Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson Page A

canny maneuver, Franklin corrected an early typo—he had reported that someone “died” at a restaurant when he meant to say “dined” at it—by composing a letter from a fictitious “J.T.” who discoursed on other amusing misprints. For example, one edition of the Bible quoted David as saying he was “wonderfully mad” rather than “made,” which caused an “ignorant preacher to harangue his audience for half an hour on the subject of spiritual madness.” Franklin then went on (under the guise of J.T.) to praise Franklin’s own paper, point out a similar typo made by his rival Bradford, criticize Bradford for being generally sloppier, and (with delicious irony) praise Franklin for not criticizing Bradford: “Your paper is most commonly very correct, and yet you were never known to triumph upon it by publicly ridiculing and exposing the continual blunders of your contemporary.” Franklin even turned his false modesty into a maxim to forgive his typo: “Whoever accustoms himself to pass over in silence the faults of his neighbors shall meet with much better quarter from the world when he happens to fall into a mistake himself.” 14
    The Franklin–Bradford newspaper war also included disputes over scoops and stolen stories. “When Mr. Bradford publishes after us,” Franklin wrote in one editor’s note, “and has occasion to take an Article or two out of the Gazette, which he is always welcome to do, he is desired not to date his paper a day before ours lest readers should imagine we take from him, which we always carefully avoid.”
    Their competition had been going on for a year when Franklin set out to win from Bradford the job of being the official printer for the Pennsylvania Assembly. He had already begun cultivating some of the members, especially those in the faction that resisted the power of the Penn family and its upper-crust supporters. After Bradford printed the governor’s address to the Assembly in a “coarse and blundering manner,” Franklin saw his opening. He printed the same message “elegantly and correctly,” as he put it, and sent it to each of the members. “It strengthened the hands of our friends in the House,” Franklin later recalled, “and they voted us their printers.” 15
    Even as he became more political, Franklin resisted making his newspaper fiercely partisan. He expressed his credo as a publisher in a famous Gazette editorial “Apology for Printers,” which remains one of the best and most forceful defenses of a free press.
    The opinions people have, Franklin wrote, are “almost as various as their faces.” The job of printers is to allow people to express these differing opinions. “There would be very little printed,” he noted, if publishers produced only things that offended nobody. At stake was the virtue of free expression, and Franklin summed up the Enlightenment position in a sentence that is now framed on newsroom walls: “Printers are educated in the belief that when men differ in opinion, both sides ought equally to have the advantage of being heard by the public; and that when Truth and Error have fair play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.”
    “It is unreasonable to imagine that printers approve of everything they print,” he went on to argue. “It is likewise unreasonable what some assert, That printers ought not to print anything but what they approve; since…an end would thereby be put to free writing, and the world would afterwards have nothing to read but what happened to be the opinions of printers.”
    With a wry touch, he reminded his readers that publishers are in business both to make money and inform the public. “Hence they cheerfully service all contending writers that pay them well,” even if they don’t agree with the writers’ opinions. “If all people of different opinions in this province would engage to give me as much for not printing things they don’t like as I could get by printing them, I