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

Ross Collins

Endnotes

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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

Endnotes

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.

Baseball and the News

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.