SEVERAL YEARS AGO, I CREATED A COURSE TITLED HOW THE NEWS Media Shape History. The interdisciplinary course, which combined journalism and history, became part of the General Education Program at American University. After receiving positive responses from students who took the course, the director of the program urged me to teach the course not just once a year, but twice—or even more often, if I was willing. I still remember the vivid image that the director, Ann Ferren, used to persuade me. “Rodger, students are clamoring to get into this course,” she said. “If you teach it only once a year, it’s like putting one tiny little jelly bean in the middle of the quad and telling all 11,000 of our students to fight over who gets it.”
Why have students been so eager to grab my little jelly bean of a course? They’ve been strongly attracted, numerous students have told me, to the concept of the news media shaping this country.
Today’s college students, as well as the public in general, recognize that the news media are one of this country’s most powerful institutions. Many students and other observers criticize the news media as being too powerful; others praise that power, arguing that a free press is fundamental to democracy. But the detractors and defenders both agree on one point: the news media have impact.
Those perceptions have made my course popular, and that popularity was what first impelled me to commit the material I use in the course to paper. The book’s publication marked the first time that a single volume took an in-depth look at the media’s influence on a broad range of events throughout our nation’s history. For this fourth edition, I’ve revised and updated Mightier than the Sword, which now describes sixteen discrete episodes in American history during which the news media have played a critical role.
I’ve chosen the word shaping with considerable care. For as I try to impress upon my students at the beginning of each semester, I don’t mean to imply that the Fourth Estate single-handedly causes events to occur. To suggest such a direct relationship between the news media and American history would be simplistic, as it would ignore the interdependence among governmental, legal, social, and economic institutions driving this nation. I’m convinced, however, that journalistic coverage can shape—and profoundly so—an issue. More specifically, the news media can place an issue on the public agenda . . . can move it to the front burner . . . can get people talking about the issue. And once a topic becomes the subject of public discourse, other institutions can cause concrete change to occur.
Each chapter in this book focuses on a milestone in the evolution of the United States that was significantly influenced by journalism paying attention to it. Ultimately, these sixteen separate stories coalesce to relate a single phenomenon of singular importance to understanding this country’s past as well as its future: as the news media report and comment on the events of the day, they wield enormous influence on those events.
I’ve selected the particular episodes in this book for several reasons. They span more than two centuries—from Tom Paine’s influence on the coming of the American Revolution to news organizations using their power to help reduce discrimination against gay men and lesbians. The episodes also involve a variety of media, ranging from newspapers and news magazines to radio, television, and such Internet venues as online publications and YouTube. At the same time, these particular case studies illustrate how the news media have interacted with a broad range of other forces—from foreign policy strategists to captains of industry to rabble-rousing demagogues—to have far-reaching effects on the political, economic, and social fabric of the nation.
Many of the topics will be familiar to anyone with a basic knowledge of journalism history, such as how William Randolph Hearst helped build public pressure for the Spanish-American War and how, a century later, television news played a critical role in ending the war in Southeast Asia. Other topics take communication scholarship in new directions. I show, for example, how newspapers helped defeat the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and how newspapers—along with radio—helped propel millions of American women into the World War II–era workforce. The topics consciously expand the definition of landmark events far beyond wars and politics to include social movements such as those that sought to secure rights for women in the nineteenth century and African Americans in the twentieth century.
Although each nexus between the news media and American history described in the following pages is important, this book doesn’t provide a comprehensive history of the evolution of American journalism. No one book, by looking at such a limited number of episodes, could document the myriad incidents and trends that have marked the development of this country’s news media. Indeed, I’ve assiduously avoided compiling any mind-numbing lists of names, dates, and newspaper titles like those that bog down standard journalism history tomes. I’ve also attempted to keep this book focused and concise—seeking to create a work that’s not only illuminating but also engaging.
The examples I’ve selected include negative as well as positive assessments. As a former newspaper reporter and now a communication professor, I firmly believe that journalism is a noble pursuit that can, at its best, shine the bright beacon of truth into the darkest corners of life—and then move the human spirit to clean up those dark corners. At the same time, however, I know the news media sometimes squander the rights guaranteed to them in the First Amendment. Several chapters of Mightier than the Sword focus on regrettable instances when this powerful institution behaved to the detriment of the people it’s supposed to serve.
This book concludes with a final chapter that focuses on how the news media have shaped history. Specifically, by drawing examples from the material described in the earlier chapters, I identify some of the common characteristics displayed by the news media that have helped shape this nation. I hope that contemporary newsmen and newswomen—as well as the organizations they work for—may be inspired to adopt some of these characteristics while pursuing their work today and in the future.
Mightier than the Sword: How the News Media Have Shaped American History, like my other books, builds on both my professional background in daily journalism and my PhD in US history in an effort to increase our understanding of both the American news media and the American culture.
In writing this particular book, I had two specific audiences in mind. The first is college students, those aspiring to work in the media as well as those whose lives are influenced by the media. For young news consumers, Mightier than the Sword provides a sense of the history, power, and responsibility inherent in the institution of journalism. The second audience is the broad one of readers who want to learn more about the intertwining of the American news media and American history—as well as what that phenomenon means in the context of the twenty-first century.
It’s difficult to name, I believe, a more white-hot topic than the power of the media. The contentious debate includes such thorny questions as: Is journalism’s job to report the news objectively, or should it also seek to lead society? Do news organizations represent a public trust, and therefore have a responsibility to serve the people, or are they first and foremost businesses answering to their stockholders? What are—or should be—the limits of news media influence? Mightier than the Sword speaks to each of these questions.
Some historians will criticize my tight focus on the news media, saying it doesn’t provide sufficient context. Those critics will be on solid ground. I readily acknowledge, for example, that my chapter about the news media’s role in Watergate could be expanded into a 200-page discussion of the various forces that helped expose the men responsible for that shocking episode of political corruption. Indeed, several books have been written on that subject. What this book provides is a synthesis of major events, such as Watergate, that have been shaped by the news media. This is the unique perspective Mightier than the Sword offers.
Other critics will find fault with several of the works I classify as news media. They’ll argue that Tom Paine’s essays are partisan rhetoric, not journalism, and that Father Charles Coughlin’s anti-Semitic radio addresses were social and political commentary, not journalism. I disagree. Paine’s essays were news in the 1770s because they introduced provocative new ideas into the most vital conversation of the day. The essays functioned as journalism, even though they sought not only to inform readers but also to persuade them to support a particular point of view. All colonial publications were partisan, as the concept of journalistic objectivity didn’t emerge until the nineteenth century. If 1700s partisan publications weren’t news media, eighteenth-century American journalism didn’t exist. As for Coughlin’s rants, I see little difference between them and the opinions published on the New York Times editorial page. Indeed, if the words of this radio commentator weren’t part of the news media, then neither are Times editorials.
Before beginning the story of how the news media have shaped American history, I want to acknowledge the man who inspired the title for this book, Thomas Jefferson. In a letter to Paine in 1792, Jefferson lauded the essayist’s critical role in propelling American colonists toward independence from Great Britain and then wrote encouragingly, “Go on then in doing with your pen what in other times was done with the sword: show that reformation is more practicable by operating on the mind of man than on the body.”1