Journalism and War the American Twin's

 This is an article I found by Don Bracken, the owner and creator of the History Publishing Company, about journalism's role in war through out history. I found it particularly interesting, because it is an article by a well know historian providing evidence supporting my percept of journalism during the American Revolution.

     "Passion was the main stuff of journalism long before the Civil War, the birthplace of modern American journalism. The Press of the American Revolution during the War and before it, was borne of it. Newspapers then were not as we know them today. Weekly advertising mediums they were, but they were primarily opinion pieces designed to protect interests or to provoke the readership. They were propaganda organs in the truest sense. They were virtual flagpoles of ideology from which the editor could wave his political flag. As tools of political activism, they often published articles of principles treating of various freedoms or governmental responsibilities, as the editors saw them to be, mostly by pseudonymous authors sometimes using names taken from the Greek or Roman classics like Cato or Ovid.

What news did exist was usually a local crime graphically treated, a poem perhaps, or a reference to a literary work or some happening from Europe that occurred months previously and brought to the editor’s notice by people arriving in town. Newspapers shared news too, for as fever rose in the colonies and happenings became more frequent the need to know took place and the sharing of news from paper to paper became more commonplace.

But news gathering during the war coverage was not organized, newspapers relied almost wholly on the chance arrival of private letters and of official and semi-official documents. News sources were scarce, but opinion was abundant and it covered both sides. Tory and patriot presses would fire verbal broadsides at each other’s interests and any newspaper hoping to maintain a dispassionate objectivity examining both sides of the issues, found themselves in a “no-man’s land” and was considered “on the other side.” Often the news was engineered, perhaps none so well as the ‘reportage’ of the Boston Massacre by the Boston Gazette."

This is the only part of Bracken's article that I felt was relevant to my point, but I found the entire article to be interesting. If you're interested to go deeper into the story, you can find it at: 

http://www.historypublishingco.com/articles_journalism_war.html