Day 76
Passage 76
Development of the Newspaper in America
1
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; Europe's rulers allowed them to print newspapers as long as these papers did not discuss any local or national issues or events.
2
Britain's American colonies entered the world of the newspaper relatively late. It was not until 1690 that the first American newssheet—Boston's Publick Occurrences published by Benjamin Harris—made 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 America's first newspaper was also the last. The Boston News-Letter, America's second printed newspaper, published fourteen years later, was a much tamer affair than Harris's paper. In the following years, newspapers appeared successively in almost every colony. By 1765, 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.
3
The major limitation on press freedom was the stamp tax passed by the British Parliament in 1765, 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 protests reverberated through these colonial newspapers when the British Parliament approved the Townshend Acts in 1767, which imposed taxes on American imports of glass, lead, paint, tea, and, significantly, paper. Though not all the colonial newspapers were on the anti-British side, most of them, in the years leading up to the American Revolution, represented something the world had never before seen: a bold press committed to challenging, even overthrowing, governmental authorities. These newspapers were, in a sense, loyal to the new authorities who had appeared on the continent: the Sons of Liberty. During the Revolution, these newspapers were also an effective force working towards the unification of sentiment, the awakening of a consciousness with common purpose, interest, and destiny among the separate colonies, and of a determination to see the war through to a success. They were more single-minded than the people themselves, and bore no small share of the undertaking of arousing and supporting the often discouraged and indifferent public spirit.
4
In the unsettled years after the Revolution, American newspapers remained filled with arguments and anger—now directed not against the British but against their political opponents. Each of the two parties that formed, the Federalists and the Republicans, had their newspapers and these papers had little sympathy for representatives of the other side. Federalist Party leaders, increasingly uncomfortable with the criticism they were taking from Republican editors, signed the Sedition Act in 1798 to protect the government from the libels of editors. The result was a dozen convictions and a storm of outraged public opinions that threw the party from power, and led the Republicans to take control of the government in the 1800.
5
After 1800, the presses began to have their views expressed in a much freer manner than ever before and newspapers became a form of public property, freely available in reading rooms, barbershops, taverns, hotels, and coffeehouses.[1] The editor, usually reflecting the sentiment of a group or a faction, began to emerge as a distinct power, closely following the drift of events and expressing vigorous opinions. The years of violence also witnessed a development in both the quality and the power of newspapers, with the press in the United States eventually demonstrating a compatibility with the maintenance of orderly government. Also, news reporting was extended to new fields of local affairs, and the intense rivalry from numerous competitors initiate the rush for the earliest reports, which was to become the dominant trait in American journalism.
——2011年03月19日北美考试机经
What can be inferred from Paragraph 5 about the news reporting before 1800?
A. They were not a public property.
B. They usually reflect the sentiment of a group.
C. They mainly focused on national affairs.
D. They didn't have too much competition.
核心词汇：
词汇练习：
阅读下列句子，用所给单词（或词组）的正确形式填空：
impose circulate initiate successively relatively regulate
distinct represent bold opponent maintenance vigorous
1. Water _____ through heat reservoirs in this temperature range is able to extract enough heat to warm residential, commercial, and industrial spaces. (TPO-21: Geothermal Energy)
2. Without the external cue, the difference accumulates and so the internally _____ activities of the biological day drift continuously, like the tides, in relation to the solar day. (TPO-13: Biological Clocks)
3. Even though the fine arts in the twentieth century often treat materials in new ways, the basic difference in attitude of artists in relation to their materials in the fine arts and the applied arts remains _____ constant. (OG: Applied Arts and Fine Arts)
4. An abandoned field, for instance, will be invaded _____ by herbaceous plants (plants with little or no woody tissue), shrubs, and trees, eventually becoming a forest. (TPO-19: Succession, Climax, and Ecosystems)
5. When not campaigning, soldiers needed to be occupied; otherwise they ____ a potentially dangerous source of friction and disloyalty. (TPO-19: The Roman Army's Impact on Britain)
6. The new candid photography—unposed pictures that were made when the subjects were unaware that their pictures were being taken—confirmed these scientific results, and at the same time, thanks to the radical cropping (trimming) of images that the camera often____, suggested new compositional formats. (TPO-22: The Birth of Photography)
7. Mendeleyev was ____ than Meyer and even assumed that if a measured atomic mass put an element in the wrong place in the table, the atomic mass was wrong. (TPO-16: Development of the Periodic Table)
8. During Jackson's second term, his ____ had gradually come together to form the Whig party. (OG: Nineteenth-Century Politics in the United States)
9. All organisms, therefore, allocate energy to growth, reproduction, ____, and storage. (Online Test: Opportunists and Competitors)
10. A green iceberg that stranded just west of the Amery Ice Shelf showed two ____ layers: bubbly blue-white ice and bubble-free green ice separated by a one-meter-long ice layer containing sediments. (OG Test 2: Green Icebergs)
11. If parent birds use begging intensity to direct food to healthy offspring capable of ____ begging, then parents should make food delivery decisions on the basis of their offsprings’ calls. (TPO-11: Begging by Nestlings)
12. In small groups we have a better chance to ____ contact and establish rapport with them. (TPO-13: Types of Social Groups)
参考答案：
1. circulated 2. regulated 3. relatively 4. successively 5. represented
6. imposed 7. bolder 8. opponents 9. maintenance 10. distinct
11. vigorous 12. initiate
注释
[1]与今日百句译（Sentence 76）相同的句型。