[Any comments, criticisms, or suggestions you have would be greatly appreciated. Please send them to me care of the Dept. of History, Virginia Commonwealth University, P.O. Box 842001, Richmond, VA 23284-2001, or via e-mail (jkirn@cabell.vcu.edu). Thanks!]
More than any other institution, it was the partisan newspaper press which sustained the high levels of voter turnout and party loyalty which characterized nineteenth-century American politics. The press and political parties grew up together in the early Republic and their fortunes were intimately related for much of the nineteenth century.
While editors benefitted from the political patronage that parties could bestow, party leaders recognized the incalculable value of the press as an agent of political socialization and a distributor of political information. It is during the Civil War era, however, that competition within the newspaper industry begins to transform the role of rural weekly newspapers in New York, diminishing their political influence, and pushing them toward their present day function as a purveyor of strictly local news.
After 1870, rural editors increasingly conceived their role to be that
of local news-gatherers. And indeed, a content analysis of eight New York
rural weeklies in 1850 and 1880 reveals a dramatic increase in the percentage
of column space devoted to purely local, and non-partisan, news. Given the
important socializing role such papers traditionally played, this transformation
may help to explain the roots of our present day disengagement from party
politics, charaterized by low voter turnout, which set in at the turn of
the century.
**Return to Conference Program**
Last updated: March 9, 1998.
Comments to: Communication Department
