Name: Craig Allen

University Affiliation and Position: Arizona State University, Associate Professor & Associate Dean of the Barrett Honors College

Book Title: Univision, Telemundo, and the Rise of Spanish Language Television in the United States 

1. Describe the focus of your book.  

The book is the first comprehensive history of U.S. Spanish-language television.  Drawing from ten years of archival research, original interviews, and exploration, it reveals the inside story behind the Spanish-language networks Univision and Telemundo, how they fought enormous odds, and finally rose as giants of mass communication in the English-speaking United States.  The book argues that scholars’ study and understanding only of English-language television has hidden a key dimension of U.S. mass media, that they are extensively and endemically internationalized.  Much of the book traces the rise of Mexican broadcast pioneer Emilio Azcárraga Vidaurreta, who founded Univision as the U.S.’s fourth television network only a few years after the beginning of TV on ABC, CBS, and NBC.  Chapters go on to recount events that demonstrate that, despite attracting virtually no attention or pursuit among U.S. media scholars, Mexico’s powerful Azcárraga dynasty fundamentally influenced and shaped the development of television in the U.S.  The history further unfolds with exploration of numerous American figures who directed the emergences of Univision and Telemundo.  Although unknown in media literature, here identified and delved for first time, they are among the U.S. mass media’s foremost pioneers.  The account reiterates the endurance, innovation, and popularity of Spanish-language television, and that its story is essential to understanding not merely the Latinx but overall history of modern America.

2. How did you come across this subject? Why did it interest you?

Spanish-language television always has been out there. Univision has been the No. 1 single source of media many times.  I don’t think media scholars ever had heard of it.  (Media scholarship is a not a domain that’s good at grasping mass communication beyond white, Anglo, English-language media.)  My professional career in television began as a volunteer rookie producer of a weekly Spanish-language TV show on an English-language station.  This was in the 1970s, when Spanish-language broadcasting was known only in a dozen cities and virtually all television was three English-language channels, ABC, CBS, and NBC.  The Spanish experience was my “break” that got me inside TV first as a news reporter, eventually as an anchor and news director.  Although I worked in English-language TV, I never stopped following the Spanish-language counterpart to which I owed my career.  Later as a media historian, I think I was the only one who knew that Spanish-language television existed. 

3. What archives or research materials did you use?

A pivotal part of the book (on a landmark court case in which the FCC eliminated Univision’s foreign owners) was drawn from research at the National Archives.  However, as an internal study of the Univision and Telemundo corporations, key documents either were not kept or subject to proprietary restrictions.  Through dealings with the companies and parties, I was able to accumulate (and cite from) materials I located in numerous private collections.  Much travel was involved. 

4. How does your book relate to journalism history? How is it relevant to the present?

I’m not sure it’s really relevant to the present.  It’s a story of history.  I tend to believe that journalism and mass communication if they exist at all are on their last legs.  A hundred years from now, people will look back at a bygone period when something known as journalism that massed a lot of people and was influential existed.  I tend to see Spanish-language television as a piece of what those in the future will look back upon toward helping them understand what once was  America’s “mass media era.”   5. What advice you have for other historians working/starting on book projects

Spend time researching a marketable topic before you begin.  Writing published history seems easy—until you have to write a treatment that sells the topic you’ve plunged into.  If you want to publish a book but your topic doesn’t brim with selling points, you will be trapped when you have to approach publishers.  In the case of Univision, I had at least 50 rejections, each time with the stock comment “The topic doesn’t fit our market,” code for “we can’t sell it.”  If the goal is a book, ask yourself “What will attract an audience?” and “What will get people to pay for what I’ve written?”  These are publishers’ first questions.  Do the analysis before, not after, you commit. 

Name: John Maxwell Hamilton

University Affiliation and Position: Louisiana State University, Hopkins P. Breazeale Professor of Journalism

Book Title:  Manipulating the Masses: Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of American Propaganda 

1. Describe the focus of your book. 

This book is about the profound and enduring threat to American democracy that rose out of the Great War – the establishment of pervasive, systematic propaganda as an instrument of the state. That horrific conflict required the mobilization of entire nations, no less in the United States than in Europe. The government in Washington exercised unprecedented power to shape the views and attitudes of the citizens it was supposed to serve. Its agent for this was the Committee on Public Information, the first and only time the United States government had a ministry of propaganda. Nothing like it had existed before, and it would be dismantled at the end of the war. But the CPI endured as a “blueprint” for the Information State that exists today in peace time as well as during war.

2. How did you come across this subject? Why did it interest you?

The story of the CPI is a sprawling one that had not been told fully. It deserved to be. The few histories of it that have been written passed over congressional inquiries into its practices, its failures in field propaganda, its heavy-handed promotion of White Russian disinformation, and its bizarre (there is no better word) end-of-war mission to Central Europe, to name a few episodes. Not well understood or documented was the CPI’s connection to intelligence agencies, its use of front organizations, or its imaginative and chaotic way of doing business. No connection had been made between political campaigning in Wilson’s election of 1916 and the birth of the CPI in 1917, a connection that shows how campaigns are test kitchens for presidents’ use of their propaganda powers after their secure the White House. No attention had been given to the constitutional irregularly of Wilson’s creation of the CPI by executive order, rather than with congressional authorization, a lapse that put it on uncertain footing from the beginning.

3.What archives or research materials did you use? The full story cannot be found in the CPI records in the National Archives. The archives of organizations with which the CPI interacted, the personal papers of individuals whom it touched, and the records of other countries that waged propaganda at the same time contain invaluable information on what the CPI did to shape views and provide context for reconstructing the conditions shaped it. Altogether I consulted more than 150 collections in the United States and Europe.

4. How does your book relate to journalism history? How is it relevant to the present?

Presidents enjoy enormous power to shape public opinion. In some cases this is a matter of bypassing he press. In some cases a matter of using the press.  This book looks at both aspects. I was surprised, by the way, by the extent to which journalists were willing to be used, even if they resented the CPI. I would call this a major finding of the book. The dynamic that existed in the Great War exists today. The Trump administration’s excessive use of is propaganda power added to the relevance of the book, something I had not anticipated when I began to write it.

5. What advice you have for other historians working/starting on book projects 

The same advice that every reporter gets from editors. Always make one more call, if you have time. I sought to turn over every rock – read that as sought to peer into every archive – that I could identify. That is why the book took so long to write.

Name: Stephen Bates

University Affiliation and Position: Associate Professor, Greenspun School of Journalism, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Book Title: An Aristocracy of Critics: Luce, Hutchins, Niebuhr, and the Committee That Redefined Freedom of the Press

1. Describe the focus of your book. 

It’s a book about the Commission on Freedom of the Press, known as the Hutchins Commission, and its 1947 report, A Free and Responsible Press.I trace the origins of the project, the biographies of the people involved, the development of their ideas, and the public response to the report, as well as why it mattered then and why it matters now.

2. How did you come across this subject? Why did it interest you?

When I read A Free and Responsible Press in the 1990s, I was struck by its prescient and eloquent analysis of the role of the news media in a liberal democracy. The book is part of the canon in schools of journalism. I think it should be known more widely, as the product of the greatest collaboration of American intellectuals in the 20th century.

3. What archives or research materials did you use?

The Hutchins Commission generated thousands of pages of memos, drafts of books, and transcripts of deliberations; several universities have more or less full sets. In the transcripts, one can see preeminent thinkers grappling with fundamental issues of philosophy and policy. A second crucial collection was the Time Inc. internal files, which I was able to consult at the Time offices; the files are now at the New-York Historical Society. Henry R. Luce principally funded the Hutchins Commission, and I think I was the first to see his handwritten annotations, mostly unfavorable, on a draft of A Free and Responsible Press. In all, I visited nearly twenty archives, thanks in part to a Senior Scholar Grant from AEJMC.

4. How does your book relate to journalism history? How is it relevant to the present?

A Free and Responsible Press is a classic, but it’s the work of a group of people who didn’t fully agree, so it embodies a lot of compromises as well as a handful of contradictions. The dialogues in the Hutchins Commission’s transcripts and memos are more incisive, with the members explaining and defending their positions. Along the way, they discuss many now-timely topics, most of which don’t appear in the report: political polarization exacerbated by a partisan press, foreign and domestic groups trying to manipulate public opinion, the perils of demagoguery and authoritarianism, and the value of media-literacy training.

5. What advice you have for other historians working/starting on book projects?

This may be obvious, but I found it helpful: Like many researchers, I ended up with enough material for a thousand-page book that nobody would want to read. I was able to keep it fairly short (224 pages plus notes) without much heartache by publishing the outtakes as freestanding articles.

Bates’ book won the Goldsmith Award from the Shorenstein Center:

An Aristocracy of Critics: Luce, Hutchins, Niebuhr, and the Committee That Redefined Freedom of the Press

Name: Stephen Banning, Ph.D.

University Affiliation: Bradley University, Peoria, Illinois

Position: Associate Professor

Book Title:

Journalism Standards of Work Today: Using History to Create New Code of Journalism Ethics

1. Describe the focus of your book.

This book traces the roots of journalism ethics back to the mid-nineteenth century

and examines the 1923 Canons of Journalism, using a historical lens to access the value of journalism ethics today. The origins of journalism’s standards of work in the mid-nineteenth century are scrutinized as the foundation of the 1923 Canons and evaluated to see if these pillars of journalistic mores are still valid despite vast changes in journalism and society.

2. How did you come across this subject? Why did it interest you?

I came across the first sources for this study accidentally while working on my master’s degree at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in Professor Betty Winfield’s historical research class. I then presented my findings at the 1992 American Journalism Historians Conference in Lawrence, Kansas. As a result, I ended up doing my thesis on journalism professionalization and was fortunate to have professors Betty Winfield, Sandra Scott and Lee Joliffe on my committee. In the 1990s Hazel Dicken-Garcia was very supportive of my research as was John Merrill, Wally Eberhard and Alf Pratt. Subsequently, I’ve published quite a few articles on journalism professionalization and ethics including two in the last year.

3. What archives or research materials did you use?

I found the organizational minutes from early press associations invaluable as they are hard to refute and clearly state what some early journalists believed about standards of work. They were difficult to find and often not recorded in library systems. I had to locate one source by calling a historian, William Howard Taft, who had cited a source in a footnote. He explained that the only copy of the source was in his basement. I have had less luck finding in depth information in archival newspapers, but I’ve found some. I did find several diaries in the Newbury Library in Chicago from a nineteenth century journalist that were enlightening, and the recent digitizing of special collections has been extremely valuable in shining a light on early editors’ discussions.

4. How does your book relate to journalism history? How is it relevant to the present?

This book shows that the principles which undergirded the elements of journalism ethics in the nineteenth century and particularly in the first national code of ethics in 1923, are the same ideologies that can be applied in new ways to the much-changed twenty-first century communication environment.

This research examined journalism ethics in regard to whether we still need journalism ethics in the twenty-first century, if it is possible to exercise journalistic standards of work and if so, on what values should these ethics be based in a world much different from that which existed when the first journalism codes of ethics were formulated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In order to distil the motivations and essence of the early journalistic standards of work, the function of media in a democracy and the formation of mass media during the first industrial revolution was discussed, and its consequential change in journalists’ locus of control and how journalists self-identified. The sudden creation of mass media pushed some journalists to create ethical principles which would guide the newly empowered press, an effort culminating in the creation of the first national code of journalistic ethics in 1923.

The journey of journalism ethics after the first industrial revolution was found to compare similarly to the condition in which we find ourselves in today, with journalism’s changing roles and boundaries that have created questions as to the application of previous codes of ethics in modern communication.

The elements of the 1923 “Canons of Journalism” are examined closely over several chapters and found to contain timeless values, despite their original application to now dated technology. The final chapter strips away the Canons’ basic elements and applies them to media today, in a way that interfaces with new technology while providing for an informed electorate.

5. What advice you have for other historians working/starting on book projects

Research what interests you and it won’t seem like work. I took that advice three decades ago and still love researching. One other thing is to try to find institutions willing to pay you to research what you love.

Vincent DiGirolamo

Associate Professor

Department of History

Baruch College, CUNY

Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys (Oxford University Press, 2019)

Q: Describe the focus of your book. 

A: Crying the News tells the story of some of the most familiar and fabled figures in American history: newsboys. It interrogates the myths surrounding these children and reconnects them to the industry in which they worked, the communities in which they lived, and the events in which they participated. It’s an epic story that spans from the Market Revolution of the 1830s to the Great Depression of the 1930s. It encompasses all regions of the country and highlights the role and representation of girls, blacks, immigrants, the homeless, the elderly, and the disabled in the trade. In the largest sense, Crying the News is a subaltern history of print capitalism.

Q: How did you come across this subject? Why did it interest you?

A: Like a lot of books, it grew out of desire to read a book that didn’t exist. I got the idea for it thirty years ago while running the trails behind UC Santa Cruz. I envisioned writing not just a sweeping social history of America’s newsboys but a newsboys’ history of the United States, one that reexamined major eras and events from their perspective, from the pavement up, so to speak. I was inspired by labor historian Herbert Gutman and the new cultural historians of the 1990s, who used seemingly marginal figures, texts, or events to illuminate entire societies or epochs.

Q: What archives or research materials did you use?

A: Some advisers warned that I wouldn’t be able to find enough source material, but I persisted. I began by following the footnotes of urban, journalism, and social welfare historians such as Robert Bremner, Alfred McClung Lee, and Walter Trattner, which led me to the vast reform literature: the published and unpublished papers of the Children’s Aid Society, then crudely stored at its New York headquarters; the Juvenile Protective Association records at Hull House in Chicago, and the New York Child Labor Committee records at the state library in Albany. I also consulted obscure trade journals such as the Proof-Sheet and the Newsdealer, and the archive of the International Circulation Managers Association in Reston, Virginia. These I supplemented with memoirs, traveler’s accounts, city guides, and of course newspapers and periodicals. This was before much was digitized. I relied on microfilm and the hand-written newspaper indexes I found in libraries and historical societies. A year-long fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society helped me piece together the early part of the story, but I also traveled to archives in Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Newark, Hartford, Boston, Buffalo, Rochester, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Toledo, St. Louis, and Kansas City. Every trip, for business or pleasure, became a research trip.

I also focused on waif fiction and urchin art—novels, paintings, and illustrations of street children—to trace popular attitudes toward them. I discovered that Horatio Alger’s 1868 novel Ragged Dick was a relative latecomer to this genre. I received access to a treasure trove of visual material, including advertisements and sheet music, collected by Peter J. Eckel, who was a devotee of Father John Drumgoole, the superintendent of St. Vincent’s Newsboys Home in New York.  One of Peter’s prized possessions was a scrapbook kept by the superintendent of the Newsboys’ Lodging House on New Chambers Street between 1875 and 1910. The Eckel Collection is now part of Princeton University’s Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Although I cast a wide net, there were still gaps in my understanding of news peddling in the Civil War, on railroads, and in the Far West until newspapers and other collections became word-searchable. Then the problem became too much material.

Q: How does your book relate to journalism history? How is it relevant to the present?

A: The book’s main service to journalism history, I think, is to illuminate the underside of the newspaper industry. I approached the topic from the perspective of a labor historian whose subjects just happened to be children and just happened to work in the newspaper industry. This approach ultimately led me to put the fields into conversation with each other and, hopefully, contribute to all three. Many historians note how widely newspapers circulated in American cities or across the hinterland, but they rarely elaborate on this all too human process as if it were incidental to the papers’ social or political influence. I see distribution as central to the journalistic enterprise and a compelling story in its own right. As British folklorist John Brand said in 1795, “nothing can be foreign to our enquiry, much less beneath our notice, that concern the smallest of the Vulgar; of those little Ones who occupy the lowest place, though by no means of the least importance in the political arrangement of human Beings.” I took this as my motto.

One of my findings is that newspapers were among the most important institutions of American childhood, providing not just income for millions of young people, but also a host of social welfare programs, such as newsboy clubs, bands, teams, trips, meals, schools, scholarships, and reading rooms. You won’t find more innovative or extensive offerings from the YMCA, Boy Scouts, or any other youth group. Far from being grateful and compliant, newsboys engaged in scores of strikes and boycotts, and they supported those of printers and other workers, all of which confirms newspapers’ reputation as a “conflict industry.” Newsboys also took part in political campaigns, working for or against their publishers. They hawked campaign biographies, put up and tore down candidates’ posters, and toured the country as stump speakers.

The issues examined in the book are still relevant today. Newspaper hawkers and carriers were the original gig workers, and they remain so. But they’ve now been joined by some sixty million unwaged independent contractors in all sectors of the economy. Newsboys also help us understand the perennial problem of fake news, the insidious influence of media monopolies, the use and abuse of press philanthropy, the longstanding prominence of socialists in reform circles, and the resurgence of youth activism.

Q: What advice do you have for other historians working/starting on book projects?

A: Learn to work well with others. It takes a lot of individual effort and commitment to write a book, but I couldn’t have written this one outside academia; it gave me the role models, the confidence, and the credibility I needed to undertake the project, and the necessary financial and intellectual base to complete it. This base included greater access to research grants and fellowships, an international community of scholars who read and critiqued my work, and conferences and seminars that enabled me to sharpen my arguments and attract the attention of agents and editors. Colleagues in the profession invested in my work literally and figuratively, and they are now helping to bring it to the attention of readers it might not otherwise reach. History is hard enough; we don’t need to do it alone.

Name: Elizabeth Atwood

University Affiliation and Position: Hood College, Associate Professor

Book Title: The Liberation of Marguerite Harrison, America’s First Female Foreign Intelligence Agent

1. Describe the focus of your book. 

This biography is the story of a middle-aged Baltimore socialite and newspaper reporter who in 1918 became America’s first female foreign intelligence agent. Although nearly forgotten now, Harrison was one of the most interesting American women of the early twentieth century. She became an intelligence agent at a time when many thought it was unseemly for women to even vote. Nevertheless, she traveled to some of the most dangerous parts of the world from 1918-1925, including war-torn Germany, Poland, Russia, Asia, and the Middle East, collecting information that helped guide U.S. foreign policy in the aftermath of World War I. She helped identify suspected Red agents, located Americans held in Bolshevik prisons, and scouted economic investment opportunities in Siberia and Iran.

The Russian Bolsheviks arrested her three times and imprisoned her twice for espionage, but she managed to escape the firing squad thanks to her charm and family connections. She also founded a Baltimore children’s hospital, created a woman geographers’ society, and saved the life of King Kong creator Merian Cooper.

• How did you come across this subject? Why did it interest you?

I first learned about her when I was a reporter at the Baltimore Sun. She was part of the folklore of the newspaper and her photograph was mounted outside a conference room. I thought it was shocking, even scandalous, for a reporter to work as an intelligence agent. A few years ago, when I had the chance to go on sabbatical, I decided to find out more about this fascinating and controversial figure.

• What archives or research materials did you use?

I began with Harrison’s own autobiographies and then compared her account with those of records in the National Archives and the Archives of the Russian Federal Security Bureau. Although she left very few letters, her files in the National Archives are fairly extensive and include some of her spy reports. In Moscow I was able to see her prison records, which included copies of her interrogations. I also read the articles she wrote for the Baltimore Sun and Evening Sun, accounts by contemporaries who knew her and interviewed her granddaughter, who lives in the Baltimore area.

• How does your book relate to journalism history? How is it relevant to the present?

Marguerite Harrison considered herself above all a newspaper woman and her espionage was carried out with the full knowledge and cooperation of her editors at the Baltimore Sun and the Associated Press. Some historians believe the scandal that erupted when her spy activities were revealed played a role in the American Society of Newspaper Editor’s adoption of a code of ethics in 1922.

I argue that her most important contribution was that she set the precedent for the American female intelligence officer. Prior to the Military Intelligence Division hiring Harrison, American officials were reluctant to hire women, believing they could not be trusted with overseas military assignments. The Europeans had no such reservations and frequently employed women to pry information from unsuspecting targets. Most famous of these was Mata Hari. Harrison was different. She persuaded the director of the Military Intelligence Division to hire her based on her knowledge of European culture and languages. She employed her keen observation skills in  writing insightful intelligence reports.

• What advice you have for other historians working/starting on book projects.

My best advice is to look for a good story that holds your interest because you’ll be living with it for quite a while. In my case, I spent years trying to figure out Marguerite Harrison. She was not very likeable in many ways. She had an affair with her sister’s husband, abandoned her son, worked as a double agent, and betrayed other journalists. But I found her fascinating and tried to understand what motivated her to do what she did.

By Rachel Grant, Membership Co-Chair

Name: Karen Miller Russell

University Affiliation and Position: University of Georgia, Jim Kennedy Professor of New Media and Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor

Book Title: Promoting Monopoly: AT&T and the Politics of Public Relations, 1876-1941

1. Describe the focus of your book. 

AT&T had one of the best known and respected U.S. publicity departments by the mid-20^th century, despised by critics but praised and emulated by other corporations. Publicity was integral to the growth of the telephone industry, and AT&T was central to the development of corporate public relations. I wanted to understand why PR was so important to AT&T and how exactly it used PR strategies and tactics to promote its views. I learned that the company’s desire to promote and protect the telephone monopoly propelled the creation of a PR program that in turn shaped the U.S. legal, political, media, and cultural landscape.

2. How did you come across this subject? Why did it interest you?

Everyone who knows anything about U.S. public relations history knows about Arthur Page, but most scholars have vastly underestimated AT&T’s commitment to public relations before the company hired him in 1927. I started off writing a biography of Page, but gradually realized that publicity started as soon as the telephone was invented, and that a formal system was in place before 1910. I decided that I needed to schedule a second trip to the archives to explore the earlier years and found a lot more than I expected.

3. What archives or research materials did you use?

I conducted research using the Page collections at the Wisconsin Historical Society and the Page Society in New York, and most importantly at the AT&T corporate archive in New Jersey, which was not available to many of the previous scholars studying Page. That’s where I found evidence of a previously forgotten corporate publicist, William A. Hovey, whose work included visits to antagonistic newspaper editors in 1886 and publicity for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. I also used databases including Newspapers.com to explore the company’s earliest attempts to influence press coverage. That allowed me to explore AT&T’s influence on local papers.

4. How does your book relate to journalism history? How is it relevant to the present?

In 1903 AT&T hired the Publicity Bureau to promote both its service and its political perspectives. The AT&T archive included a list of newspapers that printed stories provided by the company, and I used newspaper databases to track them down. AT&T’s representatives used every strategy they could think of, from paying for advertising in hopes of influencing editorial coverage (it worked) to golfing with an editor in hopes that a personal relationship would result in AT&T’s perspective at least being included in the newspaper (it did). It’s a pretty good precursor to discussions about sponsored content and native advertising.

5. What advice you have for other historians working/starting on book projects

My advice for other historians is twofold: (1) don’t believe received wisdom, and (2) read everything. Received wisdom suggested that James Ellsworth, who started at the Publicity Bureau and moved to AT&T in 1908, was a bit of a huckster, successful though not terribly ethical, and that his importance was simply that he preceded Arthur Page at AT&T. The more research I did, the more my opinion of him changed, and I ended up writing three chapters on Ellsworth and only two on Page. Ellsworth deserves the credit for creating and institutionalizing the publicity function at AT&T and its regional operating companies (the “baby Bells”). He innovated advertising and then film as corporate publicity tools, and he was responsible for the development of the company’s employee benefits program. Page certainly was an important pioneer in corporate PR, but his legacy has unfairly and inaccurately overshadowed Ellsworth’s contributions.

As for reading everything, I discovered William Hovey because a telephone engineer mentioned him on a single page in his memoir about Bell Telephone’s earliest years. I asked the archivist at AT&T’s history center if they had anything on this man – not very optimistically, because the earliest years of the company are not always well documented – and he replied that they had two folders that included his name. When I started reading about Hovey and realized what he had done at AT&T, I gasped so loudly that the archivists asked me what was wrong. Believe me, nothing was wrong! It’s not every day that you find the earliest known U.S. corporate publicist.

By Rachel Grant, Membership Co-Chair, University of Florida, rgrant@jou.ufl.edu

Dr. Mike Conway is an associate professor of journalism at Indiana University’s Media School. He recently wrote Contested Ground: “The Tunnel” and the Struggle Over Television News in Cold War America.

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Q: Describe the focus of your book. 

A: A 1962 documentary on a Berlin Wall tunnel escape brought condemnation from both sides of the Iron Curtain. The strong reaction was not limited just to the topic, but for the medium itself. The Tunnel was produced for American network television.

The Tunnel controversy and the rise of television news reveal a critical juncture in American journalism and media history as the Cold War entered one of its most dangerous periods. The surprisingly fast ascendance of television news as the country’s top choice for information signaled the public’s acceptance but threatened the self-defined leadership role of print journalism as well as the implicit cooperation among government officials and reporters on Cold War issues.

NBC’s Reuven Frank is at the center of Contested Ground as producer of The Tunnel and creator of the most popular journalism source of the period, NBC’s nightly newscast, “The Huntley-Brinkley Report.” The production and reception of the documentary, and all of television news, bring into focus a major upheaval in American news communication and the boundary work involved as government leaders, journalism competitors, and other groups fought over the shifting media landscape. 

Contested Ground has been named the 2020 winner of the Library of American Broadcasting Foundation Broadcast Historian Award. The book is also one of three finalists for the 2020 AEJMC Tankard Book Award.

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