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The reputation of the fourth estate has waxed and waned over the course of American's history, sometimes thanks to the criticisms of public figures — including members of the press itself — complaining of its shortcomings and, according to them, undue influence on the electorate. Novelist, humorist, and sometime newspaperman Mark Twain is an example of a journalist who displayed sharply mixed feelings about the profession. On the one hand, he was of the firm opinion that the press — particularly the rambunctious, freewheeling American press of the late nineteenth century — was essential to the defense of a free society. The devil's aversion to holy water is a light matter compared with a despot's dread of a newspaper that laughs, Twain wrote in his 1888 essay, The American Press. At the same time, he warned of the excesses of the press and their deleterious effect on ordinary people. There are laws to protect the freedom of the press’s speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press, he said in an 1873 speech. In an even stronger statement that has been making the Internet rounds since the early 2000s, Twain allegedly urges readers to fear the media: In a longer version of the quote, Twain supposedly goes on to deride journalists as ignorant, self-complacent simpletons: What we found when we attempted to source the quote, however, is that there is no public record of Mark Twain ever writing or uttering the words fear the media. In fact, there is no evidence that he ever used the phrase the media in the sense we're familiar with today (i.e., denoting means of mass communication) — which would have been an anachronism, in any case. When Twain was writing and speaking (in the late nineteenth and very early twentieth centuries), there was only one form of mass communication — the printed word, in the form of books, pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers — and that's how he referred to them. Twain died in 1910. No one would speak of the media, as we now understand the term, until the 1920s, at the earliest. Media historian John Nerone (author of The Media and Public Life: A History, published in 2015) writes: We therefore cannot credit Mark Twain with the exhortation, Fear the media, for they will take your honor. Who did say it? We don't know. The earliest instances of the quote we've found go back to 2003, when it first turned up on the Internet, sometimes attributed to Mark Twain, sometimes to Unknown. We suspect it was fabricated. The longer version of the quote does contain sentences uttered by Twain during a speech entitled License of the Press, delivered in Hartford, Connecticut in March 1873. It was the same speech in which he bemoaned the fact that there are laws protecting freedom of the press, but none protecting people from the press. His criticism of the journalistic profession (of which he himself was a member) was unsparing: Yet he delivered this condemnation with a wink and a nod. As we noted above, Twain had mixed feelings about journalism. amply expressed in his closing statement:
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