This book, and the ideas behind this book, began with contemporary Black liberation movements and their stories: Wesley Lowery’s They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement (New York: Little, Brown, 2016); Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele’s When They Call You A Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016); and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016) are all excellent starting points. The first chapter also depends on Steven Thrasher’s journalism, and interviews with him, Mervyn Marcano, and Aislinn Pulley.
On the early history of “objectivity” in journalism, I found two texts invaluable: David T. Z. Mindich’s Just the Facts: How “Objectivity” Came to Define America Journalism (New York: New York University Press, 1998) and Michael Schudson’s Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978). While Schudson’s approach is sociological, Mindich’s is primarily historical and focuses heavily on the lessons to be learned from purportedly “neutral” coverage of the Civil War, slavery, and lynching. Another book on which I depended for general journalism history was Christopher B. Daly’s Covering America: A Narrative History of a Nation’s Journalism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012). Finally, I recommend News with a View: Essays on the Eclipse of Objectivity in Modern Journalism, edited by Burton St. John III and Kirsten A. Johnson (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012).
All of those books are academic; the most straightforward reading I have found that summarizes the origins of journalistic “objectivity” is in a memoir by retired New York Times journalist Linda Greenhouse, Just a Journalist: On the Press, Life, and the Spaces Between (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). Onnesha Roychoudhuri’s fabulous new book, The Marginalized Majority: Claiming Our Power in a Post-Truth America, contains a cogent analysis of the problems of “objectivity” for the political left (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2018). My own original posts about “objectivity” and the story of my firing are available at https://medium.com/@lewispants/objectivity-is-dead-and-im-okay-with-it-7fd2b4b5c58f and https://medium.com/@lewispants/i-was-fired-from-my-journalism-job-ten-days-into-trump-c3bc014ce51d.
The early twentieth century was when “objectivity” started to formalize as an ideal and began to be taught in journalism schools. I looked to Hazel Dicken-Garcia’s Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989) for further context on journalism education, and Nelson Antrim Crawford’s wonderful text The Ethics of Journalism (New York: Knopf, 1924) for information on early journalistic ethics. Crawford’s book includes a delightful index of ethics codes from newspapers around the country. Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion (New York: Free Press, 1922) is a powerful snapshot of his times and includes his argument for an “objective” approach to reporting.
I came across a lot of characters who wrote about “neutrality” in reporting during its earliest days. I was particularly delighted by the words of Timothy Thomas Fortune in T. Thomas Fortune, the Afro-American Agitator: A Collection of Writings, 1880–1928, edited by Shawn Leigh Alexander (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008), and Fortune’s own words in his 1884 volume, Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South (reprint; New York: Washington Square Press, 2007). There is only one biography of T. Thomas Fortune, Emma Lou Thornbrough’s T. Thomas Fortune, Militant Journalist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), but Fortune’s autobiographical works were published as a series of essays in 1927 in the Philadelphia Tribune and the Norfolk Journal and Guide, and later republished in T. Thomas Fortune, After War Times: An African American Childhood in Reconstruction-Era Florida, edited by Daniel R. Weinfeld, with an introduction by Dawn J. Herd-Clark (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2014).
Horace Greeley’s take on neutral journalism is well summarized in “‘Gagged, Mincing Neutrality’: Horace Greeley on Advocacy Journalism in the Early Years of the Penny Press,” by Daxton R. “Chip” Stewart in News with a View: Essays on the Eclipse of Objectivity in Modern Journalism, edited by Burton St. John III and Kirsten A. Johnson (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012). I also read about Greeley in the words of his contemporary L. U. Reavis in A Representative Life of Horace Greeley (New York: G. W. Carleton & Co., 1872).
Possibly the best-documented life considered in the early chapters of this book is that of Ida B. Wells; her story is told clearly and passionately in her own book Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). I also depended on her pamphlets Southern Horrors and A Red Record republished as On Lynchings (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1969); and on Mindich’s excellent chapter on Ida B. Wells and “balance” in Just the Facts, which details the New York Times’ equivocating coverage of lynching and its criticism of Wells.
Conversely, the least well-documented life discussed in this text is Marvel Cooke’s, whose story in her own words was recorded for public record, as far as I know, only one time, in an oral history conducted by Kathleen Currie for the Women in Journalism Oral History Project of the Washington Press Club Foundation; I was also able to speak with Currie to get a clearer sense of who Cooke was. Based on Currie’s interview, Cooke is written about in several volumes, including Rodger Streitmatter’s Raising Her Voice: African-American Women Journalists Who Changed History (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994). Her five-part series “The Bronx Slave Market” for the New York Daily Compass (January 8–12, 1950), https://www.viewpointmag.com/2015/10/31/the-bronx-slave-market-1950, provides additional insight into her voice and thought.
For the stories of Heywood Broun and the formation of the Newspaper Guild, I looked to Richard O’Connor’s Heywood Broun: A Biography (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1975); Heywood Broun, as He Seemed to Us, produced as a memorial by the Newspaper Guild of New York (New York: Random House, 1940); and Heywood Hale Broun, Collected Edition of Heywood Broun (1949; reprint, Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1969). I also referred to an article about the Newspaper Guild by Philip M. Glende, “Trouble on the Right, Trouble on the Left: The Early History of the American Newspaper Guild,” Journalism History 38, no. 3 (Fall 2012); and to the text of the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Associated Press v. National Labor Relations Board 301 U.S. 103 (57 S.Ct. 650, 81 L.Ed. 953).
Kerry Gruson spent several delightful hours with me over a couple of days in Miami sharing her story, which I first learned about from Schudson’s Discovering the News and then from a Wall Street Journal article on “objectivity” by Stanford Sesser (October 29, 1969). I also depended on Gruson’s autobiographical story for the New York Times Magazine, June 30, 1985, https://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/30/magazine/the-long-road-back.html; and a column by her mother, Flora Lewis, “Trust, Arms and the Media,” Chicago Tribune, December 11, 1984.
For broader context about coverage of the Vietnam War, I recommend Daniel C. Hallin, The “Uncensored War”: The Media and Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); William M. Hammond, Reporting Vietnam: Media and Military at War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998); and Clarence R. Wyatt, Paper Soldiers: The American Press and the Vietnam War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). For Peter Arnett’s story, I depended mostly on his Live from the Battlefield: From Vietnam to Baghdad: 35 Years in the World’s War Zones (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).
Public media has many good books and memoirs written about its history, though strikingly few that deeply consider its political economy or the complex issues of “objectivity” for publicly funded outlets. I could have written a whole book just about this but was relieved to find that someone else already had: journalist James Ledbetter’s Made Possible By . . . : The Death of Public Broadcasting in the United States (London: Verso, 1997). For additional NPR history, I leaned on Jack Mitchell’s Listener Supported: The Culture and History of Public Radio (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005). On the early genesis of public broadcasting, I recommend Robert J. Blakely, To Serve the Public Interest: Educational Broadcasting in the United States (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1979); and Robert Waterman McChesney, Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928–1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). In my studies of public media, I also relied on interviews with Cecilia Garcia, Jack Mitchell, and Bill Siemering, and took bibliographic suggestions from Sarah Montague, Ben Shapiro, and Josh Shepperd. The online archives of Current Magazine are a trove and include Marlon Riggs’s article “Tongues Retied,” Current, August 12, 1991, https://current.org/wp-content/uploads/archive-site/prog/prog114g.html. Siemering’s original mission statement for NPR is available at https://current.org/2012/05/national-public-radio-purposes/.
There are not enough books about public media that deal explicitly with race and gender, but I can suggest two for further reading: Christine Acham’s Revolution Televised: Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004) and Allison Perlman’s Public Interests: Media Advocacy and Struggles over U.S. Television (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016). I hope their work will open up space for more women and people of color to write this important history.
For the history of gay media, I recommend Larry P. Gross, Up from Invisibility: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Media in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). I also depended on Barry Yeoman’s preciously hard-to-find undergraduate thesis “Moral Judgments Before News Judgments: An Historical Survey of the Treatment of Lesbian and Gay Issues by the Straight Print News Media, 1897–1982” (Lafayette, LA, 1983), available in the Joseph A. Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan. Also at Labadie, I came across Talk Back! The Gay Person’s Guide to Media Action by Lesbian and Gay Media Advocates, an activist group in Boston (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1982); it’s no longer a practical guide, but it is highly informative about the times.
Andrew Kopkind’s brilliant collection, The Thirty Years’ Wars: Dispatches and Diversion of a Radical Journalist, 1965–1994 (New York: Verso, 1995), provides a hilarious snapshot into his early life as a reporter, which was augmented in my research by a long interview with John Scagliotti. The Gay Community News is archived almost in its entirety in the Labadie Collection, as is the New York Native; for further detail on those remarkable times in queer media, I also interviewed Larry Goldsmith and got background information from Cindy Patton, Michael Bronski, Sue Hyde, and Amy Hoffman. Hoffman’s memoir, An Army of Ex-Lovers: My Life at the Gay Community News (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), is also peppered with fabulous anecdotes.
I used two key sources on the coverage of AIDS, namely, James Kinsella’s long out-of-print volume Covering the Plague: AIDS and the American Media (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989) and Randy Shilts’s classic And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987). Cindy Patton of Gay Community News wrote two fairly academic volumes on AIDS: Sex & Germs: The Politics of AIDS (Boston: South End Press, 1985) and Inventing AIDS (New York: Routledge, 1990). Celia Farber takes a more international view in Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS (Hoboken, NJ: Melville House, 2006).
My research into fired, punished, and scapegoated journalists brought me to Sandy Nelson, whose stories emerged in an interview and a number of articles still available online, including the 1996 piece in the New York Times that first brought me to her, “Gay Reporter Wants to Be Activist,” by Timothy Egan, https://www.nytimes.com/1996/08/10/us/gay-reporter-wants-to-be-activist.html. Linda Greenhouse’s story comes from her 2017 book, Just a Journalist, and Desmond Cole’s story was sourced from his blog, Cole’s Notes, https://thatsatruestory.wordpress.com/2017/05/04/i-choose-activism-for-black-liberation/ as well as the Toronto Star’s website. Vox.com is keeping a running tab of sexual assault accusations against major public figures at https://www.vox.com/a/sexual-harassment-assault-allegations-list/les-moonves.
On the history of conservative media, the most useful source I found for broad context on its genesis was Nicole Hemmer’s Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); some of her main points are well summarized in “From ‘Faith in Facts’ to ‘Fair and Balanced,’” in Media Nation: The Political History of News in Modern America, edited by Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). I found some additional context for the dominance of conservative thought in John B. Judis, The Paradox of American Democracy: Elites, Special Interests, and the Betrayal of the Public Trust (New York: Pantheon, 2000). To better understand conservative media leaders themselves, I read Andrew Breitbart’s Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2011); Matt Drudge and Julia Phillips, Drudge Manifesto (New York: New American Library, 2000); Edith Efron, The News Twisters (Los Angeles: Nash Publishing, 1971); and Bernard Goldberg, Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2001).
David Brock has published his own history of conservative media; although my reporter’s instinct is not to rely on him alone for accounts of fact, The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy (New York: Crown, 2004) is riveting; his Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative (New York: Crown, 2002) is a more personal account of his path into and out of conservative media. His best seller, The Real Anita Hill: The Untold Story (New York: Free Press, 1993), has been debunked, with Brock himself admitting to omissions and even fabrications; it’s worth a read for analytical purposes if you can stomach it.
The best counter to Brock’s account of Anita Hill is Hill’s account of herself: Speaking Truth to Power (New York: Doubleday, 1997). For a more reportorial take, Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson’s Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994) is the best. For an update from Jill Abramson, I read “Do You Believe Her Now?: It’s Time to Reexamine the Evidence That Clarence Thomas Lied to Get onto the Supreme Court—and to Talk Seriously about Impeachment,” New York Magazine, February 18, 2018, http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/02/the-case-for-impeaching-clarence-thomas.html. Finally, David Brock pointed me toward the work of feminist legal scholar Ann Scales: “The Emergence of Feminist Jurisprudence: An Essay,” Yale Law Journal 96, no. 7 (1986), and “Feminist Legal Method: Not So Scary,” UCLA Women’s Law Journal 2 (January 1, 1992), are but two of her brilliant articles that touch on the feminist argument against “objectivity.”
The best book I know of on “fake news” is poet Kevin Young’s Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2017); this book by the current director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture dives deeply into the racialized history of fabrication and falsehood in our journalistic culture.
There are many great books about people of color in journalism, as well as media activism against white supremacy, which I don’t have space to list all of here. A classic title is Juan Gonzalez and Joseph Torres’s News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media (London: Verso, 2011). I also highly recommend the personal memoir of former Washington Post journalist Jill Nelson: Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience (New York: Noble Press, 1993); it’s hilarious, cutting, and contains a cogent critique of “objectivity” as it relates to Black experience in American newsrooms. Joshunda Sanders’s How Racism and Sexism Killed Traditional Media: Why the Future of Journalism Depends on Women and People of Color (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2015) is a great primer on identity politics and representation in journalism, including clear ideas about a path forward.
My research on covering white supremacy depended on a couple of excellent podcast episodes: Reveal host Al Letson saves the life of, and then confronts, a white supremacist in the September 23, 2017, episode “Street Fight”; On the Media’s episode “The Perils of Covering the Alt-Right” (March 2, 2018) was guest-hosted by Guardian journalist Lois Beckett and features many other reporters. Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah talked to the Longform podcast in July 2018 about her GQ article on Dylann Roof and her own rejection of “objective” reporting on white supremacy (https://longform.org/posts/longform-podcast-rachel-kaadzi-ghansah-on-a-most-american-terrorist-the-making-of-dylann-roof). I conducted interviews with John Biewen and Gary Younge and got valuable historical context from Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts, “The Lost Cause Roots of Sinclair’s Propaganda,” Washington Post, April 11, 2018.
The nature of my research led me to focus on discussions of the construction of gender and sex during the 1990s, with a brief foray into the thirteenth century: Le roman de Silence was published as Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance, edited and translated by Sarah Roche-Mahdi (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2007). I also revisited Judith Butler’s beloved and maligned Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990) and Alice Dreger’s Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). Kathy Davis’s Embodied Practices: Feminist Perspectives on the Body (London: Sage, 1997) is another good ’90s-era source on embodiment from a feminist, social constructivist perspective. That said, gender, queer, and trans studies have greatly expanded since then, as has Judith Butler’s body of work.
On the history of trans movements and trans health care, I depended on Susan Stryker, Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution, rev. ed. (New York: Seal Press, 2017), and Carolyn Wolf-Gould’s “History of Transgender Medicine in the United States,” The SAGE Encyclopedia of LGBTQ Studies, edited by Abbie E. Goldberg (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2016). I also highly recommend Pat Califia’s Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1997) as an early example of a powerful trans voice in this field.
The discussion of contemporary trans coverage was supported by interviews with Meredith Talusan; Masha Gessen, “To Be or Not to Be,” New York Review of Books, February 8, 2018, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/02/08/to-be-or-not-to-be/; Donna Minkowitz, “How I Broke, and Botched, the Brandon Teena Story,” Village Voice, June 20, 2018, https://www.villagevoice.com/2018/06/20/how-i-broke-and-botched-the-brandon-teena-story/; and Rachel Lu, “The Assault on Reality,” National Review, February 16, 2018, https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/02/assault-reality/. For a primer on the philosophical problems with “objectivity,” I recommend Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
My discussions of journalistic ethics in the twenty-first century were based on my experience as a working journalist and interviews with people like Bettina Chang of City Bureau, Sarah Alvarez of Outlier Media, and Alicia Bell of Free Press’s News Voices program. The best and most surprising book I have read about journalistic ethics is Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer (New York: Knopf, 1990)—it is not a guide to ethics, but a philosophical exploration of the ethical problem of telling someone else’s story. For a more general guide, I recommend The New Ethics of Journalism: Principles for the 21st Century, edited by Kelly McBride and Tom Rosenstiel (Los Angeles: CQ Press, 2014), as well as the Society of Professional Journalists’ online resources at www.spj.org and the ongoing research and reporting at www.poynter.org and www.niemanlab.org.
Finally, there were a number of journalists whose stories I learned but was unable to fit into this book. One of them is independent journalist Jenni Monet, whose work is online at jennimonet.com; I also interviewed Celeste Headlee, whose book We Need to Talk: How to Have Conversations That Matter (New York: HarperCollins, 2018) is full of practical skills for deep listening as journalists and human beings. Ramona Martinez and the BackStory podcast introduced me to Ruben Salazar (“Behind the Bylines: Advocacy Journalism in America,” episode #0185, rebroadcast April 20, 2018). Salazar’s journalistic work is available in Border Correspondent: Selected Writings, 1955–1970, edited by Mario T. Garcia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Salazar was killed by police while reporting on the Chicano movement in LA in 1970, and his biography has yet to be written.