Misinformation Nation

Misinformation is not only a modern problem; it was a fundamental issue during the 18th century and the United States’ founding. In Misinformation Nation: Foreign News and the Politics of Truth in Revolutionary America, historian Jordan E. Taylor presents the history of how the early American press collected news from domestic and foreign sources as well as its role in shaping public opinion during a period of changing beliefs and political upheaval. Taylor’s research shows the complex relationship between the burgeoning nation and the often-unreliable foreign (especially British) news sources that informed American citizens.

Taylor uses primary news sources to trace how American newspapers, lacking firsthand information, relied heavily on British and other European reports, often translating and editing them to fit local political agendas. These practices led to misrepresented and confused views of international conflicts and beliefs, which in turn influenced American politics and social life. The parallels between the Revolutionary era’s struggles with misinformation and today’s challenges with propaganda and media bias highlight the long-standing historical tension between truth and political interests.

Read an excerpt from Misinformation Nation discussing the American press’ continued reliance on news reported by British and other European newspapers in the years after the Revolutionary War despite the United States having already won independence.

Excerpt

Once Americans earned their independence, it seemed possible, for just a moment, that they would never again think of Europe. The war was over. The peace was won. The nation belonged to them. Who cared about old King George or his Parliament? Who needed a weekly digest of the affairs of Europe? Since they were no longer members of the British empire, who would still direct their gaze eastward for their news? Despite his Irish ancestry, the Philadelphia printer Mathew Carey argued in 1785, “Europe no longer affords the inexhaustible fund of intelligence” that it once did. Printers, he added, could no longer simply copy “London and other European news in America.” It seemed unlikely that European news “can be very essential, or even entertaining to us now.” With independence, some expected that an “American reader” would find “trifling observations” about the English royal family quite dull.

If no one cared about Europe, though, what would newspapers report on? The conclusion of the war brought an end to the thrilling news that had led many Americans to subscribe to newspapers for the first time. The serialized drama of armies, fleets, and diplomats maneuvering for advantage across a vast terrain had stretched across years but was now over. Some complained that the “News-Papers are less entertaining, than they were some months ago.”

A poetic address written for the Connecticut Courant’s subscribers in 1784 pointed out that the end of the war had left a vacuum: “Peace comes hard at all adventures / On Merchants, Heroes, and News-printers.” While admitting that the “folks, who live by news” had “lost the news you crave,” the writer came to the same conclusion as Carey, suggesting that printers would “make the best of what we have,” sharing news and commentary on local politics, “town-resolves,” and “Congress and Assemblies.” Perhaps Barzillai Hudson and George Goodwin, the printers of the Courant, hoped to stimulate demand for their paper by making the case for American news as an object of interest. If this was their plan, they dropped it quickly. The next year, the Courant’s address to its subscribers described an altogether different set of public appetites: “Though war at home has ceas’d to rage, / Yet foreign news your minds engage.” The writer went on to boast that the Courant had offered news about events in Britain, Ireland, the Holy Roman Empire, Holland, Spain, France, India, and North Africa. After experimenting with local and national news, Hudson and Goodwin had found that their readers still craved news from abroad.

They were not alone. Other writers and printers in the 1780s found little local or national news to fill their columns. For much of that decade, national politics were not a theater of great political intrigue. The American colonies had agreed to the Articles of Confederation, which created a weak central government that invited apathy rather than engagement. Moreover, local news tended to stay local. In the small cities of revolutionary America, printers had little incentive to publish information that their readers would learn through conversation before they received their weekly issue. Because newspaper printers shared little news about their town or region, other printers had little to draw on. In late 1788, for example, printer George Jerry Osborne explained in his New-Hampshire Spy that his paper contained so little “American news” because “there is none to publish.” He sarcastically asked why it was that “on a continent so extensive…so little intelligence should occur.” As Osborne knew, it was not that nothing happened in North America but rather that other papers didn’t record what did happen.

As a result, foreign news continued to dominate the pages of postrevolutionary newspapers. Given the choice, most printers opted for a piece of foreign news ahead of a political essay. In a 1790 issue of his Federal Gazette, for example, printer Andrew Brown explained that he was delaying the publication of various letters and essays from correspondents because he was “obliged to devote the Gazette chiefly to foreign news, a few days longer.” Likewise, in late 1787, even as Americans were debating the ratification of the proposed US Constitution, printer Isaiah Thomas previewed the contents of a new magazine by emphasizing the importance of foreign news, with domestic news only as an aside:

By the foreign news inserted in this Magazine, our readers will perceive that there are great commotions amongst the European Nations; these commotions, although at such a distance, will in some degree affect us—this, together with the important period we have now arrived at, of settling a National Government, will undoubtedly, for months to come, furnish our Readers with as great a variety of truly momentous and interesting matters, as ever did, or perhaps ever will, come under their consideration.   

When they sought to attract subscribers in the 1780s and 1790s, printers often emphasized that their newspaper would concentrate on foreign news and particularly on revolutionary events abroad. A Boston newspaper prospectus in 1794, for example, noted, “In the present convulsed situation…when revolutions are taking place, and when Empires, which have lasted for ages, and whose adamantine pillars mocked the force of time, now totter to their basis…no person will, surely, question the utility of a periodical publication.”

American independence began a decades-long process of negotiating the relationship between long-standing British habits and a nascent American national identity. Many historians have demonstrated that the end of the revolutionary war caused colonists to reconsider the place of British culture, commerce, and politics in the new nation. These scholars, though, have left unexplored postrevolutionary Americans’ concerns with foreign and especially British news. Could the denizens of the new United States be truly American if their view of the world continued to be that of a British colony? Relying on British news sources, some feared, would weaken the new nation’s independence. Others worried that their nation’s transition away from British information was too gradual, and they looked for ways to accelerate it by translating and circulating alternative news sources. By seeking fresh information sources after they achieved independence, Americans hoped to reimagine their relationship to the world.

Even as Americans negotiated the impact of independence on their news-gathering practices, the meanings and material contexts of that news were in flux. The global revolutions and wars of the late eighteenth century disrupted epistolary communications while creating more demand for lengthy, detailed reports. Since newspapers provided more detailed accounts of events than letters or conversations could ever hope to do, Americans began to rely more on printed news sources to understand their world. Moreover, as US commerce expanded beyond the British empire in the aftermath of independence, Americans could engage with a more diverse international print culture. A greater variety of news offered competing narratives and explanations, which created more confusion and division. As news became more plural, so did Americans’ experience of it and their application of it to their politics. The expansion of Americans’ news sources created a world of many possibilities and few certainties.

While independence did little to affect Americans’ interest in foreign news, it led them to reconsider where they were getting that news. As previous chapters demonstrated, the politics of misrepresentation and London news sources during the American Revolution drew observers’ attention to the artificial pathways along which information traveled around the British world. But while they had once interpreted news sources from abroad according to their politics, American observers after the war began to judge them based more on their place of publication. A London newspaper was no longer identified as an “opposition” or “ministerial” print but rather as primarily a British paper.

It grated on some Americans that their nation remained so dependent on Britain for global news years after they had declared independence. As long as US newspapers practiced and “indiscriminate publication...of English articles of news and politics,” one printer commented, they were behaving as if the revolution never happened. Americans’ continued reliance on British news sources was obvious even in London, where a correspondent shared his “disappointment and disgust” at seeing so many US newspaper printers engaging in a “servile copying” from British papers: “A stranger here, who had heard nothing of the American revolution, would, I am confident, from the greater part of your American Newspapers, supposed you were English colonies still.” In 1795, a group of Philadelphians echoed these sentiments. They suggested that if someone could read US newspapers without knowing where they had been published, they would naturally conclude that they were from “the meridian of London.”

For many Americans, London papers’ apparent lies during the imperial crisis and war for independence disqualified them as legitimate news sources. Printer Nicholas Power of the Poughkeepsie Journal, for example, dismissed a series of “extracts from English papers” in 1793 on the basis of those papers’ “former impositions during our own war with them.” Likewise, an anonymous writer in a 1793 issue of the Boston Independent Chronicle compared those who attacked revolutionary France to Thomas Hutchinson’s supposed misrepresentations during the Anglo-American imperial crisis. The essayist implored Americans to ignore British accounts of events in France and wait instead for news that came directly from the French. To drive the point home, the writer implored Americans to “remember that there were formerly corrupted channels through which every vile insinuation was forwarded to Britain. Should we look over the British papers printed during the late [American revolutionary] war, we should find the same abuse of our patriots, and the same reflections on our public measures, as are now so liberally bestowed on our Gallic Friends.” For these observers, the American Revolution had exposed the corruption of all British newspapers, regardless of political affiliation. 

During the 1780s and 1790s, American observers continued to detect incongruities between realities in the United States, as they perceived them, and British papers’ reporting. Seeing that “British news-papers teem with abuse of America,” some people imagined that Britain’s campaign of deception and misrepresentation was continuing apace.” These self-appointed experts about the state of America judged the accuracy of the London press by comparing their own experiences with the ways that London newspapers described the United States. When these diverged, they decried the London presses’ deceit. This commonsense, empiricist approach to evaluating news has long been the practices of news consumers. “What better criterion does the man at the breakfast table possess,” asked writer Walter Lippmann in 1922, “than that the newspaper version checks up with his own opinion?”

American printers regularly shared London papers’ derisive descriptions of the United States. Francis Childs noted that British papers were “filled with reproaches, invectives, and indignities” about the United States and suggested, “Let us be no longer indebted for our intelligence to channels so corrupt.” Some readers posited that the British government was spreading lies about US instability in order to prevent a massive postrevolutionary wave of migration to the new nation. Printer Daniel Fowle wrote in his New Hampshire Gazette, “By the late London papers we find, that, in order to discourage Britons from emigrating to America, they descend to the same low cunning...which they so much practiced in vain before the late war, of painting the characters of the Americans in the blackest colours.” Of course, the United States did experience a series of crises and disputes during the 1780s that both worried American elites and delighted the Britons who felt that the Americans had been unprepared for self-government. Their “reproaches” were not entirely unearned.

Another reason that American observers distrusted London newspapers is that they seldom reprinted from American papers. Instead, much as angry colonists had accused the ministry of doing during the imperial crisis, they seemed to gather reports about the United States from letters, travelers, and diplomatic sources, or they summarized and paraphrased American newspapers’ reports. As one Briton wrote, “news printers cannot be prevailed on to copy any thing from your papers.” The result was a trade imbalance between British and American newspapers. A Portland, Massachusetts, writer noted that British newspaper editors “carefully avoid publishing any extracts from our papers but such as are calculated to show the whole world that we are starving with famine, or torn to pieces by factions. In return for these insults and neglects, we copy every event that happens in Great-Britain, as if we were still dependent on them.” Some felt that Britons’ reluctance to reprint US newspapers’ reports resulted from their perceptions of American inferiority. One anecdote circulated in American newspapers in 1788 about an American captain offering a British merchant a copy of a newspaper so that he could read the new US Constitution. But the merchant “could not condescend to read an American newspaper, saying he should soon have an opportunity of seeing it in the English papers.”

Seeing apparent misrepresentations about North America printed in London, US observers became increasingly distrustful of British reports about the broader world. If they were willing to lie about North America, why not Europe or the Caribbean or Asia? Unimpressed with some news that arrived from Britain in late 1785, the printer of the State Gazette of South-Carolina, Ann Timothy, shared a summary of this information with the heading “Lies Collected from British News-Papers.” This collection included a bit of news about the United States, which claimed that the country was in a “pitiful condition” and its people “half scalped by the Indians.” But as she dismissed these accounts of America, Timothy also tossed aside several reports about events in Europe and Canada about which she has less direct knowledge. London newspapers seemed so unreliable that almost anything they reported was suspect.

The revolutionary events that broke out in Europe at this time heightened American observers’ concerns about their continued reliance on British news sources. Boston printer Nathaniel Willis dismissed accounts coming from Britain about Irish resistance in 1780 as being “on the ministerial side.” British newspapers’ reports about the Dutch Patriot Revolt, an uprising in the Netherlands during the 1780s, seemed equally suspect. In a letter published in US newspapers in 1788, and Amsterdam merchant warned that English accounts of events in the Netherlands were “as much beyond the truth as what they quote of the Americans.” Despite “contradictory articles,” London newspapers largely took the side of Stadtholder William V against the Dutch rebels.

American observers’ distrust of British news sources sometimes guided them into misperception. Printers who sympathized with the Dutch Patriot cause, for example, largely discounted British reports of Prussia’s successful invasion of the Netherlands in 1787. Rejecting news from London that appeared to exaggerate the size of the Prussian force, New York printer Thomas Greenleaf chose instead a few paragraphs that “seem to have been written with a degree of impartiality.” Benjamin Russell of the Massachusetts Centinel likewise suggested that the “partiality of the English in favour of the Stadtholderan party, in Holland, induces very unfavourable representations respecting the Dutch patriots.” He clucked that the account from Britain “are copied into the American papers much to the prejudice of the latter.” But, he assured his readers, he could inform them based on a “better authority than that of the British news-writers" that the Dutch would stand firm against foreign encroachments. When it became clear that the Prussian invasion had in fact succeeded in dispersing the Patriots, Russell admitted that “the London papers...like the greatest liars, tell the truth for once.”

The French Revolution particularly intensified Americans’ distrust of British newspapers. Writers regularly pointed out the absurdity of relying on Britain, France’s ancient enemy, “whose inhabitants have been educated with a determined hatred against France,” for news about that country. Some observers only trusted London newspapers’ account when they ran contrary to the ministry’s wishes. Printers Francis Childs and John Swaine commented in 1791, for example, that “France (even by the English accounts) is going on quietly.” Boston editor Paul Joseph Guérard de Nancrède drew on this distrust to promote a Francophone newspaper. In a 1789 prospectus, he wrote that his aim was to free Americans from the “moral slavery in which they now moan, by means of the public English newspapers....The American lacking all other means if information, searches his papers, reads [British papers] and very often gives credence to them; it is in this way that they become, without wanting it, the partisan of a rival nation.” In contrast, Nancrède promised, the Courier de Boston would rely on direct correspondence with “all parties in Europe” to receive continental papers. This scheme did not pan out, and Nancrède’s paper lasted only a few months. Instead of translating material from other papers and corresponding with foreigners, it remained far easier for printers to continue reproducing material from the British prints that arrived at the harbor.

Jordan E. Taylor, Misinformation Nation: Foreign News and the Politics of Truth in Revolutionary America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022), 87-94.