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內容試閱:
Development of the Newspaper in America
The modern newspaper is a European invention. The oldest direct ancestor of the
modern newspaper appears to have been the handwritten news sheets that circulated
widely in the sixteenth century in Venice, which was a center for trade and, therefore, for
information. With very few exceptions, the early newspapers never reported any news about
the country in which they were printed. Print shops were tightly regulated; Europes rulers
allowed them to print newspapers as long as these papers did not discuss any local or
national issues or events.
Britains American colonies entered the world of the newspaper relatively late. It was
not until 1690 that the first American newssheetBostons Publick Occurrences published
by Benjamin Harrismade its debut. The Massachusetts authorities, in high resentment
towards that Harris dared to report that English military forces had allied themselves with
miserable savages, put him out of business four days later, so the first issue of Americas
first newspaper was also the last. The Boston News-Letter, Americas second printed
newspaper, published fourteen years later, was a much tamer affair than Harriss paper. In
the following years, newspapers appeared successively in almost every colony. By ?7??,
all but two of the colonies, Delaware and New Jersey, had weekly newspapers. These early
papers were careful not to offend colonial authorities, and were filled primarily with short
news items, documents and essays mostly taken from other newspapers, particularly British
and European papers.
The major limitation on press freedom was the stamp tax passed by the British
Parliament in ?7??, which had the effect of raising the price of newspapers to the point where
the poorer classes could not afford to buy them. As Americans were not represented in this
Parliament, American newspapers rebelled against the new tax. Similar protest