Trump 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale announced last week that the campaign will deny press credentials to Bloomberg News reporters for “rallies or other campaign events.” This follows the news organization’s pronouncement that it will not investigate the presidential campaign of its founder, Michael Bloomberg, nor the campaigns of any of “his rivals in the Democratic primary.”
“The decision by Bloomberg News to formalize preferential reporting policies is troubling and wrong,” said Parscale, adding the agency has “declared their bias openly.”
Naked bias on the part of candidate-run news organizations is something of a grand tradition.
The election of 1800 saw incumbent President and Federalist John Adams facing his vice president and friend-cum-rival, Thomas Jefferson, in a rematch of 1796. The contest was anything but genteel. In America’s second election, some of our most illustrious statesmen aired grievances, both petty and partisan, on the front page.
Although remembered for its historical significance — Jefferson’s victory over Adams represented one of the first popular elections in “modern” history to result in the peaceful transfer of power between political factions — the election was decidedly modern.
With 1800, wrote Jefferson biographer Willard Sterne Randall, “Americans proved they preferred newspapers to pamphlets to books, and, further, that they preferred their newspapers crammed with items of scandal.”
“If Jefferson was a Jacobin, a shameless southern libertine, and a ‘howling’ atheist,” summarized historian David McCullough, “Adams was a Tory, a vain Yankee scold, and, if truth be known, ‘quite mad.’”
Federalist newspapers controlled by Adams and his supporters attacked Jefferson for any number of presumed moral and ideological deficiencies. They claimed him an atheist, a Francophile, even a coward. Yale president and congregational minister Timothy Dwight denounced the possibility of a Jefferson presidency in a sermon widely reprinted in the Federalist press: “Murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will be openly taught and practiced, the air will be rent with the cries of distress, the soil will be soaked with blood, the nation black with crimes.”
Though fewer, the Jeffersonian papers were no less purple. Adams, obnoxious and disliked even within his own party, was an easy target for Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans. They blasted the New Englander as pompous, anti-democratic, a whoremonger, and a secret monarchist. Ever the gentleman, Jefferson employed pamphleteer James Callender as his personal hatchet man against Adams. In his two-volume anti-Federalist broadside, The Prospect Before Us, Callender accused Adams of possessing “a hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”
Funny, I must have missed that part in Hamilton.
