My professorial son got me Stacy Schiff’s The Revolutionary Sam Adams for Christmas. It’s actually the third Adams biography I’ve read, but being the geezer that I am, I can’t recall whether the previous biographies emphasized the part of Adam’s history about which I’m writing now.
Adams was a prolific writer/propagandist. He started what might be considered a news service that distributed newspaper articles throughout the country. Based on what Schiff writes, and I’m sure it’s accurate, it is no exaggeration to say that Adams dealt in what we would today call misinformation. For example, when the British occupied Boston he would publicize any misdeeds of the British troops, often (to borrow a term from champion liar George Santos) embellishing them to maximize their impact on an audience that, by and large, had no other source of information. It worked, as his aim was to get all the colonies behind the Bostonians, and united in opposition tactics, such as non-importation of British goods.
In a sense, he had things better than today’s purveyors of untruths, in that he had a near monopoly on information disbursal, though there were, albeit much less popular, purveyors of Tory misinformation. Journalists were comparatively honest. They didn’t even pretend to be objective.
Today people get their misinformation from the internet, but you can pick and choose your information source, and some of us actually try to exclude the obvious fabricators. It is also the case that Adam’s misinformation was typically in the nature of exaggeration of actual events, rather than outright fabrication.
It all worked out to the good so far as Adam’s propagandizing is concerned, as the one thing we can say at the moment is that as bad as things are here at the present time, they are worse in today’s England. I tend to doubt that we’ll be able to say the same things about the results of modern style disinformation campaigns. That probably has a lot to do with the ambitions of the misinformers. Adams was sincerely trying to protect the rights of Americans, while much of what we currently see by way of misinformation (lying, in other words) is done with the objective of destroying the republic and ushering in fascism.
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