Eugene David<br>...The One-Minute Pundit

Posted 5:20 PM by Gene

While looking for information on Architectural Digest (amazing how things are so hard to find on the whoop-de-do Web) I came across an article by one W. H. Earle about the revered and long, long gone Niles' Register, the first newsweekly, based in Baltimore of all places. Consider this:

[Hezekiah Niles, its founding editor,] had large ambitions: he intended to be "an honest chronicler" who "registered" events not just for his contemporaries but for posterity as well. Although politics would be covered extensively, the Register would eschew any partisan slant -- "electioneering," as the editor called it [emphasis added]....

Niles' pledge in the first issue of the Register to avoid party politics distinguished the paper from much of the American journalism of the era. Many newspapers in that day represented parties, or factions within parties, or even particular candidates, and political reportage was usually one-sided and strident. The Register, however, ignored the petty disputes between "the ins and the outs." Niles' own politics were clearly and repeatedly stated: he was a Whig of the Henry Clay school, committed to the American System of protective tariff, industrial development, and internal improvements; he was also pro-American and anti-British, pro-republican and anti-royalist, and a rationalist who opposed "superstition" in religion or in public affairs. His own views were always identified as such, however, and he advanced them as logical arguments, not partisan invective. As a result, there is a balanced quality to the Register that gave it an authority no other publication of its time could match.

An editor did this with a newsweekly in the early 19th century. Why can't MR. MARK and the TWXsters do this NOW?