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.

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.

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.

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

Dr. David E. Sumner, a professor emeritus of journalism at Ball State (1990-2015), is currently a full-time author and working on his eight book. He recently wrote Fumbled Call: The Bear Bryant-Wally Butts Football Scandal that Split the Supreme Court and Changed American Libel Law.

Q: Describe the focus of your book. 

A: Using a narrative structure, the book tells, first, what happened behind the scenes preceding Butts v. Curtis Publishing  libel trial against the Saturday Evening Post in 1963 by Wally Butts, the ex-coach of the University of Georgia football team. The case is historically significant because the Post appealed the case to the Supreme Court in 1967, which redefined and expanded the definition of “public figure” in a 5-4 divided decision.

The Post article “The Story of a College Football Fix” accused Butts of giving away inside team information to Alabama coach Paul “Bear” Bryant in a telephone conversation to help Alabama win 35-0 in the season’s opener. (Bryant filed a separate libel lawsuit and settled out of court after the Butts trial.) The University of Georgia president, two assistant coaches, and four faculty members of the Athletic Board testified against Butts. The book presents several facts that suggest perjury by the coaches to cover up what they said in their telephone conversation. Butts could have been motivated by revenge because he had been fired as coach but remained athletic director with access to team information.  The first eight chapters tell how the story originated, and the last eight chapters give a day-by-day account of arguments and witness testimonies.

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.

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

Dr. Michael Fuhlhage, an assistant professor at Wayne State University, recently wrote a book titled Yankee Reporters and Southern Secrets: Journalism, Open Source Intelligence, and the Coming of the Civil War.

Q: Describe the focus of your book.

A: Yankee Reporters and Southern Secrets reveals the evidence of secessionist conspiracy that appeared in American newspapers from the end of the 1860 presidential campaign to just before the first major battle of the American Civil War. This book tells the story of the Yankee reporters who risked their lives by going undercover in hostile places that became the Confederate States of America. It shows that by observing the secession movement and sending reports for publication in Northern newspapers, they armed the Union with intelligence about the enemy that civil and military leaders used to inform their decisions in order to contain damage and answer the movement to break the Union apart and establish a separate slavery-based nation in the South. 

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.

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

Dr. Aimee Edmondson, an associate professor and graduate director at Ohio University, recently wrote a book titled “In Sullivan’s Shadow: The Use and Abuse of Libel Law during the Long Civil Rights Struggle.”

Q: Describe the focus of your book. 

A: The far right has long sown public distrust in the media as a political strategy, weaponizing libel law in an effort to stifle free speech and silence African American dissent. In Sullivan’s Shadow demonstrates that this strategy was pursued throughout American history, as southern public officials filed scores of lawsuits in their attempts to intimidate journalists who published accounts of police brutality against civil rights protestors. Taking the Supreme Court’s famous 1964 case New York Times v. Sullivan as my starting point, I work to illuminate a series of often astounding libel cases that preceded and followed this historic ruling.

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

Dr. Patrick C. File, an assistant professor of media law at the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, recently wrote a book titled “Bad News Travels Fast: The Telegraph, Libel, and Press Freedom in the Progressive Era.”

Q: Please describe the focus of your book. 

A: The book demonstrates how law and technology intertwined at the turn of the twentieth century to influence debates about reputation, privacy, and the acceptable limits of journalism. It does this by examining a series of fascinating libel cases by a handful of plaintiffs—including socialites, businessmen, and Annie Oakley—who sued newspapers across the country for republishing false newswire reports.

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

A: When digging through journalism trade publications of the 1880s and 1890s as a Ph.D. student, I found coverage of the infamous Tyndale Palmer and Annie Oakley libel crusades, and wondered why I hadn’t read about them in journalism history scholarship since they seemed like a really big deal to journalists at the time. There appeared to be an interesting parallel to present day issues related to mass communication technology, the careless or wanton spreading of false, harmful information, and questions about how the law should try to keep up. I got to thinking about the relationship among professional practices and ethics, communication technology, and the social construction of the concept of press freedom, and a dissertation and book were born.