Newspapers Have Always Helped Decide Who the Heroes Are
Newspapers like to describe themselves as witnesses to history. Sometimes they are. But newspapers have also helped create history by deciding who deserves sympathy, who deserves suspicion, whose violence becomes heroism, and whose violence proves that an entire people are dangerous.
The old newspapers make the process easy to see.
In nineteenth-century accounts of the Texas-Mexico border, armed Texans could cross into Mexico, fight Mexican soldiers, seize supplies, and then return to the pages of American newspapers as heroes. Samuel Hamilton Walker is a good example. In accounts of the Mier Expedition, newspapers emphasized his bravery, endurance, and suffering. The Texans became courageous men betrayed by treacherous Mexicans.
What received much less attention was a rather important fact: the Texans were armed men who had crossed into Mexico.
That is how a legend gets made. You begin the story at the moment your hero becomes the victim.
Mexicans received very different treatment.
During the violence remembered as the Skinning War, newspapers did not limit themselves to identifying particular cattle thieves, raiders, or criminals. They described Mexicans collectively. The San Francisco Daily Morning Call wrote of people who were Mexican “by descent,” “by birth,” and “in sentiment,” and characterized many as deserters, fugitives, and “banditti by instinct.” They were also described as “ignorant and lazy.”
The Chicago Inter Ocean was even less subtle. Its headline referred to “Armed Bands of Greasers all Along the Rio Grande Frontier.” Mexican residents were described as “the filth and scum of a demoralized nation.”
Those were not words spoken by somebody at a political rally and reluctantly reported by a newspaper.
Those were the newspapers talking.
And words matter.
If readers are repeatedly told that a population consists of greasers, bandits, scum, criminals, and people naturally inclined toward violence, something begins to happen. When members of that population are beaten, driven from their land, or killed, the victim has already been diminished in the public imagination.
The newspaper has prepared the reader.
That is especially disturbing when we compare the rhetoric with what some Texas Rangers themselves later acknowledged. Leander McNelly wrote that “the acts committed by Americans are horrible to relate.” Former Ranger N. A. Jennings later described “the most brutal outrages” committed against peaceful Mexican farmers and stockmen.
The people whom newspapers had portrayed as naturally criminal were sometimes the victims.
Meanwhile, the men committing violence against them could become legends.
More than a century later, we congratulate ourselves because respectable newspapers no longer routinely describe an ethnic population in their own editorial voice as “greasers” or “filth and scum.”
But perhaps we congratulate ourselves too quickly.
The language has changed. The method has changed. The power of repetition has not.
Donald Trump has spent more than a decade using language such as “rapists,” “animals,” “vermin,” “scum” and similar descriptions for immigrants, political opponents and other groups. Newspapers that would never use those words in their own voice nevertheless repeat them because the president or presidential candidate said them.
Consider the Houston Chronicle, a newspaper generally regarded as moderate to liberal.
The Chronicle would never write an editorial declaring that immigrants are “rapists” or that a class of Americans consists of “vermin.” Yet during Trump’s decade at the center of American politics, those words and others like them have appeared again and again in its news coverage, headlines, columns and editorials.
An exact count would require searching thousands of articles, but we are almost certainly talking about hundreds of repetitions of Trump’s most inflammatory language when the various terms are considered together.
The newspaper has an obvious defense, and it is a legitimate one.
We didn’t say it. Trump said it. We are reporting what the president of the United States said.
That distinction matters.
The nineteenth-century editor who personally called Mexicans “greasers” is not morally identical to a twenty-first-century reporter accurately quoting a president who uses degrading language.
But that cannot be the end of the discussion.
Suppose Trump says “vermin” before 10,000 people at a rally.
A newspaper places “vermin” in its headline. Television networks repeat the clip throughout the day. Websites reproduce the quotation. Social media accounts link to the stories. Commentators debate whether the word should have been used. Newspapers publish another story about the reaction to the first story.
A word spoken once can be repeated millions of times.
At some point we have to ask an uncomfortable question:
When does reporting hateful rhetoric become distributing hateful rhetoric?
Quotation marks identify the author. They do not prevent amplification.
The old newspaper manufactured the insult itself. The modern newspaper can allow a politician to manufacture it and then deliver it to an audience vastly larger than the politician could ever reach alone.
There is another similarity.
Newspaper bias rarely requires reporters to invent facts. It can operate through selection and framing.
One man “responds”; another “confronts.”
One group consists of “residents”; another consists of “migrants.”
A politician “fires back”; his opponent “lashes out.”
Police say something, and their statement appears in the first paragraph. The family of the dead person disputes it, and their response appears twelve paragraphs later.
Every sentence can be factually defensible while the accumulated story quietly tells readers whom they should believe.
The old newspapers did this crudely. They told readers outright who the civilized people were and who the dangerous people were.
Modern journalism is usually more sophisticated.
But the power remains.
That is why those yellowed newspapers from the 1800s are so valuable. We can read “greasers,” “banditti by instinct,” and “filth and scum” today and immediately recognize the prejudice that many contemporary readers apparently did not see.
We recognize the mechanism because enough time has passed.
The harder question is whether we can recognize it while it is happening to us.
A hundred years from now, people may read our newspapers and wonder how respectable publications could place words such as “rapists,” “animals,” “vermin,” and “scum” before their readers again and again while insisting that quotation marks absolved them of responsibility for spreading the language.
The answer will probably be the same answer we give for the newspapers of the nineteenth century.
They were reporting the news.
They were also shaping it.
The technology changed. The vocabulary changed. The excuse changed.
The power to decide who becomes the hero, who becomes the villain, and whose humanity requires defending never disappeared.
