Yes. The essential problem was that contradictory and false accounts circulated, but it was very difficult for individuals to to verify or "fact check" anything. If someone made a claim about a member of their community, it was possible to investigate. But in the 18th century, the most important news usually originated abroad. And the farther away you were from the point of origin of the news, the more you have to engage in guesswork to determine if an account was true. There were several ways that information travelled in 18th century North America, all of them prone to error.

First, people passed along news through conversation. Just as today, rumor isn't a great way to assure that a piece of news is true. People embellished and exaggerated accounts.

Second, news travelled through letters. Not everyone was engaging in extensive correspondence (especially with people across the ocean), so this wasn't available to everyone. But when an interesting letter arrived in a community containing important news, it was usually shared widely. Like rumors, though, letters were only as reliable as the people sharing them. So they were often full of false accounts of reality.

Third, print became an increasingly important way that news spread in 18th century America. But unlike today, the people who work for newspapers weren't expected to verify the news that they received. Instead, newspaper printers published a variety of information and expected their readers to discern what was truthful and what was not. This was called the "open press," and it wasn't very effective at spreading truth.

If you open up a newspaper from the 18th century, they are full of complaints about what we would today call "fake news." Not all of this was what you referred to as "yellow journalists," though! In some cases, people were intentionally skewing the news. But in other cases, they were unintentionally sharing false news while doing their best to try to share truthful accounts. The information systems of the early modern world made it difficult to separate fact from fiction.

The U.S. Founders were certainly aware of this. At one point or another, most of the Founders were victims of false news spread in pamphlets, newspapers, letters, etc. Some of them even perpetrated "fake news" campaigns of their own. One famous example is Benjamin Franklin's effort to affect diplomatic negotiations to end the American Revolutionary war with a false account of Native American atrocities (see https://allthingsliberty.com/2014/11/propaganda-warfare-benjamin-franklin-fakes-a-newspaper/).

Keep in mind, though, that when the First Amendment was passed, it was often understood to provide a much more narrow freedom of speech than we associate with it today. Many of the Founders, including James Wilson who was one of the principal architects of the Constitution, noted that the First Amendment's protection of freedom of press simply meant that the government wouldn't engage in "prior restraint" (pre-publication censorship, basically). That still left the door open for the government to punish people who spread false news—which had long been a feature of English common law. And indeed in 1798, the U.S. government passed the Sedition Act, which did just that: it provided for punishments of speech and printed texts that were both false and seditious. It was only in negative public reaction to the Sedition Act that we came to understand the First Amendment as preventing the government from regulating the press for false news. So this is a case where our notion of "free speech" and "freedom of the press" has evolved considerably from what it meant in the 1780s.

Sources:

• I hate to engage in self-citation, but I cover all of this in my new book: Misinformation Nation: Foreign News and the Politics of Truth in Revolutionary America. I'll also be hosting an AMA on this topic tomorrow on this sub!

• Leonard W. Levy, "Liberty and the First Amendment: 1790-1800," The American Historical Review, Vol. 68, No. 1 (Oct., 1962), pp. 22-37.

• Paul Langford, "British Correspondence in the Colonial Press, 1763–1775: A Study in Anglo-American Misunderstanding before the American Revolution," in Bernard Bailyn and John B. Hench, eds., The Press and the American Revolution (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1981).

• Robert G. Parkinson, Thirteen Clocks: How Race United the Colonies and Made the Declaration of Independence (Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2021).