The culture of the fact—the idea of empiricism that had spread from law to government—hadn’t yet quite spread to newspapers, which were full of shipping news and runaway slave ads, and word of slave rebellions and Indian wars, and of the latest meeting of Parliament. Newspapers were interested in truth, but they established truth, as Franklin explained, by printing all sides, and letting them do battle. Printers did not consider it their duty to print only facts; they considered it their duty to print the “Opinions of Men,” as Franklin put it, and let the best man win: truth will out.
