by Ronald R. Rodgers
This study’s terrain of analysis is the decades of pastoral press criticism that arose around the rise of journalism as a force that helped to upend and reconstitute society and that shouldered aside religion and long-held traditions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
It seeks to trace religion’s struggle to hinge the notion of social responsibility and all that entailed to the news ethic of daily journalism. Within the ambit of that criticism was censure, but also discussion, analysis, judgment, proffered solutions, and even approbation.
This historical analysis attempts to isolate as much as is possible one stream of influential discourse in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It does so by thematically analyzing hundreds of intellectual discussions and debates that appeared in books, the newspaper trade journals, religious and popular periodicals, sermons, speeches, tracts, secular and religious press accounts, autobiographies and memoirs, and reports of religious associations.
All of these media were the source of considerable critical discourse about the newspaper, which in their totality foster an ethos of proper journalistic conduct.[i]
The year 1923 is roughly the end point of the time frame of this book. It is that year the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ adopted the Canons of Journalism, the first nationwide code of ethics for the profession and the first formal call for press responsibility in the United States long before the Hutchins Commission report in 1947.
While it is difficult to signpost any particular year, given the slow and haphazard pace of change, this book begins with the antebellum rise of the penny press in 1833 and accounts for the influence on the pulpit and the press of the postbellum rise of modernity, the growth of Gilded Age industrialism and powerful corporations, the political and corporate corruption of the age, the changing face of the United States with hundreds of thousands of immigrants arriving to feed the industrial machine, the population shift from rural to urban areas, and the subsequent surge of the reactionary agrarian Populist and, later, more middle-class Progressive movement, which was entwined with the religiously oriented and influential Social Gospel movement – each of which were voluminous in their critique of the daily press.
Enmeshed in all this change and reaction was the growing and transforming newspaper, which, at its core, had substituted “the market for the mission,” as one scholar has asserted.[ii] Indeed, the long conversation about the newspaper’s mission in society correlated with the growth of newspapers. And it was this conversation, I have argued elsewhere, that informed an ethos that helped codify journalistic norms for the twentieth century – seen at its earliest and most pronounced in the Canons of Journalism.
One argument I make in this study is that today, many journalists – whether at newspapers or at the panoply of digital venues captured under the rubric of “news media” – are as equally unmoored as their brethren decades ago. The advertising budgets of newspapers have been gutted. The Internet, social platforms, and mobile devices have transformed how news is consumed and shared.
The industry is struggling to find new ways of supporting journalism. And in the process, journalists are struggling to keep their footing as they attempt to redefine their news ethic for a new era. This, then, is a struggle to define the mission of journalism not unlike that of the past. But one thing the journalists of the past had that those of the present do not is a recent history from which they could draw to redefine that news ethic – the exemplars of an old ideal of newspapering from an era that one writer has described as the “Golden Age of the Newspaper,” when “editors and reporters labored to make newspapers for sensible people, never for fools.”[iii]
[i] Hazel Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America, (Madison, Wisc.: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 7.
[ii] Helen MacGill Hughes, News and the Human Interest Story (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1981), 7.
[iii] George F. Spinney, “Newspaper Methods Yesterday and To-Day,” Pearson Magazine 23, no. 5 (May 1910): 600.
Just in time to add to your summer reading list, the latest issue of Clio is here!
Spring has returned, and with it another edition of Clio, the History Division newsletter.
