By Rachel Grant, Membership Co-Chair, University of Florida, rgrant@jou.ufl.edu
Dr. Kevin Lerner, an assistant professor of Communication/Journalism at Marist College, wrote a book titled Provoking the Press: (MORE) Magazine and the Crisis of Confidence in American Journalism.
Q: Describe the focus of your book.
A: Provoking the Press: (MORE) Magazine and the Crisis of Confidence in American Journalism examines the last real challenge to the ideal of objectivity among the mainstream American press in the 1970s. Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, Women’s Liberation, the student free speech movement, and youth culture in general began to erode confidence in the institutions of American life, and the press was among these. Amid this turmoil, a young Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times journalist named Tony Lukas began to question whether or not the institutional pose of objectivity could adequately cover everything that was going on. He founded the journalism review (MORE) with his friend Dick Pollak and William Woodward, who brought the money to support this new magazine. (MORE) covered American journalism from 1971 to 1978, pushing back on many of the assumptions of the hidebound institutional press. (MORE) pushed these institutions to adapt to new cultural and political atmospheres, and at the same time chronicled the rise of the corporate press that would dominate the 1980s. Provoking the Press tells the story of this group of journalists, their often funny, often angry journalism review, and the “Counter-Conventions” they held a half dozen times in the seventies, which drew names such as David Halberstam, Tom Wolfe, Nora Ephron, Katharine Graham, Mike Wallace, and Carl Bernstein. It is a book about the power (and limits) of press criticism to change the practices of journalism, and also one about alternatives to the dominant model of journalism in the U.S.
Q: How did you come across this subject? Why did it interest you?
A: I found (MORE) when I was beginning research for my dissertation at Rutgers University. I had been interested in the intellectual history of the American press. I pitched that idea to my adviser, David Greenberg, who told me that would be “a good life’s work” and I needed to find something smaller to work on. I began narrowing that down to studying press criticism, and Susan Keith, who was also on my committee, had been doing some work on the regional journalism review movement that preceded (MORE). As it turns out, one of my mentors in my master’s program, Victor Navasky, had been involved with (MORE), and that gave me a thread to pull on to find what I needed to complete the project. I was initially interested in (MORE) because of the intellectual history of journalism, and the role of critics in shaping the press, but it was the individual stories of these people (especially the raucous Counter-Conventions) that kept me going, day-to-day.
Q: What archives or research materials did you use?
A: The staff of (MORE) was usually just three people in an office, and they had literally no filing system for most of their paperwork, so to the best of my knowledge, there is no archive of the papers of (MORE). This meant I had to work mostly from the outside in. Victor Navasky put me in touch with Dick Pollak, who was (MORE)’s founding editor, and Pollak was gracious enough to loan me his bound volumes of the magazine, which weren’t quite complete, but which gave me the best picture I could get at the time. The New York Public Library had the missing issues on microfilm. Pollak sat for several oral history interviews, and opened his address book to me to put me in touch with several of the other editors and contributors. The New York Public Library’s Manuscripts and Archives Division holds the papers of Abe Rosenthal, who was the editor of the New York Times in this period, and of Dorothy Schiff, who was the publisher of the New York Post. Both of them were annoyed by (MORE) and kept files on what they saw as the review’s antics. These collections allowed me to see what kind of effect the journalism review was having on their targets, and Provoking the Press includes a long chapter analyzing the relationship between (MORE) and the Times. The NYPL also has the papers of journalist Nora Sayre, who attended at least two of the conventions and kept notes; and an oral history with Tony Lukas, who had died before I began work on this project. I was also able to obtain audio recordings of some radio broadcasts of the Counter-Conventions from the archives at Pacifica Radio.
Q: How does your book relate to journalism history? How is it relevant to the present?
A: The 1970s are an under-researched period in journalism history, one that is only just now beginning to be examined (Matthew Pressman’s 2018 book On Press is a notable exception—Matt and I once asked for the same archives box at the New York Public Library). While much has been written about the Pentagon Papers and the Washington Post’s Watergate coverage, these are usually seen as purely triumphant moments for the press. But I try to put these back in context, and argue that these real successes for the mainstream press actually hindered some of the reforms that reporters on the fringes were trying to bring to the industry. By the time the 1980s blossomed with the advent of CNN and USA Today, metropolitan newspapers were almost literally printing money, and saw no need to take on the major reforms. My book explains some of that transition from the revolutionary sixties to the more complacent eighties through the eyes of press critics.
Provoking the Press is vitally relevant to the present because the press and American institutions in general are undergoing another, similar, crisis of confidence. Traditional modes of journalism seem to have failed to capture what was happening in the country, particularly in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. The experiences of the journalists involved in (MORE) magazine can demonstrate to anyone interested in the functioning of American journalism today how reform can and cannot be achieved. The book describes a model for the kind of critical culture that can make essential changes in the practice of journalism and the questioning of institutional objectivity.
Q: What advice you have for other historians working/starting on book projects?
A: The most valuable thing I learned about archival research is that you can find some fascinating things by being creative in your use of archives. Since (MORE) had no real archiving system, I had to think about other collections of papers that might have mentioned (MORE) or kept some of their documentation. I’ve already begun another project that involves adversaries keeping files on each other, and these papers can be just as illuminating as official collections of institutional papers. I also think that it’s helpful for historians to think like journalists, particularly if you are working in fairly recent history. Interviewing is absolutely a valid way to approach history—though if you’re interviewing people about events from four decades ago, remember that they’re not likely to remember much!