THE NEWS MEDIA HAVE SHAPED AMERICAN HISTORY. ABSOLUTELY. Boldly. Profoundly.
From the 1760s when patriots created the “Journal of Occurrences” to propel the colonists toward the American Revolution through the present as news outlets continue to champion gay and lesbian rights, the Fourth Estate has been a central force in determining how this nation has evolved. Between those two events, thousands of journalists and news organizations have served as catalysts for social movements as well as landmark events that have defined this country’s history. The news media often have used their might as a positive force—but sometimes not.
Now that I’ve piloted the reader through two and a half centuries of American journalism shaping the nation’s history, in this concluding chapter I want to focus on one final and fundamental point: How? To answer this question, I’ve looked closely at the major players in the sixteen episodes I’ve highlighted in this book. Specifically, I’ve examined the news outlets and their actions with an eye toward identifying the common characteristics they’ve shared. The following list of ten recurring traits, then, suggests some of the methods the news media have used while helping to shape this country.
1. The news organizations that have influenced important events have been willing to set the agenda. They’ve approached the news media as an institution that leads society, not as one that merely records facts. None of the news organizations profiled in the previous chapters defined its role so narrowly that it passively chronicled the news without comment or interpretation. None of them, in short, was willing to function as a stenographic service.
Examples abound. McClure’s magazine didn’t produce its legendary exposé of Standard Oil Company by asking Ida Tarbell to reproduce the prepared statements mouthed by John D. Rockefeller; Tarbell pored over court documents, wooed inside sources, and listened to disgruntled competitors until she understood the inner workings of the ruthless monopoly. Half a century later, network correspondents weren’t welcomed into the segregated South to cover the Civil Rights Movement; the correspondents faced signs reading “NO DOGS, NIGGERS OR REPORTERS ALLOWED.” Likewise, news outlets of the 2000s haven’t sat quietly and waited for the country’s lawmakers and judicial officials to decide whether lesbians and gay men deserve equal rights; in 2009 when Congress was considering legislation that would extend hate-crime laws to cover sexual orientation, the Huffington Post bluntly said, “It’s a no-brainer.”
2. For many of the journalists and their news organizations, standing tall has meant standing alone. They spurned the concept, known as pack journalism, in which throngs of reporters swarm like honey bees onto the story of the moment and then buzz off, in unison, to the next communal hot spot. The journalists who’ve helped build this country into what it is today did so partly by consciously and fearlessly breaking from the pack, despite what were often severe consequences.
When the Liberator began advocating the end of slavery in the early 1830s, other editors lambasted William Lloyd Garrison as a “scoundrel” and a “toad eater,” with proslavery groups offering monetary rewards to the bounty hunter who captured him. A century later, a triumvirate of courageous newspapers spoke out against the Ku Klux Klan even though the majority of the nation’s journalistic voices stayed silent on the subject. In the early 1950s, wire services and newspapers were one of the major forces that propelled Joseph McCarthy onto the national stage, until the CBS program See It Now showed the demagogue to be a mean-spirited bully. Twenty years later, the same network allowed anchor Walter Cronkite to break from his detached role and urge the nation to bring its soldiers home.
3. Journalists who have stood up to the countless villains in American society have often placed themselves in harm’s way. That is, courageous newsmen and newswomen have been threatened with physical danger—some of them ultimately carrying the scars for the rest of their lives and others dying before their time.
When Thomas Nast refused to stop publishing bruising editorial cartoons against “Boss” Tweed in the late 1860s, the death threats became so frequent that the artist had to relocate his wife and children to ensure their safety. During the Civil Rights Movement, TV correspondents were spat upon, clubbed, and kicked right along with the African-American men, women, and children whose protests they were filming—NBC cameraman Moe Levy was among those disabled for the rest of their lives.
The most dramatic acts of physical violence were against abolitionist editors and writers. William Lloyd Garrison was stoned and placed within a hairsbreadth of being lynched; Maria Stewart’s fiery discourse netted her a barrage of insults—as well as rotten tomatoes. Abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy lost four printing presses to proslavery mobs before he finally paid the supreme price, giving his very life to the cause and thereby becoming America’s first martyr to freedom of the press.
4. Many of the news organizations that have shaped American history have placed journalistic principle above financial gain. Time and time again, these publications and broadcast voices have—to preserve their integrity and do their job—suffered serious economic setbacks that have threatened their survival.
When Harper’s Weekly refused to end its crusade against New York’s nefarious Tweed Ring, city officials canceled the Harper Brothers Publishing Company contract to provide textbooks for the school system. When Collier’s announced it wouldn’t accept any more ads from patent medicine companies, the magazine’s revenues dropped a dramatic $80,000 in a single year. And when the Washington Post refused to allow the Watergate story to die, the value of a share of Post stock plunged from $38 to $21 in six months—thanks to President Nixon’s friends on Wall Street.
TV journalists also have endured financial strains. When NBC couldn’t find sponsors for its prime-time American Revolution of ’63 news special about the Civil Rights Movement, the network lost half a million dollars of revenue in a single night.
5. Perhaps the least admirable characteristic of the news organizations that have helped to shape American history has been a tendency among many of them to ignore or malign historically underrepresented segments of society. For much of its history, the Fourth Estate was a bastion of white, Protestant men who weren’t interested in improving the lives of the disenfranchised.
One example came when Ladies Magazine and other periodicals of the 1700s communicated that women didn’t possess the ability to function beyond the domestic sphere, and then the Brahmins of nineteenth-century journalism used their power to block women’s march toward equality. The New York World denigrated Susan B. Anthony as being “lean, cadaverous; with the proportions of a file,” and the Philadelphia Ledger and Daily Transcript published the appalling statement: “A woman is nobody. A wife is everything.”
A second instance of this regrettable tendency followed a century and a half later when Father Charles Coughlin used his golden radio voice to attack people of the Jewish faith. The Radio Priest went so far as to say, in 1942, that World War II hadn’t been caused by Germany “but by the race of Jews.”
6. Another important characteristic of many of the news organizations that have influenced American history has been an eagerness to harness the power of visual images. Magazines and newspapers often have used editorial cartoons as effective weapons in their journalistic crusades, and TV news has lifted the power of visual images to unparalleled heights.
Harper’s Weekly showcased Thomas Nast’s devastating cartoons to loosen the Tweed Ring’s stranglehold on the citizens of New York City during the late 1860s. The New York Journal followed the same path at the end of the century, though to a very different end, when the paper made use of Frederic Remington’s artistic talents as part of its campaign to push the United States into war with Spain, including a misleading drawing of the USS Maine being destroyed by a Spanish mine. In the 1920s, the Memphis Commercial Appeal published searing cartoons as the centerpiece of its courageous campaign against the Ku Klux Klan. Twenty years later, photos brought Rosie the Riveter to life as both a “glamour girl” and a strong, resourceful factory worker who helped the United States win World War II.
The compelling nature of visual images was central to making television the most potent medium of communication in the history of humankind. In an impressive series of events beginning in the 1950s, TV news repeatedly demonstrated that its images could move the nation. In television’s finest hour, CBS exposed the despicable actions of Senator Joseph McCarthy, and then the three major networks combined forces to propel civil rights onto the nation’s front burner and to help end the Vietnam War.
7. As the title of this book suggests, the news organizations that have taken leading roles in shaping this country have consistently recognized that the pen can be mightier than the sword—and mightier than tyranny or demagoguery or political corruption. The instrument of communication has varied from a quill pen in the eighteenth century to websites and blogs in the twenty-first, but the communicators highlighted in this book have proven that the combination of writing talent and driving passion can be potent. The episodes described in the previous pages repeatedly have shown that this pairing can stir the emotions of the American people at crucial moments.
During the 1770s, Tom Paine’s muscular prose helped transform lukewarm patriots into fiery revolutionaries. Half a century later, the suffering that defined the early lives of Maria Stewart and Frederick Douglass inspired them to write with a depth of feeling that helped turn the nation’s conscience against slavery. In recent years, print, broadcast, and online news outlets have joined forces to help secure new rights for gay and lesbian Americans.
8. Many of the journalistic campaigns chronicled in this book have been led by forward-thinking news organizations that have embraced, often earlier than their more staid competitors, the technological advances that have occurred during their eras. Central to the success of the muckrakers during the late 1900s was the eagerness of S. S. McClure to adapt to the changing technology vis-à-vis printing and paper production. That allowed the publisher to aim the articles in McClure’s toward low-paid office clerks and shop girls who could afford to buy mass-circulation magazines. Likewise, one of the reasons that TV news of the 1960s and early 1970s was able to hasten the end of the Vietnam War was that correspondents willingly hoisted new, lightweight cameras onto their shoulders and made use of the air transportation and communication satellites that allowed them to make their warfront images part of daily news coverage for the first time. And in the early 2000s, innovative online news voices such as Politico, Slate, and RealClearPolitics played important roles in supporting lesbian and gay rights.
9. Throughout its history, journalism has remained an endeavor in which a person—if endowed with talent, determination, and wherewithal—can make a difference, though not always a positive one. From Tom Paine stirring ideas in colonial America to Ida Tarbell taking on the biggest monopoly in the country and from William Randolph Hearst helping to start a war to Margaret Bourke-White creating the “Women in Steel” photo essay to glamorize female factory workers, individual men and women who’ve joined the Fourth Estate have, for more than two centuries, been actively shaping history.
10. Ultimately, perhaps the most important characteristic that has allowed news organizations to influence the country’s evolution has been an acceptance not of the power of the news media but of the limitations of that institution. Although the journalists and news organizations profiled in this book cherished the Fourth Estate’s role as watchdog over the official branches of government, none of the historic events described here was brought about solely by the news media. News articles, broadcasts, and web content often served as catalysts, but not in a single instance did journalists function in a vacuum. The news media may have placed a particular topic on the agenda, but the support and commitment of other institutions was always essential for meaningful change to occur.
Harper’s Weekly and the New York Times exposed Tweed’s wrongdoing, but the citizens of New York had to band together before the political corruption was finally ended and the wayward city officials wore prison stripes. The muckrakers fearlessly shined the bright light of truth into the dark corners of America, but it took other institutions to enact reform measures—the Supreme Court to dissolve the Standard Oil monopoly, Congress to pass the Pure Food and Drug Act, the American public to vote corrupt senators out of office. Television brought the grisly images of battle into the American living room, but President Johnson, responding to the pressure of public opinion, ultimately had to bring the troops home from Southeast Asia.
Watergate is the paramount example of the limited role the Fourth Estate can play. The Washington Post revealed the dimensions of the immorality of the Nixon White House, but then the Justice Department investigated the charges, the Supreme Court demanded the White House tapes, and Congress voted the articles of impeachment that toppled a president.
Although the previous chapters—as well as this list of ten characteristics describing how the news media have shaped American history—are all products of the past, I feel compelled to end this book with a few comments about the future. American journalism today is struggling. The rise of the Internet is the primary factor in the difficulties facing the nation’s news organizations. Millions of readers who once paid to subscribe to a daily paper are now, instead, turning to online sources they can access for free. Another element contributing to the crisis involves the classified ads that, just a few years ago, accounted for 40 percent of a newspaper’s revenue—until they were replaced by eBay, Craigslist, and other low- or no-cost websites. Financial woes have led papers to lay off large numbers of reporters and editors. Some papers have closed, and many others are severely threatened. Commercial TV news has also lost much of its audience, advertising revenue, and reporting resources to online sources and cable news channels.1
Newspapers and network TV news aren’t going to disappear altogether, but their roles will continue to diminish as digital journalism reinvents how news is reported and distributed. Although the changes are frightening to many journalists and admirers of the traditional news media, the transformation isn’t all bad. One plus is that who gathers and disseminates information is expanding far beyond full-time staff members, with virtually anyone now being able to become a citizen journalist. Also, decisions about what’s being covered—and what’s not—are no longer in the hands of a tiny number of publishers and corporate executives. That is, changes in how news organizations are financed means The Powers That Be now include entrepreneurs who create online startups, people who run nonprofit investigative reporting projects, and folks who put together community news sites composed of blogs and neighborhood reports.2
As a historian, I believe that looking back is essential to charting a course for the future. And as a journalism historian, I believe that these emerging citizens of the Fourth Estate should be guided by the case studies illuminated in this book, as well as by the news media traits listed in this concluding chapter. A number of those characteristics suggest principles of behavior that could help the American news media both survive and thrive in the future. Therefore, I say to anyone who practices the craft of journalism:
• Be willing to set the agenda.
• Be willing to break from the pack.
• Be willing to sacrifice financial gain for public good.
• Be willing to reach out to the politically or socially disenfranchised.
• Stay at the forefront of technological innovation.
• Don’t be so arrogant as to think that journalism is the country’s only institution of consequence.
Some wags and bean counters will criticize these suggestions, saying that such a call for news organizations to travel the journalistic high road ignores the economic realities facing the industry today. It’s true that these suggestions are based on an idealistic premise that not everyone shares: journalism that’s substantive in content and strong in backbone ultimately will succeed, prosper, and serve a democratic people well. This lofty principle is particularly important to keep in mind as journalism struggles to adapt to a media landscape that’s changing at warp speed. That is, it’s descriptors such as “substantive in content” and “strong in backbone” that are essential for journalism to remain vital and successful, whether in the form of words that are printed on paper, images that appear on the TV screen, or insightful interpretation that’s sent through a wireless platform that’s not yet been invented.