Monthly Archives: February 2022

Member News: Rob Wells, Owen V. Johnson, Teri Finneman, Pam Walck & Meg Heckman

Rob Wells joined the faculty at the University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism this spring as a visiting associate professor. He will be teaching a variety of reporting classes and is continuing work on data journalism and the history of business journalism. His second book, The Insider: How the Kiplinger Newsletter Bridged Washington and Wall Street, is due out in the Fall and will be published by the University of Massachusetts Press.

Owen V. Johnson has published an essay in The Hill proposing that Fort Benning be renamed Fort Ernie Pyle to honor all the war correspondents who have covered US troops.

Teri Finneman, Pam Walck and Meg Heckman are hosting a News Desert University conference in October. The conference will have both in-person and Zoom components the evening of Friday, Oct. 21, and during the day Saturday, Oct. 22. Topics will include a deans panel, creating a syllabus for a news desert classroom, raising funds to start these ventures, building trust in communities, lessons from students, the logistics of running a news desert operation and a brainstorming hour. The University of Kansas J-School is sponsoring and hosting the event in Lawrence. Registration will be free. Anyone interested should join our Facebook group for further announcements as we continue planning the conference and getting our registration site up.

Q and A with Editors Sid Bedingfield and Kathy Roberts Forde

Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America (University of Illinois Press, 2021)

Sid Bedingfield, Associate Professor, Hubbard School of Journalism, University of Minnesota

Kathy Roberts Forde, Professor, Journalism Department, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Describe the focus of your book.

KF: Journalism and Jim Crow is the first extended work to document the role of the white press in building white supremacist political economies and social orders in the New South—and the critical role of the Black press in fiercely resisting—from the end of Reconstruction through the first decades of the twentieth century. The tragic outcomes of this history are still with us and demand our attention.

SB: The book takes a fresh look at the rise of Jim Crow in the South by focusing on newspapers as institutions of power within their communities. The publishers and editors who ran these newspapers used the soft power of public discourse to undermine the Reconstruction project and spread the ideology of white supremacy in post-Civil War South. But they exerted hard power, too. They were political actors who worked closely with other institutions of power – the Democratic Party, obviously – but also with the railroads, mining companies, and other industries eager to take advantage of cheap labor in the emerging New South.

KF: These editors and publishers planned political campaigns to wrest power from Black Republicans, white populists, and bi-racial coalitions. They spread anti-Black, anti-democratic disinformation and propaganda. And they even used the tools of racial terror—racial massacres, lynching, convict leasing—to build a near total world of white supremacy where Black Southerners were not able to vote, serve on juries, hold public office, receive equitable public education, and pursue economic opportunity without white sufferance.

SB: The Black press fought back — even in the South, where Black journalists worked under the constant threat of violence. But by the 1870s, white public opinion in the North, led by the elite white press, had turned against the Reconstruction project. And Black voices that challenged Jim Crow and struggled to build a pluralist democracy were overwhelmed by the popularity of the white supremacy ideology nationwide.

How did you come across this subject? Why did it interest you?

KF: I did an independent study with an undergraduate student on the connections between the convict leasing system and the white press in the South, research that eventually led to the book chapter on Henry Flagler’s use of newspapers to control public information about his labor practices used to turn Florida into a tourist empire. Sid and I always share our research, and we began to piece together instance after instance of white newspaper leaders using their power to create anti-Black, anti-democratic systems and policies, often using violence.

SB: My first book, Newspaper Wars, argued that Black and White newspapers had exerted more political influence in the struggle over civil rights in the mid-twentieth century that had been previously acknowledged. I had seen how the white, daily press had collaborated with politicians and business leaders in to resist Black equality. Kathy’s research on Flagler and his effort to control the press in Florida resonated with me immediately. At the same time, I was pleased to see the historians Julian Zelizer and Bruce Shulman, in their 2018 book, call for scholars to take mass media outlets more seriously as historical actors capable of shaping political outcomes. The influence of Fox News and its inextricable link to right-wing politics was clearly opening eyes about the substantive role mass media has played in American politics.

KF: We thought about writing the book ourselves, but there was just too much territory to cover and the subject felt urgent and timely. So we asked other historians to join us, and we all worked very closely together to develop the book’s themes and arguments.

SB: Recruiting the contributors was one of the most satisfying aspects of the project. For example, I had always respected the book Right to Ride, Blair Kelley’s study of Black resistance to Jim Crow, but I had not met her. I reached out, and she grasped our concept immediately. As it turns out, we share a mentor, historian Patricia Sullivan. Her research on Black journalist J. Max Barber and the Atlanta riots of 1906 provides a poignant closing chapter in our book.

KF: We held a book symposium at the Hubbard School at UMN, where Sid is on the faculty, and Blair suggested the book needed a chapter devoted to the Black press and its calling out of Grady and the white press in the New South project. Our group immediately thought of D’Weston Haywood, whom I had met a few years earlier at the Schomburg Center when he was finalizing research for his book Let Us Make Men: The Twentieth-Century Black Press and a Manly Vision for Racial Advancement. He loved the project and joined us.

What archives or research materials did you use?

SB: I returned to some old haunts in South Carolina — the Ben Tillman Papers at Clemson University, the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina, and the South Carolina Historical Society archives in Charleston. I also made my first trip to the Alabama Department of Archives and History, the nation’s first publicly funded independent state archives agency (as they are quick to point out). I snuck in just before the pandemic hit and spent time in the papers of former Montgomery Advertiser editor William Wallace Screws and several other political figures from the period. Unfortunately, one of our greatest gaps in historical evidence concerns the populist press in the South. This project has driven home to me the importance of the white and Black populist movements in the in the1880s and 90s.There were hundreds of colorful populist newspapers in Alabama and across the South at the time, but the overwhelming majority left no archival trace at all. It is a tragic loss.

KF: I worked in the Henry Flagler Papers at the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach, the Henry W. Grady Papers at Emory’s Rose Library, and the Joseph E. Brown Papers and the Alfred H. Colquitt Papers at UGA’s Hargrett Library. I consulted various books and materials at the Atlanta History Center. Bryan Bowman, who co-authored the Flagler/Florida chapter with me, and I did a very deep dive into the expansive Justice Department Peonage Files. When he was still an ungraduated student, Bryan took an independent trip to Jacksonville to work in the state convict lease records and microfilm of historical Jacksonville newspapers. Of course, I analyzed a massive amount of press material from the period, along with legislative records and U.S. congressional records. I also read across an incredibly broad range of historiography, digging into footnotes for important breadcrumbs to follow.

How does your book relate to journalism history? How is it relevant to the present?

KF: We hope the broad public, teachers, students, and journalists will read Journalism and Jim Crow and learn about the importance of the press in political, social, and economic conflict and change in the past and in our own moment. Much is at stake. Journalists and news leaders today need to understand how white power and white normativity operate in their own newsrooms. We hope journalists across the country will discuss and learn from the ugly historical truth Journalism and Jim Crow lays bare: white journalists and mainstream journalism have too often served anti-Black, anti-democratic political purposes even as they claimed to be impartial, neutral, and objective.

SB: Kathy sums it well. I’ll just add this: I believe Fitz Brundage’s piece on lynching and the white southern press should be required reading in every newsroom and journalism school. His argument that lynching and white southern journalism were constitutive of one another is powerful and nuanced. It should be taught in classrooms nationwide.

What advice do you have for other historians that are working or starting projects?

SB: I’m not sure this applies to every project, but the impact of the symposium we held early in fall 2019 was a revelation to me. Kathy proposed we gather contributors to discuss the book. It would be costly, and I was initially skeptical. But I must say – the all-day symposium at the Hubbard School in Minneapolis moved the project forward in substantive and unexpected ways. The back-and-forth between contributors – and even some non-contributors like Alex Lichtenstein and Douglas Blackmon – enhanced the final product significantly. I have to thank the top brass at the Hubbard School and the Department of Journalism at UMass-Amherst for making it possible.

KF: Work with smart, generous partners—like Sid and everyone else on this project–who challenge you and do careful, rigorous work. And look for meaningful empty spaces in the historical record.

Journalism History Podcast Spotlight

Each month, Clio will highlight the latest episode of the Journalism History podcast and recommend a set of episodes from the archives. The podcasts — available on the website and through many podcast players — are excellent teaching tools, easy to add to your syllabi. Transcripts of each episode are available online.

This month’s focus is on Women’s History Month, with episodes discussing newspaper coverage of women in politics; the stories of trailblazing female reporters; and the media relations activities of first ladies.

Nellie Tayloe Ross, George Grantham Bain Collection (Library of Congress), retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/item/2014709682/

Episode 96: Newspaper Coverage of Women in Politics In this episode, Tracy Lucht analyzes how five trailblazing women in politics of different races, ethnicities and regions were written about after the 19th Amendment was ratified. She is the co-author of “Gender, Race, and Place in Newspaper Coverage of Women ‘Firsts’ after the Nineteenth Amendment” in the December 2021 issue of Journalism History.

Episode 77: The Founding Mothers of NPR Journalist Lisa Napoli discusses her book about how four women – Susan Stamberg, Linda Wertheimer, Nina Totenberg, and Cokie Roberts – transformed journalism through their pioneering work on National Public Radio.

Episode 67: Media Relations and First Ladies Lisa Burns joins the podcast to discuss her book, Media Relations & The Modern First Lady: From Jacqueline Kennedy to Melania Trump, and the successes and failures of first ladies’ media strategies.

Episode 61: A True Newspaper Woman Carolina Velloso discusses the career of sports reporter, photojournalist and national magazine writer Sadie Kneller Miller, a trailblazing journalist at the turn of the 20th century whose story had been lost to history.

Additionally, make sure to check out the Journalism History Podcast’s excellent series from its first season that celebrated the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage with five episodes. These cover the historiography of suffrage media research; the press and the anti-suffrage movement; literary works in suffrage periodicals; Belle La Follette’s suffrage campaigns; and an episode exploring the creation of the website suffrageandthemedia.org.

Finally, Andrew Stoner recently joined the podcast to discuss advice columnists and their impact on public opinion of homosexuality. He passed away in February. You can listen to the episode discussing his research here.

Member Spotlight: AJ Bauer

AJ Bauer, Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama

Assistant Professor, Department of Journalism & Creative Media, University of Alabama

Where you got your PhD: New York University, Department of Social & Cultural Analysis (American Studies)

Current favorite class: History of Mass Communication

Current research project: I’m working on a book called Making the Liberal Media, which tells the history of conservative press criticism in the United States from the 1940s through the 1980s. It’s basically a history of the idea of “liberal media bias.” The book sidesteps the tired and (I believe) unresolvable debates over whether or not bias exists. Instead, my archival research shows how a conservative critical disposition toward the press emerged in response to theories of public opinion and media influence developed by progressive scholars and journalists during the Interwar period. These theories were codified in federal broadcast regulations and professional press standards in the wake of World War II and were used to dismiss right anti-communists and opponents of the New Deal as inherently susceptible to propaganda and beyond the pale of “responsible” political deliberation. As a result, modern conservatism became preoccupied with challenging the veracity of mainstream sources of information while developing conservative standards of news judgment. The book chronicles the role of media activists in building the post-war conservative movement in the U.S., foregrounding the efforts of American Business Consultants, Facts Forum, and Accuracy in Media. I’ve published preliminary findings from this project in American Journalism and Radical History Review.

Fun fact about yourself: I have a masked alter-ego who occasionally performs as a hype man with the Boston-based horror surf rock band Beware the Dangers of a Ghost Scorpion!

Call for Reviewers: AEJMC 2022

The History Division Needs You! Early Call for Reviewers

The History Division will need help reviewing papers for AEJMC 2022. If you are willing to review for the History Division’s research competition, please RSVP via this Google form by April 1 and indicate your areas of expertise and/or interest.

If you have any questions, please contact Division Research Chair Rachel Grant (University of Florida) at rlgrant6@gmail.com . We will need up to approximately 75 reviewers for the competition. Graduate students are not eligible to serve as reviewers and, in general, reviewers should not submit their own research into the competition. Thank you in advance for your assistance!

Getting Students Engaged

This is the second in a series of teaching columns by 2021–2022 History Division teaching committee chair Ken Ward.

I can be a little medium-centric in my teaching. In my last column, I explained one way that’s true—in my deemphasizing the textbook in my history course to focus on things like podcasts. It’s something I’ve had success with, but this focus on the medium definitely doesn’t suit everyone.

Elisabeth Fondren, for instance.

“I’ve always focused more on the content than the platform,” she told me recently during a conversation about teaching, “so I’m not one of the professors to switch and say ‘here’s a podcast, here’s a video.’”

Clearly she’s not as hung up on content delivery as I am. But Dr. Fondren, who is an assistant professor of journalism at St. John’s University in Queens, is absolutely finding her own novel ways to connect with the current generation of students in her journalism history course. While the textbook may be safe in her classroom, another mainstay of history courses has gotten her attention: long written assignments.

For Elisabeth, it’s a matter of being in touch with what’s useful to students and making sure they’re staying energized in the learning process, not just in terms of providing relevant information but also engaging projects. It’s too easy, she told me, to lose students in the transition from learning to application, especially when today’s students have so many extracurricular responsibilities, often including jobs.

“The demand on students is so high,” she said, “and it’s the professor’s responsibility to gauge and maybe event adapt your method of delivery and assessment. It’s not a one-way street.”

Deprioritizing written assignments like long research papers doesn’t mean lowering standards. Instead, it’s a matter of finding other ways to assess what Elisabeth is really after: deep, personal engagement with course concepts and critical thinking.

Sometimes this means asking students to craft video reflections and take place in online discussions. At others, it means learning to be critical and persuasive in a medium other than a term paper. For example, in one assignment Elisabeth’s students interrogate a primary source like a documentary and then tweet about it, structuring the assignment such that students learn to build a coherent argument in only 280 characters.

Crucially, behind these assignments is Elisabeth’s drive to make history relatable to students, to use the course to bridge things that happened “back then” to what we’re experiencing today.

Nowhere is this clearer than in an oral history assignment she assigns. In it, students find and interview someone at least two generations older than them about how they’ve used media throughout their lives and how those interactions have informed their worldview. In assignments such as these, she encourages people to research within their own families to uncover ways of relating to course concepts in deeply personal ways.

Because her students come from such diverse backgrounds and share in class what they find in assignments like these, the classroom becomes a place of both learning and sharing.

“I really try to focus on how the class can be as insightful as possible for the students,” she told me. And if that insight can be harnessed through something that students find more engaging than a long written assignment, perhaps it’s worth helping students connect with history by deemphasizing the role of the paper in assessing learning.