Volume 1, No. 1, Spring 1974
Cole, Jaci and John Maxwell Hamilton. “Another Test of the News: American Partisan Press Coverage of the French Revolution.” 34-41
Download 482.26 Kb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- Cronin, Mary M. “‘War Is Thundering at Our Very Gates’: Texas Newspapers During the Civil War.” 23-33.
- Gustafson, Kristin L. “Constructions of Responsibility for Three 1920 Lynchings in Minnesota Newspapers: Marginalization of People, Groups, and Ideas.” 42-53.
- Ward, Douglas B. “The Geography of the Ladies’ Home Journal : An Analysis of a Magazine’s Audience, 1911-55.” 2-14.
- Volume 34, No. 2, Summer 2008 Basconi, Mary Alice. “Summer in the City, 1968-74: Columbia University’s Minority-Journalist Training Program.” 62-75.
- Gabrial, Brian. “A Crisis of ‘Americanism’: Newspaper Coverage of John Brown’s Raid at Harper’s Ferry and a Question of Loyalty.” 98-106.
- Peeples, Matthew. “Creating Political Authority: The Role of the Antebellum Black Press in the Political Mobilization and Empowerment of African Americans.” 76-86.
- Smith, Reed. “How Two Veteran Journalists in Opposing Media Encouraged a Sense of Community in a Georgia Town.” 107-116.
- Van Tuyll, Debra Reddin. “Necessity and the Invention of a Newspaper: Gov. Zebulon B. Vance’s Conservative, 1864-65.” 87-97.
- Volume 34, No. 3, Fall 2008 Siff, Stephen. “Henry Luce’s Strange Trip: Coverage of LSD in Time and Life , 1954-68.” 126-134.
- Mellinger, Gwyneth. “The ASNE and Desegregation: Maintaining the White Prerogative in the Face of Change.” 135-144.
- Spaulding, Stacy. “Totalitarian Refugee or Fascist Mistress Comparing Lisa Sergio’s Autobiography to her FBI File.” 145-154.
- Hume, Janice. “Public Memory, Cultural Legacy, and Press Coverage of the Juneteenth Revival.” 155-162.
- Abrahamson, David. “ The Jungle at 100: A Century of Journalism Reform.” 163-173.
- Volume 34, No. 4, Winter 2009
- Witwer, David. “Westbrook Pegler, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the FBI: A History of Infamous Enmities and Unlikely Collaborations.” 194-203.
- Rodgers, Ron. “‘Goodness Isn’t News’: The Sheldon Edition and the National Conversation Defining Journalism’s Responsibility to Society.” 204-215.
- Stoker, Kevin. “The Journalist and the Jurist: Political Adversaries Enlisted in ‘a Long Campaign on Behalf of Civil Liberties.’” 216-229.
- Wilson, Keith. “‘The Beginning of the End:’ An Analysis of British Newspaper Coverage of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.” 230-239.
- Volume 35, No. 1, Spring 2009 Ehrlich, Matthew C. “Living with the Bomb: Fred Friendly’s ‘The Quick and the Dead.’” 2-11.
- Watts, Liz. “Lydia Maria Child: Editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard , 1841-43.” 12-22.
- Walton, Laura Richardson. “Organizing Resistance: The Use of Public Relations by the Citizens’ Council in Mississippi, 1954-64. 23-33.
- Cleary, Johanna. “‘Genet’ on the Air: Janet Flanner’s Wartime Broadcasts.” 34-41.
- Sumpter, Randall S. “Core Knowledge: Early Reporting Textbooks and the Formation of Professional Identity.” 42-52.
Cole, Jaci and John Maxwell Hamilton. “Another Test of the News: American Partisan Press Coverage of the French Revolution.” 34-41. In a pioneering content analysis published in the New Republic in 1920, journalists Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz assessed the New York Times coverage of the Russian revolution. They concluded that the Times’ reporters and editors tended to report the news as they wished it to be. “The news,” they wrote, “is dominated by the hopes of the men who composed the news organization.” While scholars have used this concept to study the coverage of subsequent revolutions, this is the first content analysis to look back at the French Revolution in the late 1700s. It finds, as Lippmann and Merz did, that “hope and fear” shaped coverage by the partisan press. That journalism in two very different periods had similar tendencies suggests the inherent difficulty of covering a revolution in any time period with a press of any type.
This article examines the economic and editorial concerns that Texas editors faced during the Civil War from 1861 to 1865. It asks two questions: Did the state’s geographic distance from most battles make its newspapers immune from the financial and editorial difficulties that other southern editors faced, or did the largely frontier conditions make publishing a more financially precarious occupation for its editors during the war years? The study reveals that despite Texas’ geographic distance from most of the battles, its editors and publishers endured the same economic and news gathering hardships as did their counterparts in other Confederate states. Furthermore, the state’s thinly spread population and its lack of a manufacturing base left its editors particularly unprepared for the financial hardships and the shortage of raw materials that occurred during the war.
For decades, Minnesota history books omitted the 1920 lynchings of three black men by a mob in one of the largest cities, and residents seemed to forget or “bury” it. This study explored how initial coverage of the event in seventeen Minnesota newspapers constructed responsibility for the lynchings and likely shaped perceptions that might explain their seeming absence from collective memory. Coverage in the newspapers showed: several constructions of responsibility for the lynchings; dominant voices that reinforced the dominant constructions; reinforcement of a dominant white social structure and institutions, such as the police and law enforcement mechanisms; and what was not reported or was slighted, such as certain ideas and voices of black and white women and black men. Ultimately, this showed that the coverage contributed to hegemony through marginalizing some groups, individuals, and ideas related to it.
This article argues that geography played an important role in shaping the readership of the Ladies’ Home Journal in the early and mid-twentieth century. It draws upon circulation records of Curtis Publishing Company and the Audit Bureau of Circulations, using them to map state distribution of the Journal in six periods from 1911 to 1955. Although the magazine’s geographic identity shifted somewhat during that period, it showed a clear split between the South and the rest of the country. In exploring readership patterns, the article argues that the Journal provided an important cultural tie between West and East while the South, in large part, remained isolated. This suggests researchers must begin to see magazine audiences in regional terms, just as they do forms of fiction writing, social interaction, and ways of life. Volume 34, No. 2, Summer 2008
America’s post-riot era was a time of unfulfilled expectations for those concerned with newsroom staffing. The Kerner Commission said blacks should be trained, hired, and promoted in mainstream media, yet few news managers moved beyond tokenism to diversify what had been a white domain. In 1968, broadcaster Fred W. Friendly crafted a summer program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism that would graduate 223 minority trainees over seven years. Some became reporters, news anchors, media executives, and producers, although many left journalism for other careers. In a study more than thirty years after the project closed, participants discussed what they saw in newsrooms during this era of social change, and their recollections reflect the idealism that fueled this early effort in media hiring reform.
John Brown’s October 16, 1859, raid at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, created a flashpoint in the United States, sparking what can be called a “Crisis of Americanism.” As this article shows, evidence of this discourse appeared frequently in extensive southern and northern newspaper coverage of his raid, trial, and subsequent hanging on December 2 as editors on both sides of the slavery issue accused one another as well as prominent Americans of disloyal, treasonous behavior. This unhealthy, often shrill, debate, which helped lead to the Civil War in 1861, hardly promoted democratic ideals or best served the nation’s values and founding ideals. Instead, such incendiary rhetoric only added to the increasing division of two Americas, both of which laid valid claims to being rightful heirs to the legacy of the United States’ founding.
From its beginnings in the 1820s, African-American newspapers have always been a strong and vocal ally for the rights of blacks throughout the United States. This article delineates how and why these papers from the mid-1830s to the Civil War became important as platforms of political agency for those who were denied conventional means of political participation in the government. In particular, this study focuses on four avenues through which the newspapers were utilized to afford political agency to Africans Americans: the material and rhetorical support of black suffrage; the promotion and facilitation of public protest; the promotion of material and moral elevation; and the creation and promotion of a black national and historical identity. The success of the black press in these areas set a precedent for all subsequent African-American political struggles.
In the latter half of the twentieth century, a print and a broadcast journalist collectively reported on the people and events in Savannah, Georgia, for more than 100 years. As exceptional as their record of longevity, however, was the way in which they went about their jobs. Newspaperman Tom Coffey and TV anchor Doug Weathers practiced “community journalism,” not only reporting upon their audiences but forming a mutually beneficial relationship with them. It is an approach whose beginnings date to the earliest days of American journalism but whose practice is becoming increasingly rare today. This article explores how these two men defined their daily work in a distinctive manner and the impact their efforts had on the community as they worked with the people of Savannah rather than trying significantly to alter things.
Starting a newspaper in the nineteenth century was a risky business, and this was especially true in the Civil War South where invading armies, spiraling inflation, and conscription laws were constant threats to physical facilities, financial success, and manpower. Despite this, North Carolina Governor Zebulon B. Vance and the state’s Conservative political party found the money and the will to establish a new daily to support the his re-election bid in 1864. Campaign papers were common in the 1800s, but while most shut down following an election, the Conservative continued to publish after Vance won. Records and archives document how it was financed, equipped, and staffed, providing an unprecedented glimpse into what it took to start a newspaper not only in the nineteenth century but during America’s bloodiest war. Volume 34, No. 3, Fall 2008
Before possession of hallucinogens was made a federal crime, LSD was the subject of numerous stories in Time and Life magazines, many of which described the experience in glowing terms. The drug was frequently discussed as a scientific marvel that had the potential to enhance or induce religious experience, and this “instant mysticism” was often described in Christian and biblical terms. Letters and acid-trip journals in the papers of Clare Boothe Luce, the wife of Time and Life publisher Henry Luce, and other documentary evidence show that the extensive and largely positive coverage of LSD in these magazines was consistent with the beliefs of the Luces. The publisher remained enthusiastic about LSD even as recreational use of the drug was growing, and he made his views on the drug known to subordinates at the magazines.
During the 1950s, the American Society of Newspaper Editors became the site of an ideological struggle between the racial status quo and the new social order envisioned by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. This article examines the all-white ASNE in the years after Brown as the racial exclusivity of the organization and the profession it represented were both questioned and reaffirmed. Using a variety of primary source documents, including ASNE publications, convention transcripts, and members’ archival materials, this project isolates the ways in which the white prerogative reasserted itself through the exclusivity of the ASNE membership structure, the usage of regional history and identity by editors from the South, and the manipulation of the journalistic ideal of objectivity and First Amendment values.
Did Italian propaganda broadcaster Lisa Sergio, who claimed to have been Europe’s first female radio announcer, flee Italy in 1937 because she became an anti-fascist (as she claimed) or because she boasted too much about affairs with high fascist officials (as her FBI file asserted)? This article examines Sergio’s writings and her 300-page FBI file to attempt to determine which story was true. But troubling aspects of her autobiography surfaced (such as dramatic narrative arcs and factual inconsistencies), suggesting that factual analysis alone cannot fully explain the discrepancies. This study borrowed a framework from autobiographical theorists and scholars to show that these writings were a performance for the U.S. audience: an act of identity, gender, and culture, concealing a hidden subtext of historical agency.
Following the Civil War, African Americans in Texas celebrated their emancipation with an annual holiday known as “Juneteenth.” The celebration migrated to other areas of the country, and over the past several years there has been a concerted effort to establish it as a national holiday. Using the recent revival and diffusion of Juneteenth as its focal point, this article examines local press coverage of the celebration in four states. The coverage illustrates how journalists invoke history to explain current events and also highlights the changing, fluid nature of public memory. In contrast to the view of history as a fixed, stable account of past events, the evidence reveals that the historical record is continually changing based upon contemporary concerns, political motivations, and, in this particular case, the ongoing integration of African Americans into American society.
It has been just over 100 years since the publication of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, which certainly was a keystone in the arch of American’s literature of reform. By means of a reconsideration at the work’s centennial, these four essays explore a variety of historical issues: the origins and progress of the reformist impulse in U.S. journalism; the varied literary roots of American journalistic practices; the unresolved tensions between fictive and nonfictive writing; and the historiographic issues raised by the recent discovery of an unpublished, significantly longer version of the work. As an inspiration to all muckraking journalists over the years, the seminal position of The Jungle in American letters is matched by few other works. It is hoped these essays will encourage a diverse conversation about the book, its causes, and its effects. Volume 34, No. 4, Winter 2009
Until the early twentieth century, Park Row was synonymous with New York newspapers. Of the newspapers that left Park Row, the New York Times was notable for having established a geographic landmark that was identified with the newspaper. In fact, by 1906, Times Square had replaced Park Row as a place for New Yorkers to get election night news or to celebrate New Year’s Eve. Nevertheless, Times Square did not remain associated with its newspaper namesake, and today a successor to the “zipper” is the last physical reminder of the paper’s presence in this area of New York City. Drawing on the Archives of the New York Times Company, this article traces the history of Times Square from the construction of Times Tower through the twentieth century as the Times lost its identity as the neighborhood’s namesake.
The conservative newspaper columnist Westbrook Pegler was notorious for his enmity towards Eleanor Roosevelt, but according to previous scholarship she dismissed his criticism as insignificant. Scholars have depicted Roosevelt as a staunch champion of free speech rights and a strident critic of the FBI’s intrusion into domestic politics. In late 1942, however, she asked the FBI to launch a wartime sedition investigation that aimed to link Pegler to the fascist enemy. This was six months after she had contemplated proposing a joint conference with him to consider the problem of union abuses. These overlooked episodes contradict the standard depiction of Roosevelt’s response to Pegler and are a reminder of the news media’s central role during World War II in efforts to support or attack the growing power of organized labor.
This article explores the national discussion in 1900 about press responsibility, which was sparked by the Rev. Charles Sheldon, a pastor of a Congregationalist church, serving a week-long stint as editor of the Topeka (Kansas) Daily Capital. Afterward, the general consensus of the reams of commentary, from both the press and the pastorate, was that editing a daily paper from a “Christian point of view” was a failure. Nevertheless, the debate revealed the pulpit’s acknowledgement of its conferral of the role of agent of education and moral uplift upon the press, making it the new arbiter of public opinion. However, it also showed the pulpit challenging the notion of journalistic objectivity as it struggled to redefine news as interpretive and advocative in order to comport with a journalistic ideal grounded in the gospel.
In the early days of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, a progressive Harvard Law professor and a conservative New York editorial page editor began a correspondence that lasted twenty years. The Democratic jurist and future Supreme Court Justice, Felix Frankfurter, had helped found the American Civil Liberties Union and the New Republic. His Republican journalistic cohort, Geoffrey Parsons, wrote for the New Deal’s leading opponent, the New York Herald Tribune. Their correspondence reveals the evolution of a relationship between a journalist and a public figure and shows the mindset of the anonymous editor and the effect his editorial page had on an observer “not of his party.” In the correspondence, the law served as “the cohesive power of a free society” and a common bond between political adversaries.
Although negative perceptions of the character of African Americans were at the center of the British press debate over the merits of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, it was the way that his character was portrayed that gave it potency and direction. Editors who opposed the Proclamation besmirched him in a way that enabled them to argue that they were not defending slavery but keeping their commentary within Britain’s popular anti-slavery traditions. In contrast, those papers which supported the Proclamation believed he was a liberal statesman who shared the core moral values of the British. Because the debate occurred when newspapers were undergoing profound and innovative changes, this helped shape the character of the debate, increased its intensity, and provided a commentary on the evolving nature of British newspaper journalism. Volume 35, No. 1, Spring 2009
Fred Friendly’s NBC radio series in 1950, “The Quick and the Dead,” represented a key moment in the evolution of broadcast news documentaries as it examined the creation of the atomic bomb, the looming prospect of the hydrogen bomb, and the potential benefits of atomic energy. It aired at a charged historical moment just after the outbreak of the Korean War and not long after the announcement that America would begin work on an H-bomb in response to the Soviets’ acquisition of atomic weaponry. The program also bridged the news and entertainment worlds by featuring Bob Hope and New York Times science reporter William Laurence along with many key figures in the bomb’s development. It exemplified journalism’s ambivalence toward the new atomic age while pointing the way toward Friendly’s legendary work with Edward R. Murrow at CBS.
This article examines Lydia Maria Child’s editorship of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, the newspaper of the American Anti-Slavery Society, from 1841-43. Before becoming the editor, she edited her own magazine for children, worked with her husband at their newspaper, and wrote numerous fiction and nonfiction works for juveniles and adults. As an editor, she espoused objectivity, derided sensationalism, and applied her own inclusive formula for building circulation, emphasizing material with broad appeal to both men and women while reducing the emphasis on politics. She succeeded in doubling the Standard’s circulation but did not satisfy the more strident members of the AASS, who wanted more militancy. She also introduced a popular personal column, “Letters to New-York,” which attracted wide attention.
The Citizens’ Council of Mississippi emerged from the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta to protest the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. More than half of white Mississippians were determined to protect the public schools’ segregated classrooms and supported the organized resistance movement with enthusiasm and determination. The Council relied heavily on a deliberate and strategic PR initiative to gain support for its ideals and initiatives with leaders polishing the use of traditional public relations tools and becoming savvy users of developing media technologies. This article explores how the organization’s use of PR during the anti-civil rights movement relates to James E. Grunig’s and Todd Hunt’s widely accepted historical model that represents the development of the public relations profession.
For fifty years, journalist Janet Flanner wrote a bi-weekly “Letter from Paris” column for the New Yorker magazine. While her professional legacy included influencing American literary journalism by developing the journalistic essay, she also recorded a little-known series of radio commentaries in 1945-46 from the hotspots of Europe in the critical months surrounding the end of World War II. This article offers a detailed examination of the content and themes of those commentaries. It notes her focus on deprivations caused by the war and its aftermath, the plight of women in the war-ravaged countries, the post-war political landscape in France and Italy, and the obligation of the Allies to help rebuild France and Italy. The study concludes that her foray into radio was an important indicator of the growing significance of this medium.
This analysis of six influential reporting textbooks published during the first two decades of the twentieth century found that they helped create journalism’s professional identity in two ways. The books and their authors, who in most cases taught journalism on the university level, identified the four basic problems of journalism for students: how to recognize news, how to assign it a value, how to collect it, and how to write it. The books, along with a teaching strategy that relied on practical exercises and examples drawn from diverse newspapers, taught students how to solve those problems. The texts and teaching methods also taught journalism students about their place in a distinct professional hierarchy where they exploited sources and readers while obeying editors and publisher. Download 482.26 Kb. Share with your friends:
|