The past few weeks have brought bad news to the hardworking scribes of the news business. Three leading digital outlets—BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, and Vice—announced layoffs that left many accomplished journalists unemployed. The fingers of blame quickly pointed to the great bogeymen of our media age—Facebook and Google—and warned about a threat to democracy. After all, if the most savvy and avant-garde of the new digital journalists can’t make a living, what hope is there for old-school newspapers? To many, the health of our democracy is inextricably tied to the health of our journalism: If the latter begins to die, the former must immediately follow.

Antonio García Martínez (@antoniogm) is an Ideas contributor for WIRED. Previously he worked on Facebook’s early monetization team, where he headed its targeting efforts. His 2016 memoir, Chaos Monkeys, was a New York Times best seller and NPR Best Book of the Year.

That’s a curious sentiment, because if you were to magically teleport the architects of our democracy—men like Ben Franklin or Samuel Adams (newspapermen, both of them)—to today, they’d find our journalistic ecosystem, with its fact-checked both-sides-ism and claims to “objectivity,” completely unrecognizable. Franklin wrote under at least a dozen pseudonyms, including such gems as Silence Dogood and Alice Addertongue, and pioneered the placement of advertising next to content. Adams (aka Vindex the Avenger, Philo Patriae, et al.) was editor of the rabidly anti-British Boston Gazette and also helped organize the Boston Tea Party, when activists dumped tea into Boston Harbor rather than pay tax on it. Adams duly covered the big event the next day with absolute aplomb. They’d have no notion of journalistic “objectivity,” and would find the entire undertaking futile (and likely unprofitable, but more on that soon).

If, however, you explained Twitter, the blogosphere, and newsy partisan outlets like Daily Kos or National Review to the Founding Fathers, they’d recognize them instantly. A resurrected Franklin wouldn’t have a news job inside The Washington Post; he’d have an anonymous Twitter account with a huge following that he’d use to routinely troll political opponents, or a partisan vehicle built around himself like Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, or an occasional columnist gig at a less partisan outlet like Politico, or a popular podcast where he’d shoot the political breeze with other Sons of Liberty, à la Chapo Trap House or Pod Save America. “Journalism dying, you say?” Ben Franklin v 2.0 might say. “It’s absolutely blooming, as it was in my day.”

What is dying, perhaps, is that flavor of “objective” journalism that purports to record an unbiased account of world events. We take journalistic objectivity to be as natural and immutable as the stars, but it’s a relatively short-lived artifact of 20th-century America. Even now it’s foreign to Europeans—cities such as London cultivate a rowdy passel of partisan scribblers who don’t even pretend there’s an impregnable wall between reportage and opinion. The US was much the same until the late 19th and early 20th century. Until 1900 or so, most newspapers were overtly political, and a name like The Press Democrat meant Democrat with a big D. Advertising was a minor concern, as party leaders encouraged members to subscribe to their local party organ, obviating the need for anything more than classifieds.

A National Market for Ads

The bigger switch happened as a national market for consumer goods opened after the Civil War, when purveyors like department stores wanted to reach large urban audiences. Newspapers responded by increasing the number of ads relative to content, and switched to models that went light on the political partisanship in the interest of expanding circulation. This move was driven not exclusively by lofty ideals but also by mercenary greed. And it worked. Newspapers used to make lots of money. Mountains of money. As late as the 1980s and ’90s, many papers had margins exceeding 30 percent, greater than Google’s margins now. Media might now be a sick man, but it wasn’t always so, and needn’t be so.

Jill Abramson, former executive editor of The New York Times, offers a peek into this collision between the legacy grandeur (and profitability) of journalism and the current zeitgeist in her memoir Merchants of Truth (which faces claims of errors and plagiarism). In one scene, the Times’ CEO asks Abramson to cook up new revenue ideas, to which she indignantly responds, “If that’s what you expect, you have the wrong executive editor.” Our reborn Founding Father journalist would find this disconnect between editorial and business absolutely inconceivable. Franklin knew very well on what side his journalistic toast was buttered, and would have leapt at any new monetization ideas.