By Rachel Grant, Membership Co-Chair, University of Florida, rgrant@jou.ufl.edu
Dr. Amber Roessner is an associate professor of journalism and electronic media in the College of Communication and Information at the University of Tennessee—Knoxville. She recently wrote Jimmy Carter and the Birth of the Marathon Media Campaign.
Q: Describe the focus of your book.
A: This book tells the story of a transformative moment in American politics and journalism by examining the rise of Jimmy Carter, Time’s 1976 “miracle” man, through a representational and relational analysis of archival documents, media texts, and memory texts surrounding the negotiation of political images by presidential aspirants, campaign consultants, frontline reporters, and various publics involved in the bicentennial campaign. Though many cultural observers dismissed Carter’s campaign and presidency as the final chapter of Watergate, this book reveals that his “miraculous” rise in the bicentennial campaign signaled a new chapter in American politics and journalism that still reverberates today.
Q: How did you come across this subject? Why did it interest you?
A: Hmmm. That’s a great question. Well, you certainly cannot hail from Georgia without hearing tales of the spectacular rise [and fall] of the peanut farmer-physicist president. In graduate school, I was interested in probing the narrative around Carter’s “miraculous” rise in the 1976 presidential campaign and his subsequent failed presidency, particularly how the negotiation of image had contributed to both. But, fortunately, thanks to the wisdom of my dissertation committee, particularly Janice Hume, I recognized that the best dissertation is a done dissertation. This in mind, I pursued research around the topic of my first book, Inventing Baseball Heroes: Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson and the Sporting Press in America (LSU Press, 2014). But still intrigued with the negotiation of political images by journalist and image-makers that transpired after post-1968 reforms, I returned to my back-up dissertation idea once I arrived on Rocky Top in 2010. In the end, I sometimes think that I wrote that first book so that I could finish this second one. It certainly helped me gain an audience with one of the most important folks that I interviewed for this book—the baseball-loving former president Jimmy Carter himself, who said he enjoyed immensely the transcribed copy of my first book, and we all know that JC promised to never tell a lie so I am still rather proud of that endorsement.
Q: What archives or research materials did you use?
A: The decade-long research journey for this book involved the analysis of more than 10,000 documents, including white papers, strategic memoranda, letters, telex messages, handwritten notes, message logs, clipping files, and interview transcripts located in the files of campaign operatives and reporters housed at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library & Museum and twelve additional archival sites across the nation.
Though millions of Americans increasingly relied upon television as their primary news source by the mid-seventies, as the dilemma of ink rub-off suggested, many individuals still habitually thumbed through at least one newspaper each day and regularly pored over their favorite newsweekly. Consequently, I examined more than 15,000 newspaper and magazine articles published in top-circulating national and otherwise relevant local outlets and more than one hundred hours of network and cable news footage, alongside popular television programs and films that grappled with U.S. politics.
Following in the tradition of media historians and journalism studies scholars, such as John Nerone, Matt Carlson, Michael Buozis, and Brian Creech, I read these media texts as narratives offering insights into the objects and subjects under study, and when possible, I engaged in a consideration of industry practices and norms, including the production and consumption processes.
In that vein, I also meticulously scrutinized analysis offered by leading reporters and ombudsmen in the industry trade press and trail narratives, inspired by key texts in the campaign cannon, such as Theodore White’s The Making of the President series, Timothy Crouse’s Boys on the Bus, and Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. Trail journalism and campaign biographies from R.W. Apple, Jr., David Broder, Jimmy Carter, Elizabeth Drew, Sam Donaldson, Martin Schram, Kandy Stroud, Jules Witcover, Judy Woodruff, and many others offered the chronological and narrative framework for this book while seminal texts from media sociologists, such as Gaye Tuchman and Michael Schudson; political scientists, such as James David Barber, Betty Glad, Thomas Patterson, and Nelson Polsby; and mass communication scholars, such as James Carey, Steven Chafee, Maxwell McCombs, and Donald Shaw, offered insight into the range of heuristic frameworks that were applied to make sense of the historical phenomena under investigation.
While these primary sources offered the main chronological, narrative, and contextual framework for this study, one-hundred-and-thirty memory texts—oral histories and long-form interviews collected by researchers, including myself, over a period of forty years—offered important personal and social context for these sources.
Q: How does your book relate to journalism history? How is it relevant to the present?
A: One of the central focuses of this book is the practice of campaign journalism and its confrontation with the imagecraft involved in modern campaigns during the mid-seventies, a transitional moment in American culture that witnessed the emergence of fault lines, or cultural ruptures, that continue to influence our lives today. As dean of political writers David Broder later acknowledged, after post-1968 reforms, journalists of the era had begun injecting themselves into central events of the campaign and subsequently, they became partisan “players not observers.” As I observe in the book’s conclusion, ultimately, this move “lent credence to claims of [media] bias and further undermined the most important facet of [the journalistic industry’s] brand—its credibility.”
As social historian Raymond Williams suggested, our past helps to determine our present circumstances and future prospects, and this recent chapter of our nation’s history has influenced our present moment, contributing to the lingering crises of confidence and legitimacy in U.S. presidential politics and news media that continue to threaten our democracy.
Q: What advice you have for other historians working/starting on book projects?
A: When I first decided to return to this topic in 2010 some well-meaning folk discouraged me from turning away from what they believed was a fruitful area of scholarship in sports media history to what they viewed as well-plowed ground surrounding Jimmy Carter, but heeding the voice of my mentor and recognizing that I had something valuable to contribute to the scholarship, I did not let them dissuade me from embarking on this enlightening journey. Likewise, I would encourage you never to be deterred from contributing your insights to a scholarly conversation. Your voice matters.