Opening paragraphs......................

It was the best of times, it was the worst of journalism - and it is no small irony that the former condition led directly to the latter, that the golden age of America's founding was also the gutter age of American reporting, that the most notorious of presses in our nation's history churned out its copy on the foothills of Olympus.  The Declaration of Independence was literature, but the New England Courant talked trash.  The Constitution of the United Sates was philosophy; the Boston Gazette slung mud.  The Gazette of the United States and the National Gazette were conceived as weapons, not chronicles of daily events; the two of them stood masthead to masthead, firing at each other, without ceasing, without blinking, without acknowledging the limitations of veracity.  Philadelphia's Aurora was less a celestial radiance than a ground-level reek, guilty of "taking a line that would have been regarded as treasonable in any later international conflict."  And Porcupine's Gazette, the Aurora's sworn foe, was as barbed as its namesake.
-Eric Burns,  Infamous Scribblers:  The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism