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In a pioneering content analysis published in the New Republic in 1920, journalists Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz assessed the New York Times coverage of the Russian revolution. They concluded that the Times' reporters and editors tended to report the news as they wished it to be. "The news," they wrote, "is dominated by the hopes of the men who composed the news organization." While scholars have used this concept to study the coverage of subsequent revolutions, this is the first content analysis to look back at the French Revolution in the late 1700s. It finds, as Lippmann and Merz did, that "hope and fear" shaped coverage by the partisan press. That journalism in two very different periods had similar tendencies suggests the inherent difficulty of covering a revolution in any time period with a press of any type.
In a pioneering content analysis published in 1920, journalists Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz assessed the New York Times coverage of the Russian revolution. "A Test of the News," which appeared in the New Republic, concluded that the newspaper misreported and distorted the events leading to the taking of power by the Bolsheviks, the Russian withdrawal from World War I, and the several failed attempts at counter revolution by anticommunist forces.1 Time and again it predicted the imminent collapse of Lenin's government, which paradoxically the paper linked to a rising "Red Peril." In each case, the Times reporters and editors tended to report the news as they wished it to be. "The news," Lippmann and Merz wrote, "is dominated by the hopes of the men who composed the news organization."2
Subsequent scholarship, looking for example at coverage of the later Chinese Communist revolution,3 also has found that journalists are apt to perceive such sweeping political upheaval through their "hope and fear," to use Lippmanns and Merz's phrase.4 No one, however, has looked back and used their qualitative content analysis technique to do a thorough, methodical investigation of news reports in the early American press of the French Revolution, which offers the first historical evidence of American press attitudes toward a revolution abroad. Historians have provided ample context for such a study. They have chronicled the rise of American newspapers and printers of the late eighteenth...