Alrighty folks, so today we are going to go through, in short form, the entire history of American

journalism. It's perversion, what it was, what it kind of has become. This is sponsored by

Birch Gold. Okay, so let's start from the very beginning of the American Republic. So the first

thing to understand about American journalism is that the founders did in fact prize American

journalism, but journalism was largely political pamphleteering. There was no notion of an objective

press, like one objective press that was going to just tell you the fact. Everything was

politically engaged. All of the early newspapers in the American Republic, and there were many,

many newspapers in the American Republic, all of them had titles like the Democrat or like the Republican or like the Federalist.

If you look at the early American Republic, a perfect example of sort of a journalist in the early

days was a name James Callender.

So, James Callender was a rather famous political pamphleteer of the time. He worked as an independent journalist.

What this meant is that he was actually hired by political campaigns to go dig up stuff on the

other guy and then print it. He wrote a lot anonymously and then he became pretty famous because

he was at odds with the federalist. The federalist for those who remember their American history,

that would be George Washington, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton.

He was very much allied with the radical Republicans, like Thomas Jefferson. And so, he viciously attacked George Washington and John Adams at the behest of Thomas Jefferson during

the 1800 election and Alexander Hamilton. It was the Hamilton expose, really, that made

calendar famous, because he exposed the relationship, the sexual relationship,

between Alexander Hamilton, and a married woman named Maria Reynolds. Now, he had claimed

that relationship led to essentially graft between Hamilton and Maria Reynolds' husband.

Hamilton claimed, if you ever seen the musical, that Maria Reynolds, her husband was essentially

blackmailing him. Whatever the story was, it made James Callender quite famous. It also made him pretty notorious. So he was actually prosecuted under the Alien Sedition Act by the Adams administration in 1800, largely because he kept attacking John Adams over and over and over and over, and he put out pamphlets talking about how the administration was treasonous and all the rest. The worm turns, Thomas Jefferson, who had been his ally and his patron,

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