The Role of the Press in American Democracy

The Framers believed that citizens must have a healthy distrust of government in order to preserve their freedom. Citizens have a duty to be vigilant in defending their rights, to remain informed about political events, and to criticize government's misdeeds. Similarly, they knew from experience that the ability to circulate newspapers and pamphlets critical of the British government was essential to winning support for overthrowing British tyranny in the American Revolution.

Throughout much of American history, newspapers were explicitly partisan. In the nineteenth century, most newspapers strongly supported one of the major political parties, and criticized the policies of the opposing party. Even comparatively small towns often had both Republican and Democratic newspapers. In the late nineteenth century, as some urban newspapers gained extremely large numbers of readers, some publishers engaged in what their critics termed "yellow journalism," deliberately and sometimes unfairly skewing the paper's stories to suit the publisher's political agenda and sensationalizing stories to attract readers. In the Progressive era of the early twentieth century, crusading magazine and newspaper journalists known as muckrakers uncovered corruption in American government and business.