Washington, D.C.

As the seat of the United States federal government, Washington, D.C., serves as a magnet for print and broadcast journalists from around the world. Indeed, news media have been attracted to the capital city since the government moved there from Philadelphia in 1800. Over the next two centuries the Washington press corps grew in size and complexity along with the nation, and rose and fell in public esteem along with attitudes toward the government. Local Washington media struggled to compete with national reporters, emerging as another significant force in American journalism.

The federal government both generates and manipulates the news. Decisions by Presidents, executive agencies, Congress, and the Supreme Court affect the lives of all citizens and claim a prominent place on front pages and in broadcast news programs. Having a large stake in their news coverage, political office-holders seek to shape that coverage through news releases and conferences, interviews, background briefings, and leaks. To get beyond the press release, Washington reporters have cultivated well-placed sources throughout the government, and have been willing to risk imprisonment to protect those sources from exposure. Because of these intimate relationships, critics have accused the Washington press of shielding officials from appropriate scrutiny.

When the federal government first located in Washington, political parties established newspapers there as official organs. The Federalist newspaper immediately suffered a blow when its party lost the election of 1800 and began a decade of descent into extinction. The victorious Democratic-Republican Party established the National Intelligencer, which promoted the policies of President Thomas Jefferson (1801–09) and his immediate successors. The National Intelligencer reaped profitable federal printing contracts and in return its staff provided stenographic services for the debates in Congress. Copies of the Intelligencer were mailed free to newspapers elsewhere in the growing country, which reprinted its verbatim accounts of congressional debates.

Growing regional tensions in the 1820s rendered inadequate the National Intelligencer's monopoly on Washington reporting. Southern planters and Northern business leaders sought news of pending tariff legislation that would affect them financially and sent their own reporters to spend the congressional session in Washington and cover developments from an agrarian or commercial perspective. Without needing to duplicate the Intelligencer's verbatim accounts, they crafted critical analyses of the legislative battles they witnessed. Since they mailed their stories back to their papers, they became known as Washington correspondents. Members of Congress came to distinguish between the impartial reporters, to whom they gave access to the House and Senate floors, and the critical correspondents, whom they relegated to the public galleries. Seeking to placate the growing press corps, in 1841 Senator Henry Clay, a Kentucky Whig with presidential ambitions, persuaded the Senate to establish the first press gallery, just above the presiding officer's dais in the Senate chamber. The House set up a similar press gallery when it moved to its current chamber in 1857. By contrast, the White House did not designate a press room until the construction of the West Wing in 1902.

Technology speeded the news from Washington. The first trains reached the capital in the 1830s, and in 1844 Samuel F. B. Morse publicly demonstrated his telegraph at the Capitol, with signals carried on wires to Baltimore. “What is the news from Washington?” was one of the first messages from Baltimore, whose newspapers were the first to publish telegraphic dispatches from Washington. Several New York newspapers soon pooled their resources to establish the Associated Press, to provide telegraphed news.

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