Archive of Our Own

On the afternoon of August 6, 2013, news started breaking on Twitter about a big meeting scheduled to take place at the Washington Post. Not long after, word came that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos had purchased the paper for $250 million from the Graham family, who had run the paper for four generations. Bezos founded (and is the largest stockholder) the book sales and media giant Amazon.com and he bought the Washington Post out of his own personal fortune.1 The fact that this was a personal purchase is important. Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi pointed out at the time of the purchase that under Bezos the paper will be privately owned, so he will not be accountable to shareholders or other investors. When the Graham family decided to sell the Washington Post, they were looking for an investor who could pay the $250 million asking price and not demand an immediate return on the investment. And that’s when CEO Don Graham thought about his friend Bezos. Despite dealing with cutting-edge technology, Bezos has a reputation for taking the long-range view of business.2

One of Bezos’s first innovations after buying the paper was to provide subscribers unlimited free access to the Post’s web site, as well as mobile apps for other metropolitan papers, eliminating the monthly subscription fee typically paid by people wanting to view more than a limited number of articles offered by the paper. The goal of Bezos’s plan was to bring people to the site who were outside of the paper’s print circulation area and unlikely candidates for paying customers, but who still had an interest in news. In short, he was taking a “digital point of view.” By doing so, he was going to need knowledgeable customers who were invested in technology, as well as reporters, to improve his product.3

One of the big changes that came from Bezos was moving the Post from being a paper “for and about Washington” to having a national or even global presence.4 No longer would the Washington Post limit itself to news within its print circulation area. By 2016, under Bezos’s ownership, the Post had a growing audience, increasingly ambitious reporting, and was gaining recognition as a national newspaper. Politico’s Ken Doctor said that the Post was joining the ranks of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today as a national paper.5 The Post was drawing in this audience in part through more investigative journalism served up in a way that looked good online and on mobile devices.

Bezos had reportedly been more concerned with the “vision” side of the paper rather than the details of how to carry that out. Because of this, the details were left to executive editor Marty Barron, who became somewhat of a national celebrity after being played by actor Liv Schrieber in the Boston journalism movie Spotlight. As an example of Bezos’s vision, he told the Post staff back in 2014 that they needed to “take advantage of the gifts the internet gives us.” Very simply, this means “projects that are designed to draw a disproportionate amount of traffic per journalist.”6 Along with hiring journalists, Bezos has also brought in technology people who include “software development engineers, digital designers, product managers, mobile developers, and video engineers.”

Despite the great things happening at the Post, all is not well with the staff there. Vanity Fair reports that while Bezos is seen as a savior for the paper and an effective owner providing great leadership, he is also the same Jeff Bezos who has faced criticism from labor at this other business—Amazon. It is worth noting here that Bezos is generally considered to be the world’s richest man.7 Money aside, owning the Washington Post isn’t always a pleasant thing for Bezos.

President Donald Trump has not been fond of the renewed journalism from the Washington Post, and the president often takes out his anger on Bezos. President Trump has not generally separated Amazon from the Post, referring to the paper as Amazon’s “chief lobbyist.” But by all accounts, Bezos has exerted no influence over coverage of anything in the paper. Publisher Fred Ryan said, “Jeff has never proposed a story. Jeff has never intervened in a story. He’s never critiqued a story. He’s not directed or proposed editorials or endorsements.”8

Perhaps the more serious problems created for Bezos has been the National Enquirer’s published stories about Bezos’s extramarital affair and subsequent divorce. The tabloid reportedly obtained a collection of text messages between the lovers, along with several explicit photos they had shared. While the Enquirer published many of the text messages, they threatened to publish the “below-the-belt selfie” if Bezos (and presumably the Post) did stop its criticism of the Enquirer and its reporting methods.9 Bezos, rather than backing down, published an extended essay on the Medium online platform, complete with images of the threatening letters. Bezos also applied his considerable resources to investigating how the Enquirer obtained his text messages and photos.10

Bezos has been largely successful with his purchase of the Washington Post. Since acquiring it in 2013, he has improved readership, revenue, and reporting at the paper. He has also worked at building it up as a national news source that is primarily delivered digitally. Like he did before with Amazon, Bezos is more concerned with investing in the future of the Washington Post than with short-term profits; more interested in reader engagement than revenue. Overall, the newsroom is happy to have a forward-thinking owner who has deep pockets investing in the long-term success of the paper, but the staff would like it better if Bezos were willing to share more of that revenue with them.

Some media observers have questioned whether the news business has any future, given the challenges involved in getting people to pay for media; an issue that has sharpened through the coronavirus pandemic–caused recession. There have also been serious concerns about how the news industry can function in an environment where some politicians are calling coverage they don’t like “fake news.” However, it is good to remember that the 2020s are not the first time the news industry has faced a crisis. In this chapter, we look at how journalism and the press developed in the United States, how newspapers and other news organizations operate today, and how the news business is being transformed in the digital age.

INVENTING THE MODERN PRESS
Newspapers first appeared soon after Gutenberg developed a usable movable type. The first English-language newspaper was Curanto, which was published in Amsterdam in June 1618. This was not a newspaper as we would recognize it today, but rather a single broadsheet filled with both British and foreign news. By 1622, similar papers (or newsbooks, as they were called) were being published in Britain. The government attempted to control these papers, which were empowering the new capitalist class at the expense of the aristocracy, but the papers were still distributed through places such as coffeehouses.11

Stay up to date on the latest in media by visiting the author’s blog at ralphehanson.com

If you look ahead to the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, the type of censorship and control of print media people experienced in the 1700s is not all that different from how the early gay and alternative newspapers were treated. This illustrates Secret 4—Nothing is new: Everything that happened in the past will happen again. Among those who were publishing broadsheets were major church reformers, such as Martin Luther and John Calvin; their religious writings also helped bring about some of the earliest attempts at censorship.12

Publick Occurrences, printer Benjamin Harris’s newspaper, is frequently cited as the first newspaper in the American colonies; its first and only issue was published in Boston in 1690. As happened with many papers of the era, the government promptly shut it down. In this case, the government objected to the paper’s disparaging remarks about the king of France, along with the fact that Harris had failed to obtain a license to publish. The first paper to publish multiple issues was the Boston News-Letter, which was founded in 1704.

▲ Newsboys sold newspapers on the streets of New York and other major cities for one or two cents a copy during the penny press era of the nineteenth century.

Library of Congress

Just as media dynasties exist today, they existed in the American colonies, with Benjamin and James Franklin having their hands in just about every medium available at the time. Starting in 1721, James, the elder of the two brothers, published the New-England Courant, the first newspaper to be published without the explicit approval of the British Crown. When James was sent to prison for irritating the authorities, sixteen-year-old Benjamin, who had been working as a printer’s apprentice, took over the paper. By 1729, he had purchased the Pennsylvania Gazette and began turning it into the most influential paper in the colonies. Benjamin published the colonies’ first political cartoon, the oft-reprinted “Join, or Die” cartoon, and he introduced the weather report as a regular feature.13

The newspapers of the American colonies had little in common with newspapers today. Before the 1830s, daily papers contained shipping news and political essays. Designed primarily for the wealthy elite, these papers were often underwritten by political parties, and their content was determined by the editors’ opinions. Although we might consider this biased coverage, these early papers made no pretense of objectivity. Why should they? Each political party had its own paper, and the small number of subscribers (two thousand at most) tended to share similar viewpoints. Battles between rival newspapers could get quite heated, even extending to physical violence.

Colonial newspapers were quite expensive, costing as much as six cents a day at a time when a worker might make eighty-five cents a day. Papers were typically available only by annual subscription, which had to be paid in advance. These papers showed their business bias with names like the Advertiser or the Commercial. They typically consisted of four pages, with the front and back filled primarily with advertising and the inside pages with news and editorial content.14

The Penny Press: Newspapers for the People
In the 1830s, Benjamin Day conceived a new type of newspaper, one that would sell large numbers of copies to the emerging literate public. On September 3, 1833, he started publishing the New York Sun. The paper’s motto was “It shines for all.” It was the newly developed steam engine that made mass distribution of the Sun possible. Hand-powered presses, which hadn’t changed much since Gutenberg’s time, could print no more than 350 pages a day, but a steam-powered rotary press could print as many as sixteen thousand sections (not just pages) in the same amount of time (see Chapter 4).15

The Sun emphasized facts over opinion. Papers that followed in its wake had names like Critic, Herald, or Star. These inexpensive papers sold for a penny or two on the street, so they soon earned the name “penny press.” Instead of being subsidized by political parties, the penny papers were supported by circulation and advertising revenues. They also didn’t have to worry about subscribers who wouldn’t pay their bills, since they were all sold on the street for cash.16

Now that publishers could economically print large numbers of papers, they could command a big enough circulation to attract advertising. As a result, their profits came primarily from advertising revenues, not from subscriptions or subsidies. The makers of patent medicines, which often consisted largely of alcohol or narcotics, were the biggest advertisers. Want ads (today’s classifieds) also became a prominent feature of the papers.

A Different Kind of Journalism.
Penny papers were typically independent rather than being the voice of a political party. In fact, they tended to ignore politics altogether because their readers weren’t interested in political issues. The Sun’s editors knew their audience; as an example, their congressional news column once reported, “The proceedings of Congress thus far, would not interest our readers.”17

The concept of “news” was invented by the penny press: These papers emphasized news or “new things,” such as the newest police actions, court verdicts, and happenings on the streets. Traditional papers called the penny papers sensationalistic, not because they ran big headlines or photos—neither existed at the time—but because they were printing news instead of political arguments or debates. The penny press also moved toward egalitarianism, representing people as equals, in the press. The affairs of ordinary people were now as much news as accounts of the rich and famous.18

The British press went through a similar period of change, moving from the highly partisan press of the 1700s to a more “objective” focus on news by the end of the nineteenth century—again a change largely in response to the rise of a literate working class and the desire to reach a large audience for the paper’s advertising.19

A Modern Democratic Society
The 1830s were a period of intense growth for the United States—in industry, in the economy, and in political participation. The penny newspaper was a vital part of this growth, providing the information the public needed to make democracy work. In 1830, there were 650 weeklies and 65 dailies in the United States, but in just ten years, those numbers had doubled to 1,241 weeklies and 138 dailies.20 It was a period when more people were working for wages outside the home and were starting to use consumer goods purchased with cash. The penny press provided a means for advertising these goods, which in turn expanded the market for them.

The United States was being transformed from a rural community to an urban society, from an agricultural nation to an industrial one, from self-sufficient families to a market-based economy. Michael Schudson argues that the penny papers were a strong force in this change:

These papers, whatever their political preferences, were spokesmen for egalitarian ideals in politics, economic life, and social life through their organization of sales, their solicitation of advertising, their emphasis on news, their catering to large audiences, their decreasing concern with the editorial.

The penny papers expressed and built the culture of a democratic market society, a culture which had no place for social or intellectual deference.21

During the Civil War era, the press continued its move toward being independent from political parties. The press provided people with news about the war and whether the nation would continue to exist. Following the war, newspapers continued to grow and began to be an important part of people’s everyday lives. This was the establishment of Secret 1—The media are essential components of our lives. Hazel Dicken-Garcia, in her history of the nineteenth-century press, wrote,

The press became a “habit” as Americans, perhaps for the first time, recognized a vital need for it and established it as [a] part of their lives in a way that was unprecedented. Families sought news of relatives fighting in the war, and national leaders needed information about events as a basis for making decisions and forming policies for conducting the war. . . . Since everyone had a stake in the war and thus a driving need to know about events, the newspaper became primary reading material as never before.22

Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft and one of the world’s richest men, said in an interview in 2017 that democracies still have a need for the press habit:

So if we define media very broadly to be the things that help voters assess what’s being said, assess how those things have worked, and therefore played their role of picking, on balance, reasonable leaders who pursue reasonable policies—you can’t have a democracy without a media function like that. If anybody says we don’t need the media, that’s a little scary. Yes, some parts of the media may have bias or they may be wrong, but to attack the phenomenon of the media, I’m not sure how many populists of the past have gone to that level.23Pulitzer, Hearst, and the Battle for New York City
If the penny papers of the first half of the nineteenth century gave birth to modern journalism, the battles between New York publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst in the 1880s and 1890s provided journalism’s turbulent adolescence.

Pulitzer and the New York World.
Pulitzer came to the United States from Austria in 1864 at the age of seventeen to fight in the Civil War. He survived the war, studied law, and went on to become a reporter for a German-language newspaper. In 1878, he bought the St. Louis Post and Dispatch and became its publisher, editor, and business manager.

In 1883, Pulitzer bought the failing New York World, and in just three years, he boosted its circulation from 15,000 to more than 250,000. High circulation was critical because large readership numbers attracted advertisers who were willing to pay premium prices. Twelve years after Pulitzer bought the paper, it had a daily circulation of 540,000.24

Pulitzer changed the appearance of the paper’s front page, replacing dense type with huge multicolumn pictures and big headlines. He brought to journalism a sense of drama and style that appealed immensely to his turn-of-the-century audience. Author and press critic Paul Weaver credits Pulitzer with the invention of the modern newspaper’s front page. Before Pulitzer, the front page was no different from any other page in the paper. Pulitzer started the practice of giving the most important story the biggest and widest headline and running that story above the fold of the paper, where it would be immediately visible to anyone looking at the paper on a newsstand. Thus, above the fold came to refer to a prominent story.

Pulitzer made many other innovations. He changed headlines so that they said something more specific about the story. For example, a pre-Pulitzer New York paper ran the story about President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination under the headline “Awful Event.” Pulitzer required his editors to use headlines containing a subject and an active verb, so the Lincoln assassination might have run under the headline “Lincoln Shot.” Pre-Pulitzer stories told readers what they needed to know in a formal, structured way. Pulitzer presented the news as a story that people wanted to read; journalists went from just being reporters to being storytellers as well.25

New Readers: Immigrants and Women.
The New York City of the 1880s and 1890s was a city of immigrants—people who wanted to learn to speak and read English—and the city’s newspapers were important teachers. Pulitzer’s New York World used big headlines, easy words, and many illustrations, all of which helped the paper appeal to the immigrant community. This was also the period when the modern Sunday paper got its start. In 1889, half of all New Yorkers bought Sunday papers. To make his Sunday editions more appealing, Pulitzer started trying out illustrations, comic strips, and color comics.

Pulitzer also tailored his newspaper to female readers by publishing women’s pages and romantic fiction. He had a difficult time balancing the interests of women against those of male readers. He didn’t want to offend working-class male readers by making the paper too feminist in content, but he couldn’t ignore the independent women who were now reading papers. Women were the primary purchasers of household items, and advertisers wanted to reach them. So, the newspaper needed to tailor its content to reach these “new women” while still appealing to its working-class male readers.

▲ Pioneering woman journalist Nellie Bly created a sensation in the late 1800s with her “stunt journalism” written for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World.

New York Public Library Archives

No one epitomized the journalism of Pulitzer’s New York World better than “stunt journalist” Nellie Bly, who proved that women could go to the same extremes as men when trying to get a story. From her first act at the World (pretending to be insane in order to get an insider’s report on a women’s lunatic asylum) to her most famous stunt (traveling around the world in under eighty days), she always did things more extravagantly than anyone else.26

Bly, who lived from 1864 to 1922, authored hundreds of newspaper articles, which were generally long and written in the first person, for the Pittsburg Dispatch, the New York World, and the New York Evening Journal. She was born Elizabeth Jane Cochran but went by the nickname Pink (probably for the pink dresses she wore). It was at the Dispatch that she started using the pen name Nellie Bly. In addition to covering women’s stories for the Dispatch, Bly wrote a travelogue of a journey to Mexico under the headline “NELLIE IN MEXICO.” She also made a name for herself covering the plight of young women working in factories.In 1887, Bly moved to New York in the hope of finding a job at one of the city’s vibrant daily papers. First on her list was Pulitzer’s New York World. She eventually was able to see John Cockerill, managing editor of the World. It was Cockerill who suggested that Bly go undercover to write a story about the women’s lunatic asylum. If her story was good, he told her, she would get the job.

The asylum had been charged with abusing inmates, but none of the stories written about it had the power of Bly’s insider account. To gain access, Bly moved into a rooming house and proceeded to act erratically so as to be committed to the asylum. Once inside, she wrote articles describing patients being fed rotten food and being choked and beaten by nurses. After ten days, an attorney for Pulitzer came to rescue her. The series of stories she produced was a masterpiece.

With this series, Bly proved that a woman could find success in sensationalistic journalism and that she could tell a great story under dangerous circumstances. Today many people would consider it unethical for reporters to pretend to be someone they aren’t, and many major papers would reject their work. But in the New York of Hearst and Pulitzer, Bly’s stunts were wildly successful and were imitated by other reporters.27

The Era of Yellow Journalism.
Hearst came from a wealthy family and began his newspaper career as editor of the San Francisco Examiner, which was owned by his father. Having dominated the San Francisco newspaper market, Hearst followed Pulitzer into the New York market by purchasing the New York Journal. Soon he was using Pulitzer’s own techniques to compete against him. Hearst and Pulitzer became fierce rivals, each trying to outdo the other with outlandish stories and stunts. This style of shocking, sensationalistic reporting came to be known as yellow journalism. Why yellow? At one point, the two papers fought over which one would publish the popular comic strip “The Yellow Kid,” which featured a smart-aleck character and could be considered the “Doonesbury” of its day. Eventually, both papers featured their own “Yellow Kid” drawn by different artists.

Description
▲ “The Yellow Kid” was such a popular early comic strip character that both the New York Journal and the New York World had separate versions of the feature drawn by two different artists.

AP Photo/AP Images

Pulitzer eventually repented for his excesses during the era of yellow journalism by endowing a school of journalism at Columbia University. He also endowed the Pulitzer Prizes that every year honor the best reporting, photography, and commentary in journalism.

Magazines and the News
Along with newspapers, magazines are a big part of the American news industry from the later part of the nineteenth century up through the first ten to fifteen years of the twenty-first century. As the 2010s progressed, news magazines have had a hard time competing with the growing range of online news outlets, and many once-proud publications have become mere shadows of their old glory.

Photojournalism.
In addition to providing the first national source of news and commentary, magazines were the first source of photojournalism—the use of photographs to portray the news in print. Initially, pictures were printed in periodicals by using hand-engraved plates copied from photographs. Then in the 1880s came the invention of the halftone, an image produced by a process in which photographs are broken down into a series of dots that appear in shades of gray on the printed page. The halftone allowed the photograph to be reproduced directly in the publication rather than being copied into a drawing.

▲ War photography, in terms of the horror of the images, hasn’t changed that much since its beginnings during the American Civil War. This image of the Battle of Gettysburg (left) was taken in 1863 by photographer Timothy H. O’Sullivan, who initially trained under Mathew Brady. The photo on the right, taken by an unnamed photographer working for the NurPhoto Agency and Erbin News, shows the bodies of those killed in a suspected chemical weapons attack on a suburb of Damascus, Syria, during the country’s ongoing civil war.

Library of Congress

NurPhoto/Corbis via Getty Images

Photographer Mathew Brady is often credited with inventing photojournalism in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1845, Brady rose to prominence for his portraits of noted Americans. He attempted to sell printed reproductions of his photographs, and though the effort failed because the costs were too high, he set the stage for later celebrity photographers, such as Annie Leibovitz. Brady also realized that much of the value of his photographic portraits came from their being reproduced as engravings, woodcuts, lithographs, and the like. The original was valuable, but so were the reproductions. Today, Brady is best remembered for his pictures of the American Civil War, the first war to be photographed from beginning to end.

During the war, Brady was as much a studio operator as a photographer. He supervised the work of several talented photographers, and he made sure that the photos found their way into magazines and newspapers. By 1863, Harper’s Weekly was reproducing Brady’s Civil War photos; these images horrified American audiences and brought the atrocities of the war into their homes. The brave photographers of these images followed the Union Army in wagons filled with their camera equipment and portable darkrooms. It’s important to note that many of the photos credited to Brady, whose eyesight was failing, were likely shot by his assistants. To get the best image, photographers working for Brady often got extremely close to the line of fire. Photographer Thomas C. Roche, who often worked for Brady, got so close that he was seen shaking dirt off himself and his camera after shells hit nearby. Because of the extreme danger, some of Brady’s best photographers left his employ to get the credit they deserved for taking such risky pictures. Brady’s greatest contribution was not so much the individual war photographs that he may or may not have taken, but what evolved from the photographs: the idea that photographs are published documents preserving history.28

The Muckrakers.
Investigative reporting, made famous by the 1970s Watergate political scandal, actually started in the late 1800s at several newspapers and magazines publishers. The most lasting examples of early investigative reporting came from the so-called muckraking magazines. The term muckrakers, coined by President Theodore Roosevelt, was used to describe socially activist investigative journalists who were publishing in progressive-minded magazines in the early years of the twentieth century. Although Roosevelt favored the social and political reforms that the exposés clearly indicated were necessary, he suggested that the investigative reporters who published such stories were “muckraking”—that is, they were digging up dirt without stopping to see the good things in the world.

The most famous of all the muckrakers was Samuel S. McClure. At the beginning of the twentieth century McClure led the fight for “business, social, and political reform.”29 Although McClure was a reformer, he also sought to make a profit through the investigative articles he published in his magazine, McClure’s. The writing in McClure’s was sensationalistic, but it was based on fact. Circulation skyrocketed, and it was hard to find copies of the magazine on newsstands. Advertisers liked the magazine for the attention it attracted and its high readership.

McClure’s took on the important topics of the time, such as the insurance industry, the railroads, and the plight of urban communities. Two of the most prominent writers at McClure’s were Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell. Steffens started work at McClure’s in 1902 and was quickly sent out into the field to report on municipal government corruption. During the next two years, his reporting on the misdeeds of officials in St. Louis, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York led to indictments and reform. The resulting six articles were eventually collected in the classic book The Shame of the Cities.30 But the magazine’s most famous target was Standard Oil. Tarbell had been assigned to write a series of stories that would highlight the oil giant’s achievements. Working with the full cooperation of company officials, she spent five years writing the fifteen-article series, which revealed that the company had achieved its incredible success through the use of bribes, fraud, and violence.31 By 1908, the muckraking movement had played itself out. The original talented and committed muckrakers had moved on to other pursuits, and they were replaced by people who were more concerned with sensationalism than with accuracy.

Time Life.
Henry Luce, through his now split-up Time Warner media empire, probably did more to shape the American media environment than virtually anyone else. Luce was born in China, the son of Christian missionaries, and he graduated from Yale in 1920. He conceived the idea of Time magazine while in prep school with his friend Briton Hadden.

The two founded the magazine in 1923 as a reaction against the journalism of the time. They wanted a single weekly magazine that would keep readers up-to-date on current events. Organized around news departments, Time was written in a style that put the news in context and told the reader how to think about the issues—a style that the magazine maintains to this day. While Time presents multiple sides of a story, it also indicates which side the magazine thinks is correct, rejecting the notion of objectivity as impossible.

Luce later took on the world of business with Fortune, a glossy magazine featuring the photography of Margaret Bourke-White. The magazine’s purpose was to “reflect industrial life as faithfully in ink and paper and word as the finest skyscraper reflects it in stone, steel, and architecture.”32 Luce also was convinced that Americans wanted to get their news through pictures, so in 1936 he started Life magazine. A success from the start, Life had 230,000 subscribers for its first issue and a print order for 466,000 copies. Within four months, the print order was for more than 1 million copies.33 When Life was launched, the big star at the magazine was neither the editor nor a writer; it was photographer Bourke-White. Bourke-White was more than just a photographer—she became a cultural icon. Bourke-White’s greatest love was industrial photography. Smokestacks, trains, steam pipes, bursts of flame—these were the subjects she most wanted to shoot. In 1929, Luce, the cofounder of Time, saw Bourke-White’s photos of the Otis Steel mill and foundry and decided that she was the photographer he wanted to take pictures for his new magazine called Fortune. Bourke-White shot photos using such daring methods as hanging off the steel gargoyles at the tops of skyscrapers. She also photographed in Russia at a time when most foreigners were not allowed to take pictures of Soviet industry.34

▲ Margaret Bourke-White rests her camera on a steel gargoyle at the top of New York’s Chrysler Building in 1934.

Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

Following Bourke-White’s work at Fortune, Luce put her to work on Life two months before it started publication. Her first assignment for the new magazine was photographing the dams of the Columbia River basin. But she also shot pictures of people living in Montana—the taxi drivers, dancers in the bars, the prostitutes, the customers bowling.35 During World War II, Bourke-White became the first female photographer accredited by the U.S. Army. The army even designed a uniform for her that became the model for those worn by all women correspondents. During the war, she was on an American ship in the Mediterranean Sea that was torpedoed by a German U-boat. As she left the ship on a lifeboat in the middle of the night, Bourke-White’s biggest frustration was that the darkness prevented her from taking photographs:

I could think of nothing but the magnificent pictures unfolding before me, which I longed to take and could not. I suppose for all photographers their greatest pictures are their untaken ones, and I am no exception. For me the indelible untaken photograph is the picture of our sinking ship viewed from our dangling lifeboat.36

In 2014, Time Inc. was spun off by its parent company Time Warner as a separately traded company that includes more than twenty magazines in the United States and fifty websites. Properties include Time, Sports Illustrated, and People.37 Then, in November 2017, the Time Inc. family of magazines was purchased by Iowa magazine publisher Meredith Corp., bringing to a close the Time Warner era as one of America’s premier magazine publishers.38

BROADCAST NEWS
Starting in the 1920s and carrying into the 1940s and 1950s, newspapers were facing competition from two newly created outlets: radio and television broadcasts. Broadcast media was providing up-to-the-minute news delivered with a speed and immediacy that newspapers could not match.

News on the Radio
News was a natural part of radio programming from the very start. KDKA demonstrated the power of radio news with its 1920 nighttime broadcast of the Harding–Cox presidential election results—before the newspaper stories appeared the next morning. The newspapers, understandably, were upset by radio’s apparent poaching of their territory. In fact, in the 1930s, they threatened to cut off radio stations’ access to AP news and even threatened to stop running radio program listings. The newspapers insisted that unless the news was of “transcendent importance,” radio should not broadcast it until the newspapers were available. Not surprisingly, the radio networks did not think much of this idea. Although various restrictions were tested for a short while, in the end, radio news could not be stopped. As we will see repeatedly, old media usually try unsuccessfully to hold back the development of new media, providing yet another example of Secret 4—Nothing is new: Everything that happened in the past will happen again. Yet the old media do not go away. Instead, after a period of resistance, they change and adapt to the new environment.39 Radio eliminated the extra editions of newspapers that used to be published whenever dramatic news occurred, but newspapers as a whole suffered only a slight decline in circulation.40

One place where radio held clear superiority over newspapers was in the realm of live news. Radio could, for the first time, bring news from around the world to people “as it happened.” At no time was this more apparent than during World War II. When Adolf Hitler’s army marched into Austria in 1938, CBS was on the air from Europe with immediate news and up-to-the-minute commentary. No radio correspondent of the era stood out more than CBS’s European director, Edward R. Murrow. When Germany declared war on England in 1939, Murrow reported it from London in a voice that became familiar to all Americans. During the bombing of London, Americans listened to his live reports, which contained not just the news but also the sounds of everyday life: the air raid sirens, the antiaircraft guns, and the explosions of bombs. Murrow spoke directly to listeners from London rooftops and made them feel as if they were there with him.41

Television News Goes 24/7
Television news started with brief coverage of the 1940 Republican National Convention on an experimental NBC television station in New York City. By 1948, both the Democratic and Republican conventions were covered extensively for the still-tiny television audience. Documentary programs, such as See It Now, which was hosted by former CBS radio newsman Murrow, took on lightweight topics, as well as intensely controversial issues, such as Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, who had accused numerous people of being communists. The program also aired notable segments on the Korean War. In 1947, NBC started TV’s longest-running news and commentary program, Meet the Press, which is still on today.

▲ Television started playing a major role in presidential elections starting in 1960 with the famous Kennedy–Nixon debates.

Francis Miller/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

In August 1948, the CBS-TV News started airing for fifteen minutes every weeknight, setting the standard length for network news until the 1960s. When the ocean liner Andrea Doria sank in 1956, a CBS camera crew on a seaplane got footage of the ship going down, which was broadcast promptly. Journalist and broadcast professor Edward Bliss Jr. noted that with the film of the Andrea Doria, “television had demonstrated that it could take the public to the scene of a major story more effectively than any other news medium.”42

In 1963, CBS expanded its nightly news show to half an hour, with Walter Cronkite at the anchor desk. Along with the news, the program featured commentary from veteran newsman Eric Sevareid. NBC soon followed the new format, joined four years later by ABC. During this time, videotape, satellite communication, and color started coming into common use, giving television news more immediacy and impact than ever before. With correspondents bringing into American homes graphic news from the war in Vietnam, as well as spectacular coverage of the moon landing in 1969, television news rose in importance as the way to see what was happening in the world.

On November 3, 1979, the staff of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was taken hostage by Iranian militants, and ABC started a nightly news update at 11:30 p.m. Eastern time. That news update eventually turned into Nightline with anchor Ted Koppel, and it became one of the most respected news shows on television. The following year, Ted Turner’s CNN went on the air with news twenty-four hours a day and the promise that the station would not sign off until the end of the world.43 By the time the Gulf War began in January 1991, viewers were turning to CNN, not the networks, for news.44 But CNN’s dominance was not to last. By 2003 and the war in Iraq, CNN was facing competition in the twenty-four-hour news business from Fox News and, to a lesser extent, MSNBC. As early as 2002, the year after the September 11 terrorist attacks, Fox News was getting consistently higher ratings than the more established CNN. Fox did several things to distinguish itself from its rival. Most significantly, it was willing to take a point of view. While CNN and the broadcast networks followed the traditional objective, or neutral, style of reporting, Fox took an opinionated view in the manner of the major newsmagazines and European newspapers.45 According to the Nielsen ratings, all three of the major cable news networks rank in the top ten of all cable channels, Fox News having the largest audience, followed by MSNBC and CNN.46

According to the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank that informs the public “about the issues, attitudes, and trends shaping America and the world,” currently only about 50 percent of Americans get news regularly from television in any of its varied forms—cable news, national network news, and local news. Some of this decline is a generational effect, with young people being less likely than older people to use TV in any of its forms for news.47

THE NEWS BUSINESS
The newspapers during the era of yellow journalism were the primary source of news at the time. They faced competition from magazines, but heavyweights such as Time and Newsweek had yet to weigh in. Radio news was a decade or two away, television news would have to wait half a century, and CNN was nearly a hundred years in the future. Although newspapers today owe a huge debt to the great papers of the past, they are operating in a substantially different media environment, one that is saturated with fast, up-to-the-minute competition.

Unlike those of Hearst and Pulitzer, today’s newspapers typically face little competition from other newspapers. Most newspapers today are owned by large chains, corporations that control a significant number of newspapers or other media outlets. Former journalist Ben Bagdikian notes in his book The Media Monopoly that before World War II more than 80 percent of all newspapers published in America were independently owned. Today that picture has reversed, with chains owning more than 80 percent of all papers. The British press has had a longer tradition of concentration of ownership, with three lords owning 67 percent of the daily circulation as early as 1910.48

Until recently, newspaper publishing was one of the most profitable businesses in the United States. The Gannett newspaper chain had earnings as high as 30 to 40 percent profits from its papers.49 The average profit for publicly owned newspaper chains in 2005 was nearly 20 percent, noticeably higher than that for companies in the Fortune 500.50

But newspapers have been facing rough times for the past three decades. Newspaper circulation had been declining since the 1990s. But it is difficult to measure now with papers having a mix of print and digital audiences. Advertising revenues have also fallen by nearly two-thirds over the past ten years, dropping from $49 billion in 2006 to $14.3 billion in 2018.51 That’s not to say, however, that there have not been pockets of good news as well. Several major national and metropolitan papers have had substantial growth recently. In 2018, the New York Times had a 27 percent increase in digital circulation while the Wall Street Journal was up by 23 percent. This was on top of large digital gains during the previous several years.52

In late 2019, Gannett newspapers merged with GateHouse to form the nation’s largest newspaper chain. Critics questioned whether this would lead to layoffs, even though the companies claimed the merger would lead to a stronger newsroom.53 As of February of 2020, Gannett proved the critics right with layoffs taking place at multiple newsrooms.54

National and Metropolitan Newspapers
Until 2009, the United States had three national newspapers: USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and the much smaller Christian Science Monitor. But in April 2009, the Monitor suspended its daily publication as a newspaper and became an all-electronic, web-based news channel.55 Both USA Today and the Journal rely on satellite distribution of newspaper pages to printing plants across the country. In other respects, the two papers could not be more different: The Journal has the look of an old-fashioned nineteenth-century paper, and USA Today originated the multicolored format. The New York Times, although it is a major metropolitan newspaper, is also generally considered to be a national newspaper.

The Wall Street Journal.
The nation’s premier newspaper for business and financial news has been doing well recently and experiencing increases in both its print circulation and digital revenues. At a time when other papers have been cutting newsroom staff size and budgets, the Journal has been hiring staff and producing new features. The Journal stands out in contrast with its major competition, USA Today. The Journal was the last major paper to start using color, and it has still not fully embraced photography. Instead, it uses pen-and-ink drawings for the “mug shots” that accompany its stories. The Journal has cultivated a traditional look that deliberately evokes the newspaper layouts of the pre-Pulitzer era.56 It did undergo a substantial redesign in 2006, primarily to make the paper narrower so that it didn’t use as much newsprint, and it has continued a slow movement toward a more modern look. The Journal’s circulation is the second largest of any American newspaper, with a combined print/digital circulation of 2.27 million.57 It is the definitive source of financial news, it is highly regarded for its national and international news, and its editorial page is one of the nation’s leading conservative voices. It should be noted that unlike USA Today, almost every view of a major article from the Journal is by a paid subscriber. There are virtually no free views.

▲ The Wall Street Journal is the United States’s biggest paid circulation newspaper with a mix of business, national, and international news, along with a conservative editorial focus.

AP/Associated Press

USA Today; News McNuggets.
When the Gannett newspaper chain founded USA Today, journalists made fun of the new national paper, calling it McPaper. They claimed that the brightly colored paper full of short stories was serving up “news McNuggets” to an audience raised on television news. John Quinn, a former editor of the paper, once joked that USA Today was “the newspaper that brought new depth to the meaning of the word shallow.”58 Critics of the paper warned that starting a national newspaper was a good way for Gannett to lose a lot of money in a hurry, and the critics were right. In its first decade, USA Today reportedly lost more than $800 million, but by 1993, the paper started turning a profit. Coming out of the recession, USA Today had declining circulation, and it had fewer “sponsored” copies being bought in bulk by hotels; in 2017, it had an average daily combined print/digital circulation of 4.14 million.59 It can be difficult comparing USA Today’s circulation with that of other major newspapers because much of its circulation comes from being inserted into Gannett’s other newspapers. It also gets extensive unpaid readership through its major online presence.60

The New York Times.
While there has long been debate over what is the nation’s biggest paper, there is no question about which paper is most influential. When people in the United States refer to the Times without naming a city, they are almost certainly referring to the New York Times. According to at least one definition, news is what is “printed on the front page of the New York Times.” News stories in the United States often don’t become significant until they have been covered in the New York Times. The front page of the New York Times has as much news on it as is contained in an entire half-hour network newscast.61

▲ The New York Times is an American daily newspaper that was founded and has continuously published since 1851. It has won 125 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other news organization.

Richard Levine/Getty Images

While the company’s longtime motto is “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” the Hoovers business report suggests that a better choice would be “All the News That’s Fit to Print and Post Online.”62 While the New York Times has traditionally been considered a New York City newspaper, with the massive growth of its digital circulation, it (along with the Washington Post) is really now a national paper.

The New York Times has been a respected newspaper ever since Adolph Ochs bought the failing penny press paper in 1896 and gave it an emphasis on serious national and international news. Its stodgy look, with long columns of type, earned it the nickname “Gray Lady.” However, on October 16, 1997, the Times started running color photos on its front page, joining virtually every other paper in the country in this practice.63

The Washington Post.
The New York Times set the standard for newspaper journalism in the twentieth century and continues to do so today, but in the 1970s, the Washington Post inspired a generation of young journalists with its coverage of the Watergate scandal, the subsequent cover-up, and the downfall of President Richard Nixon. Watergate was a story that shook the nation and transformed the Post from a big-city paper to one with a national reputation.

The scandal started with a “third-rate burglary” of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office and apartment complex on June 16, 1972. When the five Spanish-speaking burglars were arrested, one was found carrying an address book that contained the number for a phone located in the White House.

Among those assigned to cover the story were two young reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. They soon realized that this was no ordinary burglary. As weeks and then months went by, their painstaking reporting connected the burglars to the White House and eventually to the president himself. They further discovered that the White House had been systematically sabotaging the Democratic presidential candidates and attempting to cover up these actions. During the summer of 1973, Americans were spellbound by the Senate hearings into the Watergate scandal. Finally, with impeachment seeming a certainty, Nixon resigned as president on August 8, 1974.64

In more recent years, the Washington Post has become known for its national importance through its online presence and for the fact that it was purchased by Amazon founder Bezos, as we discussed in the chapter opening.

Like the New York Times, the Washington Post has had a growing paid online presence, on both desktop and mobile screens.65

The Los Angeles Times.
When people talk about the press in general, they are usually speaking of the major East Coast papers, such as the Washington Post and the New York Times. In the early 2000s, the Los Angeles Times established a national presence as well. While it may not have “push[ed] the New York Times off its perch,”66 it has been one of the most respected papers on the West Coast, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 2016 for its coverage of the San Bernardino terrorist attack, two in 2015, two in 2011, one each in 2009 and 2007, two in 2005, and five in 2004.67

In 2017, the Disney corporation entered a battle with the Los Angeles Times because the media conglomerate didn’t like how the newspaper was covering the company’s business relationships with the city of Anaheim, California. Disney retaliated against the paper by banning Los Angeles Times’ critics from attending the studio’s movie press screenings. (These screenings are so critics can publish reviews on the day that movies are released.)68

But Disney quickly had to back off from that ban after movie critics and pop culture writers across the country responded by standing with the Los Angeles Times, refusing to attend early screenings or consider Disney movies for end-of-the-year awards until the ban was lifted. All this controversy only served to promote the story about Disney’s sweetheart relationship with Anaheim that the media conglomerate so desperately wanted suppressed.69

▲ Bob Woodward (left) and Carl Bernstein helped bring the Washington Post to national prominence in the 1970s with their coverage of the Watergate break-in and the subsequent cover-up.

Ken Feil/Washington Post/Getty Images

Local and Community News
While people who talk about “the media” mostly talk about the national and metropolitan newspapers and broadcasters, community media are at least numerically the biggest number of them. Jock Lauterer, in his book Community Journalism: Relentlessly Local, points out that of the more than nine thousand newspapers in the United States, 97 percent are small or community papers. The community press consists of weekly and daily newspapers serving individual communities or suburbs instead of an entire metropolitan area.70 Lauterer points out that these communities are “not just ‘communities of place’ but also communities of ethnicity, faith, ideas or interests.” He goes on to list that in addition to the stereotypical small-town paper there are alternative, African American, ethnic, gay and lesbian, Hispanic, Jewish, military, religious, and senior community papers. (This is an example of Secret 2—There are no mainstream media.)

One of the reasons community papers are important is that they publish news that readers can’t get anywhere else. Journalism professor Eric K. Meyer points out that community newspapers “have the most loyal audiences and the news that you can’t get elsewhere. A local newspaper won’t get scooped by CNN.”71 A study by the Pew Research Center found that people who valued and used local news were also more likely to feel connected to their community and vote in local elections.72

The fact that a paper serves a small town does not necessarily mean that it lacks hard-hitting, significant reporting. Consider Art Cullen, editor of the Storm Lake Times in rural Iowa, who won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for best editorial writing for a series of editorials about nitrate water pollution coming from fertilizer runoff from farm fields. Cullen investigated how the counties that were being sued for allowing the pollution to take place had their legal defense being paid for by the chemical companies that manufactured the fertilizer that was causing the pollution.

The paper, with a circulation of 3,330, is a family effort. In addition to Art working as editor, his brother, John, is the publisher, and his son, Tom, is a reporter. The paper has a total staff of about eight people. “Everybody here does everything,” Art says. “If you want to buy an ad, I’ll sell it to you.”73 Just to be clear, though, the paper isn’t all hard-hitting reporting. Art told the Washington Post’s Eric Wemple, “We strive to have a baby, a dog, a fire and a crash on every front page.”

There will be much more about the challenges facing local news near the end of this chapter.

NEWS MEDIA, IDENTITY, AND POLITICAL BIAS
One of the main reasons the direct effects model still has some support is that many critics believe the media affect the public’s political opinions by presenting reports that are biased toward a candidate or political party. But, as we discussed earlier in this chapter, by holding up detached, factual, objective journalism as an ideal for reporting, the press was making a commercial decision, not a moral one. During the penny press era of the 1830s to the 1860s, newspapers tried to appeal to the broadest possible audience. The best way to attract many people, publishers felt, was not to take an identifiable political point of view, as had newspapers of the colonial era. The alternative to this supposedly objective style is a more opinionated form of reporting that takes on an explicit point of view, such as that found in Time, Newsweek, and many British or European newspapers, such as London’s liberal Guardian or conservative (Tory) Telegraph. These publications have a clearly understood political viewpoint that is designed to appeal to a specific audience.74

Erik Sorenson, former president of the MSNBC cable news channel, suggested that there is nothing wrong with taking a particular point of view: “I think a lot of people are beginning to ask, ‘Is there something phony about pretending to be objective and reading off a teleprompter in the twenty-first century?’”75

Gans’s Basic Journalistic Values
There is more to the bias argument than the liberal-versus-conservative issue. For example, some observers charge that the media have a bias toward attractiveness or charisma. There can also be a bias toward making money or attracting an audience. Political scientist and media scholar Doris Graber argued that when it comes to selecting stories for coverage, the strongest bias is for those that will have the greatest appeal to the publication’s or program’s audience.76

Rather than looking for examples of bias in the news, media sociologist Herbert Gans set out to find the actual values exhibited within the stories themselves. He asked what the values—the biases—of journalism were. To find the answer, he studied the content of the CBS and NBC news programs, Time magazine, and Newsweek.

Gans found eight enduring values in the stories he studied: ethnocentrism, altruistic democracy, responsible capitalism, small-town pastoralism, individualism, moderatism, social order, and leadership. These values were not stated explicitly; rather, they emerged from what was presented as good and normal and what was presented as bad.77 Let’s look briefly at each of Gans’s values:

Ethnocentrism is the idea that your own country and culture are better than all others. This shows up in the U.S. media in stories that compare other countries’ values to American values. To the degree that other countries live up to American ideals, they are good; if they are different, they are bad. Therefore, enemies of the United States are presented as evil because they don’t conform to our values. Stories can be critical of the United States, but they are criticizing deviance from basic American values, not those values themselves.
Altruistic democracy is the idea that politicians should serve the public good, not their own interests. This leads to stories that are critical of corrupt politicians. Similarly, citizens, as voters, have the same obligation to work for the public good and not for selfish interests. Special interest groups and lobbyists are suspect because they are not working for the common good. This was perhaps best illustrated by the Watergate hearings in the 1970s, which revealed the corrupt behavior that occurred in the White House so that President Nixon could stay in power. President Bill Clinton was criticized for his affair with Monica Lewinsky in part because he was serving his own interests rather than working for the good of the American public. President Trump has been criticized for maintaining a controlling interest in his global business empire while overseeing American foreign policy that could affect the value of that business.
Responsible capitalism is the idea that open competition among businesses will create a better, more prosperous world for everyone. But similarly, businesses must be responsible and not seek excess profits. The same is true of labor unions. Hence the news media tend to be harsh in their coverage of greed and deception by big businesses, yet they still tend to praise people who develop and grow companies. Therefore there has been so much negative coverage of banking and investment companies following the stock market crash and recession in the late 2000s.
Small-town pastoralism is nostalgia for the old-fashioned, rural community. The agricultural community is where all goodness is rooted, while big cities are dangerous places that suffer from numerous social problems. Suburbs, where many people live, tend to be overlooked entirely.
Individualism is the constant quest to identify the one person who makes a difference. People like the notion that one person can make a difference, that we are not all cogs in a giant machine. Reporters like to use a single person as a symbol. That explains in part why journalists focused on the actions of Emma González following the Parkland school shooting. Instead of trying to talk about the gun control movement, the press used González as a symbol to represent all the protesters.78
Moderatism is the value of moderation in all things. Extremists on both the left and the right are criticized. Although the media attempt to present a balance of opinions, they tend to report on views that are mildly to the left and right of center. One of the strongest criticisms the media can make is referring to an individual as an extremist.
The value of social order is seen primarily in the coverage of disorder. When journalists cover stories that involve disorder, such as protests, floods, disasters, or riots, the focus of the story tends to be on the restoration of order. Once media coverage of the Flint water crisis got started, social order was a big issue, and the press focused heavily on how that order, in the form of clean, running tap water, might be restored.
Finally, the media value leadership. The media tend to look at the actions of leaders, whereas the actions of lower-level bureaucrats—which may well be more important—are ignored. This is in some ways an extension of the bias toward individualism, the difference one person can make.
Overall, Gans argues that there is reformist bias to the media, which tend to advocate “honest, meritocratic, and anti-bureaucratic government.”79 Journalists like to argue that since both sides criticize the press, they must be doing a good, balanced job.80 Perhaps a better explanation for why both conservatives and liberals charge the media with bias is that the eight values Gans found within the media reflect a combination of both liberal and conservative values—again illustrating why people holding a particular viewpoint will see bias in the media’s attempt to be neutral and balanced.

There has been a lot of talk about the role of objectivity in journalism without much agreement on what that means. Objectivity in journalism could mean the kind of coverage that C-SPAN does where journalists set up cameras at fixed locations and provide (typically live) gavel-to-gavel coverage of events with no interpretation. That is probably as close as you can get to a “just-the-facts” type of objective coverage that many people claim they want. But while C-SPAN certainly serves an important role, most people are not going to choose to watch an entire congressional hearing from gavel to gavel rather than reading or watching a summary report of it.

Objectivity in journalism is a problematic concept. People oftentimes see it as happening when a journalist presents a report featuring “both sides” of the issue without providing personal opinions or making commentary on which side has the better argument, whether either or both sides are lying, or whether there are more than two sides. This is sometimes referred to as “he said, she said” journalism.

Objectivity in journalism could also mean reporting what evidence suggests is the truth without presenting a contrasting point of view. Journalists, of course, always want to be reporting “the truth;” but knowing what is true, what is false, and what is opinion can be challenging. And a substantial portion of the audience might disagree with what the journalist considers to be the truth and accuse the journalist of being biased.

Too often, to news sources and consumers, objectivity means “something I agree with.”

New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, who has been an outspoken critic of the approach mainstream journalists take to objectivity, says that journalists often seem more concerned about appearing “unbiased” than presenting an accurate, unbiased picture of the world. He wrote on his blog PressThink,

Something happened in our press over the last 40 years or so that never got acknowledged and to this day would be denied by many newsroom professionals. Somewhere along the way, truthtelling was surpassed by other priorities the mainstream press felt a stronger duty to. These include such things as “maintaining objectivity,” “not imposing a judgment,” or “refusing to take sides.” . . . Journalists felt better, safer, on firmer professional ground—more like pros—when they stopped short of reporting substantially untrue statements as false.81

Instead of trying to report what is objectively true, Rosen writes that journalists use a reporting convention based on philosopher Thomas Nagel’s “view from nowhere.” Back in 2010, Rosen wrote that the view from nowhere exists for three reasons:

Because it places journalists between the extremes of the left and the right, the reporters can call this “neither–nor” position balanced.
Since they are being balanced in their coverage, they are not being biased.
And so because they are not biased, they have a claim at being legitimate reporters.82
Rosen suggests that journalists might do better working with “transparency” rather than the view from nowhere:

In the old way, one says: “I don’t have a horse in this race. I don’t have a view of the world that I’m defending. I’m just telling you the way it is, and you should accept it because I’ve done the work and I don’t have a stake in the outcome. . . .

In the newer way, the logic is different. “Look I’m not going to pretend I have no view. Instead, I am going to level with you about where I’m coming from on this. So factor that in when you evaluate my report. Because I’ve done the work and this is what I’ve concluded.”83

Rosen also suggests that reporters can gain credibility by making sure readers understand where the story is coming from, by making sure that audience members can see that this is reporting, not just opinion writing: “Don’t believe me, look for yourself. Don’t accept it, here’s the data. You think we’re biased, check it out.”84

He gives the example of Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on President Trump’s charitable giving. In addition to the stories he wrote, Fahrenthold listed the people he talked to and the documents he examined. Fahrenthold asked the public for help and made it clear the entire time he was working on the story what he was doing. The materials Fahrenthold provided not only showed his evidence, but also showed how hard he worked on the story.85
From Where Do People Get Their News?
Given the divisiveness of the 2016 election, it is not surprising that Trump and Hillary Clinton voters got their news from different places. A survey by the Pew Research Center found that Trump supporters were relatively uniform, with 40 percent saying their main source was Fox News. Coming in at a distant second was CNN with 8 percent. Third place was Facebook at 7 percent. Clinton supporters listed CNN as their top choice with 18 percent, the liberal-leaning MSNBC was at 9 percent, and Facebook was third at 8 percent.86 Pew is one of the best sources of information about media habits of people in the United States, and its reports are used consistently throughout this book.

Description
Vanessa Otero, MediaBiasChart.com

It is worth noting that Facebook itself does not produce any news; it simply allows its users to post links to news. So, although similar percentages of Trump and Clinton supporters listed Facebook as their news source, as the Pew report suggests, it is likely they are getting news from vastly different sources and sometimes from illegitimate or erroneous sources.

Given the wide range of news sources available, it can be hard to know which provide reliable, balanced, and objective news; which provide good sources of opinion and analysis; and which are the fringe news organizations full of actual fake news and false reporting.

Patent attorney Vanessa Otero created the chart printed on this page and has taken it through multiple revisions. She distributed it by posting it on Facebook. The chart rates news organizations on two axes:

Overall Quality—Ranging from Original Fact Reporting to Contains Inaccurate/Fabricated Info
Partisan Bias—Ranging from Liberal to Conservative
“We are living in a time where we have more information available to each of us than ever before in history,” Otero wrote. “However, we are not all proficient at distinguishing between good information and bad information. This is true for liberal, moderate, and conservative people. I submit that these two circumstances are highly related to why our country is so politically polarized at the moment.”87

Unsurprisingly, Otero got lots of criticism of her chart. Infowars (which she categorized as “Utter Garbage/Conspiracy Theories” in an early version of her chart) completely rejected her work and suggested instead a chart that listed liberal-leaning sites as promoting “tyranny” and the conservative sites as promoting “liberty and freedom.”

Otero has continued to revise her chart, doing away with the “Utter Garbage/Conspiracy Theories” and going instead with “Most Extreme Liberal” and “Most Extreme Conservative” on the horizontal axis. The chart is now up to version 3.1.

Otero does not demand that readers accept her analysis, offering a blank version of the template where people can create their own chart, but she does offer some advice:

I respectfully submit that if you make your own, you should be able to place at least one source in each of the vertical columns, because they exist, and at least one in each of the horizontal rows, because they also exist. If you have just a couple sources that you think are in the middle but none exist either to the right or left of them, or up or down from them, you may be on the wrong track.”88

You can access the full chart and the template here: www.ralphehanson.com/2018/05/21/ch-6-categorizing-news-sources/.

Fake News
Since Trump started his successful 2016 campaign for president, the term fake news has become a popular way to describe a wide range of stories ranging from outright fabrications to news a person simply doesn’t like. By 2020, the term fake news was so commonly used to refer to so many things that it became hard to know what it means. But there were least five common usages:

Satire—Fake news as an ironic term refers to stories that stretch the facts in order to make a joke or cultural criticism.
Mistakes and fabrication—Sometimes news stories have errors in them that eventually get corrected. Sometimes stories are fabricated by unethical reporters (you can read more about this topic in Chapter 15—Media Ethics).
Partisan clickbait—Sometimes websites make up sensational stories designed specifically to attract readers to their pages so that the readers will see the ads that appear with the fake articles. Oftentimes, if you dig deeply enough into these pages, you will see a mention that the stories are “fictional and presumably satirical news.”
Foreign political manipulation—The Russian intelligence agencies have planted and amplified stories throughout the United States and Europe in order to try to manipulate elections. Some of these stories are made up, similar to partisan clickbait, while others are simply manipulated to appear more important and popular than they really are.
Media criticism—Politicians and others often use the term fake news to refer to news outlets they don’t like as a general-purpose media criticism.
We will take much deeper look at the issue of fake news in Chapter 15—Media Ethics.

Patriotism and the Press
The job of being a journalist around the world can be a dangerous one; reporters literally risk their lives to report the news. The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that worldwide in 2019 twenty-five journalists were killed “in direct connection” to their work; most of them in Syria (seven) and Mexico (five).89 Almost all of the journalists killed in Syria died in the crossfire of fighting going on during the country’s civil war, while all of the journalists killed in Mexico had been murdered.

▲ Jamal Khashoggi

Chris McGrath / Staff / Getty Images

In 2018, Saudi Arabian journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi went into the Saudi embassy in Turkey to get documents he needed to get married. While there he was captured by a Saudi death squad, tortured, killed, and then had his body cut up into pieces so it could be smuggled out of the embassy. Khashoggi was a legal resident of the United States at the time he was murdered, reportedly by the order of the thirty-four-year-old Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS as he is often referred to. Khashoggi had been highly critical of the Saudi government for its “oppression and brutality toward its people.”90

War zones are always dangerous places for journalists, especially photographers who need to be out on the front lines to capture combat images. Photojournalist James Foley was beheaded by Islamic State militants in August 2014 after having been held hostage since November 2012.91 British photographer Tim Hetherington and U.S. photographer Chris Hondros were killed by a rocket-propelled grenade while covering fighting near the Libyan city of Misrata in 2011. Two others were injured in the attack. Hetherington was best known for codirecting the Oscar-nominated war documentary Restrepo.92 He was in Libya covering the anti–Moammar Gadhafi rebellion at the time he was killed. This was far from the first time Hetherington had been under attack. Photojournalist Lynsey Addario told the New York Times blog Lens about a time when she and Hetherington were pinned down by fire in Afghanistan: “We were ambushed from both sides,” she said.

It was a terrifying situation. I was trying to find a place to hide, to shield myself. And I remember looking over and there was Tim—just calmly sitting up, filming the whole ambush on a video camera. And I thought to myself, “Oh my God, I want to be a photographer like him.”93

▲ U.S. Army photographer Spec. Hilda Clayton was killed while taking pictures during a training exercise in Laghman province, Afghanistan, when a mortar tube accidentally exploded, claiming five lives, including hers.

Spc. Hilda I. Clayton, US Army combat photographer. May 3, 2017 from Wikimedia Commons.

This is the last frame Spec. Clayton shot. Combat journalists face the same risks as the soldiers that they cover.

Mortar explosion that killed Hilda Clayton and 4 Afghan soldiers. July 2, 2013 from Wikimedia Commons.

Journalists can also be soldiers. In 2013, Spec. Hilda Clayton, a U.S. Army combat photographer, was killed while photographing a live-fire exercise in Afghanistan when a mortar tube accidentally exploded in front of her. The blast also killed an Afghan military photographer she was training, along with three others. In 2017, the journal Military Review published (with her family’s consent) the last photo Clayton took an instant before the explosion that took her life. Combat photographers like Clayton face all the same dangers the soldiers they cover face in their efforts to document the troops’ operations.94

Death or injuries are not the only risks reporters face. BBC journalist Alan Johnston was held hostage for 114 days in the Gaza Strip, Fox News’s Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig were held hostage in Gaza for 13 days, and the Christian Science Monitor’s Jill Carroll was held hostage for three months in Iraq.95 Fox News cameraman Wiig says that the most serious consequence of attacks on journalists is that the stories from war zones won’t get told:

My biggest concern, really, is that as a result of what happened to us, foreign journalists will be discouraged from coming here to tell the story. And that would be a great tragedy for the people of Palestine, and especially for the people of Gaza.96

The Ethnic Press
Along with the small-town and suburban papers, there is also a wide range of ethnic papers that serve specialized communities, such as racial and ethnic minorities.

The African American Press.
The African American press has had a significant presence in the United States since at least 1827. Nearly four thousand Black newspapers have been published in the United States at one time or another.97

Freedom’s Journal was among the first Black newspapers; it was founded in 1827 to show all readers, white and Black, that “black citizens were humans who were being treated unjustly.”98 Many Black editors of the era faced great danger when they printed articles that contained fact-based accusations against whites. Mobs would destroy the newspaper’s offices, and editors who had not left town might be murdered.

Editors of Black papers faced further difficulties because much of the intended audience for the papers was illiterate. Moreover, because most of the audience was poor, relatively little advertising was available. These editors put their lives and livelihoods at risk publishing a paper that few might read and that probably would lose money.

A variety of emancipation papers followed in the footsteps of Freedom’s Journal, but none had as great an impact as the North Star, which published its first issue in Rochester, New York, on December 3, 1847. Its editor, Frederick Douglass, was known as a gifted writer, and his new paper let readers know that it would be fighting for an end to slavery and the recognition of the rights of Blacks. The North Star was read and noticed, but it faced the same problems as earlier Black papers, including antiBlack violence, a shortage of qualified staff, and a chronic lack of money. What it did have was a clear mission and a distinctive journalistic style. The North Star was published from 1847 until 1860.99

Another important African American paper is the Chicago Defender. Founded in 1905, the Defender was considerably less serious than the North Star, modeling its style on the yellow journalism of Hearst. It was designed to be a Black paper with a mass following rather than a publication for Black intellectuals and white elites. It was also designed to appeal to advertisers and even make money for its publisher.

Clearly, the Defender’s goals included profit as well as advocacy. The paper was sensational, with large red headlines trumpeting stories of crime. By 1920, the Defender had a circulation of more than 280,000, a spectacular number at the time. It reached far beyond Chicago, with two-thirds of its readers located outside the city.100 The Defender encouraged southern Blacks to move north to find jobs in Chicago and, not coincidentally, become loyal subscribers to the paper. In retaliation, it was banned throughout the South, and at least two of the paper’s distributors were murdered. Defender editor Robert Abbott fought for civil rights and an end to lynching. Abbott, born in 1868, has been credited with founding “the modern Negro press.”101 He demonstrated that Black papers could be profit-making institutions, as well as activist publications.

▲ John H. Sengstacke, part owner and manager of the Chicago Defender, a leading African American newspaper with a national circulation in the middle of the twentieth century, reviews layouts with an assistant.

Library of Congress

In the 1950s, the Defender became a daily tabloid. For a while it provided extensive, day-by-day coverage of the civil rights movement. In 2003, following the death of longtime publisher and editor John H. Sengstacke in 1997, the Defender and three other papers owned by relatives of Abbott were sold to Real Times Media. In 2011, the Defender laid off its executive editor, news editor, and several staffers in an attempt to cut costs.102 In the summer of 2019, the Defender ended its 114-year print run and become a digital-only publication. At the time it went digital-only the paper’s circulation had dropped only about sixteen thousand. At the time of the transition, the publisher would not say how big the newsroom staff was.103

The Spanish-Language Press.
Spanish-language newspapers are seeing some of the same declines in circulation that have been affecting the rest of the newspaper industry. According to the Pew Research Center, the average circulation for the top twenty Hispanic weekly or semi-weekly newspapers in 2018 was approximately ninety-one thousand down from about ninety-three thousand in 2016.104 El Nuevo Herald, published as a companion to the Miami Herald, had a circulation of eighty thousand at its peak, but that declined to approximately forty thousand in 2016.105 But the two papers differ in many more ways than just the language. Journalist Dan Grech, speaking on the NPR radio show On the Media, said, “The Miami Herald, like most U.S. newspapers, prizes objectivity. El Nuevo Herald is more like papers in Latin America and Europe that push for social change.”106 (You can read about Spanish-language television networks Univision and Telemundo in Chapter 8.)

THE FUTURE OF NEWS
Trying to make sense of what is happening to the newspaper business is difficult, in part because of Secret 2—There are no mainstream media. Some of the most visible segments of the newspaper business are facing major challenges, which critics are fond of pointing out. And the rural community newspapers are facing an existential threat both from structural changes in the news business and the crashing of the economy during the 2020 pandemic. So, to understand the changing newspaper market we must look at it as several media, not just one.

Newspapers may not be selling as many sheets of newsprint as they did in the past, but they are certainly not going away as a place that people turn to for news. Consider the New York Times. Over the past several years, New York Times owner and former publisher Arthur Sulzberger has been talking about how the paper will be changing. He set off a storm of controversy in spring 2007 with a comment at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland: “I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either. . . . The Internet is a wonderful place to be, and we’re leading there.”107

This statement generated comments on almost every major press blog, but what few people noticed was that Sulzberger had been saying the same thing for at least eight years. When he was part of an Ad Age roundtable in 1999, Sulzberger was asked about the future of the Times. He answered,

I don’t care how they get it 100 years from now. And the key is not caring. It goes back to knowing the audience, and being, not ambivalent, but agnostic, rather. Agnostic about the methods of distribution. Because we can’t afford to be tied to any production process. . . . There will still be communities of interest. There will still be a need, both socially and politically, for common and shared experiences.108

Now there is a big difference between “I don’t care how they get it 100 years from now” and “I really don’t know if we’ll be printing the Times five years from now.” But the basic thought, the real point of his comments, is the same—the New York Times is no longer in the business of putting black ink on white paper. Instead, the Times is in the news business and the ad sales business, and it is going to be delivering news and advertising in whatever forms will turn a profit. It is worth noting that the Reuters news agency published a story in July 2017 that suggested the New York Times was rapidly approaching the time when it would be profitable for the company to quit printing the news on paper and go 100 percent digital.109

Under its latest ownership by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the Washington Post is now moving from a strategy of being “for and about Washington” to building a national and international readership, where its targeted audience is the English-speaking world. As Columbia Journalism Review’s Michael Meyer wrote in June 2014, Bezos’s main objective for the Washington Post is “reaching the maximum number of customers by putting the Post’s journalism in a package (a tablet, a mobile site) that will draw the greatest number of readers. As it has been with Amazon, his obsession at the Post is finding a way to integrate product into millions of people’s lives in a way they haven’t yet experienced.”110

Marty Baron, the Post’s executive editor, argued in a speech back in 2015 that the future of the paper was as an online mobile product: “It’s wrong to say we’re becoming a digital society. We already are a digital society. And even that statement is behind the times. We’re a mobile society.”111 (Yes, even in 2015 Baron was arguing for Secret 6—Online media are mobile media.)

But even with all the changes taking place, Baron said some things need to remain stable in the journalism business. “The press is routinely disparaged and demonized. That leaves many news organizations fearful—fearful that we will be accused of bias, or that we will lose customers, or that we will offend someone,” he said.

“Today our profession feels shaken. But fear cannot be our guide. If there is one thing that must remain unshakeable, this is it: That we will publish the truth when we find it and when the public deserves to know.”112

The newspaper industry has been facing major changes during the past several decades. Between the 1970s and 2016, approximately five hundred daily newspapers went out of business. In 2017, the American Society of News Editors quit counting.113 One of the oddest things about this decline is that until very recently, Americans had no idea how much trouble their local papers were in financially. A Pew survey on United States adults found that 71 percent of the respondents believed that “their local news outlets are doing very or somewhat well financially.”114 Yet at the same time, only 14 percent of respondents said they had paid or given money for any kind of local news. This includes paying for print or digital news or making a pledge for public radio in the past year. Among those who don’t pay for local news, nearly 50 percent say that they can find enough free local news, so they don’t have to pay for it.

The decline of local news is a profoundly serious issue. Local news strengthens small towns and communities by providing information on civil and administrative issues, such as what their city council, school board, or zoning board is up to or what candidates to vote for in an upcoming election. Local papers provide communities with news about high school sports, events, business openings and closures, retirements, moves, as well as obituaries and stories from “around town.” And as we all realize, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, local news is how we find out about public health issues.115

Long before it became a national story, the Flint, Michigan, water contamination crisis was an important local media story. Flint is an old industrial city with a population of about one hundred thousand people. It is poor, and the auto industry jobs that have left the city aren’t coming back. The city is predominantly Black.116

As early as May 2014, the Flint Journal local newspaper was running stories about “murky or foamy” water. By September, the paper was running stories about the boil advisories because of bacterial contamination. And by October, the Journal was reporting about the GM plant switching water suppliers because of the corrosion.

Michigan Radio, a public radio news service, started covering the story in June 2014 with news about complaints about the smell and taste of the city’s water. In January 2015, a full year before the national media really started to pay attention to the story, Michigan Radio had a story about the fact that the city’s water violated the Safe Drinking Water Act because the high level of chlorides was creating other problems with the water.117 It wasn’t until December 2015 that Flint’s water crisis started to get national attention.

Exactly why local newspapers are failing has not always been well understood, with a lot of misconceptions being thrown about as explanations. On January 24, 2019, Dr. Jeremy Littau from Lehigh University sent out a series of more than thirty tweets trying to explain why newspapers are closing or laying off employees. The initial tweet in the series on the rather dry topic of media economics got more than 17,000 shares and 37,000 likes. (Remember Secret 5—All media are social.) He has since written extensively on the subject.118

Littau argues that popular sentiment is that the newspaper business began failing when newspapers stated giving away their content online for free back in the mid-1990s. But Littau sees the issue as a bit more nuanced. For decades, publishing a newspaper was essentially a way to print money with conglomerates buying up family-owned papers, taking on enormous amounts of debt to do so, and then making 30 percent or higher profits on the papers they’ve bought up.119 Unfortunately, these newspaper chains used these profits to give shareholders large returns rather than investing in the quality of their product. In the 1990s, however, things started to change. Anyone who wanted to put content up online through a blog or website could. And newspapers big and small, across the country started to post their stories online. Suddenly, people did not have to just rely on a single local source for print news. They could get news from aggregators, such as Google News or the Huffington Post, which profited off repacking content from newspapers without compensating the people who created the stories. The fact that people suddenly had many choices of places to get news where they were not paying for it put local newspapers in a difficult position.

The loss of classified advertising revenue has been another big blow to local papers. This has not just been the frequently villainized Craigslist, but any of a number of local online swap groups, eBay, and Amazon Seller. One final issue has been that people are no longer loyal to their local newspaper. People have long read their local newspaper not only for the so-called hard news of politics, crime, and local events, but also for news about births, deaths, engagements, anniversaries, and the like. And now people can get the same kind of information from social media sources, such as Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. These social media channels get the revenue for this news we are self-sharing rather than our local papers.

As this is being written in the spring of 2020, the United States, along with the rest of the world, is immersed in the global COVID-19 pandemic and the associated cratering of the economy. With businesses closed and millions of people newly out of work, newspapers that were already hurting have lost a catastrophic amount of advertising. Papers have furloughed substantial portions of their staffs, put remaining workers on short hours, and suspended paper publication to go exclusively digital. Penny Abernathy, the Knight chair in journalism and digital media economics at the University of North Carolina told the Guardian newspaper that hundreds of newspapers may close because of the pandemic. “An extinction-level event will probably hit the smaller ones really hard, as well as the ones that are part of the huge chains.”120

In Abernathy’s study “The Expanding News Desert,” published in 2018, well before the pandemic, she found that half of the counties in the United States have only one newspaper, usually a small weekly, and nearly two hundred counties have no newspaper at all. Most of the places where alternative news sources have arisen are in metro areas and not the poorer rural areas.121

There are multiple alternatives newspapers are investigating as ways of adapting to this new economic reality. One was the approach the Graham family took with the Washington Post—sell the paper to an incredibly rich billionaire (Bezos, who we discussed at the beginning of the chapter) who has deep enough pockets to take the paper into the future. Another approach is the one the Salt Lake Tribune took—becoming a nonprofit corporation. That means that members of the public can make tax-deductible contributions to the paper, in much the same way as they would pledge to public radio or television. When the paper announced the change in status in November 2019, the editor committed to maintaining its reputation for investigative reporting, sports coverage, and even restaurant reviews. The one thing that had to go, however, were political endorsements, which are forbidden for nonprofit corporations.122

Test Your Visual Media Literacy: Comic Strip Tells Story of Syrian Refugee Family

Description
© Jake Halpern and Michael Sloan. “Welcome to the New World.”

To call “Welcome to the New World” an editorial cartoon is vastly underselling the storytelling of writer Jake Halpern and artist Michael Sloan. In what is essentially a serialized graphic novel, they tell the story of a real-life refugee family from Syria who left for the United States on Election Day 2016.

Halpern, in an interview with Buffalo Spree magazine, said that he had always been interested in graphic narratives, especially the classic Maus that retells the story of the Holocaust using cats and mice to represent the Nazis and the Jews. Halpern started talking with refugee resettlement agencies looking for a family to feature in his story. The head of the agency asked him, “What would you think about the prospect of following a family from the moment they arrive? We’ve got two brothers with their families arriving on election day.”123

The story for the family is particularly difficult because shortly after President Trump took office, he implemented a travel ban against people from Syria, which leaves the family in doubt about their status.

Halpern met with the family regularly during the twenty-episode run of the story.

The family includes Ammar, his brother Jamil, their wives Raghida and Oulah, and their children. Halpern did change the family members’ names in order to help protect them. Although the family has not been identified, they still worry about having a journalist tell their story. “One of the things Jamil said to me early on was, ‘Am I safe talking to you? Will it cause me trouble?’ Because, where he came from in Syria, he was at risk for talking to the press. . . . I was in the process of saying, ‘No, you’re fine. This is America.’ But, I paused for a good, long minute to just think it through. It’s crazy that I had to stop and think about it. In the back of my mind, I worried about him.”

Halpern says the response to the comic has been positive: “A lot of people have said that there was something about the graphic form of it that they found really touching.”

Halpern said he was really excited to partner with Sloan because he liked the warm style of his work. “I thought that would work great, because there’s a temptation to turn this into a really moody, brooding, edgy, darker type of story,” he said. “But, my goal was to humanize these people, and the warmth that was so evident and alive in Michael’s drawings would get it.”

Sloan actually lives near Halpern in New York, and has done art for a variety of outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the New Yorker.

Their work won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning, the first time it had been awarded to a reporter and an artist working together.124 Bruce Headlam, the pair’s editor, said the story could have been a conventional New York Times feature series, but instead it became “the first fully reported, regularly published comic strip to appear in the Times.”125

While the Times has had editorial cartoons, it has not run comic strips, so when Headlam came up with the idea of telling a refugee family’s story with a comic strip, he wasn’t sure how the paper’s management would react. To his surprise, the editors and art directors thought it was a great idea.

Perhaps the biggest challenge was having to tell the story so tightly. Headlam points out that a typical opinion piece in the Times runs about one thousand words. Each episode of “Welcome” ran on average two hundred words.

Halpern said he felt the length restriction keenly as he and Sloan worked on the series. There was a story he wanted to include about Jamil and Ammar seeing each other in taxis at an intersection in New York after arriving in the country on separate flights from separate countries that he just couldn’t include. “The one thing that’s frustrating about this strip is there’s such little space,” Halpern said. “There’s so much on the cutting room floor. If I were writing this story in any other form, there’s no way I’d omit that story.”126

WHO is the source?
Who are the artist and writer of this story? What makes their partnership unusual?

WHOSE story are they telling?
Whom are they writing about? How did they select them for this story? What makes their story significant?

WHY did the Times choose to use a comic strip to tell this story?
Does the New York Times use comic strips to report stories very often? What made the paper think this would be a good story to tell that way? Could it have been told with a conventional newspaper feature story? What did the Times gain from using a comic strip form?

HOW do you and your classmates react to this story as a comic strip?
Have you ever read a serious journalistic story as a comic strip or as a graphic novel before? If so, what was it? What did you think of it? Do you think “Welcome to the New World” was successful? Why or why not?

CHAPTER REVIEW
Chapter Summary ⏩
Newspapers were first published in Britain and Europe in the seventeenth century. Numerous papers were later published in the American colonies, but faced extensive censorship from the British government. Newspapers printed before the nineteenth century tended to be partisan publications that were supported through high subscription fees and political subsidies. This changed with the rise of the penny press in the 1830s. The penny papers were mass produced on steam-powered printing presses and contained news of interest to ordinary people. The papers cost one or two cents and were supported by advertisers who wanted to reach the papers’ large numbers of readers.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were characterized by the yellow journalism of the New York newspapers published by Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. The two publishers tried to attract circulation and attention by running comic strips, advice columns, and sensational stories about sex, crime, and scandal. This was the time when female reporters, such as The World’s Nellie Bly, started coming to prominence with exciting sensationalistic stories. This was also the time when newspapers started running extensive headlines and illustrations.

Magazines were another big part of the development of the American news industry. Magazines were where the work of early photojournalists, including Mathew Brady and his cohort of Civil War photographers, appeared. The early twentieth century saw a trend in investigative magazine reporting known as muckraking. The work of the muckrakers set the stage for much of the investigative reporting done today by newspapers and television news.

Henry Luce founded Time magazine in 1923, creating what would become one of the nation’s largest media companies—Time Warner. Luce’s publishing empire grew to include not just the news in Time, but also photojournalism in Life, sports journalism in Sports Illustrated, and personality and celebrity journalism in People.

Evolving technology has brought changes to the news business. Radio stations started broadcasting news in the 1920s, bringing live reports into people’s living rooms

The rise of television news began in the late 1940s, bringing strong images of current events home and making national figures out of news anchors like Walter Cronkite. Cable television grew in popularity. Cable television news first came to prominence in 1991 with CNN’s live 24/7 coverage of the first Gulf War. They were soon joined by competitors MSNBC and the now-dominant Fox News.

Newspapers today face a range of challenges, including declining advertising revenue and print circulation. Major national papers like the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post have successfully transitioned into being major online publications with steadily growing digital circulation.

Community newspapers continue to be a vital source of local news but are facing severe financial problems. These problems grew out of decades of concentrated ownership focusing on profits over investing in newsrooms, changing advertising markets, and ways of sharing personal news. Newspapers that serve specific ethnic communities still exist but are facing the same problems that mainstream papers do, with declining print circulation and ad revenue. Newspapers are considering a range of strategies for going forward, including finding wealthy owners willing to support local news or becoming nonprofits.

Many people claim that the media are biased toward one political view or another. Conservative critics argue that there is a liberal bias arising from the tendency of reporters to be more liberal than the public at large. The liberals’ counterargument is that the press has a conservative bias because most media outlets are owned by giant corporations that hold pro-business views. Finally, some critics argue that the media hold a combination of values that straddle the boundary between slightly left and slightly right of center. The press in the United States began as partisan during the colonial period but adopted a detached, factual, objective style in the 1830s to appeal to a broader audience. In the twenty-first century, audience members are likely to choose media outlets that conform to their own social and political views. Despite these concerns about bias, journalists continue to risk their lives to report important and accurate news. During the 2016 presidential campaign, the term fake news became popular as a way of describing stories ranging from news the person didn’t like to outright fabrications.