By Rachel Grant, University of Florida, Membership Co-Chair, rgrant@jou.ufl.edu
Dr. Ron Rodgers, an associate professor and graduate coordinator in the department of journalism at the University of Florida, recently wrote a book titled “The Struggle for the Soul of Journalism: The Pulpit versus the Press, 1833-1923.”
Q: Describe the focus of your book.
A: Broadly speaking, my book explores the implications of religion’s powerful critique of the press during the rise of the modern, mass-appeal media beginning with the penny press in the 1830s. It looks at the effect of the critique on the shaping of the norms of journalistic conduct and content leading to the notion of the social responsibility of the press – most notably formalized in the ASNE’s Canons of Journalism in 1923. This critique had many forms. And it came from the pulpit in alliance with politicians, social scientists, educators, members of the Progressive movement, and journalists themselves.
The one major impulse for this critique was religion’s growing acquiescence to a new reality – that in an increasingly complex modern society – and especially with the tsunami of demographic changes of the era – it no longer held power over public opinion as it once did. That now belonged to the newspaper with its growing influence on society. And if that was the case, religious critics believed the increasingly commercialized newspaper needed to take over that responsibility. It sought to do so to protect what it defined as the true mission of journalism from the modern world’s toxic influence of secular market and ideological constraints on journalistic conduct and journalistic content – the news.
And at the core of this effort was the pulpit’s challenging the notion of journalistic objectivity grounded in commercialism. Instead, it sought to redefine news as interpretive and advocatory in order to comport with a journalistic ideal grounded in the gospel.
Q: How did you come across this subject? Why did it interest you?
A: In general, my research interests stem from my more than 20 years of newspaper experience working in Asia and in five Western states. In South Korea I worked for an English-language daily as a writing coach/editor and also as a feature writer whose beat was traveling around the country writing about the foreign community. I was in Korea at the time of the rise of the student democracy movement after the assassination of Park Chung Hee, followed by the insidious takeover of the government and the violent quashing of the democracy movement. That time offered me the chance to see up close the overt hand of propaganda and press censorship by an authoritarian regime as wire stories telling the truth were ripped from the machine and punched onto a spike on the managing editor’s desk at the head of the newsroom. I then moved back to the U.S. were I saw the more covert influences on news driven by commercialism and ideology.
Thus, over time, the question that arose in my mind with my experience in Korea and the U.S. regarding the external pressures on the conventions of news was: What influences how journalists conceive of their roles? That is: What influences – what historical forces – informed the norms of journalistic conduct and content we live with today?
I began with the religion and then planned to move on to other institutions. But instead I was seduced by the arguments and rhetoric of the Protestant diagnosticians of the mid-19th and early 20th century whose work represented some of the most articulate and pointed criticisms of the secular press over many decades. Actually, I would say, nothing like it exists today.
Over those decades I studied for the book, these intellectual discussions and debates about newspapers appeared in books, religious and popular periodicals, sermons, speeches, tracts, secular and religious press accounts, autobiographies and memoirs, reports of religious associations, and the newspaper trade journals of the era. All of these media were the source of much discourse about the newspaper, and, I argue, their totality fostered an ethos of proper journalistic conduct.
Q: What archives or research materials did you use?
A: I used the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature; American Periodical Series Online, 1741-1900; Access NewspaperARCHIVE, which contains tens of millions of searchable newspaper pages dating back to the 1700s; ProQuest Historical Newspapers, a searchable database; the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America site with historic newspapers from 1789 to 1963 available and searchable online; Google Book Search; the Internet Archive’s Text Archive; the Hathi Trust; and through Google Books, the Internet Archive, and my university’s microfilm system every available issue of the newspaper trade journals of the era – most especially Editor & Publisher.
Here, I would put a plug in for the value of trade journals for historical research. Indeed, the trade press of any industry is a resource that can be mined by the historian because – as I recall one source saying – trade publications were a “clearinghouse for ideas.” Indeed, for example, Editor & Publisher carried on into the 20th century the decades-old American newspaper tradition of clipping items and running them verbatim or in a summary. In that way, it became a kind of public forum for debate about and criticism and defense of journalism. In its pages you can find criticisms, compliments, and discussions by an array or sources from every segment of literate society that might otherwise have been lost to history.
Q: How does your book relate to journalism history? How is it relevant to the present?
A: How does it relate to journalism history? Well, it is about journalism during a particularly seismic era of disruption of the old ways of doing things and a consequent search for new conventions to address the changing times. The impulse for what I call a slow reveal of change involved two things: The rise of the commercialized, mass-appeal newspaper beginning with the penny press. And the subsequent incremental falling away of the mode of journalism that for many decades defined the conventions of journalists – the interpretative and advocatory partisan press.
I argue in the book that this transformation affected the work and ethics of those who reported and edited the news. That is: In partisan newspapers, journalists fundamentally understood what their roles and responsibilities were and whom they served. Thus, the question arose: At a commercially driven, mass-appeal publication supported by advertising and with no vital connection to politics, politicians, and political parties, whom did journalists serve? That was the question the many critics of journalism at the time attempted to answer during what they perceived as a window of opportunity to set journalism on a course that benefited society.
Ultimately, I believe the best history is that in which we can discern in the past a resonance in the present. I believe the past is not a country of silence, and it is the historian’s responsibility to tease out that resonance. Here, in The Struggle for the Soul of Journalism, I find a resonance to the past shift from the partisan to commercial modes of journalism and all that entailed in the current ongoing digital disruption of the news media environment. This digital revolution has gutted the advertising budgets of newspapers. The internet, social platforms, and mobile devices have altered how news is consumed and shared. And thus, the news media industry is constantly searching for new paths to profit by finding new ways of leveraging the digital realm. What that has meant is the testing and shouldering aside of traditional notions of journalistic news ethics. Journalists, I argue, are floundering in the same questioning time that their peers faced a century.
As I argue in the book: “Before we begin to transform our present news ethic we need to understand the past as the foundation of that present to discern and save what is fundamental about the mission of journalism.” That is, I believe we can rediscover the fundamental precepts of a journalistic ideal in the extended debate over many decades a century ago.
Q: What advice do you have for other historians working/starting on book projects?
A: Having only written one book, I don’t purport to be an expert with advice on book projects. For one, this book is a result of years of research and writing about parts of the whole. It was only at a certain point late in the game that I realized I might have a book here that some might find of interest – that explored a largely uncharted territory.
But if I have to say anything about writing a book, I would begin with making sure whatever it is you are going to do, make sure it is something that genuinely interests you. Then begin accumulating research. Write, present, and publish papers that deal – even marginally – with your ultimate topic. Collect a mass of data around the topic. Then approach the writing of the book in the same way I tell my students in explaining how to write anything from a headline to a news story. I do so by telling them this story: The sculptor August Rodin was once asked how to sculpt an elephant, and reportedly responded: “Take a big block of marble and carve away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant.”
In other words write, rewrite, and then rewrite – and in the process cut away. Or in the words of many a writer: Kill your darlings. This is the advice of the writer Anne Lamott in her essay “Shitty First Drafts.” And it applies to the writing of scholarly books. That is: Think in the negative and chip away anything you have collected that is not the book.
And then – as a I tell my students writing research papers – break the project into chunks and starting writing in sections or in chapters. Create in your project folder a file for each chapter. This allows you to write non-linearly – for most minds, especially mine – process the world in a non-linear and often meandering fashion.