On April 9, 1836, a prostitute named Helen Jewett was axed to death in a stylish New York City brothel; the police arrested a dry-goods clerk who had visited her that night to celebrate his nineteenth birthday. Five years later, in September 1841, a printer named Samuel Adams was bludgeoned to death and stuffed into a crate to be shipped out of town; the police arrested the brother of Samuel Colt, the inventor of the revolver. These two crimes are plenty interesting in and of themselves, but for Andie Tucher, a producer at ABC News, they are even more interesting for how they were covered by the city's new penny newspapers, and for what that coverage says about American mass journalism at its very inception. For as she shows, the birth of mass media in America was the birth of all the problems and conflicts and discontents with mass media that trouble us today.

The first inexpensive, independent newspaper aimed at a large readership, the New York Sun, was founded in 1833 by Benjamin Day. Within two years Day had two prominent competitors, the New York Transcript and James Gordon Bennett's Herald. When the Jewett case broke, the three papers jumped on the story. The Sun reported that the victim was "intelligent, beautiful, and accomplished"; the Transcript, that she was "very genteel and pretty." Bennett claimed that he got in to see the body and pronounced it "as white, as full, as polished as the purest Padan marble. The perfect figure . . . surpassed in every respect the Venus de Medicis."

Beyond that, the papers told wildly opposing stories. The Transcript reported flatly that the accused, Richard Robinson, "alone is the guilty individual," and the Sun said the same. The Herald, arguing that no "man in any respect" could "act so terribly towards lovely woman" and that the use of an ax indicated "the vengeance of female wickedness -- the burning of female revenge," proposed a conspiracy theory, a plot to frame Robinson concocted by "the licentious inmates of a fashionable brothel" and backed by "part of the police establishment, which is rotten to the heart" and "an indicted thief and editor of a daily paper" -- that is, Benjamin Day of the Sun.

If that sounds preposterous, it's because it is. But the other two papers' angle, while it accorded with the facts better, was really no closer to the full truth of the story. If Bennett's Herald portrayed the murdered prostitute as evil incarnate and Robinson as her innocent victim, the Sun and the Transcript presented her as a pure naif and Robinson as an utterly inhuman monster.

The newspapers were all indulging in the spirit of the times. People enjoyed obvious exaggerations and untruths. They stood in line to see the woman P. T. Barnum told them was the 161-year-old former nurse of George Washington, and they snapped up newspapers to read an astronomer" s descriptions of spherical amphibians living on the moon. They didn't expect strict reporting, exactly, from newspapers for which the concept of objectivity had not yet fully developed. As Tucher puts it, the papers' readers were guided "by two unspoken but clearly understood presumptions. An untruth that does not deceive is not a lie. And a truth that does not satisfy is no better than a lie."

The first of those presumptions is familiar to anybody who has ever enjoyed the Weekly World News at the checkout counter or the horoscope in the daily paper. The second presumption is far more subtle and pervasive and dangerous, for it rejects all truths that won't appeal to the reader.

What all the newspapers were doing was giving their specific audiences a truth that they could and would accept. As Tucher explains it, the Sun and the Transcript were speaking to a solidly working-class audience for whom the well-connected Robinson and his attorneys -- who got him acquitted -- represented oppressive power and its abuse. Bennett was addressing readers who were slightly better off; they would largely identify with Robinson, and see Jewett as a subversive threat to the order and morality of their ways.

The scene was somewhat changed five years later, when John Colt murdered Samuel Adams. By then Bennett's Herald was the only powerful survivor of those three original penny dailies; its main competition was a newcomer, Horace Greeley's Tribune. Both papers were going after the same audience now, and it consisted of a rising middle class. Greeley was an entirely earnest do-gooder, and the sides drawn up in reporting this murder were, as Tucher writes, "between sensationalism and moralism, amusement and education, voyeurism and verdict making, celebration of the city and fear of it, glorification of crime and condemnation of it."

The prudish Greeley didn't even like covering the story, but he felt obligated to: he felt the murderer's descent into vice provided a valuable lesson for other young men alone in the city. Bennett contended with Greeley's high-mindedness by presenting himself as performing a civic duty too, the duty to reveal every fact of the case, no matter how ugly -- but he was also no longer pursuing rumors and dubious leads. Because of that he missed a sensational aspect of the case, a scoop that would have shown the murderer behaving with almost saintly nobility in a family matter in which his famous brother was the scoundrel. Once again, the pursuit of simple truth prevented the discovery of fuller truth.

"A good many problems plague the modern mass media," Tucher says, "but looming large among them is this: we still expect journalism to tell us the Truth. Our Truth." In a nineteen-page epilogue, she gives a brisk summary of the history of newspaper journalism since 1841, describing "the enthronement of the objective voice" that began with the rise of the modern New York Times at the end of the century and the threat to that objectivity today, with "the public's growing conviction that true objectivity is not actually possible." She sketches a severely fragmented journalistic world now in which people find the particular truth they want in their own favorite medium while universally railing against the mainstream national media for opposing their point of view whatever it is.

Her final reflections should interest anyone who takes journalism seriously. She writes that "the root of our ongoing difficulties and disillusionments with the news coverage we read and hear" lies in the fact that "we tend to confuse the product of journalism with its processes. Journalism itself is essentially a process, a way to search for truth, not a tool to ratify it. . . . Various methods serve the process of journalism. Humbug itself is a method, not a conclusion; it was the arduous task of working through truths, comparing them, debating them, and judging them that allowed readers to form their own conclusions about Jewett's death and Robinson's guilt. Objectivity," she goes on, "is a method, not an outcome; it was the painstaking work of examining, investigating, and observing that allowed the Herald to paint such vivid descriptions of Colt's last day [he committed suicide on the day he was to be executed] that readers in Little Rock could see the scene with as much clarity as any denizen of Badway."

Truth certainly is as elusive and personal today as it was in 1836 or 1841. Just consider the truth about any anti-abortion demonstration, or the truth about Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill. Who doesn't feel strongly that he knows for himself what that truth is? Who wants to read an account of either that doesn't accord with that truth? Yet the idea of a single overriding objective truth in either of those matters may be beyond anything journalism can achieve.

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe