Representing Public Opinion: US Newspapers and the News System in the Long Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This essay examines the expectations and concerns of the founding generation, as they laid the foundation for a national media system while building up the postal system. It discusses the rise of the party press, and show how the infrastructure of the system, including the ways that a typical newspaper was produced, invited cooptation by political parties, even while the superego of the press system condemned partisanism. The party press has been hailed by some as more democratic than the succeeding commercial and professional press systems. The essay qualifies this point of view, by showing how the party system, coupled with the openness of the system of editorial exchange, allowed voices outside the mainstream to speak, but simultaneously policed expression, distorting public recognition of racial groups, for instance, and reformist political and social movements. Finally the essay discusses the ways in which the party press system was eclipsed by commercial and professional press systems, and the ways in which the function of the press in representing public opinion has been obscured as a result. I conclude by suggesting that twenty-first century media tools and market and public opinion research has weakened the force of the representation of public opinion as a ‘regulative fiction’.