Crossing the Lines:
Treason, Dissent, and Ben Wood's Copperhead New York Daily News
Menahem Blondheim
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The New York Daily News was established in 1855 as a political medium with a social message. Its politics were Democratic, its social agenda focused on promoting the welfare of the city's and country's laborers. In the 1870's the Daily News emerged as the largest selling newspaper in New York city and ergo, in the United States. For most of the next generation the Daily News retained that distinction, and even under the onslaught of Pulitzer's World and Hearst's Journal, the Daily News held its own, succumbing to its powerful competitors and their new brand of journalism only with the 1900 death of Benjamin Wood, the Daily News's proprietor and editor for 40 years.[i]
[i] Frank Luther Mott, America Journalism: A History of Newspapers in the United States Through 260 Years: 1690-1950 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1950), p. 354; David F. Long, "The New York News, 1855-1906: Spokesman for the Underprivileged" (Ph.D. Diss., Colombia University, 1950), pp. ii, 146-52.