ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with early America, a period when journalism and democracy both were on a new frontier. Colonial printers, in fact, operated much like modern-day bloggers, untethered by the yoke of professionalism or the need for formal journalism education. In the transformation of American culture during and immediately following the reign of Victoria, the country was bringing forth the first and second generations of cultural practitioners, those whose spells would fall, consciously or unconsciously, under the dominant cultural influence of Victorianism. Attempts by antimodernists and the intelligentsia to overhaul Victorian culture at the turn of the twentieth century found accommodation and further rationalization in the emerging social sciences, positivism, romanticism, and collectivism. The culture, so delicate when normal along lines of religion, class, race, and gender, is fracturing with repeated episodes of conflict, pitting journalists on John Locke's side of reason and morality against a Hobbesian president who prevaricates and changes positions with emotional outbursts on Twitter.
