by Doug Cumming, Washington & Lee University

What textbook do you use for your Journalism History course?

A professor in New Jersey wanted to know what to use in her class on media history. Others in the Small Programs Interest Group (SPIG) listserv responded with suggestions.

Mitchell Stephens’ History of News is good on the early years in America and Europe, “a breezy writer and the students like him.”

Paul Starr’s Creation of the Media is dry, so it’s a turnoff for students. But it does a great job of pushing the political origins of the modern media, from the Revolution through the Great Depression.

Timothy Wu’s The Master Switch offers good writing and good coverage of electronic media, especially if you feel hostile to David Sarnoff, AT&T and Bill Gates. These were suggestions from John Jenks of Dominican University, who added that there really aren’t any good textbooks. He uses these three, supplemented by articles.

Another professor offered that he had completely given up on textbooks for that course. And a fourth professor suggested websites instead.

I’ve never been a fan of textbooks in any classroom. They didn’t work for me in high school, and I don’t sense that students retain much from college textbooks. Besides, the corporate monopoly for college textbooks is just downright creepy.

For teaching history, textbooks seem particularly ill-suited. Instead of giving students a smacking sense that history is what historians make of primary sources, today’s textbooks move in the wrong direction, from secondary sources into a big bland tertiary source.

I like the older journalism histories. Take Willard G. Bleyer’s Main Currents in the History of American Journalism (a 1927 nod to the intellectual history of Vernon Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought published that same year), or Journalism in the United States (1872) by New York Herald managing editor Frederick Hudson, or the granddaddy of journalism histories, Isaiah Thomas’s History of Printing in America (1810). These are artifacts of the history itself, more like primary sources than textbooks.

There is a newer history of American journalism that has been winning praise since it came out from UMass Press a couple of years ago, Christopher B. Daly’s Covering America: A Narrative History of a Nation’s Journalism. It’s a hefty 533 pages, and lists at $49.91 for the hardback, half that on Kindle.

I don’t know if media-history classrooms are the ideal market for Covering America. I think the readers most ready for this would be journalists or recovering journalists of all stripes. That’s what I said in my review of Daly’s manuscript – “the 100,000 or so still working for news organizations, current journalism students, and those of us who have been bought out, retired or escaped into the professoriate.”

What I like about the book is that it really is a narrative, a good storyteller’s blend of journalistic anecdote and academic sourcing. I guess this is because Daly is from both worlds (as Frederick Hudson and Isaiah Thomas were). He was born in Boston (like American journalism), majored in history at Harvard, did graduate work at UNC, reported for the AP and Washington Post, and now teaches at Boston University.

I’ll quote from my recommendation to UMass Press. “This offers a fresh telling of an important dimension of American history. It adds shape and new understanding to the intriguing stories many of us know as myths of origin – from Ben Franklin’s escape from printer devil’s servitude to biographies of such greats a David Halberstam and H.L. Mencken. The renderings of legendary narratives, such as the battle over the Pentagon Papers, coverage of Korea, and the backgrounds of Murrow, Limbaugh et al., are so well done, I wondered why more movies (like “Good Night and Good Luck”) haven’t been made out of such historic figures and events. The author is skeptical enough to dig into the facts behind the legends, but happily, is not on a debunking crusade. His critical lens is that of a Darwinian paradigm, and his obvious faith in journalism as an honorable estate (as Louis Rubin calls it) and learned profession (as Robert E. Lee tried to envision it) comes through.”

(In an early printing of the book, I was flattered to see some of that quote attributed to me in a blurb on the back dust jacket, next to one from Susan Orlean. But alas, I see in later printings, I’ve been bumped from my brief career as a blurb-writer.)

Why teach journalism history at all? One reason is that it is where thoughtful people go for answers to today’s hot questions around digital and social media. For example, can an activist or partisan be, in a pure sense, a journalist? David Carr, in one of his media columns in the New York Times last summer, was willing to say that Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian is both. Greenwald’s blog makes his activist agenda obvious, but his work, notably reporting Edward Snowden’s leaks of NSA’s domestic phone-call snooping, clearly makes him a journalist, Carr says. Carr invokes journalism history. When government or political parties underwrote the press in the 19th century, journalism was partisan. When independence was rewarded, the press grew up around “objectivity” as a gold standard. Now, with those financial incentives flaking away, advocacy journalism is re-asserting itself in new ways.

Jack Shafer, media columnist for Reuters, weighed in a few weeks later. “You don’t have to be a scholar or a historian to appreciate the hundreds of flavors our journalism has come in over the centuries,” Shafer wrote in mid- July. “Just fan the pages of Christopher B. Daly’s book Covering America: A Narrative History of a Nation’s Journalism for yourself.” If Greenwald thinks he’s shaking the whole world, so did Thomas Paine, Shafer says, quoting Daly.

But just fanning pages is not what we want our students to do. My colleague Art Brisbane, the former public editor of the Times who is teaching our Knight chair of media ethics this year, was so smitten by the Daly book, he required it as a secondary textbook in his journalism ethics class. But he says he felt students got less out of it by merely dipping into as a supplemental text. He thinks it would be better as a primary text in a journalism history class.

Or maybe we should be requiring an anthology, like another book Shafer’s column commends: Muckraking: The Journalism that Changed America, edited by Judith and William Serrin. That would bring students back to primary sources – not so much studying history as doing history.