Volume 43 Number 1
Winter 2026
EDITOR’S NOTE
Lori Amber Roessner
ARTICLES
Extra! Extra! Sing All About It: Portraying Newsies in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Sheet Music
Eric Freedman, Joshua S. Duchan, Vladislava Sukhanovskaya, Julia Belden, and Finn Hopkins
Newsies were essential to the circulation pipeline, cheap labor making newspapers profitable. They became cultural tropes, foci of rags-to-riches fiction, paragons of diligence, and tragic incarnations of poverty. This study examines their portrayal—or misportrayal—in popular music between the mid-1840s and the late 1930s. Most prevalent is their depiction as pitiable and often homeless waifs, laboring for pennies to feed their families. The contrasting, upbeat depiction in a minority of songs portrayed them as cheerful, enthusiastic entrepreneurs, more akin to the saccharine representations in Walt Disney’s later film and Broadway show, Newsies, than to the economic, cultural, and social realities of their situation. This study helps us better understand how popular music, a major component of culture, largely ignored the critical role of young laborers in distributing news on behalf of corporate publishing companies, sometimes at grave risk of injury and death. It also illustrates how stereotyping these children painted a still-lingering, distorted mis-portrait of their work and lives for the sake of entertaining the American middle class and reinforcing their nostalgia and preconceptions.
Consultants who worked with local television news stations starting in the 1960s promoted themselves as objective outsiders who merely interpreted audience sentiment. Yet that description mischaracterized their role and undersold their impact. These journalistic outsiders were not objective, and their influence was significant. They imported an audience-centered approach to evaluating on-air talent that disrupted broadcast news. Through archival research of audience reports spanning the years 1963–1979, this study examines how McHugh and Hoffman (M&H), the first news consulting firm, helped stations identify their core audience and cater to viewer preferences and tastes in newscasters. M&H pushed newsroom leaders to consider how to make journalists marketable to lower-middle class viewers. Consultants’ advice on how to come across as authoritative and likable helped to shape journalists’ on-air presentation and reinforce restrictive norms for appearance and vocal delivery.
Yellow Seeds was a progressive student organization founded in Philadelphia, and the group played an important role during the Save Chinatown movement. Despite being active for less than a decade, Yellow Seeds produced the only bilingual newspaper for the Chinatown community in the 1970s. The self-titled publication helped promote Yellow Seeds’s effort in community outreach and offered a more nuanced picture of the power dynamics in Chinatown during that period. Using Yellow Seeds as an example, this paper argues that the role of the ethnic press can be contingent on the publication’s purpose, as well as the period in which it is situated. Looking at the entire known publication of Yellow Seeds, this paper discusses how its coverage and position have reflected the issues within the community, including the fight to save community spaces, the presence of multiple neglected groups, and the uneasy relationship between Yellow Seeds and other community institutions.
BOOK REVIEWS
Racializing Objectivity: How the White Southern Press Used Journalism Standards to Defend Jim Crow
Susan Bragg (Free Access Review)
Newspaper Woman of the Ozarks: The Life and Times of Lucile Morris Upton
Wendy Plotkin
Predicting the Winner: The Untold Story of Election Night 1952 and the Dawn of Computer Forecasting
Mike Conway
Capturing News, Capturing Democracy: Trump and the Voice of America
Thomas A. Mascaro
Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside
Nicholas Hirshon
Binding Media: Hybrid Print-Digital Literature from Across the Americas
Will T. Mari
Playing at War: Identity and Memory in Civil War Video Games
Zachary Rzicznek
DIGITAL MEDIA REVIEWS
The Paper (2025), Created by Greg Daniels and Michael Koman, Peacock
Brian R. Sheridan (Free access review)
East German press, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (SBB), Berlin State Library, https://zefys.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/ddr-presse/
Sheila B. Lalwani (Link pending)
ENDNOTES
Some Thoughts on Moving Forward with Journalism History
Debra van Tuyll
Endnotes
Lor Amber Roessner
Vol. 42
Vol. 41, Issue 1
Winter 2024
Editor’s Note
Pamela E. Walck
ARTICLES
“A Good Honest Journeyman Newspapering:” Billboard’s Lee Zhito Exposes Editorializing at George A. Richards’s “Station of the Stars”
Madeleine Liseblad and Gregory Pitts
A 1948 journalistic scoop informed the public and broadcast regulators about misconduct on the airwaves. The investigation by Lee Zhito established Billboard—known for music coverage and song charts—as a legitimate journalism voice in the radio industry. Zhito exposed news slanting and editorializing by station owner George A. Richards, who expressed to staff his abhorrence of Blacks, Jews, Communists, and Democrats—especially Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Mayflower doctrine banned editorializing and advocated public service, yet Richards’s views shaped news and commentary airing on KMPC in Los Angeles, WJR in Detroit, and WGAR in Cleveland. Zhito’s exposé produced national ramifications, led to the first major FCC case addressing news slanting and broadcast licensee obligations, generated 18,000 transcript pages and one of the FCC legal department’s most strongly worded documents affirming broadcaster public service. Journalists revealing secret practices can have a direct impact, pressuring industry and regulators to be more serious about upholding responsibilities.
Spinning Hate: Mississippi’s Post-Brown PR Offensive and the Secret Campaign Against ‘Agitators,’ 1956-1960
Edgar Simpson
After the US Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education ruling in 1954, the Mississippi Legislature approved several laws designed to fight integration and federalize civil rights. Among the legislation was the creation of the state Sovereignty Commission, which saw preserving white supremacy as good public policy. This study examines the efforts of the agency’s first public relations director to carry out that mission through both standard public relations practices and far more nefarious methods of coercion and intimidation against those perceived as threats to segregation.
“Too Infernally Scientific”: John Wesley Powell and News Framing of Climate Policy in the Nineteenth-Century Press
Ken J. Ward and Aaron Atkins (Free Access Article)
In 1890, John Wesley Powell launched a plan to reshape land use policies in the western United States. His proposal, grounded in science, sought to protect vulnerable water rights and garnered US press attention for eight months. Using qualitative historical analysis combined with quantitative content analysis to examine the story frames used by 281 newspapers in some 798 articles covering the debate over Powell’s proposal, this study fills a conspicuous gap in researchers’ understandings of the history of climate coverage in the US. It discovers that news coverage overwhelmingly focused on a political conflict frame that deemphasized the substance both of Powell’s proposal and the alternatives offered by his opponents. Finally, it illustrates the usefulness of applying contemporary frames to historical questions and highlights the partisan sectional identity dominant in the American West in the 1890s.
Tel Ra Productions: The Unknown Story of a Philadelphia Production Company That Captured Americans’s Passion for Sports on Film in the Post-WWII Era
Daniel Marshall Haygood
During commercial television’s early years, the nation’s four networks initially featured an extensive offering of sports programming on prime-time schedules. The networks then replaced sports with entertainment programs in these prime slots, relegating sports to weekends. Independent sports producers saw this deemphasis of athletics as an opportunity. Philadelphia-based Tel Ra Productions emerged as the leading producer of syndicated sports programming, beginning in the late 1940s. Its primary program was TeleSports Digest, a thirty-minute weekly show that featured a variety of sporting events. The program comprised the most extensive offerings of sports available, featuring some of the most valuable American sports properties, including NFL football, college basketball, professional baseball, and non-traditional sports, and unique competitive activities. Ultimately, Tel Ra Productions became the most prolific producer of US sports films from 1948 to 1966, appealing to the country’s seemingly limitless appetite for athletics.
CONVERSATIONS ON JOURNALISM HISTORY
A Conversation with Pushpa Kamal Dahal, Prime Minister of Nepal
Interview by Nicholas Hirshon
BOOK REVIEWS
Magazine
Sharon Bloyd-Peshkin
Righting the American Dream: How the Media Mainstreamed Reagan’s Evangelical Vision
Cari S. Babitzke
Journalism in the Civil War Era
William E. Huntzicker
Live From The Underground: A History of College Radio
Jason Lee Guthrie
24/7 Politics: Cable Television and the Fragmenting of America from Watergate to Fox News
John McMurria
Get the Damn Story: Homer Bigart and the Great Age of American Newspapers
Thomas R. Schmidt
Children, War & Propaganda
Charles Sorrie
DIGITAL MEDIA REVIEWS
The Magnus Archive, https://rustyquill.com/show/the-magnus-archives/
Hayley McCullough
Diving into the Belgian Press: BelgicaPress, BelgicaPeriodicals and CAMille
Alexia Vidalenche
Brazilian Digital Hemeroteca: Collection of Newspapers and Magazines from the National Library
Otávio Daros
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS
Influencing the Future by Interrogating the Past
Mike Conway
ENDNOTES
Endnotes.
Vol. 41, Issue 2
Spring 2024
Editor’s Note
Pamela E. Walck
ARTICLES
Winning Women’s Votes: Dotty Lynch and the Role of Gender in American Political Polling
Wendy Melillo
As the chief pollster for Gary Hart’s 1984 race for the Oval Office, Dorothea “Dotty” Lynch became the first female pollster to head the polling unit for a presidential campaign. Lynch’s work reconstructed how the field of political consulting regarded the role of women in elections by making women’s issues a central focus of a US presidential candidate’s campaign strategy, and by actively recruiting more women to work on presidential campaigns. Her work is also significant for the contribution she made to help explain why the gender gap played a critical role in American politics and elections.
#HandsUpDontShoot: Studying Coverage of Ferguson as a ‘Critical Incident’ from Journalism’s Recent Past
Patrick Walters
For seventy years, gatekeeping theory has described how news sources, news institutions, and audiences impact the way information is distributed and consumed through mass media. But when a Black teenager, Michael Brown, was fatally shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri, citizen accounts of him having his “hands up” quickly spread on social media, forcing journalists to acknowledge both the circumstances of the shooting and the role of social media in shaping the narrative. This historical study of the “recent past” considers how Brown’s shooting death served as a “critical incident” that forced journalists to reevaluate long-held practices in the face of citizen journalism on social media. Using textual analysis, this study examines local and national news coverage of the shooting and resulting protests, as well as subsequent investigations over the following weeks and months; it draws on content from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, New York Times, and other outlets, as well as Twitter posts from citizens. The study, which places Ferguson in the historical context of breaking news coverage, finds social media narratives initially impacted the shape of news coverage, but over time journalists ultimately reverted to their traditional reliance on official sources.
Discovering the Arizona Republican Newspaper, 1890-1900: Yellow Journalism in America’s Territorial Press
Patti Piburn
Yellow journalism is widely believed to have grown out of a circulation battle between Joseph Pulitzer and William Hearst in the 1890s. Most scholarship on its inception has been confined to newspapers in large Eastern cities. To date, little study of the period’s journalism has investigated whether, and to what degree, elements of yellow journalism were practiced by newspapers in Western US states and territories. This examination of the Arizona Republican in the 1890s shows yellow journalism was not confined to the East where it was incubated; in territorial Arizona, yellow journalism flourished. Needing to attract readers in a competitive newspaper market with a growing population, the newspaper did so with large headlines, scurrilous reporting, attention-grabbing news, and illustrations. Beyond the Eastern United States, the same force which brought on yellow journalism—publishers’ needs to attract huge readerships—fueled the practice on America’s territorial frontier in the Arizona Republican.
A Socially Responsible Trade: An Analysis of Ethical Discourse in Editor & Publisher, 1930-1934
Max Fuller
In the 1930s, the pages of Editor & Publisher were filled with nuanced stories revealing the many ethical challenges facing journalism amid the economic woes of the Great Depression, increased public scrutiny over news, and the influence of New Deal policies on journalistic practices in the US. Industry insiders discussed everything from how to best report criminal activities and sports to how to best write about the nation’s economic plight all while keeping the public’s interest in mind. Analysis of 265 E&P issues, published between 1930 and 1934, found that reporters of the day were highly concerned about ethics in the professional practice of journalism during a time when the newspaper industry faced challenges such as outside scrutiny, governmental critique, and diminished public support. It will be argued that these ethical conversations among journalists promoted functions of a press system outlined by the Social Responsibility Theory of the Press more than a decade before its adoption by the Hutchins Commission in 1947.
ESSAY
Reimagining and Revolutionizing Media History Research: Problems and Possibilities
Bailey Dick
Organizations like the American Journalism Historians Association, publications like American Journalism, and many individual scholars have begun efforts to make media history more diverse, equitable, and inclusive. Yet despite these group and individual efforts, methodological approaches remain tied to systems and norms that are inherently inequitable. This essay argues for a paradigm shift in how media history research is done by delineating methodological hurdles faced by one researcher, discussion of the problems media historians face, and an acknowledgment of the work being done to make the field more equitable.
BOOK REVIEWS
The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism
Matthew Pressman
Drawing Liberalism: Herblock’s Political Cartoons in Postwar America
Gwyneth Mellinger
Last Paper Standing: A Century of Competition Between the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News
Nicholas Hirshon
Birddogs and Tough Old Broads: Women Journalists of Mississippi and a Century of State Politics, 1880s–1980s
Wayne Dawkins
DIGITAL MEDIA REVIEW
The Greatest Night in Pop
Zakiya Moses
ENDNOTES
Endnotes.
Vol. 41, Issue 3
Summer 2024
ARTICLES
Before the Environment Was News: Outdoor Writers and the Boundaries of Journalism
Suzannah Evans Comfort
Outdoor writing is a little respected and often forgotten genre of American newsmaking. Widely popular in the early to middle twentieth century, outdoor journalists presented a blend of factuality with personal narrative and advocacy for environmental preservation as they told stories of fishing, hunting, and the outdoors more broadly in columns tucked away in the sports section. Outdoor columns were the single most consistent source of environmental newsmaking in US newspapers until the late 1960s, when news organizations started assigning journalists working in the news section to the environmental beat. But because outdoor columnists violated norms of twentieth century newsmaking by including advocacy and personal narrative in their columns, their contributions have been overlooked. This study, which draws on the organizational archives of the Outdoor Writers Association of America, demonstrates that outdoor writers were deeply engaged with the concept of “news” even from their position as delegitimized actors within the news ecosystem. As a result, an historic account of the outdoor writing profession provides a fruitful site of inquiry to examine norms of journalism, boundaries of the field, legitimacy, and ultimately power.
Women’s Entrée into Advertising Through the Brand Test Kitchen
Lisa Mullikin Parcell & Paul Myers
As branded food products spread in the early 1900s, advertisers began speaking directly to women shoppers. Adopting a women-advertising-to-women approach, national brands and advertising agencies hired home economics professionals and charged them with creating test kitchens to develop and test recipes, write advertising copy, correspond with consumers, and test products. They became the face and voice of brands, providing women entrée into the male-dominated advertising profession. These professional women brought an understanding of the needs of the housewife, knowledge of the emerging fields of dietetics and home economics, and a scientific approach to solving “home problems.” Brand test kitchens became a symbol of trust, signifying that the product was reliable, pure, and economical. Today major food brands such as Kraft, Heinz, General Mills, and Kellogg’s still maintain test kitchens to meet consumer needs, educate consumers on proper product use, and produce new branded recipes.
“Old-Time Negroes”: Nostalgic Ex-Slave Narratives in New York Newspapers of the Gilded Age
Lorraine Ahearn
In the field of social memory of slavery, a growing body of scholarship on the Jim Crow North has complicated the notion of white supremacy as a specifically Southern ideology, locating what historians view as a “missing link” in the history of race in America. This study examines a corollary gap in American journalism history—the role that white Northern newspapers played a generation after Emancipation in softening white memory of slavery and hardening discourse toward African Americans. This article applies narrative analysis to sample five large-circulation white New York City newspapers from 1889 to 1910, along with a contemporary Black city newspaper. The study concludes that white newspapers, by perpetuating racist tropes upstreamed from literature, cultivated Jim Crow ideology beyond the former Confederacy. The findings shed light on the timeline of Black Americans’ struggle for mass media representation and demonstrate journalism’s intertextual role in shaping social memory.
Historians have documented that newspaper editorials and radio commentaries played a role in turning public opinion against Japanese Americans and pressured President Franklin D. Roosevelt into interning them during World War II. But what has been overlooked were the efforts of a few reporters who fought to reverse journalistic and public opinion regarding the government-sanctioned, racially-inspired injustice. This study documents the work of the unsung journalists—some who addressed a limited forum and others with a national audience—who sought to end the internments and secure restoration of Japanese Americans’s civil rights. By doing so, these reporters fulfilled one of the press’s most sacred responsibilities to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Although these journalists failed to secure freedom for the internees during the war years—these reporters eventually helped restore the dignity and constitutional rights of Japanese Americans by speaking on their behalf.
BOOK REVIEWS
The Magnificent Reverend Peter Thomas Stanford, Transatlantic Reformer and Race Man
edited by Barbara McCaskill and Sidonia Serafini with the Rev. Paul Walker, University of Georgia Press, 2020, 264 pp.
Cathy M. Jackson
How America Gets the News: A History of U.S. Journalism
Ford Risley and Ashley Walter, Rowman and Littlefield, 2024, 238 pp.
Jason Lee Guthrie
Published by the Author: Self-publication in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature
by Bryan Sinche, University of North Carolina Press, 2024, 258 pp.
Maurine H. Beasley
American Literary Misfits: The Alternative Democracies of Mid-Nineteenth-Century Print Cultures
by D. Berton Emerson, University of North Carolina Press, 2024, 236 pp.
Jon Bekken
Cultures at the Susquehanna Confluence: The Diaries of the Moravian Mission to the Iroquois Confederacy, 1745–1755
edited and translated by Katherine M. Faull, Penn State University Press, 2024, 260 pp.
Grace Burich
A War of Sections: How Deep South Political Suppression Shaped Voting Rights in America
by Steve Suitts, NewSouth Books, University of Georgia Press, 2024, 544 pp.
Janet Dagley
Behind the Scenes: Covering the JFK Assassination
by Darwin Payne, Denton, Texas, University of North Texas Press, 2023, 306 pp.
Tracy Lucht
DIGITAL MEDIA REVIEWS
Victim/Suspect
directed by Nancy Schwartzman, Netflix (2023)
Josalyn McMillan
Critical Role
https://critrole.com/
Hayley McCullough
ENDNOTES
Endnotes
Vol. 41
These issues are available through Communication and Mass Media Complete on EBSCOHost.
Vol. 41, Issue 1
Winter 2024
Editor’s Note
Pamela E. Walck
ARTICLES
“A Good Honest Journeyman Newspapering:” Billboard’s Lee Zhito Exposes Editorializing at George A. Richards’s “Station of the Stars”
Madeleine Liseblad and Gregory Pitts
A 1948 journalistic scoop informed the public and broadcast regulators about misconduct on the airwaves. The investigation by Lee Zhito established Billboard—known for music coverage and song charts—as a legitimate journalism voice in the radio industry. Zhito exposed news slanting and editorializing by station owner George A. Richards, who expressed to staff his abhorrence of Blacks, Jews, Communists, and Democrats—especially Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Mayflower doctrine banned editorializing and advocated public service, yet Richards’s views shaped news and commentary airing on KMPC in Los Angeles, WJR in Detroit, and WGAR in Cleveland. Zhito’s exposé produced national ramifications, led to the first major FCC case addressing news slanting and broadcast licensee obligations, generated 18,000 transcript pages and one of the FCC legal department’s most strongly worded documents affirming broadcaster public service. Journalists revealing secret practices can have a direct impact, pressuring industry and regulators to be more serious about upholding responsibilities.
Spinning Hate: Mississippi’s Post-Brown PR Offensive and the Secret Campaign Against ‘Agitators,’ 1956-1960
Edgar Simpson
After the US Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education ruling in 1954, the Mississippi Legislature approved several laws designed to fight integration and federalize civil rights. Among the legislation was the creation of the state Sovereignty Commission, which saw preserving white supremacy as good public policy. This study examines the efforts of the agency’s first public relations director to carry out that mission through both standard public relations practices and far more nefarious methods of coercion and intimidation against those perceived as threats to segregation.
“Too Infernally Scientific”: John Wesley Powell and News Framing of Climate Policy in the Nineteenth-Century Press
Ken J. Ward and Aaron Atkins (Free Access Article)
In 1890, John Wesley Powell launched a plan to reshape land use policies in the western United States. His proposal, grounded in science, sought to protect vulnerable water rights and garnered US press attention for eight months. Using qualitative historical analysis combined with quantitative content analysis to examine the story frames used by 281 newspapers in some 798 articles covering the debate over Powell’s proposal, this study fills a conspicuous gap in researchers’ understandings of the history of climate coverage in the US. It discovers that news coverage overwhelmingly focused on a political conflict frame that deemphasized the substance both of Powell’s proposal and the alternatives offered by his opponents. Finally, it illustrates the usefulness of applying contemporary frames to historical questions and highlights the partisan sectional identity dominant in the American West in the 1890s.
Tel Ra Productions: The Unknown Story of a Philadelphia Production Company That Captured Americans’s Passion for Sports on Film in the Post-WWII Era
Daniel Marshall Haygood
During commercial television’s early years, the nation’s four networks initially featured an extensive offering of sports programming on prime-time schedules. The networks then replaced sports with entertainment programs in these prime slots, relegating sports to weekends. Independent sports producers saw this deemphasis of athletics as an opportunity. Philadelphia-based Tel Ra Productions emerged as the leading producer of syndicated sports programming, beginning in the late 1940s. Its primary program was TeleSports Digest, a thirty-minute weekly show that featured a variety of sporting events. The program comprised the most extensive offerings of sports available, featuring some of the most valuable American sports properties, including NFL football, college basketball, professional baseball, and non-traditional sports, and unique competitive activities. Ultimately, Tel Ra Productions became the most prolific producer of US sports films from 1948 to 1966, appealing to the country’s seemingly limitless appetite for athletics.
CONVERSATIONS ON JOURNALISM HISTORY
A Conversation with Pushpa Kamal Dahal, Prime Minister of Nepal
Interview by Nicholas Hirshon
BOOK REVIEWS
Magazine
Sharon Bloyd-Peshkin
Righting the American Dream: How the Media Mainstreamed Reagan’s Evangelical Vision
Cari S. Babitzke
Journalism in the Civil War Era
William E. Huntzicker
Live From The Underground: A History of College Radio
Jason Lee Guthrie
24/7 Politics: Cable Television and the Fragmenting of America from Watergate to Fox News
John McMurria
Get the Damn Story: Homer Bigart and the Great Age of American Newspapers
Thomas R. Schmidt
Children, War & Propaganda
Charles Sorrie
DIGITAL MEDIA REVIEWS
The Magnus Archive, https://rustyquill.com/show/the-magnus-archives/
Hayley McCullough
Diving into the Belgian Press: BelgicaPress, BelgicaPeriodicals and CAMille
Alexia Vidalenche
Brazilian Digital Hemeroteca: Collection of Newspapers and Magazines from the National Library
Otávio Daros
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS
Influencing the Future by Interrogating the Past
Mike Conway
ENDNOTES
Endnotes.
Vol. 41, Issue 2
Spring 2024
Editor’s Note
Pamela E. Walck
ARTICLES
Winning Women’s Votes: Dotty Lynch and the Role of Gender in American Political Polling
Wendy Melillo
As the chief pollster for Gary Hart’s 1984 race for the Oval Office, Dorothea “Dotty” Lynch became the first female pollster to head the polling unit for a presidential campaign. Lynch’s work reconstructed how the field of political consulting regarded the role of women in elections by making women’s issues a central focus of a US presidential candidate’s campaign strategy, and by actively recruiting more women to work on presidential campaigns. Her work is also significant for the contribution she made to help explain why the gender gap played a critical role in American politics and elections.
#HandsUpDontShoot: Studying Coverage of Ferguson as a ‘Critical Incident’ from Journalism’s Recent Past
Patrick Walters
For seventy years, gatekeeping theory has described how news sources, news institutions, and audiences impact the way information is distributed and consumed through mass media. But when a Black teenager, Michael Brown, was fatally shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri, citizen accounts of him having his “hands up” quickly spread on social media, forcing journalists to acknowledge both the circumstances of the shooting and the role of social media in shaping the narrative. This historical study of the “recent past” considers how Brown’s shooting death served as a “critical incident” that forced journalists to reevaluate long-held practices in the face of citizen journalism on social media. Using textual analysis, this study examines local and national news coverage of the shooting and resulting protests, as well as subsequent investigations over the following weeks and months; it draws on content from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, New York Times, and other outlets, as well as Twitter posts from citizens. The study, which places Ferguson in the historical context of breaking news coverage, finds social media narratives initially impacted the shape of news coverage, but over time journalists ultimately reverted to their traditional reliance on official sources.
Discovering the Arizona Republican Newspaper, 1890-1900: Yellow Journalism in America’s Territorial Press
Patti Piburn
Yellow journalism is widely believed to have grown out of a circulation battle between Joseph Pulitzer and William Hearst in the 1890s. Most scholarship on its inception has been confined to newspapers in large Eastern cities. To date, little study of the period’s journalism has investigated whether, and to what degree, elements of yellow journalism were practiced by newspapers in Western US states and territories. This examination of the Arizona Republican in the 1890s shows yellow journalism was not confined to the East where it was incubated; in territorial Arizona, yellow journalism flourished. Needing to attract readers in a competitive newspaper market with a growing population, the newspaper did so with large headlines, scurrilous reporting, attention-grabbing news, and illustrations. Beyond the Eastern United States, the same force which brought on yellow journalism—publishers’ needs to attract huge readerships—fueled the practice on America’s territorial frontier in the Arizona Republican.
A Socially Responsible Trade: An Analysis of Ethical Discourse in Editor & Publisher, 1930-1934
Max Fuller
In the 1930s, the pages of Editor & Publisher were filled with nuanced stories revealing the many ethical challenges facing journalism amid the economic woes of the Great Depression, increased public scrutiny over news, and the influence of New Deal policies on journalistic practices in the US. Industry insiders discussed everything from how to best report criminal activities and sports to how to best write about the nation’s economic plight all while keeping the public’s interest in mind. Analysis of 265 E&P issues, published between 1930 and 1934, found that reporters of the day were highly concerned about ethics in the professional practice of journalism during a time when the newspaper industry faced challenges such as outside scrutiny, governmental critique, and diminished public support. It will be argued that these ethical conversations among journalists promoted functions of a press system outlined by the Social Responsibility Theory of the Press more than a decade before its adoption by the Hutchins Commission in 1947.
ESSAY
Reimagining and Revolutionizing Media History Research: Problems and Possibilities
Bailey Dick
Organizations like the American Journalism Historians Association, publications like American Journalism, and many individual scholars have begun efforts to make media history more diverse, equitable, and inclusive. Yet despite these group and individual efforts, methodological approaches remain tied to systems and norms that are inherently inequitable. This essay argues for a paradigm shift in how media history research is done by delineating methodological hurdles faced by one researcher, discussion of the problems media historians face, and an acknowledgment of the work being done to make the field more equitable.
BOOK REVIEWS
The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism
Matthew Pressman
Drawing Liberalism: Herblock’s Political Cartoons in Postwar America
Gwyneth Mellinger
Last Paper Standing: A Century of Competition Between the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News
Nicholas Hirshon
Birddogs and Tough Old Broads: Women Journalists of Mississippi and a Century of State Politics, 1880s–1980s
Wayne Dawkins
DIGITAL MEDIA REVIEW
The Greatest Night in Pop
Zakiya Moses
ENDNOTES
Endnotes.
Vol. 41, Issue 3
Summer 2024
ARTICLES
Before the Environment Was News: Outdoor Writers and the Boundaries of Journalism
Suzannah Evans Comfort
Outdoor writing is a little respected and often forgotten genre of American newsmaking. Widely popular in the early to middle twentieth century, outdoor journalists presented a blend of factuality with personal narrative and advocacy for environmental preservation as they told stories of fishing, hunting, and the outdoors more broadly in columns tucked away in the sports section. Outdoor columns were the single most consistent source of environmental newsmaking in US newspapers until the late 1960s, when news organizations started assigning journalists working in the news section to the environmental beat. But because outdoor columnists violated norms of twentieth century newsmaking by including advocacy and personal narrative in their columns, their contributions have been overlooked. This study, which draws on the organizational archives of the Outdoor Writers Association of America, demonstrates that outdoor writers were deeply engaged with the concept of “news” even from their position as delegitimized actors within the news ecosystem. As a result, an historic account of the outdoor writing profession provides a fruitful site of inquiry to examine norms of journalism, boundaries of the field, legitimacy, and ultimately power.
Women’s Entrée into Advertising Through the Brand Test Kitchen
Lisa Mullikin Parcell & Paul Myers
As branded food products spread in the early 1900s, advertisers began speaking directly to women shoppers. Adopting a women-advertising-to-women approach, national brands and advertising agencies hired home economics professionals and charged them with creating test kitchens to develop and test recipes, write advertising copy, correspond with consumers, and test products. They became the face and voice of brands, providing women entrée into the male-dominated advertising profession. These professional women brought an understanding of the needs of the housewife, knowledge of the emerging fields of dietetics and home economics, and a scientific approach to solving “home problems.” Brand test kitchens became a symbol of trust, signifying that the product was reliable, pure, and economical. Today major food brands such as Kraft, Heinz, General Mills, and Kellogg’s still maintain test kitchens to meet consumer needs, educate consumers on proper product use, and produce new branded recipes.
“Old-Time Negroes”: Nostalgic Ex-Slave Narratives in New York Newspapers of the Gilded Age
Lorraine Ahearn
In the field of social memory of slavery, a growing body of scholarship on the Jim Crow North has complicated the notion of white supremacy as a specifically Southern ideology, locating what historians view as a “missing link” in the history of race in America. This study examines a corollary gap in American journalism history—the role that white Northern newspapers played a generation after Emancipation in softening white memory of slavery and hardening discourse toward African Americans. This article applies narrative analysis to sample five large-circulation white New York City newspapers from 1889 to 1910, along with a contemporary Black city newspaper. The study concludes that white newspapers, by perpetuating racist tropes upstreamed from literature, cultivated Jim Crow ideology beyond the former Confederacy. The findings shed light on the timeline of Black Americans’ struggle for mass media representation and demonstrate journalism’s intertextual role in shaping social memory.
Historians have documented that newspaper editorials and radio commentaries played a role in turning public opinion against Japanese Americans and pressured President Franklin D. Roosevelt into interning them during World War II. But what has been overlooked were the efforts of a few reporters who fought to reverse journalistic and public opinion regarding the government-sanctioned, racially-inspired injustice. This study documents the work of the unsung journalists—some who addressed a limited forum and others with a national audience—who sought to end the internments and secure restoration of Japanese Americans’s civil rights. By doing so, these reporters fulfilled one of the press’s most sacred responsibilities to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Although these journalists failed to secure freedom for the internees during the war years—these reporters eventually helped restore the dignity and constitutional rights of Japanese Americans by speaking on their behalf.
BOOK REVIEWS
The Magnificent Reverend Peter Thomas Stanford, Transatlantic Reformer and Race Man
edited by Barbara McCaskill and Sidonia Serafini with the Rev. Paul Walker, University of Georgia Press, 2020, 264 pp.
Cathy M. Jackson
How America Gets the News: A History of U.S. Journalism
Ford Risley and Ashley Walter, Rowman and Littlefield, 2024, 238 pp.
Jason Lee Guthrie
Published by the Author: Self-publication in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature
by Bryan Sinche, University of North Carolina Press, 2024, 258 pp.
Maurine H. Beasley
American Literary Misfits: The Alternative Democracies of Mid-Nineteenth-Century Print Cultures
by D. Berton Emerson, University of North Carolina Press, 2024, 236 pp.
Jon Bekken
Cultures at the Susquehanna Confluence: The Diaries of the Moravian Mission to the Iroquois Confederacy, 1745–1755
edited and translated by Katherine M. Faull, Penn State University Press, 2024, 260 pp.
Grace Burich
A War of Sections: How Deep South Political Suppression Shaped Voting Rights in America
by Steve Suitts, NewSouth Books, University of Georgia Press, 2024, 544 pp.
Janet Dagley
Behind the Scenes: Covering the JFK Assassination
by Darwin Payne, Denton, Texas, University of North Texas Press, 2023, 306 pp.
Tracy Lucht
DIGITAL MEDIA REVIEWS
Victim/Suspect
directed by Nancy Schwartzman, Netflix (2023)
Josalyn McMillan
Critical Role
https://critrole.com/
Hayley McCullough
ENDNOTES
Endnotes
Vol. 41, Issue 4
Fall 2024
Editor’s note
ARTICLES
“The Outlook for Pugilism is Black”: Representations of Prize fighter Jack Johnson in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Bryan E. Denham
When challenger Jack Johnson took to the ring against heavyweight champion Tommy Burns, newspapers across the US quickly cast the bout as a battle between the races. Johnson, an African American, won the battle decisively and began his reign atop the world of prize fighting. This examination of content in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch seeks to inform newspaper coverage of Johnson during his time as the heavyweight champion, and considers the racial attitudes of Joseph Pulitzer and those of his son, Joseph Pulitzer II. The study finds that while the Post-Dispatch acknowledged Johnson as champion and occasionally published dignified photos of the boxer, content became contemptuous after his 1910 victory over former champion James Jeffries. Although the boxers appeared more likely than the newspaper to use racial epithets, the Post-Dispatch published multiple derogatory and racist cartoons of Johnson. Despite the lofty journalistic principles Pulitzer espoused and the perceived historical accuracy of those ideals—a 2016 editorial in the Post-Dispatch stated that Pulitzer “championed racial justice and women’s rights decades before those ideas were popularly held”—history demonstrates a newspaper unconcerned with the sensibilities of African Americans while Johnson reigned as heavyweight champ.
The Battle of Blair Mountain and the News Media: Professional Ideology and the Coverage of Bloodshed in West Virginia
Matthew W. Ross
In 1921, “labor trouble” was the euphemistic phrase used by newspapers to describe the often-bloody conflicts that took place between working miners and their bosses in West Virginia. The Battle of Blair Mountain was one such conflict, a well-known clash between striking miners and mine operators that was made famous because airplanes were used, however unsuccessfully, to drop bombs on the miners during the hostilities. This study examines the coverage of this event by the New York Times and Washington Post to understand the ideological assumptions of professional journalists at the time toward this brutal conflict. Using a historically informed analysis of newspaper content, this study shows how the professional norms of journalism culminated in a highly ideologically informed coverage of labor struggle, revealing upper and middle-class anxiety toward class conflict in early twentieth century America.
An Early History of Newspaper Agents
Tim P. Vos & You Li
Newspaper agents have often been relegated to a minor role in the pre-history of advertising firms in the United States—individuals working at promotions long before the more recognizable modern advertising agents emerged in the twentieth century. This study reexamines the history of newspaper agents in the nineteenth century to determine who these agents were and what their duties included. The study used primary sources to examine an array of references to newspaper agents and to craft profiles on agents from thirteen newspapers in the first half of the century. The results show a much broader array of duties and identities than existing histories generally acknowledge.
The Making of Arab Stereotypes: Racist Portrayals in Political Cartoons during the 1970s Oil Crisis
Meshari Thamer Alotaibi
The 1973 oil crisis, a period marked by tensions following the Yom Kippur War and the subsequent Arab oil embargo, was a pivotal, global event with far-reaching economic and political consequences. Political cartoons played a significant role in influencing public opinion and shaping Western perspectives about Arabs and the Muslim world during this time. Many of these depictions resorted to negative stereotyping and vilifying Arabs. This research examines these portrayals by analyzing sixty-eight political cartoons from twenty-nine Western newspapers and magazines. These depictions, conceptualized here, characterized Arabs as violent, arrogant, rich, and indifferent to humanity, contributing to the propagation of long-standing stereotypes. The cartoons also depicted oil as a weapon wielded by Arabs, reinforcing biased perspectives that contrast starkly with the complex reality of Arab societies. This study highlights the influential role of media in shaping public perspectives and underscoring the need for balanced, nuanced portrayals in media representations
BOOK REVIEWS
Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory, and Citizenship
Melita M. Garza
January 6 and the Politics of History and Media and January 6th
A.J. Bauer
How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler
Ellada Gamreklidze
The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of The Village Voice, the Radical Paper that Changed American Culture
Lisa D. Lenoir
Whistle-Stop Politics: Campaign Trains and the Reporters Who Covered Them
Pam Parry
Citizen Carl: The Editor Who Cracked Teapot Dome, Shot a Judge, and Invented the Parking Meter
Ken J. Ward
DIGITAL MEDIA REVIEWS
One Piece
Hayley McCullough
VICE News Presents: When Black Women Go Missing
Josalyn McMillan
ENDNOTES