This paper reports on preliminary study of coverage of the Emancipation Proclamation with special interest in 1) how journalists treated freedom for hated ideas, such as the Proclamation is presumed to have been for most Southerners, and 2) evidence of any concern about a standard like objective reporting. Accepting functionalist theory that the press maintains and supports the social system, it was expected that journalists would support the North or South according to their regional affiliations and that this would shape coverage. It was also expected that journalists would favor limits on press freedom to protect the system to which they adhered. Thus, objective reporting was not expected, but any discussion of journalistic practices might yield insights about its development as a standard.
All Southern journalists considered here treated the Proclamation as a hated idea and editorially attacked it, regardless partisan preferences. In general, journalists seemed to reject press freedom for opponents. Coverage followed their tendency to support the larger social system they gave loyalty. That is, journalists seemed to defend freedom of expression only within the limitations and interests of their respective larger social systems and/or political positions. New York Times and Richmond Dispatch editors illustrate, for both called press freedom one of the most essential Constitutional rights–the former to accuse the South of destroying it and the latter to attack Lincoln for trampling on it. Even abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison, despite having suffered suppression thirty years earlier, asserted that press freedom was all but irrelevant concerning perpetrators of ideas he hated.
Little evidence was found of a journalistic standard such as objectivity. "Biased" comments that essentially told readers how to view the news often prefaced or followed "straight" news reports.
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