By Rachel Grant, University of Florida, Membership Co-Chair, rgrant@jou.ufl.edu
Dr. Patrick C. File, an assistant professor of media law at the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, recently wrote a book titled “Bad News Travels Fast: The Telegraph, Libel, and Press Freedom in the Progressive Era.”
Q: Please describe the focus of your book.
A: The book demonstrates how law and technology intertwined at the turn of the twentieth century to influence debates about reputation, privacy, and the acceptable limits of journalism. It does this by examining a series of fascinating libel cases by a handful of plaintiffs—including socialites, businessmen, and Annie Oakley—who sued newspapers across the country for republishing false newswire reports.
Q: How did you come across this subject? Why did it interest you?
A: When digging through journalism trade publications of the 1880s and 1890s as a Ph.D. student, I found coverage of the infamous Tyndale Palmer and Annie Oakley libel crusades, and wondered why I hadn’t read about them in journalism history scholarship since they seemed like a really big deal to journalists at the time. There appeared to be an interesting parallel to present day issues related to mass communication technology, the careless or wanton spreading of false, harmful information, and questions about how the law should try to keep up. I got to thinking about the relationship among professional practices and ethics, communication technology, and the social construction of the concept of press freedom, and a dissertation and book were born.
Q: What archives or research materials did you use?
A: The handful of plaintiffs filed hundreds of lawsuits altogether. The appellate record is mostly available in online legal databases. I traveled to a few courthouses looking for any trial records on the cases but didn’t have much luck (records unavailable due to courthouse floods and fires, among other things) so I had to rely instead on newspaper and trade press coverage of the lawsuits, which has its drawbacks. The discussion about the cases and their fallout, found in trade publications like The Journalist, The Fourth Estate, Newspaperdom, and Editor & Publisher, was what I was primarily interested in, and very few of those were digitized, so it required many hours of old-school physical page-turning and microfilm scrolling.
Q: How does your book relate to journalism history? How is it relevant to the present?
A: I argue that the legal thinking surrounding these cases laid the pre-New York Times v. Sullivan groundwork for the more friendly libel standards that journalists now enjoy and helped to establish today’s conceptions of press freedom amid the promise and peril of high-speed communication technology. I also argue that by uncovering a largely forgotten episode in the development of American libel law, which took place at a moment when journalism was disrupted by evolving professional practices, explosive commercial success, and new technology, the book provides crucial historical context for contemporary debates about the news media, public discourse, and the role of a free press.
More broadly, I think journalists’ role in framing how we think about the concept of press freedom—in courts of law and the court of public opinion—is a crucial part of the development of American democracy. I’m fascinated by the story we tell ourselves about the rise of impartiality and objectivity in journalism, while journalists and their organizations have always been active advocates for particular legal conceptions of liberty and freedom, generally intended to bolster or maintain their social power and status.
Q: What advice you have for other historians working/starting on book projects?
A: I was extremely lucky to have a thoughtful and encouraging editor in Matt Becker at UMass Press. If you have the luxury to be patient, persistent and selective in finding the right publisher with the right people to develop your work, it’s absolutely worth it. Ask other authors about their experiences and weigh your options.
This project started out as a dissertation, which has its own challenges, and one great piece of advice Matt gave me early on in the revision process was that, for a dissertation, you’re writing from a defensive position—proving to a very specific set of readers that you know all about this, and that you read everything on it. In a book, you’re writing on offense—you can assume your readers will take a little more for granted about your subject matter expertise, so you should get right to the crux of everything: Tell them the story, get to the point, strip down the footnotes to the essentials. Thinking that way has helped my writing way beyond the book.
A good friend who indexed her own first book recommended I should not do that. I hired an indexer, and I was very glad I did because it freed me up to move along other tenure-significant projects while the book was in its final phases. Fewer and fewer publishers are paying for copy editing, so that also falls to authors. Often you can get a grant to pay your copy editor/indexer.
Something I think I would have done differently: push harder to include a bibliography. The publisher wasn’t keen to include it along with endnotes, appendices, and an index, but I find bibliographies so valuable on their own in the scholarly books I read, as a resource and a means to figure out where an author is coming from.