What journalism history can do: Mending the relationship between theory and history in journalism and media studies

There appears to be a peculiar habit in journalism and media studies of treating history and theory as though they belonged to different rooms of the same house – usefully coexisting, sometimes engaging, but often content to remain in separation. This division of labor has produced excellent work in both directions, but it has also quietly reinforced the idea that history is raw material rather than an intellectual partner to theorization.

James Carey’s founding provocation for this journal ran against exactly this assumption . He called for a history that would function as an intellectual history of journalism’s ideas, one that asked not just what happened but what journalism thought itself to be at any given moment, and why.

The colonial-era US printer Benjamin Franklin is credited with responding to a question about what the Constitutional Convention of 1787 had produced by saying, “A republic – if you can keep it.”¹ The convention was the United States’ second attempt to form a national government after its revolutionary break from Britain – a break that was codified by the signatures of Franklin and fifty-five fellow delegates on July 4, 1776.

Of course, Franklin and his contemporaries’ vision of a democratic republic for propertied white men was significantly narrower than what most people in the US conceive today. That original vision of representative democracy was transformed by President Abraham Lincoln’s rhetorical reframing during the Civil War and subsequent constitutional amendments granting citizenship and basic rights to formerly enslaved people.² The vision was further expanded by the nineteenth amendment granting women the vote in the early twentieth century and by the civil rights laws of the 1960s that added enforcement mechanisms to the amendments passed a hundred years earlier. By the turn of this century, many US institutions had, at least rhetorically, embraced the notion of working toward a truly pluralistic multiracial democracy.