If you haven't read "American Aurora," read Talbot's piece at Salon.com

[BurtWorm]

http://www.salon.com/opinion/freedom/2003/09/02/franklin/print.html

"I shall not burn my press and melt my letters"
Newspaper publishing in the days of Ben Franklin and his grandson was a filthy, grinding business. Fighting for freedom of the press was even more wretched a task.

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By David Talbot

...


Because of his own impeccable revolutionary heritage, Bache was not awed by the country's first president, whom he viewed as a military fraud and a would-be king. By the end of Washington's term in 1797, Bache was piling heaps of steaming abuse on the nation's patriarch in the Aurora, sending him off on his final day in office with a call for "rejoicing" in the land over the end to "political iniquity" and "legalize corruption."

This growing scorn for America's leadership -- which only increased during the presidency of Washington's successor, John Adams -- proved too much for Bache's old friends in the Philadelphia gentry, who turned on him with a vengeance, snubbing him and his wife on the high-society circuit and boycotting the Aurora. As advertisers abandoned the paper, Bache's losses mounted -- during his eight years as publisher, the Aurora would lose almost $20,000. But Bache and his wife and publishing partner, Margaret, the daughter of a St. Croix sugar planter, persevered, exchanging their blue-blood friends for a "political underworld of journeyman printers, newspaper writers, and street- and tavern-level activists," in Pasley's words, and turning their home and newspaper office, which were housed in the same Market Street building, into a headquarters for radical republicanism.

...


Murder might not have been on the minds of Bache's enemies, but certainly imprisonment was. The following year, the Federalists in Congress pushed through the notorious Sedition Act -- a bill, commented Thomas Jefferson, that was aimed directly at his republican ally, Benjamin Franklin Bache. On June 26, 1798, Bache was arrested by a federal marshal and charged with "libeling the President & the Executive Government." Slapped with a crushing bail of $4,000, Bache was forced to appeal to his friends for help and the Aurora and his family teetered on the brink of ruin.

Adding insult to his financial and legal woes, Bache was then subjected to a relentless barrage of personal attacks by an anti-republican smear artist named William Cobbett. Combining Matt Drudge's contempt for the truth with the defamatory glee of Rush Limbaugh, Cobbett riddled Bache with poison arrows in his aptly named paper, Porcupine's Gazette, calling him a printer "notoriously in the pay of France" and "the prostitute son of oil and lamp-black" who should be dealt with like "a TURK, A JEW, A JACOBIN, OR A DOG" and demanding the suppression of the Aurora.

...


Better yet, read "American Aurora" by Richard Rosenfeld, which will make you rethink the standard image of the early Republic as serene and unanimous. You'll also see some parallels between the plight of Bache's America and the mess we're in now.

[legin]

1. I think William Cobbett is a brit

i'm afraid to say and quite a famous one too.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRcobbett.htm

[BurtWorm]

2. You're right. He was a shit in the 1790s.

A real shit to Tom Paine and the "French party." But he had a change of heart apparently after 1800. It was he who tried to keep Paine's memory alive. Was he the David Brock of 1800?

[legin]

3. I must say this is a bit of an eye-opener

I read his autobiography when I was doing an evening class in History a few years ago, I always thought he was a radical, looks like he came to it a bit later in life.

[AP]

4. A little historical background...

Adams and Hamilton and the Federalists sided with big business and the banks and urban interests, and with England, because England was built on those same industries. They favored a strong central government. Jefferson, a Republican, leaned towards decentralized power in the hands of the common man. He didn't trust Hamilton's centralization of power in the hands of the wealthy. Jefferson sided with small businesses and agriculure. Because France's economy was built on similar foundations (and because Jefferson was amabassador to France before Washington called him back to serve as Secretary of State, to counterbalance Hamilton who was Sec of the Treasury) Jefferson sided with France.

Thus, you have the Brit defaming the anti-Federalist, you have an urban center turning its back on its own citizen, and you have the slur about being in the service of (anti-big business, pro-agrarian) France.

[UTUSN]

5. Our Current Media Whores

are not worthy of the freedom----- and of the support we are called upon to give them any time they are under assault. Well, it's supposedly for US that we give the support despite their performance.

CORBETT - "combination of DRUDGE & LIMBOsevic"----Zeus! What a horrible concept.

I'm saving this for use in certain discussions that come up here:

"As a shrewd businessman as well as a man of the people, Franklin knew the secret of publishing a successful newspaper -- give readers a compelling mix of the high and low. It's a knack that has been largely forgotten by progressive publishers today, who labor under the peculiar conviction that readers can be sustained by a dry diet of indignant rhetoric and moral instruction alone."

[BurtWorm]

6. kick