Transcript for 375 Misinformation Nation: Fake News in Early America

Every time a piece of news jumps from one publication to another or when it jumps from one medium to another, there's room for error. There's room for people to make honest mistakes or to misunderstand the news and there's definitely room for people to engage in mischief.

Thank you, Liz. It's great to be here.

Yeah, I wish I had a great sort of superhero origin story about being a paper boy or something growing up, or maybe like encountering the ghost of Ben Franklin. But with the benefit of hindsight, I think one of the big reasons I became a historian of news and information is that when I started graduate school in the early 2010s focusing on the American Revolution, That was a moment in time when social media was really coming to the fore and starting to really rapidly change how Americans were collecting news and communicating. I'm sure most people remember, in some ways it was a really exciting time. Stories were circulating about how Twitter and Facebook were driving the Arab Spring or were rallying together new political coalitions in the United States. There was a lot of dissatisfaction. with traditional news media sources. A lot of people regard it as painted in some ways biased toward corporate interests and for them social media had a lot of promise it seemed to offer a way to remove like sort of this filter of elite gatekeepers who had played such an important part in the production of news in the past and sort of promised to empower people to communicate directly among each other. But then, as we spent more and more time online and as we spent more time on social media, I think we started to recognize the mixed blessings of this transition. If you knew just exactly how to navigate social media in all the right ways, you could become incredibly well informed. And if you didn't, you could become incredibly misinformed. So this kind of experience over the past decade or so has raised a lot of questions for me. When we empower people, are we also taking attention and power away from experts? Is American democracy entering a period when political decision making is going to become unmoored from reality? All of these questions are sort of rumbling around in the background. And I started doing research for a dissertation project on a different topic, really. But while I was doing this research, I kept running into these newspapers, these letters, these pamphlets that expressed some of these concerns, which felt very familiar about truth, about misinformation, about the media. And I was really pulled in by those. It turns out that the generation that led the American Revolution was every bit as cynical and concerned about newspapers as Americans today are about social media and digital media more generally. They had many of the same fears that I think a lot of us do about the circulation of misinformation around us. They thought that people were easily misled that newspapers could be wonderful. They could inform us, but they could also deceive us. And they thought that if ordinary people were not well-informed about the news, But foreign and domestic then a popular form of government would never really work because American newspapers were for the most part independent of the state Americans were worried that that made them vulnerable to sort of the intrigues of foreign powers, especially Britain and France, or even a global conspiracy like the Illuminati. So if these foreign powers could pull the strings of a newspaper, they thought that a foreign nation could manipulate public opinion and manipulate elections in their favor. So that's really how I became interested in the history of news once they started reading the newspapers especially from the American Revolutionary Era. I kept getting distracted by these conversations within them about sort of the impossibility and the vulnerability of truth and a democratic society.

Yeah, those were really important. If you look particularly as I do add news that comes into North America from from the shoreline inward, you see really three important news media sources that would arrive on ships in American ports. One of those was letters, which we haven't mentioned. One of those was newspapers printed abroad. One of those was just like you said sort of talkative people. A ship would usually collect letters and newspapers before it departed. And once it arrived, the letters went to the post office. The newspapers went to the local print shop. And the people aboard would sort of scatter throughout the city. People would quiz new arrivals and looking for the latest details. Sometimes newspaper printers had to compete to try to get the letters or the newspapers that were on board so that they would have something to reprint. And in my opinion, people in early America were quite sophisticated in thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of each of these kinds of new sources. So sort of oral reports that you would get from ship captains from sailors from passengers aboard a ship were really useful because you could engage in a conversation with those folks. You could ask follow up questions. You could sort of probe them to see what kind of useful context that they might have. But there's a problem with those kinds of new sources as well, right, which is that after you've been on a ship for weeks or months. And it would sometimes take a couple of months to travel from Europe to North America. You know, your memory starts to get a little bit of hazy. You might sort of paper over the cracks in your memories with a few details that you've concocted yourself. So some people really didn't trust news reports from folks who were doing the traveling. And they preferred either letters or newspapers. Letters are great in the sense that they can guide their recipients to think about how to approach other media. They can say, this rumor is false, this report that's going on in the newspapers right now originated with someone who isn't reputable, things like that. Letters were also really useful because they arrived in North America from a broader range of locations. The newspapers which tended to arrive mostly from the ports that Americans were trading with. The problem is letters didn't go into detail to the same extent that newspapers especially did. Letters were often really frustratingly for a historian of full of sentences like, you know, if you really want to read the news, you should check out the newspaper I don't have time. where they would sort of complain that the hand was starting to craft and for their correspondence to a newspaper that's enclosed with the letter. So newspapers were great. If you were after really detailed information, if you were after carefully sequenced narratives, if you wanted quotations or reports about legislative debate or something like that, newspapers were the only way that someone thousands of miles away was going to get that kind of detail. But they were subject to the regulation and the intervention of foreign nations. They didn't necessarily come from a neutral place or from a trusted individual. In a lot of cases, they were printed at the behest of an imperial government or political party. Another problem with newspapers that they didn't offer sort of the context that a letter or a conversation brought with them for understanding whether the contents were accurate. They were written for a particular audience at a particular moment and they were most certainly not written for an American audience until, you know, obviously material was pulled into American newspapers and reprinted some of which didn't make a lot of sense to American readers as a result. So local newspapers printed in North America tried to pull all of this together. They did their best. Typically, most of the material they reprinted came from newspapers published abroad, especially from London and the rest of England as well as some other European capitals. But newspapers also would print extracts from letters that they came across and they would sometimes do their best to sort of summarize the local gossip that's pervading the city where their newspapers being credited.

newspapers offer us as historians and people interested in the past are really useful window onto the kinds of news that people were consuming and discussing in the past. And so that's why they're such an important source for us. But it's also really important to note, I think, that not everyone at the time had access to a newspaper. They were pretty expensive. It took a lot of time and money to make the physical paper that newspapers were printed on to set the type to print it, right? This is a hand power process. There aren't sort of steam power machines yet. It takes a lot of effort to distribute the newspaper door to door or to send it through the mail. And so for the most part, your average labor could really afford a yearly newspaper subscription. They might hear sections of a newspaper being read aloud. They might borrow a copy here or there. A lot of ordinary people probably experience newspaper reports sort of second or third hand from someone who heard from someone who heard from someone who read a demo news paper and there can be sort of this game of telephone effect that happens where a newspaper is sort of setting The agenda for broader conversation even though a lot of people in the area where that newspaper is being printed are not actually reading the physical newspaper. So when news arrives in North America in whatever form, whether it's a letter or a rumor or a foreign newspaper, it's quickly amplified and transformed as people wrote letters sharing the news. People who work in print shops sort of transform the news for their purposes. And most of all, as people are sharing the latest reports with their neighbors, with their friends, their acquaintances, members of their household. And so I think we have to think of all of these news media as interacting with each other, transforming and mediating the news for different audiences. And that's really effective. That's very efficient way of allowing news to spread. But again, we have a problem, right, which is that Every time a piece of news jumps from one publication to another or when it jumps from one medium to another, there's room for error. There's room for people to make honest mistakes or to misunderstand the news and there's definitely room for people to engage in mischief. So a newspaper printer can edit or omit or translate or fabricate news based on their own interests. They don't have any professional or ethical standards to uphold. So they would, in a lot of cases, emit the news that they've disliked, translate a report if it's in another language and a favorable way, and occasionally just make something up. if they had political interests in the news that arrived partisan printers would usually just share the news that served them. And so in this kind of news environment where information is moving really promiscuously from one source to another, and nobody was usually sort of bothering to pause and verify the news or even make sure that a reproduction of an original source was a faithful reproduction, a huge amount of error sort of crept into things. And the result is that a lot of that news about events abroad ended up being false and circulating without much effort to stop it. And that's not really because Americans are particularly credulous or easily deceived or because there are a lot of evil mustache trilling villains out there trying to lie and deceive people about the news in ways that People in early America for the most part didn't fully understand the information systems that were available to them and the sort of culture surrounding information was just not ready for the very, very difficult task of communicating across a vast ocean without the tools, techniques and technologies of verification that come about a century later.

You know, it's hard to generalize, but there are lots of examples of newspaper printers in North America sort of remixing the news for their own audiences. During the 1770s, for example, some Patriot printers discovered that a New York loyalist printer named James Rivington was sort of taking letters and cutting out the bits that he didn't like when he would reprint them. So things like that did happen pretty regularly. And I think one of the things that's hard for us as people who are inheriting these sources is that we can't always tell that a newspaper printer was ignoring a particular piece of news or that they were cutting something out for like a political purpose. A lot of cases. We just don't know what information they were encountering before they made the selections that resulted in the contents of their newspaper. So we have to be a little bit cautious when we talk about newspaper printers adjusting the contents of the news based on what they received. But I can tell you that people at the time were not so cautious. They were constantly accusing rival newspaper printers of taking material and twisting it to serve their own ends. And we know that it happened enough to say that not all of those complaints or charges were entirely invented, but it's just difficult to say how often it happened without sort of the benefit of omniscience.

Yeah, people were rightly suspicious of newspapers. They understood that newspaper printers didn't have the ability to verify information before it was provided to them. And a lot of the early newspapers, including the Pennsylvania Gazette, published by Benjamin Franklin, that these newspapers were reprinting material almost without caring about whether it was true or false. Ben Franklin when he was working at the Pennsylvania Gazette, he came in for some criticism from some readers at times for the material that he was sharing. And he wrote an essay very well known to historians of newspapers called an apology for printers where he suggests that newspaper printers should Share everything that they came across without regard to whether it's true or not, they should be totally neutral, sharing what he described as a great variety of things opposite and contradictory because he thought that this is a quote, when truth and error have fair play that the truth would always prevail. And so this is in other words a way of saying that false news isn't really harmful because people would always eventually be able to determine what was true and what was false. The earliest printers like Franklin usually just left it up to readers to decide what was true. Another of my favorite examples involves a Boston printer named John Campbell, who is the first publisher of a long-standing newspaper the Boston newsletter. And in one of the earliest issues of the Boston newsletter, he admitted that he had accidentally published some false news. But he got really defensive about it. It wasn't sort of like this. gentle correction notice that you would expect it like the New York Times or Washington Post or LA Times these days he's very defensive at almost angry and he asks his readers he sort of challenges his readers you know who among you has not passed on a false rumor in their time In other words, I'm just a guy sharing rumors is sort of how he thought of himself. It's your fault. If you trusted those rumors, you have to do this sort of work yourself. And so newspaper printers, especially early on, really benefit from this culture that doesn't assign automatic trust to something just because it appears in print. This starts to change during the American Revolution. The idea that a newspaper wasn't responsible for the material that it publishes ends up being a problem for the Patriots who are leading the American Revolution. In part because they really want to hold loyalist newspaper printers responsible for the news that they were sharing. And so during the 1770s some of the particularly committed Patriot printers like John Holt and New York City proposed an alternate model. They argued that newspapers should actually go out of their way to avoid publishing falsehoods. And that sounds great, right? I'm sure that we all agree that it's a bad idea to publish falsehoods, but the problem was that during the 1770s, they didn't have any idea how to do that. They had no tools of verification that were sort of necessary to accomplish this goal of only publishing things that were true. But nevertheless, this sort of activist style where patriot printers tried to only publish things that they considered to be true, this became relatively common in the late 18th century. It suited the partisan printers of the late 1780s and the 1790s especially. Many newspapers that aligned themselves with the emerging political system of the 1790s would sometimes call the first party system of the Federalists and the Republicans. They printed news that they claimed was generally true, and that seemed true to their partisan audiences because it aligned with what those audiences already believed to be true. And so as these printers are taking on more than activists role in the distribution of news and they're intervening more in the flow of news, they would take certain steps. They wouldn't do exactly what the New York Times does today where they sort of need several independent sources before they publish, but they would Share their opinion, they would share information that they thought was false, but they would say, you know, we don't really think this is true. Sometimes they would let their readers know that they were refusing to publish news from sources that they considered to be corrupted in some way. And sometimes they would challenge their rivals directly and call their rivals out. Newspaper printers aligned with the other political faction in town. They would challenge them for printing news that they considered to be untrue. The result, I think, ultimately was probably a more dangerous product in some ways than the newspapers that people like John Campbell and Benjamin Franklin published in their early 1700s. Those newspapers were full of misinformation and falsehoods, but they didn't claim to be doing anything other than just sharing the news that came across their desks. As these partisan newspapers are starting to publish material claiming that it's true, it could actually produce more misperception in the end. Because, again, these partisan newspapers didn't have any sort of secret weapon to detect falsehood or to verify news. And a lot of cases, the only thing that they really had to justify their more activist, interventionist role in collecting news was a sort of certainty that comes from piecing together an internally coherent worldview, if you know what I mean. So the news that they presented to their readers really seems true because it fit with all the other things that, for instance, Patriots believed to be true about the world. And that, in a way, was how they were attempting to verify the news rather than seeking independent sources or using the tools that modern journalists use.

Today, you sometimes hear journalists complain about how difficult it is to get Americans to care about foreign events. That problem did not exist in the 18th century. People were obsessed with keeping up with news that was happening around what we sometimes call the Atlantic world all of the sort of civilizations, nations and empires that are scattered around the Atlantic. in the book I talk about one newspaper published I think in Vermont, which announced in its first issue that it was starting publication because it expected to answer, and this is a quote, the ardent thirst for novelty, the general cry of what's the news abroad? And one reason the newspapers were full of foreign news is because it didn't make much sense to publish local news. It took a long time to write to Typeset to print and distribute The news and by the time that all that work was done and a newspaper arrived at your doorstep, you'd have probably already heard all the best local sort of gossip in rumors, right? And since this has been a Franklin's world, I won't apologize for going back to the Franklin again. But in a poem about his newspaper The Pennsylvania Gazette, Franklin explained, if home occurrences which are well known and which concern but few are let alone, the printer sure deserves no blame for this and while in foreign news he's not runes and whatever important happens there, he carefully collects and renders clear. So in other words, Franklin is saying, you guys already know all of what's happening around you. The newspaper is here to help you access news that's happening way outside of the realm of your experience. And because American newspapers didn't usually share local news, there wasn't really very much for them to reprint from other American newspapers. A new Hampshire newspaper from the time explained to its readers the reason of no or American news appearing in this paper is because there is none to publish. And this person wasn't saying that nothing happened in this entire vast continent. They were saying that other local printers weren't sharing their local news. And so there wasn't anything for them to reprint from other local papers. I think that ultimately North American settlers cared so much about foreign news though because they saw themselves as inhabiting a periphery on the world stage. They would have said at that time that Europe, especially Western Europe, was sort of where the action was. Western Europe was more densely populated, more literate, more cultured, and a lot more powerful than North America at this time. And so their heritage, their worldview, and their inheritances, as settlers who have mostly come from Western Europe, push them to develop a fairly Eurocentric view of world events. When the newspapers looked beyond Europe, North Americans often were most interested in events that were unfolding in places like the Caribbean or other places that European empires had already spread to like India. But also another piece of this puzzle is that people in North America had very limited control over the news that they got because they relied on trade ships to bring news to them. So the flow of news around the Atlantic was very much dependent on the movement of commercial vessels. So a ship arriving in, let's say New York City from Britain would bring a lot of news about Britain and it would bring a lot of news about the colonies, the British colonies should say, but it would usually bring less news about places like Asia or Africa. For example, these were not newspapers that had sort of foreign bureaus or foreign journalists whose job it was to provide information from far-flung locations. And so because Americans were usually trading mostly with Western Europeans, They mostly got news that reflected the interests, the knowledge, and the networks of those people. So, for most of the 18th century, this massive supply of European news was matched by a demand predominantly for European news. It wasn't until the American Revolution that some people started to really consider whether this was the best way for them to learn about the world after the war for independence ended. some printers even sort of suggested maybe we'll start to focus on news that's occurring on this continent rather than sort of endlessly copying London news into American papers. But that experiment never really got off the ground in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution and a lot of printers sort of gave up on that pretty quickly in the 1780s. I guess it's a case of old habits dying hard. after the war printers went really right back to sharing global news through the lenses especially of London sources even though their readers often complained about this. One of my favorite examples of this is a story from I think a new Hampshire newspaper in 1795 where a writer is complaining about the scarcity of news. I think it was winter, sometimes things would slow down and winter. And he sort of jokingly suggests that the printer should pay someone to go down to the local prisons and interview the criminals there. And he should pay someone to sort of investigate the personal lives of politicians. And this is a joke in 1795, right? That is completely unsuitable for a newspaper in this time because it just didn't make sense to have these incredibly tight-knit communities where most interaction was face-to-face mediated by print. A few decades later as these smaller communities expand and grow into large urban centers, that kind of local reporting is exactly the kind of thing that newspapers would start to focus on, but it isn't really until the 19th century that it even occurs to most newspapers to consider that as a possibility.

I think that there are a lot of opportunities to get away with deception and for misinformation to go undetected when your thousands of miles away from where the event that you're referring to actually occurred. So misinformation can spread about domestic events very easily, but there's more of a tendency for corrections to arrive rapidly. If you're spreading a false story about the stories that George Washington died during the American Revolutionary War, which is not true. And that kind of thing could be pretty quickly squashed because all we had to do was just poke his head out of a carriage and say, hey, I'm not dead, you know, whereas a piece of news that was false that originated in Paris, it could take months for a correction to arrive in the United States and it wasn't necessarily more credible than the initially misleading piece of news. So by the time that correction arrived, in a lot of cases people would have moved on. People would be thinking about the next thing. People wouldn't really care about it. It wouldn't get the same attention as the more juicy or exciting piece of false news. That's really the nature I think of misinformation as we're finding out to our cost today. That false news often is able to seize people's attentions in a way that the truth doesn't, because the truth is often kind of boring. So that's part of it. Just this sheer separation, the sheer distance means that foreign news has a different quality and foreign misinformation is more impervious to correction than news that originates and spreads more locally.

The major impact that the American Revolution has on the news media is that it makes the business of collecting news more political. The arrival of these new Republican forms of government create all kinds of problems for newspapers. The biggest problem is the recognition that newspapers could shape or even determine public opinion. So during a revolution or in a popular form of government shaping the news that people experience could be incredibly powerful in defining the future of public affairs. And so we've mentioned how partisan printers during the American Revolution or during the 1790s would often sort of go out of their way to provide their readers with news that aligned with their own views, right? And sometimes that would lead them to intentionally or unintentionally provide false information to their readers. The stakes of the American Revolution and the stakes of political participation in the early republic meant that it wasn't so easy for someone like Ben Franklin to just dismiss this information as a minor concern as you were able to do in the colonial era. What you see instead is newspaper printers who are starting to become fiercely protective of the reputation for veracity or truthfulness. One of the easiest ways to get away with spreading false information in this time is to just add a false citation to a piece of news that you invented. And when this happened, very often, rival printers would be watching, and they would accuse each other of doing this whether it was true or not. This happened in the late 1760s, in fact, in Boston, where a couple of loyalists named John Mene and John Fleaming launched a loyalist newspaper And after their very first issue, a writer and a patriot newspaper accused them of faking a story about one of the patriot allies in parliament, publishing it, and they wrote under cloak of having been taken from the London papers. So when he saw this, the loyalist printer John Meen, he went to the patriot print shop to demand the name of the author of this accusation. And the Patriot printers of the Boston Gazette, they were fused to provide this information. So the Loyalist printer John Mean, he storms out and a few days later he violently attacks one of these Patriot printers in the street. And the accusation that he had intentionally deceived his readers with enough for this Loyalist printer John Mean to actually fight about it in the streets of Boston. So I think what this episode shows us is the rising stakes of information distribution and the dangers that people saw in these sort of unprofessional newspaper printers having such an important role in shaping the public consciousness. newspaper printers started to have to be protective of their reputation and think of themselves not as tradesmen whose job it was to set type and physically print a newspaper but rather as editors whose job it was to mediate between newly arriving ships and American audiences. So truth becomes much much more of a concern as a result of the political pressures of the American Revolution.

Absolutely, Americans following the sort of outbreak of the American Revolutionary War immediately understood the important role that newspapers had played in mobilizing the people against Great Britain. And their view, a lot of people believe that the American Revolution was only possible because the colonists were watchful and well-informed about the state of affairs in Britain. And over time in the late 1770s and 1780s and 1790s, they really started to extend that observation outward. They started to think that the reason that other subjects of despotic monarchical governments had not rebelled was just that they were ignorant or misinformed about the state of affairs in their own societies. They didn't understand, for instance, how vulnerable their king might be, how strong the people were together. And they didn't necessarily know that the American Revolution seemed to have proven that a rebellion could be successful in dethroning despotic governments. And so, American started to conclude that the best way to undermine despotic governments abroad and to prevent the growth of tyranny at home was just to make sure that people were well informed. As they saw various sort of revolutionary events and rebellions and revolts breaking out around the world in the 1780s and the 1790s in places like France, the Netherlands Poland, and Ireland, a lot of Americans believe that those events have been caused by people learning about what had happened. in the United States, learning about the American Revolution. There's an interesting character that I talk about a lot in one of the chapters of my book. He was a French Canadian young man. His name was Henri N. Twann Messier. And he's this idealistic guy who works in the print shop of the Montreal Gazette during the early stages of the French Revolution. And he's impatient to see Canada join France's Revolution. He writes a couple of newspaper essays, which I really like, that are making the case that ordinary people did not join revolutionary movements because, you know, they were reading like John Locke or Montesquieu or something like that. Normal people didn't really read these like thick treatises on government, but his view was that they didn't need to. Instead, they instinctively and immediately knew that the tyrannical governments that they lived under were unjust that they were wrong. And what they needed instead was some indication that if they fought back against what they considered to be tyranny, that they might succeed, right, that they might have a reward for taking a risk. And what Messier thought was that the oppressed people around the world needed to be informed, essentially, about the example of other successful revolutions. And so he said about trying to bring a revolution to his fellow Canadians. It's really a dramatic story. He said off on the foot and walked from Montreal to Philadelphia so that he can meet Edmund Schroes Janais, who is the new sort of bombastic larger than life, French ambassador to the United States. Janay had already been thinking along these lines a little bit, he'd already been instructed by the French government to try to rest away Canada and Louisiana from the French and Spanish empires respectively. Both of these were former French colonies, so it seemed at least possible. But Janay didn't really have like the manpower or the resources to accomplish this on his own. So he decided that he was going to try Messier's strategy. They work together and they essentially sent some secret agents into Canada and Louisiana whose job it was to distribute newspapers and pamphlets and a special address. The Janay and Messier had prepared which was essentially an extended description. of how great the French Revolution was and how everything was going on really well in France contrary to what you might have heard. Their plan was that if they could convince the ethnically French population of Canada and of Louisiana, that the French Revolution was succeeding in not only dethroning tyranny, but also in improving the state of French society, that these people would join in a revolution, or would join French forces once they invaded, and they would be able to work together to sort of overwhelm British or Spanish governments. And they were kind of successful at stirring up some trouble, but the colonial governments started to get really worried about outside agitators spreading news and you know what they might have thought of as sort of propaganda about the French Revolution. And so they said about trying to restrict outside communications and punish those who did share positive information about the French Revolution. So there's this whole sort of information war that's happening on the imperial borderlands of North America. Obviously, there's no Canadian revolution, there's no Louisiana revolution, this whole scheme sort of starts to fall apart. But I think it speaks to this utopian idea, really, in a ways that you referenced Liz at the beginning of this question, that the spread of news, the spread of information and print was liberatory, that the free flow of information was the best defense that we had against tyranny or despotism. It's an idea that gets derailed shortly after this, because of really the way that the French Revolution goes. But it becomes an idea that is really resilient, and I think has remained in the American consciousness even today.

I think that we have inherited the inherent suspicion that people had during the American Revolution for any kind of government interference with the news media. A lot of European countries are fine with having public broadcasting or public news media. Americans tend to be a bit more suspicious of that kind of thing. And I think that that is rooted in this sense that any kind of regulation by a government would inevitably produce the makings of tyranny. But I also think that the attitudes that the founding generation had toward the flow of information and their really pervasive fear of false news, it really shaped an important way how the founding generation thought about the political institutions that they were in the midst of creating. Because misinformation was so pervasive in revolutionary America, a lot of the leading figures of the time, including folks like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, they felt that ordinary people were too likely to be misinformed to be trusted with Making good political decisions for themselves and so a lot of the institutions that come out of this moment are designed specifically to Place power in the hands of people whom the founders believed would be well informed usually people like them And so some of the most anti-democratic constitutional and institutional features of American politics today, from gerrymandering to the electoral college, we could say, developed in part because of this pervasive fear that the masses and, in fact, were too credulous to determine what was true. But ultimately, I think there are a lot of ways to interpret that story. I've had people tell me after reading this book or hearing me talk that it's very depressing. I've had people tell me that they think it makes them more hopeful. I don't know. It's up to you. One thing that I do think is true is that the founding generation would have agreed that a republic works best when its people are well informed. And the founders tried all kinds of things to bring that about. One of those was to wage battle really with people that they considered to be deceivers, people that considered to be spreaders of misinformation. But the other approach in one that they did try, in which worked well, I think, was to focus on supporting the institutions outside of government, potentially that educate that enlightened and inform the people.

The way it turned out is that colonial governments mostly chose wisely, I think, to sort of tolerate the violent dissent that was coming out of the Patriot Press. You know, I think if they had tried to clamp down on Patriot newspapers and prevent them from publishing news that the British government dislike, they probably would have sparked a crisis, not unlike the Stamp Act crisis. But if we sort of set that aside and imagine that the colonial governments had succeeded in controlling the presses, I think it's hard to imagine that Patriots would have been able to maintain momentum for the course of more than a decade of protests. Much like social media today are very effective at spreading outrage and patriot mobilization really depended in a lot of ways on that steady trip of outrage and concern that allowed leaders to sort of keep the fires of resistance burning. I think that the newspapers were necessary for creating an external reality that aligned with patriot resistance, and that those who were challenging British rule would have probably lost some energy or their resistance would have petered out if their view of British despotism or the ministry or the king or whatever was mediated through the hands of the colonial government. I think it would have been unlikely that they came to such radical conclusions if they were reading the kinds of news that was printed in Canada, for example.

My second book is sort of a collective biography of the founders and their relationship to truth. It starts with Ben Franklin and it concludes with Abigail Adams. And if that isn't a suitable enough advertisement for the book, I don't know what is because those two are two of my favorites. But it's building on some of the themes of this first book. It's also though a study I think of how the founders thought about the place of truth, knowledge, and information in a republic. And so I think it's going to offer some ideas that might be relevant for those of us today who are concerned about those very issues.

The best place to reach me is probably through my website, which is just my name, JordanEtailer.com, that has all my contact information. And anyone listening to this is more than welcome to reach out to me with any questions, ideas, or reactions.

Thank you, Liz.