DAVID T. Z. MINDICH
Ph.D Candidate, American Studies
New York University
740 West End Avenue #10
New York City 10025
(212) 316-9211
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
WORK IN PROGRESS: DISSERTATION PROJECT
"Building the Pyramid: The Rise of 'Objectivity' in
19th Century American Journalism"
WORK IN PROGRESS: DISSERTATION PROJECT
DIVISION: HISTORY
"Building the Pyramid: The Rise of 'Objectivity' in
19th Century American Journalism"
Until the end of the nineteenth century, the discourse of storytelling
nearly always took a standard form: first, an announcement of
the
utility or importance of the story, followed by a chronological
narration, leaving the surprise, or what Aristotle called "Reversal of
the Situation," for last. The New York Herald's 1847 news story,
promising astonishment with the headline, "Terrible Flood in the West,"
fits this pattern: The reporter withholds what would be the modern
"lead" until the final paragraphs: a woman and her six children are
missing; the flood swept away $2 million worth of property. When, as a
young man in 1892, Theodore Dreiser entered the world of journalism
and
the office of the Chicago Globe, his editor told him that the first
paragraph of a news story must reveal "Who or what? How? When? Where?"
giving away the punch line, or lead, in the first paragraph.
Between
1847 and 1892 someone or someones, somehow, at sometime, somewhere,
did
something to change the way newspapers tell stories. My
dissertation
examines the confluence of forces that changed news from a
chronological
to an "objective" style. I have also begun to place journalistic
"objectivity" in its broad cultural context. To this end, I have divided
the dissertation into seven chapters, each corresponding to a
different
problem of journalistic "objectivity," presented here in four
sections.
Chapter 1: The Bull-Whipping of James Gordon Bennett and "Objectivity's"
Primordial Soup
and
Chapter 2: "Between the Bank and the Kitchen": A Non-Partisan Ethic
Emerges in the "Age of Inegalitarianism."
Journalism historians generally place the birth of modern American
journalism in the Jacksonian era and tie it to the "democratic
spirit"
of the age. Frank L. Mott calls what came before that era the "Dark
Ages" of American journalism, a view shared by other historians.
Daniel
Schiller agrees and sees "a pattern of objectivity," emerging in the
Jacksonian era. Michael Schudson, in Discovering the News, claims
that
the modern press emerged during the 1830s, an era he calls the "Age
of
Egalitarianism." But while Schudson and others claim that
"objectivity" grew out of the era's democratic promise, evidence shows
that the non-partisan ethic emerged in response to precisely
opposite
factors: violence, class conflict, racial and gender subjugation, and
the failure of the Jacksonian promise. While the rhetoric of
"objectivity" often included words like "fairness" and "balance," the
reality of the Jacksonian era and beyond was that the political
promises
of egalitarianism rarely extended beyond white males. I have
analyzed
comments about "objectivity" in the abolitionist paper, the
Liberator
and the penny paper, the New York Herald, and found that they often
reflected the degree to which the writers themselves felt a part of the
Jacksonian political promise. James Gordon Bennett, the editor of
the
successful Herald, attempted to remove "color" from the news and
placed
himself firmly in the center of partisan politics. On the other
hand,
William L. Garrison, the editor of the Liberator, mirrored the views
of
Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists in refusing to be the
"the
political partisan of any man," standing outside the political
process
altogether. Garrison's writings reveal how much of Jacksonian
discourse
existed outside political boundaries. The outsiders had little use
for
a form that attempted to "balance" issues in partisan terms: there
was
generally no place in the public discourse for the enfranchisement
of
women, African-Americans and others.
Chapter 3: "Between the Herald's Lack of Conviction and the Tribune's
Excess of it": The Wire Services and the "Extreme Center"
and
Chapter 4: The Rise of Data and Naive Empiricism
During this period, Horace Greeley promised his readers a "daily
photograph of the world's events," the wire services began to market
news "devoid of opinion," professional journalists' societies arose
across America, and textbooks told journalism students to "chronicle,
don't comment." Running contemporaneously alongside the journalists'
increasing use of "objective" notions such as "detachment" and
assertions of factuality, was a growing reliance in the social sciences
on these same qualities. In anthropology and related fields, the
rise
of naive empiricism meant that professionals believed that their
world
was both knowable and namable, a view that seems to have contributed
to
the journalists' claim of "objectivity." During this period, public
health workers moved from a speculative profession to one which
justified its claims with scientific studies and data-analysis. In The
Cholera Years, Charles Rosenberg outlines the response to the
Cholera
epidemics of 1832, 1849, and 1866. The medical response to the
epidemic evolved from the horrific "cures" of 1832, including mercury
poisoning and tobacco smoke enemas, to an efficient response in the
1866
epidemic. By 1866, according to Rosenberg, "statistics were becoming
the
reality of science." The journalists' increasing reliance on
"facts"
during the ante-bellum period rose in tandem with the rise of
statistical analysis and data gathering in the sciences.
Chapter 5
Edwin M. Stanton, Information Control, and the Inverted Pyramid
Historians of journalism have long sought to find the first
practitioners of the "inverted pyramid" style of news writing, a style
which conveys the most important information in the first paragraphs
of
a story. Conventional wisdom dates the shift from the chronological
to
inverted pyramid style sometime in the late 19th century. Mitchell
Stephens and others claim that the inverted pyramid form was developed
by Civil War reporters "rushing to transmit their most newsworthy
information over often unreliable telegraph lines." I present evidence
that it was not journalists, but the War Department that was using
the
form during the Civil War. Indeed, I discovered that one of the
first
writers of inverted pyramids was Edwin M. Stanton, Lincoln's
Secretary
of War. Stanton has found his way into many histories of American
journalism, but always because of his notoriety as a press censor. I
reconcile Stanton's role as a writer of inverted pyramids with his
tight
rein on discourse, journalistic and otherwise, and see Stanton's
"objective" news writing style and his censorship as two related sides
of Stanton's repressive social control. There seems, of course, an
irony in the suggestion that Stanton the censor may have also been a
progenitor of a modern journalism. But given recent criticism of
"objectivity" by Gaye Tuchman and others, which suggests journalists'
over-reliance on figures of authority, a governmental source for the
inverted pyramid may be less surprising, and indeed fitting.
Chapter 6: Dana and Pulitzer: Information Confronts Story, and the
Masculinity of "Objectivity."
and
Chapter 7: "A Slanderous and Nasty-Minded Mulattress": Ida B. Wells,
Adolf Ochs, Lynching,
and the Rhetoric of Balance
By the last years of the nineteenth century, newspapers and wire
services had embraced "objectivity" and the idea that reality lies
between competing truth claims. But the idea that the world can be seen
without human filters is, of course, problematic. For example, the
New
York Times and other papers attempted to "balance" their coverage of
lynching: on the one hand lynching is evil, on the other "Negroes are
prone" to rape. Ida B. Wells, the anti-lynching crusader, and others
critiqued this equation and demonstrated that the underpinnings of
the
"objective" philosophy could be flawed. Wells' critique showed that
"balance" oftentimes serves the status-quo, and in the case of
lynching,
is a skewed and dangerous construction. In return, the otherwise
staid
Times wrote an editorial calling Wells unpatriotic and a "slanderous
and
nasty-minded mulattress" in an attempt to discredit her criticisms.
These chapters will examine the mainstream notions of "objectivity" by
entering into these battles.
* * *
In addition to completing my study of its cultural context, there are
two ways I am exploring the origins of and reasons for the rise
of
"objectivity" in the nineteenth century. First, I have begun to read a
representative number of newspapers between 1835 and 1895. This is
not
prohibitive: even the largest newspapers of the period were twelve
pages
or less and only three ante-bellum dailies, the New York Tribune,
Herald
, and Times, exceeded four pages. I have already studied the entire
run
of New York Herald for most of the Civil War period. In his 1987
dissertation, Harlan Stensaas conducted a content analysis of six U.S.
dailies from 1865 to 1954 searching for the origins of the inverted
pyramid, but his time frame was wide, forcing his study to be thin. M
oreover, he does not critically examine the notion of "objectivity,"
not
even putting quotes around the word. Second, I have been exploring
the
journals, letters, and memoirs of a number of journalists of the
transition period. For example, Recollections of the Civil War, by
Charles A. Dana, an editor of the New York Tribune before the war, an
aide to Stanton during it, and an editor and part owner of the New
York
Sun after it, is an excellent source for understanding both the and
press and government's role in the rise of "objectivity."
A Brief Bibliography
Cott, Nancy F. The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.
Crouthamel, James L. James Watson Webb, a Biography. Middletown: Wesleyan
University Press, 1969.
Dana, Charles A. Recollections of the Civil War: With the Leaders at
Washington and in the Field in the Sixties. New York: Appleton, 1898.
Dana, Charles A. The Art of Newspaper Making. New York: D. Appleton, 1895.
Entman, Robert. Democracy Without Citizens. New York: Oxford University Press,
1989.
Gilje, Paul A. The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City,
1783-1834. Chapel Hill, 1987.
Gramling, Oliver. AP: The Story of News. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, Inc,
1940.
Greenberg, Kenneth. Masters and Statesmen. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1985.
Halttunen, Karen. Confidence Men and Painted Women : a Study of Middle-Class
Culture in America, 1830-1870. New Haven : Yale University Press,
1982.
Lippmann, Walter Public Opinion. New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1929.
Litwack, Leon F. North of Slavery: the Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961
McFeely, William S. Frederick Douglass. New York: Touchstone, 1991.
McPherson, James M. Ordeal by fire : the Civil War and Reconstruction. New York
: Knopf & Random House, 1982.
Mott, Frank L. American Journalism: A History 1690-1960. New York: MacMillan,
1962.
Oates, Stephen. With Malice Toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln. New York:
Harper and Row, 1977.
Pessen, Edward. Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics.
Urbana: University of Illinois, 1985.
Richards, Leonard L. Gentlemen of Property and Standing: Anti-Abolition Mobs in
Jacksonian America. London: Oxford University Press, 1971
Rosenberg, Charles. The Cholera Years. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1987.
Schudson, Michael. Discovering the News. New York: Basic Books, 1978.
Stensaas, Harlan. The Objective News Report: A Content Analysis of Selected
U.S. Daily Newspapers for [sic] 1865 to 1954 Dissertation. (Ann
Arbor:
University Microfilms International, 1987
Stephens, Mitchell. A History of News: From the Drum to the Satellite. New
York: Viking, 1988.
Swanberg, W. A. Citizen Hearst. New York: Collier, 1961.
Swanberg, W. A. Pulitzer. New York: Scribner, 1967.
Tucher, Andrea J. "Froth and Scum": Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the
Axe-Murder in the First Years of the New York Penny Press. Dissertation, New
York University, 1990.
Tuchman, Gaye. Making News. New York: Free Press, 1978.
Walters, Ronald G. American Reformers: 1815-1860. New York: Hill and Wang,
1978.
Wells, Ida B. "Southern Horrors" (A late-19th century pamphlet on lynching)
Wells, Ida B. Crusade for Justice: the Autobiography of Ida B. Wells. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1970.
Wilentz, Sean. Chants Democratic : New York City & the Rise of the American
Working Class, 1788-1850. New York : Oxford University Press, 1984.
Selected Articles
Barthes, Roland. "Structure of the Fait-Divers " in Critical Essays. Trans. by
Richard Howard. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972.
Cohen, Patricia C. "Unregulated Youth: Masculinity and Murder in the 1830s
City." Radical History Journal, Winter 1992.
Darnton, Robert. "Writing News and Telling Stories." In Daedalus, Spring,
1975.
Hackett, Robert A. "Decline of a Paradigm? Bias and Objectivity in News Media
Studies." In Critical Studies in Mass Communication. Vol. 1, number
3,
September, 1984.
Nerone, John C. "The Mythology of the Penny Press" with criticism by Michael
Schudson, Dan Schiller, Donald L Shaw, and John J. Pauly, in
Critical Studies
in Mass Communication, December, 1987.
Schudson, Michael "The Politics of Narrative Form: The Emergence of News
Conventions in Print and Television." Daedalus, Fall 1982, vol. 3, number
4.
Shaw, Donald L. "At the Crossroads: Change and Continuity in American Press
News 1820-1860" Journalism History, volume 8, number 2 (Summer,
1981), 39-41.
Shaw, Donald L. "News Bias and the Telegraph: a Study of Historical Change"
Journalism Quarterly, (Spring, 1967).
Tuchman, Gaye. "Objectivity as Strategic Ritual: An Examination of Newsmen's
Notions of Objectivity." In American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 77,
No. 4,
January, 1972.
Selected Newspapers
New York Sun, selected issues, 1832-40.
New York Herald, selected issues, 1835-95.
New York Tribune, selected issues, 1840-65.
New York Times, selected issues, 1851-95.
Harper's Weekly, 1860-65.
Freedom's Journal, selected issues, 1827-1835. The first African-American
newspaper.
Daily Sentinel, selected issues, 1830s. The Sentinel was a "freethinking"
radical paper of the Jacksonian era.
Liberator, 1831-40. The first major abolitionist newspaper.
Frederick Douglass's Paper and North Star, selected issues.
A Selection of Other Works, Consulted for Chapter 5
Andrews, J. Cutler. The North Reports The Civil War. Pittsburgh: University
of Pittsburgh Press, 1955.
Andrews, J. Cutler. The South Reports the Civil War. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1970.
Bates, David H. Lincoln in the Telegraph Office. New York: D.Appleton-Century
Company,1939.
Emery, Edwin. The Press and America: an Interpretive History of Journalism.
Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962.
Gobright, Lawrence. Recollections of Men and Things at Washington During the
Third of a Century. Philadelphia: Claxton, Remson & Haffelfinger,
1869.
Grant, U.S. Memoirs and Selected Letters. Mary Drake McFeely et al., eds.
Washington D.C.: Library of Congress, 1990.
Greeley, Horace. Recollections of Busy Life. New York: Ford, 1873.
Hudson, Frederic. Journalism in the United States, from 1690 to 1872. New
York: Harper & Bros., 1873.
Jones, Robert W. Journalism in the United States. New York: E. P. Dutton and
Co., 1947.
Kamm, Samuel R. The Civil War Career of Thomas A. Scott [Assistant Secretary
of War]. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania dissertation,
1940.
Lamont, Daniel S., Secretary of War, Et Al. The War of the Rebellion: A
Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies.
Washington: Government Printing Office, 1895. Series I, vols.
XLVII part 3,
XXXVIII parts 1, 5, XLVI parts 2,3, XXXVI part 3, LI part 1.
Marszalek, John F. Sherman's Other War: The General and the Civil War Press.
Memphis: Memphis State University Press, 1981.
Oates, Stephen B. With Malice Toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln. New
York: Harper and Row, 1977.
Sherman, William Tecumseh. Memoirs of General W.T. Sherman. Washington: Library
of Congress, 1990.
Thomas, Benjamin S. and Hyman, Harold M. Stanton: The Life and Times of
Lincoln's Secretary of War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962.
Villard, Henry. The Memoirs of Henry Villard, Journalist and Financier,
1835-1900, in Two Volumes. (Vol. 1). Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co.,
1904.
Ward, Geoffrey C. et al. The Civil War (video). 1990.
DAVID T. Z. MINDICH
Ph.D Candidate, American Studies
New York University
740 West End Avenue #10
New York City 10025
(212) 316-9211
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
WORK IN PROGRESS: DISSERTATION PROJECT
"Building the Pyramid: The Rise of 'Objectivity' in
19th Century American Journalism"
ABSTRACT
The dissertation examines the confluence of forces that changed news
writing from a chronological style in the 1830s to an "objective" one
by
the 1890s. Historians of journalism have long sought to find the
first
practitioners of the "inverted pyramid" style of news writing, a
style
which conveys the most important information in the first paragraphs
of
a story; the dissertation offers reasons for the development of the
form and look at some early examples. The work also suggests that the
rhetoric of "objectivity" was often connected with an over-reliance
on
governmental authority and voices of the "mainstream."
|
