The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s History Division is soliciting entries for its annual award for the best journalism and mass communication history book. The winning author will receive a plaque and a $500 prize at the August 2023 AEJMC conference in Washington, D.C. Attendance at the conference is encouraged as the author will be invited to be a guest for a live taping of the Journalism History podcast during the History Division awards event. 

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The History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) has selected Kathy Roberts Forde and Sid Bedingfield as winners of its award honoring the best journalism and mass communication history book published in 2021. Roberts Forde and Bedingfield are co-editors of Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America (University of Illinois Press).  

The committee also is recognizing a runner-up for this year’s Book Award. Steven Casey, author of The War Beat, Pacific: The American Media at War Against Japan (Oxford).

A panel of three distinguished media historians chose Journalism and Jim Crow from a strong field of entries. Focusing on the American South after Reconstruction, this volume of research essays shows how the white press constructed and sustained white supremacy. One judge emphasized the book’s “forceful argument that white journalists were not mere observers but active participants in barbaric practices including lynching, convict leasing, and voter suppression.”

Judges found the book’s cohesive discussions of systemic racism and the counternarrative of the Black public sphere to be compelling and relevant today. Wrote one judge, “Journalism and Jim Crow illuminates the role of the Southern press in building and upholding America’s own system of apartheid in a way that helps us understand how our nation’s current race relations came to be so troubled. It is the right book for this historical moment.”

Judges also praised Casey’s The War Beat, Pacific for its engaging writing and storytelling. “This book vividly portrays the lives, challenges and bravery of the correspondents who covered World War II,” said one judge. 

The committee cited Casey’s meticulous research in a range of archives. The result is a detailed investigation of how journalism in the Pacific theater was, as one judge explained, “shaped by censorship, logistics, interservice rivalries and public opinion — and how the work of war correspondents changed over time in response to commanders’ need for resources and political leverage.”

“Casey told a complex story with precision, power, and grace,” another judge noted.

Forde is a professor of journalism and associate dean of equity and inclusion in the College of Social & Behavioral Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She received the AEJMC History Division Book Award and the Frank Luther Mott-Kappa Tau Alpha Book Award in 2009 for Literary Journalism on Trial: Masson v. New Yorker and the First Amendment. Forde has twice received the AEJMC History Division Covert Award. Bedingfield is an associate professor in the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota. He is author of Newspaper Wars: Civil Rights and White Resistance in South Carolina, 1935-1965, winner of the 2018 George C. Rogers Award from the South Carolina Historical Society. Before pursuing a doctorate, Bedingfield worked more than two decades as a journalist, covering elections, campaigns, and other major events in the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Haiti, Hong Kong, and Israel. Forde and Bedingfield are co-editors of the newly launched book series Journalism & Democracy at UMass Press.

Casey is a professor in international history at the London School of Economics and author of four previous books on twentieth-century media history: Cautious Crusade: Franklin Roosevelt, American Public Opinion and the War against Nazi Germany; Selling the Korean War: Propaganda, Politics and Public Opinion; and The War Beat, Europe: The American Media at War against Nazi Germany.

Forde and Bedingfield will receive a plaque and cash prize. All three honorees will be recognized during the division’s awards gala, Aug. 2, at the 2022 AEJMC National Convention in Detroit.

For more information on the AEJMC History Division, visit https://aejmc.us/history/  

The History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) congratulates Dr. Elisabeth Fondren, Assistant Professor of Journalism at Collins College of Professional Studies, St. John’s University, New York, as winner of the 38th annual Covert Award for best mass communication history article, essay, or book chapter published in 2021.

The award memorializes Dr. Catherine L. Covert (right), professor of journalism at Syracuse University. Dr. Covert, who died in 1983, was the first woman professor in Syracuse’s Newhouse School of Journalism and the first woman to head the AEJMC History Division, in 1975. The award has been presented annually since 1985 (see https://aejmc.us/history/about/covert-award/)

Dr. Fondren’s winning submission, “Fighting an Armed Doctrine: The Struggle to Modernize German Propaganda During World War I (1914-1918),” appeared in Journalism & Communication Monographs, 2021, Vol. 23(4) 256-317.

Upon learning the news of her honor, Dr. Fondren replied: “Journalism & Mass Communication Monographs editor, Linda Steiner, as well as the late Michael S. Sweeney, were very encouraging of this project and supported me throughout the conceptualizing and writing process. Others, including my dissertation advisor Jack Hamilton, helped in shaping the arguments, and Erin Coyle provided important advice and was instrumental in modeling an institutional culture of care.

“I was very lucky to be paired with Mike Sweeney for the AEJMC History Division 2019 mentorship program, and Mike continued to provide unbelievable (!) support of my work and focus on international propaganda/journalism history throughout his illness. We spoke as late as early December 2021, when I shared a picture of my then 10-month-old daughter with him. I will forever treasure this opportunity and that I have had the chance to learn from – and with him.

“I am truly thrilled. And I look forward to seeing you in Detroit later this summer to accept this prestigious award.”

“Fighting an Armed Doctrine” attracted favorable attention during multiple rounds of judging, according to Covert Award Chair, Dr. Tom Mascaro. It was a clear winner in an outstanding field of entries analyzed, grouped, and ranked by a dedicated, diligent group of judges, according to Mascaro, who added: “Dr. Fondren’s research is a model of journalism history. Elisabeth asked an open-ended, pertinent research question—how did German officials respond to failures of their propaganda machine during the first World War?—and used foundational methods of primary-source archival historical research to not only resolve the basic question, but also inform our contemporary understanding of modern propaganda strategies. I see the sage hand of Mike Sweeney in Dr. Fondren’s research, as it transcends national boundaries and expands the record of international journalism history. “Fighting an Armed Doctrine” informs propaganda studies and human communication history, especially the rise of audiovisual forms, in larger contexts including, sadly, as used by today’s belligerent warring nations and irrational conspiracy theorists in American politics.”

The History Division will honor Dr. Fondren and present a check for $400 as part of the annual AEJMC convention in August 2022 in Detroit. The abstract for Dr. Fondren’s essay follows:

Abstract: During the First World War (1914–1918), all belligerent governments realized that propaganda proficiency was critical to selling their causes and stirring up support for the war. Yet German propagandists in particular struggled to master mass media, manage their messages, and build audience trust during the Great War in their goal to control domestic and foreign public opinion. Although previous scholarship has agreed that the German propaganda machine failed, little has been said about how Germany recognized these failures early on and sought to remedy them through increasingly modern propaganda strategies—even if those strategies were ultimately no match for the public’s growing distrust of official information. This monograph examines how it was that more institutions, more manpower, new publicity initiatives, copying tactics from enemies, crowdsourcing ideas, and eventually focusing on visuals and film did little to boost morale at home or improve Germany’s reputation abroad. The findings rest on a historical analysis of military dispatches, federal policy documents, letters, news stories, propaganda materials, and memoirs located in German and U.S. archives. Although many of the methods and tactics these early propagandists used would fail, others would become part of the universal toolbox governments still rely on to influence people’s views and spread information.

For additional references on Dr. Covert, see:

https://surface.syr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1063&context=sumagazine

https://roghiemstra.com/covert-bio.html