Vol. 31
These issues are available through Communication and Mass Media Complete on EBSCOHost.
Vol. 31, Issue 1, Winter 2014
Essay
Translation, Technology, and the Digital Archive: Preserving a Historic Japanese-Language Newspaper
By Kristin L. Gustafson
Articles
Reporting the Revolution: Margaret Fuller, Herman Melville, and the Italian Risorgimento
By David Dowling
Community Radio and Free Expression in Late Twentieth-Century El Salvador
By Juanita Darling
The Princess and the Squaw: The Construction of Native American Women in the Pictorial Press
By John M. Coward
Brave Old Spaniards and Indolent Mexicans: J. Ross Browne, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, and the Social Construction of Off-Whiteness in the 1860s
By Michael Fuhlhage
Book Reviews
African American Foreign Correspondents: A History, by Jinx Coleman Broussard
Reviewed by Pamela A. Brown
How McGruff and the Crying Indian Changed America: A History of Iconic Ad Council Campaigns, by Wendy Melillo
Reviewed by Stephen Siff
Chasing Newsroom Diversity: From Jim Crow to Affirmative Action, by Gwyneth Mellinger
Reviewed by Sonny Rhodes
Sensationalism: Murder, Mayhem, Mudslinging, Scandals, and Disasters in 19th-Century Reporting, edited by David B. Sachsman and David W. Bulla
Reviewed by Paula Hunt
Drawing Borders: The American-Canadian Relationship during the Gilded Age, by David R. Spencer
Reviewed by Dean Jobb
Digital Media Reviews
Civil Rights Digital Library
Reviewed by Dianne M. Bragg
Thank You, Mr. President: Helen Thomas at the White House
Reviewed by Kimberly Wilmot Voss
Media History Digital Library
Reviewed by Michael Stamm
Presidential Address
Driving the Discussion from Relevance to Resonance: How Historians Can Inspire Passion for Place and People
By Kimberly Mangun
Vol. 31, Issue 2, Spring 2014
Articles
Arthur D. Morse, School Desegregation, and the Making of CBS News, 1955-1964
By Jeffrey L. Littlejohn and Charles H. Ford
Partisanship in the Antislavery Press during the 1844 Run of an Abolition Candidate for President
By Erika Pribanic-Smith
Weighing the Costs: The Scripps-McRae League Reports the War in Cuba
By Michael S. Sweeney, Paul Jacoway, and Young Joon Lim
Anonymous Sources: A Historical Review of the Norms Surrounding Their Use
By Matt J. Duffy
E.L. Godkin’s Criticism of the Penny Press: Antecedents to a Legal Right to Privacy
By Erin K. Coyle
Book Reviews
Savage Portrayals: Race, Media, & the Central Park Jogger Story, by Natalie P. Byfield
Reviewed by James West
James J. Kilpatrick: Salesman for Segregation, by William P. Hustwit
Reviewed by Cynthia R. Greenlee
Sylvia Porter: America’s Original Personal Finance Columnist, by Tracy Lucht
Reviewed by Kimberly Wilmot Voss
The Battle over Marriage: Gay Rights Activism through the Media, by Leigh Moscowitz
Reviewed by Edward Aldood
Shooting Arrows and Slinging Mud: Custer, the Press, and the Little Bighorn, by James E. Mueller
Reviewed by John M. Coward
The Undeclared War between Journalism and Fiction: Journalists as Genre Benders in Literary History, by Doug Underwood
Reviewed by Jon Whitt
Digital Media Reviews
Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free Books, Movies, Music, and Wayback Machine/The Internet Archive Companion
Reviewed by Terry Lueck
The Vietnam Center and Archive
Reviewed by Jon Marshall
Boston University Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center/The Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change
Reviewed by Donna Lampkin Stephens
Vol. 31, Issue 3, Summer 2014
Essay
Everything Old Is New Again: How the “New” User-Generated Women’s Magazine Takes Us Back to the Future
By Amy Aronson
Articles
“To Exalt the Profession”: Association, Ethics, and Editors in the Early Republic
By Frank E. Fee Jr.
Reaching the Pinnacle of the “Punditocracy”: James J. Kilpatrick’s Journey from Segregationist Editor to National Opinion Shaper
By Elizabeth Atwood
“Bright and Inviolate”: Editorial-Business Divides in Early Twentieth-Century Journalism Textbooks
By Will Mari
Book Reviews
Making National News: A History of Canadian Press, by Gene Allen
Reviewed by Dean Jobb
African Americans in the History of Mass Communication: A Reader, edited by Naeemah Clark
Reviewed by Wayne Dawkins
Black Print with a White Carnation: Mildred Brown and the Omaha Star Newspaper, 1938-1989, by Amy Helene Forss
Reviewed by Fred Carroll
Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism, 1885-1917, by Gretchen Soderlund
Reviewed by Laura H. Marshall
Deadly Censorship: Murder, Honor, and Freedom of the Press, by James Lowell Underwood
Reviewed by Paul H. Gates Jr.
Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South, by Jonathan Daniel Wells
Reviewed by Kathleen L. Endres
Digital Media Reviews
The 1930s
Reviewed by Tracy Lucht
American History & Culture from the Library of Congress
Reviewed by Lori Amber Roessner
Digital Thoreau
Reviewed by Mary Saracino Zboray
National Archives Website
Reviewed by Jane Marcellus
Vol. 31, Issue 4, Autumn 2014
Essay
Why Journalism History Matters: The Gaffe, the “Stuff,” and the Historical Imagination
By Andie Tucher
Articles
The Origins of Television’s “Anchor Man”: Cronkite, Swayze, and Journalism Boundary Work
By Mike Conway
“Across the Continent…and Still the Republic!” Inscribing Nationhood in Samuel Bowles’s Newspaper Letters of 1865
By Katrina J. Quinn
New Views of Investigative Reporting in the Twentieth Century
By Gerry Lanosga
“Unlimited American Power”: How Four California Newspapers Covered Chinese Labor and the Building of the Transcontinental Railroad, 1865-1869
By Herman B. Chiu and Andrew Taylor Kirk
Book Reviews
Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet against Democracy, by Robert W. McChesney; The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War, by Stephen Kinzer
Reviewed by Tom Mascaro
Intelligently Designed: How Creationists Built the Campaign against Evolution, by Edward Caudill
Reviewed by Michael Fuhlhage
Tobacco Goes to College: Cigarette Advertising in Student Media, 1920-1980, by Elizabeth Crisp Crawford
Reviewed by Stephen Siff
Fighting for the Press: The Inside Story of the Pentagon Papers and Other Battles, by James C. Goodale
Reviewed by Mark Feldstein
Popular Media and the American Revolution: Shaping Collective Memory, by Janice Hume
Reviewed by Gael L. Cooper
The Food Section: Newspaper Women and the Culinary Community, by Kimberly Wilmot Voss
Reviewed by Tamara Baldwin
Digital Media Reviews
Black Press Research Collective (BPRC)
Reviewed by Bernell E. Tripp
Massachusetts Historical Society Digital Archives
Reviewed by Thomas C. Terry
Side by Side: Can Film Survive Our Digital Future?
Reviewed by Ginger E. Blackstone
University of Southern California Digital Library
Reviewed by Will Mari
Essay
Wallowing in Watergate: Historiography, Methodology, and Mythology in Journalism’s Celebrated Moment
By Mark Feldstein
Vol. 32
Volume 32, No. 1, 2015
These issues are available through Communication and Mass Media Complete on EBSCOHost.
Editor’s Note
Articles
An Army Like That of Gideon: Communities of Transnational Reform on the Pages of Free Russia
By J. Michael Lyons
“We needed a Booker T. Washington . . . and certainly a Jack Johnson”: The Black Press, Johnson, and Issues of Representation, 1909-1915
By Carrie Teresa
“Narrative Is a Thread, and Truth Is a Fabric”: Luigi Barzini and the Russo-Japanese War
By Michael S. Sweeney
“Girl Reporter”: Elizabeth L. Banks and the “Stunt” Genre
By Randall S. Sumpter
Essay
The Uses of Visual History
By Nicole Maurantonio
Book Reviews
Black, White, and Red All Over: A Cultural History of the Radical Press in Its Heyday, 1900-1917, by Linda J. Lumsden
Reviewed by Jon Bekken
In Remembrance of Emmett Till: Regional Stories and Media Responses to the Black Freedom Struggle, by Darryl Mace
Reviewed by Michael DiBari Jr.
Inventing Baseball Heroes: Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson, and the Sporting Press in America, by Amber Roessner
Reviewed by Christie Kleinmann
The Times-Picayune in a Changing Media World: The Transformation of an American Newspaper, by S.L. Alexander, Frank D. Durham, Alfred Lawrence Lorenz, Vicki Mayer, and C. W. Anderson
Reviewed by John F. Kirch
From the Dance Hall to Facebook: Teen Girls, Mass Media, and Moral Panic in the United States, 1905-2010, by Shayla Thiel-Stern
Reviewed by Agnes Hooper Gottlieb
Digital Media Reviews
The Miller Center of Public Affairs
Reviewed by Richard B. Kielbowicz
Women in Journalism Washington Press Club Foundation Oral History Archive
Reviewed by Maurine H. Beasley
A Global Guide to the First World War – Interactive Documentary
Reviewed by Ross F. Collins
Presidential Address
AJHA’s Story on Cusp of Change
Amy Mattson Lauters
Endnotes
Volume 32, No. 2, 2015
These issues are available through Communication and Mass Media Complete on EBSCOHost.
Editor’s Note
Articles
The Archive and Disciplinary Formation: A Historical Moment in Defining Mass Communications
By Lauren Bratslavsky
Trouble with the Statistical Curve: Walter Lippmann’s Blending of History and Social Science during Franklin Roosevelt’s First Term
By Ronald Seyb
Political Editor and Public Man in the Time of Roosevelt and Wilson: The New York World’s Frank I. Cobb
By Gerald L. Fetner
For “The Cause of Civil and Religious Liberty”: Abner Cole and the Palmyra, New York, Reflector
By Kimberley Mangun and Jeremy J. Chatelain
“Things That Talk” Materiality in Media History
By Barbara Friedman & Kathy Roberts Forde
The Flavor of News
By Michael Stamm
Rubbing Readers the Wrong Way: Materiality and the Case of Ink Rub-Off
By Rachel Plotnick
Book Reviews
The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know about ItselfBy Andrew Pettegree
Reviewed by E.M. Palmegiano
Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public OpinionBy Harold Holzer
Reviewed by David W. Bulla
The Birth of a Nation:How a Legendary Filmmaker and a Crusading Editor Reignited America’s Civil WarBy Dick Lehr”
Reviewed by Wayne Dawkins
America’s Battle for Media Democracy:
The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media ReformBy Victor Pickard
Reviewed by Nathan Godfried
Gonzo Text: Disentangling Meaning in Hunter S. Thompson’s JournalismBy Matthew Winston
Reviewed by Kevin M. Lerner
The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of JournalismBy Doris Kearns Goodwin
Reviewed by Gerald L. Fetner
Eisenhower: The Public Relations PresidentBy Pam Parry
Reviewed by Karla Gower
Digital Media Reviews
American Latinos and the Making of the United States: A Theme Study
Reviewed by Erika J. Pribanic-Smith
The Museum of Public Relations
Reviewed by Thomas H. Bivins
The Portal to Texas History
By Meredith Clark
Endnotes
Volume 32, No. 3, 2015
These issues are available through Communication and Mass Media Complete on EBSCOHost.
Editor’s Note
Articles
Edward Bernays’s 1929 “Torches of Freedom March”: Myths and Historical Significance
By Vanessa Murphree
Socialist Muckraker John Kenneth Turner:
The 21st-Century Relevance of a Journalist/Activist’s Career
By Linda Lumsden
Report on the Russians: The Controversy Surrounding William Lindsay White’s 1945 Account of Russia
By Jean Folkerts
Conflicting Narratives: Raymond Bonner, the New York Times and El Salvador in the 1980s
By John F. Kirch
Book Reviews
Hoover’s FBI and the Fourth Estate:
The Campaign to Control the Press and the Bureau’s Image
By Matthew Cecil
Reviewed by Stuart C. Babington
Gimme Rewrite, Sweetheart…: Tales from the Last Glory Days of Cleveland Newspapers Told by the Men and Women Who Reported the News
By John H. Tidyman
Reviewed by Ronald J. Zboray
Radio Journalism in America: Telling the News in the Golden Age and Beyond
By Jim Cox
Reviewed by Berrin A. Beasley
Nellie Bly Undercover: Reporting for The New York World (1887-1894)
By Tom Streissguth
Reviewed by Jan Whitt
Reporting from the Front: War Reporters during the Great War
By Brian Best
Reviewed by Michael S. Sweeney
Hate Crime in the Media: A History
By Victoria Munro
Reviewed by Clint Wilson II
Broadcast Modernity: Cuban Commercial Television 1950-1960
By Yeidy M. Rivero
Reviewed by Dean C. Cummings
Masters of the Games: Essays and Stories on Sport
By Joseph Epstein
Reviewed by Christie Kleinmann
Digital Media Reviews
American Radio History
Reviewed by Noah Arceneaux
Newseum Education
Reviewed by Carrie Teresa
Lincoln & Churchill
Reviewed by David W. Bulla
Endnotes
Volume 32, No. 4, 2015
These issues are available through Communication and Mass Media Complete on EBSCOHost.
Editor’s Note
Articles
Communists at the Stars and Stripes: American ‘Disloyalty’ or Something Else?
By Cindy Elmore
Early US Corporate Public Relations: Understanding the “Publicity Agent” in American Corporate Communications, 1902-1918
By Cayce Myers
“In the Spirit of ’76 Venceremos!”:
Nationalizing and Transnationalizing Self-Defense on Radio Free Dixie
By Cristina Mislan
The New York Times and Washington Post on Sino-American Rapprochement, 1963-1972
By Guolin Yi
Professional Notes
Re-Dating History
By Brooke Kroeger
Book Reviews
McClure’s Magazine and the Muckrakers
By Harold S. Wilson
Review by Bruce J. Evensen
Protest on the Page: Essays on Print and the Culture of Dissent Since 1865
By James. L. Baughman, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen & James P. Danky, eds.
Reviewed by Chandra D. Clark
Comic, Curious & Quirky: News Stories from Centuries Past
By Rona Levin
Reviewed by Wallace B. Eberhard
The First Lady of Radio: Eleanor Roosevelt’s Historic Broadcasts
By Stephen Drury Smith, ed.
Reviewed by Patricia Hart
Is Satire Saving Our Nation? Mockery and American Politics
By Sophia A. McClennen and Remy M. Maisel
Reviewed by Michael T. Martinez
To Write in the Light of Freedom: The Newspapers of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools
By William Sturkey and Jon N. Hale
Reviewed by Gwyneth Mellinger
El Paso’s Muckraker: The Life of Owen Payne White
By Garna L. Christian
Reviewed by James E. Mueller
Lincoln Mediated: The President and the Press through Nineteenth-Century Media
By Gregory A. Borchard and David W. Bulla
Reviewed by Stephen Banning
Digital Media Reviews
Department of Interior Library: Native Americans
Reviewed by William E. Huntzicker
John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History
Reviewed by Matthew J. Haught
Center for Civil War Photography
Reviewed by Keith K. Greenwood
Endnotes
Vol. 33
Volume 33, No. 1, 2016
These issues are available through Communication and Mass Media Complete on EBSCOHost.
Editor’s Note
Articles
The Scramble for African Media:
The British Government, Reuters and Thomson in the 1960s
By John Jenks
“‘A Nation-Wide Chain Within 60 Days’:
Radio Network Failure in Early American Broadcasting”
By Michael R. Socolow
“Wild Horse Annie” Rides on Washington:
Mythical Characterization in Newspaper Coverage of Wild Horse Advocacy
By Aaron T. Phillips
Positioning for Battle:
The Ideological Struggle over Senator Joseph McCarthy and the American Establishment
By Julie B. Lane
Professional Notes
Historical Readership Studies:
A Methodological and Autobiographical Note
By David Paul Nord
Book Reviews
Public Relations and Religion in American History: Evangelism, Temperance, and Business
By Margot Opdycke Lamme
Reviewed by Randy L. Armstrong
Global Muckraking: 100 Years of Investigative Journalism from Around the World
By Anya Schiffrin
Reviewed by Gretchen Soderlund
Pauline Frederick Reporting: A Pioneering Broadcaster Covers the Cold War
By Marilyn S. Greenwald
Reviewed by Sherilyn Cox Bennion,
Word Warrior: Richard Durham, Radio and Freedom
By Sonja D. Williams
Reviewed by Todd Steven Burroughs
Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller
By Beth A. Haller
Reviewed by Nancy L. Roberts
Community Newspapers and The Japanese-American Incarceration Camps:
Community, Not Controversy
By Ronald Bishop
Reviewed by Krysti J. Carlson-Goering
Crack of the Bat: A History of Baseball on the Radio
By James R. Walker
Reviewed by Roger Heinrich
Digital Media Reviews
Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture
Reviewed by Paulette Kilmer
A Football Life: Ed Sabol
Reviewed by Scott D. Peterson
Presidential Address
Crossing Borders and Bridging Gaps:
Preserving the Past and Ensuring the Future of AJHA
Erika Pribanic-Smith
Endnotes
Volume 33, No. 2, 2016
These issues are available through Communication and Mass Media Complete on EBSCOHost.
Editor’s Note
Articles
The Passport Battle of Journalist Anne Bauer, 1950-1954
By Edward Alwood
Editing a Paper in Hell:
Davis Lee and the Exigencies of Smalltime Black Journalism
By Thomas Aiello
Hard Sell or Soft Sell? The Advertising Philosophies and Professional Relationship of Rosser Reeves and David Ogilvy
By Daniel M. Haygood
“Boys are Running off to the Wars by Scores”:
Promoting Masculinity and Conquest in the Coverage of the Mexican-American War
By Mark Bernhardt
Professional Notes
A Bid for Expanded Research
David Kaszuba
Book Reviews
Mary McGrory: The First Queen of Journalism
By John Norris
Reviewed by Agnes Hooper Gottlieb
Imprinting Britain: Newspapers, Sociability, and the Shaping of British North America
By Michael Eamon
Reviewed by Dean Jobb
Washington Merry-Go-Round: The Drew Pearson Diaries, 1960-1966
By Drew Pearson
Reviewed by Harvey Strum
Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, the First Lady of the Black Press
By James McGrath Morris
Reviewed by Wayne Dawkins
Byline Richard Wright: Articles from the Daily Worker and New Masses
By Earle V. Bryant, ed.
Reviewed by Thomas C. Terry
Reporting Baseball’s Sensational Season of 1890:
The Brotherhood War and the Rise of Modern Sports Journalism
By Scott D. Peterson
Reviewed by Chris Lamb
Heroes and Scoundrels: The Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture
By Matthew C. Erlich and Joe Saltzman
Reviewed by Ray Begovich
Digital Media Reviews
Trumbo
Reviewed by Cayce Myers
The End of the Tour
Reviewed by Raluca Cozma
Spotlight
Reviewed by Jack Breslin
Endnotes
Volume 33, No. 3, 2016
Articles
More Than “Rations, Passions and Fashions”: Re-Examining the Women’s Pages in the Milwaukee Journal
By Kimberly Voss and Lance Speere
The Milwaukee Journal is an example of a Midwestern metropolitan newspaper that featured an unnoticed but progressive women’s section in the 1950s and 1960s produced by a group of women who were doing more than giving superficial treatment to food, family, fashion, and furnishings, derisively known as the Four F’s. They were focused on a fifth F—feminism—quietly laying the foundation for the women’s liberation movement years before marches and demonstrations drew widespread media attention to the cause. A reexamination of the soft news of the women’s pages reveals a process of social change and demonstrates how the women of these sections were finding their own ways of redefining women’s roles.
More Than “little old ladies going gliding”: The Canadian Press and Women’s Interest News
By Barbara M. Freeman
During the 1960s to the 1990s, the Canadian Press (CP) news agency struggled with how to share news of interest to female readers with its member newspapers. CP’s senior news managers and their newspaper colleagues across Canada disagreed about the journalistic value of gendered content, or even how to define it, depending on their own newsroom cultures as well as their understanding of the preferences of readers in their regions. The news agency’s internal documents and interviews with editors reveal that regional differences among editors and audiences had a great influence on how these production changes were received at CP’s member newspapers and whether they considered women’s issues and interests “hard” news, “soft” news, or of no consequence at all.
“Thus Did Restell Seal This Unfortunate Lady’s Lips with a Lie”: George Washington Dixon’s Polyanthos and the Seductive Abortion Narrative
By Nicole C. Livengood
In the late 1830s, George Washington Dixon’s Polyanthos substantially intervened in nascent anti-abortion rhetoric. Dixon adapted the conventions of seduction narratives to displace women’s responsibility for their reproductive choices onto abortionist Madame Restell. In 1841, his “abortion narrative” migrated from the page to the courtroom when the prosecution successfully used it to convict Restell in the death of Anna Maria Purdy. Restell’s conviction shows how the narrative appealed to white, middle-class men uncertain of their gender roles and class status in Jacksonian-era New York. It upheld dominant stories of women’s nonsexual, maternal natures, while affirming males’ superior, protective role. The abortion narrative’s influence throughout the 1840s suggests that the Polyanthos played a more important role in the history of the penny press than scholars have acknowledged.
Edward Kennedy’s Long Road to Reims: The Media and the Military in World War II
By Richard A. Fine
In May 1945, journalist Edward Kennedy famously bypassed military censorship to break the news of Germany’s surrender. No action by an American correspondent during WorldWar II proved more controversial. Disaccredited by the Army and denounced by many of his colleagues, at year’s end, Kennedy’s career at the Associated Press was over and his reputation in a shambles. Historians have considered the episode a rare instance of an otherwise cooperative media defying military censorship. However, reconstructing Kennedy’s career reveals just how fraught media–military relations actually were during that war, and it calls into question the conventional wisdom that the media’s relationship with the military was generally amicable during the war, only to break down a generation later in Vietnam.
Professional Notes
Reflections on Radio History, Preservation, and Relevance
Noah Arceneaux
Book Reviews
Reporting the Cuban Revolution: How Castro Manipulated American Journalists
By Leonard Ray Teel
Reviewed by Rosemary Armao
Cold War on the Airwaves: The Radio Propaganda War against East Germany
By Nicholas J. Schlosser
Reviewed by Len O’Kelly
AP Foreign Correspondents in Action: World War II to the Present
By Giovanna Dell’Orto
Reviewed by Philip Glende
Making News: The Political Economy of Journalism in Britain and America from the Glorious Revolution to the Internet
By Richard R. John and Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb, eds.
Reviewed by Owen V. Johnson
Women, Workers, and Race in LIFE Magazine: Hansel Mieth’s Reform Photojournalism, 1934-1955
By Dolores Flamiano
Reviewed by Keith Greenwood
Press Portrayals of Women Politicians, 1870s-2000s: From “Lunatic” Woodhull to “Polarizing” Palin
By Teri Finneman
Reviewed by Tracy Moniz
The African American Press in World War II: Toward Victory and Home and Abroad
By Paul Alkebulan
Reviewed by Nathaniel Frederick II
The $ystem: Journalism 1897-1920
By Lincoln Steffens, Tom Streissguth, ed.
Reviewed by Richard Anthony Lewis
Digital Media Reviews
Truth
Reviewed by Aaron T. Phillips
Kill the Messenger
Reviewed by Mary M. Cronin
Rosewater
Reviewed by Stephen A. Banning
Endnotes
Volume 33, No. 4, 2016
These issues are available through Communication and Mass Media Complete on EBSCOHost.
Editor’s Note
Articles
Baby, You Can Drive My Car:
Advertising Women’s Freedom in 1920s America
By Einav Rabinovitch-Fox
Piercing the Paper Curtain:
The Southern Editorial Response to National Civil Rights Coverage
By David Wallace
Subversive Voices:
George Seldes and Mid-Twentieth Century MuckrakingBy Helen Fordham
“What Deepest Remains”: How Photojournalistic Mutualism Between
Robert Capa and Elmer Lower Shaped Modern Concepts of World War II
By Steven Holiday and Dale Cressman
Professional Notes
Teaching History in the Age of Black Lives Matters:
Embracing the Narratives of the Long Struggle for Civil Rights
By Earnest L. Perry Jr.
Book Reviews
The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America
By Ethan Michaeli
Reviewed by Aleen J. Ratzlaff
At Home with Ernie Pyle
By Owen V. Johnson, ed.
Reviewed by Robert Rabe
American Journalism:
Murrow’s Cold War: Public Diplomacy for the Kennedy Administration
By Gregory M. Tomlin
Reviewed by Louise Benjamin
The Newspaper Warrior:
Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’s Campaign for American Indian Rights, 1864-1891
By Cari M. Carpenter and Carolyn Sorisio, eds.
Reviewed by John M. Coward
Newsmaker: Roy W. Howard, The Mastermind
Behind the Scripps-Howard News Empire from the Gilded Age to the Atomic Age
By Patricia Beard
Reviewed by Edward Alwood
The Press and Slavery in America, 1791-1859:
The Melancholy Effect of Popular Excitement
By Brian Gabrial
Review by Stephen Banning
From Jack Johnson to LeBron James: Sports, Media, and the Color Line
By Chris Lamb, ed.
Reviewed by Matt Haught
Relentless: The Stories Behind the Photographs
By Neil Leifer with Diane K. Shah
Reviewed by Amy Forss
Pulitzer’s Gold: A Century of Public Service Journalism
By Roy J. Harris Jr.
Reviewed by Mary Beadle
Digital Media Reviews
The Bain Collection
Reviewed by Denitsa Yotova
True Story
Reviewed by Erika J. Pribanic-Smith
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
By Koji Fuse
Endnotes
Thanks to Reviewers
Vol. 34
Volume 34, No. 1, 2017
Articles
One More Miracle: The Groundbreaking Media Campaign of John “Mets” Lindsay
By Nicholas Hirshon
John Lindsay, the mayor of New York City from 1966 to 1973, developed an innovative media strategy for his underdog reelection campaign in 1969. A Yale graduate with a patrician image, Lindsay sought to win over middle-class voters by associating with the New York Mets during the baseball team’s unlikely march to the World Series. When the “Miracle Mets” clinched the pennant, Lindsay ventured into the delirious clubhouse and received a champagne shower from the players. Lindsay called the celebration “a nonpolitical event,” but newspaper photographs of the post-game revelry have been credited for Lindsay’s subsequent victory at the polls. Lindsay’s association with the Metsexemplifies an understudied period when politicians such as Richard Nixon, Robert F. Kennedy, and George McGovern used athletes as surrogates.
Framing Mexicans in Great Depression Editorials: Alien Riff-Raff to Heroes
By Melita M. Garza
Great Depression editorials published in English- and Spanish-language newspapers in San Antonio, Texas, waged a war of ideas about the role of Mexicans and immigrants in the United States that went beyond socially constructing news events to another kind of storytelling—the mythmaking power of idea-driven opinion writing about “the other.” Against a backdrop of mass deportations and repatriations to Mexico, the city’s three major daily newspapers staked dichotomous positions. William Randolph Hearst’s Light railed against “the criminal menace,” competing against the independent San Antonio Express and its concept of the Mexican as “indispensable” worker hero. Meanwhile, the Spanish-language La Prensa offered a complex representation of the immigrant, creating a mythology that was largely absent from the mainstream media.
The Man under the Bed: J. Edgar Hoover’s 1958 Book Masters of Deceit and the Revival of Anti-Communist Identity in America
By Matthew Cecil
Conceived by an FBI’s public relations official as a “small book” on communism, J. EdgarHoover’s Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight Itbecame a bestseller after its release in 1958. The book’s arrival, at a time when the communist movement in the United States was in decline, helped revive slumbering American anti-communists. The book’s sales were propelled by FBI promotional efforts and by ardent anti-communists who purchased dozens or even hundreds of copies to distribute to civic organizations and students across the country. An examination of the production, promotion, and defense of Masters of Deceit reveals the power Hoover had to create relationships with similar-thinking Americans who identified strongly with him
Publicists in U.S. Public Relations History: An Analysis of the Representations of Publicists, 1815-1918
By Cayce Myers
The role of publicists in public relations history is largely overlooked. Although today publicists are commonly associated with the entertainment industry, late nineteenth and early twentieth century publicists were a professional group that played an important role in developing modern public relations practice, particularly the craft of research-based, ethical, and strategic communication. These early publicists’ reputations and skills at managing public opinion were highly sought after by universities, businesses, and in political circles. Because their work often involved international issues, their impact was present both domestically and outside of the United States. Understanding the role the publicist played in public relations development presents a new narrative of publicrelations history that shows that early public relations practice contained professional, strategic, and international communication practices.
Professional Notes
Journalism History without Borders: The Transnational Paradigm and the Case of John Mitchel
By Debra Reddin van Tuyll
Book Reviews
Indelible Ink: The Trials of John Peter Zenger and the Birth of America’s Free Press
By Richard Kluger
Reviewed by David Copeland
That’s the Way It Is: A History of Television News in America
By Charles L. Ponce de Leon
Reviewed by Jim Foust
The Life of Kings: The Baltimore Sun and the Golden Age of the American Newspaper
Edited by Frederic B. Hill and Stephens Broening
Reviewed by Kate Dunsmore
Life Story: The Education of an American Journalist
By Gerald Moore
Reviewed by Kate Roberts Edenborg
Charles K. McClatchy and the Golden Era of American Journalism
By Steven M. Avella
Reviewed by Molly Yanity
Carolina Israelite: How Harry Golden Made Us Care about Jews, the South, and Civil Rights
By Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett
Reviewed by Lorraine Ahearn
The Polish Hearst: Ameryka-Echo and the Public Role of the Immigrant Press
By Anna D. Jaroszynska-Kirchmann
Reviewed by David Cassidy
The Network: The Battle for the Airwaves and the Birth of the Communications Age
By Scott Woolley
Reviewed by Richard C. Robinson
Digital Media Reviews
National Museum of African American History and Culture
Reviewed by Ashley Towle
Citizenfour
Reviewed by Simon Vodrey
Presidential Address
Looking Back, Marching Forward: Celebrating AJHA’s History while Preparing for the Future
Pete Smith
Endnotes
Volume 34, No. 2, 2017
Articles
“Television’s Closet Revolutionary”: Mary Jane Odell and Her Fight for Public Affairs Programming
By Tracy Lucht and Chunyu Zhang
Mary Jane Odell was a mainstay in Midwestern television for thirty years as the host of a variety show in Des Moines, Iowa, and a two-time Emmy Award winner for her public affairs programs in Chicago. Acclaimed for her in-depth interviewing, Odell rose to become Iowa’s secretary of state, contributing an important voice to the broader debate over television content and women’s roles in the media. Three distinct phases in her career are identified—tradition, experimentation, and confrontation—which align with her work in commercial, community, and public television. These narrative themes illustrate how gender both constrained a notable woman’s opportunities and expanded her definition of high-quality television to include diversity in the range of perspectives heard in the public discourse.
Between Human Welfare and National Security: William S. Gailmor and Popular Front Journalism in the Cold War, 1950-1952
By Nathan Godfried
Radio news analyst William S. Gailmor was blacklisted in the late 1940s for presenting a “popular front” perspective on the air. The popular front, a mass social democratic movement in the 1930s–40s, reached its height after World War II, embracing the causes of anti-fascism, labor rights, civil rights, civil liberties, economic democracy, and media reform. From November 1950 to November 1952 Gailmor returned to journalism, writing a regular column on “Human Welfare” issues for the New York tabloid the Daily Compass. Examining Gailmor’s columns—especially those highlighting the tension between human needs and the demands of the national security state—reveals how a minority of popular front journalists continued to challenge the prevailing Cold War narrative, even at the height of the Red Scare.
Confronting the “Seeker Of Newspaper Notoriety”: Pathological Lying, the Public, and the Press,1890-1990
By Justin Clark
Between 1890 and 1920, the diagnosis of pathological lying, usually defined as purposeless lying, was widely recognized by American legal experts, social workers, journalists, and the general public. This article explores the origins of the diagnosis and its cultural importance as an explanation for the perceived prevalence of false reporting, unverifiable accusation, and manufactured “news fakes” in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, intensifying competition for scoops and an increase in libel suits prompted experts and the public to search for the origins of a perceived “epidemic of exaggeration.” The emblem of this epidemic became the pathological liar, a deviant publicity-seeker whose pointless deceptions exposed the vulnerability of the press to manipulation. The discovery of pathological lying helped recast the press in public discourse as the target, rather than the agent, of deception.
Glamour-izing Military Service: Army Recruitment for Women in Vietnam-Era Advertisements
By Jessica Ghilani
In the late 1960s, popular women’s magazine advertisements for the Women’s Army Corps and Nurse Corps featured militarized femininity at its finest. The recruiting ads depicted military service as an inclusive, exciting environment in which young women could explore job opportunities, meet male suitors, travel, and build self-esteem. Despite shifting cultural attitudes toward American women’s workforce participation, the construction of military femininity in these Vietnam-era ads aligned neatly with broader media messages about gender and heteronormative rituals of courtship. Examining the mass mediation of military messages included in female-focused magazines reveals cultural and historical aspects of advertising, public relations, representation, and print media as they emerge in primary documents.
Professional Notes
The Ghost of Television News in Media History Scholarship
By Mike Conway
Book Reviews
Indians Illustrated: The Image of Native Americans in the Pictorial Press
By John M. Coward
Reviewed by Selene G. Phillips
The Lost Journalism of Ring Lardner
By Ron Rapoport, ed.
Reviewed by John P. Ferré
Full Court Press: Mississippi State University, the Press, and the Battle to Integrate College Basketball
By James A. Peterson
Reviewed by Wayne Dawkins
Henry Alsberg: The Driving Force of the New Deal Federal Writers’ Project
By Susan Rubenstein DeMasi
Reviewed by Jane Marcellus
Six Minutes in Berlin: Broadcast Spectacle and Rowing Gold at the Nazi Olympics
By Michael J. Socolow
Reviewed by Ron Bishop
Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, A Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill
By Candice Millard
Reviewed by David W. Bulla
The Riot Report and the News: How the Kerner Commission Changed Media Coverage of Black America
By Thomas J. Hrach
Reviewed by Kimberley Mangun
The Today Show: Transforming Morning Television
By Cathleen M. Londino
Reviewed by Teresa Jo Styles
Digital Media Reviews
Radio Boulevard, Western Historic Radio Museum
Reviewed by Richard C. Robinson
Christine
Reviewed by Madeleine Liseblad
Endnotes
Volume 34, No. 3, 2017
Articles
The Anti-Semitic Roots of the “Liberal News Media” Critique
William Gillis
Anti-Semitic beliefs that associated Jews, especially New York Jews, with the news media helped create the idea of a “liberal news media.” Anti-Semites around the world have linked Jews with “control” of the news media since the nineteenth century. In the postwar United States, anti-Semitic critiques of the news media were closely linked with Cold War–era anticommunism, Christian conservatism, and reaction to the civil rights movement by white conservatives. Anti-Semites of the postwar period were usually fervent Christian anticommunists who believed that Jews secretly manipulated and masterminded the news in order to promote the civil rights movement, destroy the Christian United States, and pave the way for communist world government.
Promulgating the Kingdom: Social Gospel Muckracker Josiah Strong
Christina Littlefield and Falon Opsahl
Social gospel leaders in the United States and England edited newspapers to educate the masses on key social issues in hopes of ushering in the kingdom of God, both prior to and alongside their secular muckraking peers. US Congregationalist Josiah Strong, much maligned for the pro-Anglo-Saxon nature of his domestic missions book Our Country, spent his last seventeen years documenting the problems cities faced and possible solutions. He fought for factory safety, as well as eight-hour days, living wages, worker’s compensation benefits, and social secretaries to care for employees’ needs. An examination of Strong’s journals, Social Engineering, Social Service, and Gospel of the Kingdom, shatters stereotypes about the reformer and shows how he used muckraking techniques to promote social reform.
Modern Foreign Correspondents After World War I: The New York Evening Post’s David Lawrence and Simeon Strunsky
Gerald L. Fetner
In the aftermath of World War I and the Peace Conference of 1919, the American public’s interest in foreign affairs increased. The Wilson administration’s wartime program, the New Diplomacy, contributed to this interest. It called for open diplomacy among statesmen and diplomats in the settlement of international conflicts, and press access to and publicity of their deliberations. The goal was an internationalized public opinion that would aid both concepts. With the prospect of an enlarged role for the United States in foreign affairs, prominent newspaper publishers and editors supported a robust coverage of foreign news, marked by a modern narrative consisting of the facts and an interpretation of their meaning. The New York Evening Post’s David Lawrence and Simeon Strunsky promoted the New Diplomacy and explained its ramifications for American foreign policy and press relations.
Filtering History: Photojournalists’ Access to U.S. Presidents, 1977 to 2009
Erin K. Coyle and Nicole Smith Dahmen
Photojournalists assigned to the White House strive to provide an independent record of the president. Each presidential administration determines whether and how photojournalists may receive access to photograph the president. Narratives from professional organizations and interviews of photojournalists reveal that photojournalists’ access to each president varied between 1977 and 2009. During the administrations of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush, photojournalists suggested the White House managed each president’s image by determining whether and under what circumstances photojournalists could photograph each president. The administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush took additional steps to manage the president’s image by releasing pictures taken by White House staff. Those practices limited photojournalists’ abilities to provide the public with independently captured images of each president.
Professional Notes
New Horizons for Teaching Journalism History: A Multimedia Approach
David Dowling and John Haman
Book Reviews
Free Speech and Unfree News: The Paradox of Press Freedom in America
By Sam Lebovic
Reviewed by Karie Hollerbach
Sympathy, Madness, and Crime: How Four Nineteenth-Century Journalists Made the Newspaper Women’s Business
By Karen Roggenkamp
Reviewed by Michael Buozis
Gutenberg’s Europe: The Book and the Invention of Western Modernity
By Frédéric Barbier
Reviewed by W. Joe Watson
American Journalists in the Great War
By Chris Dubbs
Reviewed by Willie R. Tubbs
The War Beat, Europe: The American Media at War Against Nazi Germany
By Steven Casey
Reviewed by Wallace B. Eberhard
The History of Fashion Journalism
By Kate Nelson Best
Reviewed by Dolores Flamiano
Media Nation: The Political History of News in Modern America
By Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer, eds.
Reviewed by James McPherson
Tangled Bylines: A Father and Son Cover the Twentieth Century
By Clyde H. Farnsworth
Reviewed by: Pamela A. Brown
Digital Media Reviews
Newsgames – Journalism Innovation through Game Design
Reviewed by Juli James
Snowden
Reviewed by Elisabeth Fondren
Endnotes
Volume 34, No. 4, 2017
These issues are available through Communication and Mass Media Complete on EBSCOHost.
Articles
Conflicts of Interest in Journalism: Debating a Post-Hutchins Ethical Self-Consciousness
By Gwyneth Mellinger
“A Lady of Many Firsts”: Press Coverage of the Political Career of Mississippi’s Evelyn Gandy
By Pete Smith
“This was no Place for a Woman”: Gender Judo, Gender Stereotypes, and World War II Correspondent Ruth Cowan
By Candi Carter Olson
Nell Nelson’s Undercover Reporting
By Samantha Peko and Michael S. Sweeney
Professional Notes
Copyright and Historical Sources
By Cayce Myer
Book Reviews
Media and Culture in the U.S. Jewish Labor Movement: Sweating for Democracy in the Interwar Era
By Brian Dolber
Reviewed by Jon Bekken
The Woman War Correspondent, the U.S. Military, and the Press, 1846–1947
By Carolyn M. Edy
Reviewed by Janice Hume
The Voice of America: Lowell Thomas and the Invention of 20th-Century Journalism
By Mitchell Stephens
Reviewed by Ron Bishop
Ruby A. Black: Eleanor Roosevelt, Puerto Rico, and Political Journalism in Washington
By Maurine H. Beasley
Reviewed by Carol Sue Humphrey
On the Frontlines of the Television War: A Legendary War Cameraman in Vietnam
By Yasutsune “Tony” Hirashiki; Terry Irving, ed.
Reviewed by Eddith Dashiell
Reporting the Retreat: War Correspondents in Burma
By Philip Woods
Reviewed by Richard Fine
Tough Sell: Fighting the Media War in Iraq
By Tom Basile
Reviewed by Kevin Swift
Digital Media Review
The Great War
Reviewed by J. Ian Tennant
Vol. 35
Volume 35, No. 1, 2018
These issues are available through Communication and Mass Media Complete on EBSCOHost.
Editor’s Note
Articles
Journalism History and Conservative Erasure
By A. J. Bauer
Journalism history’s object of analysis has been increasingly politicized from without, eclipsed by a modern conservative movement that has successfully mobilized around a belief in a “liberal media.” The elision of right-wing forms of journalism and media criticism has been a constitutive feature of the field to date, as evidenced by gaps in the critical interventions of James Carey. Narrating the long history of conservative news media criticism from the 1930s through the emergence of Accuracy in Media in the early 1970s serves to historicize the contemporary conservative “echo chamber” and demonstrates the historiographical value of an expanded conception of “journalism” as a culturally embedded and politically contested category, simultaneously defined from within and without the profession.
“We Need This Television Just Like Any Other American Citizen”: The Battle Over Western TV Boosters, 1952–1961
By James C. Foust
In the wake of the Federal Communication Commission’s 1952 Sixth Report and Order, which established plans for a nationwide television system, it became clear that traditional station allocations could not provide service to many isolated mountainous regions. Thus enterprising tinkerers, appliance store operators, and others set up so-called booster stations to broadcast the signals of urban stations into isolated western towns. However, the FCC wanted the boosters shut down, contending that they threatened the overall television allocation plan and could potentially create dangerous interference. Booster operators and viewers who depended on them were able to enlist the help of Western congressmen and governors to plead their case. Ultimately, the FCC was forced several times to backtrack on booster prohibitions, ultimately approving their operation in 1960.
Political Papers and Presidential Campaigns in the Republic of Texas, 1836-1844
By Erika J. Pribanic-Smith
During Texas’s decade as a republic, its newspapers never galvanized into a truly partisan press. The newspapers of Texas were political, but rather than focusing on party principles, they opposed or supported political candidates during the republic’s four presidential elections, with two-term President Sam Houston as the pivotal figure. The independence of most newspapers from party patronage and influence and their patriotic elevation of the good of the country over loyalty to any faction demonstrated that editors did not fully adopt the American style of press partisanship they experienced before moving to Texas. Elections in the republic revolved around personalities instead of policies.
Cowboy Songs from a Cold War Adversary: Listening to RIAS as Portrayed in the East German Press
By Kevin Grieves
For much of the Cold War, East Germany attempted to prevent Western media content from reaching its populace. The US government–run radio station Radio in the American Sector (RIAS), broadcasting from West Berlin, emerged as a significant threat in the view of the East German regime. However, analysis of the East German press’s treatment of East Germans listening to RIAS during the early postwar period indicates that the coverage was far from uniform. RIAS appeared initially as a competitor to East German radio before being cast as an enemy broadcaster by the early 1950s, revealing shifts in official East German attitudes toward outside propaganda messages. Such attitudes—competing with enemy media, counterpropaganda, educating citizens about propaganda, or blocking messages seen as threatening—remain relevant today.
Professional Notes
Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s The Vietnam War
Richard Fine
Book Reviews
Woodrow Wilson, the Great War, and the Fourth Estate
By James D. Startt
Reviewed by Stephen Ponder
Newspaper Wars: Civil Rights and White Resistance in South Carolina, 1935-1965
By Sid Bedingfield
Reviewed by Fred Carroll
From Prague to Jerusalem: An Uncommon Journey of a Journalist
By Milan Kubic
Reviewed by Ulf Jonas Björk
Eddie Adams: Bigger than the Frame
Foreword by Don Carleton; preface by Alyssa Adams; essay by Anne Wilkes Tucker
Reviewed by Linda J. Lumsden
The Rise & Fall of the Associated Negro Press: Claude Barnett’s Pan-African News and the Jim Crow Paradox
By Gerald Horne
Reviewed by Cristina Mislán
After the War: The Press in a Changing America, 1865-1900
David Sachsman, ed., with Dea Lisica
Reviewed by Julie Ann Goldsmith
The History of the Provincial Press in England
By Rachel Matthews
Reviewed by Paulette D. Kilmer
Making Photography Matter: A Viewer’s History from the Civil War to the Great Depression
By Cara A. Finnegan
Reviewed by Jennifer Kowalewski
Digital Media Reviews
Digital Archive of ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives
Reviewed by Koji Fuse
FBI and CIA Documents Online
Reviewed by Matthew Cecil
Presidential Address
“Little Rock, India”
David J. Vergobbi
Endnotes
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Volume 35, No. 2, 2018
Editor’s Note
Articles
Ethics and the Profession: The Crystallizing of Public Relations Practice from Association to Accreditation, 1936–1964
By Nicholas Browning
Scholars consider the development of public relations ethics to be an integral component in professionalizing public relations. If this connection exists, the solidifying of the profession that took place from the interwar to postwar periods should provide not only evidence for this linkage, but also insight into a philosophy of public relations practice and its key ethical considerations. This study establishes the bookend years of 1936, which marked the founding of the first professional public relations association, and 1964, which marked the start of Public Relations Society of America’s accreditation for practice, as defining moments in establishing a profession. An analysis of speeches from business leaders, government officials, and communication practitioners shed light on practices and ethics. The uneasiness many current scholars and professionals express toward persuasive strategies was largely absent during the formative years, as truthful advocacy via two-way communication became emblematic of public relations practice.
The Blood of Others: Television Documentary Journalism as Literary Engagement
By Thomas A. Mascaro
The provocations that spurred literary engagement (littérature engagée) also motivated documentary journalists, yet their work is defined narrowly as journalism history, instead of engaged literature. Like their literary counterparts, documentarians immersed themselves in research and location, reported comprehensively, and posed existential questions that animated civic action. Long-form documentary journalism is thus analyzed in concert with engagement—meaning political involvement by intellectuals denoting commitment and obligation. Engagement arose after World War I, transformed during the Spanish Civil War, and emerged as a dividend that permeated network documentaryjournalism after World War II. Historical-critical method establishes foundations and criteria, combs existing scholarship for markers of engaged documentary journalism, and moves exemplars from the corners of journalism history into the spotlight of engagement.
Reporting from Behind Enemy Lines: How the National Guardian and Liberation Brought Vietnam to the American Left
By Michael Koncewicz
Working alongside the more freewheeling Underground Press Syndicate, the National Guardian and Liberation were two of the more notable outlets on the American Left that quickly developed a forum for antiwar journalism during the Vietnam era. In the initial years of the war, these two older left-wing publications served as vital outlets for antiwar reporting that connected generations of activists, leading to important exchanges between the Old and New Left. Figures such as Wilfred Burchett, Dave Dellinger, and several others published stories that brought their readers behind enemy lines, offering up profound challenges to traditional notions of objectivity during the war. Collectively, their on-the-ground reports played an invaluable role in shaping the later, more expansive print culture of the antiwar movement.
The New York Times and the Times of London on India’s Independence Leaders, 1920–1948
By Jane O’Boyle
During the years before India’s independence, the Times of London published news stories that were derisive and skeptical of Mahatma Gandhi, reflecting a national policy to diminish his power in the process to “quit India.” The Times was respectful of the untouchables’ leader Bhimrao Ambedkar and his civil rights movement for untouchables, perhaps to further distract from Gandhi’s popularity. The New York Times lavished positive attention on Gandhi and largely ignored Ambedkar altogether. The American newspaper framed a hero of colonial independence and never his oppression of untouchables, adhering to news policy during the Jim Crow era of racial persecution. Implications add context to news coverage of international leaders, global policy, and public opinion.
Professional Notes
Not Your Grandpa’s Hoax: A Comparative History of Fake News
By Julien Gorbach
Book Reviews
Behind the Wireless: A History of Early Women at the BBC
By Kate Murphy
Reviewed by Catherine A. Luther
Advancing the Civil Rights Movement: Race and Geography of Life Magazine’s Visual Representation, 1954–1965
By Michael Dibari Jr.
Reviewed by David R. Davies
China’s War Reporters: The Legacy of Resistance against Japan
By Parks M. Coble
Reviewed by John Jenks
The Trials of a Scold: The Incredible True Story of Writer Anne Royall
By Jeff Biggers
Reviewed by James Aucoin
Legendary Sports Writers of the Golden Age: Grantland Rice, Red Smith, Shirley Povich, and W. C. Heinz
By Lee Congdon
Reviewed by Kathleen M. O’Toole
The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation
By Benjamin Fagan
Reviewed by Michael Fuhlhage
Dying for the Truth: The Concise History of Frontline War Reporting
By Paul Moorcraft
Reviewed by Dean Smith
Cecil Brown: The Murrow Boy Who Became Broadcasting’s Crusader for Truth
By Reed W. Smith
Reviewed by Michael J. Socolow
Digital Media Reviews
Lantern
Reviewed by Naeemah Clark
Archive of American Television
Reviewed by Will Mari
Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum
Review by Jon Marshall
Endnotes
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Volume 35, No. 3, 2018
Articles
The Accidental Press Critic: Newsroom Ethnography and Resistance to Self-Criticism and Management Change at the New York Times in 1974
By Kevin M. Lerner
In the late 1960s, the New York Times granted the business and organizational scholar Chris Argyris unprecedented access to its newsroom and the newspaper’s management, agreeing to let Argyris assess the paper’s leadership structures and to make recommendations. Argyris found the Times to be the most sclerotic, unchangeable organization he had ever worked with, and the newspaper abandoned the idea of adopting his reforms. Nevertheless, Argyris ended up forcing the Times to examine itself when the book he wrote about his experiences—which he published without revealing the newspaper’s name—was decoded by a journalism review called (MORE). Though his press criticism was accidental, Argyris’s work still fits squarely in the traditions of newsroom ethnography and in Wendy Wyatt’s discourse model of press criticism.
The Life Cycle and Conventions of Nineteenth-Century Breaking News: Disaster Reporting of the 1875 Virginia City Fire
By Katrina M. Quinn
Coverage of the Virginia City, Nevada, fire of 1875 provides an opportunity to investigate the life cycle and conventions of breaking-news disaster reporting in the nineteenth century. Factors include timing, publication configuration, and rhetorical style of the story. Stories were characterized by the prominent use of dispatch reportage and a transition from summary content to more detailed content over the course of the first week. The escalating deployment of sensational language and content through the breaking-news cycle functioned to convey the degree of the disaster and to create a multisensory experience for the reader. Another discovery is the emergence of nationalistic discursive themes throughout the reportage, tying disaster reporting to the rhetorical construction of American national identity during the dynamic age of westward expansion.
Poor Richard Revised: Benjamin Franklin and the Ritual Economy of Copyright in Colonial America
By Jason Lee Guthrie
Benjamin Franklin was the most prolific and profitable author in colonial America. Work on the history of intellectual property has increasingly identified Franklin as a central figure, particularly in the philosophical development of American copyright law. His understanding and use of what we now think of as intellectual property are potentially illustrative of its emerging theorization in the eighteenth century. Evidence of this can be found in his thoughts and actions regarding copyright and patent specifically, as well as related issues such as the attribution and development of ideas. Adapted from economic anthropology, the theory of ritual economy provides a framework through which to consider how Franklin’s worldview materialized in everyday economic practices, including interactions with proto-intellectual property issues.
Reading Helen Jewett’s Murder: The Historiographical Problems and Promises of Journalism
By Michael Buozis
Historians’ frequent use of a nineteenth-century murder case as a pivotal moment in histories of American journalism and sexuality reveals historiographical complications arising from the co-constitution of journalism and history. The journalistic constitution of the “facts” of this story—and any news story—can be viewed as both shaping and reflecting contemporary understandings of the case. Analyzing the ways in which historians use and contextualize the journalism surrounding the murder complicates many received notions of journalism history, regarding such issues as objectivity and sensationalism. By reading journalism texts as evidence of professional, political, and socioeconomic practices, critical historians can better elaborate the social and cultural construction of many historical subjects, focusing less on what happened and more on how sense was made of what happened.
PROFESSIONAL NOTES
It Ain’t Over ’Til It’s Over: Ending (?) the Narrative about the Chicago Tribune and the Battle of Midway
Michael S. Sweeney and Patrick S. Washburn
BOOK REVIEWS
Defending the Masses: A Progressive Lawyer’s Battles for Free Speech
By Eric B. Easton
Reviewed by Patrick C. File
Newsprint Metropolis: City Papers and the Making of Modern Americans
By Julia Guarneri
Reviewed by Paula Hunt
Across the Waves: How the United States and France Shaped the International Age of Radio
By Derek Vaillant
Reviewed by Don Flournoy
Alone atop the Hill: The Autobiography of Alice Dunnigan, Pioneer of the National Black Press Carol McCabe Booker, ed.
Reviewed by Aleen J. Ratzlaff
Future Proofing the News: Preserving the First Draft of History
By Kathleen Hansen and Nora Paul
Reviewed by Wallace B. Eberhard
Race News: Black Journalists and the Fight for Racial Justice in the Twentieth CenturyBy Fred Carroll
Reviewed by Bill Kovarik
The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction
By Nora M. Alter
Reviewed by Thomas A. Mascaro
We Believed We Were Immortal: Twelve Reporters Who Covered the 1962 Integration Crisis at Ole Miss
By Kathleen Wickham
Reviewed by Erika J. Pribanic-Smith
DIGITAL MEDIA REVIEWS
Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum
Reviewed by Mary Spillman
Roy W. Howard Archive
Reviewed by Julien Gorbach
Museum of Broadcast Communications
Reviewed by Len O’Kelly
ENDNOTES
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Volume 35, No. 4, 2018
Articles
Who is Nicholas Stanford? The New York Times Music Critic and his Secret Role in the Rise of the “Liberal Media” Claim
By Sid Bedingfield
The March of Time Radio Docudrama: Time Magazine, BBDO, and Radio Sponsors, 1931–39
By Cynthia B. Meyers
Heritage and Hate: Constructing Identity in the Raleigh News and Observer’s Progressive-Era Coverage of the Ku Klux Klan
By P. Brooks Fuller
“Watchdog” Journalists and “Shyster” Lawyers: Analyzing Legal Reform Discourse in the Journalistic Trade Press, 1895–1899
By Patrick C. File
Professional Notes
Functionalist Explanations in Media Histories: A Historiographical Essay
By Tim P. Vos
Book Reviews
Before Journalism Schools: How Gilded Age Reporters Learned the Rules
By Randall S. Sumpter
Reviewed by Dean Jobb
Kentucky’s Rebel Press: Pro-Confederate Media and the Secession Crisis
By Craig Berry
Reviewed by Jeffrey A. Smith
They Came to Toil: Newspaper Representations of Mexicans and Immigrants in the Great Depression
By Melita M. Garza
Reviewed by Mary M. Cronin
The Untold Story of Smoketown, the Other Great Black Renaissance
By Mark Whitaker
Reviewed by Wayne Dawkins
How Student Journalists Report Campus Unrest
By Kaylene Dial Armstrong
Reviewed by Sheryl Kennedy Haydel
The Struggle for the Soul of Journalism: The Pulpit vs. The Press 1833-1923
By Ronald Rodgers
Reviewed by Anthony Hatcher
Breaking Babe Ruth: Baseball’s Campaign Against Its Biggest Star
By Edmund F. Wehrle
Reviewed by Raymond McCaffrey
Ku Klux Kulture: America and the Klan in the 1920s
By Felix Harcourt
Reviewed by Andris Straumanis
Digital Media Reviews
NYS Historic Newspapers
Reviewed by Rob Wells
Deception for Journalism’s Sake: A Database
Reviewed by Samantha Peko
The American Folklife Center Archive
Reviewed by Pamela E. Walck
Vol. 36
Volume 36, No. 1, 2019
These issues are available through Communication and Mass Media Complete on EBSCOHost.
Articles
Historiography: Woman Suffrage and the Media
By Linda J. Lumsden
Scholars began to study the periodicals and people who shaped the suffrage press in the early 1970s. Since 2000, suffrage media history has expanded to follow three main interdisciplinary strands that embrace a broad range of media including film, literature, and cartoons: a trend toward cultural approaches; the retrieval of black women’s voices and a scourging of racism within the movement; and a celebration of suffrage in art and as spectacle. The field awaits an analysis of the symbiotic relationship between suffragists and mainstream media and a comprehensive look at suffrage print culture. American journalism historians might look to British cultural scholars for models that address how suffrage media drew women into the public sphere and changed them both.
Fiction and Poetry in the Revolution and the Woman’s Journal: Clarifying HistoryBy Amy Easton-Flake
The literary works that appeared in almost every issue of the Revolution, the organ of the National Woman Suffrage Association, and in the Woman’s Journal, the organ of the American Woman Suffrage Association, enrich our understanding of these two organizations. Contextualized readings of the fiction and poetry reveal that these pieces played an integral, polemical role within the journals as they articulated and advocated each organization’s particular view of new womanhood and the changes needed to advance women. These literary works also elucidate how the two group’s disparate views on divorce, and the reforms most needed to improve women’s position within marriage, were crucial in defeating a call for union in 1870.
Legacies of Belle La Follette’s Big Tent Campaigns for Women’s Suffrage
By Nancy C. Unger
In countless speeches and articles in La Follette’s Magazine, Belle Case La Follette urged that women needed the vote to secure “standards of cleanliness and healthfulness in the municipal home,” and because “home, society, and government are best when men and women keep together intellectually and spiritually.” This range of often mutually exclusive arguments created an inclusive big tent. However, arguing that women were qualified to vote by their roles as wives and mothers, while maintaining that gender was superfluous to suffrage, also contributed to an uneasy combination that would continue the conflict over women’s true nature and hinder their activism for decades to come.
Differently Radical: Suffragist Issues and Feminist Ideas in the Crisis and the Masses
By Linda M. Grasso
The 1915 women’s suffrage issues of two periodicals, the Crisis, the NAACP magazine, and the Masses, an irreverent outlet for left-wing political eclecticism, compel a reassessment of what constitutes feminist radicalism. Given that a bedrock principle of 1910s U.S. feminism was the valuing of all women and girls as human beings—then a radical claim—both periodicals circulated differently radical feminist messages in their suffrage issues. The Crisis insisted that black and white women were equally entitled to voting rights. The Masses promoted white women’s emancipation and regarded women’s suffrage as part of that crusade. Comparing the contents of both issues makes clear that considering race in gendered radicalism and gender in race radicalism are essential when examining suffrage media rhetoric.
Mediating Political Mobility as Stunt-Girl Entertainment:
Newspaper Coverage of New York’s Suffrage Hike to Albany
By Tiffany Lewis
In December 1912, a group of women calling themselves suffrage pilgrims left New York City on foot and hiked 170 miles to Albany to urge the Governor-elect William Sulzer to pass a woman suffrage amendment. At a time when women’s mobility was restricted and transgressive, their hike sparked public condemnation and the media’s fascination. This research examines the newspaper coverage of their hike and argues that reporters tamed and ordered the threat of the suffragists’ political mobility by featuring their protest as entertainment that conformed to the popular genre of stunt-girl serials in the 1910s. Journalists domesticated the transgressive protest by serializing the political pilgrimage through episodic coverage that captured the hikers at moments of stasis and made the hike more legible for potentially threatened readers. The numerous articles de-politicized their hike and constructed the women’s feat as palatable entertainment and an impressive stunt that merited a just reward.
Covering a Countermovement on the Verge of Defeat:
The Press and the 1917 Social Movement Against Woman Suffrage
By Teri Finneman
In the critical year of 1917, the suffrage movement gained the momentum it needed to secure a federal amendment granting women the right to vote. During this turning point, the mainstream local and regional press covered opponents of woman suffrage. Examination of the press portrayals of this countermovement, by means of social movement theory, reveal that most coverage situated the anti-suffrage debate in the context of World War I. News reports provided limited framing of anti-suffragist arguments that centered on negative, emotional rhetoric, while suffrage supporters were framed as providing researched arguments that emphasized their opponents’ contradictions. An emphasis on episodic rather than thematic framing diminished the complexity of the suffrage debate, creating a divide of public fear versus progressive advocacy that illustrates the challenges and shortfalls in news coverage of countermovements.
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Volume 36, No. 2, 2019
Articles
Journalism Versus the Flying Saucers: Assessing the First Generation of UFO Reportage, 1947-1967
By Phillip J. Hutchinson and Herbert J. Strentz
Stories of flying saucers and Unidentified Flying Objects reflect one of the most expansive and enduring news topics of the twentieth century. A historical analysis of UFO reportage over its first two decades indicates that American news organizations were deeply implicated in hyping and often obfuscating the UFO phenomenon. Journalists not only created and perpetuated the label “flying saucers,” news organizations also thrived upon a synergistic relationship with the entertainment industry. Consequently, germane issues related to UFOs, science, national security, and culture often became lost in the seams that delineated news values and reporting traditions from entertainment. When judged against the professional standards of the era, UFO coverage often was superficial, redundant, silly, and poorly coordinated.
Unveiling the “Sick Elephant”: CIA Public Relations and the Soviet Economic Forecast Controversy of 1964
By Matthew Cecil
In 1964, when CIA officials held the agency’s first news conference since its founding, Director John McCone hoped for a public relations triumph. Instead, the event backfired as the news media and others roundly rejected a public role for the secretive agency. While the CIA boasted a public affairs office soon after its founding in 1947, that office was charged with providing friendly reporters with unattributed background information. The goal of McCone’s decision to hold a news conference was to feature the agency’s “analytical brains” in part to distract the public from the CIA’s other, more problematic mission, covert operations. Unlike the FBI, which thrived in the realm of public relations around its domestic criminal justice activities, the CIA had no non-secret mission to promote.
A Forgotten Pioneer in Sports Television: Phillies Jackpot Bowling (1959-1960)
By Nicholas Hirshon
Phillies Jackpot Bowling, a television series broadcast on NBC in 1959 and 1960, played a historic role in transforming the image of bowling and precipitating an era of unprecedented popularity for the game. Professional bowlers competed to roll six consecutive strikes in nine throws and hit a jackpot that reached tens of thousands of dollars. Winning contestants made more money in just a few minutes on the lanes than many baseball and football stars earned over an entire season. In an era when bowling was dismissed as the dull hobby of gamblers and drinkers, Phillies Jackpot Bowling cast the game as exciting and wholesome. The show also marked little-known chapters in the careers of its three famous hosts, Leo Durocher, Mel Allen, and Bud Palmer.
Stoicism and Courage as Journalistic Values: What Early Journalism Textbooks Taught About Newsroom Ethos
By Raymond McCaffrey
Discussion of a “newsroom ethos” that may direct journalists into harm’s way and also impede their ability to receive help in coping with the after effects of their work experiences has become more common as researchers have focused on the mental-health risks faced by reporters and photographers. Journalism textbooks covering a period from 1913-1978 were found to have encouraged detachment and discouraged the displaying of emotions in what was depicted as a macho profession. Aspiring journalists were taught that courage was an important attribute because taking risks was part of the job and that some of the most influential journalists had died heroic deaths in their pursuit of the truth. Textbook writers helped developed a true mythology around journalists, one replete with heroes and legends.
Professional Notes
Trust and Verify: Myths and Misinformation in the History of Women War Correspondents
By Carolyn Edy
Book Reviews
Political Pioneer of the Press: Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Her Transnational Crusade for Social Justice
Lori Amber Roessner, and Jodi Rightler-McDaniels, eds.
Reviewed by Gwyneth Mellinger
Reporter: A Memoir
By Seymour Hersh
Reviewed by Gerald L. Fetner
Fumbled Call: The Bear Bryant-Wally Butts Football Scandal That Split the Supreme Court and Changed American Libel Law
By David E. Sumner
Reviewed by Pat Farabaugh
Crusader for Democracy: The Political Life of William Allen White
By Charles Delgadillo
Reviewed by Joe Mirando
Print News and Raise Hell: The Daily Tar Heel and the Evolution of a Modern University
By Kenneth Joel Zogry
Reviewed by Kaylene D. Armstrong
Sports Makes You Type Faster: The Entire World of Sports by One of America’s Most Famous Sportswriters
By Dan Jenkins
Reviewed by Joe Marren
Publisher for the Masses: Emanuel Haldeman-Julius
By R. Alton Lee
Reviewed by Jean Folkerts
Digital Media Reviews
Digital Newspaper Collection
Reviewed by Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen
Audio Description Project
Reviewed by Rachael E. Vacanti
Dreams Rewired
Reviewed by Patrick G. Wilz
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Volume 36, No. 3, 2019
Articles
The Mysterious Mr. Maxwell and Room M-1:
Clandestine Influences on American Postal Censorship during World War I
By Alexander S. Leidholdt
Infrequently examined archival sources raise the possibility that British press mogul Lord Northcliffe and his country’s intelligence agents enabled America’s purging of journalistic dissent during World War I. William Maxwell—Northcliffe’s representative in the United States and a liaison with a British-funded spying ring—performed a pivotal role in suppressing America’s foreign-language press. He displayed a remarkable ability to install himself as the spearhead of the Post Office’s wartime monitoring and censorship activities in New York. The information he gathered also served the Department of Justice, the Bureau of Intelligence, the Military Intelligence Section, and the Office of Naval Intelligence. Maxwell later became a key advisor to the Post Office and lobbied to expand his responsibilities to include surveilling all of the country’s foreign-language publications.
Terry Pettus and the 1936 Seattle Newspaper Strike:
Pivotal Success for the Early American Newspaper Guild
By Cindy Elmore
The American Newspaper Guild was struggling for life when Tacoma, Washington, journalist Terry Pettus wrote his 1935 letter requesting to join. Once on board, Pettus then successfully recruited journalists throughout the Northwest to the Guild. He launched, then advised the Seattle Newspaper Guild throughout its successful 1936 strike against William Randolph Hearst’s Post-Intelligencer. Archival records show that Pettus’ actions were pivotal to Guild successes, as the Seattle labor victory ushered in a tripling of Guild contracts with publishers nationwide in just a year. When Pettus’ own Tacoma newspaper closed soon thereafter he was unable to land a new general interest newspaper job, probably because of publisher blacklisting. However, the experience led Pettus toward decades of subsequent political and labor activism in the Northwest.
The “Sound of an Extra”:
Representing Civil War Newsboys by Pen and in Print
By Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray
By the time the Civil War began, newsboys had become fixtures of America’s urban landscape. Many people who bought their daily newspaper on the street wrote about newsboys in their diaries and letters. Their writings shed light on the lived experience of wartime journalism. Newsboys were the only representative of newspapers that most readers encountered in person. With their shouts about the latest news, newsboys created a collective listening/reading experience. This meant that the popular urban reception of war news was not only generated individually but in public as well. Reception of the news was greatly influenced by the newsboys who put their own spin on events and generated mass reaction from street crowds.
Westbrook Pegler and the Rise of the Syndicated Columnist
By Philip Glende
The syndicated political columnist emerged as a fixture of American newspapers in the 1930s. By the end of the decade, the partisan views of a few journalists were placed before millions of potential readers. Columnists offered readers an alternative to the event-based, source-driven reporting style of the day. They offered publishers an inexpensive source of politically sophisticated content that they could use to advance their ideological interests or to demonstrate fairmindedness on the opinion pages. Conservative columnist Westbrook Pegler was among the best known and most divisive newspaper writers of the day. He was a sharp critic of the Roosevelt administration, organized labor and liberals, and his work as a regular contributor to daily newspapers was followed by supporters and detractors alike.
“Fully Conscious of Their Power”:
Nineteenth Century Michigan Editors Search for Journalistic Professionalism
By Stephen A. Banning
Recent studies suggest some nineteenth century editors had an elite professional identity, while others progressed further, actively attempting to professionalize with codes of ethics and university education. Michigan Press Association proceedings were examined from the nineteenth century to better understand concepts of journalistic personal identity. Findings show the Michigan Press Association, while existing in a remote section of the United States at the time, was sophisticated in its operation and aims, and valued being seen as professionals in the mold of doctors, lawyers, and clergy. This reveals nineteenth-century journalism professional interest was more widespread than has been previously realized.
Book Reviews
Bad News Travels Fast: The Telegraph, Libel, and Press Freedom in the Progressive Era
By Patrick C. File
Reviewed by David J. Vergobbi
Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine
By Joe Hagan
Reviewed by James Aucoin
Washington’s Golden Age: Hope Ridings Miller, the Society Beat, and the Rise of Women Journalists
By Joseph Dalton
Reviewed by Mary Saracino Zboray
Mediating America: Black and Irish Press and the Struggle for Citizenship, 1870-1914
By Brian Shott
Reviewed by Mohammed Alrmizan
Fear and Loathing Worldwide: Gonzo Journalism Beyond Hunter S. Thompson
Robert Alexander and Christine Isager, eds.
Reviewed by Kevin Lerner
Let Us Make Men: The Twentieth-Century Black Press and a Manly Vision for Racial Advancement
By D’Weston Haywood
Reviewed by Brian Carroll
Justice in Plain Sight: How a Small-Town Newspaper and Its Unlikely Lawyer Opened America’s Courtrooms
By Dan Bernstein
Reviewed by Kenneth Ward
Dear Courier: The Civil War Correspondence of Editor Melvin Dwinell
Ford Risley, ed.
Reviewed by Leighton Wingate
Digital Media Reviews
Europeana Newspapers
Reviewed by Elisabeth Fondren
Joseph Pulitzer: Voice of the People
Reviewed by Connor Harrison
Google Dataset Search
Reviewed by Syed Ali Hussain
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Volume 36, No. 4, 2019
Articles
Prejudice and the Press Critics: Colonel Robert McCormick’s Assault on the
Hutchins Commission
By Stephen Bates
Many publishers responded negatively to A Free and Responsible Press, the 1947 report of the Commission on Freedom of the Press, but none more negatively than Colonel Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune. Convinced that the report was “part of a plot” to destroy the First Amendment, McCormick underwrote a 642-page rebuttal, Prejudice and the Press: A Restatement of the Principle of Freedom of the Press with Specific Reference to the Hutchins-Luce Commission, by Tribune reporter Frank Hughes. The story behind Prejudice and the Press represents an unknown chapter in the midcentury battle between conservative publishers and liberal press critics. Although Prejudice and the Press is meandering, snide, and suffused with red-baiting, it effectively rebuts a key foundation of A Free and Responsible Press
Divided Loyalties: The Chicago Defender and Harold Washington’s Campaign for
Mayor of Chicago
By Jon Marshall and Matthew Connor
Congressman Harold Washington campaigned in the1983 Democratic primary to become Chicago’s first African-American mayor against two white opponents. The Chicago Defender hesitated to endorse him despite its history as a leader of the black press. Unlike some of its competitors in the black media, the Defender was slow to recognize that a progressive African American movement was gaining political momentum. The Washington campaign cared deeply about the Defender’s endorsement because it relied heavily on the city’s black media to strengthen its grassroots efforts in African-American neighborhoods. The Defender finally endorsed Washington only after his campaign put intense public and behind-the-scenes pressure on owner John Sengstacke and it became clear that Washington could actually win the primary.
Making China Their “Beat”: A Collective Biography of U.S. Correspondents in China, 1900-1949
By Yong Volz and Lei Guo
What was the social composition of the U.S. correspondents in China during the first half of twentieth century? Borrowing Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of capital and adopting the collective biography approach, this study analyzed the demographic characteristics and career paths of 161correspondents to illustrate the opportunity structure and its historical variations in the largely unstructured field of foreign correspondence during its formative years. Being a missionary kid, having a journalism education, especially from the Missouri School of Journalism, or being raised in the northeast region with an Ivy League education, were among the kinds of valued social and cultural capital that conferred an advantage in becoming a China correspondent.
President Ford’s Personal Watergate: The Undermining of the Public Sphere During the Mayaguez Incident
By Michael Sweeney, Michael DiBari, Edgar Simpson, and William Schulte
In May 1974, Cambodian troops captured the U.S. container ship SS Mayaguez and her crew off the Cambodian coast, igniting a clash between the new Khmer Rouge regime and a U.S. president dealing with aftermath of Watergate. The Mayaguez incident was initially reported as a successful rescue mission, with the administration of President Gerald R. Ford keeping silent about the forty-one U.S. military personnel who died. For five days, the Pentagon insisted that one American had been killed. This incident highlights key communication steps in the life cycle of a politically constructed falsehood meant to mislead and limit information reaching the public sphere.
Professional Notes
Election Symbols: The Language of the Heart, Veil over the Mind?
Paulette D. Kilmer
Book Reviews
Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763-1789
By Joseph M. Adelman
Reviewed by Julie Hedgepeth Williams
Provoking the Press: (MORE) Magazine and the Crisis of Confidence in American Journalism
By Kevin Lerner
Reviewed by Roy J. Harris Jr.
The Mexican Press and Civil Society, 1940-1976: Stories from the Newsroom, Stories from the Street
By Benjamin T. Smith
Reviewed by Ana Lourdes Cárdenas
Making News: The Political Economy of Journalism in Britain and America from the Glorious Revolution to the Internet
Richard R. John and Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb, eds.
Reviewed by Dean Jobb
The Miami Times and the Fight for Equality: Race, Sport, and the Black Press, 1948-1958
By Yanela G. McLeod
Reviewed by Stephen Siff
The Superwoman and Other Writings by Miriam Michelson
Lori Harrison-Kahan, ed.
Reviewed by Vanessa Murphree
Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist
By Julien Gorbach
Reviewed by Norma Fay Green
Digital Media Reviews
The Vault at Pfaff’s
Reviewed by Samantha Peko
Hoosier State Chronicles: Indiana’s Digital Historic Newspaper Program
Reviewed by Melissa Greene-Blye
Fresh Air Archive
Reviewed by Bailey Dick
Vol. 37
Vol. 37
These issues are available through Communication and Mass Media Complete on EBSCOHost.
Volume 37, No. 1, 2020
Articles
Telling the Story and Telling the Story Not: U.S. Army-Media Relations
During the Battle of Manila
Nicholas Evan Sarantakes
The battle of Manila was the longest and largest urban battle in the history of the U.S. Army. However, the World War II engagement received little journalistic coverage. Despite having enormous advantages over reporters in controlling the organization of news coverage, the Army largely failed to get the type of reporting that served the institutional interests of the service. A small number of army public affairs officers, often with little training, organized support to represent distinct factions within the military that were not always in keeping with the larger interests of the service, or the nation. The rivalries and pride of journalists overseas and back home actually diverted many away from reporting, which worked to the advantage of General Douglas MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Command.
The Magnifying Effect of Television News: Civil Rights Coverage and Eyes on the Prize
Kathleen Wickham
Henry Hampton’s award-winning documentary Eyes on the Prize was notable for its reliance on news footage and interviews with civil rights activists. Undergirding the approach was his reliance on a pre-production process called Scholar School where he hosted academics, civil rights activists, and members of the media for intense discussions regarding the civil rights movement. Audio tapes of the media session demonstrate a connection between the development of broadcast news as a credible source of information about the civil rights movement and the movement’s use of the media to obtain national attention for its goals. The narrative uses a constructivist approach to place the details heard on the tapes within the context of civil rights scholarship through the use of interviews and archival materials resulting in a nuanced understanding about the perceptions and role of the media in civil rights coverage.
“It would be for the best to suspend publication”: The German-American Press and
Anti-German Hysteria during World War I
Kevin Grieves
During World War I, the German-American press became a lightning rod for anti-German sentiment. New rules required German-language papers to supply English translations, and many publications faced bankruptcy. Some of the most strident attacks came from English-language journalists. Analysis of content of German-language newspapers reveals how editors of those newspapers positioned their publications during World War I, responded to attacks from other journalists, and how they articulated their professional stance in relation to loyalty to the government. Questions about journalists’ obligations to expressions of patriotism and support of their government have arisen on a regular basis up to the present, and this research helps shed light on how notions of journalistic independence are reconciled with a sense of patriotic obligation.
Mississippi’s Forgotten Son: Billy Barton and his Journalistic Battle for Redemption
in the “Closed Society”
Jason A. Peterson
In the summer of 1960, Billy Barton, a journalism major at the University of Mississippi, worked as an intern at the Atlanta Journal. Barton, a reporter at the university newspaper, the Mississippian, was misidentified by a Citizens’ Council informant as a sit-in participant and a member of the NAACP. As a result, Barton faced a number of damning accusations through a “whisper campaign” perpetuated by Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett, the Sovereignty Commission, and the Citizens’ Council that ruined his reputation within what has been called the state’s “Closed Society.” In an effort to clear his name, Barton took his story to the press, igniting a firestorm of controversy concerning the treatment of the student journalist and challenging the pervasive nature of Mississippi’s white ideology. While Barton’s plight unified the majority of editors in the state, the Closed Society ultimately prevailed.
Professional Notes
The Mock Trial of Matthew Lyon: Teaching Media Law by Roleplaying Its Past
Nicholas Hirshon
Book Reviews
Looking at the Stars: Black Celebrity Journalism in Jim Crow America
By Carrie Teresa
Reviewed by Dianne Bragg
Rewriting the Newspaper: The Storytelling Movement in American Print Journalism
By Thomas R. Schmidt
Reviewed by Philip M. Glende
Painting War: George Plante’s Combat Art in World War II
By Kathleen Broome Williams
Reviewed by J. Ian Tennant
Freedom of Expression: Foundational Documents and Historical Arguments
Stephen A. Smith, ed.
Reviewed by Reed Smith
Cub Reporters: American Children’s Literature and Journalism in the Gilded Age
Paige Gray
Reviewed by Christina Littlefield
No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life in Baseball Writing
By Joe Bonomo
Reviewed by Joel Weiner
Digital Media Reviews
Foreign Language Press Survey
Reviewed by Jon Bekken
The Papers of Benjamin Franklin
Reviewed by Jason Lee Guthrie
Defensores de la Democracia
Reviewed by Rebecca Kelliher
Presidential Address
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Volume 37, No. 2, 2020
Articles
Regulating Public Relations: How U.S. Legal Policies and Regulations Shaped Early Corporate Public Relations
Cayce Myers
Nineteenth and twentieth century developments in corporations’ legal duties involving “public relations” activities gave rise to professional public relations practice. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, court cases, trade press, and the popular press used the term “public relations” to refer to the status of an organization and certain expected behaviors. As corporations and utilities grew in the late nineteenth century these “public relations” responsibilities were applied to them creating a legal requirement of transparency, disclosure, and good faith actions. Examining court decisions and the popular press this paper shows how this application of the term “public relations” to corporations had a relationship with public relations practice. Implications for public relations historiography and American public relations development are discussed.
“Guttural Phrases” and “Vulgar Directives”: The Evolution of Press Standards on Profanity
Matthew Pressman
Historically, major American newspapers have rarely printed expletives, obscenities, and vulgarities. When newspapers have deviated from that norm, it has usually been for one of four reasons: to report on a political figure cursing publicly; to convey realism in a story about a marginalized group (often a racial minority); to express the emotions of people in traumatic situations; or to quote faithfully from a book or film. Using digitized historical newspapers, industry publications, and archival sources, it is possible to analyze how press standards and practices on profanity have changed from the 1960s to the Donald Trump era. The changes at the Associated Press and the New York Times are especially noteworthy, because their guidelines provide the model for many other news organizations.
Advocacy, Editorial Opinion, and Agenda Building: How Publicity Friends Fought for Louis D. Brandeis’s 1916 Supreme Court Confirmation
Erin Coyle, Elisabeth Fondren, and Joby Richard
Louis D. Brandeis’s “publicity friends” used agenda building to advocate for his confirmation as a Supreme Court Justice in 1916. Editors of the New Republic, Harper’s Weekly, and La Follette’s Weekly coordinated publicity efforts for Brandeis, their friend, fellow progressive, and political ally. Analysis of archival sources shows that these advocates strategically used publicity to support Brandeis and consciously engaged in advocacy agenda building and defensive agenda building to support Brandeis’s confirmation. The results of this study show publicity was used to advocate for Brandeis’s confirmation and to counter attacks on his reputation.
The News Ecosystem During the Birth of the Confederacy: South Carolina Secession in Southern Newspapers
Michael Fuhlhage, Jade Metzger-Riftkin, Sarah Walker, and Nicholas Prephan
During the secession crisis in 1860-61, the American South was far from unified. Contrary to the idea that the South constituted a single distinct region, this analysis of secession news in Southern newspapers demonstrates the slave states consisted of a constellation of Souths rather than one unified South. Through their decisions about what to print, Southern editors serving unique localities contributed to the social construction of sectionally distinct visions of nationhood. Their decisions about which news and opinion they would reprint and how news was framed made them integral agents in the news ecosystem. This study examines 822 newspaper articles covering secession in the weeks before, during, and after South Carolina’s secession in the Charleston Mercury, New Orleans Picayune, Alexandria Gazette, and Macon Telegraph.
Professional Notes
Media History and Advertising Archives
Cynthia B. Meyers
Book Reviews
In Sullivan’s Shadow: The Use and Abuse of Libel Law during the Long Civil Rights Struggle
By Aimee Edmondson
Reviewed by Jim R. Martin
Horace Greeley: Print, Politics, and the Failure of American Nationhood
By James M. Lundberg
Reviewed by John Vivian
Tulsa 1921: Reporting a Massacre
By Randy Krehbiel
Reviewed by Meta G. Cartsarphen
The Evening Star: The Rise and Fall of a Great Washington Newspaper
By Faye Haskins
Reviewed by Rich Shumate
Citizen Reporters: S.S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and the Magazine that Rewrote America
By Stephanie Gorton
Reviewed by Ashley Walter
Ben Robertson: South Carolina Journalist and Author
By Jodie Peeler
Reviewed by Dante Mozie
Postgate: How the Washington Post Betrayed Deep Throat, Covered Up Watergate, and Began Today’s Partisan Advocacy Journalism
By John O’Connor
Reviewed by Katrina J. Quinn
Digital Media Reviews
National Women & Media Collection
Reviewed by Kimberly Wilmot Voss
Kansas Memory
Reviewed by Katherine A. Foss
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
Reviewed by Connor Harrison
Volume 37, No. 3, 2020
Articles
Driving and Restraining Forces: Toward the Marketization of Broadcast News in the United Kingdom in the 1990s
Madeleine Liseblad
Television news broadcasting evolved rapidly in the United Kingdom in the 1990s. All aspects of the newscast changed and broadcasting became properly marketized. There were clear societal driving and restraining forces at play in the UK during this time. Key driving forces, including competition, new technology, and American consultants spurred on television news development. Restraining forces, such as a resistance to change, money, unions and a fear of Americanization slowed down development. The 1991 Independent Television franchise auction and the privatization movement were both driving and restraining forces. Rich data were derived from primary sources, in particular archival material from the Frank N. Magid Associates European archives and in-depth interviews with Magid staff and UK journalists active in the 1990s.
Black Press Scholarship: Where We Have Been, Where We Are, and Where We Need to Go
Felecia Jones Ross
Since the 1970s, the black press has been the topic of numerous television documentaries, books, scholarly and trade articles, and theses and dissertations. They have included biographies of the people who provided the content, as well as information on the way black newspapers covered civil rights, sports, wars, and other major events of the twentieth century. They have revealed a powerful institution that recognized, supported, and expressed the aspirations of a group marginalized by an oppressive, dominant society. While the information is rich, it has revealed other gaps in the knowledge of this institution. As the black press continues to be a topic for dissertations and theses and with digitization, the closing of these gaps looks promising.
The Non-Jewish Jew: Walter Lippmann and the Pitfalls of Journalistic “Detachment”
Julien Gorbach
Walter Lippmann has been touted by historians as “the most wise and forceful spokesman for the ideal of objectivity” during the years when objectivity became journalism’s foundational professional standard. But Lippmann has also been roundly criticized as a self-hating Jew for columns about assimilation and the rise of Hitler, columns that, like all his writing, were shaped by his own, idiosyncratic belief in journalistic “detachment.” His mishandling of what was then called “the Jewish question” highlights the dilemma of weighing a journalist’s professional commitment to detachment against the contrary assertion that the best journalism “comes from somewhere and stands for something.” The full story of this controversy offers clarity about poorly understood challenges with standards that traditional news outlets and digital platforms still face today.
The Ideological Influence of Political Cartoons on the 1884 U.S. Presidential Race
Flora Khoo
During the 1884 presidential campaign, the battle between candidates Grover Cleveland and James Blaine signified a historic moment as cartoonists such as Thomas Nast, Joseph Keppler, and Bernhard Gillam brought the world of politics to their drawing board to communicate who should be selected for the highest office in the nation. The year 1884 was an important point in history as it was the first and only time that Nast and Harper’s Weekly supported a Democratic candidate since the Civil War. Utilizing original publications from Harper’s Weekly and Puck magazine, this essay underscores the influence of political cartoons and the public to reinforce agenda, and draws attention to the persuasive power of caricatures through symbols, satires and parodies, and Nast’s influence on other cartoonists.
Mutiny at Bamber Bridge: How the World War II Press Reported Racial Unrest Among U.S. Troops and Why It Remains in British Memory
Pamela E. Walck
What began as good-natured ribbing for more libations escalated into a verbal altercation between African American troops and white U.S. military police on the night of June 24, 1943. The evening ended with a gun battle in the English village of Bamber Bridge, an event that left one soldier dead and several U.S. troops injured. Was the violence spurred by military policies limiting the roles of African Americans? Was it fueled by an uncensored radio bulletin about race rioting in Detroit accidentally transmitted to London? Or fueled by white U.S. soldiers’ growing anger over the preferential treatment the Brits extended to African Americans? Seven decades later, the event remains forged into the collective memory of residents and is reinforced by modern-day press recollections.
Book Reviews
On Press: The Liberal Values That Shaped the News
By Matthew Pressman
Reviewed by Thomas Mascaro
Journalism’s Ethical Progression: A Twentieth-Century Journey
Gwyneth Mellinger and John P. Ferré, eds.
Reviewed by Lorraine Ahearn
Contested Ground: The Tunnel and the Struggle over Television News in Cold War America
By Mike Conway
Reviewed by Will Mari
Mag Men: Fifty Years of Making Magazines
By Walter Bernard and Milton Glaser
Reviewed by Sherillyn Cox Bennion
Coming Full Circle: From Jim Crow to Journalism
By Wanda Smalls Lloyd
Reviewed by Wayne Dawkins
The Enforcers: How Little-Known Trade Reporters Exposed the Keating Five and Advanced Business Journalism
By Rob Wells
Reviewed by Kenneth Ward
Journalism and the Russo-Japanese War: The End of the Golden Age of Combat Correspondence
By Michael S. Sweeney and Natascha Toft Roelsgaard
Reviewed by Tim Moran
Lincoln’s Informer: Charles A. Dana and the Inside Story of the Union War
By Carl Guarneri
Reviewed by Leonard Ray Teel
Digital Media Reviews
Walter J. Brown Media Archives & Peabody Archives Collection
Reviewed by Jason Lee Guthrie
Richard Jewell
Reviewed by Luis Antunes
ARSA – Airheads Radio Survey Archive
Reviewed by Len O’Kelley
Volume 37, No. 4, 2020
Articles
Championing Humanity, Overlooking Atrocity: Edward R. Murrow and the Holocaust
Laurel Leff
What distinguished Edward R. Murrow’s April 1945 concentration camp broadcast was the people of Buchenwald. While other journalists focused on the dead as “dumps of unburied corpses” and the living as “wretched remnants,” Murrow described the inmates as people who had lives before their internment. Murrow’s work a decade earlier with Jewish professors fired by the Nazi regime helped him sense humanity when others perceived nothing but carnage. Yet, like other correspondents covering the liberation, Murrow never mentioned Jews in his broadcast. Nor had he done much on the plight of Europe’s Jews while they were being murdered, broadcasting a single story. Despite his displaced scholars work and his London base, Murrow never fully recognized the extermination of European Jewry as an important news story.
“Improving the Race”: The Discourse of Science and Eugenics in Local News Coverage, 1905-1922
Rachel Grant & Cristina Mislán
In the early twentieth century, journalism contributed to the eugenics movement before it reached national and global saliency. Local newspapers played a role in writing about eugenics in Columbia, Missouri, that integrated “scientific” discourse with questions about the social and cultural makeup. Examining the Missouri School of Journalism’s newspaper, the Columbia Missourian, and the city’s newspaper, the Columbia Tribune, shows that the media discourse focused on three themes: 1) “race suicide” and its implications for designating social value; 2) elevating the “superior race” through purity and racial difference; and 3) promoting the politics of respectability. This article contributes to previous research on early journalism by analyzing how local news production incorporated “objectivity” as a practice that in turn elevated eugenics as a legitimate form of science.
Ronald Rodgers
A debate over “the overgenerous publicity given baseball by the newspapers” and the call for curtailing coverage of the sport was part of an early twentieth-century campaign against the “free publicity evil” by American newspaper publishers – culminating in the Chicago Tribune’s 1921 campaign to persuade the nation’s newspapers to run fewer and shorter baseball stories. The heart of that dispute between newspapers and the national game involved a negotiation defining “What is news? – to include a reconsideration of news values in the struggle between the adage about “giving readers what they want” and the maturing articulation about what it means for the press to serve the public interest, which culminated in early expressions about the concept of “constructive journalism.”
Mortimer Thomson’s “Witches of New York”: Undercover Reporting on the Fortune-Telling Trade
Samantha Peko
During the 1850s, undercover journalists broke new ground by covering slave auctions, Northern uprisings, and fraud. In 1857, Mortimer Thomson, a comedic writer for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, went undercover. For the series, “The Witches of New York,” he visited New York fortune tellers who advertised regularly in the newspapers. They sold tonics, offered to find stolen property, helped with matchmaking, and claimed they could tell the future. The series also took the reader to the seedier parts of Lower Manhattan to debunk tricksters and frauds. Later, his works were chronicled in a book, The Witches of New York. His work predates the turn of the twentieth century “stunt journalists” such as Nellie Bly, who wrote first-person narratives about their adventures to actively expose social injustice.
On the Edge of the American Revolution: The Nova Scotia Gazette in 1775
Kate Dunsmore
This study focuses on the first Canadian newspaper, the Nova Scotia Gazette, on the eve of the American Revolution. It explores the means by which the paper’s printer, Anthony Henry, was able to continue including both American patriot and British loyalist viewpoints long after polarization in the colonies that became the United States drove printers to solely support the Patriot cause. The analysis identifies printerly practices Henry used to continue publishing multiple perspectives. Also discussed are how differences between the economic, political and social reality of Nova Scotia and that of the American colonies contributed to Henry retaining an impartial stance.
Book Reviews
Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America
By E. James West
Reviewed by Bernell E. Tripp
Humbug! The Politics of Art Criticism in New York City’s Penny Press
By Wendy Jean Katz
Reviewed by Mark Bernhardt
Front Pages, Front Lines: Media and the Fight for Women’s Suffrage
Linda Steiner, Carolyn Kitch and Brooke Kroeger, eds.
Reviewed by Lisa C. Luedeman
Media Relations and the Modern First Lady: From Jacqueline Kennedy to Melania Trump
Lisa M. Burns, ed.
Reviewed by Heather J. Stone
Graphic News: How Sensational Images Transformed Nineteenth-Century Journalism
By Amanda Frisken.
Reviewed by Geoffrey Ellwand
Journalists as Witnesses to Executions: Processing the Viewing Room
By Kenna R. Griffin
Reviewed by Leigh Ann Wilson
Digital Media Reviews
Reviewed by Candi Carter Olson
Federal Cases Involving Unauthorized Disclosures to the News Media, 1778 to the Present
Reviewed by Mark Feldstein
J. Walter Thompson Company Collection
Reviewed by Carole O’Reilly
Vol. 38
Volume 38, No. 1, 2021
Articles
Henry Luce’s American & Chinese Century: An Analysis of US News Magazines’ Coverage of General Chiang Kai-shek from 1936 to 1949
Daniel M. Haygood & Glenn W. Scott
Time magazine founder and publisher Henry Luce was accused by scholars and critics of using his media empire to support and promote General Chiang Kai-shek and his ruling Chinese Nationalist Party during the pre-war, World War II, and Chinese Civil War periods. The criticism was particularly directed at the content contained in Time magazine, the leading weekly news magazine of the era. However, the coverage of General Chiang was actually much more varied than Luce’s most ardent critics had concluded, and the portrayals differed depending on which events were covered and during which time periods.
“We Females Have to Be Contented with the Tales of Adventures”: Trauma and Gender in Dorothy Day’s Early Reporting
Bailey Dick
This examination into the early writings of radical Catholic activist and newspaper founder Dorothy Day will explore how she fits into a cohort of journalists whose experiences with trauma both drove and shaped their written work. However, unlike many other traumatized journalists or women writers at the time, Day’s reflections on her trauma allowed her to embrace her own experiences of suffering and emotion in her writing that evolved into the deeply personal, yet empowering writing style for which the Catholic Worker is renowned. This finding is revealed through a close reading of Day’s personal papers at Marquette University, as well as her work published in the Call, the New Masses, and the New Orleans Item. These primary documents serve as a supplement to published letters, oral histories, and news articles written about Day’s life.
“Pure Caucasian Blood”: Libel by Racial Misidentification in American Newspapers (1900–1957)
Aimee Edmondson
Utilizing critical race theory, we can better understand the role that the American legal system and newspapers played in their efforts to maintain the racial status quo prior to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. At the intersection of race, journalism, and libel law, we see a rich vein of case law spawned from newspapers erroneously identifying white people as black. Such racial misidentification prompted a series of libel suits from 1900 to 1957 before the US Supreme Court placed libel law under First Amendment protection in New York Times v. Sullivan. Jim Crow had long been secure in southern newspapers and some errors in racial identification were inevitable. Before Sullivan, it could indeed be libelous when newspapers falsely identified white people as black.
On the night of February 8, 1968, in Orangeburg, South Carolina, a town located ninety minutes away from Charleston, state highway patrolmen were stationed at the edge of South Carolina State College, a historically black institution, hoping to gain control of a crowd of unarmed students protesting a nearby segregated bowling alley. Triggered by what they erroneously believed was gunfire aimed toward them, the patrolmen fired into the group, killing three young men and wounding twenty-eight others. Among those covering what became known as the Orangeburg massacre was the college’s student newspaper, the Collegian. Textual analysis and media framing theory guide this examination of how the campus newspaper staff used their coverage to honor their fallen peers. Collegian coverage also communicated the anger of a campus community that felt betrayed by state lawmakers and expressed frustrations over what many believed was a lack of accurate news coverage by the mainstream media.
Book Reviews
George Seldes’ War for the Public Good: Weaponising a Free Press
By Helen Fordham, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, 166 pp
Susan Bragg
Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press
By Kim Gallon, Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2020
Brian Gabrial
A History of the American Civil Rights Movement through Newspaper Coverage: The Race Agenda, Vol. II
By Steve Hallock, New York, Peter Lang, 2020, 493 pp
Marilyn Greenwald
Yankee Reporters and Southern Secrets: Journalism, Open Source Intelligence, and the Coming of the Civil War
By Michael Fuhlhage, New York, Peter Lang, 2019, 276 pp.
Cathy M. Jackson
Sports Journalism: A History of Glory, Fame, and Technology
By Patrick Washburn and Chris Lamb, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2020, 288 pp.
David Kaszuba
Political Godmother: Nackey Scripps Loeb and The Newspaper That Shook the Republican Party
By Meg Heckman, Lincoln, Potomac Books, 2020, 194 pp
Hillary Woodworth McNerney
Social Justice Journalism: A Cultural History of Social Movement Media from Abolition to #womensmarch
By Linda J. Lumsden, New York, Peter Lang, 2019, 308 pp.
Jennifer E. Moore
Up All Night: Ted Turner, CNN, and the Birth of 24-Hour News
By Lisa Napoli, New York, Abrams Press, 2020, 306 pp.
Patti Piburn
Digital Media Reviews
Digital Transgender Archive
Maintained by the College of the Holy Cross, https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/. Reviewed August 2020
Susan Bragg
Public Books 101, Season 1: The Internet
https://www.publicbooks.org/podcast/; Reviewed November 2020
Jason Lee Guthrie
The Tom Wolfe Papers at the New York Public Library
http://Archives.nypl.org/Mss/22833#Overview
Connor Harrison
The Worcester Women’s History Project.
http://www.wwhp.org/Resources/
William E. Huntzicker
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Volume 38, No. 2, 2021
Articles
A “Moral Challenge”: Journalists, Joe McCarthy, and the Struggle for Truth, 1950–1955
Glen Feighery
News coverage of US Sen. Joseph McCarthy has long been studied, and consistent throughout this extensive research is the implication that he influenced journalism standards—specifically, objectivity. Drawing on trade publications and professional magazines to examine those implications, journalists not only discussed McCarthy coverage but acknowledged that reporting on the senator was difficult. Often, journalists were confronted by their own shortcomings and prompted to question their practices. Many felt objectivity hampered their ability to portray the truth about the senator; indeed, some believed that objectivity spread misinformation. Journalists responded by discussing, and in many instances embracing, interpretive reporting to provide context. They saw covering McCarthy as an opportunity to improve journalism. Between 1950 and 1955, journalists reconsidered objectivity and expanded the idea of fairness beyond simple balance. It also led journalists toward a responsibility to interpret and explain facts as well as convey a fuller truth. These strategies could still benefit journalists today.
“When I Couldn’t Bedazzle Them With Brilliance, I Bamboozled Them With Bullshit”: Harry Edwards, Black Power, and Countering Media Repression of the Black Athlete’s Revolt
Dexter L. Blackman
Harry Edwards led the organization of a Black Power campaign to organize a boycott of the 1968 Olympics. Contrary to the prevailing conclusion that the boycott failed to materialize because it was unpopular, Edwards’ efforts challenged the state-enforced Cold War-consensus that racial discrimination was declining in American society. Consequently, the state, including the mainstream media, moved swiftly to repress the boycott by demonizing him as a “black militant” and accessing the effort as misguided. Edwards, like several Black radicals, responded by adopting a militant façade that attracted media attention that allowed him to counter oppositional pronouncements and keep the boycott newsworthy for a year. Edwards’ use of the media, however, continues to complicate understandings of the boycott and Black Power. Uncritical mainstream media-based assessments suggest both failed because they were unpopular. By contrast, activist-focused studies conclude that activists succeeded by expanding discussions on racial discrimination in the national discourse.
“Serve It Up Hot and Brief”: The Journalistic Innovations and Influence of Willard M. Kiplinger
Rob Wells
The newsletter format has witnessed a popular resurgence in digital media but little is known about the origins of this multi-billion dollar industry for specialized information. Newsletter industry pioneer Willard M. Kiplinger, whose Kiplinger Washington Letter claims to be the oldest continuously published newsletter in the US, perfected a type of reporting that influenced publications ranging from Newsweek to U.S. News & World Report, Bloomberg, Axios, and others. The Kiplinger Washington Letter was influential during the New Deal, with Kiplinger serving as a crucial bridge between conservative business leaders and New Deal regulators. Kiplinger’s weekly newsletter nurtured a close reader engagement through a specialized research service and extensive correspondence with his subscribers, a type of early crowdsourcing that anticipated the active audience interaction in digital journalism.
“Well-Bred and Well-Fed,” the Science Service Covers Eugenics: 1924 to 1966
Susan E. Swanberg
Founded in 1921 by then-retired newspaper publisher, E.W. Scripps, Science Service was established as an agency for the popularization of science. The original intent of Science Service was to publish its content in newspapers and popular science periodicals. Eventually, however, the organization produced its own popular publications, including the Science News-Letter (News-Letter). Stories written by Science Service writers and occasional contributors appeared in the News-Letter and were often re-published in the mainstream press. In spite of its high aspirations, Science Service became a promoter of eugenics, likely because E.W. Scripps himself believed in the protoscience. From the early-to-mid 1920s until 1966, the News-Letter published articles endorsing the principles, values, and doctrines of eugenics. The goal of this case study is to explore the previously unexamined role Science Service played in propagandizing (or at least promoting) eugenics’ unscientific, nativist ideas about heredity in Science Service publications and in the popular press.
Book Reviews
Promoting Monopoly: AT&T and the Politics of Public Relations, 1876–1941
by Karen Miller Russell, New York, Peter Lang, 2020, 254 pp.
Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen
An Aristocracy of Critics: Luce, Hutchins, Niebuhr, and the Committee that Redefined Freedom of the Press
by Stephen Bates, New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Press, 2020, 312 pp.
John P. Ferré
Constructing the Outbreak: Epidemics in Media & Collective Memory
by Katherine A. Foss, Amherst, Massachusetts, University of Massachusetts Press, 2020, 232 pp.
Amie M. Jones
Jimmy Carter and the Birth of the Marathon Media Campaign
by Amber Roessner, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Louisiana State University Press, 2020, 344 pp.
Kathryn J. McGarr
Editor Emory O. Jackson, the Birmingham World, and the Fight for Civil Rights in Alabama, 1940–1975
by Kimberley Mangun, New York, Peter Lang Publishing, 2019, 268 pp.
Gheni Platenburg
An Unladylike Profession: American Women War Correspondents in World War I
by Chris Dubbs, Lincoln, Nebraska, Potomac Books, 2020, 336 pp
Natascha Toft Roelsgaard
American Consultants and the Marketization of Television News in the United Kingdom
by Madeleine Liseblad, New York, Peter Lang Publishing, 2020, 278 pp.
Michael J. Socolow
Digital Media Reviews
Prelinger Archives
https://archive.org/details/prelinger
Reviewed May 2021
Mark Baldridge
Topographical Collection of King George III
https://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/georgeiiitopographicalcollection; Reviewed May 2021
Amélie Doche
The Internet Archive
https://archive.org/about/; Reviewed May 2021
Ollie Gratzinger
Women Who Rock Digital Oral History Archive
https://Womenwhorockcommunity.org/Digital-Oral-History-Project/
Mary Beth Ray
_________________________________________________________________________________________
Vol. 38, Issue 3, 2021
“We are Propagandists for Democracy”: The Institute for Propaganda Analysis’ Pioneering Media Literacy Efforts to Fight Disinformation (1937–1942)
Elisabeth Fondren
The Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA) advocated for “propaganda literacy” against the backdrop of rising nationalism before and during World War II (1937–1942). Through a historical analysis of unpublished archival papers, notes, correspondence, newspaper articles, and the Institute’s publications, this article shows how the IPA raised awareness and highlighted the need for information literacy during a time that precedes modern attempts to promote critical thinking and counter one-sided views. Supported by a network of public opinion scholars, educators, and editors, these anti-propaganda efforts gained momentum. Initially, the IPA’s monthly newsletter Propaganda Analysis and its educational programs, specialized leaflets, and publicity campaigns were received favorably by the public. But critics in government and the press attacked the IPA’s platform. By early 1942, the IPA could neither overcome its financial struggles nor thwart social and political pressures to cede its work, perceived as “un-American” in light of the US’s war mobilization.
Selling Mexico’s Robin Hood: Pancho Villa and His Public Relations Campaign to Target the Press and Public Opinion
Young Joon Lim & Michael S. Sweeney
Francisco “Pancho” Villa was not just a military general or quasi-politician, but also a practitioner of public relations. By close observation of his actions and words, as recorded by primary sources, this study explores his strategies and tactics to build support among three specifically targeted audiences: the people of Mexico, American war correspondents, and the people of the United States. By examining secondary literature about public relations and about Pancho Villa’s life, this study finds evidence of his practicing public relations as we understand it today. This analysis is enriched through the use of primary documents from the archives of Byron C. Utecht at the University of Texas at Arlington, who interviewed and observed Villa.
We Are Nobody’s Fools: The Radicalization of the Hampton Script from 1930–1959 to Advance Black Activism
Sheryl Kennedy Haydel
At Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) in Virginia, student journalists continued the tradition of publishing the Hampton Script. During this time, the Script covered race, politics, and community building during decades of economic and racial turmoil. Despite publishing on the campus of one of the country’s oldest historically Black universities, the Script departed from the conservative leanings of Hampton and embraced an aggressive tone to advocate for racial uplift and equality. Furthermore, the student editors and writers adopted a mission to actively engage the paper’s audience by delivering news about race, politics, and community solidarity. In doing so, the Script embraced the traditional role of the Black press—that of being the champion for the race and forum for protest.
“They’ll Never Make Newspaper Men”: Early Gendering in Journalism, 1884–1889
Autumn Lorimer Linford
Scholars have long noted that journalism is a heavily gendered profession. An examination of the initial five years of the Journalist, the first news trade publication dedicated to defining and standardizing modern journalism in the late 1800s, finds that gendering in the news industry began as early as 1884. This early establishment of gender-based newsroom work suggests that gender and professionalization shaped each other, intertwining so that modern journalism was gendered from the start. The Journalist provides evidence that male news workers standardized masculine character traits and behaviors as benchmarks in the field—ideals that still persist today.
Book Reviews
Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood
By Vanessia Díaz, Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press, 2020, 328 pp.
Joanna Arcieri
Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell
by Jason L. Riley, New York, Basic Books, 2021, 270 pp.
A.J. Bauer
Free Speech and the Suppression of Dissent during World War I
by Eric Chester, New York, Monthly Review Press, 2020, 504 pp.
Jon Bekken
Cold War Correspondents: Soviet and American Reporters on the Ideological Frontlines
by Dina Fainberg, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021, 376 pp.
Raluca Cozma
Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter
by Kerri K. Greenidge, New York, Liveright, 2019, 432 pp.
Rachel Grant
Public Relations History: Theory, Practice, and Profession
by Cayce Myers, New York, Routledge, 2020, 184 pp.
Burton St. John III
Politics, Culture, and the Irish American Press: 1784–1963
Edited by Debra Reddin Van Tuyll, Mark O’Brien, and Marcel Broersma, Syracuse, NY, Syracuse University Press, 2021, 448 pp.
Carolina Velloso
Digital Media reviews:
The Public Domain Review
Mark Baldridge
Firefly Lane (2021)
Stefanie Davis Kempton
Editor & Publisher (1901–2015) Internet Archive
Will Mari
The Free Speech Center
Middle Tennessee State University,
Dylan M. McLemore
Vol. 38, Issue 4, 2021
“Amelia Bloomer, The Lily, and Early Feminist Discourse in the US”
Tracy Lucht
The Lily, a temperance and woman’s rights publication started by Amelia Bloomer in 1849, was among the first periodicals published by and for women in the US. This study argues that Bloomer’s editorship of the Lily from 1849–1854 advanced the cause of woman’s rights in the US through discourse, dialogue, and practice. The issues addressed in the Lily—marital relations, political representation, property ownership, education and work opportunities, fair wages, fashion customs, women’s health, religion, and gendered social norms—reflected a broad-based agenda for feminism that is familiar today. At the same time, the journal’s privileging of middle-class white womanhood exposed fissures and blind spots related to race and class that would reverberate for generations. In her role as editor, Bloomer helped show readers the personal was political, earning her a significant place in feminist media history.
Breaking the White Circle: How the Press and Courts Quieted a Chicago Hate Group, 1949-1952Erika J. Pribanic-Smith
Joseph Beauharnais’s story illustrates the dilemma created in cases of hate speech. The government and courts of Illinois decided that in Beauharnais’s case, it should not be protected. In a legal proceeding that has been cited more than three hundred times, just more than half of the US Supreme Court justices agreed with this verdict. After reviewing the societal and legal environments in which this story occurred, this article examines Beauharnais’s White Circle League literature, the means Chicago’s press and other organizations used to counter it, the legal ramifications of Beauharnais’s rhetoric, and the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s ruling. The authors supplemented resources from a substantial FBI file with additional government documents, newspaper articles, and court cases. This research reveals that many in Illinois—and some Supreme Court justices—considered the racist nature of Beauharnais’s expression intolerable. Furthermore, the study demonstrates the role of Chicago’s alternative press in shutting down the White Circle League.
Boundaries and Journalistic Authority in Newspaper Coverage of the Hutchins Report
Patrick Walters
In the weeks following its March 1947 release, the much-anticipated Hutchins Commission’s report on the press prompted intense US newspaper coverage on both news pages and in editorial columns. Using textual analysis, this study examines these reports on the Commission’s work, and builds on the research of Margaret Blanchard, Victor Pickard, Stephen Bates, and others. It finds that newspapermen immediately began working to stake their claim to journalistic authority amid the rise of broadcast. Newspapers took great pains to tell audiences that they, more than any other entity, answered to their customers’ interests. This paper argues that with radio thriving and the rise of television just around the corner, print news coverage of the report’s release largely marked an early case of newspapers attempting to set boundaries and establishing themselves as the true “press” that was willing to take responsibility on its own terms and knew its audience better than other mediums.
Getting the Story Right: Readers criticizeques of “The Last Days of Joe McCarthy”
Autumn Lorimer Linford
The conservative critique of mainstream media that has fed increasing levels of media distrust originated in anti-communist publications in the 1930s and was cultivated by various interests on the right over the next two decades. National Review was an influential purveyor of this critique in the late 1950s and used the publication of “The Last Days of Joe McCarthy” by political journalist Richard Rovere in 1958 to highlight it. An analysis of reader responses to Rovere’s article reveals that this conservative media critique resonated with many on the right and provides evidence that National Review had begun to establish itself among conservatives as a trustworthy alternative to the mainstream media.
Book Reviews
Feminist Media: From the Second Wave to the Digital Age
by Claire Sedgwick, Lanham, Maryland, Roman & Littlefield, 2020, 197 pp.
Karlin Andersen
Little Lindy Is Kidnapped: How the Media Covered the Crime of the Century
by Thomas Doherty, New York, Columbia University Press, 2020, 288 pp.
Dane S. Claussen
Sensational: The Hidden History of America’s “Girl Stunt Reporters,”
by Kim Todd, New York, Harper, 2021, 375 pp.
Agnes Hooper Gottlieb
Susan, Linda, Nina and Cokie: The Extraordinary Story of the Founding Mothers of NPR
by Lisa Napoli, New York, Abrams Press, 2021, 340 pp.
Tracy Lucht
The Columnist: Leaks, Lies, and Libel in Drew Pearson’s Washington
by Donald A. Ritchie, New York, Oxford University Press, 2021, 367 pp.
Jon Marshal
The Radio Right: How a Band of Broadcasters Took on the Federal Government and Built the Modern Conservative Movement
by Paul Matzko, New York, Oxford University Press, 2020, 304 pp.
Gwyneth Mellinger
Newspaper Confessions: A History of Advice Columns in a Pre-Internet Age
by Julie Golia, New York, Oxford University Press, 2021, 219 pp.
Kimberly Wilmot Voss
Digital Media reviews:
Mediastan: A Wikileaks Road Movie, 2013
Patrick D. Anderson
The Crown
Created by Peter Morgan, Netflix, 2020 (Season 4).
Kimberley Pager-McClymon
Vatican News
Maintained by Holy See – Dicastery for Communication (DPC), https://www.vaticannews.va/
Jon P. Radwan
Deadline, 2019
Brian R. Sheridan
Homefront Heroines: The WAVES of WWII
Project Director Kathleen M. Ryan; Producer David Staton, https://www.homefrontheroines.com/
Serenity Sutherland
Vol. 39
Vol. 39, Issue 1, 2022
ARTICLES
Race and Local Television News: The Emergence of Black Journalists in New Orleans
Bala James Baptiste
WDSU-TV, the first New Orleans broadcast station in the city to hire a Black reporter and thus racially integrate, claimed that its liberal-leaning owner, Edgar Stern Jr., independently decided to hire Bill Rouselle in 1968, rather than being influenced to do so by federal entities and other factors. Through archival materials, newspaper content, federal reports, and exclusive in-depth interviews of journalists of the period, this study argues to the contrary: federal instigation, a decline in the local white population, and competition among New Orleans TV stations preceded integration at WDSU. While WDSU’s editorials advocated for integration in the early 1960s, years elapsed before the station integrated. Management hired Rouselle because it wanted to televise an African American face, not Black voices. Nevertheless, local Black television reporters instilled hope and pride in the city’s Black community.
The Wiz in the Witch Hunt: Milton Stewart, the FCC, and the FBI
Stephen Bates
Milton D. Stewart was an innovative and influential young media reformer of the mid- and late 1940s. He intersected with some of the most eminent figures in the field, including Robert M. Hutchins and the Commission on Freedom of the Press. At age twenty-two, Stewart made regulatory history by persuading the Federal Communications Commission to accept content analysis as evidence in a licensing proceeding. A few years later, a former landlady’s allegations led to an exhaustive FBI investigation of Stewart’s associations, writings, beliefs, and personal life, including his views on media reform. Although media-related writing and activism were not proximate causes of the Stewart probe, this study argues that his case illustrates the nature of information that the FBI could gather, including matters far afield from national security.
Princess Rassari Heshla Tamanya of Ethiopia predicted race war when she met with white reporters in New York in 1935, as Italy prepared to invade her homeland. The princess, though, was a fraud. She was a Harlem singer. This article examines the creation and coverage of a short-lived media hoax to illustrate how the widespread acceptance of racial stereotypes in the mid-twentieth-century United States informed reporters’ understanding of the professional practices of objectivity and sensationalism, which mirrored the racist assumptions that saturated popular culture, especially in mediums influenced by blackface minstrelsy and human zoos. The hoax succeeded because the princess satisfied the expectations of readers and reporters, regardless of race. The article also examines the unmasking and remembrance of the fraud. A Pan-Africanist scholar exposed it because it jeopardized his understanding of the world. It became a historical footnote only after it was stripped of its political and social implications.
Nellie Bly Merchandise and the Changing American Woman: A Material Culture Study
Autumn Lorimer Linford
When stunt reporter Elizabeth Cochran, better known as Nellie Bly, encircled the globe in a 72-day dash in late 1889, she became a national celebrity. Riding the wave of her fame, merchandisers across the country put her name and face on all types of products, from a night lamp to flower varieties to a woman’s hat. This material culture study of Bly-branded merchandise between 1889 and 1922 suggests this ephemera contains insights into the culture which produced them and shows that while traditional gender roles pervaded society throughout the height of Bly’s fame, both sexes recognized women’s increasingly growing agency and economic power. While it may not have been socially acceptable for most middle- and upper-class white women to take on public roles outside the home, the success of Bly merchandise suggests that women’s purchasing power enabled them to live vicariously through other women, like Bly, who did.
BOOK REVIEWS
The American Newsroom: A History, 1920-1960
Reviewed by Christopher B. Daly
Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America
Reviewed by Wayne Dawkins
The War Beat, Pacific: The American Media at War Against Japan
Reviewed by Elisabeth Fondren
Circulation and Control: Artistic Culture and Intellectual Property in the Nineteenth Century
Jason Lee Guthrie
Barry Goldwater, Distrust in Media, and Conservative Identity: The Perception of Liberal Bias in the News
Reviewed by Julie B. Lane
First to Fall: Elijah Lovejoy and the Fight for a Free Press in the Age of Slavery
Reviewed by Jennifer E. Moore
DIGITAL MEDIA REVIEWS
Georgetown Law Library: US Women’s Civil Rights
LaKesha Anderson
Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, The Internet Archive
Gordon Coonfield
Black Archives
Kathleen M. Ryan
Encyclopedia of Milwaukee
Kimberly Wilmot Voss
Vol. 39, Issue 2, 2022
ARTICLES
When the New York Times Liked Ike: The Newspaper’s Controversial Presidential Endorsements of 1952 and 1956
Kathryn J. McGarr
The New York Times has only endorsed presidential candidates during party primaries—interfering in intra-party politics—twice in its history: once, in January 2016, coming out for John Kasich for the nomination that would go to Donald Trump, and the other, in January 1952, endorsing Dwight Eisenhower over his main Republican rival, Robert Taft. Understanding the exceptionalism of the 1952 election sheds light on the unusually close relationships between top members of the New York Times and the military, as well as reveals tensions within the Times over editorial decisions that the news team feared undermined its coverage. This paper uses archival collections of the New York Times—in addition to papers from several other personal and institutional archival collections—to demonstrate how important decisions were made, as well as contested, on the ground.
Darktown: Newspaper coverage of Atlanta’s first Black police, 1930-1960
Brian Carroll
When the city of Atlanta hired its first Black police officers in 1948, it was covered by the city’s Black newspaper, the Atlanta Daily World, a leading but conservative Black periodical and the only daily Black newspaper in the forties, as well as in the city’s mainstream newspapers, the morning Atlanta Constitution and the afternoon Atlanta Journal. This study explores what each newspaper omitted and included, and what each emphasized or otherwise deemed important. This examination also draws attention to the many roles of the Black press beyond reporting the news, as well as the ways the newspapers framed the breakthrough, strategies and tactics used to argue for or against the Black patrols. These first Black hires are placed into historical context, one that juxtaposes shame and pride, degradation and achievement, fealty to Jim Crow and progress with respect to civil rights.
The Flag Unfurled: The Negotiation of Civil War Memory in Confederate Displays
Alexia Little
Contextualization of symbols and monuments in the eras they were constructed, dedicated, and used remains important to exploring nuances of Civil War memory even as arguments about Confederate symbols continue to plague American society and public memory. This study explores the traces of Civil War memory in newspaper coverage of four Confederate monument celebrations across geographic sections. Discourse and narrative analyses of 258 articles, published in seven US newspapers in the 1890s and 1920s, examines how the promotion of the reconciliation strategy distorted memory of the Civil War away from fact to promote economic and political advantage while marginalizing realities of wartime atrocities and slavery. Analysis examines Lost Cause symbolism embodied in the Confederate flag in addition to the monuments themselves. This study contends that newspaper coverage served as strategic sites where narratives of sectional reunion and reconciliation took precedence over historical memory, thus influencing remembrances of the Civil War and perpetuation of symbols.
The Journalist and the Manipulator: Walter Lippmann, Karl Mannheim, and the Case for a “New Objectivity” to Check Demagoguery
Ronald P. Seyb
Prior to Donald Trump’s presidency, many scholars viewed the 1930s through the 1960s as the period when demagogues such as Huey Long, Father Charles Coughlin, Joseph McCarthy, and George Wallace posed the greatest threat to the American republic. Concerns about the public’s vulnerability to the emotional manipulation practiced by demagogues were, however, present from the founding forward, becoming particularly acute at the dawn of the modern age. This article argues that two important early twentieth century works, Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion and Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia, maintained that the demagogue’s most effective tool was the creation of an absolutist, often personalistic, mythology. Mannheim contended that journalists could combat the corrosive influence on the public of demagogues’ absolutist rhetoric by practicing a “new objectivity,” an approach to interpreting and explaining phenomena that encouraged “the broadest possible extension of [the public’s] horizon of vision.”
BOOK REVIEWS
LOOK: How a Highly Influential Magazine Helped Define Mid-Twentieth-Century America
Reviewed by Carolyn Kitch
News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism
Reviewed by Michael Clay Carey
The Life & Times of Louis Lomax: The Art of Deliberate Disunity
Reviewed by Sage Goodwin
Manipulating the Masses: Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of American Propaganda
Reviewed by Julien Gorbach
The Correspondents: Six Women Writers on the Front Lines of World War II
Reviewed by Agnes Hooper Gottlieb
The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free
Reviewed by Jane Marcellus
DIGITAL MEDIA REVIEWS
The Story of Super Mario Bros. 3, The Gaming Historian
Walter J. Iriarte
OutMuseum, Outfest
Claudia Chiang-Lopez
SCP Foundation Wiki
Hayley McCullough
ENDNOTES
Vol. 39, Issue 3, 2022
ARTICLES
Rethinking the Collective Memory: Mister Rogers, Senator Pastore, and Public Broadcasting
Matt Cikovic
In the spring of 1969 Fred Rogers quietly offered testimony to US Senator John Pastore about the special kind of content he and other public broadcasters produce. In the decades since, his comments have become a popular viral video used as a tool in the fight for public broadcasting in the United States. But the video’s narrative of Rogers emotionally moving the “crusty” Pastore to fund public broadcasting is not the whole picture. This study explores the collective memory around Rogers and Pastore interactions and examines US Senate transcripts, contemporary news coverage, and an appraisal of the testimony’s legacy to provide greater nuance to this viral video.
Local Film Censorship’s Last Stand: The Memphis Board of Review, 1967 to 1976
Thomas J. Hrach
The last major American city with legal authority to continue the practice of censoring films was Memphis, Tennessee. The practice ended when a federal judge in 1976 ruled that the authority that governed the city’s Board of Review was unconstitutional. Memphis held on to the practice of censoring films into the 1970s while almost all other US cities had stopped the practice in the mid-1960s. Memphis held on so long because of the city’s legacy of censorship and its goal of retaining old-world values in the changing era of the 1960s and 1970s. This paper gives a history of the Board of Review in Memphis to demonstrate how censorship was used as an attempt to hold onto outdated values in changing times.
Johnson Publishing Company and the Search for a White Audience
E James West
Johnson Publishing Company, the publisher of Negro Digest and Ebony, made efforts to expand its white audience during the 1940s and early 1950s. Johnson Publishing aggressively sought “to sell white readers the idea that a Negro magazine is worth buying,” through the regular publication of letters from “white” readers, consistent references to its influence among whites, fundraising and subscription drives to circulate its magazines among white readers and within white institutions, advertising campaigns in major national publications, and other projects and editorial content. This study argues that these efforts can be situated within both a longer history of white readership of Black periodicals and are connected to a broader turn toward Black literature by white Americans during—and immediately following—World War II. In doing so, Johnson was able to position his publications as both recognizably Black periodicals and the “interracial magazine[s] that America needs.”
The Newsgirl Question”: Competing Frames of Progressive Era Girl Newsies
Autumn Lorimer Linford
It was a much-repeated line in newspapers across the US: While newsboys could make money selling papers by keeping their eyes peeled, their female counterparts could only sell papers by keeping their eyes appealing. This oft-repeated adage is an example of the gendered experiences of Progressive Era newsgirls—girls and young women who hawked newspapers as newsies on city streets. Newsgirls took up a disproportionate amount of public conversation during this period compared to their male counterparts, yet they have been brushed past by historians. This research suggests the image of newsgirls was strategically framed and exploited to further reformer’s causes, bolster newspapers’ business, or excuse the public’s equal parts of apathy and fascination.
BOOK REVIEWS
Betsy Ann Plank: The Making of a Public Relations Icon
by Karla K. Gower, Columbia, Missouri, University of Missouri Press, 2022, 226 pp.
Nicholas Browning
NBC Goes to War: The Diary of Radio Correspondent James Cassidy from London to the Bulge
edited with an introduction by Michael S. Sweeney, New York, Fordham University Press, 2022, 213 pp.
Noah Arceneaux
True Story: How a Pulp Empire Remade Mass Media
by Shanon Fitzpatrick, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2022, 312 pp
Amy Aronson
The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler
by Kathryn S. Olmsted, New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Press, 2022, 328 pp.
Steven Hallock
The Sunday Paper: A Media History
by Paul Moore and Sandra Gabriele, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2022, 328 pp.
Paula Hunt
Diamonds and Deadlines: A Tale of Greed, Deceit, and a Female Tycoon in the Gilded Age
by Betsy Prioleau, New York, Abrams Press, 2022, 357 pp.
William E. Huntzicker
Not Exactly Lying: Fake News and Fake Journalism in American History
by Andie Tucher, New York, Columbia University Press, 2022, 367 pp.
Autumn Lorimer Linford
DIGITAL MEDIA REVIEWS
Drafting the Past: A Podcast on the Craft of History
Jason Lee Guthrie
ESPN 30 for 30: Vick (2020), ESPN
Dafna Kaufman
Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza
Kimberly Voss
Downton Abbey
Gordan Alley-Young
Vol. 39, Issue 4, 2022
ARTICLES
The idea of investigative reporting is inextricably intertwined with Watergate in the popular and journalistic imagination. But this article traces the long history of the exposé tradition in American journalism, particularly arguing that the evidentiary mindset of investigative reporters first took root in the ferment of 1830s abolitionism. In myriad pamphlets and newspapers, abolitionists began unearthing and laying before the public documentary proof of the abuses of slavery. The apotheosis of this work came in 1839 with the publication of the book-length American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. It was a tour de force of systematic, evidence-based journalism more than a century before the phrase “investigative reporting” came into use. By connecting the idea of exposing hidden wrongdoing with the documentary method, abolition writers established an early legacy of verification as justification for moral outrage in the act of reporting.
“Free press wins in underhanded fashion”: Columnist Drew Pearson’s Blackmail of General Douglas MacArthur
Mark Feldstein
Syndicated columnist Drew Pearson was one of the most important figures in the history of US investigative journalism, holding up its lonely banner in mid-twentieth-century Washington before its resurgence during the Vietnam War and Watergate scandals. His lacerating exposés of high-level political officials sent scoundrels to prison and made the crusading reporter the most feared and reviled journalist in the nation’s capital from the early 1930s to the late 1960s. Yet a little-studied 1934 libel case against the muckraker by General Douglas MacArthur, settled out of court, nearly strangled Pearson’s column in its infancy. Pearson’s novel extralegal defense—blackmailing the general with secret love letters from his much younger Amerasian mistress—forced MacArthur to abandon his lawsuit, emboldened Pearson’s aggressive reporting in the decades ahead, and prevented a potentially ruinous defeat in court that could have established a legal precedent that chilled press scrutiny of public officials. An analysis of previously unpublished archival materials—correspondence, diaries, memos, legal motions, and declassified FBI reports—reveals an intricate story of political and journalistic intrigue.
ESSAYS
Watergate at 50: Solidifying a Mythical Narrative
W. Joseph Campbell
The years since the 1972 break-in at the Watergate complex in Washington, DC, have solidified the dominant popular narrative about the scandal that toppled Richard Nixon’s presidency. The dominant narrative revolves around the claim—ever appealing and reassuring to journalists—that investigative reporting by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for the Washington Post uncovered the crimes that forced Nixon’s resignation in August 1974. This essay describes how the narrative of the heroic journalist took hold, why it is misleading, and how it might be revised to emphasize that Watergate ended a corrupt presidency despite, and not because of, journalists and their sources.
IRE and the Institutionalization of Investigative Journalism
James L. Aucoin
Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) has been a leading actor in the establishment of investigative reporting as an institutional asset in American and worldwide journalism. The organization has upheld standards of the practice and provided training while serving as a primary force in creating collaboration as a standard for investigative projects with national and worldwide impacts and supporting the creation of other nonprofit investigative journalism organizations. This essay looks at the long, rich history of investigative reporting in the United States and how this practice continues to influence journalism across the globe.
Truth and the Politics of Deception: An Insider’s View of Washington’s Political-Journalistic Complex
Gordon Freedman
The Watergate and January 6 investigations link to debates that the constitutional framers had over the powers of the chief executive, constraints on the press, and notions of truth as a core issue in managing the democratic republic. The framers left the Congress, the press, and the electorate to police presidential abuse. All these entities must act in concert to constrain any president operating outside the law, in an elaborate choreography aimed at engaging and enraging the public and empowering the judiciary, congressional, and executive branches to act. Critical to this process is a vigorous, vigilant, and diligent press.
CONVERSATIONS ON INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING
A Conversation with Dwight Chapin, President Richard Nixon’s Appointments Secretary
Dwight Chapin, President Richard Nixon’s Appointments Secretary
Nicholas Hirshon
A Conversation with Connie Chung, Longtime Network News Anchor
Connie Chung, Longtime Network News Anchor
Nicholas Hirshon
A Conversation with John Dean, President Richard Nixon’s White House Counsel
John Dean, President Richard Nixon’s White House Counsel
Nicholas Hirshon
A Conversation with Adam Schiff, Democratic Congressman from California, and Joe Walsh, former Republican Congressman from Illinois
Adam Schiff, Democratic congressman from California, and Joe Walsh, former Republican congressman from Illinois
Nicholas Hirshon
A Conversation With Steve Scully, Longtime C-SPAN Political Editor
Steve Scully, Longtime C-SPAN Political Editor
Nicholas Hirshon
A Conversation with Ron Nixon, Associated Press Vice President for Investigative, Enterprise, and Grants and Partnerships
Ron Nixon, Associated Press Global Investigations Editor
Nicholas Hirshon
A Conversation with Jane Seymour, Star of The Absolute Truth
Jane Seymour, Star of The Absolute Truth
Nicholas Hirshon
A Conversation with Jill Wine-Banks, Assistant Special Prosecutor for the Watergate Trial
Jill Wine-Banks, Special Assistant Prosecutor for Watergate Trial
Pamela E. Walck
A Conversation with Katie Strang, The Athletic Investigative Reporter
Katie Strang, The Athletic Investigative Reporter
Pamela E. Walck
REVIEWS
The New Journalism
Leonora LaPeter Anton, Tampa Bay Times
Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall and Redemption of the Black Athlete,
Isaac Avilucea, Axios
Project Censored: The News That Didn’t Make The News
Jeff McDonald, San Diego Union-Tribune
La République des Mallettes (The Briefcase Republic)
Caroline Michel-Aguirre, L’Obs
16 Shots
Adam Mahoney, Capital B
Making a Murderer
Christina Sterbenz, VICE News
Spotlight
Thomas C. Zambito, USA Today
Special Report: Infant Mortality in Memphis
Alex Stuckey, Houston Chronicle
Vol. 40
Volume 40, Issue 1
Winter 2023
EDITORIAL NOTE
Pamela E. Walck
ARTICLES
All the President’s Media: How the Traditional Press Responded to New Communications Technology Adopted by US Presidents
Ashley Walter and Karlin Andersen Tuttle (Free access article)
Both Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy mastered new forms of mass media communications, ridding themselves of formal gatekeepers to communicate directly to US citizens. For Roosevelt, mastering radio airwaves would allow him to navigate past traditional presidential rhetorical tropes and print journalists’ interpretations of his presidential messages to speak directly to the American public. For Kennedy, television meant advertising spots, late-night talk show appearances, and hour-long specials with his family as a way of pushing the medium beyond televised speeches in his campaigns. This study attempts to understand how the traditional press reacted to these unfiltered messages. Findings suggest that newspaper editorials and magazine stories initially praised these men’s innovative approaches to new technology, but over time, legacy media became disillusioned as it began to view presidential uses of new media as a nuisance that hampered legitimate reporting.
Publishing Respectability: Almira Spencer and the Young Ladies’ Journal of Literature and Science
Paula Hunt
Almira Spencer’s Young Ladies’ Journal of Literature and Science (1830-31) was the rare magazine both published and edited by a woman in the early nineteenth century and illustrates how such publications were creative and capitalist ventures that allowed women to exercise an unusual amount of freedom in business and exert social influence. Spencer’s magazine was an instrument for expressing her opinions, an occasion to be an arbiter of middle-class values, and a means to earning a living. Spencer harnessed her experience as a respectable woman, mother, and teacher to guide, inform, and educate the daughters of America’s middle class through a magazine carefully crafted to consider their unique intellectual needs, moral responsibilities, and role in society. By launching her opinions and judgement into the public arena through a magazine, Spencer embodied both the possibilities of empowerment and obstacles of constraint in middle-class women’s lives in the 1820s and 1830s.
Walter Lippmann and Public Opinion
Tom Arnold-Forster
Walter Lippmann’s seminal writing, Public Opinion, remains a classic text in communications studies a century after its first publication. By examining Lippmann’s unpublished notes and drafts alongside key contemporary works, new light is shed on how the book’s origins predated the First World War and how its argument went beyond debates about technocratic government. Lippmann’s main agenda was to contest liberal-constitutionalist theories of public opinion; his core intervention was to develop a social psychology of opinion formation. He drafted and wrote Public Opinion as a descriptive account of democratic politics under modern conditions. Instead of simply prescribing technocratic solutions, Lippmann framed a starker paradox: democracy through public opinion defined modern politics, but modernity also made opinion formation ever more difficult.
ESSAYS
A Shot in the Arm: A Call to Broaden, Deepen, and Diversify Media History
Will Mari
In a meditation on the future of journalism history, this essay focuses on some positive trends, including the growth of media history academic groups and the field’s broader expansion in terms of topics and connections, as well as some challenges with an eye toward hope. It also examines exemplars—in the form of journals, organizations, and scholars—who are showing a promising way forward during an uncertain time in journalism. This contemplation concludes with specific recommendations each media historian can take to do their part in shoring up the future of media history.
An Editor’s Reflection: The Early Days of American Journalism
W. David Sloan
In a reflection on the founding of American Journalism in 1983 by Gary Whitby, this fortieth anniversary essay examines the earliest beginnings of the journal, and the chief aims of the individuals who helped establish the journal: to improve historical scholarship through superior historiography. This essay argues that Whitby’s founding of American Journalism did more than help scholars advance in their profession. It was also a critical event in advancing historical scholarship among journalism and mass communication scholars.
The New History of War Reporting: A Historiographical Perspective on the Role of the Media and War
Alexander G. Lovelace
The following essay argues for a new method of studying the media at war. While past scholarship has focused on war correspondents, censorship, and propaganda, this new history of war reporting instead investigates how news shaped the decisions of commanders on the battlefield. In other words, instead of focusing on how governments and militaries attempted to control the press the new history of war reporting flips the question to investigate how the media influenced the decisions of commanders on the battlefield. This essay drawls from the author’s new book The Media Offensive: How the Press and Public Opinion Shaped Allied Strategy during World War II.
CONVERSATIONS ON INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM
A Conversation with Lisa Guerrero, Inside Edition Chief Investigative Correspondent
Nicholas Hirshon
BOOK REVIEWS
The Double Life of Katharine Clark: The Untold Story of the Fearless Journalist Who Risked Her Life for Truth and Justice
Agnes Hooper Gottlieb (Free access review)
Big Men Fear Me: The Fast Life and Quick Death of Canada’s Most Powerful Media Mogul
Gene Allen
City of Newsmen: Public Lies and Professional Secrets in Cold War Washington
Daniel DeFraia
Clash: Presidents and the Press in Times of Crisis
Mark Feldstein
A Century of Repression: The Espionage Act and Freedom of the Press
John P. Ferré
News Media and the Indigenous Fight for Federal Recognition
Melissa Greene-Blye
When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America
Oscar Winberg
DIGITAL MEDIA REVIEWS
Gallica: Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF)
Clara Bordier. (Free access review)
Archive of Our Own
Hayley McCullough
ENDNOTES
Volume 40, Issue 2
Spring 2023
EDITORIAL NOTE
ARTICLES
“Our Reporter Is Just Come From The Ruins”: Reporting Practices and the 1860 Pemberton Mill Disaster
Katrina Jesick Quinn & Mary M. Cronin
The largest industrial disaster ever to have occurred on American soil at the time, the gruesome January 10, 1860, collapse of the Pemberton Mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts, provides an opportunity to study early breaking news reporting in the nineteenth century narrative and illustrated press. Using newspapers at the local, regional, and national level, the study examines reporting strategies, story structures, and the journalistic standards undergirding this content. This research finds that by 1860 newspapers had adopted a scope of reporting strategies and editorial practices that fulfilled complex, evolving roles for the press. It also reveals that, despite the scope and sensational nature of the calamity, the story quickly transitioned from news, to myth, to forgotten in national memory.
“By Far the Best of Our Foreign Representatives:” Vira B. Whitehouse and the Origins of Public Diplomacy
Ayla Oden & John Maxwell Hamilton
The Committee on Public Information’s efforts during World War I marked the beginning of American public diplomacy, but its influence has been overlooked. This paper examines the role of suffragist Vira B. Whitehouse in the pioneering endeavor in Berne, Switzerland. Scant research has looked at Whitehouse’s significant contribution to public diplomacy and, even then, it largely ignores the challenges she faced. Nor does the research link her work as a suffrage leader with her success in creating a brand-new form of diplomacy.
Race Films and the Black Press: Representation and Resistance
Carolina Velloso
Beginning with the release of The Birth of a Nation through the mid-twentieth century, the film industry began featuring African Americans on the silver screen. The emergence of race films—major film productions made by African Americans and featuring Black artists—were frequently reported and reviewed in the Black press. This examination of the coverage of race films in three major Black newspapers, the Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, and Baltimore Afro-American, traces coverage of race films by the Black press between 1915 and 1950. This study builds on literature from journalism and communication studies, as well as film studies to illustrate how the Black press fulfilled its role as an advocacy press and served its mission of racial uplift through its race film coverage. It argues that Black newspapers achieved this by giving positive coverage to race films, their actors, producers, and crew members, and by unreservedly criticizing Black members of the entertainment industry if the Black press perceived that they were acting in ways detrimental to the greater cause of improving attitudes toward the Black community.
ESSAYS
Historicizing Metajournalistic Discourse Analysis: Thinking Beyond Journalism about Journalism
Michael Buozis
In a meditation on the burgeoning literature of metajournalistic discourse analysis, this essay argues for ways in which the discipline of journalism history could be invigorated by researchers considering much broader conceptions of the actors, sites, and texts that constitute media history. Through an analytical literature review of existing metajournalistic discourse studies, both historical and contemporary, this essay suggests a variety of contexts and types of archives historians might more fully exploit in their research
Shifting the Archival Gaze: A Case for Leveraging Computational Methods to Uncover Media History Narratives
Meg Heckman & Giulia Taurino
Through an interdisciplinary examination of a bourgeoning technology, this essay grapples with the opportunities and challenges of using a type of artificial intelligence called machine learning to catalog and make sense of the unpreceded number of digital materials now available to media historians. The authors—a journalism professor and an AI researcher—describe their recent interdisciplinary efforts to use machine learning to explore a collection of roughly 5.7 million photographic negatives donated to their institution by the Boston Globe. Their work illuminates the tremendous power of emerging computational methods to uncover more complete histories, but it also serves as a reminder that such tools should be used with caution.
CONVERSATIONS ON INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM
A Conversation with Ralph Nader, Former US Presidential Candidate
Nicholas Hirshon
BOOK REVIEWS
Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project’s Living Newspapers in New York
Kevin M. Lerner
Century’s Witness: The Extraordinary Life of Journalist Wallace Carroll
Sid Bedingfield
Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at War
Julien Gorbach
Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life
Meg Heckman
Eliza Scidmore: The Trailblazing Journalist Behind Washington’s Cherry Trees
Ken J. Ward
Digital Media Reviews
Radiooooo: A Better Way to Find Music, Radiooooo.com
Noah Arceneaux
Digital Archives and Cultural Heritage: The Inathèque, http://Inatheque.ina.fr/
Léa Andolfi
ENDNOTES
Endnotes.
Volume 40, Issue 3
Summer 2023
Editor’s Note
Pamela E. Walck
ARTICLES
Indian Ideology in The Warpath: Lehman Brightman’s Red Power Journalism
John M. Coward
The Warpath, the “angry Indian” newsletter founded by the militant but oft overlooked journalist Lehman Brightman, was one of several Red Power publications founded in the late 1960s as part of the social and cultural upheavals of that era. Brightman’s publication deployed several major themes as he argued for Native American rights and against the federal Indian bureaucracy, especially “America’s colonial office,” the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In The Warpath, Brightman demanded Indian liberation and self-determination, calling for direct political action at places like Alcatraz and Mount Rushmore, a place Brightman and other activists occupied in 1970. Brightman also celebrated Indian history and culture, criticized Indian stereotypes, excoriated moderate Indian leaders and, perhaps most significantly, investigated the appalling conditions at underfunded and understaffed Indian schools. His principal achievement was the articulation of a strident anti-racist and anti-colonial ideology that continues to resonate in Indian Country.
War Chief, Friend of the President, Prohibitionist: Would the “Real” Little Turtle Please Stand Up?
Melissa Greene-Blye & John Bickers
A chronological examination of historical newspapers of the late-eighteenth, nineteenth, and early-twentieth century reveals that representations of Mihšihkinaahkwa—popularly known as Little Turtle—a Myaamia, or Miami, tribal leader shifted from that of a fierce warrior, actively battling the army of the United States, to a “friend of the president,” a diplomatic leader who supported assimilationist policies, and was, “surpassed for bravery and intelligence, perhaps, by none of his race.” Important questions remain about the how and why newspaper framing of Little Turtle changed over time and what his conversion from foe to friend tells us about the role of the press in constructing collective memory specifically as it relates to Indigenous issues and individuals. This study examined press representation of Little Turtle using the lens of critical media discourse to examine the ways in which select “exemplar Indians” were created as part of the process of building collective memory within the larger process of nation-building.
“Too Soon to Tell”: The Hundred-Year Odyssey of the Famous Quip on the French Revolution
Andrew Thomas Park
The popular anecdote that Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai once declared it “too soon to tell” the significance of the French Revolution of 1789 is clearly recognizable as a meme and has followed a winding path through media history. While the story was seemingly debunked in 2011, when it was revealed that Zhou had meant the 1968 unrest in Paris—rather than the French Revolution—it is argued this was merely another stage in its hundred-year evolution. Regardless of whether the quip had an actual Chinese author or not, its early spread in mainstream media was the result of an educated and globally minded Western audience shaped by orientalism and rhetoric surrounding the dangers of radical revolution. This study examines how, when China began opening to the world in the 1970s, the people involved in this process began to be written into the meme, with the Zhou Enlai variant only becoming consolidated in the 1990s. In tracing the story’s development, this article examines how quips—or memes—propagate and evolve over time, particularly in pre-digital environments, where texts benefit from the interplay of different formats and genres.
Conservative News Cultures and the Future of Journalism History
A.J. Bauer
Political historians have long identified a gap in the literature on US conservatism surrounding that movement’s relationship to journalism and mass media. This essay calls on journalism historians to fill this gap and theorizes why they have thus far failed to do so. It notes the field’s tendency to engage with ahistorical and anachronistic concepts, which make journalism history legible to journalism studies but also subordinates historical work to the imperatives of social science. It uses “conservative news cultures” as a historically rooted theoretical framework for narrating discrete works of journalism history that, when put into conversation, comprise an unrealized subfield. More broadly it advocates for recognizing journalism history as political history and for theorizing new, historically rooted objects of study in need of social scientific analysis.
A Change in Time: American Journalism’s 2013 Transition to a Commercial Publisher
Barbara G. Friedman & Kathy Roberts Forde
Change is never easy, especially for historians who have their feet firmly planted in the past. So, in 2013, when American Journalism editor Barbara G. Friedman and associate editor Kathy Roberts Forde proposed moving from independent university presses to a commercial academic publisher, there was apprehension. But theirs was a utilitarian goal: creating a solid path for journalism and mass communication scholars to achieve tenure and promotion at their universities in an age when metrics matter and expanding the journal’s reach. In this reflection, part of American Journalism’s fortieth anniversary essay series, the former editors explain how the transition from independent to commercial publishing enabled a “gem of a journal” to achieve—and exceed—those initial goals. The authors also offer some considerations for the future.
The Global Panoply of Propaganda-Press Cultures: Expanding International Journalism History
Elisabeth Fondren
More than two decades after journalism historians proposed an international or global turn in how to study the interconnected histories of journalism and information cultures, much has been achieved. This essay is an invitation to scrutinize the relationship between propaganda and journalism history more fully, specifically, by exploring the intellectual, cultural, and global dimensions of press-propaganda activities during wars and democratic crises. Building on ongoing work to internationalize the field of journalism history, future scholarship could analyze the multidirectional flows of global information; how journalists work as propagandists both willingly and unwillingly; how reporters expose lies, half-truths, or circumvent censorship; how communities engage in counterpropaganda via the press; and the role of visual narratives in modern media. This essay draws on findings from international and transnational press-propaganda scholarship and offers methodological considerations for researching and writing that history.
CONVERSATIONS ON JOURNALISM HISTORY
A Conversation with Pat LaFontaine, Hall of Fame Hockey Player
Nicholas Hirshon
BOOK REVIEWS
The Wendell Smith Reader: Selected Writings on Sports, Civil Rights and Black History
Wayne Dawkins
Magazine Century: American Magazines Since 1900 (2nd edition)
Sharon Bloyd-Peshkin
Prints of a New Kind: Political Caricature in The United States, 1789–1828
Flora Khoo
Reporting World War II
John Maxwell Hamilton
Shame the Devil: How Critics Keep American Journalism Honest
Kevin M. Lerner
Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People’s Republic
Wei Rose Luqui Lu
Mr. Associated Press: Kent Cooper and the Twentieth-Century World of News
Will Mari
DIGITAL MEDIA REVIEWS
The New York Times Presents: Framing Britney Spears (2021)
Brandy Hadden
Queerly Represent Me
Hayley McCullough
Presidential Address 2022
The Value of Community and Understanding History in Troubling Times
Aimee Edmondson
ENDNOTES
Endnotes.
Vol. 40, Issue 4
Fall 2023
Editor’s Note
Pamela E. Walck
ARTICLES
Debate over Civil War Soldier Voting in California’s Partisan Press, 1863–1864
Erika J. Pribanic-Smith
California’s fall 1863 elections marked the first time the state attempted any sort of untraditional voting. Republicans asserted that Civil War circumstances necessitated extending suffrage to soldiers stationed away from home, but Democrats posited that absentee voting violated the state constitution and opened the door for fraud. This paper examines how California’s Republican and Democratic newspapers debated the issue from the state’s first official proposal for a solider suffrage law in January 1863 until December 1864, just after the presidential election. This research aims to answer the following questions: What arguments did the California partisan press use for and against soldier voting? And what do those arguments reveal about party newspapers in the state during the Civil War? The study not only provides insights into the nature of California’s Civil War press but also provides historical context for more recent elections in which absentee balloting was controversial.
Foreign Correspondence in the Early Telegraphic Era: The Herald, the Tribune, and the 1848 Revolutions
Ulf Jonas Bjork
In 1848, political revolutions were breaking out all over Europe simultaneously while new technological advancements were having significant and profound impacts on news gathering practices abroad. New forms of communication and transportation, including the telegraph, the railroad, and the ocean-going steamship, meant the faster transmission of news and a wider spirit of cooperation between competing, penny press newspapers that resulted in shared telegraphic dispatches. This study examines the foreign correspondence published in the New York Tribune and the New York Herald, and how the breaking news came in telegraphic dispatches that the two papers shared. This study reveals how correspondence became a way for both of publications to provide readers with unique material because both James Gordon Bennett of the Herald and Horace Greeley of the Tribune thought European letters were valuable sources of an American perspective on world events that gave readers an eyewitness account.
Into the State: How American Reporters Came to Work For the US Government
Daniel DeFraia
What a reporter is and does, and does not do, and the integrity of that idea, has always been an unsettled question, interrogated on the blurred, unregulated borders between journalism and the state. In embattled liminal spaces, reporters—negotiating a nebulous terrain of high-stakes reporting that tested and revised their emerging, unstable journalistic norms—fought in war, collaborated with US intelligence, and engaged in secret diplomacy. This article, focusing on the careers of two reporters, Sylvester Scovel in Cuba and William Bayard Hale in Mexico, explains how and why reporters came to work for the state, a neglected tradition conceptualized here as “state work,” from the 1890s to 1920s. That history is an argument for scholars of journalism and political history to study what reporters did, not just what they published, to better understand the role of journalism in US democracy.
ESSAYS
Revising the First Rough Draft: On Journalism, History, and Journalism History
Jason Lee Guthrie
Media history is more important than ever. Yes, this is true because media are more pervasive, more fundamental to our lives than ever. It is also true because media historians form one of the final bulwarks of fact-based research in a world awash with false claims and fake news. Yet, the importance of media history is not only ontological and methodological. It is also quite practical. This essay speaks directly to those who conduct historical research in the areas of journalism, media, and communication and who make their disciplinary homes in schools of journalism, media studies, and mass communication. This essay argues that such scholars are uniquely positioned to help address issues of conflict between journalists and historians, and offers some strategies for them to do so.
Forging a Path Toward Accessibility: Rethinking How We Collect and Share Stories
Ashley Walter
In a meditation on the future of journalism and media history—through the lens of a closer re-examination of methodology—this essay challenges journalism historians to rethink how they collect and share stories in an increasingly digital world, especially regarding oral history interviewing. By pushing back on assumptions and centering access, this essay argues for reassessing whose stories get told and who is able to tell stories. It also provides a primer on conducting oral histories remotely.
CONVERSATIONS ON JOURNALISM
Conversations with Ron Wyden, Senator from Oregon, and Jamie Raskin, Congressman from Maryland
Nicholas Hirshon
BOOK REVIEWS
Social Justice, Activism and Diversity in U.S. Media History
Bailey Dick
Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War
Ross F. Collins
Vivian Castleberry: Challenging the Traditions of Women’s Roles, Newspaper Content, and Community Politics
Teri Finneman
The Weekly War: How the Saturday Evening Post Reported World War I
Meghan Menard McCune
Fierce Ambition: The Life and Legend of War Correspondent Maggie Higgins
John McQuaid
Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting
Randall Patnode
Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism
Ashley Walter
DIGITAL MEDAI REVIEWS
Ms. Marvel: A Superheroine’s Tale of Truth and Justice
Syed Ali Hussain and Shireen Korkzan
History of the Atlantic Cable & Undersea Communications
Lisa Bolz
ENDNOTES
Endnotes.