Social media Paper 350-700 words. Due today @7PM Eastern Time

Journalist E-mail

· Resource: Read Chapter 7 and 13 of Media and Culture.

· Your paper is 350 to 700 words in length.

· The paper includes the following:

 Your responsibility as a journalist to provide fair, honest, and balanced coverage.

· How you struggled with whether your story was socially rresponsible

 Assessing the credibility of the political Internet sites you visited for your research (consider Drudge Report, Daily Kos, Politico, Colbert Nation, The Hill, etc.).

· Your awareness of how political news reporting might influence public opinion and American values.

· The content is comprehensive, accurate, and persuasive

· The paper develops a central theme or idea directed toward the appropriate audience.

· The paper links theory to relevant examples and the vocabulary of the theory is correctly used.

· The introduction provides sufficient background on the topic and previews major points.

· Conclusion is logical, flows from the body of the paper, and reviews major points.

· Paragraph transitions are present, logical, and maintain the flow throughout the paper.

· The tone is appropriate to the content and assignment.

· Please comply with the rules of grammar (correct spelling, punctuation, sentences are clear, complete, and concise).

· Sentence transitions are present and maintain the flow of thought.

· The paper includes tables and graphs, headings, and title page.

· Major points are stated clearly and supported with examples.

· The paper MUST have APA (citations-in the body and references-at the bottom) style of formatting.

· Post your paper as Microsoft Word ( or x) document attachment only.

CHAPTER 7 ○ NEWSPAPERS��219

WORDS AND PICTURES

221
The Evolution of
American Newspapers

Competing Models

of Modern Print
Journalism

The Business and
Ownership of
Newspapers

243
Challenges Facing
Newspapers Today

Newspapers and
Democracy

Newspapers:
The Rise and Decline of
Modern Journalism

Much of the recent worry over and sentiment
about the struggling newspaper industry is
reflected in the name of the Web site “News-
paper Death Watch,” which lists newspapers
that have folded since the site went up in 2007
(newspaperdeathwatch.com). Among them
are the Tucson Citizen, Rocky Mountain News,
Cincinnati Post, Union City Register-Tribune,
Honolulu Advertiser, and Albuquerque Tribune.
The site also lists hybrids—daily newspapers
that publish a print version only a few days a
week—and those that have converted to online
editions only. Among hybrids and online-only
papers are the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, De-
troit News, Detroit Free Press, Christian Sci-
ence Monitor, Ann Arbor News, and Flint Journal
(Michigan). Not since the recording industry in
the 1930s (during the Great Depression, when
few people could afford to buy records) or radio
in the 1950s (when television “stole” radio’s ads
and programs) have we seen a mass medium in
such a crisis.

220��WORDS AND PICTURES

NEWSPAPERS

We should not be surprised. We have
known for years that television and cable
delivered news cheaply and more imme-
diately than printed newspapers. We have
known that the Internet, which solved the
space limitations of newspapers, allowed
papers to compete with television for
breaking news and provided a cheaper al-
ternative to expensive newsprint. Still, few
people thought that newspapers would
decline this rapidly as the main vehicle for
carrying news. So what happened?

Newspapers were overwhelmed by two
changes that collided with the 2008–10
economic recession. First, new genera-
tions of readers grew up not on their local
paper’s comic strips and sports sections,
but on cable TV and the Internet. By
2009, more than 65 percent of the adult
population over age sixty-five reported
reading a newspaper the previous day,
but less than 30 percent of young people
between eighteen and thirty-five did the
same. Second, the advertising climate
cooled. Newspapers lost their strong grip
on classified ads with the emergence of
mostly free Web sites like craigslist and
eBay. Revenue from such ads peaked in
2000, with newspapers earning a total
of $19 billion from classifieds. By 2009,
newspapers earned only $6 billion from
classified ads. The recent economic
recession and housing crisis substantially
limited traditional retail ads, especially
from department stores, realtors, and car
dealers (some of which were driven out of
business by the bankruptcies of GM and
Chrysler in 2009). Newspaper advertis-
ing overall spiked in 2005 at $49 billion
in earnings, but by 2009 that figure was
cut almost in half to just $27.6 billion.1
With fewer advertisers, newspapers laid
off workers, shrank their size, changed
formats, or declared bankruptcy.

In addition, many newspaper owners like
the Tribune Company, which declared
bankruptcy in 2008, had become over-
leveraged. That is, many media conglom-
erates borrowed lots of money in the
1990s to buy more media companies
and newspapers to expand their busi-
nesses and profits. They used some of
the borrowed money to fund these pur-
chases, and some they invested. Then
they used the interest from their invest-
ments, plus profits from ad revenue, to
pay their bank and loan debt. But when
advertising tanked and their investments
began losing money in fall 2008 (as the
stock market crashed), many big media
companies became incapable of paying
their debts (�just like bankrupt and over-
extended home owners who borrowed
too much money and could not keep up
expensive house payments—often after
they lost their jobs). To raise capital,
reorganize their debt, and avoid bank-
ruptcy, media companies had to lay off
reporters and sell valuable assets.

So what will happen to newspapers? Just
as the music and radio industries adapted
and survived, newspapers will survive,
too—likely by delivering a print version
every few days or going online only. In this
chapter, we examine the rise and fall of
newspapers in the United States and dis-
cuss what the future may hold for them.

“We will stop printing the
New York Times sometime
in the future, date TBD.”
ARTHUR SULZBERGER, NEW YORK
TIMES PUBLISHER, 20

CHAPTER 7 ○ NEWSPAPERS��221

DESPITE THEIR CURRENT PREDICAMENTS, newspapers and their online offspring
play many roles in contemporary culture. As chroniclers of daily life, newspapers both inform

and entertain. By reporting on scientific, technological, and medical issues, newspapers

disseminate specialized knowledge to the public. In reviews of films, concerts, and plays, they

shape cultural trends. Opinion pages trigger public debates and offer differing points of view.

Columnists provide everything from advice on raising children to opinions on the U.S. role as an

economic and military superpower. Newspapers help readers make choices about everything

from what kind of food to eat to what kind of leaders to elect.

Despite the importance of newspapers in daily life, in today’s digital age the industry

is losing both papers and readers. Newspapers have lost their near monopoly on classified

advertising, much of which has shifted to free Web sites like eBay, monster.com, and craigslist.

According to the Newspaper Association of America, in 2009 total newspaper ad revenues

fell 27 percent. This was on top of the 17.7 percent decline in advertising in 2008. Despite a

20 percent rise in online ad sales in 2007, the year 2009 saw an 11 percent decrease in online

ads—which usually account for about 10 percent of a newspaper’s revenue. Because of these

declines, many investors in publicly held newspapers don’t believe print papers have much

of a future. The loss of papers, readers, advertising, and investor confidence raises significant

concerns in a nation where daily news has historically functioned to “speak truth to power” by

holding elected officials responsible and acting as a watchdog for democratic life.2

In this chapter, we examine the cultural, social, and economic impact of newspapers. We will:

• Trace the history of newspapers through a number of influential periods and styles.

• Explore the early political-commercial press, the penny press, and yellow journalism.

• Examine the modern era through the influence of the New York Times and journalism’s

embrace of objectivity.

• Look at interpretive journalism in the 1920s and 1930s and the revival of literary journal-

ism in the 1960s.

• Review issues of newspaper ownership, new technologies, citizen journalism, declining

revenue, and the crucial role of newspapers in our democracy.

As you read this chapter, think about your own early experiences with newspapers and the

impact they have had on you and your family. Did you read certain sections of the paper, like

sports or comics? What do you remember from your childhood about your parents’ reading hab-

its? What are your own newspaper reading habits today? How often do you actually hold a news-

paper? How often do you get your news online? For more questions to help you think through

the role of newspapers in our lives, see “Questioning the Media” in the Chapter Review.

The idea of news is as old as language itself. The earliest news was passed along orally from fam-

ily to family, from tribe to tribe, by community leaders and oral historians. The earliest known

written news account, or news sheet, Acta Diurna (Latin for “daily events”), was developed by

Julius Caesar and posted in public spaces and on buildings in Rome in 59 B.C.E. Even in its oral
and early written stages, news informed people on the state of their relations with neighboring

tribes and towns. The development of the printing press in the fifteenth century greatly acceler-

ated a society’s ability to send and receive information. Throughout history, news has satisfied

our need to know things we cannot experience personally. Newspapers today continue to docu-

ment daily life and bear witness to both ordinary and extraordinary events.

The Evolution of
American Newspapers

“There’s almost no
media experience
sweeter . . . than
poring over a good
newspaper. In the
quiet morning, with
a cup of coffee—so
long as you haven’t
turned on the TV,
listened to the
radio, or checked
in online—it’s
as comfortable
and personal as
information gets.”

JON KATZ, WIRED,
1994

“Oral news systems
must have arrived
early in the devel-
opment of lan-
guage, some tens
or even hundreds
of thousands of
years ago. . . . �And
the dissemination
of news accomp-
lishes some of the
basic purposes
of language:
informing others,
entertaining
others, protecting
the tribe.”

MITCHELL STEPHENS,
A HISTORY OF NEWS,
198

222��WORDS AND PICTURES

NEWSPAPERS

Colonial Newspapers and the Partisan Press
The novelty and entrepreneurial stages of print media development first happened in Europe

with the rise of the printing press. In North America, the first newspaper, Publick Occurrences,

Both Foreign and Domestick, was published on September 25, 1690, by Boston printer Benjamin

Harris. The colonial government objected to Harris’s negative tone regarding British rule, and

local ministers were offended by his published report that the king of France had an affair with

his son’s wife. The newspaper was banned after one issue.

In 1704, the first regularly published newspaper appeared in the American colonies—the

Boston News-Letter, published by John Campbell. Considered dull, it reported on events that

had taken place in Europe months earlier. Because European news took weeks to travel by ship,

these early colonial papers were not very timely. In their more spirited sections, however, the

papers did report local illnesses, public floggings, and even suicides. In 1721, also in Boston,

James Franklin, the older brother of Benjamin Franklin, started the New England Courant. The

Courant established a tradition of running stories that interested ordinary readers rather than

printing articles that appealed primarily to business and colonial leaders. In 1729, Benjamin

Franklin, at age twenty-four, took over the Pennsylvania Gazette and created, according to histo-

rians, the best of the colonial papers. Although a number of colonial papers operated solely on

subsidies from political parties, the Gazette also made money by advertising products.

Another important colonial paper, the New-York Weekly Journal, appeared in 1733. John Peter

Zenger had been installed as the printer of the Journal by the Popular Party, a political group

that opposed British rule and ran articles that criticized the royal governor of New York. After a

Popular Party judge was dismissed from office, the Journal escalated its attack on the governor.

When Zenger shielded the writers of the critical articles, he was arrested in 1734 for seditious libel—

defaming a public official’s character in print. Championed by famed Philadelphia lawyer Andrew

Hamilton, Zenger ultimately won his case in 1735. A sympathetic jury, in revolt against the colonial

government, decided that newspapers had the right to criticize government leaders as long as the

reports were true. After the Zenger case, the British never prosecuted another colonial printer.

Newspapers: The Rise and Decline of Modern Journalism

First Native
American
Newspaper
The Cherokee
Phoenix appears in
Georgia in 1828,
giving a voice to
tribal concerns as
settlers encroach
and move west
(p. 238).

Yellow Journalism
Joseph Pulitzer buys
the New York World
in 1883; William
Randolph Hearst
buys the New York
Journal in 1895
and battles Pulitzer
during the heyday of
the yellow journalism
era (pp. 225–227).

1650 1800 1850

Penny Press
Printer Benjamin Day
founds the New York
Sun in 1833 and sets
the price at one cent,
helping usher in the
penny press era and
news for the working
and emerging middle
class (p. 224).

First Precedent for Libel
and Press Freedom
In 1734, printer John
Peter Zenger is arrested
for seditious libel; jury
rules in Zenger’s favor
in 1735—establishing
freedom of the press
and newspapers’ right
to criticize government
(p. 222).

First Colonial
Newspaper
In 1690, Boston
printer Benjamin
Harris publishes the
first North American
newspaper—Publick
Occurrences,
Both Foreign and
Domestick (p. 222).

First African
American Newspaper
Freedom’s Journal
begins short-lived
operation in 1827,
establishing a tradition
of newspapers speak-
ing out against racism
(p. 236).

CHAPTER 7 ○ NEWSPAPERS��223

The Zenger decision would later provide a key

foundation—the right of a democratic press to

criticize public officials—for the First Amend-

ment to the Constitution, adopted as part of

the Bill of Rights in 1791. (See Chapter 15 for

more on the First Amendment.)

By 1765, about thirty newspapers oper-

ated in the American colonies, with the first

daily paper beginning in 1784. Newspapers

were of two general types: political or com-

mercial. Their development was shaped in

large part by social, cultural, and political

responses to British rule and by its even-

tual overthrow. The gradual rise of politi-

cal parties and the spread of commerce

also influenced the development of early

papers. Although the political and commer-

cial papers carried both party news and

business news, they had different agendas.

Political papers, known as the partisan
press, generally pushed the plan of the par-
ticular political group that subsidized the

paper. The commercial press, by contrast,

served business leaders, who were interested in economic issues. Both types of journalism left a

legacy. The partisan press gave us the editorial pages, while the early commercial press was the

forerunner of the business section.

From the early 1700s to the early 1800s, even the largest of these papers rarely reached a

circulation of fifteen hundred. Readership was primarily confined to educated or wealthy men

Modern Journalism
Adolph Ochs buys the
New York Times in
1896, transforming
it into “the paper of
record” and jump-
starting modern
“objective” journalism
(p. 228).

Watergate
Investigative reporting
by Bob Woodward
and Carl Bernstein
of the Washington
Post uncovers
the Watergate
scandal and leads
to the resignation of
President Richard
Nixon in 1974
(p. 232).

First Online Paper
Ohio’s Columbus
Dispatch in 1980
becomes the first
newspaper to go
online (p. 232).

Dominance of
Chains
Led by Gannett, the
Top 10 newspaper
chains by 2001
control more than
one-half of the
nation’s total daily
newspaper circula-
tion (p. 242).

Newspapers
in Peril
In 2009, a number
of daily newspapers
either close, stop
publishing daily edi-
tions, or go online
only (p. 241).

First U.S.–Based
Spanish Paper
New York’s EI
Diario–La Prensa
is founded in 1913
to serve Spanish-
language readers
(p. 237).

Catholic Worker
In 1933, Dorothy
Day cofounds
a religious
organization; its
radical monthly
paper, the Catholic
Worker, opposes
war and supports
social reforms
(p. 240).

First Underground
Paper
In 1955, the
Village Voice
begins operating in
Greenwich Village
(p. 239).

Paywalls
By 2010,
newspapers begin
charging readers
for access to all or
part of their Web
sites (p. 247).

Postmodern News
In 1982, the
Gannett chain
launches USA
Today, ushering
in the postmodern
era in news
with the first
paper modeled
on television
(pp. 232–233).

1900 1950 2000 2050

COLONIAL NEWSPAPERS
During the colonial period,
New York printer John Peter
Zenger was arrested for
libel. He eventually won his
case, which established
the precedent that today
allows U.S. journalists and
citizens to criticize public
officials. In this 1734 issue,
Zenger’s New-York Weekly
Journal reported his own
arrest and the burning of the
paper by the city’s “Common
Hangman.”

224��WORDS AND PICTURES

NEWSPAPERS

who controlled local politics and commerce. During this time, though, a few pioneering women

operated newspapers, including Elizabeth Timothy, the first American woman newspaper

publisher (and mother of eight children). After her husband died of smallpox in 1738, Timothy

took over the South Carolina Gazette, established in 1734 by Benjamin Franklin and the Timothy

family. Also during this period, Anna Maul Zenger ran the New-York Weekly Journal throughout

her husband’s trial and after his death in 1746.3

The Penny Press Era: Newspapers Become Mass Media
By the late 1820s, the average newspaper cost six cents a copy and was sold through yearly sub-

scriptions priced at ten to twelve dollars. Because that price was more than a week’s salary for

most skilled workers, newspaper readers were mostly affluent. By the 1830s, however, the Industri-

al Revolution made possible the replacement of expensive handmade paper with cheaper machine-

made paper. During this time, the rise of the middle class spurred the growth of literacy, setting the

stage for a more popular and inclusive press. In addition, breakthroughs in technology, particularly

steam-powered presses replacing mechanical presses, permitted publishers to produce as many as

four thousand newspapers an hour, which lowered the cost of newspapers. Penny papers soon
began competing with six-cent papers. Though subscriptions remained the preferred sales tool of

many penny papers, they began relying increasingly on daily street sales of individual copies.

Day and the New York Sun
In 1833, printer Benjamin Day founded the New York Sun. Day set the price at one penny and sold

no subscriptions. The Sun—whose slogan was “It shines for all”—highlighted local events, scandals,

and police reports. It also ran serialized stories, making legends of frontiersmen Davy Crockett

and Daniel Boone and blazing the trail for the media’s enthusiasm for celebrity news. Like today’s

supermarket tabloids, the Sun fabricated stories, including the infamous moon hoax, which

reported “scientific” evidence of life on the moon. Within six months, the Sun’s lower price had

generated a circulation of eight thousand, twice that of its nearest New York competitor.

The Sun’s success initiated a wave of penny papers that favored human-interest stories:
news accounts that focus on the daily trials and triumphs of the human condition, often featuring

ordinary individuals facing extraordinary challenges. These kinds of stories reveal journalism’s ties

to literary traditions, such as the archetypal conflicts between good and evil, or between individu-

als and institutions. Today, this can be found in everyday feature stories that chronicle the lives of

remarkable people or in crime news that details the daily work of police and the misadventures of

criminals. As in the nineteenth century, crime stories remain popular and widely read.

Bennett and the New York Morning Herald
The penny press era also featured James Gordon Bennett’s New York Morning Herald, founded in

1835. Bennett, considered the first U.S. press baron, freed his newspaper from political influence.

He established an independent paper serving middle- and working-class readers as well as his own

business ambitions. The Herald carried political essays and news about scandals, business stories,

a letters section, fashion notes, moral reflections, religious news, society gossip, colloquial tales

and jokes, sports stories, and, later, reports from the Civil War. In addition, Bennett’s paper spon-

sored balloon races, financed safaris, and overplayed crime stories. Charles Dickens, after return-

ing to Britain from his first visit to America in the early 1840s, used the Herald as a model for the

sleazy Rowdy Journal, the fictional newspaper in his novel Martin Chuzzlewit. By 1860, the Herald

reached nearly eighty thousand readers, making it the world’s largest daily paper at the time.

Changing Economics and the Founding of the Associated Press
The penny papers were innovative. For example, they were the first to assign reporters to cover

crime, and readers enthusiastically embraced the reporting of local news and crime. By gradually

CHAPTER 7 ○ NEWSPAPERS��225

separating daily front-page reporting from overt political viewpoints on an editorial page, penny

papers shifted their economic base from political parties to the market—to advertising revenue,

classified ads, and street sales. Although many partisan papers had taken a moral stand against

advertising some controversial products and “services”—such as medical “miracle” cures, abor-

tionists, and especially the slave trade—the penny press became more neutral toward advertis-

ers and printed virtually any ad. In fact, many penny papers regarded advertising as consumer

news. The rise in ad revenues and circulation accelerated the growth of the newspaper industry.

In 1830, 650 weekly and 65 daily papers operated in the United States, reaching a circulation of

80,000. By 1840, a total of 1,140 weeklies and 140 dailies attracted more than 300,000 readers.

In 1848, six New York newspapers formed a cooperative arrangement and founded the

Associated Press (AP), the first major news wire service. Wire services began as commercial or-
ganizations that relayed news stories and information around the country and the world using

telegraph lines and, later, radio waves and digital transmissions. In the case of the AP, the New

York papers provided access to both their own stories and those from other newspapers. In the

1850s, papers started sending reporters to cover Washington, D.C.; and in the early 1860s more

than a hundred reporters from northern papers went south to cover the Civil War, relaying their

reports back to their home papers via telegraph and wire services. The news wire companies

enabled news to travel rapidly from coast to coast and set the stage for modern journalism.

The marketing of news as a product and the use of modern technology to dramatically cut

costs gradually elevated newspapers from an entrepreneurial stage to the status of a mass me-

dium. By adapting news content, penny papers captured the middle- and working-class readers

who could now afford the paper and also had more leisure time to read it. As newspapers sought

to sustain their mass appeal, news and “factual” reports about crimes and other items of human

interest eventually superseded the importance of partisan articles about politics and commerce.

The Age of Yellow Journalism: Sensationalism and Investigation
The rise of competitive dailies and the penny press triggered the next significant period in

American journalism. In the late 1800s, yellow journalism emphasized profitable papers that
carried exciting human-interest stories, crime news, large headlines, and more readable copy.

NEWSBOYS sold Hearst
and Pulitzer papers on the
streets of New York in the
1890s. With more than a
dozen dailies competing,
street tactics were ferocious,
and publishers often made
young “newsies” buy the
papers they could not sell.

226��WORDS AND PICTURES

NEWSPAPERS

Generally regarded as sensationalistic and the direct forerunner of today’s tabloid papers, reality

TV, and celebrity-centered shows like Access Hollywood, yellow journalism featured two major

characteristics. First were the overly dramatic—or sensational—stories about crimes, celebrities,

disasters, scandals, and intrigue. Second, and sometimes forgotten, are the legacy and roots that

the yellow press provided for investigative journalism: news reports that hunt out and expose
corruption, particularly in business and government. Reporting increasingly became a crusading

force for common people, with the press assuming a watchdog role on their behalf.

During this period, a newspaper circulation war pitted Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World

against William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. A key player in the war was the first popu-

lar cartoon strip, The Yellow Kid, created in 1895 by artist R. F. Outcault, who once worked for

Thomas Edison. The phrase yellow journalism has since become associated with the cartoon

strip, which was shuttled back and forth between the Hearst and Pulitzer papers during their

furious battle for readers in the mid to late 1890s.

Pulitzer and the New York World
Joseph Pulitzer, a Jewish-Hungarian immigrant, began his career in newspaper publishing in the

early 1870s as part owner of the St. Louis Post. He then bought the bankrupt St. Louis Dispatch for

$2,500 at an auction in 1878 and merged it with the Post. The Post-Dispatch became known for sto-

ries that highlighted “sex and sin” (“A Denver Maiden Taken from Disreputable House”) and satires

of the upper class (“St. Louis Swells”). Pulitzer also viewed the Post-Dispatch as a “national con-

science” that promoted the public good. He carried on the legacies of James Gordon Bennett: mak-

ing money and developing a “free and impartial” paper that would “serve no party but the people.”

Within five years, the Post-Dispatch became one of the most influential newspapers in the Midwest.

In 1883, Pulitzer bought the New York World for $346,000. He encouraged plain writing and

the inclusion of maps and illustrations to help immigrant and working-class readers understand

the written text. In addition to running sensational stories on crime and sex, Pulitzer instituted

advice columns and women’s pages. Like Bennett, Pulitzer treated advertising as a kind of news

that displayed consumer products for readers. In fact, department stores became major advertis-

ers during this period. This development contributed directly to the expansion of consumer cul-

ture and indirectly to the acknowledgment of women as newspaper readers. Eventually (because

of pioneers like Nellie Bly—see Chapter 13), newspapers began employing women as reporters.

YELLOW JOURNALISM
Generally considered
America’s first comic-strip
character, the Yellow Kid was
created in the mid-1890s by
cartoonist Richard Outcault.
The cartoon was so popular
that newspaper barons
Joseph Pulitzer and William
Randolph Hearst fought over
Outcault’s services, giving
yellow journalism its name.

“There is room in
this great and
growing city for a
journal that is not
only cheap but
bright, not only
bright but large . . .
that will expose all
fraud and sham,
fight all public
evils and abuses—
that will serve
and battle for the
people.”

JOSEPH PULITZER,
PUBLISHER, NEW YORK
WORLD, 1883

CHAPTER 7 ○ NEWSPAPERS��227

The World reflected the contradictory spirit of the yellow press. It crusaded for im-

proved urban housing, better conditions for women, and equitable labor laws. It cam-

paigned against monopoly practices by AT&T, Standard Oil, and Equitable Insurance. Such

popular crusades helped lay the groundwork for tightening federal antitrust laws in the early

1910s. At the same time, Pulitzer’s paper manufactured news events and staged stunts, such

as sending star reporter Nellie Bly around the world in seventy-two days to beat the fictional

“record” in the popular 1873 Jules Verne novel Around the World in Eighty Days. By 1887, the

World’s Sunday circulation had soared to more than 250,000, the largest anywhere.

Pulitzer created a lasting legacy by leaving $2 million to start the graduate school of

journalism at Columbia University in 1912. In 1917, part of Pulitzer’s Columbia endowment

established the Pulitzer Prizes, the prestigious awards given each year for achievements in

journalism, literature, drama, and music.

Hearst and the New York Journal
The World faced its fiercest competition when William Randolph Hearst bought the New

York Journal (a penny paper founded by Pulitzer’s brother Albert). Before moving to New

York, the twenty-four-year-old Hearst took control of the San Francisco Examiner when

his father, George Hearst, was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1887 (the younger Hearst had

recently been expelled from Harvard for playing a practical joke on his professors). In

1895, with an inheritance from his father, Hearst bought the ailing Journal and then raided

Joseph Pulitzer’s paper for editors, writers, and cartoonists.

Taking his cue from Bennett and Pulitzer, Hearst focused on lurid, sensational stories and

appealed to immigrant readers by using large headlines and bold layout designs. To boost cir-

culation, the Journal invented interviews, faked pictures, and encouraged conflicts that might

result in a story. One tabloid account describes “tales about two-headed virgins” and “prehis-

toric creatures roaming the plains of Wyoming.”4 In promoting journalism as mere dramatic

storytelling, Hearst reportedly said, “The modern editor of the popular journal does not care

for facts. The editor wants novelty. The editor has no objection to facts if they are also novel.

But he would prefer a novelty that is not a fact to a fact that is not a novelty.”

Hearst is remembered as an unscrupulous publisher who once hired gangsters to distribute

his newspapers. He was also, however, considered a champion of the underdog, and his paper’s

readership soared among the working and middle classes. In 1896, the Journal’s daily circulation

reached 450,000, and by 1897 the Sunday edition of the paper rivaled the 600,000 circulation

of the World. By the 1930s, Hearst’s holdings included more than forty daily and Sunday papers,

thirteen magazines (including Good Housekeeping and Cosmopolitan), eight radio stations, and

two film companies. In addition, he controlled King Features Syndicate, which sold and distrib-

uted articles, comics, and features to many of the nation’s dailies. Hearst, the model for Charles

Foster Kane, the ruthless publisher in Orson Welles’s classic 1940 film Citizen Kane, operated the

largest media business in the world—the News Corp. of its day.

THE PENNY PRESS
The World (top) and the New
York Journal (bottom) cover
the same story in May 1898.

The early commercial and partisan presses were, to some extent, covering important events

impartially. These papers often carried verbatim reports of presidential addresses and murder

trials, or the annual statements of the U.S. Treasury. In the late 1800s, as newspapers pushed for

greater circulation, newspaper reporting changed. Two distinct types of journalism emerged:

Competing Models of
Modern Print Journalism

228��WORDS AND PICTURES

NEWSPAPERS

the story-driven model, dramatizing important events and used by the penny papers and the

yellow press; and the “just the facts” model, an approach that appeared to package information

more impartially and that the six-cent papers favored.6 Underpinning these efforts is the ques-

tion of whether, in journalism, there is an ideal, attainable objective model or whether the quest

to be objective actually conflicts with journalists’ traditional role of raising important issues

about potential abuses of power in a democratic society.

“Objectivity” in Modern Journalism
As the consumer marketplace expanded during the Industrial Revolution, facts and news

became marketable products. Throughout the mid-1800s, the more a newspaper appeared not

to take sides on its front pages, the more its readership base grew (although editorial pages were

still often partisan). In addition, wire service organizations were serving a variety of newspaper

clients in different regions of the country. To satisfy all their clients and the wide range of politi-

cal views, newspapers began to look more impartial.

Ochs and the New York Times
The ideal of an impartial, or purely informational, news model was championed by Adolph

Ochs, who bought the New York Times in 1896. The son of immigrant German Jews, Ochs grew

up in Ohio and Tennessee, where at age twenty-one he took over the Chattanooga Times in

1878. Known more for his business and organizational ability than for his writing and editing

skills, he transformed the Tennessee paper. Seeking a national stage and business expansion,

Ochs moved to New York and invested $75,000 in the

struggling Times. Through strategic hiring, Ochs and

his editors rebuilt the paper around substantial news

coverage and provocative editorial pages. To distance

his New York paper from the yellow press, the editors

also downplayed sensational stories, favoring the

documentation of major events or issues.

Partly as a marketing strategy, Ochs offered a

distinct contrast to the more sensational Hearst and

Pulitzer newspapers: an informational paper that

provided stock and real estate reports to businesses,

court reports to legal professionals, treaty summaries

to political leaders, and theater and book reviews to

educated general readers and intellectuals. Ochs’s

promotional gimmicks took direct aim at yellow jour-

nalism, advertising the Times under the motto “It does

not soil the breakfast cloth.” Ochs’s strategy is similar

to today’s advertising tactic of targeting upscale viewers and readers who control a dispropor-

tionate share of consumer dollars.

With the Hearst and Pulitzer papers capturing the bulk of working- and middle-class

readers, managers at the Times at first tried to use their straightforward, “no frills” reporting

to appeal to more affluent and educated readers. In 1898, however, Ochs lowered the paper’s

price to a penny. He believed that people bought the World and the Journal primarily be-

cause they were cheap, not because of their stories. The Times began attracting middle-class

readers who gravitated to the now affordable paper as a status marker for the educated and

well informed. Between 1898 and 1899, its circulation rose from 25,000 to 75,000. By 1921,

the Times had a daily circulation of 330,000, and 500,000 on Sunday. (For contemporary

circulation figures, see Table 7.1 on the next page.)

THE NEW YORK TIMES
established itself as the
official paper of record by
the 1920s. The Times was
the first modern news-
paper, gathering information
and presenting news in a
straightforward way—
without the opinion of the
reporter. Today, the Times is
known for its opinion columns
and editorial pages as much
as for its original reporting.

CHAPTER 7 ○ NEWSPAPERS��229

“Just the Facts, Please”
Early in the twentieth century, with reporters adopting a more “scientific” attitude to news- and

fact-gathering, the ideal of objectivity began to anchor journalism. In objective journalism,
which distinguishes factual reports from opinion columns, modern reporters strive to maintain

a neutral attitude toward the issue or event they cover; they also search out competing points of

view among the sources for a story.

The story form for packaging and presenting this kind of reporting has been traditionally

labeled the inverted-pyramid style. Civil War correspondents developed this style by imitating
the terse, compact press releases that came from President Abraham Lincoln and his secretary

of war, Edwin M. Stanton.7 Often stripped of adverbs and adjectives, inverted-pyramid reports

began—as they do today—with the most dramatic or newsworthy information. They answered

who, what, where, when (and, less frequently, why or how) questions at the top of the story and

then narrowed down the story to presumably less significant details. If wars or natural disasters

disrupted the telegraph transmission of these dispatches, the information the reporter chose to

lead with had the best chance of getting through.

For much of the twentieth century, the inverted-pyramid style served as an efficient way

to arrange a timely story. As one news critic pointed out, the wire services distributing stories

to newspapers nationwide “had to deal with large numbers of newspapers with widely differ-

ent political and regional interests. The news had to be ‘objective’ . . . to be accepted by such a

heterogeneous group.”8 Among other things, the importance of objectivity and the reliance on

the inverted pyramid signaled journalism’s break from the partisan tradition. Although impos-

sible to achieve ( journalism is after all a literary practice, not a science), objectivity nonetheless

became the guiding ideal of the modern press.

Despite the success of the New York Times and other modern papers, the more factual

inverted-pyramid approach toward news has come under increasing scrutiny. As news critic

and writing coach Roy Peter Clark has noted, “Some reporters let the pyramid control the con-

tent so that the news comes out homogenized. Traffic fatalities, three-alarm fires, and new city

ordinances all begin to look alike. In extreme cases, reporters have been known to keep files of

story forms. Fill in the blanks. Stick it in the paper.”9 Although the inverted-pyramid style has

for years solved deadline problems for reporters and enabled editors to cut a story from the

bottom to fit available space, it has also discouraged many readers from continuing beyond the

key details in the opening paragraphs. Studies have demonstrated that the majority of readers

do not follow a front-page story when it continues, or “jumps,” inside the paper.

TABLE 7.1
THE NATION’S TEN
LARGEST DAILY
NEWSPAPERS, 2008
vs. 2010
Sources: Audit Bureau of
Circulations FAS-FAX Report,
March 31, 2008; Audit Bureau
of Circulations, FAS-FAX Report,
March 31, 2010; Audit Bureau
of Circulations, Audience-FAX*
eTrends, http://abcas3.accessabc
.com/audience-fax/default.aspx.

Wall Street Journal 2,069,463 2,092,523 +1.1%

USA Today 2,284,219 1,826,622 - 20.0%

New York Times 1,077,256 951,063 -11.7%

Los Angeles Times 773,884 616,604 -20.3%

Washington Post 673,180 578,482 -14.1%

(New York) Daily News 703,137 537,676 -23.5%

New York Post 702,488 525,004 -25.3%

San Jose Mercury News 234,772 516,700 +120.1%

Chicago Tribune 541,633 452,145 -16.5%

Houston Chronicle 494,131 366,542 -25.8%

2008 Weekday 2010 Weekday % Change
Newspaper Circulation Circulation from 2008

230��WORDS AND PICTURES

NEWSPAPERS

Interpretive Journalism
By the 1920s, there was a sense, especially after the trauma of World War I, that the impartial

approach to reporting was insufficient for explaining complex national and global conditions. It

was partly as a result of “drab, factual, objective reporting,” one news scholar contended, that

“the American people were utterly amazed when war broke out in August 1914, as they had no

understanding of the foreign scene to prepare them for it.”10

The Promise of Interpretive Journalism
Under the sway of objectivity, modern journalism had downplayed an early role of the partisan

press: offering analysis and opinion. But with the world becoming more complex, some papers

began to reexplore the analytical function of news. The result was the rise of interpretive
journalism, which aims to explain key issues or events and place them in a broader historical
or social context. According to one historian, this approach, especially in the 1930s and 1940s,

was a viable way for journalism to address “the New Deal years, the rise of modern scientific

technology, the increasing interdependence of economic groups at home, and the shrinking of

the world into one vast arena for power politics.”11 In other words, journalism took an analytic

turn in a world grown more interconnected and complicated.

Noting that objectivity and factuality should serve as the foundation for journalism, by the

1920s editor and columnist Walter Lippmann insisted that the press should do more. He ranked

three press responsibilities: (1) “to make a current record”; (2) “to make a running analysis of it”;

and (3) “on the basis of both, to suggest plans.”12 Indeed, reporters and readers alike have histori-

cally distinguished between informational reports and editorial (interpretive) pieces, which offer

particular viewpoints or deeper analyses of the issues. Since the boundary between information

and interpretation can be somewhat ambiguous, American papers have traditionally placed

news analysis in separate, labeled columns and opinion articles on certain pages so that readers

do not confuse them with “straight news.” It was during this time that political columns devel-

oped to evaluate and provide context for news. Moving beyond the informational and storytell-

ing functions of news, journalists and newspapers began to extend their role as analysts.

Broadcast News Embraces Interpretive Journalism
In a surprising twist, the rise of broadcast radio in the 1930s also forced newspapers to become

more analytical in their approach to news. At the time, the newspaper industry was upset

that broadcasters took their news directly from papers and wire services. As a result, a battle

developed between radio journalism and print news. Although mainstream newspapers tried

to copyright the facts they reported and sued radio stations for routinely using newspapers as

their main news sources, the papers lost many of these court battles. Editors and newspaper

lobbyists argued that radio should be only permitted to do commentary. By conceding this

interpretive role to radio, the print press tried to protect its dominion over “the facts.” It was

in this environment that radio analysis began to flourish as a form of interpretive news. Lowell

Thomas delivered the first daily network analysis for CBS on September 29, 1930, attacking

Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. By 1941, twenty regular commentators—the forerunners of

today’s “talking heads” on cable, radio talk-show hosts, and political bloggers—were explaining

their version of the world to millions of listeners.

Some print journalists and editors came to believe, however, that interpretive stories,

rather than objective reports, could better compete with radio. They realized that interpreta-

tion was a way to counter radio’s (and later television’s) superior ability to report breaking

news quickly. In 1933, the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) supported the idea

of interpretive journalism. Most newspapers, however, still did not embrace probing analysis

during the 1930s. So in most U.S. dailies, interpretation remained relegated to a few editorial

“Journalists must
make the signifi-
cant interesting
and relevant.”

BILL KOVACH AND
TOM ROSENSTIEL,
THE ELEMENTS OF
JOURNALISM, 2007

CHAPTER 7 ○ NEWSPAPERS��231

and opinion pages. It wasn’t until the 1950s—with

the Korean War, the development of atomic power,

tensions with the Soviet Union, and the anticommu-

nist movement—that news analysis resurfaced on the

newest medium: television. Interpretive journalism

in newspapers grew at the same time, especially in

such areas as the environment, science, agriculture,

sports, health, politics, and business. Following the

lead of the New York Times, many papers by the 1980s

had developed an “op-ed” page—an opinion page

opposite the traditional editorial page that allowed a

greater variety of columnists, news analyses, and let-

ters to the editor.

Literary Forms of Journalism
By the late 1960s, many people were criticizing

America’s major social institutions. Political assas-

sinations, Civil Rights protests, the Vietnam War, the

drug culture, and the women’s movement were not

easily explained. Faced with so much change and

turmoil, many individuals began to lose faith in the

ability of institutions to oversee and ensure the social

order. Members of protest movements as well as many

middle- and working-class Americans began to suspect

the privileges and power of traditional authority. As

a result, key institutions—including journalism—lost

some of their credibility.

Journalism as an Art Form
Throughout the first part of the twentieth century—journalism’s modern era—journalistic

storytelling was downplayed in favor of the inverted-pyramid style and the separation of fact

from opinion. Dissatisfied with these limitations, some reporters began exploring a new model

of reporting. Literary journalism—sometimes dubbed “new journalism”—adapted fictional
techniques, such as descriptive details and settings and extensive character dialogue, to nonfic-

tion material and in-depth reporting. In the United States, literary journalism’s roots are evident

in the work of nineteenth-century novelists like Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, and Theodore

Dreiser, all of whom started out as reporters. In the late 1930s and 1940s, literary journalism

surfaced: Journalists, such as James Agee and John Hersey, began to demonstrate how writing

about real events could achieve an artistry often associated only with fiction.

In the 1960s, Tom Wolfe, a leading practitioner of new journalism, argued for mixing

the content of reporting with the form of fiction to create “both the kind of objective reality

of journalism” and “the subjective reality” of the novel.13 Writers such as Wolfe (The Electric

Kool-Aid Acid Test), Truman Capote (In Cold Blood), Joan Didion (The White Album), Norman

Mailer (Armies of the Night), and Hunter S. Thompson (Hell’s Angels) turned to new journalism

to overcome flaws they perceived in routine reporting. Their often self-conscious treatment of

social problems gave their writing a perspective that conventional journalism did not offer. After

the 1960s’ tide of intense social upheaval ebbed, new journalism subsided as well. However,

literary journalism not only influenced magazines like Mother Jones and Rolling Stone, but it also

affected daily newspapers by emphasizing longer feature stories on cultural trends and social

JOAN DIDION’S two essay
collections—Slouching
Towards Bethlehem (1968)
and The White Album
(1979)—are considered
iconic pieces from the new
journalism movement. Both
books detail and analyze
Didion’s life in California, where
she experienced everything
from the counterculture
movement in San Francisco to
meeting members of the Black
Panther Party, the Doors, and
even followers of Charles
Manson.

232��WORDS AND PICTURES

NEWSPAPERS

issues with detailed description or dialogue. Today, writers such as Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (Ran-

dom Family), Dexter Filkins (The Forever War), and Asne Seierstad (The Bookseller of Kabul) keep

this tradition alive.

The Attack on Journalistic Objectivity
Former New York Times columnist Tom Wicker argued that in the early 1960s an objective ap-

proach to news remained the dominant model. According to Wicker, the “press had so wrapped

itself in the paper chains of ‘objective journalism’ that it had little ability to report anything be-

yond the bare and undeniable facts.”14 Through the 1960s, attacks on the detachment of reporters

escalated. News critic Jack Newfield rejected the possibility of genuine journalistic impartiality

and argued that many reporters had become too trusting and uncritical of the powerful: “Objec-

tivity is believing people with power and printing their press releases.”15 Eventually, the ideal of

objectivity became suspect along with the authority of experts and professionals in various fields.

A number of reporters responded to the criticism by rethinking the framework of conven-

tional journalism and adopting a variety of alternative techniques. One of these was advocacy

journalism, in which the reporter actively promotes a particular cause or viewpoint. Precision

journalism, another technique, attempts to make the news more scientifically accurate by using

poll surveys and questionnaires. Throughout the 1990s, precision journalism became increas-

ingly important. However, critics have charged that in every modern presidential campaign—

including that of 2008—too many newspapers and TV stations became overly reliant on political

polls, thus reducing campaign coverage to “racehorse” journalism, telling only “who’s ahead”

and “who’s behind” stories rather than promoting substantial debates on serious issues. (See

Table 7.2 for top works in American journalism.)

Contemporary Journalism in the TV and Internet Age
In the early 1980s, a postmodern brand of journalism arose from two important developments.

In 1980 the Columbus Dispatch became the first paper to go online; today, nearly all U.S. papers

offer some Web services. Then the colorful USA Today arrived in 1982, radically changing the

look of most major U.S. dailies.

“Critics [in the
1960s] claimed
that urban plan-
ning created slums,
that schooI made
people stupid, that
medicine caused
disease, that psy-
chiatry invented
mental illness, and
that the courts
promoted injus-
tice. . . . And objec-
tivity in journalism,
regarded as an
antidote to bias,
came to be looked
upon as the most
insidious bias of
all. For ‘objective’
reporting repro-
duced a vision of
social reality which
refused to examine
the basic struc-
tures of power and
privilege.”

MICHAEL SCHUDSON,
DISCOVERING THE
NEWS, 1978

1 �John Hersey “Hiroshima” New Yorker 1946

2 �Rachel Carson Silent Spring Houghton Mifflin 1962

3 �Bob Woodward/ Watergate investigation Washington Post 1972–73
� �Carl Bernstein

4 �Edward R. Murrow Battle of Britain CBS Radio 1940

5 �Ida Tarbell “The History of the McClure’s Magazine 1902–04
Standard Oil Company”

6 �Lincoln Steffens “The Shame of the Cities” McClure’s Magazine 1902–04

7 �John Reed Ten Days That Shook Random House 191

the World

8 �H. L. Mencken Coverage of the Scopes Baltimore Sun 19

“monkey” trial

9 �Ernie Pyle Reports from Europe Scripps-Howard 1940–45
and the Pacific during newspapers
World War II

10�Edward R. Murrow/ Investigation of Senator CBS Television 1954
��Fred Friendly Joseph McCarthy

Journalists Title or Subject Publisher Year

TABLE 7.2
EXCEPTIONAL WORKS OF
AMERICAN JOURNALISM

Working under the aegis
of New York University’s
journalism department,
thirty-six judges compiled a
list of the Top 100 works of
American journalism in the
twentieth century. The list
takes into account not just
the newsworthiness of the
event but the craft of the
writing and reporting. What
do you think of the Top 10
works listed here? What are
some problems associated
with a list like this? Do you
think newswriting should be
judged in the same way we
judge novels or movies?
Source: New York University,
Department of Journalism, New
York, N.Y., 1999.

CHAPTER 7 ○ NEWSPAPERS��233

USA Today Colors the Print Landscape
USA Today made its mark by incorporating features closely associated with postmodern forms,

including an emphasis on visual style over substantive news or analysis and the use of brief

news items that appealed to readers’ busy schedules and shortened attention spans.

Now the second most widely circulated paper in the nation, USA Today represents the only

successful launch of a new major U.S. daily newspaper in the last several decades. Showing its

marketing savvy, USA Today was the first paper to openly acknowledge television’s central role in

mass culture: The paper used TV-inspired color and designed its first vending boxes to look like

color TVs. Even the writing style of USA Today mimics TV news by casting many reports in pres-

ent tense rather than the past tense (which was the print-news norm throughout the twentieth

century).

Writing for Rolling Stone in March 1992, media critic Jon Katz argued that the authority

of modern newspapers suffered in the wake of a variety of “new news” forms that combined

immediacy, information, entertainment, persuasion, and analysis. Katz claimed that the news

supremacy of most prominent daily papers, such as the New York Times and the Washington

Post, was being challenged by “news” coming from talk shows, television sitcoms, popular films,

and even rap music. In other words, we were changing from a society in which the transmission

of knowledge depended mainly on books, newspapers, and magazines to a society dominated

by a mix of print, visual, and digital information.

Online Journalism Redefines News
What started out in the 1980s as simple, text-only experiments for newspapers developed

into more robust Web sites in the 1990s, allowing newspapers to develop an online presence.

Today, online journalism is completely changing the industry. First, rather than subscribing to

a traditional paper, many readers now begin their day by logging on to the Internet and scan-

ning a wide variety of news sites, including those of print papers, cable news channels, news-

magazines, bloggers, and online-only news organizations. Such sources are increasingly taking

over the roles of more traditional forms of news, helping to set the nation’s cultural, social, and

political agendas. One of the biggest changes is that online news has sped up the news cycle to

a constant stream of information and has challenged traditional news services to keep up. For

instance, Matt Drudge, the conservative Internet news source and gossip behind The Drudge

Report, hijacked the national agenda in January 1998 and launched a scandal when he posted a

story claiming that Newsweek had backed off, or “spiked,” a story about President Bill Clinton

having an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Although Drudge’s report was essen-

tially accurate, Newsweek had delayed the story because its editors thought they needed more

confirming sources before they could responsibly publish the allegations. Drudge effectively

“outed” the Newsweek story prematurely, and critics debated whether his actions were legiti-

mate or irresponsible.

Another change is the way nontraditional sources help shape news stories. In summer

2010, British Petroleum’s CEO Tony Hayward first called the oil spill in the Gulf Coast “relatively

tiny” and later made the insensitive remark, “I want my life back” (after eleven of his own

workers lost their lives in the initial explosion). Internet bloggers, Twitter users, and 24/7 cable

analysts ignited a media storm that forced traditional news to cover the remarks (and backlash)

and prompted BP to start a giant $50 million ad campaign in which Hayward apologized and

said BP would take full responsibility. However, online and cable commentators then criticized

BP for spending money on advertising and buying access to Internet search terms like “oil spill”

(so its corporate Web site appears first on Google searches) rather than putting that money into

cleanup. The traditional media followed suit and began to cover the criticisms and arguments

taking place online as the story and cleanup unfolded for months. For more about how online

news ventures are changing the newspaper industry, see pages 245–248.

“Too many blog
posts begin with
‘I heard that . . . ’
and then launch
into rants and
speculation.
No phone calls,
no emails, no
interviews to
find out if what
they heard is
true. It’s the
Internet version
of the busybody
neighbor, except
far less benign.”

CONNIE SCHULTZ,
PULITZER PRIZE–
WINNING COLUMNIST
FOR CLEVELAND PLAIN
DEALER, 2010

234��WORDS AND PICTURES

NEWSPAPERS

THE WALL STREET
JOURNAL not only has the
largest circulation of any
newspaper in the United
States, it also has the most
online subscriptions—over
400,000 members pay for
access to the paper’s Web
site. Its online success has
been attributed to two facts:
It instituted a paywall as soon
as the paper went online
in 1995, and it provides
specialized business and
financial information that its
readers can’t get elsewhere.
(Pictured above is News Corp.
CEO Rupert Murdoch reading
the Wall Street Journal.)

In the news industry today, there are several kinds of papers.

National newspapers (such as the Wall Street Journal, the New

York Times, and USA Today) serve a broad readership across the

country. Other papers primarily serve specific geographic regions.

Roughly 100 metropolitan dailies have a circulation of 100,000 or

more. About 30 of these papers have a circulation of more than

200,000. In addition, about 100 daily newspapers are classified as

medium dailies, with circulations between 50,000 and 100,000.

By far the largest number of U.S. dailies—about 1,200 papers—fall

into the small daily category, with circulations under 50,000.

While dailies serve urban and suburban centers, more than 7,500

nondaily and weekly newspapers (down from 14,000 back in 1910)

serve smaller communities and average just over 5,000 copies

per issue.16 No matter the size of the paper, each must determine

its approach, target readers, and deal with ownership issues in a

time of technological transition and declining revenue.

Consensus vs. Conflict: Newspapers
Play Different Roles
Smaller nondaily papers tend to promote social and economic

harmony in their communities. Besides providing commu-

nity calendars and meeting notices, nondaily papers focus on

consensus-oriented journalism, carrying articles on local
schools, social events, town government, property crimes, and

zoning issues. Recalling the partisan spirit of an earlier era,

small newspapers are often owned by business leaders who may

also serve in local politics. Because consensus-oriented papers

have a small advertising base, they are generally careful not to offend local advertisers, who pro-

vide the financial underpinnings for many of these papers. At their best, these small-town papers

foster a sense of community; at their worst, they overlook or downplay discord and problems.

In contrast, national and metro dailies practice conflict-oriented journalism, in which
front-page news is often defined primarily as events, issues, or experiences that deviate from

social norms. Under this news orientation, journalists see their role not merely as neutral fact-

gatherers but also as observers who monitor their city’s institutions and problems. They often

maintain an adversarial relationship with local politicians and public officials. These papers

offer competing perspectives on such issues as education, government, poverty, crime, and the

economy; and their publishers, editors, or reporters avoid playing major, overt roles in com-

munity politics. In theory, modern newspapers believe their role in large cities is to keep a wary

eye fixed on recent local and state intrigue and events.

In telling stories about complex and controversial topics, conflict-oriented journalists often

turn such topics into two-dimensional stories, pitting one idea or person against another. This

convention, or “telling both sides of a story,” allows a reporter to take the position of a detached

observer. Although this practice offers the appearance of balance, it usually functions to generate

The Business and
Ownership of Newspapers

CHAPTER 7 ○ NEWSPAPERS��235

conflict and sustain a lively news story; sometimes, reporters ignore the idea that there may be

more than two sides to a story. But faced with deadline pressures, reporters often do not have the

time—or the space—to develop a multifaceted and complex report or series of reports. (See “Media

Literacy and the Critical Process: Covering Business and Economic News” above.)

Newspapers Target Specific Readers
Historically, small-town weeklies and daily newspapers have served predominantly white, main-

stream readers. However, ever since Benjamin Franklin launched the short-lived German-language

Covering Business and Economic News
The financial crisis and subsequent recession spotlighted
newspapers’ coverage of issues such as corporate
corruption. For example, since 2008 articles have detailed
the collapse of major investment firms like Lehman Broth-
ers, the GM and Chrysler bankruptcies, the fraud charges
against Goldman Sachs, and of course all the scandals sur-
rounding the subprime mortgage/home foreclosure crisis.
Over the years, critics have claimed that business news
pages tend to favor issues related to management and
downplay the role of everyday employees. Critics have also
charged that business coverage favors positive business
stories—such as managers’ promotions—and minimizes
negative business news (unlike regional newspaper front
pages, which usually emphasize crime stories). In an era
of Wall Street scandals and major bankruptcies, check the
business coverage in your local daily paper to see if these
charges are accurate or if this pattern has changed.

1 DESCRIPTION. Check a week’s worth of business news in your
local paper. Examine both the business

pages and the front and local sections for

these stories. Devise a chart and cre-

ate categories for sorting stories (e.g.,

promotion news, scandal stories, earnings

reports, home foreclosures, auto news,

and media-related news), and gauge

whether these stories are positive or nega-

tive. If possible, compare this coverage to

a week’s worth of news from the business

boom years of the 1990s. Or compare

your local paper’s coverage of home fore-

closures or auto company bankruptcies to

the coverage in one of the nation’s dailies

like the New York Times.

2 ANALYSIS. Look for patterns in the coverage. How many stories
are positive? How many are negative?

Do the stories show any kind of gender

favoritism (such as more men covered

than women) or class bias (management

favored over workers)? Compared to the

local paper, are there differences in the

frequency and kinds of coverage offered in

the national newspaper? Does your paper

routinely cover the business of the parent

company that owns the local paper? Does

it cover national business stories? How

many stories are there on the business of

newspapers and media in general?

3 INTERPRETATION. What do some of the patterns mean? Did

Media Literacy and
the Critical Process

you find examples where the coverage

of business seems comprehensive and

fair? If business news gets more posi-

tive coverage than political news, what

might this mean? If managers get more

coverage than employees, what does

this mean, given that there are many

more regular employees than manag-

ers at most businesses? What might it

mean if men are more prominently fea-

tured than women in business stories?

Considering the central role of media

and news businesses in everyday life,

what does it mean if these businesses

are not being covered adequately by

local and national news operations?

4 EVALUATION. Determine which papers and stories you
would judge as good and which ones

you would judge as weaker models for

how business should be covered. Are

some elements that should be included

missing from coverage? If so, make

suggestions.

5 ENGAGEMENT. Either write or e-mail the editor reporting
your findings, or make an appointment

with the editor to discuss what you

discovered. Note what the newspaper is

doing well and make a recommendation

on how to improve coverage.

236��WORDS AND PICTURES

NEWSPAPERS

Philadelphische Zeitung in 1732, newspapers aimed at ethnic groups have played a major role in ini-

tiating immigrants into American society. During the nineteenth century, Swedish- and Norwegian-

language papers informed various immigrant communities in the Midwest. The early twentieth

century gave rise to papers written in German, Yiddish, Russian, and Polish, assisting the massive

influx of European immigrants.

Throughout the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, several hundred foreign-language

daily and nondaily presses existed in at least forty different languages in the United States. Many

are financially healthy today, supported by classified ads, local businesses, and increased ad

revenue from long-distance phone companies and Internet services, which see the ethnic press

as an ideal place to reach those customers most likely to need international communication ser-

vices.17 While the financial crisis took its toll and some ethnic newspapers failed, overall, loyal

readers allowed such papers to fare better than the mainstream press.18

Most of these weekly and monthly newspapers serve some of the same functions for

their constituencies—minorities and immigrants, as well as disabled veterans, retired work-

ers, gay and lesbian communities, and the homeless—as the “majority” papers do. These

papers, however, are often published outside the social mainstream. Consequently, they

provide viewpoints that are different from the mostly middle- and upper-class establish-

ment attitudes that have shaped the media throughout much of America’s history. As noted

by The State of the News Media 2010, a report from the Pew Research Center’s Project for

Excellence in Journalism, ethnic newspapers and media “cover stories about the activities

of those ethnic groups in the United States that are largely ignored by the mainstream press,

they provide ethnic angles to news that actually is covered more widely, and they report on

events and issues taking place back in the home countries from which those populations

or their family members emigrated. These outlets have also traditionally been leaders in

their communities.”19

African American Newspapers
Between 1827 and the end of the Civil War in 1865, forty newspapers directed at black

readers and opposed to slavery struggled for survival. These papers faced not only higher

rates of illiteracy among potential readers but also hostility from white society and the

majority press of the day. The first black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, operated from 1827

to 1829 and opposed the racism of many New York newspapers. In addition, it offered a

public voice for antislavery societies. Other notable papers included the Alienated American

(1852–56) and the New Orleans Daily Creole, which began its short life in 1856 as the first black-

owned daily in the South. The most influential oppositional newspaper was Frederick Doug-

lass’s North Star, a weekly antislavery newspaper in Rochester, New York, which was published

from 1847 to 1860 and reached a circulation of three thousand. Douglass, a former slave, wrote

essays on slavery and on a variety of national and international topics.

Since 1827, more than three thousand newspapers have been edited and owned by African

Americans. These papers, with an average life span of nine years, took stands against race bait-

ing, lynching, and the Ku Klux Klan. They also promoted racial pride long before the Civil Rights

movement. The most widely circulated black-owned paper was Robert C. Vann’s weekly Pitts-

burgh Courier, founded in 1910. Its circulation peaked at 350,000 in 1947—the year professional

baseball was integrated by Jackie Robinson, thanks in part to relentless editorials in the Courier

that denounced the color barrier in pro sports. As they have throughout their history, these

papers offer oppositional viewpoints to the mainstream press and record the daily activities

of black communities by listing weddings, births, deaths, graduations, meetings, and church

functions. Today, there are more than two hundred daily and weekly African American papers,

including Baltimore’s Afro-American, New York’s Amsterdam News, and the Chicago Defender,

which celebrated its one hundredth anniversary in 2005.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS
helped found the North Star
in 1847. It was printed in the
basement of the Memorial
African Methodist Episcopal
Zion Church, a gathering
spot for abolitionists and
“underground” activities in
Rochester, New York. At
the time, the white-owned
New York Herald urged
Rochester’s citizens to throw
the North Star’s printing
press into Lake Ontario.
Under Douglass’s leadership,
the paper came out weekly
until 1860, addressing
problems facing blacks
around the country and
offering a forum for
Douglass to debate his
fellow black activists.

“We wish to plead
our own cause. Too
long have others
spoken for us.”

FREEDOM’S JOURNAL,
1827

CHAPTER 7 ○ NEWSPAPERS��237

The circulation rates of most black

papers dropped sharply after the 1960s.

The combined circulation of the local

and national editions of the Pittsburgh

Courier, for instance, dropped to only

twenty thousand by the early 1980s.20

Several factors contributed to these

declines. First, television and black radio

stations tapped into the limited pool

of money that businesses allocated for

advertising. Second, some advertisers, to

avoid controversy, withdrew their sup-

port when the black press started giving

favorable coverage to the Civil Rights

movement in the 1960s. Third, the loss

of industrial urban jobs in the 1970s and

1980s not only diminished readership but

also hurt small neighborhood businesses,

which could no longer afford to advertise

in both the mainstream and the black

press. Finally, after the enactment of

Civil Rights and affirmative action laws,

black papers were raided by mainstream

papers seeking to integrate their news-

rooms with good African American jour-

nalists. Black papers could seldom match

the offers from large white-owned dailies.

In siphoning off both ads and talent, a more integrated mainstream press hurt many black

papers—an ironic effect of the Civil Rights laws. For example, today while more than one-third

of the overall U.S. population counts as part of a minority group, only around 13 percent of the

newsroom staffs at the nation’s daily papers are racial minorities.

Spanish-Language Newspapers
Bilingual and Spanish-language newspapers have long served a variety of Mexican, Puerto Rican,

Cuban, and other Hispanic readerships. New York’s El Diario–La Prensa has been reaching Spanish-

language readers since 1913, while Los Angeles’ La Opinión was founded in 1926 and is now the

nation’s largest Spanish-language daily. Other prominent publications are in Miami (La Voz and

Diario Las Americas), Houston (La Información), Chicago (El Mañana Daily News and La Raza), San

Diego (El Sol ), and New York (Hoy and El Noticias del Mundo). In 2010, more than eight hundred

Spanish-language papers operated in the United States, most of them weekly and nondaily papers.21

Until the late 1960s, mainstream newspapers virtually ignored Hispanic issues and culture.

But with the influx of Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban immigrants throughout the 1980s

and 1990s, many mainstream papers began to feature weekly Spanish-language supplements.

The first was the Miami Herald’s “El Nuevo Herald,” introduced in 1976. Other mainstream

papers also joined in, but many folded their Spanish-language supplements by the mid-1990s.

In 1995, the Los Angeles Times discontinued its supplement, “Nuestro Tiempo,” and the Miami

Herald trimmed budgets and staff for “El Nuevo Herald.” Spanish-language radio and televi-

sion had beaten newspapers to these potential customers and advertisers. As the U.S. Hispanic

population reached about 16 percent by 2009, Hispanic journalists accounted for only about

4.6 percent of the newsroom workforce at U.S. daily newspapers.22

AFRICAN AMERICAN
NEWSPAPERS
This 1936 scene reveals
the newsroom of Harlem’s
Amsterdam News, one of
the nation’s leading African
American newspapers.
Ironically, the Civil Rights
movement and affirmative
action policies since the
1960s served to drain
talented reporters from the
black press by encouraging
them to work for larger,
mainstream newspapers.

238��WORDS AND PICTURES

NEWSPAPERS

Asian American Newspapers
In the 1980s, hundreds of small papers emerged to serve immigrants from

Pakistan, Laos, Cambodia, and China. While people of Asian descent made up

only about 4 percent of the U.S. population in 2008, this percentage is ex-

pected to rise to 9 percent by 2050.23 Today, more than fifty small U.S. papers

are printed in Vietnamese. Ethnic papers like these help readers both adjust to

foreign surroundings and retain ties to their traditional heritage. In addition,

these papers often cover major stories that are downplayed in the mainstream

press. For example, in the aftermath of 9/11 airport security teams detained

thousands of Middle Eastern–looking men. The Weekly Bangla Patrika, a

Long Island, New York, paper with a circulation of twelve thousand, not only

reported in detail on the one hundred people the Bangladeshi community lost

in the World Trade Center attacks but also took the lead in reporting on how it

feels to be innocent yet targeted by ethnic profiling.24

A growth area in newspapers is Chinese publications. Even amid a poor

economy, a new Chinese newspaper, News for Chinese, started up late in 2008.

The Chinese–language paper began as a free monthly distributed in the San

Francisco area. By early 2009, it began publishing twice a week. The World

Journal, a daily, is the largest U.S.-based Chinese–language paper. It publishes

six editions on the East Coast; on the West Coast, the paper is known as the

Chinese Daily News.25

Native American Newspapers
An activist Native American press has provided oppositional voices to main-

stream American media since 1828, when the Cherokee Phoenix appeared in

Georgia. Another prominent early paper was the Cherokee Rose Bud, founded

in 1848 by tribal women in the Oklahoma territory. The Native American Press

Association has documented more than 350 different Native American papers,

most of them printed in English but a few in tribal languages. Currently, two national papers

are the Native American Times, which offers perspectives on “sovereign rights, civil rights, and

government-to-government relationships with the federal government,” and Indian Country

Today, owned by the Oneida nation in New York.

To counter the neglect of their culture’s viewpoints by the mainstream press, Native Ameri-

can newspapers have helped to educate various tribes about their heritage and build commu-

nity solidarity. These papers also have reported on both the problems and the progress among

tribes that have opened casinos and gambling resorts. Overall, these smaller papers provide a

forum for debates on tribal conflicts and concerns, and they often signal the mainstream press

on issues—such as gambling or hunting and fishing rights—that have particular significance for

the larger culture.

The Underground Press
The mid to late 1960s saw an explosion of alternative newspapers. Labeled the underground
press at the time, these papers questioned mainstream political policies and conventional
values often voicing radical opinions. Generally running on shoestring budgets, they were also

erratic in meeting publication schedules. Springing up on college campuses and in major cities,

underground papers were inspired by the writings of socialists and intellectuals from the 1930s

and 1940s and by a new wave of thinkers and artists. Particularly inspirational were poets and

writers (such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, LeRoi Jones, and Eldridge Cleaver) and “protest”

musicians (including Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, and Joan Baez). In criticizing social institutions,

THE WORLD JOURNAL is
a national daily paper that
targets Chinese immigrants
by focusing on news from
China, Hong Kong, Taiwan,
and other Southeast Asian
communities.

CHAPTER 7 ○ NEWSPAPERS��239

alternative papers questioned the official reports

distributed by public relations agents, government

spokespeople, and the conventional press (see “Case

Study: Alternative Journalism: Dorothy Day and I. F.

Stone” on page 240).

During the 1960s, underground papers played a

unique role in documenting social tension by includ-

ing the voices of students, women, African Ameri-

cans, Native Americans, gay men and lesbians, and

others whose opinions were often excluded from the

mainstream press. The first and most enduring un-

derground paper, the Village Voice, was founded in

Greenwich Village in 1955. It is still distributed free,

surviving only through advertising. Among campus

underground papers, the Berkeley Barb was the most

influential, developing amid the free-speech move-

ment in the mid-1960s. Despite their irreverent and

often vulgar tone, many underground papers turned

a spotlight on racial and gender inequities and, on

occasion, influenced mainstream journalism to examine social issues. Like the black press,

though, many early underground papers folded after the 1960s. Given their radical outlook, it

was difficult for them to generate sponsors or appeal to advertisers. In addition, like the black

press, the underground press was raided by mainstream papers, which began expanding their

own coverage of culture by hiring the underground’s best writers. Still, today more than

120 papers are members of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (see Figure 7.1).

Newspaper Operations
Today, a weekly paper might employ only two or three people, while a major metro daily might

have a staff of more than one thousand, including workers in the newsroom and online opera-

tions, and in departments for circulation (distributing the newspaper), advertising (selling ad

space), and mechanical operations (assembling and printing the paper). In either situation, how-

ever, most newspapers distinguish business operations from editorial or news functions. Journal-

ists’ and readers’ praise or criticism usually rests on the quality of a paper’s news and editorial

components, but business and advertising concerns today dictate whether papers will survive.

Most major daily papers would like to devote one-half to two-thirds of their pages to adver-

tisements. Newspapers carry everything from full-page spreads for department stores to shrink-

ing classified ads, which consumers can purchase for a few dollars to advertise used cars or old

furniture (although many Web sites now do this for free). In most cases, ads are positioned in

the paper first. The newshole—space not taken up by ads—accounts for the remaining 35 to 50
percent of the content of daily newspapers, including front-page news. The newshole and physi-

cal size of many newspapers had shrunk substantially by 2010.

News and Editorial Responsibilities
The chain of command at most larger papers starts with the publisher and owner at the top and

then moves, on the news and editorial side, to the editor in chief and managing editor, who are

in charge of the daily news-gathering and writing processes. Under the main editors, assistant

editors have traditionally run different news divisions, including features, sports, photos, local

news, state news, and wire service reports that contain major national and international news.

Increasingly, many editorial positions are being eliminated or condensed to a single editor’s job.

San Francisco
Bay Guardian

LA Weekly

Salt Lake City Weekly

Austin Chronicle
Austin, Tex. Riverfront Times

St. Louis, Mo. Gambit Weekly
New Orleans, La.

Miami New Times

Creative Loafing
Atlanta, Ga.

Independent Weekly
Chapel Hill, N.C.

Washington
City Paper

Village Voice
New York City

Boston Phoenix

Pittsburgh
City Paper

Chicago Reader

City Pages
Minneapolis/

St. Paul, Minn.
Westword

Denver, Colo.

Willamette Week
Portland, Ore.

FIGURE 7.1
SELECTED ALTERNATIVE
NEWSPAPERS IN THE
UNITED STATES
Source: Association of Alterna-
tive Newsweeklies, http://www
.aan.org.

“We received no
extra space for
9/11. We received
no extra space for
the Iraq war. We’re
all doing this within
our budget. It is a
zero-sum game.
If something is
more important,
something else
may be a little less
important, a little
less deserving of
space.”

JOHN GEDDES,
MANAGING EDITOR,
NEW YORK TIMES,
2006

O ver the years, a number of unconventional reporters have struggled against the status
quo to find a place for unheard voices
and alternative ways to practice their
craft. For example, Ida Wells fear-
lessly investigated violence
against blacks for the
Memphis Free Speech
in the late 1800s.
Newspaper lore also
offers a rich history
of alternative jour-
nalists and their
publications, such
as Dorothy Day’s
Catholic Worker and
I. F. Stone’s Weekly.

In 1933, Dorothy Day
(1897–1980) cofounded
a radical religious organiza-
tion with a monthly newspaper, the
Catholic Worker, that opposed war
and supported social reforms. Like
many young intellectual writers during
World War I, Day was a pacifist; she
also joined the Socialist Party. Quit-
ting college at age eighteen to work
as an activist reporter for socialist
news papers, Day participated in the
ongoing suffrage movement to give
women the right to vote. Throughout
the 1930s, her Catholic Worker orga-
nization invested in thirty hospices for
the poor and homeless, providing food
and shelter for five thousand people a
day. This legacy endures today, with
the organization continuing to fund
soup kitchens and homeless shelters
throughout the country.

For more than seventy years, the
Worker has consistently advocated
personal activism to further social

justice, opposing anti-Semitism,
Japanese American internment camps
during World War II, nuclear weapons,
the Korean War, military drafts, and
the communist witch-hunts of the

1950s. The Worker’s circula-
tion peaked in 1938 at

190,000, then fell
dramatically during

World War II, when
Day’s pacifism
was at odds with
much of Amer-
ica. Today, the
Catholic Worker

has a circulation
of 80,000.

I. F. Stone (1907–
1989) shared Dorothy

Day’s passion for social ac-
tivism. He also started early, publish-
ing his own monthly paper at the age
of fourteen and becoming a full-time
reporter by age twenty. He worked
as a Washington political writer
for the Nation in the early
1940s and later for the
New York Daily Com-
pass. Throughout
his career, Stone
challenged the
conventions and
privileges of both
politics and jour-
nalism. In 1941,
for example, he
resigned from the
National Press Club
when it refused to serve
his guest, the nation’s first
African American federal judge. In
the early 1950s, he actively opposed
Joseph McCarthy’s rabid campaign

to rid government and the media of
alleged communists.

When the Daily Compass failed in
1952, the radical Stone was unable to
find a newspaper job and decided to
create his own newsletter, I. F. Stone’s
Weekly, which he published for nine-
teen years. Practicing interpretive and
investigative reporting, Stone became
as adept as any major journalist at
tracking down government records
to discover contradictions, inaccura-
cies, and lies. Over the years, Stone
questioned decisions by the Supreme
Court, investigated the substandard
living conditions of many African
Americans, and criticized political
corruption. He guided the Weekly to
a circulation that reached seventy
thousand during the 1960s, when
he probed American investments of
money and military might in Vietnam.

I. F. Stone and Dorothy Day embodied
a spirit of independent reporting that

has been threatened by the
decline in newspaper

readership and the rise
of chain ownership.

Stone, who believed
that alternative
ideas were crucial
to maintaining a
healthy democracy,
once wrote that

“there must be free
play for so-called

‘subversive’ ideas—
every idea ‘subverts’ the

old to make way for the new.
To shut off ‘subversion’ is to shut

off peaceful progress and to invite
revolution and war.”1

Alternative Journalism:
Dorothy Day and I. F. Stone

CASE
STUDY

CHAPTER 7 ○ NEWSPAPERS��241

Reporters work for editors. General assignment reporters handle all sorts of stories that

might emerge—or “break”—in a given day. Specialty reporters are assigned to particular beats

(police, courts, schools, local and national government) or topics (education, religion, health,

environment, technology). On large dailies, bureau reporters also file reports from other major

cities. Large daily papers feature columnists and critics who cover various aspects of culture,

such as politics, books, television, movies, and food. While papers used to employ a separate

staff for their online operations, the current trend is to have traditional reporters file both

print and online versions of their stories—accompanied by images or video they are respon-

sible for gathering.

Recent consolidation and cutbacks have led to layoffs and the closing of bureaus outside

a paper’s city limits. For example, in 1985 more than six hundred newspapers had reporters

stationed in Washington, D.C.; in 2010 that number was under three hundred. The Los Angeles

Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Baltimore Sun—all owned by the Tribune Company—

closed their independent bureaus in 2009, choosing instead to share reports.26 The downside

of this money-saving measure is that far fewer versions of stories are being produced and

readers must rely on a single version of a news report. According to the American Society of

Newspaper Editors (ASNE), the workforce in daily U.S. newsrooms declined by 5,900 jobs in

2008 and by 5,200 more in 2009.27 These trends have put a strain on the remaining report-

ers and editors, who are increasingly being asked to develop stories in multiple formats with

fewer personnel.

Wire Services and Feature Syndication
Major daily papers might have one hundred or so local reporters and writers, but they still

cannot cover the world or produce enough material to fill up the newshole each day. Newspa-

pers also rely on wire services and syndicated feature services to supplement local coverage.

A few major dailies, such as the New York Times, run their own wire services, selling their sto-

ries to other papers to reprint. Other agencies, such as the Associated Press (AP) and United

Press International (UPI), have hundreds of staffers stationed throughout major U.S. cities and

world capitals. They submit stories and photos each day for distribution to newspapers across

the country. Some U.S. papers also subscribe to foreign wire services, such as Agence France-

Presse in Paris or Reuters in London.

Daily papers generally pay monthly fees for access to all wire stories. Although they use

only a fraction of what is available over the wires, editors routinely monitor wire services each

day for important stories and ideas for local angles.

Wire services have greatly expanded the reach and

scope of news, as local editors depend on wire firms

when they select statewide, national, or international

reports for reprinting.

In addition, feature syndicates, such as United
Features and Tribune Media Services, are commer-

cial outlets that contract with newspapers to provide

work from the nation’s best political writers, editorial

cartoonists, comic-strip artists, and self-help colum-

nists. These companies serve as brokers, distributing

horoscopes and crossword puzzles as well as the

political columns and comic strips that appeal to a

wide audience. When a paper bids on and acquires

the rights to a cartoonist or columnist, it signs exclu-

sivity agreements with a syndicate to ensure that it

is the only paper in the region to carry, say, Clarence

POLITICAL CARTOONS are
often syndicated features in
newspapers and reflect the
issues of the day.

242��WORDS AND PICTURES

NEWSPAPERS

Page, Maureen Dowd, Bob Herbert, Anna Quindlen, or cartoonist Tom Toles. Feature syndi-

cates, like wire services, wield great influence in determining which writers and cartoonists

gain national prominence.

Newspaper Ownership: Chains Lose Their Grip
Edward Wyllis Scripps founded the first newspaper chain—a company that owns several
papers throughout the country—in the 1890s. By the 1920s, there were about thirty chains in the

United States, each one owning an average of five papers. The emergence of chains paralleled

the major business trend during the twentieth century: the movement toward oligopolies in

which a handful of corporations control each industry.

By the 1980s, more than 130 chains owned an average of nine papers each, with the twelve

largest chains accounting for 40 percent of the total circulation in the United States. By the early

2000s, the top ten chains controlled more than one-half of the nation’s total daily newspaper

circulation. Gannett, for example, the nation’s largest chain, owns over eighty daily papers

(and hundreds of nondailies worldwide), ranging from small suburban papers to the Cincinnati

Enquirer, the Nashville Tennessean, and USA Today. (See “What Gannett Owns.”)

Around 2005, consolidation in newspaper ownership leveled off because the decline in

newspaper circulation and ad sales panicked investors, leading to drops in the stock value of

newspapers. Many newspaper chains responded by significantly reducing their newsroom staffs

and selling off individual papers. According to Pew’s State of the News Media 2010 report, about

“13,500 jobs for full-time, newsroom professionals” have disappeared since 2007, “the total

falling from 55,000 to 41,500. . . . That means that newsrooms have shrunk by 25 percent in

three years. . . . To put it another way, newspapers headed into 2010, devoting $1.6 billion less

annually to news than they did three years earlier.”28

For an example of this cost cutting, consider recent actions at the Los Angeles Times (owned

by the Chicago-based chain Tribune Company). Continuing demands from the corporate offices

for cost reductions have led to the resignations of editors and publishers. Cuts have also caused

the departures of some of the most talented staff members, including six Pulitzer Prize winners.

In 2007, Chicago real estate developer Sam Zell bought the Tribune Company for $8 billion and

made it private, insulating it for a time from market demands for high profit margins. However,

by 2008 the company faced declining ad revenue and a tough economy and was forced to file

for bankruptcy protection. While it continues to operate, its recent history indicates the sorts of

troubles even major newspapers face.

About the same time, large chains started to break up, selling individual newspapers to

private equity firms and big banks (like Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase) that deal in

distressed and overleveraged companies with too much debt. For example, in 2006, Knight

Ridder—then the nation’s second-leading chain—was sold for $4.5 billion to the McClatchy Com-

pany. McClatchy then broke up the chain by selling off twelve of the thirty-two papers, including

the San Jose Mercury News and Philadelphia Newspapers (which owns the Philadelphia Enquirer).

McClatchy also sold its leading newspaper, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, to a private equity

company for $530 million, less than half of what it had paid to buy it eight years earlier.

Ownership of one of the nation’s three national newspapers also changed hands. The Wall

Street Journal, held by the Bancroft family for more than one hundred years, accepted a bid of

nearly $5.8 billion from News Corp. head Rupert Murdoch (News Corp. also owns the New York

Post and several papers in the United Kingdom and Australia). At the time, critics also raised

serious concerns about takeovers of newspapers by large entertainment conglomerates (Mur-

doch’s company also owns TV stations, a network, cable channels, and a movie studio). As

small subsidiaries in large media empires, newspapers are increasingly treated as just another

product line that is expected to perform in the same way that a movie or TV program does.

“Sadly, today in
America when a
newspaper reader
dies, he or she is
not replaced by a
new reader.”

JEFFREY COLE,
DIRECTOR, CENTER
FOR THE DIGITAL
FUTURE, USC
ANNENBERG
SCHOOL, 2006

As chains lose their grip, there are concerns about who will own papers in the future and

the effect this will have on content and press freedoms. Recent purchases by private equity

groups are alarming since these companies are usually more interested in turning a profit than

supporting journalism. However, ideas exist for how to avoid this fate. For example, more sup-

port could be rallied for small, independent owners who could then make decisions based on

what’s best for the paper and not just the quarterly report. For more on how newspapers and

owners are trying new business models, see “New Models for Journalism” on page 248.

Joint Operating Agreements Combat Declining Competition
Although the amount of regulation preventing newspaper monopolies has lessened, the govern-

ment continues to monitor the declining number of newspapers in various American cities as

well as mergers in cities where competition among papers might be endangered. In the mid-

1920s, about five hundred American cities had two or more newspapers with separate owners.

However, by 2010 fewer than fifteen cities had independent, competing papers.

In 1970, Congress passed the Newspaper Preservation Act, which enabled failing papers to

continue operating through a joint operating agreement ( JOA). Under a JOA, two competing
papers keep separate news divisions while merging business and production operations for a

period of years. Since the act’s passage, twenty-eight cities have adopted JOAs. In 2010, just six

JOAs remained in place—in Charleston, West Virginia; Detroit; Fort Wayne, Indiana; Las Vegas;

Salt Lake City; and York, Pennsylvania. Although JOAs and mergers have monopolistic tenden-

cies, they sometimes have been the only way to maintain competition between newspapers.

For example, Detroit was one of the most competitive newspaper cities in the nation until

1989. The Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press, then owned by Gannett and Knight Ridder,

respectively, both ranked among the ten most widely circulated papers in the country and sold

their weekday editions for just fifteen cents a copy. Faced with declining revenue and increased

costs, the papers’ managers asked for and received a JOA in 1989. But problems continued.

Then, in 1995, a prolonged and bitter strike by several unions sharply reduced circulation, as

the strikers formed a union-backed paper to compete against the existing newspapers. Many

readers dropped their subscriptions to the Free Press and the News to support the strikers. Be-

fore the strike (and the rise of the Internet), Gannett and Knight Ridder had both reported profit

margins of well over 15 percent on all their newspaper holdings.29 By 2010, Knight Ridder was

out of the chain newspaper business, and neither Detroit paper ranked in the top 20. In addi-

tion, the News and Free Press became the first major papers to stop daily home delivery for part

of the week, instead directing readers to the Web or brief newsstand editions.

WHAT
GANNETT
OWNS
Consider how Gannett
connects to your life;
then turn the page for
the bigger picture.

NEWSPAPERS
• 85 daily papers and 650

nondaily publications
– USA Today
– Asbury Park Press (N.J.)
– Detroit Free Press
– Rochester Democrat and

Chronicle (N.Y.)
– Arizona Republic

(Phoenix)
– Cincinnati Enquirer
– Courier-Journal

(Louisville, Ky.)
– Des Moines Register

(Iowa)
– Indianapolis Star
– News Journal

(Wilmington, Del.)
– Tennessean (Nashville)
– Army Times Publishing

Company (newspapers)
– Newsquest plc

(newspaper publishing,
United Kingdom)

TELEVISION
• Captivate Network

(advertising-based
television in elevators)

• 23 TV stations
– KARE-TV (Minneapolis)
– KNAZ-TV (Flagstaff, Ariz.)
– KSDK-TV (St. Louis)
– KTHV-TV (Little Rock,

Ark.)
– KUSA-TV (Denver)
– KXTV-TV (Sacramento,

Calif.)
– WATL-TV (Atlanta)
– WBIR-TV (Knoxville, Tenn.)
– WCSH-TV (Portland, Me.)
– WGRZ-TV (Buffalo, N.Y.)
– WJXX-TV (Jacksonville)
– WKYC-TV (Cleveland)
– WTLV-TV (Jacksonville)
– WTSP-TV (Tampa)
– WZZM-TV (Grand Rapids,

Mich.)

INTERNET
• CareerBuilder (50 percent)
• Metromix.com
• ShopLocal.com
• MomsLikeMe.com

MAGAZINES
AND PRINTING
• Clipper Magazine (direct

mail advertising)
• Gannett Healthcare Group

(periodical publishing)
• Gannett Offset (commercial

printing)

Turn page for more

Publishers and journalists today face worrisome issues, such as the decline in newspaper reader-

ship and the failure of many papers to attract younger readers. However, other problems persist as

newspapers continue to converge with the Internet and try to figure out the future of digital news.

Readership Declines in the United States
The decline in newspaper readership actually began during the Great Depression, with the rise

of radio. Between 1931 and 1939, six hundred newspapers ceased operation. Another circulation

crisis occurred from the late 1960s through the 1970s with the rise in network television viewing

Challenges Facing
Newspapers Today

NEWSPAPERS

and greater competition from suburban weeklies. In addition, with an increasing number of

women working full-time outside the home, newspapers could no longer consistently count on

one of their core readership groups.

Throughout the first decade of the 2000s, U.S. newspaper circulation dropped again; this

time by more than 25 percent.30 In the face of such steep circulation and readership declines,

newspapers began to adopt new strategies:

After years of trying to maximize audience with relatively low circulation prices, relying more on

advertising for revenue, [newspapers] raised the price of print editions substantially, to 75 cents or

$1 in most cities. And many were preparing for experiments with a version of paid online content early

in 2010. As a result, many companies by the end of 2009 were reporting at least a modest increase

in circulation revenue. But that came at a cost, the biggest print circulation losses yet for an industry

whose audience numbers chart over the last six years has come to look like a ski slope.31 (See Figure 7.2.)

Remarkably, while the United States continues to experience declines in newspaper reader-

ship and advertising dollars, many other nations—where Internet news is still emerging—have

experienced increases. For example, the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) reported that

between 2003 and 2009, there was an 8.8 percent growth in newspaper readership worldwide,

mostly in regions where the Internet had not become ubiquitous.32 These increases are concentrat-

ed in Asia, Africa, and South America, while sales are declining in North America and Europe. In

2010, WAN’s Web site also boasted that newspapers are still the world’s “second largest advertising

medium” (after television) and that worldwide newspapers have “more than 1.6 billion readers a

day.”33 (See “Global Village: For U.S. Newspaper Industry, an Example in Germany?” on page 246.)

Going Local: How Small and Campus Papers Retain Readers
Despite the doomsday headlines and predictions about the future of newspapers, it is important

to note that the problems of the newspaper business “are not uniform across the industry.” In

fact, according to the Pew Research Center’s The State of the News Media 2010 report, “small

dailies and community weeklies, with the exception of some that are badly positioned or badly

managed,” still do better than many “big-city papers.”34 The report also suggested that smaller

papers in smaller communities remain “the dominant source for local information and the

place for local merchants to advertise.”

Smaller newspapers are doing better for several reasons. First, small towns and cities often

don’t have local TV stations, big-city magazines, or numerous radio stations competing against

newspapers for ad space. This means that smaller papers are more likely to retain their rev-

enue from local advertisers. Second, whether they are tiny weekly papers serving small towns

or campus newspapers serving university towns, such papers have a loyal and steady base of

readers who cannot get information on their small communities from any other source. In fact,

many college newspaper editors report that the most popular feature in their papers is the

“police report”: It serves as a kind of local gossip, listing the names of students “busted” over

the weekend for underage drinking or public intoxication.

Finally, because smaller newspapers tend to be more consensus-oriented than conflict-

driven in their approach to news, these papers usually do not see the big dips in ad revenue that

may occur when editors tackle complex or controversial topics that are divisive. For example,

when a major regional newspaper does an investigative series on local auto dealers for poor

service or shady business practices, those dealers—for a while—can cancel advertising that the

paper sorely needs. While local papers fill in the gaps left by large mainstream papers and other

news media sources, they still face some of the same challenges as large papers and must con-

tinue to adapt to retain readers and advertisers.

WHAT DOES
THIS MEAN?
To recoup some of
its lost newspaper
advertising revenue,
Gannett is investing
in online sites that are
similar to classified ads.

• Revenue. Gannett’s 2009
revenue was $5.6 billion,
down 28 percent from
2006’s peak revenue of
$7.8 billion.1

• Advertising. Despite the
declines in print advertising,
74 percent (or $4.1 billion)
of Gannett’s revenue still
comes from newspapers.

• USA Today. The second-
largest newspaper in the
United States, USA Today
has a daily circulation of
more than 1.8 million.
However, its Web site
attracts 56 million visitors
per month, more than thirty
times the print circulation.2

• Market Reach. Gannett’s
ownership of newspaper,
television, and direct mail
companies means it can
reach large segments of the
population. For example, in
2009 “in Indianapolis, the
combination of all Gannett
products reached 79%
of the adult population,
an average of 5.4 times a
week for 5.3 million total
impressions each week—a
5% increase since 2007.”3

• Television. In 2009,
Gannett’s twenty-three
television stations
earned $56 million in
retransmission fees. This
is up from $19 million—or
199 percent—in 2008.4
The stations reach over
20 million U.S. households
(18.2% of the population)
and account for 11 percent
of Gannett’s revenue.

CAPTIVATE NETWORK
reaches 3 million people a
day in elevators.

CHAPTER 7 ○ NEWSPAPERS��245

Convergence: Newspapers
Struggle in the Move to Digital
Because of their local monopoly status, many news-

papers were slower than other media to confront the

challenges of the Internet. But faced with competi-

tion from the 24/7 news cycle on cable, newspapers

responded by developing online versions of their

papers. While some observers think newspapers are

on the verge of extinction as the digital age eclipses

the print era, the industry is no dinosaur. In fact, the

history of communication demonstrates that older

mass media have always adapted; so far, books, news-

papers, and magazines have adjusted to the radio,

television, and movie industries. And with more than

fifteen hundred North American daily papers online

in 2010, newspapers are solving one of the industry’s

major economic headaches: the cost of newsprint.

After salaries, paper is the industry’s largest expense,

typically accounting for more than 25 percent of a

newspaper’s total cost.

Online newspapers are truly taking advantage of the flexibility the Internet offers. Because

space is not an issue online, newspapers can post stories and readers’ letters that they weren’t

able to print in the paper edition. They can also run longer stories with more in-depth coverage,

as well as offer immediate updates to breaking news. Also, most stories appear online before

they appear in print; they can be posted at any time and updated several times a day.

Among the valuable resources that online newspapers offer are hyperlinks to Web sites that

relate to stories and that link news reports to an archive of related articles. Free of charge or for

a modest fee, a reader can search the newspaper’s database from home and investigate the en-

tire sequence and history of an ongoing story, such as a trial, over the course of several months.

Taking advantage of the Internet’s multimedia capabilities, online newspapers offer readers the

ability to stream audio and video files—everything from presidential news conferences to local

sports highlights to original video footage from a storm disaster. Today’s online newspapers of-

fer readers a dynamic, rather than a static, resource.

However, these advances have yet to pay off. Online ads accounted for only about 10 per-

cent of a newspaper’s advertising in 2009—up about 3 percent from 2007. So newspapers, even

in decline, are still heavily dependent on print ads. But this trend does not seem likely to sustain

papers for long. Ad revenue for newspaper print ads declined 7 percent in 2007 and another

17 percent in 2008 (see Figure 7.3 on page 247). Then in 2009, print ad revenue fell another 25

to 35 percent at many newspapers.36 To jump-start online revenue streams, more than four hun-

dred daily newspapers collaborated with Yahoo! (the number one portal to newspapers online)

in 2006 to begin an ad venture that aimed to increase papers’ online revenue by 10 to 20 percent.

By summer 2010, with the addition of the large Gannett chain, Yahoo! had nearly nine hundred

papers in the ad partnership. During an eighteen-month period in 2009–10, the Yahoo! consor-

tium sold over thirty thousand online ad campaigns in local markets with most revenue shared

50/50 between Yahoo! and its partner papers.37

One of the business mistakes that most newspaper executives made near the beginning of the

Internet age was giving away online content for free. Whereas their print versions always had two

revenue streams—ads and subscriptions—newspaper executives weren’t convinced that online

revenue would amount to much, so they used their online version as an advertisement for the

P
e
rc

e
n

t
D

e
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in
e

Year

–2

–4

–6

–8

–10

–12

Daily Sunday

S
e

p
t

0
3

M
a

r
0

4
S
e
p
t

0
4

M
a
r
0
5
S
e
p
t

0
5

M
a
r
0
6
S
e
p
t

0
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M
a
r
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M
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0
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M
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r
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0
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9

FIGURE 7.2
NEWSPAPER
CIRCULATION
PERCENTAGE DECLINES,
2003–2009
Source: Pew Research Center,
Project for Excellence in Journal-
ism, “Newspapers: Charts &
Graphs: Newspaper Circulation
Percentage Declines,” The State
of the News Media 2010, http://
www.stateofthemedia.org/2010/
chartland.php?id=1321&ct=line
&dir=&sort=&ckal1Cols=1&c1=1
&c2=1, accessed July 6, 2010;
Joseph Plambeck, “More Steep
Circulation Declines at Newspa-
pers,” New York Times, April 26,
2010, http://mediadecoder.blogs
.nytimes.com/2010/04/26.

“In 2009, the
[Christian Science]
Monitor [became]
the first nationally
circulated
newspaper to
replace its daily
print edition with
its website.”

DAVID COOK,
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
MONITOR

GLOBAL
VILLAGE

I
n 2010, print news readership
was climbing in places like India
and China. And many “ modernized”

European countries also seem to sup-
port papers better than the United
States does. Why? One possible
reason is that the Internet developed
faster in the U.S. and, therefore, was
adopted earlier by new generations.
To explore this discrepancy further, this
New York Times article offers insights
into Germany’s ongoing cultural and
economic embrace of newspapers.

While daily newspaper circulation in
the United States fell 27 percent from
1998 through 2008, it slipped 19 per-
cent in Germany. While fewer than half
of Americans read newspapers, more
than 70 percent of Germans do. While
newspapers’ revenues have plunged
in the United States, they have held
steady in Germany since 2004.

American publishers blame the
economic crisis and the Internet for
their plight, but [a new] report says the
structure of the U.S. newspaper indus-
try is a big part of the problem.

For U.S. Newspaper Industry,
an Example in Germany?
by Eric Pfanner

Most German newspapers are owned
by [families] or other small companies
with local roots, but the American
industry is dominated by publicly traded
chains. Under pressure from sharehold-
ers clamoring for short-term results,
the study contends, U.S. newspapers
made reckless cuts in editorial and
production quality, hastening the flight
of readers and advertisers to the Web.

Instead of focusing on journalism, . . .
U.S. newspapers made unwise invest-
ments in new media and compounded
the damage by giving away their con-
tents free on the Internet.

German publishers have been much
more reticent about the Web, in some
cases keeping large amounts of their
content offline. . . .

[However,] it is equally possible that
German newspapers have yet to bear
the brunt of the challenges confronting
American papers.

Germans have been slower than Ameri-
cans to embrace the Internet for some
other purposes, not just news. E-com-
merce in Germany, for example, was
slow to take off because of concerns

about data security and a
suspicion about the use of
credit cards. While German
publishers have recently
stepped up their efforts to
develop new digital business
lines, in this regard they trail
American newspapers. As
the study notes, the Internet
generates only low-single-
digit percentages of most
German newspapers’ sales,
while online revenue has

reached double figures at some U.S.
papers.

German papers do have one big
advantage in dealing with the digital
challenge: they are well organized at an
industry level.

Publishers have lobbied the government
of Chancellor Angela Merkel to draft
legislation that would create a new kind
of copyright for online content; German
publishers say this could serve as a lever
to extract revenue from search engines
and news aggregators. And they have
complained to the German antitrust
authorities about the dominance of the
biggest search engine, Google.

Whether these moves will help publish-
ers build for the future, or simply protect
their existing businesses, is not clear.

For now, however, German publishers
profess confidence in a continuation of
the status quo, a luxury that newspapers
in the United States and other countries,
for whatever reasons, cannot afford.

In thinking about differences between
Germany and the United States,
can you suggest other reasons that
account for the U.S. newspaper
struggles? Do you think the points
made in this article will continue to
keep Germany more newspaper-
friendly over time? Would similar
measures make a difference in the
United States, or is the move to the
Internet and the disappearance of
newspapers inevitable?

Source: Eric Pfanner, “For U.S. Newspaper Indus-
try, an Example in Germany?,” New York Times,
May 16, 2010, http://www.nytimes
.com/2010/05/17/business/media/
17iht-cache17.html?_r=3&ref=media.

CHAPTER 7 ○ NEWSPAPERS��247

printed paper. Since those early years, most newspapers are now trying to establish a paywall—
charging a fee for online access to news content—but customers used to getting online content for

free have shunned most online subscriptions. One paper that did charge early for online content

was the Wall Street Journal, which pioneered one of the few successful paywalls in the digital

era. In fact, the Journal, helped by the public’s interest in the economic crisis and 400,000 paid

subscriptions to its online service, replaced USA Today as the nation’s most widely circulated

newspaper in 2009. Locally and regionally, however, fewer than thirty newspapers charged for

online content in 2010. Most of these papers—like the Santa Barbara News-Press and the Idaho

Press-Tribune—had print circulations under 30,000 and paid online-only subscriptions in the

100–1,200 range. They charge anywhere from $3 to $15 per month for an online subscription.38

An interesting case in the paywall experiments is the New York Times. In 2005, the paper

began charging online readers for access to its editorials and columns, but the rest of the site

was free. This system lasted only until 2007. Starting in 2011, the paper will again add a paywall

where visitors who read more than a certain number of articles each month will have to pay a

fee for unlimited access to the site. The Times is hoping that many loyal readers—the site gets

seventeen million visitors a month—will pay for unlimited access, while casual visitors will still

be able to view a handful of articles each month.39 However, a 2010 report found that even

among the “most loyal news consumers,” only 19 percent “said they would be willing to pay for

news online.” The report, based on a national random telephone sample of 2,259 consumers,

also found that “a large majority”—82 percent—of consumers

who had favorite online news sites “said they would find some-

where else to get the news.”40 The hard truth may be that most

consumers who are already accustomed to getting “free” news

online won’t like the idea of paying. Only time will tell if pay-

walls will create new revenue for papers or alienate readers.

Blogs Challenge Newspapers’
Authority Online
The rise of blogs in the late 1990s brought amateurs into the

realm of professional journalism. It was an awkward meeting.

As National Press Club president Doug Harbrecht said to con-

servative blogger Matt Drudge in 1998 while introducing him to

the press club’s members, “There aren’t many in this hallowed

LOCAL PAPERS
In Palo Alto, California,
newspapers are thriving.
The city has three active
papers (two dailies and one
weekly) that, despite some
cutbacks, remain profitable
and have survived the recent
recession. Their success
comes from a combination
of factors, including: The
papers are free, short (fifteen
to twenty pages), have a
local focus, and sometimes
act as a watchdog on the
local city government. Would
you read such a paper?
(Shown here are two editors
of the Palo Alto Weekly.)

P
e
rc
e
n

t
G

ro
w

th
i
n

2
0

0
9
35

10
5
0

–5

–10

–15

–20

–25

–30

–35

Media Sector
Magazines NewspapersRadioNetwork TVOnlineCable

FIGURE 7.3
PERCENTAGE CHANGE IN
AD SPENDING BY MEDIUM,
2008–09
Source: Project for Excellence
in Journalism, “State of the
News Media 2010: An Annual
Report on American Journalism,”
Overview: Key Findings, Econom-
ics,” http://www.stateofthemedia
.org/2010/overview_key_findings
.php#keyecon, accessed July 6,
2010.

248��WORDS AND PICTURES

NEWSPAPERS

room who consider you a journalist. Real journal-

ists . . . pride themselves on getting it first and right;

they get to the bottom of the story, they bend over

backwards to get the other side. Journalism means

being painstakingly thorough, even-handed, and

fair.”41 Harbrecht’s suggestion, of course, was that

untrained bloggers weren’t as scrupulous as profes-

sionally trained journalists. In the following decade,

though, as blogs like the Daily Kos, the Huffington

Post, AndrewSullivan.com, and Talking Points Memo

gained credibility and a large readership, traditional

journalism slowly began to try blogging, allowing

some reporters to write a blog in addition to their

regular newspaper, television, or radio work. Some newspapers such as the Washington Post

and the New York Times even hired journalists to blog exclusively for their Web sites.

By 2005, the wary relationship between journalism and blogging began to change.

Blogging became less a journalistic sideline and more a viable main feature. Established

journalists left major news organizations to begin new careers in the blogosphere. For exam-

ple, in 2007 top journalists John Harris and Jim VandeHei left the Washington Post to launch

Politico.com, a national blog (and, secondarily, a local newspaper) about Capitol Hill politics.

Another breakthrough moment occurred when the Talking Points Memo blog, headed by

Joshua Micah Marshall, won a George Polk Award for legal reporting in 2008. From Marshall’s

point of view, “I think of us as journalists; the medium we work in is blogging. We have kind

of broken free of the model of discrete articles that have a beginning and end. Instead, there

are an ongoing series of dispatches.”42 Still, what distinguishes such “ dispatches” and the

best online work from so many opinion blogs is the reliance on old-fashioned journalism—

calling on reporters to interview people as sources, look at documents, and find evidence to

support the story.

New Models for Journalism
In response to the challenges newspapers face, a number of concerned journalists, econo-

mists, and citizens are calling for new business models and ideas about how to combat

newspapers’ rapid decline. Possibilities include developing new business ventures like online

papers begun by former print reporters, or having wealthy universities like Harvard and Yale

buy and support newspapers, thereby better insulating their public service and watchdog

operations from the expectations of the marketplace. Another possibility might be to get

Internet companies involved. Google’s executives worry that a decline in quality journalism

will mean fewer sites on which to post ads and from which to earn online revenue. Wealthy

Internet companies like Microsoft and Google could expand into the news business and start

producing content for both online and print papers. In fact, in March 2010 Yahoo! began

hiring reporters to increase the presence of its online news site. The company hired report-

ers from Politico.com, BusinessWeek, the New York Observer, the Washington Post, and Talking

Points Memo, among others.

Additional ideas are coming from universities (where journalism school enrollments

are actually increasing). For example, the dean of Columbia University’s Journalism School

(started once upon a time with money bequeathed by nineteenth-century newspaper mogul

Joseph Pulitzer) commissioned a study from Leonard Downie, former executive editor of the

Washington Post, and Michael Schudson, Columbia journalism professor and media scholar.

Their report, “The Reconstruction of American Journalism,” focused on the lost circulation,

NEWSPAPER WEB
SITES provide papers
with a great way to reach
thousands, if not millions,
of potential readers. But,
with readers used to getting
online news for free, most
sites lose revenue. Would you
pay for online news? Does
it make a difference if the
paper is national or local?

“Now, like hundreds
of other mid-career
journalists who are
walking away from
media institutions
across the country,
I’m looking for other
ways to tell the
stories I care about.
At the same time,
the world of online
news is maturing,
looking for depth
and context. I think
the timing couldn’t
be better.”

NANCY CLEELAND, ON
WHY SHE WAS LEAVING
THE LOS ANGELES
TIMES, POSTED ON THE
HUFFINGTON POST,
2007

CHAPTER 7 ○ NEWSPAPERS��249

advertising revenue, and news jobs and aimed to create a

strategy for reporting that would hold public and government

officials accountable for providing basic access to the kinds

of information and documentation that citizens in a democ-

racy need in order to be well informed.43 Here is an overview

of their recommendations, some of which have already been

implemented:

• News organizations “substantially devoted to reporting on

public affairs” should be allowed to operate as nonprofit enti-

ties in order to take in tax-deductible contributions while still

collecting ad and subscription revenues. For example, the

Poynter Institute owns and operates the St. Petersburg Times,

Florida’s largest newspaper. As a nonprofit, the St. Petersburg Times is protected from the unre-

alistic 16 to 20 percent profit margins that publicly held newspapers had been expected to earn

in the 1980s and 1990s.

• Philanthropic organizations and foundations “should substantially increase their support

for news organizations” that have shown a commitment to public affairs news and the

kind of reporting that holds local leaders, politicians, officials, and government agencies

accountable.

• Public radio and TV, through federal reforms in the Corporation for Public Broadcasting

(CPB), should reorient their focus to “significant local news reporting in every community

served by public stations and their Web sites.”

• Operating their own news services or supporting regional news organizations, public and

private universities “should become ongoing sources of local, state, specialized subject and

accountability news reporting as part of their educational mission.”

• A national Fund for Local News should be created with money the Federal Communica-

tions Commission (FCC) collects from “telecom users, television and radio broadcast

licensees, or Internet service providers.”

• Via use of the Internet, news services, nonprofit organizations, and government agencies

should “increase the accessibility and usefulness of public information collected by fed-

eral, state, and local governments.”

As the journalism industry continues to reinvent itself and tries new avenues to ensure

its future, not every “great” idea will work out. Some of the immediate backlash to this report

raised questions about the government becoming involved with traditionally independent news

media. What is important, however, is that newspapers continue to experiment with new ideas

and business models so they can adapt and even thrive in the Internet age. (For more on the

challenges facing journalism, see Chapter 13.)

Alternative Voices
The combination of the online news surge and traditional newsroom cutbacks has led to a

new phenomenon known as citizen journalism, or citizen media, or community journalism
(in those projects where the participants might not be citizens). As a grassroots movement,

citizen journalism refers to people—activist amateurs and concerned citizens, not profes-

sional journalists—who use the Internet and blogs to disseminate news and information.

In fact, with steep declines in newsroom staffs, many professional news media organizations—

like CNN’s iReport and many regional newspapers—are increasingly trying to corral

citizen journalists as an inexpensive way to make up for journalists lost to newsroom

“downsizing.”

POLITICO quickly became
a reputable place for
Washington insiders as well
as the general population
to go for political news
and reporting, allowing the
organization to thrive at a
time when other papers were
struggling. As Editor-in-Chief
John Harris states on the
site, Politico aims to be more
than just a place for politics;
it also “hope[s] to add to the
conversation about what’s
next for journalism.” What do
you think its success means
for the future of the news
media?

250��WORDS AND PICTURES

NEWSPAPERS

A 2008 study by J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism reported that more than

one thousand community-based Web sites were in operation, posting citizen stories about

local government, police, and city development. This represented twice the number of com-

munity sites from a year earlier. J-Lab also operates the Knight Citizen News Network, “a Web

site that advises citizens and traditional journalists on how to launch and operate community

news and information sites.”44 In 2009, academics examined “60 of the most highly regarded

citizen sites identified by nationally known experts in new media.” While the study found that

“a number of these sites individually revealed some impressive work,” the funding and “re-

sources to provide these services at the same level of full news operations, day-in and day-out,

do not exist, at least as of now.” The report also found “fairly limited levels of new content,”

many sites that were not very transparent about funding and daily operations, and poli-

cies “no more likely to encourage citizen postings” than traditional commercial news media

sites.45 While many of these sites do not yet have the resources to provide the kind of regional

news coverage that local newspapers once provided, there is still a lot hope for community

journalism moving forward. These sites provide an outlet for people to voice their stories and

opinions, and new sites are emerging daily.

“It may not be
essential to
save or promote
any particular
news medium,
including printed
newspapers. What
is paramount
is preserving
independent,
original, credible
reporting, whether
or not it is popular
or profitable, and
regardless of the
medium in which it
appears.”

LEONARD DOWNIE AND
MICHAEL SCHUDSON

MEDIA MOBILIZING
PROJECT (mediamobilizing
.org) is a community-based
organization in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, that helps
nonprofit and grassroots
organizations create and
distribute news pieces about
their causes and stories.
Such organizations are key
to getting out messages that
matter deeply to communities
but that the mainstream
media often ignore.

Of all mass media, newspapers have played the longest and strongest role in sustaining democ-

racy. Over the years, newspapers have fought heroic battles in places that had little tolerance

for differing points of view. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), from 1992

through June 2010, 815 reporters from around the world were killed while doing their jobs.

Of those, 72 percent were murdered, 18 percent were killed in combat assignments and war

reporting, and 10 percent were killed while performing “dangerous assignments.”46 By fall 2010,

37 reporters had died, including 6 in Pakistan and 3 in Honduras. Many deaths in the 2000s re-

ported by the CPJ came from the war in Iraq. From 2003 to fall 2010, 144 reporters had died in

Iraq, along with 54 media workers and support staff. For comparison, 63 reporters were killed

while covering the Vietnam War; 17 died covering the Korean War; and 69 were killed during

World War II.47 Our nation is dependent on journalists who are willing to do this very dangerous

reporting in order to keep us informed about what is going on around the world.

Newspapers and
Democracy

CHAPTER 7 ○ NEWSPAPERS��251

In addition to the physical danger, newsroom cutbacks, and the closing of foreign bureaus,

a number of smaller concerns remain as we consider the future of newspapers. For instance,

some charge that newspapers have become so formulaic in their design and reporting styles

that they may actually discourage new approaches to telling stories and reporting news.

Another criticism is that in many one-newspaper cities, only issues and events of interest to

middle- and upper-middle-class readers are covered, resulting in the underreporting of the

experiences and events that affect poorer and working-class citizens. In addition, given the

rise of newspaper chains, the likelihood of including new opinions, ideas, and information in

mainstream daily papers may be diminishing. Moreover, chain ownership tends to discourage

watchdog journalism and the crusading traditions of newspapers. Like other business manag-

ers, many news executives have preferred not to offend investors or outrage potential advertis-

ers by running too many investigative reports—especially business probes. This may be most

evident in the fact that reporters have generally not reported adequately on the business and

ownership arrangements in their own industry.

Finally, as print journalism shifts to digital culture, the greatest challenge is the upheaval

of print journalism’s business model. Most economists say that newspapers need new business

models, but some observers think that local papers, ones that are not part of big overleveraged

chains, will survive on the basis of local ads and coupons or “big sale” inserts. Increasingly,

independent online firms will help bolster national reporting through special projects. In 2009,

the news Web site Huffington Post hired a team of reporters to cover the economy. Also that

year, the Associated Press wire service initiated an experiment to distribute investigative reports

from several nonprofit groups—including the Center for Public Integrity, the Center for Investiga-

tive Reporting, and ProPublica—to its fifteen hundred members as a news source for struggling

papers that have cut back on staff. But in the end, there will be no returning to any golden age of

newspapers; the Internet is transforming journalism and relocating where we get our news.

As print journalism loses readers and advertisers to digital culture, what will become of

newspapers, which do most of the nation’s primary journalistic work? John Carroll presided

over thirteen Pulitzer Prize–winning reports at the Los Angeles Times as editor from 2000 to

2005, but he left the paper to protest deep corporate cuts to the newsroom. He has lamented

the future of newspapers and their unique role: “Newspapers are doing the reporting in this

country. Google and Yahoo! and those people aren’t putting reporters on the street in any num-

bers at all. Blogs can’t afford it. Network television is taking reporters off the street. Commer-

cial radio is almost nonexistent. And newspapers are the last ones standing, and newspapers

are threatened. And reporting is absolutely an essential thing for democratic self-government.

Who’s going to do it? Who’s going to pay for the news? If newspapers fall by the wayside, what

will we know?”48

“The primary
purpose of
journalism
is to provide
citizens with the
information they
need to be free and
self-governing.”

BILL KOVACH AND
TOM ROSENSTIEL,
THE ELEMENTS OF
JOURNALISM, 2007
(c) Bedford/St. Martin’s bedfordstmartins.com 1-457-62096-0 / 978-1-457-62096-6

252��WORDS AND PICTURES

CHAPTER
REVIEW
COMMON THREADS

With the coming of radio and television, newspapers in
the twentieth century surrendered their title as the mass
medium shared by the largest audience. However, to this
day newspapers remain the single most important source of
news for the nation, even in the age of the Internet. Although
many readers today cite Yahoo! and Google as the primary
places they search for news, Yahoo! and Google are only
directories that guide readers to other news stories—most
often to online newspaper sites. This means that newspa-
per organizations are still the primary institutions doing the
work of gathering and reporting the news. Even with all the
newsroom cutbacks across the United States, newspapers
remain the only journalistic organization in most towns and

One of the Common Threads discussed in Chapter 1 is about the role that media play in a democracy.
The newspaper industry has always played a strong role in our democracy by reporting news and investigating
stories. Even in the Internet age, newspapers remain our primary source for content. How will the industry’s
current financial struggles affect our ability to demand and access reliable news?

partisan press, 223
penny papers, 224
human-interest stories, 224
wire services, 225
yellow journalism, 225
investigative journalism, 226
objective journalism, 229

inverted-pyramid style, 229
interpretive journalism, 230
literary journalism, 231
consensus-oriented journalism, 234
conflict-oriented journalism, 234
underground press, 238
newshole, 239

feature syndicates, 241
newspaper chain, 242
joint operating agreement

(JOA), 243
paywall, 247
citizen journalism, 249

KEY TERMS
The definitions for the terms listed below can be found in the glossary at the end of the book.
The page numbers listed with the terms indicate where the term is highlighted in the chapter.

cities that still employs a significant staff to report news and
tell the community’s stories.

Newspapers link people to what matters in their com-
munities, their nation, and their world. No other journalistic
institution serves society as well. But with smaller news re-
sources and the industry no longer able to sustain high profit
margins, what will become of newspapers? Who will gather
the information needed to sustain a democracy, to serve
as the watchdog over our key institutions, to document the
comings and goings of everyday life? And, perhaps more
important, who will act on behalf of the people who don’t
have the news media’s access to authorities or the ability to
influence them?

CHAPTER 7 ○ NEWSPAPERS��253

For review quizzes, chapter summaries, links
to media-related Web sites, and more, go to
bedfordstmartins.com/mediaculture.

REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. What are the limitations of a press that serves only
partisan interests? Why did the earliest papers appeal
mainly to more privileged readers?

2. How did newspapers emerge as a mass medium during
the penny press era? How did content changes make
this happen?

3. What are the two main features of yellow journalism?
How have Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst
contributed to newspaper history?

Competing Models of Modern Print Journalism

4. Why did objective journalism develop? What are its char-
acteristics? What are its strengths and limitations?

5. Why did interpretive forms of journalism develop in the
modern era? What are the limits of objectivity?

6. How would you define literary journalism? Why did it
emerge in such an intense way in the 1960s? How did
literary journalism provide a critique of so-called objec-
tive news?

The Business and Ownership of Newspapers

7. What is the difference between consensus- and conflict-
oriented newspapers?

8. What role have ethnic, minority, and oppositional news-
papers played in the United States?

1. What kinds of stories, topics, or issues are not being
covered well by mainstream papers?

2. Why do you think people aren’t reading U.S. daily news-
papers as frequently as they once did? Why is newspa-
per readership going up in other countries?

3. Discuss whether newspaper chains are ultimately good
or bad for the future of journalism.

QUESTIONING THE MEDIA
4. Do newspapers today play a vigorous role as watchdogs

of our powerful institutions? Why or why not? What
impact will the “downsizing” and closing of newspapers
have on this watchdog role?

5. Will blogs and other Internet news services eventually
replace newspapers? Explain your response.

9. Define wire service and syndication.
10. Why did newspaper chains become an economic trend in

the twentieth century?
11. What is the impact of a joint operating agreement (JOA)

on the business and editorial divisions of competing
newspapers?

Challenges Facing Newspapers Today

12. What are the major reasons for the decline in U.S.
newspaper circulation figures? How do these figures
compare with circulations in other nations?

13. What major challenges does new technology pose to the
newspaper industry?

14. With traditional ownership in jeopardy today, what are
some other possible business models for running a
newspaper?

15. What is the current state of citizen journalism?
16. What are the challenges that new online news sites

face?
Newspapers and Democracy

17. What is a newspaper’s role in a democracy?
18. What makes newspaper journalism different from the

journalism of other mass media?

The Evolution of American Newspapers

DEMOCRATIC EXPRESSION
AND THE MASS MEDIA

The Culture of
Journalism:
Values, Ethics, and
Democracy

CHAPTER 13 ○ JOURNALISM��417

In 1887, a young reporter left her job at the
Pittsburgh Dispatch to seek her fortune in New
York City. Only twenty-three years old, Elizabeth
“Pink” Cochrane had grown tired of writing for
the society pages and answering letters to the
editor. She wanted to be on the front page. But
at that time, it was considered “unladylike” for
women journalists to use their real names, so
the Dispatch editors, borrowing from a Stephen
Foster song, had dubbed her “Nellie Bly.”

After four months of persistent job-hunting and
freelance writing, Nellie Bly earned a tryout at
Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, the nation’s
biggest paper. Her assignment: to investigate
the deplorable conditions at the Women’s Lunatic
Asylum on Blackwell’s Island. Her method: to
get herself declared mad and committed to the
asylum. After practicing the look of a disheveled
lunatic in front of mirrors, wandering city streets
unwashed and seemingly dazed, and terrifying
her fellow boarders in a New York rooming house

419
Modern Journalism in
the Information Age

423
Ethics and the News
Media

429
Reporting Rituals and
the Legacy of Print
Journalism

435
Journalism in the Age
of TV and the Internet

439
Alternative Models:
Public Journalism
and “Fake” News

445
Democracy and
Reimagining
Journalism’s Role

418��DEMOCRATIC EXPRESSION AND THE MASS MEDIA

by acting crazy, she succeeded in
convincing doctors and officials to com-
mit her. Other New York newspapers
reported her incarceration, speculating
on the identity of this “mysterious waif,”
this “pretty crazy girl” with the “wild,
hunted look in her eyes.”1

Her two-part story appeared in October
1887 and caused a sensation. She was
the first reporter to pull off such a stunt.
In the days before objective journalism,
Nellie Bly’s dramatic first-person
accounts documented harsh cold baths
(“three buckets of water over my head—
ice cold water—into my eyes, my ears,
my nose and my mouth”); attendants who
abused and taunted patients; and newly
arrived immigrant women, completely
sane, who were committed to this “rat
trap” simply because no one could under-
stand them. After the exposé, Bly was fa-
mous. Pulitzer gave her a permanent job,
and New York City committed $1 million
toward improving its asylums.

Within a year, Nellie Bly had exposed a
variety of shady scam artists, corrupt poli-
ticians and lobbyists, and unscrupulous
business practices. Posing as an “unwed
mother” with an unwanted child, she
uncovered an outfit trafficking in newborn
babies. And disguised as a sinner in need
of reform, she revealed the appalling con-
ditions at a home for “unfortunate women.”
A lifetime champion of women and the
poor, Nellie Bly pioneered what was then
called detective or stunt journalism. Her
work inspired the twentieth-century
practice of investigative journalism—
from Ida Tarbell’s exposés of oil corpora-
tions in the early 1900s to the 2010
Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting,
awarded to (1) Sheri Fink of ProPublica
.org (with the New York Times Magazine)

for a story documenting “the urgent
life-and-death decisions made by one
hospital’s exhausted doctors when they
were cut off by the floodwaters of Hur-
ricane Katrina,” and (2) Barbara Laker
and Wendy Ruderman of the Philadel-
phia Daily News for exposing “a rogue
police narcotics squad, resulting in an
FBI probe and the review of hundreds of
criminal cases tainted by the scandal.”2

Such journalism can be dangerous.
Working for Dublin’s Sunday Indepen-
dent, Veronica Guerin was the first
reporter to cover in depth Ireland’s esca-
lating organized crime and drug prob-
lem. In 1995, a man forced his way into
her home and shot her in the thigh. After
the assault, she wrote about the inci-
dent, vowing to continue her reporting
despite her fears. She was also punched
in the face by the suspected head of
Ireland’s gang world, who threatened to
hurt Guerin’s son and kill her if she
wrote about him. She kept writing.
In December 1995, she flew to New
York to receive the International Press
Freedom Award from the Committee to
Protect Journalists.

When Guerin returned to Dublin, she
began writing stories naming gang
members suspected of mastermind-
ing drug-related crimes and a string of
eleven unsolved contract murders. In
June 1996, while stopped in her car at
a Dublin intersection, she was shot five
times by two hired killers. Ireland and
the world’s journalists mourned Veronica
Guerin’s death. Later, the Irish govern-
ment created laws that allowed judges
to deny bail to dangerous suspects and
opened a bureau to confiscate money
and property from suspected drug
criminals and gang members.

THE CULTURE OF JOURNALISM

CHAPTER 13 ○ JOURNALISM ��419

JOURNALISM IS THE ONLY MEDIA ENTERPRISE that democracy absolutely
requires—and it is the only media practice and business that is specifically mentioned and

protected by the U.S. Constitution. However, with the major decline in traditional news audi-

ences, the collapse of many newspapers, and the rise of twenty-four-hour cable news channels

and Internet news blogs, mainstream journalism is searching for new business models and

better ways to connect with the public.

In this chapter, we examine the changing news landscape and definitions of journalism.

We will:

• Explore the implicit values underlying news practices and the ethical problems confront-

ing journalists.

• Study the legacy of print-news conventions and rituals.

• Investigate the impact of television and the Internet on news.

• Consider contemporary controversial developments in journalism and democracy—

specifically, the public journalism movement and satirical forms of news.

As you read through this chapter, think about how often you look at the news in a typical day. What

are some of the recent events or issues you remember reading about in the news? Where is the first

place you go to find information about a news event or issue? If you start with a search engine, what

newspapers or news organizations do you usually end up looking at? Do you prefer opinion blogs

over news organizations for your information—why or why not? Do you pay for news—either by buy-

ing a newspaper, or news magazine, or by going online? For more questions to help you understand

the role of journalism in our lives, see “Questioning the Media” in the Chapter Review.

In modern America, serious journalism has sought to provide information that enables citizens

to make intelligent decisions. Today, this guiding principle has been almost abandoned. Why?

First, we may just be producing too much information. According to social critic Neil Postman,

as a result of developments in media technology, society has developed an “information glut”

that transforms news and information into “a form of garbage.”3 Postman believed that scientists,

technicians, managers, and journalists merely pile up mountains of new data, which add to the

problems and anxieties of everyday life. As a result, too much unchecked data—especially on the

Internet—and too little thoughtful discussion emanate from too many channels of communication.

A second, related problem suggests that the amount of data the media now provide has

made little impact on improving public and political life. Many people feel cut off from our major

institutions, including journalism. As a result, some citizens are looking to take part in public

conversations and civic debates—to renew a democracy in which many voices participate. For

example, one benefit of the controversial Bush v. Gore 2000 presidential post-election story was

the way its legal and political complications engaged the citizenry at a much deeper level than

the predictable, staged campaigns themselves did.

What Is News?
In a 1963 staff memo, NBC news president Reuven Frank outlined the narrative strategies

integral to all news: “Every news story should . . . display the attributes of fiction, of drama.

It should have structure and conflict, problem and denouement, rising and falling action, a

Modern Journalism in the
Information Age

“A journalist is the
lookout on the
bridge of the ship
of state. He peers
through the fog and
storm to give warn-
ings of dangers
ahead. . . . He is
there to watch over
the safety and the
welfare of the
people who trust
him.”

JOSEPH PULITZER,
1904

“When watchdogs,
bird dogs, and bull
dogs morph into
lap dogs, lazy dogs,
or yellow dogs, the
nation is in trouble.”

TED STANNARD,
FORMER UPI
REPORTER

THE CULTURE OF JOURNALISM

420��DEMOCRATIC EXPRESSION AND THE MASS MEDIA

beginning, a middle, and an end.” 4 Despite Frank’s candid insights, many journalists today are

uncomfortable thinking of themselves as storytellers. Instead, they tend to describe themselves

mainly as information-gatherers.

News is defined here as the process of gathering information and making narrative
reports—edited by individuals for news organizations—that offer selected frames of reference;

within those frames, news helps the public make sense of prominent people, important events,

political issues, cultural trends, and unusual happenings in everyday life.

Characteristics of News
Over time, a set of conventional criteria for determining newsworthiness—information most
worthy of transformation into news stories—has evolved. Journalists are taught to select and

develop news stories with one or more of these criteria: timeliness, proximity, conflict, promi-

nence, human interest, consequence, usefulness, novelty, and deviance.5

Most issues and events that journalists select as news are timely or new. Reporters, for

example, cover speeches, meetings, crimes, and court cases that have just happened. In

addition, most of these events have to occur close by, or in proximity to, readers and viewers.

Although local papers usually offer some national and international news, many readers and

viewers expect to find the bulk of news devoted to their own towns and communities.

Most news stories are narratives and thus contain a healthy dose of conflict—a key ingredi-

ent in narrative writing. In developing news narratives, reporters are encouraged to seek con-

tentious quotes from those with opposing views. For example, stories on presidential elections

almost always feature the most dramatic opposing Republican and Democratic positions. And

stories in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, pitted the values of other

cultures against those of Western culture—for example, Islam versus Christianity or premodern

traditional values versus contemporary consumerism.

Reader and viewer surveys indicate that most people identify more closely with an indi-

vidual than with an abstract issue. Therefore, the news media tend to report stories that feature

prominent, powerful, or influential people. Because these individuals often play a role in shap-

ing the rules and values of a community, journalists have traditionally been responsible for

keeping a watchful eye on them.

“DEEP THROAT�”
The major symbol of
twentieth-century
investigative journalism,
Carl Bernstein and Bob
Woodward’s (above right)
coverage of the Watergate
scandal for the Washington
Post helped topple the
Nixon White House. In All
the President’s Men, the
newsmen’s book about
their investigation, a major
character is Deep Throat,
the key unidentified source
for much of Woodward’s
reporting. Deep Throat’s
identity was protected by
the two reporters for more
than thirty years. Then in
summer 2005 he revealed
himself as Mark Felt (above),
the former No. 2 official in
the FBI during the Nixon
administration. (Felt passed
away in 2008.)

CHAPTER 13 ○ JOURNALISM ��421

But reporters also look for the human-interest story: extraordinary incidents that happen

to “ordinary” people. In fact, reporters often relate a story about a complicated issue (such as

unemployment, war, tax rates, health care, or homelessness) by illustrating its impact on one

“average” person, family, or town.

Two other criteria for newsworthiness are consequence and usefulness. Stories about

isolated or bizarre crimes, even though they might be new, near, or notorious, often have little

impact on our daily lives. To balance these kinds of stories, many editors and reporters believe

that some news must also be of consequence to a majority of readers or viewers. For example,

stories about issues or events that affect a family’s income or change a community’s laws have

consequence. Likewise, many people look for stories with a practical use: hints on buying a

used car or choosing a college, strategies for training a pet or removing a stain.

Finally, news is often about the novel and the deviant. When events happen that are outside

the routine of daily life, such as a seven-year-old girl trying to pilot a plane across the country or

an ex-celebrity involved in a drug deal, the news media are there. Reporters also cover events that

appear to deviate from social norms, including murders, rapes, fatal car crashes, fires, political

scandals, and gang activities. For example, as the war in Iraq escalated, any suicide bombing in

the Middle East represented the kind of novel and deviant behavior that qualified as major news.

Values in American Journalism
Although newsworthiness criteria are a useful way to define news, they do not reveal much

about the cultural aspects of news. News is both a product and a process. It is both the morning

paper or evening newscast and a set of subtle values and shifting rituals that have been adapted

to historical and social circumstances, such as the partisan press ideals of the 1700s or the infor-

mational standards of the twentieth century.

For example, in 1841, Horace Greeley described the newly founded New York Tribune as

“a journal removed alike from servile partisanship on the one hand and from gagged, mincing

neutrality on the other.”6 Greeley feared that too much neutrality would make reporters into

wimps who stood for nothing. Yet the neutrality Greeley warned against is today a major value

of conventional journalism, with mainstream reporters assuming they are acting as detached

and all-seeing observers of social experience.

Neutrality Boosts Credibility . . . and Sales
As journalism professor and former reporter David Eason notes: “Reporters . . . have no special

method for determining the truth of a situation nor a special language for reporting their find-

ings. They make sense of events by telling stories about them.”7

Even though journalists transform events into stories, they generally believe that they are—

or should be—neutral observers who present facts without passing judgment on them. Conven-

tions such as the inverted-pyramid news lead, the careful attribution of sources, the minimal

use of adverbs and adjectives, and a detached third-person point of view all help reporters

perform their work in a supposedly neutral way.

Like lawyers, therapists, and other professionals, many modern journalists believe that their

credibility derives from personal detachment. Yet the roots of this view reside in less noble territory.

Jon Katz, media critic and former CBS News producer, discusses the history of the neutral pose:

The idea of respectable detachment wasn’t conceived as a moral principle so much as a marketing

device. Once newspapers began to mass market themselves in the mid-1880s, . . . publishers ceased

being working, opinionated journalists. They mutated instead into businessmen eager to reach the

broadest number of readers and antagonize the fewest. . . . Objectivity works well for publishers,

protecting the status quo and keeping journalism’s voice militantly moderate.8

“The ‘information’
the modern media
provide leaves
people feeling use-
less not because
it’s so bleak but be-
cause it’s so trivial.
It doesn’t inform at
all; it only bombards
with random data
bits, faux trends,
and surveys that
reinforce precon-
ceptions.”

SUSAN FALUDI,
NATION, 1996

“Real news is bad
news—bad news
about somebody,
or bad news for
somebody.”

MARSHALL MCLUHAN,
UNDERSTANDING
MEDIA, 1964

THE CULTURE OF JOURNALISM

422��DEMOCRATIC EXPRESSION AND THE MASS MEDIA

To reach as many people as possible across a

wide spectrum, publishers and editors realized

as early as the 1840s that softening their parti-

sanship might boost sales.

Other Cultural Values in Journalism
Neutral journalism remains a selective process.

Reporters and editors turn some events into

reports and discard many others. This process

is governed by a deeper set of subjective beliefs

that are not neutral. Sociologist Herbert Gans,

who studied the newsroom cultures of CBS,

NBC, Newsweek, and Time in the 1970s, general-

ized that several basic “enduring values” have

been shared by most American reporters and

editors. The most prominent of these values,

which persist to this day, are ethnocentrism,

responsible capitalism, small-town pastoral-

ism, and individualism.9

By ethnocentrism Gans means that, in
most news reporting, especially foreign cover-

age, reporters judge other countries and cultures on the basis of how “they live up to or imitate

American practices and values.” Critics outside the United States, for instance, point out that

CNN’s international news channels portray world events and cultures primarily from an Ameri-

can point of view rather than through some neutral, global lens.

Gans also identified responsible capitalism as an underlying value, contending that jour-
nalists sometimes naively assume that businesspeople compete with one another not primarily

to maximize profits but “to create increased prosperity for all.” Gans points out that although

most reporters and editors condemn monopolies, “there is little implicit or explicit criticism

of the oligopolistic nature of much of today’s economy.”10 In fact, during the major economic

recession of 2008–09, many journalists did not fully understand the debt incurred by media oli-

gopolies and other financial conditions that led to the bankruptcies and shutdowns of numerous

papers during this difficult time.

Another value that Gans found was the romanticization of small-town pastoralism:
favoring the small over the large and the rural over the urban. Many journalists equate

small-town life with innocence and harbor suspicions of cities, their governments, and urban

experiences. Consequently, stories about rustic communities with crime or drug problems

have often been framed as if the purity of country life had been contaminated by “mean”

big-city values.

Finally, individualism, according to Gans, remains the most prominent value
underpinning daily journalism. Many idealistic reporters are attracted to this profes-

sion because it rewards the rugged tenacity needed to confront and expose corruption.

Beyond this, individuals who overcome personal adversity are the subjects of many

enterprising news stories.

Often, however, journalism that focuses on personal triumphs fails to explain how large

organizations and institutions work or fail. Many conventional reporters and editors are

unwilling or unsure of how to tackle the problems raised by institutional decay. In addition,

because they value their own individualism and are accustomed to working alone, many

journalists dislike cooperating on team projects or participating in forums in which community

members discuss their own interests and alternative definitions of news.11

RESPONSIBLE CAPITALISM
As the financial crisis
worsened in 2009, many
news stories began to focus
on how ordinary citizens
were “victimized” by Wall
Street and other financial
institutions, acknowledging
that businesses don’t always
work to “create increased
prosperity for all.” (Shown
here is a 2009 protest
against Bank of America.)

CHAPTER 13 ○ JOURNALISM ��423

Facts, Values, and Bias
Traditionally, reporters have aligned facts with an objective position and values with subjective

feelings.12 Within this context, news reports offer readers and viewers details, data, and description.

It then becomes the citizen’s responsibility to judge and take a stand about the social problems

represented by the news. Given these assumptions, reporters are responsible only for adhering

to the tradition of the trade—“getting the facts.” As a result, many reporters view themselves as

neutral “channels” of information rather than selective storytellers or citizens actively involved

in public life.

Still, most public surveys have shown that while journalists may work hard to stay neutral,

the addition of partisan cable channels such as Fox News and MSNBC has undermined reporters

who try to report fairly. So while conservatives tend to see the media as liberally biased, liberals

tend to see the media as favoring conservative positions. (See “Case Study: Bias in the News” on

page 424.) But political bias is complicated. During the early years of Barack Obama’s presi-

dency, many pundits on the political Right argued that Obama got much more favorable media

coverage than former president George W. Bush. But left-wing politicians and critics maintained

that the right-wing media—especially news analysts associated with conservative talk radio and

Fox’s cable channel—rarely reported evenhandedly on Obama, painting him as a “socialist” or

as “anti-American.”

According to Evan Thomas of Newsweek magazine, “the suspicion of press bias” comes

from two assumptions or beliefs that the public holds about news media: “The first is that

reporters are out to get their subjects. The second is that the press is too close to its subjects.”13

Thomas argues that the “press’s real bias is for conflict.” He says that mainstream editors and

reporters really value scandals, “preferably sexual,” and “have a weakness for war, the ultimate

conflict.” Thomas claims that in the end journalists “are looking for narratives that reveal some-

thing of character. It is the human drama that most compels our attention.”14

“There’s a fine line
between show biz
and news biz. The
trick is to walk up
to that line and
touch it with your
toe but don’t cross
it. And some people
stay so far away
from the line that
nobody wants to
watch what they
do. And other peo-
ple keep crossing
the line. . . . But
there has to be a
line because the
line is called truth.
And the difference
between what we
do is, we tell true
stories and other
people tell make-
believe stories.”

DON HEWITT,
CREATOR OF
60 MINUTES

A profound ethical dilemma that national journalists occasionally face, especially in the

aftermath of 9/11, is: When is it right to protect government secrets, and when should those

secrets be revealed to the public? How must editors weigh such decisions when national

security bumps up against citizens’ need for information?

In 2006, Dean Baquet, then editor of the Los Angeles Times, and Bill Keller, executive editor

of the New York Times, wrestled with these questions in a coauthored editorial:

Finally, we weigh the merits of publishing against the risks of publishing. There is no magic formula. . . .

We make our best judgment.

When we come down on the side of publishing, of course, everyone hears about it. Few people are

aware when we decide to hold an article. But each of us, in the past few years, has had the experience

of withholding or delaying articles when the administration convinces us that the risk of publication

outweighed the benefits. . . .

We understand that honorable people may disagree . . . to publish or not to publish. But

making those decisions is a responsibility that falls to editors, a corollary to the great gift of our

independence. It is not a responsibility we take lightly. And it is not one we can surrender to the

government.15

Ethics and the News
Media

424��SOUNDS & IMAGES

A ll news is biased. News, after all, is primarily selective storytell-ing, not objective science. Edi-
tors choose certain events to cover and
ignore others; reporters choose particu-
lar words or images to use and reject
others. The news is also biased in favor
of storytelling, drama, and conflict; in
favor of telling “two sides of a story”; in
favor of powerful and well-connected
sources; and in favor of practices that
serve journalists’ space and time limits.

In terms of overt political bias, a 2010
Pew study reported that 81 percent
of Republicans polled said they “com-
pletely” or “mostly agree” that “most
news sources today are biased in their
coverage”; for Democrats in this study,
the figure was 64 percent and for
independents,76 percent.1 Since the
late 1960s, public perception says that
mainstream news media operate mostly
with a liberal bias. A June 2006 Harris
Poll found 38 percent of adults surveyed
detected a liberal bias in news coverage
while 25 percent sensed a conservative
bias (31 percent were “not sure” and
5 percent said there was “no bias”).2 This
would seem to be supported by a 2004
Pew Research Center survey that found
that 34 percent of national journalists
self-identify as liberal, 7 percent as con-
servative, and 54 percent as moderate.3

Given primary dictionary definitions of
liberal (adj., “favorable to progress or
reform, as in political or religious affairs”)

Bias in the News
and conservative (adj., “disposed to
preserve existing conditions, institu-
tions, etc., or to restore traditional ones,
and to limit change”), it is not surprising
that a high percentage of liberals and
moderates gravitate to mainstream
journalism.4 A profession that honors
documenting change, checking power,
and reporting wrongdoing would attract
fewer conservatives, who are predis-
posed to “limit change.” As sociologist
Herbert Gans demonstrated in Decid-
ing What’s News, most reporters are
socialized into a set of work rituals—
especially getting the story first and tell-
ing it from “both sides” to achieve a kind
of balance.5 In fact, this commitment to
political “balance” mandates that if jour-
nalists interview someone on the Left,
they must also interview someone on
the Right. Ultimately, such a balancing
act makes conventional news a middle-
of-the-road or moderate proposition.

Still, the “liberal bias” narrative persists.
In 2001, Bernard Goldberg, a former
producer at CBS News, wrote Bias.
Using anecdotes from his days at CBS,
he maintained that national news slanted
to the left.6 In 2003, Eric Alterman,
a columnist for the Nation, countered
with What Liberal Media? Alterman
admitted that mainstream news media
do reflect more liberal views on social
issues, but argued that they had be-
come more conservative on politics and
economics—displayed in their support

CASE
STUDY

for deregulated media and concentrated
ownership.7 Alterman says the liberal
bias tale persists because conservatives
keep repeating it in the major media.
Conservative voices have been so suc-
cessful that a study in Communication
Research reported “a fourfold increase
over the past dozen years in the number
of Americans telling pollsters that they
discerned a liberal bias in the news. But
a review of the media’s actual ideologi-
cal content, collected and coded over a
12-year period, offered no corrobora-
tion whatever for this view.” 8 However, a
2010 study in the Harvard International
Journal of Press/Politics reported that
both Democratic and Republican leaders
are able “to influence perceptions of
bias” by attacking the news media.9

Since journalists are primarily storytell-
ers, and not scientists, searching for
liberal or conservative bias should not
be the main focus of our criticism. Under
time and space constraints, most journal-
ists serve the routine process of their
profession, which calls on them to moder-
ate their own political agendas. News
reports, then, are always “biased,” given
human imperfection in storytelling and in
communicating through the lens of lan-
guage, images, and institutional values.
Fully critiquing news stories depends,
then, on whether they are fair, represent
an issue’s complexity, provide verification
and documentation, represent multiple
views, and serve democracy.

There is a liberal bias in the media. 38 66 18 36 62 35 10

There is no bias in the media. 5 1 8 7 3 5 9

There is a conservative bias in the media. 25 13 37 26 13 24 47

Not at all sure. 31 20 36 31 22 36 34

Total Republican Democrat Independent Conservative Moderate Liberal
% % % % % % %

Political Party Affiliation Political Philosophy

Note: Percentages add up to more than 100 percent due to multiple responses accepted.
Source: The Harris Poll® #52, June 30, 2006, http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll.

IS THERE A BIAS IN REPORTING THE NEWS?

CHAPTER 13 ○ JOURNALISM ��425

What makes the predicament of these national editors so tricky is that in the war against

terrorism, the government claimed that one value terrorists truly hate is “our freedom”; yet

what is more integral to liberty than the freedom of an independent press—so independent that

for more than two hundred years U.S. courts have protected the news media’s right to criticize

our political leaders and, within boundaries, reveal government secrets?

Ethical Predicaments
What is the moral and social responsibility of journalists, not only for the stories they report but

also for the actual events or issues they are shaping for millions of people? Wrestling with such

media ethics involves determining the moral response to a situation through critical reasoning.

Although national security issues raise problems for a few of our largest news organizations,

the most frequent ethical dilemmas encountered in most newsrooms across the United States

involve intentional deception, privacy invasions, and conflicts of interest.

Deploying Deception
Ever since Nellie Bly faked insanity to get inside an asylum in the 1880s, investigative journalists

have used deception to get stories. Today, journalists continue to use disguises and assume false

identities to gather information on social transgressions. Beyond legal considerations, though,

a key ethical question comes into play: Does the end justify the means? For example, can a

newspaper or TV newsmagazine use deceptive ploys to go undercover and expose a suspected

fraudulent clinic that promises miracle cures at a high cost? Are news professionals justified in

posing as clients desperate for a cure?

In terms of ethics, there are at least two major positions and multiple variations. First,

absolutist ethics suggests that a moral society has laws and codes, including honesty, that every-

one must live by. This means citizens, including members of the news media, should tell the

truth at all times and in all cases. In other words, the ends (exposing a phony clinic) never jus-

tify the means (using deception to get the story). An editor who is an absolutist would cover this

story by asking a reporter to find victims who have been ripped off by the clinic, telling the story

through their eyes. At the other end of the spectrum is situational ethics, which promotes ethical

decisions on a case-by-case basis. If a greater public good could be served by using deceit, jour-

nalists and editors who believe in situational ethics would sanction deception as a practice.

Should a journalist withhold information about his or her professional identity to get a

quote or a story from an interview subject? Many sources and witnesses are reluctant to talk

with journalists, especially about a sensitive subject that might jeopardize a job or hurt another

person’s reputation. Journalists know they can sometimes obtain information by posing as

someone other than a journalist, such as a curious student or a concerned citizen.

Most newsrooms frown on such deception. In particular situations, though, such a practice

might be condoned if reporters and their editors believed that the public needed the informa-

tion. The ethics code adopted by the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) is fairly silent on

issues of deception. The code “requires journalists to perform with intelligence, objectivity,

accuracy, and fairness,” but it also says that “truth is our ultimate goal.” (See Figure 13.1, “SPJ

Code of Ethics,” on page 426.)

Invading Privacy
To achieve “the truth” or to “get the facts,” journalists routinely straddle a line between “the

public’s right to know” and a person’s right to privacy. For example, journalists may be sent

to hospitals to gather quotes from victims who have been injured. Often there is very little

the public might gain from such information, but journalists worry that if they don’t get the

quote, a competitor might. In these instances, have the news media responsibly weighed the

426��DEMOCRATIC EXPRESSION AND THE MASS MEDIA

THE CULTURE OF JOURNALISM

FIGURE 13.1
SOCIETY OF PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISTS’ CODE OF ETHICS
Source: Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ).

CHAPTER 13 ○ JOURNALISM ��427

protection of individual privacy against the public’s right to know? Although the latter is not

constitutionally guaranteed, journalists invoke the public’s right to know as justification for

many types of stories.

Privacy issues also affect corporations and institutions. For example, in 1998 a Cincinnati

Enquirer reporter got into trouble for illegally gaining access to the voice-mail system at

Chiquita, a company best known for selling bananas. The reporter used voice-mail information

to report on the company’s business practices. Although a few journalists applauded the report-

er’s resourcefulness, many critics said it was a violation of the company’s privacy rights. Today,

in the digital age, when reporters can gain access to private e-mail messages, Twitter accounts,

and Facebook pages as well as voice mail, such practices raise serious questions about how far a

reporter should go to get information.

Even Google (one of the main Web sites consumers use to search for news) faces newsroom-

style challenges on privacy issues. In 2008, a Pittsburgh couple sued Google, claiming that the

“Street View” service on Google Maps (used often by reporters today) constituted an invasion of pri-

vacy, since satellite cameras revealed images of their house beyond their “private road” sign. Asking

for $25,000 in damages for “mental suffering” and the diminishment of their home’s value, the

couple saw their claim dismissed in 2009 by a Pennsylvania U.S. District court. In the case, Google

argued that “today’s satellite-image technology means that . . . complete privacy does not exist.”16

In the case of privacy issues, media companies and journalists should always ask the ethical

questions: What public good is being served here? What significant public knowledge will be

gained through the exploitation of a tragic private moment? Although journalism’s code of eth-

ics says, “The news media must guard against invading a person’s right to privacy,” this clashes

with another part of the code: “The public’s right to know of events of public importance and

interest is the overriding mission of the mass media.”17 When these two ethical standards col-

lide, journalists usually err on the side of the public’s right to know.

Conflict of Interest
Journalism’s code of ethics also warns reporters and editors not to place themselves in posi-

tions that produce a conflict of interest—that is, any situation in which journalists may stand
to benefit personally from stories they produce. “Gifts, favors, free travel, special treatment or

privileges,” the code states, “can compromise the integrity of journalists and their employers.

Nothing of value should be accepted.”18 Although small newspapers, with limited resources and

poorly paid reporters, might accept such “freebies” as game

tickets for their sportswriters and free meals for their restau-

rant critics, this practice does increase the likelihood of a con-

flict of interest that produces favorable or uncritical coverage.

On a broader level, ethical guidelines at many news

outlets attempt to protect journalists from compromising

positions. For instance, in most cities, U.S. journalists do not

actively participate in politics or support social causes. Some

journalists will not reveal their political affiliations, and some

even decline to vote.

For these journalists, the rationale behind their deci-

sions is straightforward: Journalists should not place them-

selves in a situation in which they might have to report on

the misdeeds of an organization or a political party to which

they belong. If a journalist has a tie to any group, and that

group is later suspected of involvement in shady or crimi-

nal activity, the reporter’s ability to report on that group

would be compromised—along with the credibility of the

HELEN THOMAS, a
former member of the
White House Press Corps
who had covered every
president from John F.
Kennedy to Barack Obama,
resigned in 2010 after her
revealing, controversial, and
personal remarks on Israel
and Palestine were filmed
and circulated widely on
the Internet. In the age of
viral video, blogging, and
Twitter, reporters have to
be increasingly guarded and
careful about expressing
their personal opinions. As
in the case of Helen Thomas,
one misstep can mean the
end of a storied and well-
respected career.

428��DEMOCRATIC EXPRESSION AND THE MASS MEDIA

THE CULTURE OF JOURNALISM

news outlet for which he or she works. Conversely, other journalists believe that not actively

participating in politics or social causes means abandoning their civic obligations. They

believe that fairness in their reporting, not total detachment from civic life, is their primary

obligation.

In the digital age, conflict of interest cases surrounding opinion blogging have grown more

complicated, especially when those opinion blogs run under the banner of traditional news

media. For example, in 2010 David Weigel, whom the Washington Post hired to blog about the

conservative movement, was forced to resign after private e-mails and listserv messages were

exposed in which he had used inflammatory rhetoric to vent about well-known conserva-

tives like Matt Drudge, Ron Paul, and Rush Limbaugh. A Post editor commented at the time,

“We can’t have any tolerance for the perception that people are conflicted or bring a bias to

their work. . . . There’s abundant room on our Web site for a wide range of viewpoints, and

we should be transparent about everybody’s viewpoint.”19 Critics afterward noted that main-

stream news media sites should make clear to their readers whether the bloggers are actu-

ally opinion writers or professional journalists trying to write fairly on subjects about which

they may not agree. In this case, Weigel’s credibility regarding his ability to blog fairly about

right-wing politicians and pundits was compromised when his personal exchanges ridiculing

conservatives came to light.

Resolving Ethical Problems
When a journalist is criticized for ethical lapses or questionable reporting tactics, a typical

response might be “I’m just doing my job” or “I was just getting the facts.” Such explanations

are troubling, though, because in responding this way, reporters are transferring personal

responsibility for the story to a set of institutional rituals.

There are, of course, ethical alternatives to self-justifications such as “I’m just doing my

job” that force journalists to think through complex issues. With the crush of deadlines and

daily duties, most media professionals deal with ethical situations only on a case-by-case basis

as issues arise. However, examining major ethical models and theories provides a common

strategy for addressing ethics on a general rather than a situational basis. The most well-known

ethical standard, the Judeo-Christian command to “love your neighbor as yourself,” provides

one foundation for constructing ethical guidelines. Although we cannot address all major moral

codes here, a few key precepts can guide us.

Aristotle, Kant, Bentham, and Mill
The Greek philosopher Aristotle offered an early ethical concept, the “golden mean”—a guide-

line for seeking balance between competing positions. For Aristotle, this was a desirable middle

ground between extreme positions, usually with one regarded as deficient, and the other exces-

sive. For example, Aristotle saw ambition as the balance between sloth and greed.

Another ethical principle entails the “categorical imperative,” developed by German

philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). This idea maintains that a society must adhere to

moral codes that are universal and unconditional, applicable in all situations at all times. For

example, the Golden Rule (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”) is articu-

lated in one form or another in most of the world’s major religious and philosophical tradi-

tions, and operates as an absolute moral principle. The First Amendment, which prevents

Congress from abridging free speech and other rights, could be considered an example of an

unconditional national law.

British philosophers Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) promoted

an ethical principle derived from “the greatest good for the greatest number,” directing us “to dis-

tribute a good consequence to more people rather than to fewer, whenever we have a choice.”20

“In the era of
YouTube, Twitter
and 24-hour cable
news, nobody is
safe.”

VAN JONES, FORMER
SPECIAL ADVISOR TO
THE OBAMA ADMIN-
ISTRATION ON ENVI-
RONMENTAL JOBS,
WHO WAS FORCED
TO RESIGN IN 2009
BECAUSE OF HIS PAST
CRITICISMS OF REPUB-
LICAN LEADERS THAT
SURFACED ON TALK
RADIO AND TV

CHAPTER 13 ○ JOURNALISM ��429

Developing Ethical Policy
Arriving at ethical decisions involves several steps. These include laying out the case; pinpoint-

ing the key issues; identifying involved parties, their intents, and their competing values; study-

ing ethical models; presenting strategies and options; and formulating a decision.

One area that requires ethics is covering the private lives of people who have become

prominent in the news. Consider Richard Jewell, the Atlanta security guard who, for

eighty-eight days, was the FBI’s prime suspect in the park bombing at the 1996 Olympics.

The FBI never charged Jewell with a crime, and he later successfully sued several news

organizations for libel. The news media competed to be the first to report important devel-

opments in the case, and with the battle for newspaper circulation and broadcast ratings

adding fuel to a complex situation, editors were reluctant to back away from the story once

it began circulating.

At least two key ethical questions emerged: (1) Should the news media have named Jewell

as a suspect even though he was never charged with a crime? (2) Should the media have camped

out daily in front of his mother’s house in an attempt to interview him and his mother? The Jewell

case pitted the media’s right to tell stories and earn profits against a person’s right to be left alone.

Working through the various ethical stages, journalists formulate policies grounded in over-

arching moral principles.21 Should reporters, for instance, follow the Golden Rule and be willing

to treat themselves, their families, or their friends the way they treated the Jewells? Or should

they invoke Aristotle’s “golden mean” and seek moral virtue between extreme positions?

In Richard Jewell’s situation, journalists could have developed guidelines to balance Jewell’s

interests and the news media’s. For example, in addition to apologizing for using Jewell’s name

in early accounts, reporters might have called off their stakeout and allowed Jewell to set inter-

view times at a neutral site, where he could talk with a small pool of journalists designated to

relay information to other media outlets.

Unfamiliar with being questioned themselves, many reporters are uncomfortable discuss-

ing their personal values or their strategies for getting stories. Nevertheless, a stock of rituals,

derived from basic American values, underlie the practice of reporting. These include focusing

on the present, relying on experts, balancing story conflict, and acting as adversaries toward

leaders and institutions.

Focusing on the Present
In the 1840s, when the telegraph first enabled news to crisscross America instantly, modern

journalism was born. To complement the new technical advances, editors called for a focus

on the immediacy of the present. Modern front-page print journalism de-emphasized political

analysis and historical context, accenting instead the new and the now.

As a result, the profession began drawing criticism for failing to offer historical, political,

and social analyses. This criticism continues today. For example, urban drug stories heavily

dominated print and network news during the 1986 and 1988 election years. Such stories, how-

ever, virtually disappeared from the news by 1992, although the nation’s serious drug and

addiction problems had not diminished.22 For many editors and reporters at the time, drug

stories became “yesterday’s news.”

Reporting Rituals and the Legacy
of Print Journalism

“We should have
the public interest
and not the bottom
line at heart, or
else all we can do
is wait for a time
when sex doesn’t
sell.”

SUSAN UNGARO,
EDITOR, FAMILY
CIRCLE, ON MEDIA
COVERAGE OF THE
CLINTON-LEWINSKY
SCANDAL, 1998

430��DEMOCRATIC EXPRESSION AND THE MASS MEDIA

THE CULTURE OF JOURNALISM

Modern journalism tends to reject “old news” for whatever new event or idea disrupts

today’s routines. During the 1996 elections, when statistics revealed that drug use among

middle-class high school students was rising, reporters latched on to new versions of the drug

story, but their reports made only limited references to the 1980s. And although drug problems

and addiction rates did not diminish in subsequent years, these topics were virtually ignored

by journalists during the 2000, 2004, and 2008 national elections. Indeed, given the space and

time constraints of current news practices, reporters seldom link stories to the past or to the

ebb and flow of history. (To analyze current news stories, see “Media Literacy and the Critical

Process: Telling Stories and Covering Disaster” on page 431.)

Getting a Good Story
Early in the 1980s, the Janet Cooke hoax demonstrated the difference between the mere telling

of a good story and the social responsibility to tell the truth.23 Cooke, a former Washington Post

reporter, was fired for fabricating an investigative report for which she initially won a Pulitzer

Prize (it was later revoked). She had created a cast of characters, featuring a mother who con-

tributed to the heroin addiction of her eight-year-old son.

At the time the hoax was exposed, Chicago columnist Mike Royko criticized conven-

tional journalism for allowing narrative conventions—getting a good story—to trump jour-

nalism’s responsibility to the daily lives it documents: “There’s something more important

than a story here. This eight-year-old kid is being murdered. The editors should have said

forget the story, find the kid. . . . People in any other profession would have gone right to the

police.”24 Had editors at the Post demanded such help, Cooke’s hoax would not have gone as

far as it did.

According to Don Hewitt, the creator and longtime executive producer of 60 Minutes,

“There’s a very simple formula if you’re in Hollywood, Broadway, opera, publishing, broad-

casting, newspapering. It’s four very simple words—tell me a story.”25 For most journalists, the

bottom line is “Get the story”—an edict that overrides most other concerns. It is the standard

against which reporters measure themselves and their profession.

Getting a Story First
In a discussion on public television about the press coverage of a fatal airline crash in Milwaukee

in the 1980s, a news photographer was asked to discuss his role in covering the tragedy. Rather

than take up the poignant, heartbreaking aspects of witnessing the aftermath of such an event,

the excited photographer launched into a dramatic recounting of how he had slipped behind

police barricades to snap the first grim photos, which later appeared in the Milwaukee Journal.

As part of their socialization into the profession, reporters often learn to evade authority figures

to secure a story ahead of the competition.

The photographer’s recollection points to the important role journalism plays in call-

ing public attention to serious events and issues. Yet he also talked about the news-gathering

process as a game that journalists play. It’s now routine for local television stations, 24/7 cable

news, and newspapers to run self-promotions about how they beat competitors to a story. In

addition, during political elections, local television stations and networks project winners in

particular races and often hype their projections when they are able to forecast results before

the competition does. This practice led to the fiasco in November 2000 when the major net-

works and cable news services badly flubbed their predictions regarding the outcome of voting

in Florida in the presidential election.

Journalistic scoops and exclusive stories attempt to portray reporters in a heroic light: They

have won a race for facts, which they have gathered and presented ahead of their rivals. It is

not always clear, though, how the public is better served by a journalist’s claim to have gotten a

story first. In some ways, the 24/7 cable news, the Internet, and bloggers have intensified the

CHAPTER 13 ○ JOURNALISM ��431

race for getting a story first. With a fragmented audience and more media competing for news,

the mainstream news often feels more pressure to lure an audience with exclusive, and some-

times sensational, stories. Although readers and viewers might value the aggressiveness of re-

porters, the earliest reports are not necessarily better, more accurate, or as complete as stories

written later with more context and perspective.

For example, in summer 2010 a firestorm erupted around the abrupt dismissal of Shirley

Sherrod, a Georgia-based African American official with the U.S. Department of Agriculture

over a short clip of a speech posted by right-wing blogger Andrew Breitbart on his Web site

BigGovernment.com. His clip implied that Sherrod had once discriminated against a white farm

family who had sought her help when their farm was about to be foreclosed. FoxNews.com

picked up the clip, and soon it was all over cable TV, where Sherrod and the Obama administra-

tion were denounced as “reverse racists.” The Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, demanded

and got Sherrod’s resignation. However, once reporters started digging deeper into the story and

CNN ran an interview with the white farmers that Sherrod had actually helped, it was revealed

that the 2½-minute clip had been re-edited and taken out of context from a 43-minute speech

Sherrod had given at an NAACP event. In the speech, Sherrod talked about the discrimination that

both poor white and black farmers have faced, and about rising above her own past. (Her father

had been murdered forty-five years earlier, and an all-white Georgia grand jury did not indict the

Telling Stories and Covering Disaster
Covering difficult stories—such as natural disasters
or tragedies—may present challenges to journalists
about how to frame their coverage.The opening sections,
or leads, of news stories can vary depending on the
source—whether it is print, broadcast, or online news—or
even the editorial style of the news organization (e.g., some
story leads are straightforward, some are very dramatic).
And, although modern journalists claim objectivity as
a goal, it is unlikely that a profession in the storytelling
business can approximate any sort of scientific objectivity.
The best journalists can do is be fair, reporting and telling
stories to their communities and nation by explaining the
complicated and tragic experiences they convert into
words or pictures. To explore this type of coverage, try this
exercise with examples from recent disaster coverage of a
regional or national event.

1 DESCRIPTION. Find print and broadcast news versions of the
same disaster story (use LexisNexis if

available). Make copies of each story,

and note the pictures chosen to tell

the story.

2 ANALYSIS. Find patterns in the coverage. How are the stories
treated differently in print and on televi-

sion? Are there similarities in the words

chosen or images used? What kinds of

experience are depicted? Who are the

sources the reporters use to verify their

information?

3 INTERPRETATION. What do these patterns suggest?
Can you make any interpretations

or arguments based on the kinds of

disaster covered, sources used, areas

covered, or words/images chosen?

How are the stories told in relation to

their importance to the entire com-

munity or nation? How complex are

the stories?

Media Literacy and
the Critical Process

4 EVALUATION. Which stories are the strongest? Why? Which
are the weakest? Why? Make a judgment

on how well these disaster stories serve

your interests as a citizen and the inter-

ests of the larger community or nation.

5 ENGAGEMENT. In an e-mail or letter to the editor, report your
findings to relevant editors and TV news

directors. How did they respond?

432��DEMOCRATIC EXPRESSION AND THE MASS MEDIA

THE CULTURE OF JOURNALISM

accused white farmer despite testimony from three wit-

nesses.) Conservative pundits apologized, Glenn Beck

demanded that Sherrod be rehired, and Tom Vilsack

offered her a new job (which she ultimately declined).26

In another example, after Barack Obama clinched

the Democratic presidential nomination in spring 2008,

his wife, Michelle, gave him an affectionate “fist bump”

that was caught on camera. Despite many people recog-

nizing it as a congratulatory gesture signifying a job well

done, some in the news media were apparently baffled

by its meaning, or worse. For example, one pundit, E.

D. Hill of Fox News, speculated: “A fist bump? A pound?

A terrorist fist jab? The gesture everyone seems to in-

terpret differently?” For several weeks, the news media

covered the story and unearthed other video examples

of the gesture, including President Bush exchanging

fist bumps with soldiers. One New York Times reporter

called the whole affair a “media dorkathon.”

This kind of scoop behavior, which becomes viral

in the digital age, demonstrates pack or herd journal-
ism, which occurs when reporters stake out a house,
chase celebrities in packs, or follow a story in such

herds that the entire profession comes under attack

for invading people’s privacy, exploiting their personal

problems, or just plain getting the story wrong.

Relying on Experts
Another ritual of modern print journalism—relying on outside sources—has made reporters

heavily dependent on experts. Reporters, though often experts themselves in certain areas by

virtue of having covered them over time, are not typically allowed to display their expertise

overtly. Instead, they must seek outside authorities to give credibility to seemingly neutral

reports. What daily reporters know is generally subordinate to whom they know.

During the early 1900s, progressive politicians and leaders of opinion such as President

Woodrow Wilson and Walter Lippmann believed in the cultivation of strong ties among national

reporters, government officials, scientists, business managers, and researchers. They wanted

journalists supplied with expertise across a variety of areas. Today, the widening gap between

those with expertise and those without it has created a need for public mediators. Reporters

have assumed this role as surrogates who represent both leaders’ and readers’ interests. With

their access to experts, reporters transform specialized and insider knowledge into the every-

day commonsense language of news stories.

Reporters also frequently use experts to create narrative conflict by pitting a series of quotes

against one another, or on occasion use experts to support a particular position. In addition, the

use of experts enables journalists to distance themselves from daily experience; they are able to

attribute the responsibility for the events or issues reported in a story to those who are quoted.

To use experts, journalists must make direct contact with a source—by phone or e-mail or

in person. Journalists do not, however, heavily cite the work of other writers; that would violate

reporters’ desire not only to get a story first but to get it on their own. Telephone calls and face-to-

face interviews, rather than extensively researched interpretations, are the stuff of daily journalism.

Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter once called expert sources the “usual suspects.” Alter contended

that “the impression conveyed is of a world that contains only a handful of knowledgeable

GETTING THE STORY
WRONG
The pressure on journalists
to tell great stories and to
tell them first sometimes
results in simply getting
the facts wrong. In
2010, Shirley Sherrod
was forced to resign as
head of the Georgia rural
development office for
the U.S. Department of
Agriculture when a short
clip showing her seeming to
discriminate against a white
farm family was posted
on BigGovernment.com.
FoxNews.com pounced
immediately on the “juicy”
story, and soon it was
picked up by other news
media outlets. It later came
to light that the clip was
taken out of context, but by
that time Tom Vilsack, the
Secretary of Agriculture,
fearing further scandal, had
already demanded Sherrod’s
resignation.

CHAPTER 13 ○ JOURNALISM ��433

people. . . . Their public exposure is a

result not only of their own abilities, but

of deadlines and a failure of imagination

on the part of the press.”27

In addition, expert sources have

historically been predominantly white

and male. Fairness and Accuracy in

Reporting (FAIR) conducted a major study

of the 14,632 sources used on the 2001

evening news programs on ABC, CBS,

and NBC. FAIR found that only 15 percent

of sources were women—and 52 percent

of these women represented “average

citizens” or “non-experts.” By contrast, of

the male sources, 86 percent were cast in

“authoritative” or “expert” roles. Among

“U.S. sources” where race could be deter-

mined, the study found the following:

“[W]hites made up 92 percent of the

total, blacks 7 percent, Latinos and Arab-

Americans 0.6 percent each, and Asian

Americans 0.2 percent. (According to the

2000 census, the U.S. population [stood

at] 69 percent non-Hispanic white, 13 per-

cent Hispanic, 12 percent black, and 4 percent Asian.)”28 So as mainstream journalists increased

their reliance on a limited pool of experts, they alienated many viewers, who may have felt

excluded from participation in day-to-day social and political life.

A 2005 study by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism found similar results. The

study looked at forty-five different news outlets over a twenty-day period, including newspa-

pers, nightly network newscasts and morning shows, cable news programs, and Web news

sites. Newspapers, the study found, “were the most likely of the media studied to cite at least

one female source . . . (41% of stories),” while cable news “was the least likely medium to cite a

female source (19 % of stories).” The study also found that in “every [news] topic category, the

majority of stories cited at least one male source,” but “the only topic category where women

crossed the 50% threshold was lifestyle stories.” The study found that women were least likely

to be cited in stories on foreign affairs, while sports sections of newspapers also “stood out in

particular as a male bastion,” with only 14 percent citing a female source.29

By the late 1990s, many journalists were criticized for blurring the line between remaining

neutral and being an expert. The boom in twenty-four-hour cable news programs at this time

led to a news vacuum that eventually was filled with talk shows and interviews with journalists

willing to give their views. During events with intense media coverage, such as the 2000, 2004,

and 2008 presidential elections, 9/11, and the Iraq war, many print journalists appeared several

times a day on cable programs acting as experts on the story, sometimes providing factual infor-

mation but mostly offering opinion and speculation.

Some editors even encourage their reporters to go on these shows for marketing reasons.

Today, many big city newspapers have office space set aside for reporters to use for cable,

TV, and Internet interviews. Critics contend that these practices erode the credibility of the

profession by blending journalism with celebrity culture and commercialism. Daniel Schorr,

who worked as a journalist for seventy years (he died in 2010), resigned from CNN when the

cable network asked him to be a commentator during the 1984 Republican National Convention

HERD JOURNALISM often
leads to the overexposure
of a story or incident that
should not merit intense
scrutiny, such as the fist
bump between then–
Democratic presidential
nominee Barack Obama and
his wife, Michelle.

“I made a special
effort to come on
the show today
because I have . . .
mentioned this
show as being
bad . . . as it’s
hurting America.”

JON STEWART, ON
CNN’S CROSSFIRE,
2004

434��DEMOCRATIC EXPRESSION AND THE MASS MEDIA

THE CULTURE OF JOURNALISM

along with former Texas governor John Connally. Schorr believed that it was improper to mix a

journalist and a politician in this way, but the idea seems innocent by today’s blurred standards.

As columnist David Carr pointed out in the New York Times in 2010, “Where there was once a

pretty bright line between journalist and political operative, there is now a kind of continuum,

with politicians becoming media providers in their own right, and pundits, entertainers and

journalists often driving political discussions.”30

Balancing Story Conflict
For most journalists, balance means presenting all sides of an issue without appearing to

favor any one position. The quest for balance presents problems for journalists. On the one

hand, time and space constraints do not always permit representing all sides; in practice this

value has often been reduced to “telling both sides of a story.” In recounting news stories as

two-sided dramas, reporters often misrepresent the complexity of social issues. The abortion

controversy, for example, is often treated as a story that pits two extreme positions (staunchly

pro-life vs. resolutely pro-choice) against each other. Yet people whose views fall somewhere

between these positions are seldom represented (studies show this group actually represents

the majority of Americans). In this manner, “balance” becomes a narrative device to generate

story conflict.

On the other hand, although many journalists claim to be detached, they often stake out a

moderate or middle-of-the-road position between the two sides represented in a story. In claim-

ing neutrality and inviting readers to share their detached point of view, journalists offer a dis-

tant, third-person, all-knowing point of view (a narrative device that many novelists use as well),

enhancing the impression of neutrality by making the reporter appear value-free (or valueless).

The claim for balanced stories, like the claim for neutrality, disguises journalism’s narra-

tive functions. After all, when reporters choose quotes for a story, these are usually the most

dramatic or conflict-oriented words that emerge from an interview, press conference, or public

meeting. Choosing quotes sometimes has more to do with enhancing drama than with being

fair, documenting an event, or establishing neutrality.

The balance claim is also in the financial interest of modern news organizations that stake

out the middle ground. William Greider, a former Washington Post editor, makes the connection

between good business and balanced journalism: “If you’re going to be a mass circulation jour-

nal, that means you’re going to be talking simultaneously to lots of groups that have opposing

views. So you’ve got to modulate your voice and pretend to be talking to all of them.”31

Acting as Adversaries
The value that many journalists take the most pride in is their adversarial relationship with the

prominent leaders and major institutions they cover. The prime narrative frame for portraying

this relationship is sometimes called a gotcha story, which refers to the moment when, through

questioning, the reporter nabs “the bad guy” or wrongdoer.

This narrative strategy—part of the tough questioning style of some reporters—is frequently

used in political reporting. Many journalists assume that leaders are hiding something and that

the reporter’s main job is to ferret out the truth through tenacious fact-gathering and “gotcha”

questions. An extension of the search for balance, this stance locates the reporter in the middle,

between “them” and “us,” between political leaders and the people they represent.

Critics of the tough-question style of reporting argue that, while it can reveal significant

information, when overused it fosters a cynicism among journalists that actually harms the

democratic process. Although journalists need to guard against becoming too cozy with their

political sources, they sometimes go to the other extreme. By constantly searching for what

politicians may be hiding, some reporters may miss other issues or other key stories.

“Cable news is full
of spin doctors
shouting at each
other. . . . Jerry
Springer without
the hair pulling.”

TOM RAWLINS, EDITOR,
ST. PETERSBURG
TIMES, 1998

“Opinion journalism
can be more honest
than objective-
style journalism,
because it doesn’t
have to hide its
point of view.”

MICHAEL KINSLEY,
WASHINGTONPOST.COM,
2006

CHAPTER 13 ○ JOURNALISM ��435

When journalists employ the gotcha model to cover news, being tough often becomes an

end in itself. Thus reporters believe they have done their job just by roughing up an interview

subject or by answering the limited “What is going on here?” question. Yet the Pulitzer

Prize, the highest award honoring journalism, often goes to the reporter who asks ethically

charged and open-ended questions, such as “Why is this going on?” and “What ought to be

done about it?”

The rules and rituals governing American journalism began shifting in the 1950s. At the time,

former radio reporter John Daly hosted the CBS network game show What’s My Line? When he

began moonlighting as the evening TV news anchor on ABC, the network blurred the entertain-

ment and information border, foreshadowing what was to come.

In the early days, the most influential and respected television news program was CBS’s See

It Now. Coproduced by Fred Friendly and Edward R. Murrow, See It Now practiced a kind of TV

journalism lodged somewhere between the neutral and narrative traditions. Generally regarded

as “the first and definitive” news documentary on American television, See It Now sought “to

report in depth—to tell and show the American audience what was happening in the world using

film as a narrative tool.”32 Murrow worked as both the program’s anchor and its main reporter,

introducing the investigative model of journalism to television—a model that programs like

60 Minutes, 20/20, and Dateline would later imitate.

Differences between Print and TV News
Although TV news reporters share many values, beliefs, and conventions with their print

counterparts, television transformed journalism in a number of ways. First, broadcast news

is driven by its technology. If a camera crew and news van are dispatched to a remote loca-

tion for a live broadcast, reporters are expected to justify the expense by developing a story,

even if nothing significant is occurring. For instance, when a national political candidate

does not arrive at the local airport in time for an interview on the evening news, the reporter

may cover a flight delay instead. Print reporters, in contrast, slide their notebooks or laptops

back into their bags and report on a story when it occurs. However, with print reporters now

posting regular online updates to their stories, they offer the same immediacy that live televi-

sion news does.

Second, while print editors cut stories to fit the physical space around ads, TV news direc-

tors have to time stories to fit between commercials. Despite the fact that a much higher per-

centage of space is devoted to print ads (about 60 percent at most dailies), TV ads (which take

up less than 25 percent of a typical thirty-minute news program) generally seem more intrusive

to viewers, perhaps because TV ads take up time rather than space.

Third, while modern print journalists are expected to be detached, TV news derives its

credibility from live, on-the-spot reporting; believable imagery; and viewers’ trust in the report-

ers and anchors. In fact, since the early 1970s the annual Roper polls have indicated that the

majority of viewers find television news a more credible resource than print news. Viewers tend

to feel a personal regard for the local and national anchors who appear each evening on TV sets

in their living rooms.

Journalism in the Age of TV
and the Internet

“It’s the job of jour-
nalists to make
complicated things
interesting. The
shame of American
journalism is that
[PBS’s] Frontline,
with its limited
resources, has
been doing infin-
itely better, more
thoughtful, more
creative reporting
on places like
Afghanistan or
Rwanda than the
richest networks in
the world. If it is a
glory for Frontline,
it is a shame for
those big networks
and the [people] at
the top of the corp-
orate structure
who run them.”

DAVID HALBERSTAM,
JOURNALIST, OCTOBER
2001

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THE CULTURE OF JOURNALISM

By the mid-1970s, the public’s fascination with the Watergate scandal, combined with the

improved quality of TV journalism, helped local news departments realize profits. In an effort

to retain high ratings, stations began hiring consultants, who advised news directors to invest in

national prepackaged formats, such as Action News or Eyewitness News. Traveling the country,

viewers noticed similar theme music and opening graphic visuals from market to market. Con-

sultants also suggested that stations lead their newscasts with crime blocks: a group of TV stories

that recount the worst local criminal transgressions of the day. A cynical slogan soon developed

in the industry: “If it bleeds, it leads.”

Few stations around the country have responded to viewers and critics who complain

about overemphasizing crime. (In reality, FBI statistics reveal that crime and murder rates

have fallen or leveled off in most major urban areas since the 1990s.) In 1996, the news

director at KVUE-TV in Austin, Texas, created a new set of criteria that had to be met for

news reports to qualify as responsible crime stories. She asked that her reporters answer

the following questions: Do citizens or officials need to take action? Is there an immediate

threat to safety? Is there a threat to children? Does the crime have significant community

impact? Does the story lend itself to a crime prevention effort? With KVUE’s new standards,

the station eliminated many routine crime stories. Instead, the station provided a

context for understanding crime rather than a mindless running tally of the crimes

committed each day.33

Sound Bitten
Beginning in the 1980s, the term sound bite became part of the public lexicon. The TV equiv-
alent of a quote in print news, a sound bite is the part of a broadcast news report in which

an expert, a celebrity, a victim, or a person-in-the-street responds to some aspect of an event

or issue. With increasing demands for more commercial time, there is less time for interview

subjects to explain their views, and sound bites have become the focus of intense criticism.

Studies revealed that during political campaigns the typical sound bite from candidates had

shrunk from an average duration of forty to fifty seconds in the 1950s and 1960s to fewer than

eight seconds by the late 1990s. With shorter comments from interview subjects, TV news

sometimes seems like dueling sound bites, with reporters creating dramatic tension by edit-

ing competing viewpoints together as if interviewees had actually been in the same location

speaking to one another. Of course, print news also pits one quote against another in a story,

even though the actual interview subjects may never have met. Once again, these reporting

techniques are evidence of the profession’s reliance on storytelling devices to replicate or

create conflict.

Pretty-Face and Happy-Talk Culture
In the early 1970s at a Milwaukee TV station, consultants advised the station’s news direc-

tor that the evening anchor looked too old. The anchor, who showed a bit of gray, was re-

placed and went on to serve as the station’s editorial director. He was thirty-two years old

at the time. In the late 1970s, a reporter at the same station was fired because of a “weight

problem,” although that was not given as the official reason. Earlier that year, she had

given birth to her first child. In 1983, Christine Craft, a former Kansas City television news

anchor, was awarded $500,000 in damages in a sex discrimination suit against station

KMBC (she eventually lost the monetary award when the station appealed). She had been

fired because consultants believed she was too old, too unattractive, and not deferential

enough to men.

Such stories are rampant in the annals of TV news. They have helped create a stereotype

of the half-witted but physically attractive news anchor, reinforced by popular culture images

CHAPTER 13 ○ JOURNALISM ��437

(from Ted Baxter on TV’s Mary Tyler Moore Show to Ron Burgundy in the film Anchorman).

Although the situation has improved slightly, national news consultants set the agenda for what

local reporters should cover (lots of crime) as well as how they should look and sound (young,

attractive, pleasant, and with no regional accent). Essentially, news consultants—also known as

news doctors—have tried to replicate the predominant male and female advertising images of the

1960s and 1970s in modern local TV news.

Another strategy favored by news consultants is happy talk: the ad-libbed or scripted banter

that goes on among local news anchors, reporters, meteorologists, and sports reporters before

and after news reports. During the 1970s, consultants often recommended such chatter to cre-

ate a more relaxed feeling on the news set and to foster the illusion of conversational intimacy

with viewers. Some also believed that happy talk would counter much of that era’s “bad news,”

which included coverage of urban riots and the Vietnam War. A strategy still used today, happy

talk often appears forced and may create awkward transitions, especially when anchors report

on events that are sad or tragic.

Pundits, “Talking Heads,” and Politics
The transformation of TV news by cable—with the arrival of CNN in 1980—led to dramatic changes

in TV news delivery at the national level. Prior to cable news (and the Internet), most people

tuned to their local and national news late in the afternoon or evening on a typical weekday,

with each program lasting just thirty minutes. But today, the 24/7 news cycle means that we can

get TV news anytime, day or night, and constant new content has led to major changes in what

is considered news. Because it is expensive to dispatch reporters to document stories or main-

tain foreign news bureaus to cover international issues, the much less expensive “talking head”

pundit has become a standard for cable news channels. Such a programming strategy has little

need for expensive on-site reporters and distant news bureaus, and it requires few resources

beyond the studio and a few guests.

Today’s main cable channels have built their evening programs along partisan lines:

Fox News tips right with pundit stars like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck;

MSNBC leans left with Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, and Lawrence O’Donnell; and

CNN stakes out the middle with hosts like Anderson Cooper and John King. But although

CNN does more original reporting than Fox News and MSNBC (Cooper often reports live

from the scene of events), the originator of cable news has been losing in the ratings race

since 2009.

Audience preference for partisan “talking heads” over

traditional reporting suggests that in today’s fragmented

media marketplace, going after niche audiences along politi-

cal lines is smart business—although not necessarily good

journalism. This is in stark contrast to the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries, when appearing “objective” in news

reports—so as not to offend anyone—would attract larger

audiences. Ironically, the return to partisan news is a return

to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the earli-

est newspapers, subsidized by political parties, appealed to

elites (mostly land-owning men) who wanted to know about

politics and commerce. But what should concern us today

is the jettisoning of good journalism—using reporters to

document stories and interview key sources—for celebrity

pundits who may have strong opinions and charisma but

who may not have all the facts.

ANDERSON COOPER has
been the primary anchor
of Anderson Cooper 360°
since 2003. Although the
program is mainly taped
and broadcast from his
New York City studio, and
typically features reports
of the day’s main news
stories with added analyses
from experts, Cooper is
one of the few “talking
heads” who still reports live
fairly often from the field
for major news stories.
Most recently and notably,
he has done extensive
coverage of the aftermath of
Hurricane Katrina, the 2010
earthquake in Haiti, and the
2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf
of Mexico.

438��DEMOCRATIC EXPRESSION AND THE MASS MEDIA

THE CULTURE OF JOURNALISM

Convergence Enhances and Changes Journalism
For mainstream print and TV reporters and editors, online news has added new dimensions

to journalism. Both print and TV news can continually update breaking stories online, and

many reporters now post their online stories first and then work on traditional versions. This

means that readers and viewers no longer have to wait until the next day for the morning

paper or for the local evening newscast for important stories. To enhance the online reports,

which do not have the time or space constraints of television or print, newspaper reporters

are increasingly required to provide video or audio for their stories. This allows readers and

viewers to see full interviews rather than just the selected print quotes in the paper or the

sound bites on the TV report.

However, online news comes with a special set of problems. Print reporters, for example,

can do e-mail interviews rather than leaving the office to question a subject in person. Many

editors discourage this practice and allow e-mail interviews only when a phone or live interview

is impossible. These editors think relying on e-mail gives interviewees the chance to control and

shape their answers. While some might argue that this provides more thoughtful answers, tradi-

tional journalists say it takes the elements of surprise and spontaneity out of the news interview,

during which a subject might accidentally reveal information—something less likely to occur in

an online setting.

Another problem for journalists, ironically, is the wide-ranging resources of the Inter-

net. This includes access to versions of stories from other papers or broadcast stations.

The enormous amount of information available on the Internet has made it all too easy for

journalists to unwittingly (or intentionally) copy other journalists’ work. In addition, access

to databases and other informational sites can keep reporters at their computers rather than

out tracking down certain kinds of information, cultivating sources, and staying in touch

with their communities.

Most notable, however, for journalists in the digital age are the demands that con-

vergence has made on their reporting and writing. Print journalists at newspapers (and

magazines) are expected to carry digital video

cameras so they can post video along with the

print versions of their stories. TV reporters

are expected to write print-style news reports

for their station’s Web site to supplement the

streaming video of their original TV stories.

And both print and TV reporters are often

expected to post the Internet versions of their

stories first, before the versions they do for the

morning paper or the six o’clock news. Journal-

ists today have to be able to tell their stories in

multiple ways.

The Power of Visual Language
The shift from a print-dominated culture to an

electronic-digital culture requires that we look

carefully at differences among various approaches

to journalism. For example, the visual language

of TV news and the Internet often capture events

more powerfully than words. Over the past fifty

NEWS IN THE DIGITAL AGE
Al-Jazeera, the Arab satellite
news service originating
in the small Persian Gulf
nation of Qatar, was formed
in 1996 to fill the gap after
the British Broadcasting
Corporation (BBC) closed its
Arabic news service in Saudi
Arabia. Although some have
charged al-Jazeera with an
anti-U.S. bias, it is actually
the most independent
news service in the Arab
world and regularly covers
controversial issues and
dissenting political views
in the region. In 2003, the
news service launched its
English-language Web site at
english.aljazeera.net, and in
2006 started an English-
language TV station.

CHAPTER 13 ○ JOURNALISM ��439

years, television news has dramatized America’s key events. Civil Rights activists, for instance,

acknowledge that the movement benefited enormously from televised news that documented

the plight of southern blacks in the 1960s. The news footage of southern police officers turn-

ing powerful water hoses on peaceful Civil Rights demonstrators or the news images of “white

only” and “colored only” signs in hotels and restaurants created a context for understanding

the disparity between black and white in the 1950s and 1960s.

Other enduring TV images are also embedded in the collective memory of many

Americans: the Kennedy and King assassinations in the 1960s; the turmoil of Watergate in

the 1970s; the first space shuttle disaster and the Chinese student uprisings in the 1980s;

the Oklahoma City federal building bombing and the Clinton impeachment hearings in the

1990s; the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center in 2001; Hurricane

Katrina in 2005; the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007; and the historic 2008 election of

President Obama. During these critical events, TV news has been a cultural reference point

marking the strengths and weaknesses of a nation.

Today, the Internet, for good or bad, functions as a repository for news images and video,

allowing us to catch up on stories we may have missed or to be overexposed to contro-

versial (or trivial) clips. After 24/7 cable news and various Internet sites ran endless loops

of Barack Obama’s former Chicago pastor delivering provocative sermons, Obama was

forced to respond. On the campaign trail in Philadelphia in March 2008, he delivered a

speech on U.S. race relations and his biracial heritage that critics and supporters at the

time compared favorably to Martin Luther King’s famous 1964 “I Have a Dream” speech.

While Obama’s speech drew relatively small audiences on cable when he delivered it live,

it became an Internet phenomenon on YouTube, viewed by millions of people. And in the

days after, 24/7 cable and other Internet sites once again played endless loops of excerpts

from the speech.

In 1990, Poland was experiencing growing pains as it shifted from a state-controlled economic

system to a more open market economy. The country’s leading newspaper, Gazeta Wybor-

cza, the first noncommunist newspaper to appear in Eastern Europe since the 1940s, was

also undergoing challenges. Based in Warsaw with a circulation of about 350,000 at the time,

Gazeta Wyborcza had to report on and explain the new economy and the new crime wave

that accompanied it. Especially troubling to the news staff and Polish citizens were gangs that

robbed American and Western European tourists at railway stations, sometimes assaulting them

in the process. The stolen goods would then pass to an outer circle, whose members transferred

the goods to still another exterior ring of thieves. Even if the police caught the inner circle mem-

bers, the loot usually disappeared.

These developments triggered heated discussions in the newsroom. A small group of

young reporters, some of whom had recently worked in the United States, argued that the best

way to cover the story was to describe the new crime wave and relay the facts to readers in a

neutral manner. Another group, many of whom were older and more experienced, felt that

the paper should take an advocacy stance and condemn the criminals through interpretive

Alternative Models: Public Journalism
and “Fake” News

440��DEMOCRATIC EXPRESSION AND THE MASS MEDIA

THE CULTURE OF JOURNALISM

columns on the front page. The older guard won this particular debate, and more interpretive

pieces appeared.34

This story illustrates the two competing models that have influenced American and

European journalism since the early 1900s. The first—the informational or modern model—

emphasizes describing events and issues from a seemingly neutral point of view. The second—a

more partisan or European model—stresses analyzing occurrences and advocating remedies

from an acknowledged point of view. (To learn about how the press works in China, see

“Global Village: The Newsroom in China” on page 441.)

In most American newspapers today, the informational model dominates the front page,

while the partisan model remains confined to the editorial pages and an occasional front-page

piece. However, alternative models of news—from the serious to the satirical—have emerged to

challenge modern journalistic ideals.

The Public Journalism Movement
From the late 1980s through the 1990s, a number of papers experimented with ways to involve

readers more actively in the news process. These experiments surfaced primarily at midsize

daily papers, including the Charlotte Observer, the Wichita Eagle, the Virginian-Pilot, and the

Minneapolis Star Tribune. Davis “Buzz” Merritt, editor and vice president of the Wichita Eagle at

the time, defined key aspects of public journalism:

• It moves beyond the limited mission of “telling the news” to a broader mission of helping

public life go well, and acts out that imperative. . . .

• It moves from detachment to being a fair-minded participant in public life. . . .

• It moves beyond only describing what is “going wrong” to imagining what “going right”

would be like. . . .

• It moves from seeing people as consumers—as readers or nonreaders, as bystanders to be

informed—to seeing them as a public, as potential actors in arriving at democratic solutions

to public problems.35

Public journalism is best imagined as a conversational model for journalistic practice. Modern

journalism draws a distinct line between reporter detachment and community involvement;

public journalism—driven by citizen forums, community conversations, and even talk shows—

obscures this line.

In the 1990s—before the full impact of the Internet—public journalism served as a response

to the many citizens who felt alienated from participating in public life in a meaningful way.

This alienation arose, in part, from viewers who

watched passively as the political process seemed

to play out in the news and on TV between the

party operatives and media pundits. Public jour-

nalism was a way to involve both the public and

journalists more centrally in civic and political

life. Editors and reporters interested in addressing

citizen alienation—and reporter cynicism—began

devising ways to engage people as conversational

partners in determining the news. In an effort to

draw the public into discussions about commu-

nity priorities, these journalists began sponsoring

reader and citizen forums, where readers were

supposed to have a voice in shaping aspects of the

news that directly affected them.

“We need to see
people not as
readers, non-
readers, endan-
gered readers, not
as customers to
be wooed or an
audience to be
entertained, but as
a public, citizens
capable of action.”

DAVIS “BUZZ“ MERRITT,
WICHITA EAGLE, 1995

CITIZEN JOURNALISM
One way technology has
allowed citizens to become
involved in the reporting of
news is through cell phone
photos and videos uploaded
online. Witnesses can now
pass on what they have
captured to major mainstream
news sources, like CNN’s
iReports or onto their own
blogs and Web sites.

P ublishing and broadcasting have been growth industries in China. Since 1979, when the sale of
advertisements in state-controlled
newspapers became legal, the media
industry has undergone dramatic com-
mercial reform. The state has weaned
the media from subsidies and pushed
outlets to rely on advertising revenue, all
while keeping control over news content
through financial incentives, administra-
tive measures, and the threat of punish-
ment. Since Hu Jintao became president
in 2003, journalists say, these restric-
tions have become more stringent.

Though the Chinese constitution
protects freedom of the press, speech,
and expression, there are institutional
barriers to the free distribution of
news in China. All news outlets must
be authorized by the State Council
and must comply with specific media
regulations guarding almost every
aspect of operation: hiring and training
practices, amount of registered capi-

The Newsroom in China
tal, location of premises, ties to any
sponsoring state agency, and number
of news bureaus.

Regulations for operating broadcast,
print, and Internet news outlets also
list broad categories of unacceptable
content, including anything that “disrupts
the social order or undermines social
stability” or is “detrimental to social
morality or to the finer cultural tradi-
tions of the nation.” Outlets that violate
regulations can be punished with fines or
shutdowns. By law, all news outlets must
be affiliated with a state entity, but the
degree of direct party oversight, the level
of financial pressure, and the influence of
reporters and editors vary across regions
and types of media. National state-
controlled media such as the Xinhua
News Agency, Guangming Daily, People’s
Daily, and China Central Television, for
instance, enjoy the backing of the central
party leadership and are known to do
critical reporting at the local level even
as they praise the Beijing elite. Print and
Internet media tend to have more leeway
than broadcast news outlets.

For chief editors, though, miscalculating
official reaction carries significant risk.
No case illustrates this more clearly
than the crackdown at Nanfang Dushi
Bao in 2004. Cheng Yizhong led the
newspaper as it investigated the death
in police custody of college graduate
Sun Zhigang. The newspaper’s power-
ful reporting resonated with the public,
forcing the government to make na-
tionwide changes in detention policies.
Yet the very same reporting caused the
newspaper itself to come under inves-
tigation. Cheng was subsequently held
in police custody for five months, and
two colleagues served several years in
prison on corruption charges.

In addition, journalists understand
they have to stay away from stories

GLOBAL
VILLAGE

about the military, ethnic conflict,
and religion (particularly Falun Gong
and underground churches), along
with articles on the inner workings of
the party and, to a lesser extent, the
government.

There are penalties for crossing the
censors’ line. Serious infractions are
noted in a journalist’s employment
record. Seeing a pattern of contro-
versial reports, propaganda authori-
ties may close down a publication or
“reorganize” its personnel. Each year,
several high-profile publications disap-
pear or have offending staff demoted
and shuttled off to publications where
they have less impact.

In China’s commercial press, the
payment system for journalists has
emerged as a central method of con-
tent control. At most papers, reporters
receive bonuses when their articles
are published, and those bonuses
make up the bulk of their income. The
end result is that staff reporters are
more likely to go after stories that will
make it into print—or at least cover
them in a way that will not offend the
censors.

While authorities effectively keep
unwanted news from reaching mass
audiences, journalists know they can
troll the Web for hidden treasures.
Thus, they say, the scope of news
and commentary has broadened over
nearly three decades of commercial
reform and information revolution.
That the government’s system of
media control has effectively stayed
the same is a source of optimism for
some journalists.

Source: Committee to Protect Journalists, “Falling
Short: Olympic Promises Go Unfulfilled as China
Falters on Press Freedoms,” Chapter 5, “Censor-
ship at Work: The Newsroom in China,” June 5,
2008, http://cpj.org/Briefings/2007/Falling_Short/
China/5_2.html.

PRESS FREEDOMS
Although there was a bit more journalistic freedom
allowed immediately following the 2008 Sichuan
earthquake, the Chinese government severely
tamped down any efforts to investigate the
shoddy construction of the many school buildings
that collapsed during the disaster. Tan Zuoren, an
activist and writer, was recently imprisoned for
threatening to reveal the number of children killed
during the earthquake.

442��DEMOCRATIC EXPRESSION AND THE MASS MEDIA

THE CULTURE OF JOURNALISM

An Early Public Journalism Project
Although isolated citizen projects and reader forums are sprinkled throughout the his-

tory of journalism, the public journalism movement began in earnest in 1987 in Columbus,

Georgia. The city was suffering from a depressed economy, an alienated citizenry, and an

entrenched leadership. In response, a team of reporters from the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer

surveyed and talked with community leaders and other citizens about the future of the city.

The paper then published an eight-part series based on the findings.

When the provocative series evoked little public response, the paper’s leadership realized

there was no mechanism or forum for continuing the public discussions about the issues raised

in the series. Consequently, the paper created such a forum by organizing a town meeting. The

editor of the paper, Jack Swift, organized a follow-up cookout at his home at which concerned

citizens created a new civic organization called United Beyond 2000 to tackle issues such as

racial tension and teenage antisocial behavior.

The committee spurred the city’s managers and other political leaders into action. The

Columbus project generated public discussion, involved more people in the news process, and

eased race and class tensions by bringing various groups together in public conversations. In

the newsroom, the Ledger-Enquirer reimagined the place of journalists in politics: “Instead of

standing outside the political community and reporting on its pathologies, they took up resi-

dence within its borders.”36

Criticizing Public Journalism
By 2000, more than a hundred newspapers, many teamed with local television and public

radio stations, had practiced some form of public journalism. Yet many critics and journalists

remained skeptical of the experiment, raising a number of concerns including loss of editorial

control, loss of credibility, loss of balance, and loss of diverse views.37

First, some editors and reporters argued that public journalism was co-opted by the

marketing department, merely pandering to what readers wanted and taking editorial con-

trol away from newsrooms. They believed that focus group samples and consumer research—

tools of marketing, not journalism—blurred the boundary between the editorial and business

functions of a paper. Some journalists also feared that as they became more active in the

community, they may have been perceived as community boosters rather than as commu-

nity watchdogs.

Second, critics worried that public journalism compromised the profession’s credibility,

which many believe derives from detachment. They argued that public journalism turned

reporters into participants rather than observers. However, as the Wichita Eagle’s editor Davis

Merritt points out, professionals who have credibility “share some basic values about life, some

common ground about common good.” Yet many journalists insist they “don’t share values

with anyone; that [they] are value-neutral.”38 Merritt argues that, as a result, modern journalism

actually has little credibility with the public.

His view was buoyed by polls that reveal the public’s distrust of newspapers. Research

studies in 1988, for instance, indicated that 50 percent of surveyed respondents had “a great

deal of confidence in newspapers”; by 1993 and into the early 2000s, similar polls showed that

confidence had dropped to less than 25 percent.39 But two years into the Iraq war, in 2005, this

figure rose to 28 percent,40 which some critics attributed to the work that war correspondents

were doing as embedded journalists covering the Iraqi and Afghan wars. A Gallup Poll released

in 2008 found that 24 percent of Americans had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence

in newspapers, down from 30 percent in a 2006 Gallup survey. Similarly, television news also

experienced a drop—with 24 percent of respondents saying they had confidence, down from

33 percent in 2006.41

“The idea is to
frame stories from
the citizen’s view,
rather than insert-
ing man-in-the-
street quotes into
a frame dominated
by professionals.”

JAY ROSEN, NYU, 1995

CHAPTER 13 ○ JOURNALISM ��443

“FAKE” NEWS has
encroached on the territory of
“real” news for several years.
Although The Colbert Report
and the character of Stephen
Colbert are meant as parodies
of shows like The O’Reilly
Factor and televised political
pundits like Bill O’Reilly, many
young American viewers have
admitted that they watch the
show (and its counterpart, The
Daily Show) to stay current
and informed, as well as to
be amused. Stephen Colbert
and his “Colbert-isms” have
also become a part of the
zeitgeist—his term truthiness
was named Word of the Year
by Merriam-Webster in 2005
and by the American Dialect
Society in 2006.

Third, critics also contended that public journalism undermined “balance” and the

both-sides-of-a-story convention by constantly seeking common ground and community

consensus; therefore, it ran the risk of dulling the rough edges of democratic speech.

Public journalists countered that they were trying to set aside more room for centrist

positions. Such positions were often representative of many in the community but were

missing in the mainstream news, which has been more interested in the extremist views

that make for a gripping story.

Fourth, many traditional reporters asserted that public journalism, which they consid-

ered merely a marketing tool, had not addressed the changing economic structure of the news

business. With more news outlets in the hands of fewer owners, both public journalists and

traditional reporters needed to raise tough questions about the disappearance of competing

daily papers and newsroom staff cutbacks at local monopoly newspapers. Facing little competi-

tion, in 2009 newspapers continued to cut reporting staffs and expensive investigative projects,

reduced the space for news, or converted to online-only operations. While such trends tempo-

rarily helped profits and satisfied stockholders, they also limited the range of voices and diverse

views in a community.

“Fake” News and Satiric
Journalism
For many young people, it is especially disturbing that

two wealthy, established political parties—beholden

to special interests and their lobbyists—control the

nation’s government. After all, 98 percent of congres-

sional incumbents get reelected each year—not always

because they’ve done a good job but often because

they’ve made promises and done favors for the

lobbyists and interests that helped get them elected

in the first place.

Why shouldn’t people, then, be cynical about

politics? It is this cynicism that has drawn increas-

ingly larger audiences to “fake” news shows like The

Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report

on cable’s Comedy Central. Following in the tradi-

tion of Saturday Night Live (SNL), which began in

1975, news satires tell their audiences something

that seems truthful about politicians and how they

try to manipulate media and public opinion. But

most important, these shows use humor to critique

the news media and our political system. SNL’s

sketches on GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah

Palin in 2008 drew large audiences and shaped the

way younger viewers thought about the election.

The Colbert Report satirizes cable “star” news

hosts, particularly Fox’s Bill O’Reilly and MSNBC’s

Chris Matthews, and the bombastic opinion-

argument culture promoted by their programs. In

critiquing the limits of news stories and politics,

The Daily Show, “anchored” by Stewart, parodies

444��DEMOCRATIC EXPRESSION AND THE MASS MEDIA

THE CULTURE OF JOURNALISM

the narrative conventions of evening news programs: the clipped eight-second “sound

bite” that limits meaning and the formulaic shot of the TV news “stand up,” which depicts

reporters “on location,” attempting to establish credibility by revealing that they were

really there.

On The Daily Show, a cast of fake reporters are digitally superimposed in front of exotic

foreign locales, Washington, D.C., or other U.S. locations. In a 2004 exchange with “political

correspondent” Rob Corddry, Stewart asked him for his opinion about presidential campaign

tactics. “My opinion? I don’t have opinions,” Corddry answered. “I’m a reporter, Jon. My job

is to spend half the time repeating what one side says, and half the time repeating the other.

Little thing called objectivity; might want to look it up.”

As news court jester, Stewart exposes the melodrama of TV news that nightly depicts

the world in various stages of disorder while offering the stalwart, comforting presence

of celebrity-anchors overseeing it all from their high-tech command centers. Even before

CBS’s Walter Cronkite signed off the evening news with “And that’s the way it is,” network

news anchors tried to offer a sense of order through the reassurance of their individual

personalities.

As a satirist, Stewart is not so reassuring, arguing that things are a mess and in need of

repair. For example, while a national news operation like MSNBC thought nothing of adopting

the Pentagon slogan “Operation Iraqi Freedom” as its own graphic title, The Daily Show coun-

tered with “Mess O’ Potamia.” Even as a fake anchor, Stewart displays a much greater range

of emotion—a range that may match our own—than we get from our detached “hard news”

anchors: more amazement, irony, outrage, laughter, and skepticism.

While Stewart often mocks the formulas that real TV news programs have long used,

he also presents an informative and insightful look at current events and the way “tradi-

tional” media cover them. For example, he exposes hypocrisy by juxtaposing what a politi-

cian said recently in the news with the opposite position articulated by the same politician

months or years earlier. Indeed, many Americans have admitted that they watch satires

such as The Daily Show not only to be entertained but also to stay current with what’s going

on in the world. In fact, a prominent Pew Research Center study in 2007 found that people

who watched these satiric shows were more often “better informed” than most other news

consumers, usually because these viewers tended to get their news from multiple sources

and a cross-section of news media.42

Although the world has changed, local TV news story formulas (except for splashy

opening graphics and Doppler weather radar) have gone virtually unaltered since the

1970s, when SNL’s “Weekend Update” first started making fun of TV news. Newscasts still

limit reporters’ stories to two minutes or less and promote stylish anchors, a “sports guy,”

and a certified meteorologist as familiar personalities whom we invite into our homes each

evening. Now that a generation of viewers has been raised on the TV satire and political

cynicism of “Weekend Update,” Jay Leno, David Letterman, Conan O’Brien, The Daily

Show, and The Colbert Report, the slick, formulaic packaging of political ads and the

canned, cautious sound bites offered in news packages are simply not so persuasive.

Journalism needs to break free from tired formulas—especially in TV news—and reimagine

better ways to tell stories. In fictional TV, storytelling has evolved over time, becoming increas-

ingly complex. Although the Internet and 24/7 cable have introduced new models of journalism

and commentary, why has TV news remained virtually unchanged over the past forty years?

Are there no new ways to report the news? Maybe audiences would value news that matches the

complicated storytelling that surrounds them in everything from TV dramas to interactive video

games to their own conversations. We should demand news story forms that better represent

the complexity of our world.

“There’s no
journalist today,
real or fake, who is
more significant
for people 18 to 25.”

SETH SIEGEL,
ADVERTISING AND
BRANDING
CONSULTANT, TALKING
ABOUT JON STEWART

CHAPTER 13 ○ JOURNALISM ��445

Journalism is central to democracy: Both citizens and the media must have access to the infor-

mation that we need to make important decisions. As this chapter illustrates, however, this is a

complicated idea. For example, in the aftermath of 9/11, some government officials claimed that

reporters or columnists who raised questions about fighting terrorism, invading Iraq, or devel-

oping secret government programs were being unpatriotic. Yet the basic principles of democ-

racy require citizens and the media to question our leaders and government. Isn’t this, after all,

what the American Revolution was all about?

Conventional journalists will fight ferociously for the overt principles that underpin

journalism’s basic tenets—questioning government, freedom of the press, the public’s right

to know, and two sides to every story. These are all worthy ideals, but they do have limita-

tions. These tenets, for example, generally do not acknowledge any moral or ethical duty for

journalists to improve the quality of daily life. (See “Examining Ethics: Reporting Violence on

Campus” on page 446.) Rather, conventional journalism values its news-gathering capabili-

ties and the well-constructed news narrative, leaving the improvement of civic life to political

groups, nonprofit organizations, business philanthropists, individual citizens, and practi-

tioners of Internet activism.

Social Responsibility
Although reporters have traditionally thought of themselves first and foremost as observers

and recorders, some journalists have acknowledged a social responsibility. Among them was

James Agee in the 1930s. In his book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which was accompanied

by the Depression-era photography of Walker Evans, Agee regarded conventional journalism as

dishonest, partly because the act of observing intruded on people and turned them into story

characters that newspapers and magazines exploited for profit.

Agee also worried that readers would retreat into the comfort of his writing—his narrative—

instead of confronting what for many families was the horror of the Great Depression. For Agee,

the question of responsibility extended not only to journalism and to himself but to the read-

ers of his stories as well: “The reader is no less centrally involved than the authors and those

of whom they tell.”43 Agee’s self-conscious analysis provides insights into journalism’s hidden

agendas and the responsibility of all citizens to make public life better.

Deliberative Democracy
According to advocates of public journalism, when reporters are chiefly concerned with

maintaining their antagonistic relationship to politics and are less willing to improve politi-

cal discourse, news and democracy suffer. Washington Post columnist David Broder thinks

that national journalists like him—through rising salaries, prestige, and formal education—

have distanced themselves “from the people that we are writing for and have become much,

much closer to people we are writing about.”44 Broder believes that journalists need to be-

come activists, not for a particular party but for the political process and in the interest of

re-energizing public life. In some ways this happened with the intense coverage, especially

on the Internet and 24/7 cable, of the Obama/McCain presidential race in 2008. But this

might also involve mainstream media spearheading voter registration drives or setting up

Democracy and Reimagining
Journalism’s Role

“Neither journalism
nor public life will
move forward until
we actually rethink,
redescribe, and re-
interpret what jour-
nalism is; not the
science of informa-
tion of our culture
but its poetry and
conversation.”

JAMES CAREY,
KETTERING
REVIEW, 1992

“Information
these days is like
steam. It escapes
through the tiniest
cracks. The notion
that any piece of
information . . . can
be sealed away, I
think, is a relic of
the past.”

JON KLEIN, CNN
PRESIDENT, APRIL
2007

446��SOUNDS & IMAGES

O n April 16, 2007, a twenty-three-year-old Virginia Tech student killed thirty-two
people and then himself—the largest
mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
Between murdering two students in
a dorm and massacring thirty more
students and teachers in another
building, the shooter—remarkably—
sent a package to NBC that contained
“more than 45 photographs, more than
23 minutes of videotape, and 23 . . .
pages of written materials.”1 After in-
forming authorities and sending them
copies, NBC News decided on April
18 to run a number of the photos and
videos of the killer, Seung-Hui Cho.
NBC also shared the killer’s “mani-
festo” with other news networks and
newspapers—in exchange for the NBC
logo appearing on the images.

Media saturation of these chilling ma-
terials lasted only a day or so. In pro-
test, families of two victims canceled
scheduled appearances on NBC’s
morning Today program. A poster on

Reporting Violence on Campus
the campus soon announced, “VT Stay
Strong—Media Stay Away.” The next
day, NBC cut displays of the images
to “10 percent” of its overall coverage
on both its broadcast and cable news
services. Fox News decided to quit
running the images altogether.

Soon, the Canadian newspaper Ottawa
Citizen asked a key ethical question:
“How should the media handle the public
manifesto of a killer?”2 Under scrutiny
from the public and critics, mainstream
news media asserted their positions.
Steve Capus, president of NBC News,
said that the “decision was not taken
lightly. . . . We selectively chose certain
limited passages and material to release.
We believe it provides some answers to
the critical question, ‘Why did this man
carry out these awful murders?’�”3 NBC’s
decision was backed by many journalists.
But Harry Smith, CBS’s Early Show an-
chor, said his own program ran too much
footage, and at some point he stopped
producers from airing more: “To be
brutally honest, I felt manipulated by the
fact [that Cho] was getting exactly what
he wanted.”4 Several journalists wrestled
with the same problem as they—in ap-
parent contradiction— showed footage
while acknowledging they were giving
the killer what he wanted: having his “de-
mented” but carefully prepared materials
distributed widely to the public.

Bob Steele, an ethics scholar
from the Poynter Institute,
ultimately backed Capus and
NBC: “The pieces of the tape
we see give the public more
understanding of what went
on in this demented individu-
al’s mind. . . . These are pieces
of a 1,000-piece jigsaw
puzzle—a painful puzzle we
don’t want to look at but have
to.”5 Brian Williams, anchor of

EXAMINING
ETHICS

the NBC Nightly News, agreed: “I don’t
know of a reputable news organization
in this country that, upon receipt of that
package, would have . . . slipped it in a
drawer and not shared its contents. It is
beyond disturbing. It is beyond horrify-
ing. It is also news, and the news is our
role, however unpleasant the stories
are at times.”6

At the other end of the spectrum, CBC—
Canada’s main TV news service—chose
not to run anything from the manifesto.
CBC news chief Tony Burman criticized
NBC’s decision: “Sickened as I’m sure
most viewers were, I imagined what kind
of impact this broadcast would have
on similarly deranged people.”7 Kevin
Cameron, an Alberta risk-assessment
specialist, backed the CBC stance: “The
video should have never been released.
It adds to the justification of other
people like him.”8 He pointed out that
the videos made by student killers Eric
Harris and Dylan Klebold in their 1999
rampage that killed fifteen—including
themselves—at Colorado’s Columbine
High School remain sealed even though
some news media are working to get
those videos released.

So what would you do as a TV news
director or managing editor in this situ-
ation? In the end, Al Tompkins, a former
TV news director who teaches broadcast
news and ethics courses at Poynter, said
that refusing to air this controversial
material “would have been an easy thing
to do. . . . People would have said, ‘Good
for you.’ But that doesn’t . . . enlighten us.
That only protects us. And the job of the
journalist is not to protect us from the
truth; it’s to tell us the truth, no matter
how repugnant it is.”9 Do you agree? Is
there a way to tell such a tragic story—to
tell the truth about what happened—
without showing images from the killer’s
“multimedia manifesto” ?10

SOCIALLY RESPONSIBLE NEWS
While journalists have to report on major national
events like the April 2007 killings at Virginia Tech
or the August 2007 highway bridge collapse in
Minneapolis, they often have a tendency—especially
on TV—to turn tragedy into melodrama, complete
with dramatic theme music and graphic titles like
“Massacre at Virginia Tech” or “Road to Ruin.”

CHAPTER 13 ○ JOURNALISM ��447

pressrooms or news bureaus in public libraries or shopping malls, where people converge

in large numbers.

Public journalism offers people models for how to deliberate in forums, and then it cov-

ers those deliberations. This kind of community journalism aims to reinvigorate a deliberative

democracy in which citizen groups, local government, and the news media together work more

actively to shape social, economic, and political agendas. In a more deliberative democracy, a

large segment of the community discusses public life and social policy before advising or elect-

ing officials who represent the community’s interests.

In 1989, the historian Christopher Lasch argued that “the job of the press is to encourage

debate, not to supply the public with information.” 45 Although he overstated his case—journalism

does both and more—Lasch made a cogent point about how conventional journalism has lost its

bearings. Adrift in data, mainstream journalism has lost touch with its partisan roots. The early

mission of journalism—to advocate opinions and encourage public debate—has been relegated

to alternative magazines, the editorial pages, news blogs, and cable news channels starring elite

reporters. Tellingly, Lasch connected the gradual decline in voter participation, which began in

the 1920s, to more professionalized conduct on the part of journalists. With a modern “objec-

tive” press, he contended, the public increasingly began to defer to the “more professional”

news media to watch over civic life on its behalf.

As the advocates of public journalism acknowledge, people have grown used to letting

their representatives think and act for them. More community-oriented journalism and other

civic projects offer citizens an opportunity to deliberate and to influence their leaders. This

may include broadening the story models and frames they use to recount experiences; paying

more attention to the historical and economic contexts of these stories; doing more investiga-

tive reports that analyze both news conventions and social issues; taking more responsibility for

their news narratives; participating more fully in the public life of their communities; admitting

to their cultural biases and occasional mistakes; and defending themselves better when they are

attacked for performing their watchdog role.

Arguing that for too long journalism has defined its role only in negative terms, news scholar

Jay Rosen notes: “To be adversarial, critical, to ask tough questions, to expose scandal and

wrongdoing . . . these are necessary tasks, even noble tasks, but they are negative tasks.” In ad-

dition, he suggests, journalism should assert itself as a positive force, not merely as a watchdog

or as a neutral information conduit to readers but as “a support system for public life.” 46

448��DEMOCRATIC EXPRESSION AND THE MASS MEDIA

COMMON THREADS

Historians, media critics, citizens, and even many politi-
cians argue that a strong democracy is only possible with
a strong, healthy, skeptical press. In the “old days,” a few
legacy or traditional media—key national newspapers, three
major networks, and three newsmagazines—provided most of
the journalistic common ground for discussing major issues
confronting U.S. society.

In today’s online and 24/7 cable world, though, the
legacy or mainstream media have ceded some of their power
and many of their fact-checking duties to new media forms,
especially in the blogosphere. As discussed in this chapter
and in Chapter 7, this loss is partly economic, driven by
severe cutbacks in newsroom staffs due to substantial losses
in advertising (which has gone to the Internet) and because
bloggers, 24/7 cable news media, and news satire shows like
The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are fact-checking the
media as well as reporting traditional stories that used to be
the domain of professional news organizations.

One of the Common Threads discussed in Chapter 1 is about the role that media play in a democracy. Today, one
of the major concerns about the media is the proliferation of news sources. How well is our society being served
by this trend—especially on cable and the Internet—compared with the time when just a few major news media
sources dominated journalism?

The case before us then goes something like this: In
the “old days,” the major news media provided us with
major news narratives to share, discuss, and argue about.
But in today’s explosion of news and information, that
common ground has eroded or is shifting. Instead, today
we often rely only on those media sources that match
our comfort level, cultural values, or political affiliations;
increasingly these are blog sites, radio talk shows, or cable
channels. Sometimes these opinion channels and sites
are not supported with the careful fact-gathering and
verification that has long been a pillar of the best kinds
of journalism.

So in today’s media environment, how severely have
technological and cultural transformations undermined the
“common ground” function of mainstream media? And, are
these changes ultimately good or bad for democracy?

KEY TERMS
The definitions for the terms listed below can be found in the glossary at the end of the book.
The page numbers listed with the terms indicate where the term is highlighted in the chapter.

CHAPTER
REVIEW

news, 420
newsworthiness, 420
ethnocentrism, 422
responsible capitalism, 422

small-town pastoralism, 422
individualism, 422
conflict of interest, 427
herd journalism, 432

sound bite, 436
public journalism, 440

CHAPTER 13 ○ JOURNALISM��449

REVIEW QUESTIONS
Modern Journalism in the Information Age

1. What are the drawbacks of the informational model of
journalism?

2. What is news?
3. What are some of the key values that underlie modern

journalism?
Ethics and the News Media

4. How do issues such as deception and privacy present
ethical problems for journalists?

5. Why is getting a story first important to reporters?
6. What are the connections between so-called neutral

journalism and economics?
Reporting Rituals and the Legacy of Print Journalism

7. Why have reporters become so dependent on experts?
8. Why do many conventional journalists (and citizens) believe

firmly in the idea that there are two sides to every story?
Journalism in the Age of TV and the Internet

9. How is credibility established in TV news as compared
with print journalism?

10. With regard to TV news, what are sound bites and happy
talk?

11. What roles are pundits now playing in 24/7 cable news?
12. In what ways has the Internet influenced traditional

forms of journalism?
Alternative Models: Public Journalism and “Fake” News

13. What is public journalism? In what ways is it believed to
make journalism better?

14. What are the major criticisms of the public journalism
movement, and why do the mainstream national media
have concerns about public journalism?

15. What role do satirical news programs like The Daily
Show and The Colbert Report play in the world of
journalism?

Democracy and Reimagining Journalism’s Role

16. What is deliberative democracy, and what does it have
to do with journalism?

1. What are your main criticisms of the state of news
today? In your opinion, what are the news media doing
well?

2. If you were a reporter or an editor, would you quit voting
in order to demonstrate your ability to be neutral? Why
or why not?

3. Is there political bias in front-page news stories? If so,
cite examples.

4. How would you go about formulating an ethical policy
with regard to using deceptive means to get a story?

5. For a reporter, what are the dangers of both detachment
from and involvement in public life?

6. Do satirical news programs make us more cynical about
politics and less inclined to vote? Why or why not?

7. What steps would you take to make journalism work
better in a democracy?

QUESTIONING THE MEDIA

For review quizzes, chapter summaries, links
to media-related Web sites, and more, go to
bedfordstmartins.com/mediaculture.

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