece he chose to broadcast his views was the poet Phillip Freneau. The Republicans had been bedeviled by the Gazette of the United States, a paper edited by a former Boston schoolmaster, John Fenno, who was adoring in his treatment of Hamilton. Hamilton had urged Fenno to start the paper in 1789 and later raised money to rescue it from financial distress …
“Like other newspapers of the 1790s, Freneau’s National Gazette did not feign neutrality. With the population widely dispersed, newspapers were unabashedly partisan organs that supplied much of the adhesive power binding the incipient parties together. Americans were a literate people, and dozens of newspapers flourished….They more closely resembled journals of opinion than daily newspapers. Often scurrilous and inaccurate, they had few qualms about hinting that a certain nameless official was embezzling money or colluding with a foreign power. ‘Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper,’ Jefferson later said. ‘Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put in that polluted vehicle.”’ No code of conduct circumscribed responsible press behavior.’”
Considering that James Madison was Jefferson’s ‘cat’s paw’ during the Washington and Adam administrations, it is rather amusing to have Krauthammer state “We have norms, Madisonian norms.” Perhaps this is true in Madison’s public positions, but hopefully not in his and Jefferson’s backstage practices.
