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.
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