Volume 1, No. 1, Spring 1974
Cecil, Matthew, “Coming on like Gang Busters: J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and the Battle to Control Radio Portrayals of the Bureau, 1936-1958,” 252-61
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- Volume 41, No. 1, Spring 2015 Mellen, Roger P., “John Wilkes and the Constitutional Right to a Free Press in the United States,” 2-10.
- Alwood, Edward, “The Role of Public Relations in the Gay Rights Movement, 1950-1969,” 11-20.
- Hrach, Thomas J., “‘Beyond the Bounds of Tolerance’: Commercial Appeal Editorials and the 1969 Memphis Garbage Strike,” 21-30.
- Rodgers, Ronald R., “‘A Strange Absence of News’: The Titanic, the Times , Checkbook Journalism, and the Inquiry into the Public’s Right to Know,” 31-38.
- Gorbach, Julien, “The Journalist and the Gangster: A Devil’s Bargain, Chicago Style,” 39-50.
- Sweeney, Michael S., “Editor’s Note on Submissions of Books and Manuscripts for Review,” 51. Volume 41, No. 2, Summer 2015
- Cabosky, Joseph, “‘For Your Consideration’: A Critical Analysis of LBGT-Themed Film Award Campaign Advertisements: 1990-2005,” 73-84.
- Reel, Guy, “Dudes, ‘Unnatural Crimes,’ and a ‘Curious Couple’: The National Police Gazette’s Oblique Coverage of Alternative Gender Roles in the Late Nineteenth Century,” 85-92.
- Ferrucci, Patrick, and Earnest Perry, “Double Dribble: The Stereotypical Narrative of Magic and Bird,” 93-102.
- Lyons, J. Michael, “From Alabama to Tahrir Square: ‘Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story,’” 103-111.
- Volume 41, No. 3, Fall 2015 Mascaro, Thomas A, “‘Congress Needs Help’: A Case Study in Documentary Journalism History,” 118-128.
- Peterson, Scott D., and Jennifer E. Moore, “Picturing Sports: Finding the ‘Actual’ in Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Sporting News,” 129-138.
- Hirshon, Nicholas, “The Myth of the Nassau Mausoleum: A Brainchild of the First All-Sports Radio Station,” 139-152.
- Fainberg, Dina, “A Portrait of a Journalist as a Cold War Expert: Harrison Salisbury,” 153-164.
- Heflin, Kristen, “The Internet Is Not the Antidote: A Cultural-Historical Analysis of Journalism’s Crisis of Credibility and the Internet as a Remedy,” 165-175
- Volume 41, No. 4, Winter 2016 Hume, Janice, “The Past as Persuader in The Great Speckled Bird ,” 182-190.
- Güven, Erdem, “The Image and the Perception of the Turk in Freedom’s Journal,” 191-199.
- Pribanic-Smith, Erika J., “Southern Values and the 1844 Election in South Carolina Newspapers,” 200-210.
- Myers, Cayce, “Southern Traitor or American Hero The Representation of Robert E. Lee in the Northern Press from 1865 to 1870,” 211-221.
- Mascaro, Thomas A., Mike Conway, and Raluca Cozma, “Toward a Standard for the Evaluation of Documentary Journalism History,” 222-228.
- Viera, Hernán, “Publicaciones Periódicas del Uruguay,” 229-230.
- Volume 42, No. 1, Spring 2016 Jolliffe, Lee, “Special Edition: Adventure Journalists in the Guilded Age (Guest Editor’s Note),” 2-4.
- Mueller, James, “Stanley before Livingstone: Henry Morton Stanley’s Coverage of Hancock’s War against the Plains Tribes in 1867,” 5-14.
Cecil, Matthew, “Coming on like Gang Busters: J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and the Battle to Control Radio Portrayals of the Bureau, 1936-1958,” 252-61. From 1935 to 1958, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI battled with producers of radio shows such as Gang Busters and The FBI in Peace and War, objecting to portrayals of the Bureau. FBI officials believed that those and certain other programs undermined the Bureau’s authority and legitimacy through story lines emphasizing sensational violence and the thrill of the chase rather than staid logic and scientific detection. Eventually the FBI created and promoted its own radio crime drama in an effort to control its public image, valorize its authority and justify its ongoing cultural and jurisdictional growth. The details of the FBI’s efforts to control its image, as revealed by its own meticulously maintained files, offer a cautionary tale of how a government agency, particularly a law enforcement agency, carries an outsized ability to influence news and entertainment portrayals of its work. Volume 41, No. 1, Spring 2015
John Wilkes was a radical British politician who was extremely popular with many American revolutionaries and provided a powerful example of why liberty of the press was so critical. Wilkes was arrested, thrown out of Parliament, put into prison, and accused of treason and seditious libel. His legal travails, his publications, and his every movement were covered with great interest by the colonial newspapers. While a blasphemous and pornographic publication eventually tarnished his reputation, he was nonetheless an important force behind many American constitutional protections. This article explores a connection not previously developed—how John Wilkes was a key inspiration for the first-ever constitutional protection for a free press. The conclusion here is that Wilkes should be remembered for his crucial influence upon the American ideal of press freedom; his battle against seditious libel charges was a notable precedent for attitudes against control of the media on this side of the Atlantic.
This study examines public relations strategies of the gay and lesbian rights movement during the 1950s and 1960s when most homosexuals remained deeply closeted to avoid the social stigma associated with the same-sex lifestyle. The analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of public relations strategies and focuses on activists who spearheaded these efforts to gain recognition for this social minority. As this study shows, public relations played a vital role in the early stages of the gay rights movement. It concludes that though gay and lesbian activists of the 1950s and 1960 had no formal training in PR, they made a concerted effort to influence public opinion using fundamental public relations strategies more than a decade before the Stonewall riots that marked the beginning of the modern Gay Liberation Movement.
In February 1968, the Memphis city garbage workers went on strike, an event that precipitated Martin Luther King’s coming to the city and his subsequent assassination on April 4 of that year. The city’s morning newspaper, The Commercial Appeal, on its editorial pages denounced the strike and derided King. The newspaper berated union officials, insulted the workers, and emboldened the intransigent mayor. This article is a review of the editorial page copy from the newspaper during the two months of the strike along with other materials that reveal the attitudes of Editor Frank Ahlgren. It shows that the hard-line approach during the first few weeks of the strike came from a fundamental misunderstanding of the black community and an overwhelming dislike for unions. Also, it examines whether the newspaper editorial page has some culpability in King’s death.
This study explores the controversy around allegations that the Titanic’s surviving wireless operator and the operator aboard the rescue ship held back news detailing the disaster so they could sell their stories to The New York Times. Those allegations and a Senate inquiry into news suppression as part of the Titanic investigation raised some of the first questions about the ethics and/or the propriety of the then-accepted practice of journalists paying for news—an early sounding defining the responsibility of the press to society that still has resonance a century later. Informing that debate in both the nation’s press and in the halls of Congress were an uncongealed journalistic news ethic in the face of rising notions of the public interest during a progressive era that saw the press as one more monied power in need of reform.
Ben Hecht grew to personify the mix of cynicism, sentimentality and mischief of the Chicago newspaper reporter, a historical type that he immortalized in his stage comedy, The Front Page. Treating Hecht as an “ideal type,” this study looks at the antics and chicanery of Chicago crime reporters, and the extraordinary bonds that Chicago journalists forged with the city’s gangsters. It argues that the temptation of the Mephistophelean bargain, the proposition that rules are made to be broken, explains both Hecht’s Romanticist style, emblematic of Chicago journalism, and the fascination with criminals and gangsters that Hecht shared with his fellow newspapermen.
Volume 41, No. 2, Summer 2015
The sale of The New York World in 1931 to the Scripps-Howard chain marked the end of what many viewed as a “newspaperman’s newspaper,” one that, particularly after the arrival of Walter Lippmann in 1921, had become a literate defender of liberal values for many New Yorkers. But while the death of The World is often attributed to poor business practices, an equally significant contributor to its decline was the changing demands of a readership that had in the interwar period lost its taste for liberal homilies. Lippmann responded to these new reader demands by seeking to inculcate at The World a scientific approach to advocacy that would, by probing what Lippmann called the “twilight zone of news” where important causal forces and normative considerations resided, bridge the news-opinion dichotomy in a way that would allow the paper to honor its crusading past while satisfying the demands of its readership for a more fact-based journalism.
Massive campaigns are annually launched by Hollywood studios to persuade film awards bodies to vote for their films, with success resulting in publicity, prestige, and potentially millions more in product revenues. During the 1990s and early 2000s, the media were supposedly progressing in their portrayal of LGBT storylines. As the Academy Awards body is composed of mostly older, white men who are, or were, the major players in the film industry, critically and historically analyzing the print advertisement campaigns that targeted these persons gives us telling indications of these culture creators’ views toward LGBT content. This study found that, over sixteen years, film award campaign ads continually avoided queer imagery while promoting heteronormative themes, even in queer films. This counters a notion of progress during this era within this elite group while complementing psychological, political, and mass communication research analyzing how normative voters respond to queer content in advertisements.
The National Police Gazette, a popular New York City tabloid that reached its heyday in the late nineteenth century, was known for its challenging and changing assumptions about masculinities in its coverage of sports, professional pursuits, and even dress. This study examined two issues a year selected randomly over a twenty-one-year period, 1879-1899, to determine if the Gazette ever offered coverage of or hints at homosexual or bisexual lifestyles. It also examined the way the tabloid covered trials involving Oscar Wilde, during which he was accused of sodomy. Little has been written about “mainstream” nineteenth-century newspapers’ coverage of gay or sexually alternative lifestyles, probably because very little of such coverage was offered. This examination found that occasionally the Gazette hinted at multiple meanings of cross-dressing (usually women dressing as men) or the effeminate characteristics of “dudes,” but it rarely covered gay or alternative lifestyles in any direct way.
Earvin “Magic” Johnson and Larry Bird’s fabled rivalry began in the 1979 NCAA basketball championship, a contest that still stands as the highest-rated basketball game of all time. This rivalry featured East versus West, traditional versus modern and, more implicitly, black versus white. Johnson and Bird are now largely considered extremely similar players who, together, brought the National Basketball Association an increased and sustainable popularity during the 1980s. But while both Johnson and Bird are considered similar players now, it wasn’t always this way. This study examines news media coverage of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird from the Boston Globe and Los Angeles Times. Researchers analyzed texts to assess whether journalists employed common stereotypes when describing the two athletes. The newspapers examined created an image of Johnson and Bird as classic stereotypical characters that represented what it was like to be black and white in America during this period.
The history of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s provides ample opportunity to understand how groups use mass media to build and sustain social movements. This article examines an understudied but important piece of movement literature, the “Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story” comic, which simultaneously provided an “origin story” for the modern movement and a step-by-step guide to nonviolent action. Young activists such as Congressman John Lewis, a college student when “The Montgomery Story” was published in 1957, called the comic the “Bible of the movement.” The comic would later surface in South Africa, in Latin America translated into Spanish and, after a translation into Arabic, on Tahrir Square in Egypt in 2011. Through letters and archival documents, the article explores the creation and distribution of the comic and its usefulness as a compact and simplified “movement narrative” that was adapted to use in other social movements. Volume 41, No. 3, Fall 2015
Congress Needs Help, an NBC News documentary that aired at 10 p.m. November 24, 1965, detailed problems and suggestions for improvement in America’s legislative machinery. It is notable for its sweeping scope and because NBC News commissioned a $100,000 organizational efficiency study to underpin the documentary’s research. The broadcast spawned a pamphlet circulated to every member of Congress, a Random House book, and legislative reform. The story of Congress Needs Help also offers a glimpse into the effects of seniority on committee obstructions to civil rights legislation and very early criticism of congressional oversight of President Johnson’s Vietnam War policy. Using archival methods in primary documents, this article examines the history of the film and assesses its impact and unique place in documentary journalism history.
This is an exploratory study of sporting news in selected issues of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper from 1885 to 1895. Asking how the illustrated press portrayed sports and sporting events in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the authors analyzed pictorial content to understand how the ethos of realism was employed in pictorial representations of sports. During this period in journalism history, visual journalism was in transition. Photographic reproduction in newspapers was still being developed and perfected, so illustrating pictorial news content was still widely practiced. Using Thomas Connery’s “paradigm of actuality” thesis, the researchers developed an “actuality” scale to help identify how realism was used to report on both amateur and professional sports in illustrated news reporting. In this exploratory study, the authors attempt to reveal how pictorial news about sports changed over time and suggest how connections between actuality and the cultural messages found in late nineteenth-century pictorial sports reporting can provide clues to intended audiences.
Relatively little historical research has focused on sports radio despite its growth in the American media landscape. From its inception in 1987, the world’s first all-sports radio station, WFAN in New York City, broadcast derisive commentary about a major hockey arena, Nassau Coliseum on Long Island. This historical article describes how three WFAN hosts, Don Imus, Mike Francesa, and Steve Somers, encouraged their listeners to view the venue as “Nassau Mausoleum,” a term that Somers popularized. Anecdotes from primary sources, including interviews with Somers and his producer, demonstrate that sports radio commentary can impact how listeners think and behave, exemplifying the two-step flow of communications. This article also considers how public relations executives from Nassau Coliseum and its National Hockey League team, the New York Islanders, tried to combat the negative remarks.
In 1949 Harrison E. Salisbury moved to Moscow—the capital city of Communism—to report on the goings-on of the enemy for the New York Times, and thus began an illustrious career, which became closely associated with the Cold War at home and abroad. Using archival sources, and close reading of contemporary publications, this article focuses on the early years of Salisbury’s work as a prism on the changes that occurred in American reporting from Moscow with the advent of the Cold War. It demonstrates how in the late 1940s and the early 1950s the boundaries of journalistic objectivity were redrawn to accommodate the Cold War agenda, leading to an evolution of a new style of writing on Soviet affairs that Salisbury pioneered in his work. While the new style seemingly moved away from the sphere of politics and ideology and stressed the importance of neutral historical and cultural analysis of Russia, it naturalized the Soviet-American confrontation and cemented the link between journalistic impartiality and anti-Communism.
This article historicizes journalism’s present crisis of credibility as rooted in the criticisms of partisanship and commercialization that continually arose throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It then explores how the Internet, as the most compelling solution to this crisis, developed to meet very different needs than those of mainstream journalism organizations. Following this Internet analysis and discussion is an investigation of the invasion and gradual acceptance of nonprofessional online content from the 1990s to today. The article concludes by asserting that the Internet cannot be heralded as the solution to the crisis of credibility, largely because the crisis is not a technical one of information delivery, but an epistemological conflict at the heart of journalism practice, a conflict between the irreconcilable values of deliberation and verification. Volume 41, No. 4, Winter 2016
This study examines journalistic uses of history in the underground newspaper The Great Speckled Bird during its original run, 1968 to 1976, based on Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest K. May’s categories of the uses of history by political decision makers. The Bird used history for context, nostalgia and analogy, to promote values, and to challenge past assumptions, all to bolster a point of view for its readers, the hippie community in Atlanta, Georgia.
The importance of Freedom’s Journal to African American society as the first African American newspaper in the United States is indisputable. News and articles that were published in this newspaper had great impact on African American society of the nineteenth century. The newspaper had a crucial role in creating consciousness about racism and slavery problems in the United States. Freedom’s Journal was also trying to raise awareness within the ranks of African Americans regarding the problem of slavery in other countries and was furthermore committed to enlightening African Americans about those distant countries. The Ottoman Empire was one of those “distant and unknown countries,” especially for African Americans in those years (1820s). In this article, the perception of “the Turk” in Freedom’s Journal has been examined through published news, poems, and articles that were especially focused on the Greek Uprising, Islam, the Janissaries, and the role of women in Ottoman society. Literature research techniques have been used as a method of research for this paper. In all, 103 issues of Freedom’s Journal that were published weekly from 1827 to 1829 have been searched and all scripts that were related to subjects such as the Ottoman Empire, Islam, and the Greek Uprising have been examined.
The first scholarly exploration of how South Carolina newspapers covered the 1844 presidential election, this article reveals that the state’s editors devoted ample energy to the presidential campaign and actively supported presidential candidates even though the state’s electorate did not vote for president. However, by the time of this election, South Carolina newspapers largely had strayed from the partisan function that had been ascribed to the press since the prior century. A majority of the editors displayed a deep concern for the South above all, and they advocated for candidates based on adherence to southern values rather than political party. Furthermore, this paper argues that the tariff was the primary campaign issue for South Carolina editors, contrary to prior historians’ assertions that President Polk won the South based on his support for the annexation of Texas.
This study examines the portrayal of Robert E. Lee in the popular northern press from the end of the Civil War in 1865 until immediately after his death in 1870. Through this examination of the postbellum northern press two distinct images of Lee emerge—one of Lee as a traitor and one of Lee as a hero. In examining these portrayals of Lee this study examines how the northern press framed Lee in terms of his involvement with secession, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. These articles demonstrate the difficulty the press had in reconciling the positive image of Lee with the unpopular image of the Civil War. Using scholarship on the Southern cavalier myth, the Lost Cause, and American hero creation as theoretical frameworks, this study analyzes these articles to show the genesis of the creation of Lee as an American hero.
The following is a lightly edited transcript of a panel discussion October 10, 2015, at the annual conference of the American Journalism Historians Association in Oklahoma City. The idea for the panel arose as the editors and reviewers of Journalism History grappled with the issue of assessing the historical significance of particular documentaries. Michael S. Sweeney, the editor in chief of Journalism History, invited Thomas Mascaro of Bowling Green State University and author of Into the Fray: How NBC’s Washington Documentary Unit Reinvented the News to propose a set of guidelines for assessing documentaries. The editor then invited Mike Conway of Indiana University and Raluca Cozma of Iowa State University to respond to Mascaro’s proposals. The transcript is printed here in hopes of continuing the discussion and assisting the work of documentary historians.
This is the thirteenth in a series of articles on archival collections of interest to mass communication historians. Readers of Journalism History are invited to suggest collections that they would like to see appear in future articles, and the editors would welcome volunteers to write such articles. This is Journalism History’s first foray into resources that exist primarily in a language other than English. Volume 42, No. 1, Spring 2016
This is the first issue of Journalism History overseen by a guest editor. Lee Jolliffe of Drake University proposed and produced a special edition devoted to adventure journalism of the nineteenth century. The staff members of Journalism History are grateful for her shepherding this issue to completion.
Before Henry Morton Stanley achieved international fame by finding missionary David Livingstone in Central Africa and contributing “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” to the national lexicon, Stanley had covered Hancock’s War in 1867 against the Cheyenne for the Missouri Democrat. Stanley’s reporting on the war and the subsequent peace negotiations established him as a journalist and put him on the path to world fame. Because the campaign was Stanley’s first extensive experience in journalism, study of his war reporting sheds light on his development into one of the most noted reporters of the age.
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