Misinformation Nation

Foreign News and the Politics of Truth in Revolutionary America

By: Jordan E. Taylor

Narrated by: Christopher P. Brown

In Misinformation Nation, Jordan E. Taylor reveals how foreign news defined the boundaries of early American politics and ultimately drove colonists to revolt against Britain and create a new nation.

News was the lifeblood of early American politics, but newspaper printers had few reliable sources to report on events from abroad. Though frequently false, the information that Americans encountered in newspapers, letters, and conversations framed their sense of reality, leading them to respond with protests, boycotts, violence, and the creation of new political institutions. Fearing that their enemies were spreading fake news, American colonists fought for control of the news media. As their basic perceptions of reality diverged, Loyalists separated from Patriots and, in the new nation created by the revolution, Republicans inhabited a political reality quite distinct from that of their Federalist rivals.

The American Revolution was not only a political contest for liberty, equality, and independence (for white men, at least); it was also a contest to define certain accounts of reality to be truthful while defining others as false and dangerous. Misinformation Nation argues that we must also conceive of the American Revolution as a series of misperceptions, misunderstandings, and uninformed overreactions.

©2022 Johns Hopkins University Press (P)2022 Kalorama

History repeats itself

Fascinating book. The hypothesis that tendentious news coverage influences real events is proven. The author is careful to indicate that such coverage was not the sole, instrumental driver of the American Revolution & later events of the early Republic period, But is most satisfying to know that the founding fathers were not pure philosophers, students of John Locke & Montesquieu & others of the Enlightenment period, & their precursors in Ancient Greece & Rome. They were also mightily influenced by what they read in the news every day & every week. The flow of news from Tory & Whig papers in London is shown to have reappeared consistently in “loyalist” & “patriot” leaning papers throughout the 13 colonies. The author also makes a convincing argument that the English Tory press & stories that reappeared weeks or months later in colonial loyalist papers probably offered a more accurate picture of Parliamentary & Royal machinations than did the competing Whig press (& patriot press replication). This book gives an entirely new & fresh way to think about the late 18th century colonial debates, valuable to close students of the period & amateurs. The book is written to be intelligible & enjoyable to the non scholarly reader. And is excellently narrated.