Journalism History

From Cab Rides to the Cold War: Richard Rovere, the New Yorker, and Postwar Washington

This article explores how Richard H. Rovere's "Letter from Washington" helped the New Yorker become a prominent voice on U.S. politics in the years following World War II. He combined the style of a literary critic with a detached approach to politics to create a style that distinguished the New Yorker's Washington reports from those of its competitors and helped shape the magazine's reputation as a powerful player in the postwar political culture. His consistent support of the anti-Communist...

Dorothy Jurney: A National Advocate for Women's Pages As They Evolved and Then Disappeared

Dorothy Jurney was a groundbreaking women's page editor at several newspapers and a long-time advocate for women in journalism. She began her career during the depression after graduating from Northwestern University, and after working on the news side of newspapers during World War II, she moved back to the women's section. She went on to redefine the content of the sections at the Miami Herald and the Detroit News Press and was called the "godmother of the transformation of the women's page...

Japanese American Internment in Popular Magazines: Race, Citizenship, and Gender in World War Ii Photojournalism

This article analyzes published photographs of Japanese Americans interned in World War II by Dorothea Lange (1895-1965), Ansel Adams (1902-84), and Carl Mydans (1907-2004) in Survey Graphic, U.S. Camera, and Life respectively. Although their work was constrained by the economic and ideological realities of the war's photojournalism, they transcended the medium to provide historians with valuable insights into a controversial chapter in our national history when the government felt it was nec...

Physicians and Obscenity: A Struggle for Free Speech, 1872-1915

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, literature that reflected changing attitudes toward sexuality, religion, marriage, and government fell victim to the Comstock Act and related state laws on obscenity. Among the earliest individuals convicted was Dr. Edward Bliss Foote for a brochure that promoted birth control, and, he and his son, Dr. Edward Bond Foote, challenged obscenity legislation in Congress, state legislatures, and courts and also offered personal assistance to def...

Covering Eleanor Roosevelt: Associated Press Reporter Bess Furman and Four Years with the First Lady

Between 1933 and 1936, Eleanor Roosevelt changed Associated Press Washington Bureau reporter Bess Furman's reporting life. She joined the AP in 1929 and was assigned to cover women, but Lou Hoover and other official wives were difficult to cover because of their rule that they were never to be quoted. When Mrs. Roosevelt came to the White House, she changed that by granting access through press conferences, travel, and friendship, and Furman's reporting changed because of Mrs. Roosevelt's int...

The Southern Press: Literary Legacies and the Challenge of Modernity

[...] to become a writer "means to acquire the shaman's status, the secret skill of the storyteller, the magic power of persuasion, self-expression and emotional release." Cumming's book carries the reader through the New Journalism of the late 1960s and up to the present, but the richest material comes from the two decades after World War II, when the white southern press passed through its own version of what historian Joel Williamson has called "the crucible of race."

Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy

As newspaper after newspaper radically cuts its news hole or quits publishing, and ABC News announces it is laying off a quarter of its work force, the so-called creative destruction of capitalism is in full view in the world of mainstream journalism. [...] there is nobody in a better position to diagnosis the current ills of journalism and reflect on the potential solutions to the problem than Jones. The iron core consists of foreign news, particularly war, politics, and public policy at a...

Journalism's Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting

The title of this book was inspired by pulp fiction in the 1950s, which was a time when, according to the author, American foreign correspondence still enjoyed something of a "golden age." [...] one will find here a panoply of remarkable characters.

Battling Nell: The Life of Southern Journalist Cornelia Battle Lewis, 1893-1956

Alexander S. Leidholdr argues for her significance in the last sentence of the book: "Lewis's extraordinary, contradictory, and intensely idiosyncratic life's journey remains notable not just because of its connectedness to many of the convulsive events that shaped southern history in the first half of the twentieth century but also for the agency Battling Nell displayed, the gender barriers she helped to demolish, and the courage and vitality with which she asserted herself." The book contr...

Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print and Power

A crowd swarmed the north end of Park Row, the street where New York newspapers maintained their empires, ready for the cornerstone laying of Joseph Pulitzer's new World building. The great publisher was in Paris, managing his newspapers and the building project at long distance because he was nearly blind, tormented by ailments real and imagined. Another biography of Joe P.? An accurate account of earlier works is elusive, depending on whether you count the pure biographies or the tell-all...

Los Angeles Before Hollywood: Journalism and American Film Culture, 1905-1915

Looking at journalists' reactions to film's rise in popularity in Los Angeles in the early twentieth century, Olsson charts differing perspectives of reporters from the era of penny arcades and nickelodeons to the advent of full length features. [...] he reveals a shocking amount of racial and ethnic prejudice among white journalists covering the movie industry.

Hidden Voice: The Origins of Public Broadcasting in the United States

Extension officials wished to improve the economy by disseminating information about markets and weather as well as inform citizens about the latest research in agriculture, and radio correspondence courses also were offered with university professors presenting lectures from specially equipped classrooms. Some educational stations, whose discussion programs touched on controversial topics, were called purveyors of "propaganda"; commercial stations, with advertising designed to reach "genera...

From 'Perverts' to 'Fab Five': The Media's Changing Depiction of Gay Men and Lesbians

Streitmatter cannot be faulted for not being able to take the long view of DeGeneres' legacy because it is just not clear yet. In his introduction to From "Perverts" to "Fab Five", Streitmatter sets out four goals for the book: to highlight the shift in the media's depiction of gay men between 1950 and the early 2000s; to consider the impact ofthat shift; to look at whether the coverage of lesbians followed the same route as that of gay men; and to see which genre of the media was the most e...