ENGLISH 104

Media of mass communications, journalism historian Mitchell Stephens has said, evolve from a human ``thirst to know." {e} The curiosity that was allegedly fatal to the cat, more likely a "need to know," is considered a survival trait for humans from the time before people became socially organized. After social organization led to common settlements, cities and defined borders, a good deal of the ``news’‘ that was thirsted for was about social relations, winners and losers and clues about who really held power.

As that information became more complex, its transmission evolved from being the casual pastime of everybody to the semi-pro business of people who would organize it and make decisions on what part of the information was important to whole groups of people – audiences.

In this brief history the newspaper will be the star, because it is the medium of mass communications on the model of which, until very recently, everyone’s idea of news (including broadcast news) was largely fashioned.

But the development of organized modes of news transmission starts earlier. Even in preliterate societies, control over what was in the news people heard was a source of power, often jealously guarded by those already in power. The job of official messenger or runner appeared in societies as widely different as the post-Shaka (unified) Zulu nation, the Native Americans throughout the Americas, griots of West Africa and the ``singers of tales" whose embedment in local culture of news and literature persisted in the Balkans into the 20th century. Most of the point-to-point messengers were employed by the rulers of the society and served to put out the official view of things and exercise social control at a distance. Again, an arm of power. Tribal archivists and the person who acted as the community "memory" had somewhat more independence.

News and the written word did not intersect immediately. We know, as seen above, that the first uses of written language were to keep track of trade goods in the town of Uruk, in Mesopotamia, in about 3100 B.C.E. School texts, literature (the epic tale of Gilgamesh) and treaty texts have also survived, but not news as such.

With writing, we imagine, the idea of audience changes; writing can ``speak to a crowd" as long as it exists, on clay tablets or hard drives -- the longer it lasts, the larger the crowd. As time passes, it may no longer be ``news" as the audience understands it; it stops being "new" and starts being "everybody knows" common knowledge and history. But if it is information that some in the crowd want, even centuries later, it remains successful as mass communication.

This brief history deals with how mass communication evolved, how storytelling by nearly everyone in society specialized into storytelling as a trade and eventually a profession, and how the increasing complexity and specialization of society created a need for information that people were willing to pay for.

The focus of this account is the newspaper, a relatively recent medium dating from the eighteenth century that nonetheless became the model of media designed for an audience that is more interested in information than entertainment and shaped the newer examples in broadcast and even Web sites.

But newspapers had many precursors and the job of ``information producer" arrived at its present form through some twists and turns. A look at some of those twists and turns helps us understand why the producer, and the product, behave they way they do today.

The principal sources of this brief account are the standard histories of the U.S. mass media -- Frank Luther Mott's Journalism in America and Edwin and Michael Emery's The Press and America -- as well as G.A. Cranfield's The Press and Society, about mass media in the United Kingdom. An indispensible (and brief) analysis of newspapers as social history, Discovering the News by Michael Schudson, plays a part as well, as does -- emphatically -- Paul Starr's recent, and highly valuable, study The Creation of the Media. Readers who want to know more about what's discussed here should go to those books first, as well as to others listed in the bibliography that were less heavily relied upon.

THE PROBLEM OF AN AUDIENCE

Mass communication begins with an audience of more than one. The individual ``communication model" is the dyad, or two-person exchange. It allows for a kind of intimacy that the mass audience model never approaches, even if the two members of the dyad are having a fight.

As soon as anyone begins to address an ``audience" – two or more people listening at the same time – mass communication is born, and the speaker has to choose words, language and structure -- and content -- that will achieve her or his purpose for all listeners.

Why would two or more people hold still to listen to one speaker? Mitchell Stephens, as we heard, suggests that there is a human ``thirst to know," but we don’t have to romanticize it. People need information to live: Where is the food? Who or what is dangerous? What don’t I know that can hurt or help me? People who have that information get listened to – especially, we should note, if those people or their traditions or organizations have reputations for truth-telling.

In preliterate societies the news producer was already special. In some societies the news producer was a rhapsode or griot or one of a thousand other names suggesting wisdom, experience and cultural memory. Homer, who told stories of Troy, the invading Greeks, and the long homecoming of Odysseus, was one of the many rhapsodes. West African griots memorized, recited and preserved the 12th-century epic of Mali, "Sundiata," until it was finally written down in the 20th century. As recently as the early 20th century, researchers found the ``Singer of Tales" still a main source of such cultural capital in the Balkan countries.

Stephens suggests that the news values in preliterate societies dominated by the spoken word were similar to those of today, including "the local angle." This requires us to note that there are different kinds of "news" even though (as Stephens notes) the word "news" has been used in English for about five centuries with about the same meaning.

One kind of news is information about the ways of one's own culture. Most of Homer's stories are considered just that, but what those tales said about good and bad, clever and stupid behavior in Greek society apparently was read as a manual for living by later Greek civilization. That's a local angle.

News, Stephens says, is what's on a society's mind. (9) So it's not only a way to decode how a society works but also a source of what's "new," not known yet. This includes what's going on in the immediate community: what is safe or profitable to do and what is to be avoided.

Some of the most elaborate communication networks in preliterate cultures, however, were arranged to get news from afar. After Shaka Zulu unified the Zulu nation, the news network was quite official. Runners were employed by the king to take news from the throne to the people. ``They were rarely channels of dissent," Stephens notes.

And isolated communities thirsted for news from afar, especially if it could affect their safety. During the time of the Great Fear during the 1789 French Revolution, villages sent residents on missions to the nearest city to get news: Was it true, they wondered, that the king’s forces were ndiscriminately slaughtering peasants wherever they went?

* * *

When the written word entered the news picture, the nature of the audience shifted slightly. The community singer, rhapsode or griot had an audience in plain view (except, reputedly, for blind Homer). The producer of written news, however, no longer was able to read the faces and body languages of the audience to know how to adjust the discourse. More guesswork was involved in crafting a message that would have maximum impact on a (perhaps) known but unseen group of people.

Early writing as it appeared in ancient Sumer was pictographic and, as we heard above, mostly involved with trade – keeping track of numbers of jars of oil, communicating to a factor on the other end of the caravan route what he might expect to find in the shipment. The audience was narrow. Where Sumerian writing was ideograms (cunieform), the people who became known as the Phoenicians created an alphabet in about 1500 B.C.E. As we see below, a syllabary or alphabet makes it possible to match symbols with sounds in the spoken language -- a huge help for spreading literacy.

About 750 years later, at the time that the memorized-and-sung epics we call Homer’s were first being written down, the Greeks added vowels to the trade alphabet.{e}

But the first identifiable news activity had to be left to the Romans. They had an empire that was large and lasted (unlike Alexander the Great’s) a long time. Information needed to travel the roads of the empire swiftly, so the mails were an imperial institution, just as in Shaka Zulu's later kingdom. But to stay in power, they had to find a way to make the government look good to the people. What to do?

THE ROMAN SOLUTION

Roman rulers wanted to preserve at least the illusion of popular, democratic support, so they posted what were called the acta urbana (acts of the city) in public places -- accounts of the official acts of the Republic. Sometimes, when daily, they were called acta diurna, Emery and Emery note. They were propaganda, but they were not only read, it appears, but widely copied and sold to those who couldn’t or wouldn’t go to the public square to read them. Letters exchanged by prominent Roman citizens – especially those sent to exiles or those posted to remote areas of the empire – refer to the acta as having been enclosed with the letter to keep the homesick Roman up to date on events in the Eternal City. The first-century C.E. Roman historian Tacitus says they were widely read by soldiers and colonists serving in the empire’s far provinces.

Though none of these documents has survived independently, the portrait of them appearing in other surviving Roman writings show some important advances in the direction of what we call ``news." The government of the empire recited what the Senate and administration had done in these documents. But the copyists who reproduced and sold them appear to have added human interest stories and outright gossip to make them more salable. We think of hand-copying such documents as the slow, lifetime task of medieval monks but in fact, Stephens relates, Roman copyists working in teams were able to turn out a thousand copies of such a document in a very short time.

So beneath the elite literary culture of the Republic and Empire there was an underlayment of citizen engagement with government through something like what we would call "news." Note that as it veered from being "official" it became more popular.

The citizenry of Rome was not highly literate but literacy spread under the Empire's canopy of trade and security, aided by the phonetic Latin alphabet or syllabary.

In a different imperial civilization without such a syllabary, the outcome was different. The earliest Chinese empires (beginning in the third century B.C.E. and then, after a hiatus, resuming in the seventh century C.E.) had an equally large territory to administer and sent out rather similar newsletters from the heart of the empire to provincial governors to keep them up on events. They included gossip, but do not seem to have slipped into the private sector as did the Roman acta urbana. In a system called ti, the far-flung provinces maintained agents at the palace who sent these agents’ reports, or ti pao, out to the provincial governors who executed the will of the emperor and court in far-flung possessions.

During the latter Tang dynasty some of the ti pao were actually printed by block printing, rather than copied. But, as Stephens points out, the ti pao were not for public consumption, but very much internal communication for the literate civil service class.

Chinese characters were not phonetic, at least not in the way that syllabaries are, and that makes literacy harder to achieve. The civil service class, educated and admitted to the civil service by examination in a roughly 40,000-character language, alone was able to read the ti pao.

Certainly the constraints on public literacy of an ideographic writing system – which still weighs down literacy in China today – kept the reading public small compared to that in Rome, where news was represented in an alphabet. Still, the court gazette in Peking – the hometown ti pao – probably holds some kind of record for continuous publication. It lasted over 1,000 years, finally folding in 1911 as the empire collapsed.

After the Roman Empire fell in C.E. 476 and the formerly-conquered provinces of Europe and the Mediterranean began to form slowly into nations, literacy declined. Latin was the written language, used by an educated elite in the

church, but few spoke it. The new languages -- with Celtic, Germanic and Latin roots -- gradually grew apart, and "vulgar" Latin as used in the church became the Swahili of Europe for a time, a trade language.

The need for news among the commercial classes, of course, never died, and as commerce flourished again with the Renaissance, a lot of news passed back and forth in reports sent by agents to the entrepreneurial heads of trading houses.

Gradually the vernacular languages replaced Latin as the language of trade and science. This, still, was not news for the masses; in fact it was more useful (then as now) to the merchant if no one else knew the facts in the report (what sort of cargo was on the way to which ports, for instance, and when it might arrive). Factors and merchants in the West benefited greatly from these intelligence reports; the consumers had to take their chances. But the move to the vernacular languages had another effect. Starr argues that the Reformation in Europe, which emphasized the faithful's reading the scripture for themselves, in their own language, was a significant boost to literacy at that point. (27)

The arrival of printing added an economic factor to the preservation of prose. Though the market for printed products started small, even in 1470 -- just decades after Gutenberg's famous Bible -- a text in print cost 50 to 80 percent less to produce than the same text copied in manuscript. (Starr 26)

With the introduction of printing in the West around the 15th century C.E., a more public form of information called the ``newsbook" appeared. Unlike newspapers, these pamphlets usually described only one thing – perhaps a king’s triumphal visit to another country – and were usually subsidized by the subject, for whose propaganda benefit it was produced – like today’s political advertising.

Presses, unlike pen and ink, were expensive to own and hard to hide, so the powerful found it easy to control the printed product. Licensing and exclusive printing patents were used to keep the printers following the party line. As the newsbook evolved into pamphlets and ``broadsides," the occasional subversive production frequently came from religious dissidents, but seldom more than once. Printers found it easier to write about events in other countries and avoid controversial statements about their own powers-that-were -- just as Shakespeare and his dramatic contemporaries stayed out of trouble with Queen Elizabeth's formidable secret service by placing their corrupt and scandalous royals in foreign countries (Italy was a favorite) or far in the past.

In 17th-century France, a security-conscious state where dissidents were repressed, "The Netherlands became a center of French-language publishing beyond the reach of the French state." (Starr 27) British editors, as well, got much news about France from -- Holland.

But the news couldn't be suppressed just because the printers were under the gun. Robert Darnton has traced the path of subversive gossip from anti-court salons -- where every participant had to write down a bit of gossip in a register in order to be admitted -- to hand-written and hand-copied newsletters in which those chunks of gossip were compiled and circulated to eager readers. (George Washington's False Teeth).

Newsbooks, pamphlets and the like were one-shot products and often appealed to readers with outlandish reports of wonders – two-headed animals, or two-headed people. News in England appeared in the 1500s as printed ballads -- "every plot, every rebellion, every public execution produced its ballad," says G.A. Cranfield in The Press and Society. "Unusually ghastly crimes were assured of a splendid coverage" and "news of the court and of royal pageantry was always popular" as ballads gave way to newsbook-like pamphlets.

What was important in the British 16th century, Cranfield says, was that "Printers had appeared who were prepared to publish news. They accustomed people to the idea of printed news, and assisted in the growth of an appetite for it" even though the level of literacy outside the ruling class was probably not high. (2-5)

Early versions of periodicals called corantos evolved along with the newsbooks; they came out more than once but irregularly, and often leaned heavily on commercial news to make themselves salable to those who had money – the merchant class. By 1620, though, there were regular weekly corantos in The Netherlands (Cranfield 5)

The next step was a printed product devoted to "news" that came out regularly, so it wouldn’t have to re-introduce itself to an audience every time as newsbooks did. That was the newspaper, the medium that built an audience (and vice versa).

The history of news media is basically the history of the development of a public definition of "news".

By that we mean that news, unlike literature, has an immediate audience of consumers who believe they know what information they want and need, and call it news. This audience has developed expectations and demands about news to which the news media have had to respond. So the media of mass communication -- as a storeful of products -- have developed in the mirror of what the public wants in its news.

It's the argument of this brief history that the public definition of news -- a definition that media producers are anxious to know, because it gives them a road map for success -- evolves rapidly and more or less continually. Media workers are, therefore, always trying to keep up with the latest definition. Nor is it likely that most media consumers are particularly conscious of such a "definition," again because it manifests itself as what he or she wants to know today. Media workers, because they are mass communicators, have to wrestle those thousands of individual definitions into the idea of news as held by an audience.

That public definition of news developed, until quite recently, in step with the rise of newspapers. Most of our ideas about news (including what is done in radio, television and the emerging electronic infotechnologies) come from the history of newspapers, Denis McQuail says.

The first newspapers that appeared to be distinct from the commercial newsletters that preceded them appeared in England in the late 16th/early 17th century. The first English-language newspaper actually appeared in Holland, in the same month that the Mayflower landed at Plymouth in 1620, so the "Pilgrim fathers" (and mothers) would never have seen an English-language newspaper. Only later waves of Massachusetts colonists would have seen newspapers printed in England for English readers. The first press in the American colonies was set up at Harvard College in 1638, two years after the college’s founding.

How would we recognize a "newspaper"? McQuail, a media sociologist, says newspapers, like other media of mass communications, have these general components:

(1) a technology; (2) "the political, social, economic and cultural situation of a society", (3) a set of "activities, functions or needs" and (4) people, especially as they behave in groups .

This completely sociological definition, which could apply just as well to the automobile, nevertheless lets us know that media evolved throughout their part of modern history as an "activity" to meet some need felt by people. The "situation" is that of a developing market society. Urbanization and the division of labor began to be dominant features of the social landscape around the 15th century in the West, where most of our history of news is centered. The "technology" was, to start with, printing.

Media provide information about where and how to get things -- goods, services -- and how to cope with the requirements of life in society. As society gets more "advanced" newspapers become market tools, informing the public not

only on where and how to get things but where and how to get them most cheaply and informing the public on the role of other big institutions, especially including government, in their daily lives.

The first newspapers had as their features regularity, a price on the cover, multiple purposes including information and entertainment, and a "public or open character," McQuail says. Some were independently published and others were published by government and so had an "official voice" character as well as the other features mentioned. The London Gazette, founded in 1665 and generally accounted the first British newspaper, was reprinted in the colonies, and coffeehouses imported copies of it and kept them on file for their patrons.

The society in which these newspapers evolved was itself evolving: becoming more urbanized and more "commercial." That meant people lived close together, making a newspaper easier to distribute. And it means that more goods were exchanged for currency rather than made at home or bartered, so people had more incentive to have good information about who sold what and at what price -- making advertising attractive.

In the colonies, newspapers grew out of newsletters and in fact the first regularly appearing newspaper, in Boston and published by the postmaster of the commonwealth, was called the News-Letter (1704). It lasted over seventy years with a few lapses, but failed when it chose the wrong side in the Revolution. A competitor, the Boston Gazette, was later a famous Patriot organ and was printed by Benjamin Franklin's older brother James, with young Benjamin as apprentice (and anonymous columnist) in the shop. James Franklin’s New England Courant, like many other colonial papers, reprinted literary work by British essayists, including those of Addison and Steele, mainstays of the home country’s The Spectator.

According to Edwin and Michael Emery’s The Press and America, the Courant only lasted five years but James Franklin pioneered in an important way – publishing a newspaper that explicitly was not published "by the authority" of any government licensing agency and signaling an independent press.

Paul Starr's valuable account, The Creation of the Media, contrasts the relatively unregulated development of news media in the United States with the much heavier government hand in the "home country," Great Britain, even though in many other ways the media of the two countries evolved the same conventions and features. The colonial printers and writers were inconsistently reined in by the patchwork governments of private colonies and crown colonies that made up the pre-independence America, though the authorities didn't have much to worry about because most publishers were either the local postmaster or a printer who depended on government business for his livelihood.

Nevertheless, some have suggested that culture of flexibility set a tone for the way the media were treated by the institutions of the fledgling U.S. government. Starr argues that some distinct pro-media decisions by U.S. politicians and agencies have made a big difference -- and a positive one, up till recently -- in the quality of U.S. mass media.

By 1735 Boston had five newspapers. Maryland was the fourth colony, after Pennsylvania and New York, to have a lasting newspaper. The Maryland Gazette was founded in Annapolis in 1727.

U.S. media were loosely licensed in the colonial era but it was a low-key environment compared to Britain, where the ruler of Parliament, Lord Harley, subsidized as many as five newspapers (in 1713) to promote the Tory line and employed Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift in his stable of propagandists. (Starr 37). In a succeeding (1731) government, Walpole had five newspapers on the string also and went so far as to take care of one annoying independent paper by buying it. (Cranfield 41, 44)

Newspapers that were not controlled by government developed an independent stance that was often a thorn in the side of officials, and the history of newspapers in many countries was one of hard-won freedom through struggles with censorship. The conflict between commercial and/or popular success and political independence may have caused a temporary sorting-out of roles in the newspaper business that occurred in many countries, including the U.S.-- a division of the business into the political party press, the commercial "penny press," as it was called in this country and the smaller but still highly important commercial newspapers, of which The Wall Street Journal is a survivor.

Cranfield notes that between 1815 and 1830, just after the end of the two-decade war against Napoleon, the British media fractured. The influence of Radical politics -- ranging from the Utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill and others to the communism of Marx and Engels -- saw many anti-establishment newspapers develop and a vicious government counteroffensive that including jail for many editors. Most famous among editors was William Cobbett, "generally regarded among Tories as the incarnation of the Devil," whose Political Register set the tone for many other pro-worker, anti-government papers that followed. (90ff.)

During this period, Starr suggests, the U.S. government felt insulated by its oceans from the security mania of many European regimes, mistrusting anyone outside their borders, and "experienced less pressure to impose a military or security-minded framework on new communication technologies..."(15)

Government controls over the press included laws that criminalized speaking out against the government, which early British law defined as "seditious libel." Many printers were jailed or worse for it.

Well before the American Revolution, the 1734 trial of John Peter Zenger, printer of a New York news-sheet, was a landmark for freedom of the press in the colonies. Zenger was arrested and tried for "seditious libel" for attacking the authorities who, backed by the British Crown, ran New York. His lawyer argued that Zenger was innocent because his statements about the government, though harsh, were true. When the judge told him he couldn't argue that point, he turned to the jury and said he had to rely on them. The jury said "not guilty" in a famous decision that still has weight when cited in court, even though the U.S. Common Law wouldn't be born for half a century. Though this seems an obvious verdict today, in fact British law on seditious libel dating from a 1606 ruling specifically said that if the anti-government statement being prosecuted was true, it was even more criminal than if it had just been made up! (Starr 38)

Despite its lack of legal force, Starr said, the political effect of the Zenger decision in the colonies was to spread the notion that "the press could serve as the guardian of popular liberty by scrutinizing government." (59)

By 1765 most newspapers were printed on larger sheets, 11 by 17 inches or about the size of tabloids today, and nearly all were published by printers who had many other jobs on their minds and didn't make a lot of their money as newspaper publishers. News was gathered from ship captains and most news stories began by citing the source-- a recently arrived ship-- before going on to the actual point of the story, an early example of establishing the credibility of a news account by citing the source. The other source of material was the mail -- clipping material from other newspapers outside the area. Local news seems to have been downplayed in the colonial press because, as Mott says, "towns were so small that everybody knew what was going on".

In the first years of the new nation, the growth of newspapers was heavily on the political or "party press" side. At this time editors became important, Mott says, because the press had moved beyond the unsystematic printing of whatever came across the printer's desk.

Newspapers became troops in the political wars of the day. The conflict between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson over the character of the new nation is reflected in several facts: Jefferson, although a libertarian who endorsed the free press in the abstract, nevertheless hated and felt hounded by the press of the day. Hamilton, in favor of a strong central government and central bank, is revered as, among other things, the founder of one of the oldest papers, the New York Post.

By 1800, New York had 11 newspapers. But even then, newspapers depending on commercial news outnumbered the purely political press, Mott relates. Despite the effects of the Zenger case, the early republic’s laws included prohibitions against seditious libel, meaning writing critically about public officials and their conduct. Though the pro-government, anti-press law grew out of English common-law traditions, seditious libel was actually abolished in Britain in 1792 but the law didn’t expire of natural causes in liberated America until 1801, according to Gillmor & Barron's authoritative text, Mass Communications Law. Starr argues the repression of the press was a "transatlantic development in the aftermath of the French Revolution [1789]" that put the screws to publishers and editors in France and England. In the United States, however, it backfired, as editors who were jailed became "heroes" of the public. (79-80)

However, as noted above, Britain's rulers, spooked by the anti-establishment tone of the press from 1815 to nearly 1848, found many ways to oppress editors of radical publications. By contrast, Mott says, the press enjoyed more freedom in post-revolutionary America than it had ever before anywhere in the world. Unlike that of Britain and the Continent, the U.S. press was neither constrained by taxes or by laws against expression.

SECTION 4
AN ERA OF RAPID GROWTH
By 1830 the U.S. counted 650 weekly and 65 daily newspapers and the dailies had a total circulation of about 80,000; by 1840 there were 1,141 weeklies and 138 dailies, more than double in each category, but daily circulation had nearly quadrupled to around 300,000. The press evolved, as Michael Schudson says in Discovering The News, from "advertisers" to "heralds and suns"-- in other words, from purely commercial to outspokenly political or at least public-spirited, going by their names. In the decade of the ’30s, the drop in price from about six cents to a "penny" reflected the fact that, political orientation aside, these papers no longer tried to pay their bills with the money they got from selling the copies. Rather paradoxically, these non-"advertisers" tried for large circulation to get more -- advertising.
Nobody is sure why newspaper circulation during this period expanded much faster than population. Increased literacy, new cheaper printing methods and the growth of commercial advertising all had a part. But whatever the reason, as Schudson points out, the readership of newspapers during this period expanded outside an educated, commercial elite, so that "...for the first time, the newspapers reflected not just politics or commerce but social life." European observers from this point on in the nineteenth century expressed repeated astonishment at the wide readership and influence of the press in U.S. society, compared to their home countries, Emery and Emery noted.
British publishers, especially those whose fight was often with the government in power, were pretty sure reason for the American advantage was that, where U.S. papers were untaxed, the press in the home country was taxed for the purpose of keeping news out of working peoples’ hands. "There was in fact general agreement among the ruling class," Cranfield said, "that too many of the poor were reading newspapers and learning subversive ideas from them." (89) A comparison run in the Working Man's Friend in 1833 indicated that with its much lower population, the United States had almost three times as many newspapers and twice the circulation as did Great Britain. Even France, the radical paper asserted, had lighter taxes on newspapers than Britain. (Cranfield 139)
Light taxes or not, the period from Jefferson to Jackson-- about 1800 to 1830-- was called by Mott the "Dark Ages" because of the highly partisan stance of many newspapers, and the unparalleled "scurrility and vulgar attack on personal character" in which they engaged. The editor of a newspaper established specifically to be a pro-Jackson organ "could blister his opponent with a paragraph," said Mott. In that respect they were very similar in tone to the British pro-worker press, though the lines were drawn differently -- party against party in the United States, class against class in the home country.

PENNY PAPERS AND THE RISE OF THE "BOURGEOIS PRESS"
In 1833 the first successful "penny paper," the New York Sun, began publication, and at least a dozen more penny dailies were started in the next five years. James Gordon Bennett, one of the best-known of the early publisher-editors of the penny press, is credited by Mott with establishing the notion that the personality of the editor was a big part of his paper. In his New York Herald, Bennett asserted daily, in a variety of ways, that the newspaper was led by and reflected the opinions of the people, not elites. Schudson cites this "common folks" orientation as a hallmark of what became known as the penny press. Bennett, a cultured Scotsman raised in poor circumstances but educated in the "Scottish Enlightenment" tradition, was probably the most important editor/publisher of the "penny paper" era (Schudson 50). But he was corrupt and ready to sell his opinion, and pressed a pro-slavery view throughout his long tenure as well as beating the drum for the Mexican War and expansionism. At his death in 1973 he had been hugely influential in politics and in the development of the newspaper business, as we see in James L. Crouthamel's account. A relentless businessman, he spent lavishly on the latest presses and in 1848 installed a "lightning" steam-powered double-cylinder press that printed 10,000 impressions per hour and allowed for a daily circulation of 80,000. By 1857, even newer and larger presses were allowing a daily circulation of 150,000. Bennett's moves to ensure his paper supply and telegraphic and other connections to remote news were influential and he was among the founders of the New York precursor to the Associated Press in 1848 (Crouthamel 44-46).
The new printing technology pushed newspapers to excesses of self-congratulation. Multiple "decks" of headlines, usually praising the daily's speedy methods of acquiring news, filled up space until "it was only in the last quarter of the column that the reader began to find the facts of the story," Mott says. The size of pages, originally increased in England to beat the per-page tax, grew with the advent of high-speed cylinder presses until one paper published with pages measuring three by five feet. Size sometimes became more important than quality, and news sometimes suffered at the expense of sensationalism.
The penny dailies changed the idea of news. News was now more local, it was sensational (with a heavy emphasis on crime and police reporting), and it had human interest. "The role of the reporter came into its own" as the share of locally reported news in the penny press rose from a quarter to nearly a half by 1860, according to a study cited by Starr. (135) National news occasionally stepped out front in times of crisis; war correspondents became heroes during the 1846 Mexican War, though they still had to file their dispatches by pony express until the telegraph made it as far as New Orleans during the conflict. Telegraph service had begun in 1844, two years before the war began, but spread slowly. In 1848 the Associated Press was formed to take advantage of quick transmission and cut deals for lower group telegraph rates.
Despite the urgings of newspaper owners (like Bennett), the U.S. government declined to nationalize the telegraph and put it into the postal system, as was done in Britain. By Starr's reckoning, government control actually slowed down development of the telegraph in Britain and France even though most of the technical advances were made in Europe, not the United States. That control also imposed censorship, which U.S. media didn't have to face.
Communications quickened in general, and Emery and Emery point out that the time lag for news from "the Lower South" dropped from a month to ten days even before the advent of the telegraph.
As the purely commercial newspapers and the more restrained party press began to decline, some of the penny papers took over the market, especially in the large eastern cities of the United States, and evolved into what McQuail calls the high point and model of what we mean by the press, the "19th-century bourgeois newspaper".
An early example was Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, often counted the most important antislavery voice in the years leading up to and including the Civil War. Other newspapers followed suit, seeking a "factual" news presentation and stressing their reliability.
Greeley was not only a great antislavery crusader but also the inventor of the modern editorial page. As opinion and began to gravitate to this section, Mott said, the news pages became more "professional."
This "professionalism" is a major theme of Michael Schudson's "social history" of the U.S. press. It is signaled first in the post-Civil War marker that Mott lays down as "the triumph of the news principle," meaning that political partisanship (despite the incredibly divisive nature of the war) gave way to an emphasis on news. And it meant that the new hero would become the reporter, not the editor. Nevertheless it was well-known editors who accomplished the increase in overall influence of the press-- especially the big-city dailies-- after the defining national experience of the Civil War. Greeley's innovation, the editorial page, meant that readers increasingly looked for facts on the front page and opinions on the page set aside for them -- and expected them to be separated in that fashion. And Charles A. Dana and the New York Sun led the way to a higher profile for both good and ill as the penny press got respectability and readership by adding functions of the commercial and opinion press, like financial reporting and columnists. Greeley, the Herald’s Bennett, and Dana were public figures of considerable influence as the newspaper industry grew in status and real civic leadership.
In his development of the "human interest" story as the key feature of the Sun, Dana established a fact- or at least reality-based journalism that de-emphasized the importance of "important" people and elevated the everyday lives of ordinary people to near-literary stature. There's no question that The Sun helped set the tone for New York's newspapers as the news principle became entrenched even though it remained the popular favorite because of price. It was always the cheapest of the penny papers (when the Herald and Greeley's Tribune raised their prices to two pennies, The Sun held firm).
Schudson describes the public's need for such a connection in a rapidly urbanizing society in the terms that his fellow sociologists have advanced: community evolving into mass society. In mass society, the individual has more independence but paradoxically feels cut off from the comforting connections of the small town. "People came unstuck from ...custom, found chances to form individual personalities, and faced new possibilities of impersonality in the social relations of modern life," says Schudson.

ECONOMIES OF SCALE IN URBAN NEWS
Technology and economics made the mass-produced newspaper the right new form of "making connections" at the right historical time. Urbanization packed the potential audience closely together, making papers easy to distribute. And people packed together created new kinds of stories, with happy and unhappy endings.
Newspapers in the post-war 19th century developed an establishment acceptance that resulted from several trends. There was the increasing emphasis on fact and reliability of news, in the news columns, and an increasing distinction between news pages and opinion pages. There was also an increase in the economic status of large newspaper companies and chains, which grew slowly in the late 19th century and then came to dominate the newspaper industry in the l930s. As newspapers and their owners became richer, they became more likely to be part of the establishment. A Fourierean socialist like Greeley, who hired Karl Marx as a European correspondent for the Tribune, wouldn't fit in with the news moguls of the late nineteenth century, or today.
Dana, in his youth a radical, Transcendentalist and member of the Brook Farm commune, wrote distinctly radical dispatches from Paris in midcentury as a star editor/reporter for Bennett's Herald. But Dana became more and more conservative as his newspaper, The New York Sun, increased in wealth, circulation, and establishmentarian tone on the editorial page, Mott notes. He was a "publisher-editor" who watched both the news and business side of his enterprise. Different tax treatment, geographical differences and an orientation toward news of Europe all contributed to a quite different path to the same sort of "high bourgeois" model in the home country, England. Founded in 1778, The Times was one of many papers that shuttled in and out of the direct control of factions of government in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Under several notable editors beginning with John Walters in 1803, the paper nicknamed "The Thunderer" gradually pulled away from all other papers in the first half of the century to become a maker and breaker of governments (in a system where Parliamentary control could flip with every crisis and vote of no confidence). Almost separately, Sunday-only newspapers became widely read, especially by workingmen (and a few women), because they could be read by daylight on a day off work in an era when household lighting in the evening was scarce and expensive. (Cranfield 121)
A civic culture developed, aided by the growth of coffee-house society -- in which newspapers were read aloud by paid readers, by one 1831 account. Cranfield says it’s been estimated that every copy of a London newspaper was read (or listened to) by 30 persons, and from 1800 to 1830, tax receipts indicate a doubling of newspaper circulation. But prices remained high, with no echo of the penny press phenomenon in England, because per-copy taxes on newspapers remained so onerous. The Times grew because it stayed ahead of the curve on printing technology and coverage of government, where it embarrassed prominent ministers who had to read news of their own underlings’ doings in The Times before having heard of them otherwise. Its coverage of the Crimean War of the early 1850s, England’s major mid-century conflict, was when it "probably reached its zenith." (Cranfield 162)
Its dominance, too, was spurred by advertising, including government notices. Where the threat of withholding paid notices had once been a way of controlling the press, new laws requiring that public notice be placed in papers of largest circulation meant the notices had to go in The Times anyway, and [the Duke of]"Wellington ruefully admitted that ‘we have no power over them’ ". (Cranfield 155).
The authorities had tried often to reduce the influence of The Times by cutting the taxes on newspapers to increase competition, but it didn’t work. Finally in 1855 the taxes were abolished, and "it was as though a spell had been broken," Cranfield says. Newspapers priced at a penny sprang up all over urbanized England as the home country experienced its own belated "penny press" explosion 25 years after that of the United States. Educational reforms around 1835 were just now creating an expanded reading public and a press grew to meet its needs. But The Times remained most influential with influential people even as a more middle-class readership appeared. The new newspapers were fed with foreign news by the Reuters news agency, which first made its mark during the Crimean War. And in the 1880s, the "high bourgeois" era in both England and the United States, several editors tried "USA Today"-style digest newspapers and the Daily Mail emerged to top its competitors in that new category and rival The Times for readership. Held back by official fear and economic repression, a compressed version of the evolution of newspapers in the United States emerged with a rush in the last third of the 19th century in Great Britain.

SECTION 5

SECTION 5

The Roots of the Modern Newspaper and the Idea of News

“The printed newspaper is at the heart of all of our journalism histories,” said Mitchell Stephens in a recent Web posting (http://www.nyu.edu/classes/stephens/International%20History%20page.htm) Nearly everything we know or believe about newspapers today is based in the "high bourgeois" 19th-century newspaper model characterized by a professional stance and a reverence for facts, objectivity, fairness and the "public (or national) interest," as McQuail puts it. Most of the internal rules of broadcast news were later adapted from that model also, as was the notion of the journalist as professional. As we'll see, the newspaper (as well as its print kindred, magazines) had the public's need for knowledge all to itself in the late 19^th century, and became what sociologists call an "institution of society" and what economists call big, big business. They were unavoidable.

          Thomas Leonard says “The middle of the nineteenth century produced news readers of greater independence and larger appetite,” and the newspapers were happy to feed both. (91) The rise of the press to prominence, largely in the “Atlantic” (the United States and Western Europe), paralleled and was boosted by eventful times: the Civil War in the U.S.; Britain’s working-class reform era and the Crimean War (1854) and France’s post-1848 belle époque followed by the humiliating defeat by Germany at the time of the Paris Commune of 1871. More than ever, dangerous times showed how willing people of every economic class were becoming to pay for reliable information.

          Histories of the era from roughly 1870 to just before the First World War (Hobsbawm’s Age of Empire or Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower  are readable examples) show public events increasingly propelled and multiplied by their own reflections in the increasingly omnipresent media. At the same time, Anthony Smith believes, the hotly-competing daily newspapers were providing the latest facts, but (especially in the United States, where journalistic innovations were beginning to come first and be imitated elsewhere) “It was no longer necessary for the newspaper to provide a continuous history of the era.”

          “The raw material of the modern newspaper had to be ‘hot,’ earthshaking;” Smith continued,  “the world of the newspaperman seemed to consist of a succession of convulsive actions, autonomous, sudden, unanticipated, disconnected.” (Newspaper 159)

          Newspapers became public institutions with casts of characters, rather than one-man shows. By 1866, Mott reports, bylines for reporters in U.S. papers were becoming increasingly common (405). Along with the storied publishers like Greeley of the Tribune, Bennett of the Herald, and Dana of the Sun, reporters became public figures. William Howard Russell’s reports on the (badly botched by Britain) Crimean War for The Times brought down ministers. (Smith, Newspaper 125-26) Richard Harding Davis, who reported for Hearst on the Spanish-American War from Cuba, represented the reporter as U.S. media hero. He was preceded by Henry Morton Stanley, who in 1871-72 tracked down the long-missing missionary David Livingstone at his central African ministry for the Herald. (Mott 416; Smith, Newspaper 157) In France, publisher-editors of satirical newspapers were the heroes, until the political tides turned and they often had to leave the country for a spell.

          Meanwhile advances in press technology pushed the potential of mass-circulation newspapers. They included Hoe's invention of the one-piece stereotyped printing plate for rotary presses (1861), Ottmar Mergenthaler's pathbreaking linotype machine, which ended the need to set type by hand, letter by letter (1886) and the replacement of rags by wood pulp as the basis for newsprint and the creation of "web" (continuous rolls) of paper that could print at high speeds on the rotary press (1860s and 1870s).

          Why print so much? Emery and Emery, in their history of the U.S. media, note that U.S. population doubled -- but the number of city residents tripled -- between 1870 and 1900. During that period, the number of daily newspapers increased fourfold and the total number of copies sixfold, from 2.6 million copies in 1870 to 15 million in 1900. Illiteracy dropped from 20 percent to 10 percent and the number of high schools increased about tenfold. (201) In 1870, Mott said (404), there were about 4,500 newspapers of all sorts, from daily to weekly, in the country. Between 1870 and 1890, circulation of U.S. newspapers increased at four times the rate of U.S. population, Mott summarizes, and Emery and Emery (206) add that in that period well over three-quarters of that growth was in evening newspapers, in part because of increased readership by women

          Most of this growth was in the Midwest and far west, and though New York City’s fabled papers were still models they had company in the ranks of top names. The Chicago Tribune, dailies in Ohio and Indiana’s industrial belt cities and the Atlanta Constitution took their places in the first rank. And Mott (396) said “Nearly every village of 1,000 inhabitants had two [weekly] papers.”

          Censorship and taxes, as we have seen, suppressed the growth and influence of newspapers in Europe. The singular success of The Times helped break the tax dam and the growth of the late-Victorian mercantile society brought prosperity to London’s 18 dailies and the (as of 1861) 1,102 newspapers of all sorts throughout the tight little island nation.  Newspaper repression in France was even more stringent, starting with a law in 1820 requiring large deposits of money by publishers before starting up a newspaper. The ostensible reason was ensuring that fines for censorship violations would be paid, but transparently, the ruling regime wanted to make sure that only the very wealthy could afford to publish newspapers. Only in 1881 were these shackles removed in a new press law that began, “La Presse est libre…” James Curran notes that a similar “deposit” was required in Britain in the earlier 19^th century. (“Capitalism and Control” 199) In Germany, advertising itself was a monopoly of the government until the 1848 almost-revolution. Once that source of revenue was made available, German newspapers grew rapidly. (Smith, Newspaper 111 and 119). But advertising was generally a lesser source of revenue for newspapers on the Continent and that kept political support (and partisanship) out front, with “relatively little emphasis on news gathering (Starr 147).  Despite a certain worldwide admiration for the American model of objective journalism and reverence for the facts, European and U.S. newspapers began drifting apart in their approach to “objectivity and balance” during this time, Anthony Smith said, with the European press staying with “an older ethic … by which the newspaper is supposed to belong to one of several contending ideologies.” (Newspaper 166).

          Photography in newspapers advanced with technology, but slowly. Illustration, however, flourished. flourished. Woodcut cartoons by Thomas Nast helped bring down the corrupt Tweed government in New York City. Hearst sent the artist Frederick Remington to Cuba to illustrate Richard Harding Davis's first-person accounts of Teddy Roosevelt charging up San Juan Hill. His assignment gave rise to one story about Hearst that has never been confirmed but is too good not to include (and all the chroniclers of the media epoch do). Remington is said, early in his assignment in Cuba, to have wired Hearst that he wanted to come home because nothing was happening: there was no war to cover. Hearst is supposed to have wired back: "you furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war."

          Newspapers of the late 19^th century had no competition from other kinds of media, but plenty of competition among themselves. The great "yellow journalism" war between Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer in New York, during which Hearst is credited with having instigated the Spanish-American War to boost circulation, was a major shootout of mass circulation newspapers, and the most notable example of that time of the excesses of competition. Lesser examples abound and continue today.

Newspapers became big. From the four to eight pages per edition that characterized the early penny dailies, Pulitzer's New York World was publishing up to 24 pages daily and 48 Sunday in the 1890s. E.W. Scripps pioneered the idea of chain ownership, owning in whole or part 34 papers in 15 states during the 1890-1910 era.

          In the first decade of the new century, a notable departure was the expansion of an explicitly African-American press into standard newspaper formats. Early versions such as Frederick Douglass's North Star had been advocacy publications. But papers like the Chicago Defender and New York's Amsterdam News in their form as complete newspapers represent the rise of a self-confident black middle class in many urban areas. The Defender boasted the anti-lynching campaigning of pioneer newswoman Ida B. Wells-Barnett but also the great "Simple stories" of Langston Hughes in column format, relaxed and fully-realized satirical tales of the "class struggle" within African-American society.

          The increased role of newspapers in social change and people's everyday lives -- and their growing role as businesses and engines of the economy -- brought an evolution of the newsroom as an organization. Big-city newspapers, starting with Greeley's New York Tribune, took on ranks of editors and reporters and developed the roles of city editors, news editors and the "rewrite man" who converted rambling accounts to inverted pyramids with summary leads. Reporters got public personalities and acquired reportorial "beats," or specialization. The newspaper looked less and less like the print shop it was in 1800 and more and more like an industrial workplace, with occupational specialties and team-based assembly.

COURTS AND THE PRESS: PRIOR RESTRAINT

          Mott points out that the libel laws, usually based in state not federal rulings and varying from place to place, generally got less restrictive and intimidating as the end of the 19th century approached. Constraints on the press, especially in smaller and wilder venues, often harked back to Benjamin Franklin's half-serious suggestion that offending editors should be beaten up. At its worst, editors were persecuted and even executed for their unconventional politics, like the antislavery publisher Elijah Lovejoy, murdered in Illinois before the Civil War, or the anarchist editors hung in Chicago in the era of the Haymarket riots.

          Though the sedition laws and libel concerns dogged the press slightly throughout the 19th century, it wasn't until World War I that political divisions within the increasingly diverse U.S. brought press freedom questions to the U.S. Supreme Court, where a foundation of First Amendment definitions started to evolve. The war with Spain and U.S. participation in the world war added size, power and importance to the federal branches and therefore to their coverage in the national press. Theodore Roosevelt set aside a room in the White House for reporters.

          The role of the postal service in delivering newspapers became a constraint on press freedom during the Great War, when German-language and socialist newspapers were denied mailing privileges. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes set the first markers in several decisions (including dissents, when he was on the losing side) of that period. He introduced the "marketplace of ideas" concept set out earlier by the poet John Milton in 17th-century England. Both suggested that when truth and untruth battle on a level playing field, truth will win, so let the games begin. Holmes added, in a famous phrase, that only a "clear and present danger" to institutions of democracy justified censorship.

          This was the first high court signal on “prior restraint” of the press -- stopping publication. The definitive decision came in the case of Jay Near, a publisher of a weekly newspaper in Minnesota. Near -- and his newspaper -- was racist, anti-Semitic and ready to take on anyone in authority. But when the local government tried to shut him down under a law against nuisance press, big-city publishers like the conservative Chicago Tribune publisher Col. Robert McCormick held their noses and backed Near’s appeal to the Supreme Court. In 1931 the court said that publishers had a responsibility to answer for what they published but that government should not stop publication. For a great account of this important and entertaining case, see Fred Friendly’s book Minnesota Rag.

SECTION 6

THE BABY THAT GREW-- BROADCASTING

          Meanwhile, the news medium that would challenge and threaten newspapers in their dominance of the field made its first baby steps-- one of the first of them at the instigation of a newspaper. The young genius Marconi came to the U.S. in 1899 at the invitation of the New York Herald. At 25 Marconi was already the closely guarded treasure of the British military-- especially the Navy-- for his invention that could communicate through thin air (without the clumsy cables or wires of the telegraph). Now the Herald wanted to use his “radio” to get news of the America’s Cup sailing race without waiting for the racers to come back to port. It worked, sort of. Ironically, Marconi sold rights to the news also to the Associated Press, and two different chase boats sent back Morse code transmissions about the race. But they were both on the same frequency, and so scrambled each other – a sign of the problems to come for broadcasting.

           But Marconi also met with U.S. military and government types, who bought the technology for use by the U.S. Navy. A company, American Marconi, was founded (but it still had strong British participation). During the First World War (1914-1919) as the U.S. prepared to enter active hostilities, military secrecy led the government to expropriate the company by “inviting” it to sell its assets to the government-approved Radio Corporation of America (RCA). It was an offer that could not be refused. After the Great War, U.S. companies struggled to control the technology but the thousands of amateurs (“ham” operators) talking to each other over the airwaves and building their own radio sets made it impossible to keep the possibilities of the new format held closely.

          One Westinghouse engineer, in his spare time, began “broadcasting” from his garage in Pittsburgh, playing music and cultural programming that was listened to by amateurs all over the area. Then the amateurs began selling radio sets to the non-techies. A Westinghouse executive experienced the shock of understanding: People would listen to interesting programs and buy radio sets to do it. As Erik Barnouw notes in his extremely entertaining Tube of Plenty, the first deliberate broadcast (in Pittsburgh) happened on Election Night 1920, ironically providing rapid updates on the contest for President between two newspaper publishers-- Warren G. Harding and James Cox. It represented the high point of newspapers’ social influence and the beginning of their decline in the face of broadcast technology.

          Events followed rapidly, in Barnouw’s telling. The first “commercials” were broadcast in 1922, marking a decision to support broadcast that way rather than by the British scheme of publicly owned broadcast stations supported by a special sales tax on radio (and later TV) sets. By 1925, five million homes had radios, and in 1927 the federal government made the first of its many moves to regulate and control the profusion of stations on the air. As a result the large companies pushing broadcast-- Westinghouse, AT&T, RCA and General Electric-- formed the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) to avoid antitrust prosecution.

          As Paul Starr relates, the development of radio – and later, television – took a different path in the United States than in Great Britain and other European industrial democracies. In Britain, the Post Office had a regulatory role and one national radio network – the BBC – was supported by a tax on every radio set sold. In France, the Post Office also had a role but licenses – in kind of a hybrid system – were awarded to 10 private station owners. (340ff.) But here and elsewhere, the problem raised by Marconi’s two ships broadcasting on the same frequency had to be dealt with. Someone had to decide what bandwidth the radio stations would use and slice it up so stations wouldn’t interfere with one another.

          After several earlier tries at regulating the radio, Congress finally passed the 1934 Communications Act, setting up the Federal Communications Commission to make these decisions and ride herd on broadcasters. One impetus for the decision may have been an international conference in Madrid in 1932 that set out guidelines for broadcast served notice to U.S. broadcasters that the train could be leaving for them if they didn’t have one agency that could speak for American broadcasting. Broadcasters found friends to help make the 1934 Act easy on them – one executive said “every major point we had asked for was there” -- because President Roosevelt was disliked by many newspaper publishers and needed friends himself, Starr notes. (360) Newspapers were grouchy about the new technology, and sealed a deal to keep news off the air as their price for not fighting the legislation. The deal did not last long.

          Radio grew fast. In cities, 93 percent of households had a radio in 1935, tapering off to 34 percent in rural areas.  Roosevelt found radio friendly; his “fireside chats,” Stephens said, took him back to the birthright of every tribal leader (dare we say, griot?) in being able to speak to nearly all of his constituents at the same time, without anyone talking back.

          Before and after passage of the 1934 Communications Act there was much public outcry to force the broadcasting companies to provide public service broadcasts and start a public broadcasting service, but the companies lobbied hard and quickly came up with a varied diet of cultural programming that blunted the mood in Congress. The 1934 Act included no public service provisions, and the road was clear for the development of commercial broadcasting. The struggle, however, had established one big logical – and logistical -- difference between broadcast and the print media. The amount of “space” in the airwaves – the broadcast spectrum -- was limited, though large, and there was therefore said to be a logical reason for the government to be the regulator of who used what space and whether or not the users of those “public airwaves” were doing anything to benefit the public.

          Paul Starr (366) makes the instructive point that the Rev. Bob Shuler, a radio preacher who expressed anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic opinions, lost his license because the predecessor to the FCC, the Federal Radio Commission, had regulatory authority to deny him the airwaves on the grounds that he couldn’t prove his (generally outrageous) charges that public officials took orders from the Vatican. A court upheld the FRC’s ruling. Only a year earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court had denied Minnesota the right to do the same to Jay Near, the equally outrageous newspaper publisher (above), because governments don’t regulate the print press – just broadcast.

          The twenties and thirties were the heyday of Hollywood. Movies and movie stars ruled the public’s idea of entertainment. But television was about to change that. The entertainment possibilities of broadcasting-- both radio and TV-- were so clear and attractive that news often began to look like an afterthought. CBS developed a reputation for news in radio because it was always behind the giants-- RCA’s two networks, NBC and later ABC-- in providing entertainment. News, however, was always the answer to the regulators’ question: what public good is served by letting you use the public airwaves? NBC started a news division as part of its concessions to the government over its monopolistic position in broadcasting.

          The 1930s and ‘40s were years of the dominance of radio, while television grew its wings. Millions listened faithfully to radio drama serials, both adults and children, and radio news flourished, especially during World War II when the public was hungry for signs of victory and broadcasters like Edward R. Murrow from London during the Blitz were heroes on a level with Richard Harding Davis half a century earlier.

          Broadcast organizations needed radio profits to support the development of television, so in the mid- and late 1940s radio gradually lost its diversity along with its dramatic-- and news-- programs. Instead, music programs with disc jockeys-- a very cheap form of programming-- took over the radio bands in the late forties and early fifties, Barnouw relates.

          From 1952 to 1956 the number of TV stations climbed from just over 100 to over 500, and Hollywood diversified its business for the new trend and began making entertainment products for TV, such as sitcoms and Westerns. In 1956 the studios began selling off their backlists to TV, and the “old movie” became a common TV programming item. By 1952 the FCC had responded to public concern about the value of broadcasting to the public by establishing public broadcasting-- what we know as PBS today. The public’s attention to “public affairs” was fleeting. In 1953 President Eisenhower’s inauguration was broadcast, but the heaviest viewership was for the heavily-anticipated episode of “I Love Lucy” in which Lucille Ball gave birth to baby Desi-- 68 percent of all TV sets tuned in to that one. (Barnouw)

          Because television-- and before it, radio-- specialized in telling good dramatic stories, the bias in broadcast news has always leaned in the same direction. Just at the time when newspapers moved away from dramatic presentation (as in the “penny press”) and stuck to the facts-- sometimes to the edge of being very boring-- broadcast used its unusual advantages and traditions to move in the opposite direction. The tension between these two different ways of communicating has persisted, as we shall see below. But as Stephens points out, the need to write a language for radio that was easy to articulate, with short sentences that the listener could hold in the memory, had a radical effect on the style and brevity of news prose.

SECTION 7

THE NEWSPAPER INDUSTRY MATURES AND DWINDLES

          Broadcasting had gone from nothing to a giant industry based on seemingly magic technology in the fifty years since Marconi made his trip to America. In the twentieth century, newspaper technology had made some strides but with nothing like the effect of the major advances of the previous century. The number of U.S. (general circulation, English-language) daily newspapers peaked at 2,200 just before World War I. Mass circulation newspapers’ circulation outpaced population through the ‘20s and then engaged in a long, still-evolving struggle with broadcast and electronic technology for the attention of a media-saturated public. The number of newspapers dropped drastically from 1920 on, even during good times, through consolidations and mergers.  The only medium that gained in advertising revenue during the Depression-racked 1930s was radio. (Emery and Emery 429ff.). By contrast, between the two World Wars the British press grew enormously (Smith, “Control” 177) in part because its late release from the burden of special taxes caused it to consolidate audiences later and peak later.

THE PRESS EXAMINES ITSELF

          After World War II, a sense of both optimism and responsibility resulted in the establishment of the Hutchins Commission. This huge group of academics, professional journalists and political figures produced a giant report on the press that stressed the "national and public interest" as the touchstone for effective, truth-telling media. It was led and named after the president of the University of Chicago, Robert Maynard Hutchins. The commission’s findings, in many volumes, could be summed up in the need to balance the news media’s necessary freedom with a sense of social responsibility. And the commission warned against the dangers of chain ownership and monopolies, suggesting the urge for profit would erode the news media’s social responsibility. This caused irritated reaction among those many large and influential newspapers and broadcast organizations that were chains, monopolies or both.

MODERN LAW AND THE MODERN PRESS

The case of Near vs. Minnesota, above, had established that only under the most unusual circumstances could the government forbid publication of news. But it was clear that what was published was subject to criticism, maybe even legal action, after the fact. The case of John Peter Zenger had (rather romantically, and before there were U.S. courts to take it as a precedent) established that truth was an excellent defense against charges of libel.

          But what if the press said something untrue? The cutthroat competition between Greeley and Bennett in the penny press era, or Hearst and Pulitzer in the Yellow Press era, could lead to mistakes and false statements. Should newspapers, or news organizations, stay away from controversy or pursuit of the bad guys because they could be sued and lose?

          The U.S. Supreme Court tackled this question during the civil rights era. The role of the press as advocate for citizens in the public arena was  anchored by the well-known New York Times vs. Sullivan decision of 1964. A southern police official claimed the Times had libeled him (actually, the complaint was about an advertisement placed by a civil rights organization). If public officials could win libel suits because news organizations dived into areas of controversy, many felt, the press could be weakened or intimidated. The justices said, therefore, that public officials were less protected against incorrect news coverage about their conduct of public duties -- libel -- than private citizens. To ensure “robust, uninhibited and wide-open” debate on public issues, said Justice William Brennan for the court, media have to be allowed to perform their jobs without the threat of ruinous lawsuits hanging over them.

          What this settled, of course, was that the press could be excused for getting a fact or two wrong as long as it could show it did its level best to verify its facts. Competitive and deadline pressures cause mistakes, the court recognized implicitly, but the press should never negligently avoid taking every step to get it right – a sloppy practice that Brennan referred to as showing “actual malice”.

          Subsequent libel decisions have built on this by increasingly requiring media to show they followed a truth-seeking process as well as they could before publishing or broadcasting the story. “Public figures” like movie stars and others who seek out the limelight have become included in the less-protected sector.

          Private citizens, however, are still protected against libel, even accidental. And courts have increasingly recognized a right to personal privacy as including a right against unwanted intrusions by media inquiries into one’s private life.

Can a writer get in trouble for expressing an opinion about someone? According to Gertz v. Welch (1965), not as long as the expression is clearly an opinion and doesn’t claim to be a fact. There’s a difference, Justice Lewis Powell said, between saying you thought someone was a bad person and accusing that person of being a provable wrongdoer or a criminal. “There is no such thing as a false idea,” Powell wrote in that case.

          Government, including law enforcement, has not been left helpless by the courts, however. Holmes’s “clear and present danger” doctrine still has force.  Two decisions in the Vietnam War era went different ways. When during the unpopular war the New York Times published the classified Pentagon Papers, the government failed in its attempt to have the Supreme Court stop publication. But when a left-wing magazine, The Progressive, sought to publish an account of how to make an H-bomb, taken from unclassified sources, the court ruled against the magazine and forbid publication.

          Some of the legal problems that can come up between government and news organizations are linked to the way journalists do their jobs.  There can be a conflict between press freedom and a defendant’s right to a fair trial. Reporters often get information from sources that require anonymity. Courts have always tried to get reporters to testify to what they know about criminal cases, and many reporters have gone to jail to protect their confidential sources in such cases. The federal government has stayed out of this arena but many states have passed Shield Laws to protect reporters’ sources under well-defined circumstances. The Supreme Court, in Branzburg v. Hayes, ruled that there were circumstances in which courts could demand that reporters reveal what they know and to whom they had spoken.

          And under a 1964 decision, Stanford Daily,  police may search newsrooms for evidence, and courts have increasingly probed not only the information gathered by media but also the process of newsgathering. In most cases, courts have required that there be unusual circumstances involved such that the need for a fair trial outweighs the need for a free press.

ON PAPER, ON THE AIR, ON THE WEB…

After World War II, newspapers matched population growth with circulation gains until the 1960s but saw significant declines afterwards. The number of newspapers declined as evening papers closed or merged with morning partners. Anthony Smith noted that the big daily newspapers lived and died with the big city, and the suburbanization of American life eroded their strength. Similar declines were seen in the
European press at the same time (Smith, Gutenberg 30ff.) Leo Bogart, in his book Press and Public (1981) seriously unsettled the news industry by showing that its losses were compounded because its audience was getting older in a hurry and the young readers to replace the older cohort were not signing on.

          The evening television news had grown from fifteen-minute headline roundups in the fifties to full-scale, anchor-based news programs with live reports from remote locations, which many saw as the reason for the collapse of evening newspapers.

          Many of the mid-century innovations in publishing technology, such as photographic or "cold" type and computerized production, made it possible for smaller and less-capitalized publications to emerge. The newspaper trend had for over a century been to use galloping economies of scale to produce a publication that had something for everybody.

          Now those everybodies were deserting the newspapers for more "narrowcast" versions of their particular interests, in small publications, cable and other special outlets. Cable television, too, was putting pressure on the broadcast TV networks and shaving chunks from their mass audiences.

          Still, the beleaguered newspaper industry made significant technological strides in the 1980s – computerized typesetting and page make-up that cut out huge and expensive portions of the labor and time needed to produce a newspaper.  Moreover, the computer’s ability to store huge amounts of text and make it available as an archive was seen by many as a way for newspapers to stop being today’s news only and start being the sum of everyday knowledge. Anthony Smith, in a romantic flight of fancy, saw newspaper libraries as the new “electronic Alexandria” – a reference to the great classical library at Alexandria, Egypt, said to have contained all of the knowledge of the ancient world.

Newspaper publishers, wary of the expense involved in this venture, took their time – and meanwhile a Pentagon program called DARPANET evolved with startling speed into the Internet and left those plans in the dust. (Gutenberg, 4-5 and 300-317)

          Researcher Agnes Hooper Gottlieb, pointing to a generally dismal response of the newspaper industry to technological challenges starting with radio, says worldwide daily newspaper circulation peaked in 1992 at 575 million and the highest number of dailies was reached in 1985. The maximum circulation figures occurred at different times in different nations, she says, with the Western industrial nations actually peaking earlier – U.S. daily circulation declining since 1971, Britain since 1957, France since 1950 and so on. Japan, which Anthony Smith notes as the nation whose press responded most rapidly to the need for computerization (Gutenberg 124ff.) is by Gottlieb’s count the latest to peak, in 1981. (129)

          The introduction and amazing growth of the Internet -- which increases in size faster than the rate at which new knowledge is produced, which gives you the idea there is some padding in there -- is the communications phenomenon of our time. At the same time, it is good to remember that access to the Net is still limited, that it stratifies sharply along class, race and income lines, and that it represents the cultural mind-set of its creators, European white males. But it must be acknowledged that getting “published” on the Net -- with a potentially massive audience of self-selected information seekers -- represents just about the cheapest access to a truly mass audience that has occurred in the history of mass media that we have been looking over. The close observer will notice that the Net’s method of presentation on many sites hews pretty closely to newspaper or newsletter layout and the structure of many written accounts on the Web still resembles variations on the inverted pyramid.

INFORMATION OR STORY?

          Mott and Schudson both make the case that there was a swing from fact-based journalism to interpretation in the 1930's, followed by a swing back. Again in the 1960s, the magazine-style personal journalism of Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson, among others, was called (for the umpteenth time) a "New Journalism".

          Again, public reaction against that antifact, subjective writing style caused a return to "just the facts."

          Schudson makes a distinction that not everyone would agree on. For the reporters and editors of the Progressive era (1890-1914, perhaps) the reverence for the "facts" was not the same as the notion of "objectivity" that is held by news professionals today. Progressives, Schudson says, "understood that facts provided moral direction of themselves and [they] prided themselves that their own moral precepts grew naturally out of their association with the real world." As Schudson says convincingly elsewhere, that meant that a reporter of the day would not be self-conscious about inserting opinion or interpretation into a fact-based story. His (or, rarely, her) own sensibility, rooted in the "real world," was not to be doubted.

          The modernist idea of “objectivity,” Schudson argues, is different from this respect for facts in being an "ideology of distrust of the self"-- a much more up-to-date or perhaps “postmodern” notion. He suggests that in the 1890s journalism split more or less along class lines, with the "information model" appealing to the educated, elite upper class and the "storytelling model" appealing to the middle and working class. The "information model," he suggests, has evolved into the modern professional stance of objectivity, and is first cousin to the scientific method. The storytelling model, on the other hand, still appears in newspapers (in various forms, such as lifestyle features and columns) but has been largely transplanted to the explicitly entertainment media of television and the movies.

          But the information vs. storytelling distinction still represents a major tension in journalism. Any writer who has tried to construct a lead in which telling the story did not get in the way of the facts-- or vice versa-- sees that.

          In March, 2005 the Associated Press announced it would provide member newspapers alternative lead paragraphs for many of its stories – one with “just the facts” and one feature-style, to “draw in the reader through imagery, narrative devices, perspective or other creative means.” (Seelye “Competitive”) The client could use the information, or tell the story, as the client chose…

SO, HOW DO YOU DO NEWS, REALLY?

          Our survey has shown us that the idea of news and the way to “do” it has developed as an arrangement, often unspoken,  between the audience and the providers. The providers, of course, are businesses in a market society that have owners and workers, so an arrangement inside the news organizations has arisen as well.

          Whenever big changes have taken place (usually slowly) in the way news has been produced) they have been affected both by the need to turn a profit and the need to uphold some acknowledged standards for the product. The unusual relationship of news and information to the “role of the citizen” in industrial democracies such as the U.S. has been a vital factor in the growth of the standards that the public appears (usually) to demand from the news and the organizations that produce it.

          The "professionalization" trend of the twentieth century has seen journalistic practice bounce like a pinball among several poles of significance. The idea of news as public service is a constant, invoked by journalists as a reason for special privileges or legal protections while gathering news. The idea of news as independent and iconoclastic appears to push in a different direction, with the strong suggestion that public institutions are always in danger from corruption or incompetence and require a very skeptical press "watchdog". There is a potential contradiction between the journalist and news organization as upholder of civic values, and the same as upsetters of the status quo and pursuers of the bad guys in public, political and corporate spheres.

          Philosophical ideas and fads about the nature of the world around us influenced the news, too, since it was supposed to be a picture of that world. There were several wild swings in the scientific view of the "real world" as orderly and verifiable, or disorderly, subjective and chaotic. Those changes have caused similarly wild swings in the confidence-- of journalists, and sometimes of the public-- in the idea of "objectivity" as something within human grasp.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

          Some of the better histories of news are being written right now and printed in -- newspapers. Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post has made a reputation as an insider critic of news; he has published several books but his columns in the Post are, you might say, a first rough draft of critique of the first rough draft of history, to improve on a phrase of the Post’s old boss, Ben Bradlee.

          The work of newspaper ombudsmen, or reader representatives, is consistently important because it criticizes the newspaper’s own standards and practices – in public. The Washington Post’s and New York Times’ ombudsmen (the Times resisted the ombudsman trend fiercely and only lately appointed one, whom they call “public editor”) both write regular Sunday columns.

          Of the sources used in this brief survey, Mott’s book and that of the Emerys are still the heavyweight conventional histories of U.S. media and have not been surpassed even though quite old. Paul Starr’s 2004 book focuses on the political context in which U.S. media developed but is superior in other ways as well. The best comprehensive mass media history focusing on “news” is that of Mitchell Stephens, used extensively in this mini-tour of the territory. Cranfield’s history of the British press is veddy British but also veddy brief. Anthony Smith’s many excellent books and essays on media include the invaluable The Newspaper: An International History.

          Schudsen wrote his book as a sociologist of professions (this was his first one, his doctoral dissertation) and went on to become one of our best “cultural studies” sociologists of the media. Denis McQuail, a European sociologist with a moderate-left perspective, sees news organizations as big social institutions and part of a vast dance of information and audience. Barnouw’s very entertaining history of broadcast media (of which Tube of Plenty is a part) is also a skeptical-leftish critique of the business orientation of broadcast. Todd Gitlin, as a youthful ‘60s radical, made a huge impact on the study of media and public political opinion with his book, The Whole World is Watching: Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left. As a professor of media sociology he continues to break new ground.

          Other media critics you will not see in local papers include David Shaw, who used to work at the Los Angeles Times and has written several good books of press criticism including Press Watch (1984). Ben Bagdikian, once the ombudsman or reader representative at the Post, has gone through a half-dozen editions of his classic The Media Monopoly. Eric Alterman writes his media criticism in the venerable left-wing magazine The Nation.

 BIBLIOGRAPHY

 Alterman, Eric. Sound & Fury: The Washington Punditocracy and the Collapse of American Politics, New York: HarperCollins 1992

Barnouw, Eric. Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television. New York: Oxford 1982

Bogart, Leo. Press and Public: Who Reads What, When, Where and Why in American Newspapers. Hilldale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum 1981.

Cranfield, G.A. The Press and Society from Caxton to Northcliffe. London: Longman, 1978.

Crouthamel, James L. Bennett’s New York Herald and the Rise of the Popular Press. Syracuse: Syracuse UP 1989

Curran, James, “Capitalism and Control of the Press 1800-1975” in Curran, Michael Gurevitch and Janet Woollacott, eds., Mass Communication and Society. London: Sage 1979, pp. 195-230

Emery, Edwin and Michael Emery. The Press and America: An Interpretative History of the Mass Media. 4^th ed.,  Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:Prentice-Hall 1978

 Friendly, Fred. Minnesota Rag. New York: Random House 1981.

Gitlin, Todd ed. Watching Television: A Pantheon Guide to Popular Culture, 1987

________ Inside Prime Time, Pantheon, 1985

Gottlieb, Agnes Hooper, “Newspapers in the Twentieth Century” in Shannon E. Martin and David A. Copeland, eds. The Function of Newspapers in Society: A Global Perspective. Praeger, Westport, Ct. 2003  pp. 127-137

 Hertsgaard, Mark. On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux 1988.

 Kurtz, Howard. Media Circus (1993) or Spin Cycle (1997)

Lee, Martin and Norm Solomon. Unreliable Sources. Lyle Stuart, 1990.

Leonard, Thomas C. News For All: America’s Coming-of-Age with the Press. New York: Oxford UP, 1995.

Mott, Frank Luther. American Journalism: A History 1690-1960. 3^rd Ed. New York: McMillan 1962

Schudson, Michael. Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers, Basic Books, 1978.

Seelye, Katherine Q. “To Stay Competitive, A.P. Gives Clients More Than Just Facts”. The New York Times. 21 March 2005 C7

Shaw, David Presswatch. McMillan 1984

Smith, Anthony. Goodby, Gutenberg: The Newspaper Revolution of the 1980s, Oxford U.P. 1980

___________ The Newspaper: An International History, London: Thames and Hudson  1979

___________ The Politics of Information

___________ “Technology and Control: The Interactive Dimensions of Journalism” in James Curran, Michael Gurevitch and Janet Woollacott, eds. Mass Communication and Society.  London: Sage 1979, pp. 174-194

Starr, Paul, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications.  New York: Basic Books 2004.

 Stephens, Mitchell A History of News: From the Drum to the Satellite New York: Penguin 1988

____________, “Call for an international history of journalism,” http://www.nyu.edu/classes/stephens/International%20History%20page.htm