Bob P.'s American Life

I started this piece with a description of the life of Joseph Pulitzer, but I didn't think it would keep your attention, so I dropped it. While I was researching his life, however, I came upon an interesting fact that is germane to the topic at hand: in the 1890s, for a city with a population of 1.5 million people (the size of today's Phoenix, AZ, more or less), New York City had 19 daily, English-language newspapers. That's right, 19, a figure that doesn't include the foreign-language dailies or weekly papers or specialty publications that served a particular political, social, or religious audience. Obviously, there was no alternative media back then. If you wanted to know what was going on, you had to read a newspaper. So, let's assume you chose to read the New York Call every day (I'm fudging on chronology a little bit, because the Call didn't come out until 1908), which was one of the three English-language dailies in the United States associated