Partisan Takes Echo Colonial Pamphlets as Social Media and AI Redraw the Press

Partisan media, once thought tamed by professional journalism, is returning in full force—fueled by technology and echoing the raucous pamphleteering of America’s earliest days.

It is said that everything old is new again. Not far from the rattle of subway cars and the grime of municipal politics, New Yorkers now find themselves enveloped by a media landscape as energetically opinionated as anything their revolutionary forebears could muster. Adam Penenberg, writing in the Brooklyn Eagle, observes that today’s hyper-partisan press—a potent mix of broadcast, digital, and social—closely mirrors the pamphlet-wielding chaos of America’s founding era, only this time with the volume amplified by algorithm, meme, and generative AI.

Penenberg’s argument lands at a moment of acute informational anxiety. Where once the “view from nowhere” ethos of mid-20th century journalism aimed to present an impartial chronicle of events, now cable channels sort audiences into ideological boxes, Twitter squabbles spark editorial crusades, and AI churns out tailored takes around the clock. The new pamphleteers eschew scrupulous neutrality in favour of zestful polemic. What the penny papers and broadsides of 1790 managed through ink and typeset, modern platforms achieve through reach and cacophony.

For New York, the implications are not merely academic. The city is both beneficiary and casualty of this trend. Local newsrooms, hollowed by years of declining ad revenues, struggle to compete as partisanship, sensationalism, and manufactured outrage drive engagement elsewhere. Outlets with clear leanings—whether rightward on talk radio or left-leaning in digital upstarts—outpace their centrist competitors in building loyal (if siloed) audiences. The city’s public square feels more fractured for it.

New Yorkers find themselves navigating a digital thicket of fervid takes on everything from housing policy to subway crime, with little consensus on basic facts. The ferocious tempo of the news—pushed by polarising algorithms—narrows civic debate, often reducing complex issues to tribal sound bites. If the goal is an informed citizenry, the effect looks, at best, equivocal.

There are economic stakes as well: the city’s robust media and advertising sectors must reckon with shifting models of audience trust and revenue. Partisan outlets, both large and small, often see surges in subscriptions and ad dollars linked tightly to political flare-ups. This buoys their bottom line even as it corrodes shared informational ground. Meanwhile, tepid investment in rigorous, community-level coverage undermines accountability for City Hall and the police alike.

Politically, the return of opinionated media bodes double trouble for both electeds and would-be reformers. Where old New York’s rags once delighted in kingmaking and muckraking, today’s media insurgents can sink or lift reputations overnight. Digital “explainers” and AI-boosted newsletters accelerate the feedback loop between grievance, mobilisation, and policy action—or backlash.

Socially, the city must confront a deepening sorting of its residents by information diet. Brooklyn millennials and outer-borough retirees now consume news, memes, and snippets from sharply divergent ecosystems. The shared touchstones that once held city dwellers in an uneasy civic consensus—think the Times on Sunday or the 6 o’clock local—look positively quaint to a cohort nurtured on Substack and TikTok.

The phenomenon is not uniquely New York, nor even uniquely American. Populist and partisan presses shape politics from London to Lagos, with algorithms and artificial intelligence abetting fervour and filter bubbles. But the city’s significance as a media capital, and its historic embrace of public debate, make these trends matter more here. The pamphleteering spirit—a blend of wit, polemic, and provocation—remains in the city’s bones, even if the means have been digitised.

There are, to be fair, upsides to the cacophony. The founding-era press, however shrill, gave voice to dissenters and expanded the boundaries of democratic participation. Today’s digital pamphleteers have similarly broadened the range of voices, exposing corruption and championing causes that mainstream outlets once ignored or suppressed. Diversity, in this instance, can be a source of civic strength.

How much opinion is too much?

Yet, as any classical liberal might wonder, is more really merrier when outrage is monetised and consensus eroded? The phenomenon of “confirmation shopping”—seeking content to validate biases—is hardly conducive to engaged pluralism. Nor is it sustainable for civic institutions, which wither when public trust splinters into a thousand micro-polemics.

The economics of the moment portend further fissuring. Traditional outlets, already beleaguered, face headwinds as algorithmic platforms—many situated across the Hudson—hoover up scant ad revenue. Meanwhile, AI-powered content farms can saturate social networks with plausible but unverified “takes” at scale. Paradoxically, this has prompted nostalgia for the dogged, if imperfect, editorial judgment of yesteryear.

What, then, ought to be the city’s response? We reckon New York requires both a plural press and a renewed investment in shared facts. Pamphleteering will persist, but so must the infrastructure of verification and debate. Journalism schools, philanthropic backers, and the city’s own competitive egos all have roles to play in rebuilding the robust local coverage and institutional reliability on which the metropolis has long relied.

In the end, the city’s fate depends less on whether its media resembles the partisan clamour of its founding than on whether New Yorkers—contrarian, curious, and resilient—can make use of the noise. The pamphlet wars of the 1790s eventually yielded a durable republic, if not an especially civil discourse. Amid the digital din, the hope is that some of that sturdy civic spirit endures. ■