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It was the link between the extension of democracy and the westward march that made it easier for Americans to view innocently their bloddy conquest of the Philippines as a continuation of the western expansino of democracy (Miller 3). Archibald Paton Thornton As Stuart Creighton Miller points out in his book Benevolent Assimilation, many Americans felt that they were doing the Filipinos a favor, so to speak by stepping in to colonize the Philippine nation. American leaders and the public (both anti-imperialists and imperialists) had the assumption that “Filipinios were not capable of governing themselves” (15). This assumption and sense of innocence was also fueled by the media during that time as Christopher Vaughan suggests in his article; “The ‘Discovery’ of the Philipines by the US Press 1898-1902” in The Historian. Vaughan dicussess the element of the newly emerging importance of the media around this time and the implications that the press may have played in shaping the opinions of American citizens at this time. While “U.S. readers obtained widely varying views of the Philippines depending on their locale and reading habits, there was a remarkable degree of thematic similarity in th