Rival publishers grudgingly recognized James Gordon Bennett as the most successful of the revolutionaries who created modern journalism in the mid-nineteenth century. The news-gathering enterprise of the New York Herald and its attention-getting style attracted circulation and advertising that compelled Bennett's legion of critics to acknowledge his accomplishments. But contemporaries could not agree on what caused the Herald to become the leading newspaper. Was it, they debated, because it was so good or because it was so bad? In 1866, thirty-one years after Bennett founded the Herald, a conclusion forced itself on James Parton, the biographer of Horace Greeley: "It is impossible any longer to deny that the chief newspaper of [this city] is the New York Herald. No matter how much we may regret this fact, or be ashamed of it, no journalist can deny it." In an essay unmatched by subsequent analysis, Parton explained why neither the...