With all the politicking going on in the nation today, many think it has actually gotten worse over the years. I’m not sure that’s really the case. When you look at some of the bad press John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and especially Thomas Jefferson received by the newspapers in their runs for elections, you have to hold your breath.

Most of them tried to make nothing of it—for the most part they ignored it. Thomas Jefferson has an interesting quote regarding what he thought about bad news:

“Were I to undertake to answer the calumnies of the newspapers, it would be more than all my own time, and that of twenty aids could effect, for while I should be answering one, twenty new ones would be invented. I have thought it better to trust to the justice of my countrymen that they would judge me by what they see on the conduct of the stage where they have placed me.”

It’s a sadder state of affairs when biographers pick up on some of Jefferson’s exploits as reported in the newspapers as if the lies were truth just because they found their way into print. Jefferson was in reality one of our greatest Founding Fathers.