Andie Tucher, editorial producer of The Twentieth Century documentary series at ABC News, was a Clinton campaign
speechwriter.
Review
"From the yellowed columns of newsprint, Ms. Tucher . . . skillfully draws a contemporary moral."
--New York Times Book Review
"[Tucher] presents the colorful story of the early penny press with all the verve, intelligence, and humor
it merits."
--American Heritage
"A deceptively complex book. . . . A readable, racy, and often funny study of an important aspect of antebellum
social history. Among the book's many virtues is the author's repeated concern to stress the relevance of these
ancient scandals for contemporary debate about the nature of journalism and, indirectly, for the relationship between
fact and truth in modern historical debate."
--American Historical Review
"Will add a new dimension to the ongoing efforts to understand the development of the penny press and its
links to modern journalism. . . . This well-written book is a valuable contribution to the literature on journalism
in the nineteenth century."
--Journal of the Early Republic
"This is scholarship as solid as oak and history as timely as today's tabloid titillation. No one I know but
Andie Tucher could have spun from two long-forgotten murders such a rollicking account of the misbegotten origins
of the tumultuous affair between the popular press and the American people. You can read it for pleasure alone--she
has the storyteller's touch--or to ponder the riddle of democracy when the mass media run amuck. Either way, you
will never again think the same about truth, justice, and the comics."
--Bill Moyers
"Deeply researched, beautifully written, and thoughtfully argued, Froth and Scum is the most significant new
work on the penny press and nineteenth-century journalism in many years. Tucher has made an original and important
contribution to American cultural history."
--Daniel Czitrom, Mount Holyoke College
The University of North Carolina Press Web Site, July, 2000
Summary
Two notorious antebellum New York murder cases--a prostitute slashed in an elegant brothel and a tradesman bludgeoned
by the brother of inventor Samuel Colt--set off journalistic scrambles over the meanings of truth, objectivity,
and the duty of the press that reverberate to this day. In 1833 an entirely new kind of newspaper--cheap, feisty,
and politically independent--introduced American readers to the novel concept of what has come to be called objectivity
in news coverage. The penny press was the first medium that claimed to present the true, unbiased facts to a democratic
audience. But in Froth and Scum, Andie Tucher explores--and explodes--the notion that 'objective' reporting will
discover a single, definitive truth. As they do now, news stories of the time aroused strong feelings about the
possibility of justice, the privileges of power, and the nature of evil. The prostitute's murder in 1836 sparked
an impassioned public debate, but one newspaper's 'impartial investigation' pleased the powerful by helping the
killer go free. Colt's 1841 murder of the tradesman inspired universal condemnation, but the newspapers' singleminded
focus on his conviction allowed another secret criminal to escape. By examining media coverage of these two sensational
murders, Tucher reveals how a community's needs and anxieties can shape its public truths. The manuscript of this
book won the 1991 Allan Nevins Prize of the Society of American Historians for the best-written dissertation in
American history. from the book Journalism is important. It catches events on the cusp between now and then--events
that still may be changing, developing, ripening. And while new interpretations of the past can alter our understanding
of lives once led, new interpretations of the present can alter the course of our lives as we live them. Understanding
the news properly is important. The way a community receives the news is profoundly influenced by who its members
are, what they hope and fear and wish, and how they think about their fellow citizens. It is informed by some of
the most occult and abstract of human ideas, about truth, beauty, goodness, and justice.