The New York Times has come under sustained assault in recent years. In 1993, Times alumnus Hilton Kramer anticipated the trend when he began writing a weekly New York Post column dissecting the gray lady's ongoing machinations. The attack intensified in June 2000 when Ira Stoll, then of the Wall Street Journal, set up smartertimes.com to expose editorial sloppiness, gross misreporting and telling silences on the part of what purports to be our national newspaper of record. Shortly before Stoll gave up this labor of love to help found the New York Sun, Andrew Sullivan began cataloguing on his eponymous web site the most egregious misreporting to be found in the news columns and on the editorial pages of the Times. The assault gained in ferocity this past summer when Charles Krauthammer, George Will, the editors of the Wall Street Journal and the Times' own staffer Bill Keller joined with Sullivan and others in remarking on the degree to which partisanship has come to distort the reporting of the news now that Howell Raines is executive editor of the New York Times.

Though true, these accusations need to be taken with several grains of salt, for the attack on the Times presupposes the existence of a golden age when the gray lady actually lived up to her motto: "All the News That's Fit to Print." New Yorkers of a certain age have for decades rolled their eyes when they glanced at the upper left-hand corner of the Times' front page. In its own bailiwick, the Times has never been above making the most of the peccadilloes of those to whom it is opposed, and over the years it has consistently relegated scandals involving its favorites to the back pages, if not to the executive editor's circular file.

In any case, we should be neither surprised nor shocked to discover that what styles itself as a newspaper of record is and has always been partisan. After all, at its very inception, the newspaper was a product of fierce partisanship. Indeed, one may justly wonder whether serious journalism could be sustained in the absence of partisan strife. Our interest in knowing is quite often inspired by our inclination to take sides, and the desire to inform and the desire to instruct are virtually inseparable. That is why there is not now, never has been, and never will be a nonpartisan press.

There is a difference, however, between competent and intelligent partisanship, and the less sustainable, transparent, clumsy, embarrassing sort we have lately seen at the Times. For an example of press partisanship that was not just competent but almost impossibly versatile, we could do worse than to go back to the very beginning of political journalism-to the career of one Marchamont Nedham.

In the Beginning...

What we call a newspaper was once termed a newsbook. Published serially as a weekly gazette, the newsbook picked up precisely where the pamphlet left off. The first newsbook made its debut in London on November 29, 1641 on the eve of the English Civil War. The Irish rebellion had quite recently broken out, and two days thereafter Parliament presented the Grand Remonstrance to a startled and distraught king. The inventor of the newsbook was an entrepreneurial young bookseller and printer of pamphlets named John Thomas, who had hitherto been closely associated with John Pym, then the dominant figure in what later came to be called the Long Parliament. At this critical juncture, Thomas sought to answer what Pym and his associates in Parliament evidently took to be a necessity: reporting to the people of England the deliberations in Parliament that had given rise to the remonstrance, thereby extending to them an unprecedented invitation to adjudicate the bitter dispute emerging between Parliament and the king.

The opinions of ordinary people matter as the ultimate underpinning for political regimes. They have always mattered, even when dormant, and they always will. In Thomas' day, however, opinion mattered as it had at no time subsequent to the demise of the Roman republic, for it had been thoroughly aroused from its torpor and the people had been apprised of their power and instructed in its legitimacy. Thanks to moveable type, the populace of England had become what it had never before been: a public-a wakeful community able to judge.

The printing press was even more essential to England's Great Rebellion than it had been to the Protestant Reformation. The surviving English pamphlet literature of the period stretching from 1628 to 1660 is greater than that of the American and French revolutions put together. Thomas prospered, imitators soon flooded the market, and even the royal court found it necessary to sponsor Cavalier newsbooks to answer the Roundhead onslaught-an astounding fact when one considers the court's notorious reluctance to compromise its established authority by appealing to public opinion. Every gazette sought to rally those sympathetic to its faction, to inform and encourage them, and to provide them with the arguments necessary to sustain the cause. Each sought to persuade the uncommitted and dishearten the opposition. Each sought, as well, to reshape and direct opinion and to prepare the public for shifts in policy already contemplated or at a distance foreseen. Along the way, even Royalist pamphleteers and newsbook editors contributed powerfully, if unwittingly, to a process of democratization by which a much larger public was invited to join, and indeed did join, the political nation.

The Cavaliers, who had good reason to regret this development, were especially sensitive to its consequences. Looking back in mid-December 1648, some seven weeks before the execution of Charles I, the editor of Mercurius Impartialis attributed "the ruines both of King and people" to "the Pulpit and the Presse." It was from these two sources, he argued, that "his Majesties Subjects [have] beene Poysoned with Principles of Heresie, Schisme, Faction, Sedition, Blasphemy, Apostacie, Rebellion, Treason, Sacriledge, Murther, Rapine, Robbery, and all" the other "enormous Crimes, and detestable Villanies, with which this Kingdome hath of later times swarmed."

For the first time in history, the press was arguably more of a force even than the pulpit. The invention of moveable type offered a new species of clerk, the man of letters, an opportunity to pass judgment on the princes of Europe, and it gave him occasion in which to invite his readers to do so as well. It promised to liberate the classically-trained humanist from mere service to power, indeed, to transform him into what we now call "the public intellectual." In making censors of the learned and judges of ordinary readers, the public prints promised a species of emancipation to all. This did not escape the notice of contemporary witnesses. As one newsbook writer observed on the eve of the execution of the king, there was a real difference between the English people in Queen Elizabeth's day and those in his own time. The former had been "rather guided by the tradition of their Fathers, than by acting principles in reason and knowledge. But to the contrary in these our dayes, the meanest sort of people are not only able to write, &c. but to argue and discourse on matters of highest concernment; and thereupon do desire, that such things which are most remarkable, may be truly committed to writing, and made publique."

As this observation suggests, it was printing, not the pulpit, that first conjured into existence and opened up the space that is now termed "the public sphere." It was this space that John Milton had set out to defend in November 1644 when he published an unprecedented attack on the licensing of the press in his pamphlet Areopagitica. More than three decades after the first appearance of the newsbook, the poet Andrew Marvell could easily imagine a "young Priest" of the High Anglican persuasion "inclined to sacrifice to the Genius of the Age; yea, though his Conscience were the Offering", deploying the pulpit against "the Press" envisaged as a "villanous Engine . . . invented much about the same time with the Reformation, that hath done more mischief to the Discipline of our Church, than all the Doctrine can make amends for." It would be characteristic of so "malapert", a "Chaplain", he supposed, that he should regard "Printing" as a disturber of "the Peace of Mankind" and lament "that Lead, when moulded into Bullets, is not so mortal as when founded into Letters"-all the while thinking to himself,

'Twas an happy time when all Learning was in Manuscript, and some little Officer . . . did keep the Keys of the Library. When the Clergy needed no more knowledge then to read the Liturgy, and the Laity no more Clerkship than to save them from Hanging. . . . There have been wayes found out to banish Ministers, to fine not only the People, but even the Grounds and Fields where they assembled in Conventicles: But no Art yet could prevent these seditious meetings of Letters. Two or three brawny Fellows in a Corner, with meer Ink and Elbow-grease, do more harm than an hundred Systematical Divines with their sweaty Preaching.

Marvell's satire was exceedingly apt. A decade before, at the time of the Restoration, the Royalist penman Roger L'Estrange had in all seriousness made precisely the same point, observing, "it has been made a Question long agoe, whether more mischief than advantage were not occasion'd to the Christian world by the Invention of Typography."

The Ur Editorialist

L'Estrange made these remarks in passing in a pamphlet arguing for the execution of a particularly influential journalist named Marchamont Nedham. Born in August 1620 at Burford in Gloucestershire into a genteel family of modest means, Nedham had studied at All Souls College and had taken his B.A. from the University of Oxford in 1637. He then worked briefly as an usher at Merchant Taylor's School in London and as an underclerk at Gray's Inn before discovering his true métier. When he first took up his pen to write for the public prints less than two years after John Thomas had introduced the newsbook, he was barely 23 years in age.

Nedham was an entertainer of sorts and a time-server-"a jack of all sides", as one contemporary critic put it, "transcendently gifted in opprobrious and treasonable Droll." In the course of a long and checkered career-stretching from early in the English Civil War in 1643 to a time shortly before his death in 1678, when the Exclusion Crisis was just getting underway-he displayed a political and moral flexibility and a lust for lucre exceeded only by his talent. He began as a fierce defender of the parliamentary cause, switched in 1647 to the side of the king-and then, some nine months after his royal patron's demise and while on the lam from Newgate Jail, he wrote to offer his services to the presiding officer of the regicide court.

Nedham's was not a costive muse. In the course of his career, he published more than 34 pamphlets and books. In addition, he composed most of the copy that appeared in the Roundhead newsbook Mercurius Britanicus, then edited the Cavalier newsbook Mercurius Pragmaticus; and then (for a brief time under license from his friend John Milton) he edited the newsbook Mercurius Politicus-in turn for the Rump, for the Nominated Parliament, for the Protectorate, and for the Rump twice again, celebrating the coups d'état that overthrew each, and in the end, even hailing the return of the king. On the eve of the Restoration, after publishing a brief but bitter satire warning the Roundheads of Royalist vengeance to come, he prudently withdrew into exile. But soon he managed to purchase for himself a personal pardon. And while many of his erstwhile associates suffered execution, imprisonment or exile, he ended his days writing pamphlets for Charles II, the Earl of Danby, and their Tory allies. Nedham wrote such pamphlets against the Exclusion Whigs and their leader, the first Earl of Shaftesbury, whom Nedham had the effrontery to denounce not just as "a man of . . . dapper Conscience, and dexterity, that can dance through a Hoop; or that can be a Tambler through Parties, or a small Teazer of Religions, and Tonzer of Factions", but also as "a Pettifogger of Politiciks" ever ready "to shift Principles like Shirts"; and "quit an unlucky Side in a fright at the noise of a New Prevailing Party", and even as "a Will-with-a-Wisp, that uses to lead Men out of the way; then leaves them at last in a Ditch and Darkness, and nimbly retreats for Self-security."

No darker pot ever insulted a kettle. As should by now be clear, Nedham himself was a man of dapper conscience and dexterity extraordinaire; he had a well-earned reputation for shifting principles like shirts; and he was certainly a Will-with-a-Wisp, possessed of what one contemporary described as "a dextrous faculty of creeping into the breech of every Rising Power."What he lacked in constancy to other men, this inky wretch made up for in audacity. The vigor of the language that he deployed in his denunciation of Shaftesbury, his light touch therein, and the vividness of the metaphors he found apt suggest on his part a certain grudging admiration for the man-the appreciation of one virtuoso for a bravura performance of another.

Nedham's own virtuosity as a flack invited on the part of his critics similar flights of fancy. On the eve of the Restoration, an opponent described him as "a Mercury with a winged conscience, the Skip-Jack of all fortunes, that like a Shittle-cock drive him which way you will, falls still with the Cork end forwards." In a satirical pamphlet published early in 1660, the editor of Mercurius Politicus is represented as taking leave of his regicide associates with the following words: "for now [that] the scæne's alter'd, I must go change my habit; if ever the times turn, you shall find me as faithful as I was before." Another critic predicted at that time that Nedham would soon be writing for the Cavaliers. "He is like a Catt", he wrote, "that (throw him which way you will) still light[s] on his feet."

If this particular journalist did land right-side up and light on his feet at every toss and turn, if he was almost always in someone's pay, it was because, at every stage in the set of struggles that defined his age, his was the indispensable pen. No one in his generation knew how to sway English public opinion more effectively than he. Marchamont Nedham could not only sow the whirlwind; he could ride the storm as well.

Of Interests and Ideas

That L' Estrange should have articulated his attack on the press in a pamphlet demanding that none other than Marchamont Nedham be indicted for treason stands to reason. Nedham was a true pioneer. He was the first intellectual journalist, the very model of a modern sophist, the harbinger of much that we now take for granted; by 1660 his name had come to be synonymous with the press. This man of many masks, who had passed himself off as Mercurius Britanicus, then as Mercurius Pragmaticus, and finally as Mercurius Politicus, was, as L'Estrange readily conceded, "the Golia[t]h of the Philistines", and his "pen was in comparison of others like a Weavers beam." It is, L'Estrange added, "incredible what influence" his weekly newsbooks "had upon numbers of inconsidering persons." Nedham had "with so much malice calumniated his Sovereign, so scurrilously abused the Nobility, so impudently blasphemed the Church, and so industriously poysoned the people with dangerous principles" that, had "the Devil himself (the Father of Lies)" held this particular journalist's office, "he could not have exceeded him."

As seems only fitting, it was this self-same diabolical colossus who first deployed in the public prints Niccolò Machiavelli's reflections on the rise and fall of republics, doing so in a systematic effort to sort out the practical exigencies of England's republican experiment. Nedham had never been averse to the Florentine, and from early on he had brazenly championed raison d'état as preached by the Duc de Rohan, arguing that it is material interest-not justice, honor or religion-that makes the world go round. In The Case of the Kingdom Stated, According to the Proper Interests of the Severall Parties Ingaged, the first tract that Nedham wrote in any way sympathetic to the Royalist cause, he first cited this renowned Huguenot grandee, then analyzed in cold-blooded terms the interests of England's various contending parties, and ultimately advised patience on the part of the king. He argued that Charles could profit from the quarrel then emerging between the Presbyterians and Independents if he tarried until the moment when "his onely Interest will be, to close with that Party which gives most hope of Indulgence to his Prerogative, & greatest probability of favor to his Friends." The policy of divide and rule is, he explained, "what Machiavell sets downe as a sure Principle towards the purchase of Empire."

Of course, when the rhetorical situation required it, Nedham could pass himself off as a believing Christian and frequently did so, and he was perfectly capable of speaking in the familiar accents of moral rectitude, denouncing one side or the other for an addiction to hypocrisy, blasphemy and vice. But nearly as often, especially when the opportunity for candor presented itself, he displayed an outright contempt for highmindedness of virtually every kind. "Interest", he insisted, "is the true Zenith of every State and Person, according to which they may certainly be understood, though cloathed never so much with the most specious disguise of Religion, Justice and Necessity: And Actions are the effects of Interests, from whom they proceed, and to whom they tend naturally as the stone doth downward."

Nedham's skepticism in matters religious and moral, his propensity for scoffing and his fascination with Machiavelli may, indeed, be the key to understanding his astonishing trajectory. He was venal and mercenary but not lacking in courage. In that unstable age, he accommodated every twist and turn in the course of events without betraying the slightest sign of any discomfort or shame, and he served each and every one of his masters with vigor and panache, displaying a gift for invective and a literary virtuosity that made him one of the minor wonders of the age. It was almost as if moral and political dexterity was for Nedham itself a matter of principle. He seems to have taken to heart his friend Henry Oxinden's contention that, to survive in the world, one must practice "the art of dissimulation" and not be "startled" or "troubled chameleon-like, as the necessity of occasion serves, to turn into all shapes" since even "the most constant men must be content to change their resolutions according to the alterations of time."

Chameleon-like Nedham certainly was, as was he shameless. Some would have called him reptilian, and many thought him louche. But servile and fawning he was never. He may have been pliant, accommodating and all too ready to please; he earned the obloquy to which he was exposed. But if he was often bent, Nedham never once bowed. On two occasions, he was imprisoned for what he had written, and he repeatedly tested the limits of what his employers could tolerate. In 1660, when he joined John Milton in futile resistance to the rising Royalist tide, he consciously courted the noose. Think of him what you will: Marchamont Nedham was anything but risk-averse.

Moreover, when he stuck out his neck, this gifted scrivener was not just chasing cheap thrills. He seems invariably to have been pursuing a political agenda all his own. There need be no doubt that he preferred republican government to hereditary monarchy, and religious toleration (within an exceedingly loose Erastian establishment organized along congregationalist lines) to the species of enforced uniformity and discipline sought variously by Anglican Royalists and Presbyterian divines. But Nedham's preferences, serious for him though they clearly were, never led him to excess. He was first and foremost a practical man-always willing to settle for the best that he thought he could get, never disposed to a bootless sacrifice of self, and perfectly ready to argue that, in adversity, it is one's God-given duty to turn one's coat, which, of course, more than once he dutifully did.

A Friend to Liberty

Nedham was a man of what, with some hesitation, we might call the libertarian Left. Above all else, he hated priestcraft. In 1650, when he published a pamphlet in defense of the English republic entitled The Case of the Commonwealth of England Stated, he directed his invective against what he called "our modern Pharisee, the conscientious pretender and principal disturber of the public peace", who was intent on propagating what Nedham denounced as "an opinionated humour." In the process, he made it clear that he preferred what he dubbed "the worldling . . . the greater part of the world being led more by appetites of convenience, and commodity than the dictates of conscience."

His real purpose in this tract was to rally the Royalists to the new order and isolate the Presbyterians, to whom he attributed all of the vices that Machiavelli had ascribed to the species of Christianity predominant in his own time. Presbyterianism, Nedham observed, has "contracted so many adulterations of worldly interest that it hath lost the beauty which it once appeared to have and serves every sophister as a cloak to cover his ambitious design." Nedham lamented that "so many knowing men and of able parts should prove so degenerous as to prostitute themselves and the majesty of the nation to serve the ambitious ends of a few priests."

In his judgment, the proposed Presbyterian course was "destructive to every man's interest of conscience and liberty" and would eventuate in "an intolerable tyranny over magistrates and people." This "mad discipline" would not only eliminate the bishops and clip "the wings of regality", but also "intrench also upon the lawyers, curb the gentry in their own lordships by a strange way of parochial tyranny, and bring all people into the condition of mere galley slaves while the blind priests sit at the stern and their hackney dependants, the elders, hold an oar in every boat."

Nedham saw at the heart of Presbyterianism "the popish trick taken up by the presbyterian priests in drawing all secular affairs 'within the compass of their spiritual jurisdiction.'" In claiming the right to judge "scandalous sins", they extended their reach to "every action of human life. So that all the people besides their favorites, from the counselor to the beggar, must at every turn stoop like asses to be ridden by them and their arbitrary assemblies."

Presbyterian discipline is, Nedham firmly insisted, indistinguishable from that of "the Church of Rome." Wherever there is "a jurisdiction in the church . . . distinct from the civil", it will prove impossible to keep "church discipline within its limits."

Even in his early days at Mercurius Britanicus as a scrivener writing in support of the parliamentary cause, Nedham had been a radical-working in cooperation with the war party in Parliament, intent on polarizing the political situation, eager to subvert all deference to the monarchy, and devoted from early on to securing the deposition of Charles I. It is not, then, surprising that as editor of Mercurius Politicus he sought to bolster the partisans of the regicide republic in their audacity by celebrating the execution of his erstwhile royal patron, by insisting that a repudiation of monarchy be the cornerstone of the new regime, and by advancing on the Commonwealth's part an ambitious foreign policy aimed not just at promoting Protestantism but at spreading the revolution to a continent that seemed-in the wake of the Reformation, the Wars of Religion in France, and the Thirty Years' War in Germany-to be poised on the edge of a republican transformation comparable to the one that England had itself undergone.

What such a revolution required he intimated in the pages of his newsbook, denouncing, as he did in the very first issue, the Royalists and their Presbyterian allies as "Priest ridden", and charging that "for the carrying on" of their "traiterous Designe" the latter "have farr out-stript the Jesuit, both in Practise and Project." For all of their sophistication, he contended, his contemporaries "may be still at the same pass" as their "Fore-Fathers" since the "new Clergie are still the same Idol, only a little disguised with a new dress of Mummery." It is perfectly consistent with his critique of priestcraft that Nedham should similarly depict "the vanity of admiring Kings, [of] placing Them in a lofty seat of Impunity, like Gods", as a species of "Idolatry" grounded in a "Superstition" inculcated by the "antiquated Cheats of the Clergy." By eliminating ecclesiastical jurisdiction altogether and by rigorously subordinating the church to a republican state, Nedham hoped to strip from "the mystery of Tyranny" all the "gaudy Robes, and gay Appearances" conferred upon it by "ancient Christian Policie."

To grasp fully what Nedham had in mind, one must attend carefully to the third issue of the English Commonwealth's semi-official gazette, wherein its editor makes a passing, but highly revealing observation to the effect that "Churchmen of all Religions and Nations are of the same humor, to imbroile the world up to the ears in Blood rather than part with one Tittle of that Power and Profit, which may serve to satisfie the avarice and Ambition of their Interest and order."

In the 1640s and 1650s, when Marchamont Nedham and his allies in Parliament threw their weight behind the Independents, insisting on a radical interpretation of the Protestant doctrine of the priesthood of all believers and contending that "with God there is no respect of Persons", they harbored intentions regarding the Christian religion far more subversive than their godly republican allies ever imagined.

Nedham and his friends did not achieve the radical transformation at which they aimed. They did, however, set a precedent from which their successors profited at the time of the American and French revolutions. The Excellencie of a Free State was reprinted in London in 1767 and dispatched to the American colonists; it was translated into French in 1790 and widely read. John Adams excerpted it in his Defense of the Constitutions of the United States of America in the 1780s, and the Marquis de Condorcet cited the work in his influential discussion of the progress of the human mind. If we live in secular republics distinguished by a separation of church and state, if we are no longer in thrall to a condominium of princes and priests, it is in part because of the challenge laid down in the 1640s and 1650s by a disreputable journalist who shifted his political loyalties almost as often as he changed his shirts.

Marchamont Nedham was willing to engage in chicanery on a scale that few journalists today would have the wit to imagine. But if he was ready to turn coat in a trice, that is what his tumultuous times required of a hired hand intent on surreptitiously nudging the nascent British "public" in a secular, republican direction. If the world's first great journalist was promiscuous in his partisanship, it was in part because he was true to his principles. Nedham always knew what he was about and was unsurpassedly clever in concealing it as he moved from patron to benefactor to protector and back again.

Of course, it was never Nedham's privilege to edit a newspaper that had earned the ring of independent authority. Thanks to the efforts of the Rump and of Oliver Cromwell, Mercurius Politicus was in command of something approaching a monopoly of opinion-making much of the time. There was never any doubt that it spoke for the ruling order, however ephemeral that order might be-for the Rump, for the Nominated Parliament, for Oliver Cromwell, for his ill-fated son, for the Rump twice more: for whomever currently paid the bills. No one reading the gazettes with which Nedham was associated ever expected an impartial representation of events. But they did expect to be engaged seriously at an intellectual level appropriate to the subject, and they were.

What distinguishes Howell Raines from Marchamont Nedham, therefore, is less a matter of journalistic integrity or partisanship than a question of competence. Had a journal with the reputation of the New York Times existed in his day, and had he been given its command, Nedham would have had the wit to recognize its value. He would have taken care to preserve the franchise and would never have squandered an authority it had taken generations to accumulate. He was sly enough to be able to foresee that, in abandoning the appearance of impartiality and in turning itself into the vehicle of a political sect, such a journal would be jettisoning its effectiveness as a partisan tool. The temptation for an abuse of trust attendant on the possession of a power seemingly unchecked is no doubt great-but, as Nedham would have understood, resisting that temptation is prerequisite for persuasion. Perhaps the inky wretches of our own day will at some point come to recognize this. But, alas, not yet.