Ch 3 Modern press

Ernie Pyle, US correspondent in WWII, whose human, patriotic, critical style was widely emulated.

Every jump of technical progress leaves the relative intellectual development of the masses a step behind, and thus causes a fall in the political-maturity thermometer. It takes sometimes tens of years, sometimes generations, for a people’s level of understanding gradually to adapt itself to the changed state of affairs, until it has recovered the same capacity for self-government as it had already possessed at a lower stage of civilization.  – Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, 1940. 

This chapter focuses on the print media in the 20th and  21st centuries.  The site includes sub-pages, including a) War and peace in the press; b) Science and environmental journalism; c) Muckraking, gonzo and sports and other specialized forms of journalism; d) Demise of the newspaper.

Two selections from this chapter are in the Features section:  E.W. Scripps and Science, and Who Killed the American Newspaper?

Discussion questions

  1. An older generation’s voice:  What was Will Irwin on about when he said newspapers (in 1911) were speaking with the voice of an older generation? Have you heard this sort of criticism about newspapers or other media in the modern era?
  2. Roosevelt on Muckraking:  Teddy Roosevelt encouraged the muckrakers before he became president, but afterwards warned that they were going too far. Why do you suppose he took that position?
  3. Wartime censorship:  What is the danger of wartime censorship, according to George Seldes?  How was wartime censorship different in WWI than it was in WWII?
  4. Lenin and Gandhi:  How did attitudes towards freedom of speech reflect larger differences between the revolutions in Russia (led by Vladimir Lenin) and India (led by Mohandas Gandhi)?
  5. Three golden ages of journalism are described in this February, 2014 ProPublica article. Do you agree that these are the high points of the profession?
  6. Adversarial press:  Many conservatives think that Richard Nixon was treated unfairly during the Watergate scandal and that the media lost the war in Vietnam.  What evidence can you present on both sides of these arguments?
  7. Digital revolution: How well did American newspapers deal with the advent of computer networks?
  8. Digital revolution:  With increasing problems in the commercial press, will the media revert to a partisan model, or will someone find a way into Lippmann’s proverbial era of “organized intelligence?”  Read the spring, 2014 New York Times “innovation report.” What’s missing?
  9. Arab spring:  Circumventing media has its limits, according to these Washington Post July 2015 articles about the Arab Spring and faded hopes for free press.  What similar moments in history might we recall in trying to make sense of the tragedy?
  10. Covering the bomb:  After the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US government tried to cover up the gruesome effects of radiation with the help of William L. Laurence, a New York Times reporter.  Two reporters exposed the lie and told the story with real compassion: John Hersey of the New Yorker and Charles H. Loeb of the Atlanta Daily World, a Black newspaper. Hersey became famous. Until 2021, Loeb was all but forgotten. Why?

People & Events

Will Irwin, Richard Harding Davis, Ida B. Wells, Samuel Hopkins Adams, Lincoln Steffens, Cecil Chesterton, Ida Tarell, David Graham Phillips, Upton Sinclair, Bolo Pasha, George Seldes, John Reed, Frederick Douglass, John H. Johnson, Ralph McGill, Homer Bigart, Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, John Hershey

Documentary videos

  1. Soldiers without swords — The Black Press (web site)  Excellent and eye-opening PBS documentary series.  YouTube site.
  2. Ida B. Wells: A passion for justice documentary.
  3. Dawn’s Early Light — An insightful documentary about Atlanta Journal editor Ralph McGill and the struggle to report the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s.   The video, produced in the 1970s, is a good companion to the Gene Roberts / Hank Klibanoff book, The Race Beat. A Cspan video of a Gene Roberts discussion about the book is also available.
  4. Journalism :  Burton Holmes Films,  (1940) — A free downloadable film originally made for high school students about the kind of work that journalists do.  Interesting from an historical perspective.
  5. Journalists Killed in the Line of Duty  (2005). News anchors Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite narrate this remarkable documentary that chronicles the deaths of seven journalists, including The Wall Street Journal‘s Daniel Pearl and NBC correspondent David Bloom.
  6. Page One: Inside the New York Times (2011) is a somewhat quirky documentary about the Times that faces, as a Washington Post critic says, the cold hard reality of the declining newspaper business.
  7. Black and white and dead all over — An article and trailer for a documentary about a sad look at the newspaper industry as it struggles to remain financially viable. Featuring Bob Woodward of the Washington Post and David Carr of the New York Times. Lots of fond farewells, little to no creative thinking about new business models or sustaining new forms of journalism.  PBS  2013.
  8. A brief history of the American Press – Center for Foreign Journalists, 1992. Narrated by former AP chief of foreign bureaus,  George Krimsky.
  9. ‘Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu’ New York Times, 1978. End of the ‘hot type’ process at the Times.

EThics and social responsibility

Hutchins (1947), MacBride (1980), and Miller (2010) Commissions

  1. Hutchins, Robert M. Chair, the Commission on Freedom of the Press. A Free and Responsible Press: A General Report on Mass Communication: Newspapers, Radio, Motion Pictures, Magazines, and Books, University of Chicago, 1947. Full report on the web here.
  2. Hutchins Commission:  Main points
  3.  Realigning Journalism with Democracy: The Hutchins Commission: Its Times and Ours
  4. MacBride Commission, 1980: Many Voices, One World
  5. Miller Commission, March 2010: Old Media, New Media and the Challenge to Democratic Governance
  6. Bill Moyers: Journalism must survive the pressure cooker of plutocracy. Remarks at the Bernstein Awards, May 26, 2015.
  7. Myth of the Fourth Estate:  Essay in Lapham’s Quarterly raises questions about the role of the press.

 Ethics and new media

  1. “Two Visions of Responsibility: How National Commissions Contributed to Journalism Ethics, 1963-1975.” It wasn’t just the work of the Hutchins Commission that changed the way journalists saw the ethical boundaries of their work. There were also a number of commissions on violence in the 1963-75 time frame, and the media responded with revisions of codes of ethics, the creation of news councils and journalism reviews, and increased employment of minorities.
  2. Many say the press fabricates stories about Trump. What’s going on? Christian Science Monitor, Oct. 26, 2017.