The following are ideas from our 2022 award-winning members to consider implementing in your own journalism history classes.
Journalistic Truth
Melita M. Garza, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
At a Glance: Students use historical research methods and concepts from media studies to explicate the meaning of journalistic truth, the role of moral courage in pursuit of journalistic truth, and role of journalism as a bulwark of freedom and human rights.
Goals: I developed this course out of frustration with the negative framing of journalists and journalism and with the hope of helping students see why accountability journalism matters today as much as yesterday.
The course has a three-fold purpose. The first is to engage students in the theory and philosophy of the constructs of truth, moral courage, and journalism. The second is to link the work of current “protectors of the truth,” as linguist George Lakoff refers to journalists, with the work of reporters of the past who spoke truth to power and paid a price. The third is to teach historical methods in a way that enables students to see how researching the journalistic past can illuminate our understanding of the journalistic present.
The connection between the present and the past on this topic crystalized for me when I saw Ed Hall’s “The New Black Power” cartoon, which is on the cover of my syllabus. Hall explained to me that he saw Yamiche Alcindor, Abby Phillip, and April Ryan as taking a stand for justice in much the same way that athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos did when they gave the black power salute at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. By riffing off former war correspondent John Dominis’s famous photo, Hall linked not only a piece of sports history, but also a piece of journalism history to our understanding of today. This course is about helping students make their own links between the past and present so that they can better understand both.
How to Do It: I teach this course as a readings/podcasts and research colloquium. Students lead class discussion for assigned weeks, interspersed with mini-lectures from the professor, visits from guest speakers, and in-class assignments with professor-developed worksheets and reflection prompts. The overarching objective is to help students develop an understanding of the role of journalists in promoting democracy, justice, and equality, whether reporting domestically or in conflict zones abroad.
The course first focuses on defining “truth” and moral courage, while providing a grounding in key attributes of journalism. Subsequent readings relate to specific journalists and historical periods and are presented thematically. In short reflection papers, students are encouraged to compare and contrast the way journalists across time confronted questions of truth and balanced risk. I also introduce background on historical methods. Readings and class activities incorporate obituaries, excerpts from journalists’ memoirs, original documents from digital archives, news stories, and academic research articles. This exposes the students to an array of sources and helps them find an approach to their final paper.
This course examines contemporary journalists who have faced danger for standing on moral principle, including the Nobel Prize winning Filipina journalist Maria Ressa and the slain U.S. journalist James W. Foley, and links them to historical figures such as the abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy, who was murdered in 1837 in Alton, Illinois, for advocating an end to slavery. The course emphasizes these are not just things that happen in other places and times, using examples like the May 29, 2020, Minnesota arrest on live television of CNN correspondent Omar Jimenez as he reported on the police shooting of an unarmed Black man—George Floyd. “The arrest told all media that there are people within law enforcement who now feel empowered enough to shut down coverage of unrest — unrest resulting from police violence — flat out in the open,” (James Poniewozik, “CNN Arrest is What Actual Censorship Looks Like,” New York Times, May 29, 2020).
White Supremacy and The Press
Kathy Roberts Forde, University of Massachusetts Amherst
At a Glance: Students learn how to write public history about the role of the press in the white supremacist North Carolina election of 1898 and Wilmington Massacre, using secondary and primary sources.
Mock Trial Exercise
Katie Foss, Middle Tennessee State University
At a Glance: I created a mock trial exercise to help students understand the historical context and media framing that contributed to the villainization of “Typhoid Mary” Mallon.
Why It’s Needed: In health communication history, the case of “Typhoid” Mary Mallon is key to understanding shifts in medicine and journalism in the early 1900s, demonstrating how media of the moment fueled a critical public health transformation – at Mallon’s expense. I used to lecture on this topic. However, even when I contextualized her case, students sympathized with public health authorities and perceived her as a murderer, drawing from popular culture’s consistently negative representations of her story. To help students better understand the various factors and personalities that impacted the media framing and Mallon’s overall case, I developed this mock trial activity, based on Mary Mallon’s actual appeal to the New York Supreme Court.
Students’ transformation in understanding this moment does not occur during the trial in as much as after the trial, in the follow-up discussion. We talk about the research process and their assigned positions during the trial, linking their responses to the historical context. More than a lecture, this mock trial helps students to both understand why public health officials were quick to lock up Mary Mallon in 1907 and the contextual factors that are usually missed in telling her story. In researching Mallon’s case, students learn that Mallon was a poor, Irish immigrant woman, with no family or education. She never understood that she could feel healthy, but harbor and spread Salmonella typhi, the bacteria that causes typhoid fever, through her cooking. Timing played a significant role in Mallon’s demise, as she became infamous shortly after scientists discovered asymptomatic carriers, but before the typhoid vaccine was release. Furthermore, the discovery and pursuit of Mallon made the self-trained “Sanitary Engineer” George Soper famous. Moreover, even before Mallon’s trial, the press framed her as a monster, cooking the skulls of her “victims.” As students learn more about this context, their perceptions of Mary Mallon shift from thinking of her as a villain to a victim of her time.
How to Do It: A mock trial or role-play can be used to teach many concepts or moments in media history. When using this approach, consider personal obstacles, included mental wellness and disabilities, in how you set up the activity. I set up the roles to be gender-neutral and inclusive. I also recognize that not all students are comfortable speaking in front of the class. To account for this range, I specify what each role will entail and allow for minimal speaking roles (i.e. “the jury” or another group of people that can appoint a spokesperson).
I require all students to read a set of materials to prepare for the activity and come to class with a typed list of notes or a summary of their informed positions.
Following the activity, I do a debrief, in which students speak as themselves to reflect and critically analyze the moment/situation/trial.
Transcription Project
Will Mari, Louisiana State University
At a Glance: I have students contribute to volunteer transcription efforts at the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and other institutions. These are defined as projects that take previously non-digitized material and translate them into text for use by scholars and the public. They are crowd-sourced, large-scale efforts that have relatively easy-to-follow instructions and that students often find enjoyable—and they certainly mix things up a bit (I substitute this activity for a traditional primary-source response).
Goals: The overarching goal for this project is to show students the value of actively engaging in history instead of passively receiving it, by 1) working directly with primary sources and historical methodology, and 2) contribute to a larger, service project.
How to Do It: Students can choose from a variety of projects (see links) and can add to, revise or review original transcriptions of the text of media items such as ads, diary entries, log books, recipes, and in one particularly poignant case, slave ads, which of course have a long and tragic association with American journalism.
Instructions for Students: Please pick ONE transcription project from the Smithsonian or National Archives or Library of Congress: (there are a number listed; many are completed, but others are still in progress) https://transcription.si.edu/; https://www.archives.gov/citizen-archivist; https://crowd.loc.gov. Or you can participate in this project, with Cornell: https://freedomonthemove.org/
Please follow the relevant instructions (each of the projects above have a “how-to” page or pages; please review these carefully), and then upload a screenshot of your completed submission for any one of the above projects, of your choice, with a short, two-paragraph description, to our class page by the end of the day. We’ll start this activity in class, but you’ll finish it on your own today.
Then, in one paragraph (3-5 sentences) tell me briefly WHY you picked your project, and then, in a second paragraph (3-5 more sentences), tell me something you learned about the “HOW” of doing media history. Please make sure to review the readings this week that discuss historical methodology.
Focus on contributing to a project, but try not to worry about being perfect or adding something radically new—most media-history research, in fact, adds incrementally to existing knowledge and only rarely turns the world upside down (though that does happen!). If you get stuck, or run into obstacles (or just can’t find something that needs to be added to), please see me during office hours or send me an email. I have a working list of alternative projects.