Kathy Olson
Professor and chair
Department of Journalism and Communication
Lehigh University
Where you work: Lehigh University
Where you got your Ph.D.: UNC-Chapel Hill
Current favorite class: Media Ethics and Law
Current research project: A book on the First Amendment and the right of publicity
Fun fact about yourself: As a kid, I lived in a requisitioned house in Berlin that had belonged to one of the generals executed for the plot to assassinate Hitler.
Kathy Roberts Forde (University of Massachusetts Amherst) has collaborated on “Truth, Dissent & the Legacy of Daniel Ellsberg,” a free, online 50th anniversary conference commemorating the release of the Pentagon Papers, April 30-May, 2021. The website also features information about the Ellsberg Archive Project and a five-part podcast series, The Whistleblower.
Marilyn Greenwald (Ohio University) had an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal. “Dr. Seuss, Meet the Sanitized Sleuths Known as the Hardy Boys” deals with literary “cancel culture” and the updating and changing of series juvenile fiction in 1959 and 1960, including the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and Tom Swift books.
Three History Division members have been elected to 2021 AEJMC leadership positions. Katherine Foss (Middle Tennessee State University) and Kimberly Voss (University of Central Florida) will serve on the Research Committee. Shearon Roberts (Xavier University of LA) will serve on the Teaching Committee.
Teri Finneman (University of Kansas) hosted History Division members on Zoom for the recording of her interview with White House Reporter Jonathan Karl of ABC, author of Front Row at the Trump Show. The event is now available as a Journal History Podcast here.
Wendy Melillo (American University) has won this year’s Michael S. Sweeney award for her article “Democracy’s Adventure Hero on a New Frontier: Bridging Language in the Ad Council’s Peace Corps Campaign, 1961-1970.”
Jennifer Moore, University of Minnesota-Duluth
Where you work: Associate professor of journalism, University of Minnesota-Duluth
Where you got your Ph.D.: Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
Current favorite class: History of American Media
Current research project: I am very excited about my sabbatical leave during the 2021-2022 school year. I have a couple of projects planned, including a book-length manuscript about a largely forgotten but important newspaper editor.
Fun fact about yourself: During the pandemic, I’ve been volunteering with a local music venue in Duluth to help produce live-streaming performances on YouTube.
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:
Rachel Grant (University of Florida) won the top paper in the International Communication Association’s Ethnicity and Race in Communication Division, with co-authors Raegan Burden and Spenser Cheek. Their paper, “I Am Speaking:” 2020 VP Nominee Kamala Harris’s Impact of Black Feminism as Social Influencers on Twitter,” will be presented at ICA’s conference in May. ica21-printprogram.pdf (ymaws.com)
Cayce Myers’ (Virgina Tech University) essay, “The Legal Legacy of 9/11,” was published online in February with Journalism History, as part of its series of essays on the anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Cayce is vice chair of the AEJMC History Division. Myers Essay: The Legal Legacy of 9/11 – Journalism History journal (journalism-history.org)
Elisabeth Fondren (St. John’s University) appeared as a guest on the Journalism History Podcast, in the episode, “The Great War Through the Lens,” with host Teri Finneman. Fondren talked about the work of World War 1-era photographer Percy Brown. Fondren Podcast: The Great War Through the Lens – Journalism History journal (journalism-history.org)
Teri Finneman (University of Kansas) and Will Mari’s (Louisiana State University) pandemic oral-history project was featured on Poynter.org, as written up and presented by Kristen Hare, “The Essential Workers.” Oral history: How journalists in mid-America became essential workers during the pandemic – Poynter
Owen V. Johnson’s (Indiana University) essay “The Press of Change: Mass Communications in Late Communist and Post-Communist Societies,” originally published in 1992 in Adaptation and Transformation in Communist and Post-Communist Systems, edited by Sabrina P. Ramet (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), has recently been republished in a Routledge edition of the book. His study was funded by a research grant from the National Council for Soviet and East European Research.
Joe Saltzman (University of Southern California) chaired a panel on the Image of the Public Relations Practitioner in Popular Culture at the AEJMC Public Relations Division virtual conference on Friday, February 26. He produced a special video showing excerpts from films and TV shows from 1901 to 2019. He also recently delivered three lectures to 40 Chinese students in China on the Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture.
Hi everyone,
My social-media feeds are filled with hope, for once, as friends and family not only start to get their vaccines, but finish their second doses, and more folks become eligible every day. Even though our 2021 conference is virtual, I am also feeling increasingly confident that we’ll be in Detroit next year and back to a new kind of normal by the end of this fall.
But there have been some really ugly events over the past couple of months that we as media historians need to meditate on and respond to. The first is the racist attack in Atlanta that killed eight people, include six Asian Americans. Your division leadership denounces this senseless violence and we affirm the life and dignity of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI), many of whom we count as valued colleagues and friends. For more on how to help proactively, check out groups like Stop AAPI Hate and AAPI Women Lead.
The past year has been full of violence, from the murder of George Floyd last summer to the Jan. 6 attach on the U.S. Capitol and the shooting (last week as I write this) in Boulder, Colorado. It can be hard to know what to do, as scholars. We can and should roundly condemn these acts of violence and repression, but we should then use our classrooms and our scholarship to confront the endemic issues that cause them.
I had an opportunity to talk briefly about this with Dr. Rachel Grant, an assistant professor at the University of Florida, and our Clio newsletter editor, who does vital research on race, social movements, social justice, and Black feminism, often through a media-historian’s lens. She encouraged me to call on the allies of Black and Indigenous people, along with other historically underrepresented groups, to stand with and support them.
Having courageous conversations with students in the classroom, whether it be via Zoom, a hybrid format, or in person, is a lot easier to write about than to do. While I try to foster a dynamic, healthy space for hard topics, like the baked-in history of racism in American institutions like journalism or the military, I of course fall short. I don’t always know what to say, how to create a safe space for conversation, or how to help students discuss these topics when confronting institutional racism makes me uncomfortable as well.
But just because it’s hard or awkward doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. I encourage our members to engage head on with current events, using the crucial context of history. We have some good resources on our division page (and that will migrate to our new site), but other sites and organizations that might help with teaching the media history of systematic racism include Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research, the Organization for American Historians, and Blackpast.org.
Finally, I would also urge you to read, cite and teach the work of our own members – especially members from historically underrepresented groups – who study these issues.
With our conference, I am hoping for a good showing of research on issues and representation, and want to thank our reviewers for their help, in advance. This column may not appear before the deadline, but I also want to thank those who submitted their work this year amidst really trying circumstances. I also wanted to encourage you, too, that if you just did not have the bandwidth to do so, to please continue your membership and to submit next year.
Please reach out to our research chair, Dr. Maddie Liseblad, at maddie madeleine.liseblad@mtsu.edu, if you have a question about the paper competition (or just to thank her for all she does!).
We will have more information on our conference programming once we get through the judging process, but Cayce and I are excited about we already have in store. We’ll be in touch with further details as we get them.
Don’t forget to join our more secure, revamped Facebook group, “History Division,” if you haven’t had the chance to do so.
Please reach out to me at wmari1@lsu.edu, wtmari@gmail.com, or @willthewordguy, on Twitter, if you need anything or have any questions or suggestions.
#mediahistorymatters and so do you—please continue to stay safe, and we’ll be in touch again soon.
By Will Mari
Hi again, folks!
Now that we know our conference format—online—for the summer, I wanted to check in briefly.
Please look at our paper call (which also has info on abstracts), and let Maddie know if you have questions—please also consider being a reviewer. You can learn more and sign up via our site, here. We need a good group of folks this year, especially with those abstracts.
We’ll be getting more updates from big AEJMC about the platform used to host the presentations, as well as on pricing, soon. Cayce, Maddie and I have continued planning for a variety of aspects of the conference, and we’re getting excited about the range of panels, papers and activities that we have in store. We’ll be reaching out to some of you in the next few weeks and months as we head into the spring soon, too.
Speaking of the conference, we had to make the hard decision to not have a preconference this year—I want us to conserve our resources and to focus on making the primary conference great. As I told our executive committee, Dr. Shearon Roberts was incredibly generous to have organized permission to use the physical space at Xavier for free. Thank you! But with things now virtual, and since we did not get much interest, but also in the interest of reducing burdens on our members, we’ll save that idea for another time, perhaps under Cayce and Maddie.
I wanted to share some good news about our site: thanks to the hard work of Keith Greenwood, our webmaster, we’ve secured mediahistorydivision.com and .org. He’s hard at work at starting the transfer of material from our old site, and that should be done sometime later next month, before our next issue of ‘Clio.’ We’ll not lose our archives or content from the old page, but the new one will be a lot easier to update, navigate and use—stay tuned for more update there. This is something we voted on last year, but have been working on behind the scenes since.
Please let me know if you have any questions, and don’t hesitate to contact me at wmari1@lsu.edu, wtmari@gmail.com, or @willthewordguy, on Twitter. Take care!
The Journal of Public Relations Research invites submissions for a special issue on Faith, Spirituality, and Public Relations. More than half the world’s population professes an adherence to a faith; however, much of the scholarly research on public relations focuses on the corporate context.
This belies the important roles that religious figures, movements, and organizations have played in the development of public relations practices and the influence they continue to exert on the discipline. From the ancient origins of public relations through
the present day, the contribution of faith to the discipline deserves further study.
Thus, this issue aims to highlight the importance of faith and spirituality and their contributions and connections to the public relations field. Authors are encouraged to broadly interpret faith and spirituality to encompass organized religions, spiritual figures/leaders/texts, and faith communities and movements. Approaches from
varied disciplines and methodologies are welcomed, and manuscripts that create or expand theory in public relations will be prioritized. All submissions should detail the significance of the manuscript to the discipline.
Manuscript and Technical Requirements
• Content shall further the Journal’s primary purpose, which is to create, test, refine, critique, or expand theory in public relations. Authors should explicitly articulate how their scholarship serves the purpose of the journal.
• Content shall reflect the highest standards of scholarship, regardless of the research methods used.
• Manuscripts shall be submitted in APA style and edited to the highest standards of English-language grammar, spelling, punctuation, sentence structure, word usage, etc.
• Manuscripts shall conform to the Journal’s standard limit of 20 pages of text (not including references, figures, tables). Manuscripts that exceed the standard page limit may be considered if the authors (a) justify the manuscript length in their cover letter; (b) report qualitative and/or historical data; and (c) keep to a reasonable length appropriate for the nature of the research method and the subject studied.
• Authors shall take care to indicate in the online manuscript submission system that their submission is, in fact, intended for the special issue on Faith, Spirituality, and Public Relations. Failure to make this indication (in the cover letter AND in the appropriate selection box) will lead to the manuscript being entered into the Journal’s regular review process, rather than the special issue process.
Important Dates
• June 1, 2021: Initial manuscript submissions due from authors
• August 1, 2021: Decisions announced to authors
• October 1, 2021: Final manuscripts due from authors for publication
• December 2021: Publication of special issue
Questions? Contact Guest Editor Cylor Spaulding at cspaulding@fullerton.ed
The History Division Needs You! Call for Reviewers
The History Division will need help reviewing papers and extended abstracts for AEJMC 2021. If you are willing to review for the History Division’s research competition, please RSVP via this Google form.
If you have any questions, please contact Division Research Chair Maddie Liseblad (Middle Tennessee State) at Madeleine.Liseblad@mtsu.edu. We will need approximately 75 reviewers for the competition. Graduate students are not eligible to serve as reviewers and, in general, reviewers should not submit their own research into the competition. Thank you in advance for your assistance!
Clarence Thomas, Virginia Commonwealth University
Where you work:
I am a tenured Associate Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. I have been teaching college for 42 years—30 at VCU. I will retire in June 2021.
Where you got your Ph.D.:
I earned my Ph.D. in Media History at the University of Florida in 1990. I am the first man and the first African American to do so.
Current favorite class:
I teach a variety of history courses, however, my favorite course is one that I created called Diversity in the Media.
Current research project:
I am currently interested in U.S. Presidents of the past who were controversial (like Trump) and how they might have used the media of the time.
Fun fact about yourself:
I love jazz, vocal and instrumental. I was a trombonist from elementary school through college.