PPT Slide
“The province of men with money, the newspaper business generally represented their interests. That was why a region whose voters were roughly half Democrats and half Republicans had an overwhelmingly Republican press. The men who put up the capital, the Northern business class, were predominately Republican... Through the press, the well-to-do had the opportunity, largely unavailable to any other social group, to disseminate their conception of politics and partisanship and set the public agenda.”
“The Press Transformed” from The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865-1928 by Michael McGerr, Oxford, 1986.