These are the notes I presently have for another lecture I am planning on giving my Library and Information Science 101 students in the fall. Feedback is welcome, as always.
The first newspapers in the US were owned and run by political parties. If you had one set of beliefs, you knew where to get your news, and your idiot neighbor, having the other set of beliefs, knew where to get his news too. This was a pretty cozy arrangement for all involved (except for maybe the readers, which is something we will talk about a little later) and in fact, Jeffrey Pasley suggests in "THE TYRANNY OF PRINTERS": Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic that Thomas Jefferson won the election of 1800 mostly because a network of republican newspapers had sprung up in the 1790s to sway public opinion for him. He goes on to suggest that the political parties were too new and unestablished in America to support themselves and that often, it was the editors of newspapers whose political opinions and editorializing drove the social debate.
There are, of course, problems with that model, one of which being that objectivity suffers. What is objectivity? It’s an important word for journalism. It refers to the condition of being fair, disinterested, unbiased, factual, and non-partisan. Disinterested doesn’t mean you don’t care, it just means that you are more interested in the facts and objective truth than you are in taking sides. Non-partisan means you don’t have a vested interest in a political party or political ideology that could taint your presentation of the facts. Unbiased means that you do not show prejudice against one side or the other. So a lot is packed into the idea of objectivity.
Another problem is that if thinking is limited to only what fits into the agendas of our two political parties, then there are, quite simply, a whole lot of ideas that are removed from the arena of the debate before they even get a chance to be heard. We will talk a bit more about this idea later when we get into Noam Chomsky and the idea of “marginalized thought” and “manufactured consent.” Those are pretty heavy ideas, so we will only touch on them.
During the American Civil War, the newspaper industry changed considerably. For starters, there was the onset of mass production. It became easy to print a gazillion copies of an issue, but that meant you had to SELL a gazillion copies to make it worthwhile. Fortunately for them, newspapers learned that relevancy sold papers…and nothing was more locally relevant than battle news from the war. Another important innovation at this time was the telegraph. It allowed for near instantaneous transmission of news and photos from the front lines. Reporters were embedded with the troops and could readily send “local interest stories” to different communities: “Oh noez, Johnny Reb from Mayberry got hit by a cannonball!” Of course, this was expensive…so not only did you have to sell a bunch of papers to make it work, you also had to bring in advertisers to help fund you. Advertisers naturally had an impact on content and opinion.
Near the turn of the 20th century, a new model was established for newspapers by Harrison Gray Otis in Los Angeles. He left school pretty early in life, was decorated for service on the Union side of the Civil War, took some business courses, made some political connections and then took a government appointment in LA, which was at the time a bunch of dirt and some stucco buildings. He used his money to buy a portion of the LA Daily Times and subsequently shortened the name to the LA Times, the name it still bears today. One of his business partners left the Times and started the LA Tribune. The two papers were philosophically at odds with one another, with Otis being staunchly anti-labor and conservative and the Tribune espousing more liberal political views. The two warred along for quite some time until Harry Chandler took a part-ownership interest in the times and, having enough money to do so, bought the printing plant that the Tribune used, thus leaving them with no way to produce newspapers anymore. LA became a one paper town again. With its position secured, Gray used the Times to booster the city, to influence commerce and development, to lure people into the new town, and to sing the praises of the marvelous real estate to be had there…real estate in which he was heavily invested. Thus, he came to LA practically penniless, built a press that was at least as much about advancing his own political and economic interests as it was informing and educating the public about the vital matters of the day. It should not be a surprise that 35 years later Otis died a multimillionaire (in today’s money a billionaire). That newspapers could be used not just to report the news or bias the news but to actually create the news seems like sort of a novel concept…but we will see that mass media often do that today.
In fact, it didn’t take too long for that model to spread. In 1912, Will Irwin wrote a series for Collier’s Weekly called “The American Newspaper,” in which he called out the newspaper industry for disguising ads as stories, publishing editorials favorable to major advertisers and other problems in a seemingly incestuous relationship between newspapers, advertisers, and industry.
But if the complaint against newspapers is that they exist only to serve industry, there was another side of the coin. Muckraking was used to refer to investigative journalists…between, say, late 1800s and early 1900s, who investigated and published “watchdog” reports that exposed corrupt practices of industry or government in an attempt to promote social reform and justice. This was a phenomenon mostly noted in the NYT and on the east coast. Some examples are Julius Chambers, who went undercover in a mental hospital to report on the abuse of patients. After his report, a number of patients were forced to be released because they were not mentally ill and were being held against their will. Ida B Wells wrote influential pieces about racism and lynching in Memphis. Her writing arguably helped lay the foundation for the civil rights movement to come 60 years later.
During the time of muckraking, the powers that be—captains of industry, political leaders—were more than a little concerned about the effect of muckraking on the general population. They saw that widespread reporting of poor living conditions, injustice, and unfair treatment of the disenfranchised could cause backlash, disorder, and general unruliness. There is nothing the ruling elites want more than social order. When there is social order, the peasants don’t storm the Bastille.
At the same time, there were breakthroughs in psychology that led to new understandings of our motivations. Turned out that we are illogical, irrational, more likely to be motivated by emotion than hard facts. This is partly why muckraking had worked…and it led to a practice called yellow journalism—using sensationalism and loose reliance on facts to sell papers. But what people were ALSO figuring out is that we are easily manipulated by language and symbols. Edward Bernays, who was actually Sigmund Freud’s American nephew, by the way, penned a book in 1928 called Propaganda. In it he wrote, “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”
With this understanding, the field of Public Relations was born. Richard Eweth wrote that “PR could be used to analyse and manage public opinion. The ‘social engineers’ by and large unseen and unknown could “identify and master techniques of communication that would have the most compelling effect on public attitudes and thinking.”
Certainly, the muckrakers used compelling language and emotional arguments, but their aim was to illuminate the lousy conditions of the down-. They showed concern for the less fortunate and wanted to call out the forces that made their lives so hard. They tried to improve society, and that is at the heart of what is known as the “social responsibility theory of media.” The other side of that is, of course, that sensationalism sells papers. So don’t be surprised by the tear-jerking story on the front cover. If you ever feel like you are under attack from all sides, you know, there is a reason.
Another example of muckraking was Robert Abbott, who started the Chicago Defender in 1905. We will watch a documentary about that next class period and learn more about it. The Defender reported frankly and unabashedly about the problems facing the African American community—including lynching, racism, unemployment, and everything else. The newspaper quickly gained circulation in cities outside of Chicago and was a major player in the great migration, in which African Americans left southern cities and improved their stations in life by moving north.
If I had to sum up these competing forces—I would say that there is a mechanized, industrial, profit-driven camp on one side of America, while on the other side there is a spiritual, humanist, emotional camp. I have my own biases and am firmly entrenched in one of those sides. However, I also acknowledge that it takes both sides to make things work. I believe the trick is establishing the proper balance between the two. Regrettably, modern media seems to be especially infatuated with celebrity gossip, local crime stories, and industry PR, so there is not much news in our news.
Discussion Questions:
If a news source is not objective, what happens?
We saw that Otis recruited people to live in LA…and if Abott was likewise compelling African Americans to move north…many of them relocating to Chicago, how are they different from one another?
How did the introduction of advertising revenue affected the news?