These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

solution for the industrial age, and this was an age of knowledge.55 One of the first casualties of disruptive innovation, from the vantage of American democracy, was the paper newspaper, which had supplied the electorate with information about politics and the world and a sense of political community since before the American Revolution. “Printers are educated in the Belief, that when Men differ in Opinion,” Benjamin Franklin had once written, “both Sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Publick; and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.”56 There had been great newspapers and there had been lousy newspapers. But the Republic had never known a time without newspapers, and it was by no means clear that the Republic could survive without them, or at least without the freedom of the press on which they were established, the floor on which civil society stands.