Misinformation Nation is the sort of memorable rhyme that might seem better-suited to a Schoolhouse Rock tune than a scholarly monograph, but as Jordan Taylor argues, misinformation was so pervasive at the founding of the United States that it might well deserve an educational song. Perhaps an anthropomorphic newspaper, along with vivid 1970s graphics and a groovy chorus, could help teach us that the news has been mediated since the very first newspapers in British North America. Such a song would be helpful in our current political moment, when media literacy skills are undertaught yet absolutely essential to informed and responsible civic action. In the years Jordan E. Taylor spent working on Misinformation Nation: Foreign News and the Politics of Truth in Revolutionary America, “fake news,” political polarization, and confirmation bias have made it harder to identify, much less combat, that misinformation. But his book proves that none of this is new, a revelation at the same time comforting and alarming.
Misinformation Nation is a history of how foreign news reached the news-reading public in the thirteen British North American colonies and later the United States. Pick up any single issue of a newspaper from the second half of the 18th century and you will immediately realize the ambition of Taylor’s project. Read every paragraph and try to identify every bit of foreign news. You will notice that first-hand accounts of and reactions to the biggest events of the 18th-century Atlantic world are scattered among mundane and often weird stories. After reading through the entire newspaper, you will almost surely have missed something, or gotten distracted by something completely unrelated to your search. Then, try to determine if the news you’ve read is factual. It is a daunting task. Yet Taylor has done the painstaking work of not only identifying news from non-American newspapers, but using all of these paragraphs of information and misinformation to explore the connections between communication, misperception, and revolution.
“A gentleman in St. James’s-street received a letter lately from a friend of his at Port Egmont, in Falkland Island, dated March 1, 1770, which makes not the least mention of the Spaniards having been there with an armed force to demand restitution of that island.” All images taken from the September 13, 1770 issue of the Massachusetts Spy, via Chronicling America.
Taylor argues that a “mediation revolution” occurred from the 1760s through the 1790s. Throughout this period, American newspaper readers demanded a regular supply of news from Canada, the Caribbean, and Europe for commercial, political, and cultural reasons. This bounty of foreign news helped the united colonies-turned-United States think about their shifting identity among nations and among revolutions. But while it may seem rather random to modern eyes, the content of 18th century newspapers had been wrangled onto the page from a chaotic stream of transatlantic information, which is why Taylor’s analysis focuses on the people who mediated the news, the majority of whom were white men. In these decades, communication was unreliable. “If news traveled on an Atlantic highway,” Taylor writes, “it was neither as a driver nor as a passenger, but rather as a hitchhiker.” (p. 18) It could take weeks or months for a single paragraph of information (or misinformation) to travel from one side of the Atlantic to the other. It was near impossible for printers to know how much news they would receive from one week to the next, and their subscribers were voracious. In Taylor’s “mediation revolution,” it was not the technology, the pace of news, or the social status of news mediators that changed, but rather the worldviews that those mediators curated for newspaper readers.
The first four chapters of Misinformation Nation are a must-read intervention in the historiography of the American Revolution, a newspaper-driven perspective on paranoia, propaganda, and the emergence of a national identity. In the 1760s and 1770s, fears that the colonies were being misrepresented in the metropole, especially that British officials were exaggerating news from North America for their own purposes, stirred up Taylor’s “mediation revolution.” Printers in colonial port cities asserted themselves as mediators, claiming their authority to present their version of increasingly revolutionary events. Still, these printers relied on London newspapers for most foreign news and had little control over how much or how frequently they received news. After the United States secured its independence and expanded its commercial networks beyond the Anglophonic Atlantic, American mediators craved their own independence, taking on the onerous responsibility of translating news, rather than relying on London printers’ translations and interpretations as they had for decades.
Throughout the book, Taylor is most interested in whether American newspapers presented “a coherent version of the world in which resistance seemed worthwhile,” and how much of that coherence relied on misinformation and misperception. (p. 85) To that end, the second half of the book focuses on how the news of other revolutions in the 1780s and 1790s spread within in the new United States, with some hoping that the American Revolution might be a model for dismantling communication power structures—an “information script” for revolution, in Taylor’s words. But hopes quickly faded as imperial mediators retained power in neighboring British Canada and French Louisiana and the momentum behind these revolutionary movements dwindled. As the number of active newspapers grew exponentially in the United States, so did the number of printer-mediators, who increasingly defined the truth about foreign revolutionary movements in Federalist and Republican terms. Taylor highlights the “partisan information war” about the French Revolution, as well as the “dehumanized and depoliticized version of Black-led revolutions” in the Caribbean. (p. 10) By the late 1790s, the democratization of news mediation had generated so much misinformation that the federal government felt compelled to rein in this multitude of mediators, in part through the Alien and Sedition Acts.
“It was on Wednesday reported, that an insurrection of vast numbers happened on the Continent, who were all provided with arms, and were determined to dispute it, inch by inch, with their oppressors.”
Taylor makes it easy to identify who wielded the power of mediation by describing individuals as being “upstream” or “downstream” from the news: “in a single city, a ship captain might be upstream of a printer, who was upstream of a subscriber, who was upstream of a servant. At each point of mediation, someone could withhold, reshape, misremember, or intentionally transform the news.” (p. 31) Although some misinformation could be blamed on poor timing or innocent misinterpretation, Taylor writes, “North Americans usually assumed that false news was the product of deception. Contradiction required villains.” (p. 201) In the 18th century as much as the 21st century, mediators had the potential to be civic heroes, sniffing out mis- and disinformation from verifiable truth. Unfortunately, Taylor argues, “those empowered by the mediation revolution were not especially skilled nor even particularly interested in identifying and limiting the spread of falsehoods.” (p. 18) Moreover, mediators could use their positions “upstream” to impose their understanding of truth on the “observers,” newspaper readers and anyone else who was “downstream.” The challenge for historians like Taylor is that the political actions of people upstream are much easier to document and understand than the people downstream.
Misinformation Nation is best read alongside other histories of the “Age of Revolutions,” as a constant reminder of the importance of communication. As he moves from the aftermath of the Seven Years War through the revolutions of the 1790s, Taylor reminds readers that newspapers recorded the details more than the epoch-making events. “Observers in North America experienced revolutionary events one at a time,” he writes, “. . . an infinity of small events, snatches of uncertain information, and the occasional bombshell.” (pp. 149-150) The technological and geographical limitations of the 18th century might seem worlds away from our 24-hour social media-driven global news cycle, but the overwhelming crush of details that might be significant historical events or might be irrelevant before the ink dries can feel very familiar. Swept up in the stories, the reader forgets that Taylor is also a mediator. He doesn’t pause to point out the decisive moments that immediately come to mind at the mention of the “Age of Revolutions.” He jumps around in the chronology just enough to cause some disorientation. Taylor’s narrative echoes his sources, “inefficient at sharing major news items,” but more than capable of managing the details. (p. 98)
2022 was an incredibly prolific year for Taylor, who saw this book published as well as four scholarly articles. Much of Taylor’s work, including Misinformation Nation, bridges a conspicuous gap in scholarship between histories of early modern transatlantic communications that focus on the earlier 18th century and histories of late-18th century American newspapers that focus on domestic news. But in his acknowledgements and in social media posts around the book’s debut, Taylor has been honest about his struggles on the job market as he finished this book, and his decision to walk away from academia. He calls Misinformation Nation “a testament more to stubbornness than talent.” (p. xi) The appendix suggests that this book is actually a testament to diligence. Misinformation Nation is undergirded by a dataset of “40,000 citations in American newspapers to non-American papers.” (p. 226) The time and skill required to pull these citations together pays off in Taylor’s ability to confidently state, for example, that, “during the 1790s, Americans received more than eighty times as much of their news from France as they had three decades before.” (p. 101)
“. . . where Subscriptions, Articles of Intelligence, and Advertisements, &c. for this Paper, are taken in . . .”
The increase in digitization of newspapers in recent years means that previously impossible projects like this are now doable, but only if the value of the work is recognized. Even without a catchy song or cartoon newspaper, Misinformation Nation should convince readers that “every revolution is an information revolution,” and that historians must think critically about how information travels and who determines what is news. (p. 11)