[hga]

Wasn't political party support also a source of income? In those more honest days, papers didn't pretend they were "objective", and you'll see traces of this today in some papers that retain "Republican" or "Democrat" in their names (Whigs, not that I remember. :-)

[dredmorbius]

Very much so. I was going to mention that but figured I'd rambled on enough already.

You might enjoy a piece I wrote about a year ago on J.P. Morgan and the purported "Banker's Manifesto" of 1892. (It proves to be a hoax.) The investigation took me through quite a few old newspaper archives, many of them political organs.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/39w8u4/jp_morg...

The Arizona Republic, commenting on its own endorsement of Hillary Clinton, a Democrat, the first presidental endorsement for that party in the paper's 150+ year history, noted that it was originally known as the Arizona RepublicAN.