The news media of the late 1700s and early 1800s consisted almost entirely of partisan political operations. Ron Chernow, the biographer of Washington and Hamilton, describes the newspapers of that era as ‘avowedly partisan’, with ‘no pretense of objectivity’. It was, Chernow, writes, a ‘golden age for wielding words as rapier-sharp political weapons’.

Some two centuries later, we are returning to a media landscape in which the majority of sources are ‘avowedly partisan’ with little pretense of the objectivity that only a few decades ago was a hallmark of American journalism.