Yeah, this book is really driving it home just how much the press narrative has unchanged, and in fact really moderated over time.
I mean, in 1800, you had the Sedition act, which made publishing anti-government writing punishable with prison terms, and then you had Republican (today's Democrats) newspaper publishers getting hauled in front of Federalist judges (including Supreme Court Justices) on Sedition charges, and the judges essentially directing the jury to find these people guilty. Such as George's nephew Bushrod (awesome name) Washington declaring to the jury that a newspaper was "libelous beyond even the possibility of a doubt."
Yet newspapers were still publishing things like "you who are for French notions of government (French revolution Jacobin Terror), for the sea of anarchy and misrule, for arming the poor against the rich, for the foes of God and man, go to the left."
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