To think through the future of a free press in the United States, journalists should have a fact-based understanding of their own past, as should critics and scholars of journalism. Instead, we swim about in a nostalgia-based sea of what never was—never, that is, until the late 1960s. I am less panic-stricken about the future of a free press than many others, not because I believe the path forward looks easy and untroubled (hardly!) but rather because I recognize that the common understanding of American journalism’s past, from the 1780s to the late 1960s, often misreads the historical record and exaggerates the role of the press as a check on government.

In this essay, I argue that, wise as the founders were, and guided though they were by a strong distrust of unchecked power, the journalism they knew had little in common with the journalistic practices that would emerge early in the 19th century when newspapers were avowedly subdivisions of political parties. They had even less in common with the proudly independent and professionally identified journalists of the late 19th century and 20th century and after. The key changes during this time, strangely enough, were not primarily driven by new technologies.

I can’t provide all the evidence for these claims here, but enough, I hope, to underpin three main points: (1) the founding fathers who wrote the Constitution in 1787 and its Bill of Rights in 1791 did not consider the press to be a central check on governmental power; (2) they did not see “reporting” as the chief contribution of the press to public life; and (3) the idea that the press should hold government accountable through assertive, independent, investigative and analytical reporting is not part of a long historic heritage but largely a product of changes in journalism—and in government—from the Vietnam War to the 1990s and beyond. Let me get into some details on these three points.

First, despite what journalists claim, the First Amendment was not “first for a reason.” When Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of The New York Times declared in 2019, echoing many others, “The First Amendment is first for a reason,” she was quite literally wrong. In 1791, after much debate in Congress, President George Washington sent on to the 13 states 12 amendments to the Constitution for their ratification. They did not ratify the first two amendments on the list. So, numbers three through 12 became numbers one through 10 as we know them. The First Amendment is first thanks to a historical accident. James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay authored 85 short essays in 1787 and 1788, collectively known as The Federalist Papers, and published them in New York newspapers, seeking to persuade New York to ratify the Constitution. None of these essays paid any attention to newspapers themselves as a key constituent of a democratic governing process.

Second, holding power to account was enormously important to the founders, but holding power to account through reporting was simply not on their minds. There were no newsrooms. Newspapers were something of a sideline in a printer’s shop. The printers often combined their printing with serving as a post office. They sold stationery. They did “job printing” and other work to make money, including publishing pamphlets and almanacs. Benjamin Franklin’s printing business had contracts to print the paper money of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. While the newspapers of the 1760s and 1770s became more politically engaged, they were still more preoccupied with reprinting than reporting news, running items lifted from European newspapers brought by ship across the Atlantic. Before the late 1960s, metro daily papers, the heart of U.S. journalism (with all due respect to radio and television) did very little we would recognize today as assertive, penetrating, analytical, or investigative work. This is not to deny that some monthly magazines pursued what President Theodore Roosevelt derisively labeled “muckraking” at the beginning of the 20th century, but investigative work was nonetheless rare, and it was not institutionalized until the late 1960s and 1970s. The vogue for muckraking in the magazines died out within a decade. Crusading journalism was relatively rare in general circulation newspapers, although it was vital in the Black press, notably in the anti-lynching reporting of Ida B. Wells.

Third, for most of the 19th century, newspapers were practically subsidiaries of the political parties that became powerful institutions a generation or two after the founders. And it would not be until the last decades of the 19th century that journalists developed a more independent-minded sense of their task, a distinctive way of writing with a “summary lead” (placing the key information up front), reliance on interviewing (a practice essentially unknown before the Civil War and regarded by European visitors to the U.S. as rude and presumptuous—and therefore very American), and the beginnings of a self-consciousness of themselves as a coherent occupational group, complete with well-populated gatherings in favorite bars and an insiders’ newsletter (The Journalist) founded 1884 and surviving until 1907 when it merged into Editor and Publisher.

What happened in the late 1960s and 1970s was a set of novel developments—and not in journalism alone but also in government. We can probably date this to the passage in 1966 of what came to be known as the Freedom of Information Act—passed, by the way, with significant cooperation and participation from journalists. On its heels in 1967, Newsday became the first daily newspaper in the country to establish a team of reporters to pursue exclusively investigative reporting. Soon thereafter, the Associated Press created a “special assignment team” to report on what AP called “the submerged dimension” in government action. And in 1969, the Fund for Investigative Journalism was born, with the purpose of “increasing public knowledge about the concealed, obscure or complex aspects of matters significantly affecting the public.” Designated investigative teams were established in 1970 at the Boston Globe and the Chicago Tribune.

There was in the 1970s—even preceding The Washington Post’s pursuit of the Watergate story after the June 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters—a growing cultural approval for transparency practices in government, most of which have influence to this day. The 1970 Legislative Reorganization Act opened up committee hearings and committee votes to being reported, even to being televised (C-SPAN began in 1979), and it ended the prohibition of recording votes when the House moved to the “committee of the whole.” The Federal Elections Campaign Acts of 1971 and 1973 led to the 1975 establishment of the Federal Elections Commission—and despite the courts rejecting some of the reforms limiting campaign contributions, one of the surviving provisions requires that campaign contributions must still be disclosed. This set of reforms was, as historian Julian Zelizer has written, “a revolution in the disclosure of political information.”

There is no doubt that The Washington Post’s pursuit of the Watergate story after the break-in and attempted burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex accelerated a broad commitment to transparency. The Freedom of Information Act was amended and strengthened in 1974. A group of investigative reporters came together to establish Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE). Some of this “open government” legislation helped empower journalists by making government information available. Some of it helped public interest groups, notably through the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which was signed into law in 1970. NEPA required federal agencies proposing actions that might adversely affect the environment to make public a “detailed statement” on the expected environmental impact of their intended action. These “environmental impact statements” empowered public interest groups concerned about the environment to sue the government to prevent a federal agency from going ahead with its plans without revision.

And public accountability through government action did not stop there. In 1978, the Inspectors General Act established an Office of Inspector General in every Cabinet department and most other major federal agencies. About half of these Inspector General (IG) officers are presidentially appointed, not departmentally appointed, and their reports are public documents. The IGs have become a powerful set of watchdogs internal to the government itself. There are more than 70 IGs overseeing some 14,000 staff members. Their reports become the bases for news stories with some frequency, as they often have prosecution recommendations for persons in the agencies to which they are assigned.

What can account for all this opening up of government information? I don’t see any easy answer to this question, but it is well worth noting that the legal historian Lawrence Friedman published a study in 1999 called The Horizontal Society. Various long-standing conventional hierarchies were weakening—although when Friedman wrote, Mark Zuckerberg was still in high school and Facebook had not yet been conceived. Social media no doubt accelerated the move to more “horizontal” media of communication, but the evolution in that direction of society as a whole was already at work. In the 1990s, Friedman had already recognized around the world a weakening of traditional hierarchies in families, churches, towns, and nations. He also noted that horizontality was not necessarily a move to equality—it made “the masses of the people … unformed, malleable, protoplasmic. This is thus a society of the black arts of manipulation—a society of propaganda, focus groups, public opinion polls.” The 20th century was “a century of rabble-rousers, of demagogues, of fiery orators—an age of men (and an occasional woman) who tried to create, out of an inchoate mass, an identity army, ready to march against whoever or whatever was labeled the enemy of the day.” I do not think Friedman is a prophet, but he is a shrewd observer. He wrote that sentence about the last century, but obviously it fits 2024 in many corners of the globe, including the United States.

News organizations of the 1940s and 1950s, when trust in the media was much higher than today, were not dedicated to holding governmental power (or other centers of power) to account. I acknowledge that this is a subtle matter. But that the news media became more dedicated to serving the public good through vigorous, fact-based reporting in the years after 1968 or 1970 is clear, even if this is a matter of degree rather than a total makeover. In Meg Greenfield’s (posthumous) memoir, Washington, this longtime Washington reporter and op-ed page editor of The Washington Post recalled that Washington journalism in the 1940s and 1950s was “more obliging to its government sources, much more willing to keep its secrets, and much more involved in its actual policymaking than it ever should have been—and than the successor generation in Washington today would dream of being.” There was more “old-boy” collusion that would later be unacceptable. It is worth observing that a move toward a more critical, assertive, and negative stance of news reporting toward political leaders took place at the same time in other countries, including Sweden, Britain, Japan, and countries in South America.

Looking back at the 1940s and 1950s, how far could this friendly insider-ism collusion go? Far, very far. As an example, in 1945 Walter Lippmann, a brilliant analyst of American politics and American journalism and a well-known syndicated columnist, worked with James “Scotty” Reston, a rising star at The New York Times, to talk with Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg, a likely aspirant for the Republican presidential nomination in 1948. These two journalists advised Vandenberg that if he wanted to be a serious candidate, he would need to distance himself from isolationism and take some leadership on international affairs. Vandenberg apparently listened attentively and asked the journalists if they could draft a speech for him along these lines. They did. Vandenberg delivered the speech in the Senate. Lippmann praised the speech in his column and Reston wrote in The Times that the speech was “wise” and “statesmanlike.” Neither noted that they had ghostwritten the speech.

Such connivance is not dead, but it is more rare and would be more scandalous now than it was in the 1950s. There was a revolution in the U.S. press in the late 1960s and 1970s. We typically fail to recognize it because neither journalists nor historians settled on a name for it—it has been called interpretive journalism, analytical journalism, enterprise journalism, investigative reporting, contextual journalism, social science journalism, and explanatory reporting. The Pulitzer Prize board added to its list of journalism awards one for “explanatory journalism” in 1985 (changing the name of the prize to “explanatory reporting” in 1998). Even the notion that journalism’s primary democratic obligation is to hold government accountable employs a language of relatively recent currency. Former executive editor of The Washington Post, Leonard Downie, Jr., and his Washington Post colleague Robert Kaiser wrote of a rising “culture of accountability” in 2002. Downie told me that “I believe I was the first to use the term ‘accountability journalism’ widely and often.” I think he is right about this. Political scientist Melvin Dubnick finds that “accountability” as a general term for holding government accountable to the public came into general usage only in the 1990s. The idea that journalists should investigate, that news organizations should have specially delegated “spotlight” teams, and that interpretive and explanatory and investigative work—not he-said-she said journalism and not opinion-spouting—should be integral to journalism’s mission is much more contemporary than journalists normally recognize.

Journalism has changed since Benjamin Franklin’s days at his printing press or James Madison’s days overseeing the writing of the Bill of Rights. The founders knew newspapers, but they did not dream of anything remotely like today’s professional, fact-based, sometimes investigative, often analytical journalism. The First Amendment that today can be invoked both rhetorically and legally to protect news organizations was not, as First Amendment scholars remind us, used in this way until after World War I. The glories of U.S. journalism, especially since 1968, do not lie in the hopes or achievements of the founders so much as they are rooted in the changed political culture—both in government and in professionalized journalism, of the decades since 1968. Some of our heroes did not meet in Constitution Hall in the 18th century; some of them are with us still, and in the realm of the digital and the nonprofits, some of them are still emerging.