Journalism

Journalism. The regular, periodic publication of information about contemporary affairs began in British North America in the early eighteenth century.At first, the notion that “news” should provide timely accounts of recent events was not self‐evident. One early paper, The Universal Instructor in All Arts and Sciences and Pennsylvania Gazette, devoted most of its space to printing serially an encyclopedia, A through Z. In 1729, a new owner, Benjamin Franklin, squashed the encyclopedia project and introduced a mode of journalism more literary and satirical, on the one hand, and more engaged in civic affairs on the other, something he learned from English literary models and from his brother's New England Courant.

Colonial Era papers were typically four‐page weeklies that provided an assortment of local advertising, short paragraphs of local hearsay, and large, unedited chunks of European political and economic news from the London press. Political news of other colonies rarely appeared. Local political news was scarce, too, until the 1760s. As conflict with England grew intense, colonial printers were compelled to choose sides. Print shops became hives of political activity. Pamphleteers reached new height of influence with Thomas Paine's Common Sense in 1776. At a time when the largest newspapers sold no more than 2,000 copies of a weekly issue, Common Sense sold an estimated 150,000. Paine addressed the general populace, dropping esoteric classical references for familiar biblical ones, seeking a common language.

The first daily newspaper in North America appeared in Philadelphia in 1783. By 1800, among more than two hundred newspapers, Philadelphia had six dailies, New York City five, Baltimore, Maryland, three, and Charleston, South Carolina, two. The widespread habit of reading, and especially newspaper reading, astonished foreign visitors. By 1850, the United States had more than two thousand newspapers, including more than two hundred dailies. The press was aided by explicit protection of press freedom in many state constitutions and in the Bill of Rights. Congress also supported the press with preferential postal rates. Nevertheless, Federalist party leaders assaulted the Republican opposition with the Sedition Act (1798), which made it a crime to print “any false, scandalous and malicious writing against the government of the United States.”

In the first decades of the new nation, newspapers were frequently weapons for party or faction. Polemics overshadowed reports, but this began to change. In the 1820s, several New York papers began to send small boats out to incoming ships to get the news from London faster than their rivals. This turn toward reportage accelerated when, beginning with the New York Sun in 1833, a new breed of newspaper sought commercial success and a mass readership. Between 1833 and 1835, in New York, Boston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, “penny papers” began selling for a penny an issue rather than the six cents at which papers were commonly priced. Hawked on the streets by newsboys, instead of being available only by subscription, the penny papers aggressively sought out local news, assigning reporters to the courts and to the coverage of “society.”

Low price, innovative distribution methods, and popular content brought large circulation gains that, in turn, encouraged an aggressive use of recently developed technologies. The Sun began with a traditional hand‐run flatbed press but quickly switched to a cylinder press making a thousand, rather than two hundred, impressions an hour. In 1835, already selling twenty thousand copies a day, the Sun became the first newspaper in the country to purchase a steam‐driven press. Penny papers also led the way in using the telegraph. The New York Herald was the penny paper with the most sustained commercial success. Editor James Gordon Bennett (1841–1918), unlike most newspaper proprietors of the day, had never worked as a printer.

Another leader of the new journalism had a more conventional career. Horace Greeley, born in New Hampshire in 1811, entered journalism by printing a small weekly in Vermont. Moving to New York in 1831, he worked as a job printer, published a literary magazine and a Whig party campaign paper, and in 1841 launched his own penny paper, the New York Tribune. Quickly reaching a circulation of 10,000, the Tribune was strongly antislavery and, as a reform‐minded journal of ideas, reported on women's rights, socialist experiments, temperance, and other reforms. Margaret Fuller was among the talented writers Greeley recruited. By the 1850s, with the Tribune surpassing 250,000 in circulation and widely influential throughout the North and West, Greeley mounted thundering editorial attacks on the Fugitive Slave Act, the Kansas‐Nebraska Act, and the Dred Scott decision (see Scott v. Sandford ). A founder of the Republican Party, he pushed President Abraham Lincoln to make emancipation a central aim of the Civil War, but his growing reputation for political instability was heightened by personal idiosyncracies and unsuccessful campaigns for political office. The Tribune continued to thrive, with 500 employees in 1871, but it was no longer under the day‐to‐day control of Greeley, who was increasingly immersed in politics as a Liberal Republican opposed to both the Reconstruction policies of the Radical Republicans and the corruption of the Ulysses S. Grant administration. Nominated for president in 1872 by both the Liberal Republican and Democratic parties, he nevertheless lost to Grant by a lopsided margin and died a few weeks after the election.

The press reflected the pluralism of American society. Different churches and social movements had their own journals. A foreign‐language press served immigrants; the German press was especially strong. In 1828, the Cherokee Phoenix became the first Native American newspaper, published bilingually in English and Cherokee. The African‐American press began with Freedom's Journal (1827–1829) and the Colored American (1837–1841). Frederick Douglass launched the North Star in Rochester in 1847.

News‐gathering became the central function of the general‐interest newspaper, but political reporting was not well institutionalized. As late as 1846, only Baltimore and Washington, D.C., papers assigned special correspondents to cover Congress. Country weeklies—the predominant form of American journalism in an agricultural society—were local town boosters providing some national but little or no state and local political coverage. As politics heated up in the 1850s, however, more than fifty papers hired Washington correspondents. Most wrote for half a dozen or more papers at once and earned further salary as clerks for congressional committees or speechwriters for politicians.

The frequently strong connection between paper and party began to weaken after the Civil War for two reasons. First, newspapers became highly profitable businesses. Circulation leaped forward while the cost of production plummeted with wood pulp as a new source of paper and mechanical typesetting, a new labor‐saving device. Advertising revenue surpassed subscription fees as the primary source of income as the papers courted new audiences (particularly women).

Second, liberal reformers began to criticize party loyalty. They promoted new forms of electoral campaigning, urging “educational” campaigns with more pamphlets and fewer parades. Newspapers at the same time became more willing to take an independent stance. By 1890, a quarter of daily newspapers in northern states, where the reform movement was most advanced, claimed independence of party.

A key figure in developing a big‐business model of the newspaper was Joseph Pulitzer, an Austrian Jewish immigrant who became a reporter and then publisher and editor in St. Louis. He bought the failing New York World (circulation 15,000) in 1883. By 1886, he brought its circulation to 250,000. By 1895, the World, with 1,200 employees, was the largest paper in the country. Pulitzer's crusading journalism, intensified attention to local news, lavish use of illustration, and relatively simple language appealed to New York's thousands of immigrants.

If Pulitzer inaugurated the new mass journalism, his rival William Randolph Hearst made it notorious. Like Pulitzer, Hearst saw the press as both a political agency and a business. Taking over his father's San Francisco Examiner in 1887, he bought the New York Journal in 1895 and several Chicago dailies soon thereafter. In New York, he brought to the Journal pages of comics, sensational news coverage, a self‐promoting crusading spirit, and several hundred thousand readers. Battling for New York's mass readership, Hearst and Pulitzer pushed for a war with Spain over Cuba. Even so, the common view that yellow journalism “caused” the Spanish‐American War is dubious. Many other leading papers, including those with the greatest influence in elite circles, opposed American intervention.

While Pulitzer and Hearst competed for mass circulation, the Chattanooga publisher Adolph Ochs (1858–1935) in 1896 bought the languishing New York Times, with a circulation of 9,000 compared to the World’s 600,000 and the Journal's 430,000. In his inaugural declaration “to give the news impartially, without fear or favor,” Ochs set out to distinguish his paper from the yellow journals, to capture a high‐toned readership, and to set the standards of journalistic integrity.

Besides the general‐circulation papers, newspapers continued to flourish as agents of various special communities. The United States had about 800 non‐English‐language newspapers in 1884, 1,300 by 1917. Black dailies attained large circulations: 300,000 for the Pittsburgh Courier by the 1940s; 230,000 for the Chicago Defender by 1920, two‐thirds of it outside Chicago. The Defender was the first African‐American publication with a broad, national circulation. Editor Robert S. Abbott helped stimulate black migration north by writing about the opportunities for blacks in northern cities. After World War II, the black press declined as the mainstream press began to cover racial issues, the white‐run media began to hire black journalists, advertising support weakened, and a growing black middle class left the inner city.

A small‐town and rural press persisted and neighborhood and suburban newspapers sprang up, generally serving more as community cheerleaders than as community tribunes. Even establishment politics was of little account in the small‐town press. But in the metropolitan press, hard‐bitten reporters and hard‐hitting reporting became the cultural ideals. In leading cities, reporting became a full‐time occupation and reporters a self‐conscious community, with their own organizations and informal watering holes.

New reporting practices gave reporters greater autonomy. Conducting and printing interviews, all but unknown before the Civil War, became a routine practice. Standard news stories shifted from a chronological ordering of events to the “summary lead” that placed important aspects of the news first, implicitly designating reporters as legitimate interpreters of a complex world.

The rise of mass‐circulation monthly magazines with an appreciative, national middle‐class audience in the 1890s brought yet another sign of the reporter's authority: muckraking. Progressive Era practitioners of this new investigative journalism revealed illegal and unsavory practices of capital, labor, and state and local government. It was Theodore Roosevelt who, in a sizzling attack on their negativism, labeled them “muckrakers.”

Stimulated in part by muckraking attacks on business and in part by the general rationalization of corporate enterprise, public relations developed in the early twentieth century. Journalists grew self‐conscious about the manipulability of information in an age of public relations and, as they learned in World War I, an age of propaganda. One response was the signed political column that openly acknowledged its subjective viewpoint. Columnists became popular features in leading newspapers, available nationwide through syndication.

Journalists typically had no formal training. After World War II, however, journalism schools multiplied, developing on a large scale in the state universities. By the late twentieth century, more than half of the nation's journalists held degrees in journalism or communication.

During and after World War I, the government suppressed radical newspapers and German‐language newspapers. In 1925, in Gitlow v. United States, the Supreme Court upheld a conviction of radical pamphleteers but acknowledged for the first time that First Amendment guarantees of press freedom applied to the states under the Fourteenth Amendment. In Near v. Minnesota (1931), the High Court struck down a “gag law” that permitted the suppression of “malicious” and “scandalous” publications. The decision outlawed the prior restraint of publications and termed suppression a greater danger than journalistic irresponsibility.

Larger and larger corporate entities reaped the benefits of this enlarged press freedom. Chain or group newspaper ownership, begun around the turn of the century by E.W. Scripps, Hearst, and others, expanded. Hearst's empire, at its peak in 1935, included twenty‐six daily newspapers with a seventh of the nation's total circulation. By 1980, two‐thirds of one thousand seven hundred daily newspapers, commanding three‐fourths of total daily circulation, were group‐owned. City by city, newspaper competition dropped sharply; 181 cities had competing daily papers in 1940, 29 in 1986.

Broadcasting was a new influence in journalism. Radio became a news medium in the 1920s and a significant source of breaking news during World War II. But it never challenged the dominance of newspapers as television did. By 1963, polls found more Americans claiming to rely on television than on newspapers as their primary source of news. Watching the evening network news became in many homes a family ritual. Nothing established television's place more than John F. Kennedy's assassination. Few people learned of the assassination first from television, but by the evening of 22 November 1963, millions of people were glued to their sets. They saw, on live television, Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald; they watched the funeral procession, listening to the solemn beat of the drum.

TV coverage of the Vietnam War took on a symbolic centrality for both Washington elites and the public at large. Reporting in Vietnam, the media directly challenged the government. During the Lyndon B. Johnson presidency, the press drew attention to the “credibility gap”: official lies and half‐truths about the war. With the presidency of Richard M. Nixon, two events brought the press a new prominence. In 1971, the New York Times published the first installment of the “Pentagon Papers”, a classified Defense Department history of the Vietnam War secretly photocopied and released by a one‐time Pentagon insider, Daniel Ellsberg. When the Nixon administration obtained a court injunction preventing the Times from further publication, the Washington Post and then the Boston Globe, St. Louis Post‐Dispatch, and Chicago Tribune continued the series.

A second milestone for the press was Watergate, the collective term for a tangle of illegal activities by Nixon‐administration officials, and by the president himself. The uncovering of the scandal by Congress, the courts, and federal administrative agencies was initiated by the Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Investigative reporting was already expanding, thanks to the growing distrust of government in the Vietnam War years, but Watergate served as the symbolic capstone to this newly aggressive journalism.

TV news expanded in the 1970s. Sixty Minutes, an hour‐long program of investigative journalism that began in 1968, became the nation's most popular TV program. ABC began a late‐night news program in 1979 as a daily update on the Iranian hostage crisis. In 1980, this became Nightline, another long‐running and influential news program. In 1970, the television networks had no competition, but by 1990 more than half of American homes had cable systems, the networks' share of total television viewership had declined, and network investment in news shrank amid corporate buyouts and mergers. Cable's C‐SPAN (1979) and the Atlanta businessman Ted Turner's twenty‐four‐hour Cable News Network (CNN, 1980) were important additions to the national news diet.

In print journalism, nationally oriented newspapers—notably the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post, joined in 1982 by USA Today —expanded their national reach. Metropolitan dailies lost readership, partly from TV's competition, partly from suburbanization that meant increasing numbers of people who worked in cities did not live, vote, or pay taxes in them.

As the twentieth century ended, journalism became a target for criticism from insiders and outsiders. Women and minority groups mounted challenges to media stereotyping and media hiring practices. Before the 1960s, for instance, women journalists typically wrote exclusively about fashion and society; the National Press Club admitted women only in 1971. But changes were afoot. Whereas 80 percent of journalists were male in 1971, only 66 percent were by 1982 (the figure remained the same ten years later). Whereas about 4 percent of journalists were African American, Asian American, or Hispanic in 1982, the figure was 7 percent in 1992.

Conservative research institutes and think tanks, meanwhile, prominently criticized “liberal bias” in the press. Surveys confirmed that journalists for national news outlets (but not for “the press” at large) were more liberal than the general population. At the same time, many observers concluded that journalists' possible political bias was a lesser problem than their “professional” and commercial bias toward stories of conflict and sensation. News coverage of presidential candidates of both parties grew increasingly negative after 1980. In the 1990s, a “public journalism” or “civic journalism” movement emerged that called on the industry to reassess professional values and rededicate itself to the “public good.” Meanwhile, technological change in the newsroom led to a new emphasis on computer‐assisted reporting and a new blending of media forms, with one reporter preparing the same story in print, on‐line, and on camera for a newspaper's cable station.
See also Censorship; Political Parties; Printing and Publishing; Public Opinion; Sedition; Steam Power; Urbanization; Zenger Trial.

Bibliography

Frank Luther Mott , American Journalism: A History, 1690–1960, 3d ed., 1962.
George Juergens , Joseph Pulitzer and the New York World, 1966.
Michael Schudson , Discovering the News, 1978.
Sally Miller , The Ethnic Press in the United States, 1987.
Donald Ritchie , The Press Gallery, 1991.
James Baughman , The Republic of Mass Culture, 1992.
Charles E. Clark , The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo‐American Culture, 1665–1740, 1994.
Michael Schudson , The Power of News, 1995.
David H. Weaver and and G. Cleveland Wilhoit , The American Journalist in the 1990s, 1996.

Michael S. Schudson