Abstract
In The Media and Public Life: A History, the distinguished historian of communications John Nerone traces the evolution of journalism in America from the colonial era to the present. Although Nerone has much to say about journalistic values, his history is most emphatically not an onward-and-upward chronicle of triumphant professionalism. Journalism for Nerone is not and never has been a profession like medicine or law. Rather, it is a set of craft practices organized around institutional arrangements that journalists almost never controlled. Journalism did not reflect public opinion, as historians often assume. Rather, it has been a “mechanism” for representing it—a role Nerone contends it played better than any other institution during his lifetime, yet one that is waning today.
Written for an academic audience in an acerbic and occasionally elliptical style, Media and Public Life may well confound undergraduates unfamiliar with names, places, and dates. Even so, it deserves a wide readership among media scholars, historians, and social scientists. Well grounded in U.S. historiography, including the recent literature on print culture and political economy, it will be particularly valuable for lecturers seeking an up-to-date literature review and PhD students on the prowl for dissertation topics. No book since Michael Schudson’s Discovering the News (1978) has done more to clarify key junctures in the history of the American newspaper. Christopher B. Daly’s Covering America: A Narrative History of a Nation’s Journalism (2012) covers much of the same ground with more detail, though less analytical heft, while Paul Starr’s Creation of the Media (2004), which is excellent on political economy, is more tightly focused on public policy, and does not extend beyond the Second World War.
Media and Public Life is innovative not only in its chronological sweep, but also in its topical range. The newspaper remains near center stage, as is appropriate for a book about public life. Yet, Nerone also has much to say about the post office, radio, newsreels, television, magazines, and the Internet. The etymology of key terms—including “journalism,” “correspondent,” “reporter,” and “media”—is helpfully explained, while familiar topics are presented in a fresh and revealing light. Eighteenth-century revolutionaries in France and America lacked faith in the marketplace of ideas: “Well, revolutions are not markets.” The Post Office Act of 1792 created a “postal Internet” that inscribed the “logic of the Republic on the land.” Late 19th-century newspaper illustrators combined interpretation and explanation in an innovative mode of visual storytelling that “prefigured what the modern news professionals would mean by journalism.”
Like so many journalism historians—beginning at least as far back as Schudson—Nerone rejects “mediacentrism.” Yet Nerone’s argument differs from Schudson’s in two main ways. First, Nerone rejects as unduly schematic Schudson’s audience-based stage model. In place of Schudson’s stages, Nerone proposes a succession of transformative “moments”: the 18th-century Enlightenment; the politicization of the press during the American Revolution; the rise of the commercial newspaper in the early republic, an innovation that for Nerone, in an implicit critique of Schudson, preceded the much ballyhooed penny press of the 1830s—for there was “always a counterpoint to political newspapering”; the industrialization of the big-city newspaper in the final decades of the 19th century, an age in which “appearances always deceived and no one with power could be trusted”; the tightly structured post-Second World War “high-modern media system” (glossing Daniel Hallin) that had the “sense-making capacity” to “represent an intelligent public”; and the current retreat from high modernism, in which “the belief in an intelligent supervising public has been weakened to the point where it has ceased to function as a regulative fiction.”
Nerone’s second departure from Schudsonian orthodoxy concerns the emergence of objectivity as a journalistic value. For Schudson, objectivity was a by-product of an interwar crisis of democratic capitalism. For Nerone, in contrast, its origins can be traced back to the early 20th-century muckraker, a “proto-professional” who pioneered a then-novel theory of “how objective reporting would help democracy work”: “The journalists would interpose themselves between the citizens and the governing process, posing in effect as supercitizens. Journalists would represent the public.”
Media and Public Life is infused with a thinly veiled moral passion tempered by institutional realism. Popular access to news was long limited in Great Britain by high newspaper taxes and in the United States by “racial supremacy.” Journalists failed or are failing the “test of capacity” on several issues indispensable to the survival of the “political community”: slavery in the 19th century and climate change today. The investigative reporting of Lincoln Steffens and I. F. Stone is lauded, as is Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin—a “quasi-feminist communicative act” that effectively made a sentimental appeal when rational-critical argument had failed. Mid-20th century American journalists are praised for sustaining the salutary “regulative fiction” (the phrase is Nietzsche’s) of a “universal supervising intelligence” that helped keep politicians and business leaders accountable while policing the boundaries of public discourse, a not inconsiderable achievement in an age in which White supremacists, fascists, and even Nazis are rapidly entering the media mainstream. “What is scarier,” Nerone asks rhetorically, in reference to the vast data-mining capabilities of private corporations: “the ocean of data that the Googles and Facebooks of the world hold, or the fact that the NSA occasionally inserts a straw and takes a sip?”
Nerone shares Schudson’s admiration for social history. Yet Nerone pays far more attention than Schudson did to women, religiosity, and African Americans. Anne Royall’s gossipy scandal sheets laid the groundwork for James Gordon Bennett’s Herald; the evangelical antimasonic press furnished a template for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune; Ida Wells-Barnett’s courageous reporting on lynching helped invent muckraking—an innovation long marginalized by the “ideological work” that was necessary for White journalists to “make the new journalism acceptable to both elites and ordinary white folk.”
Schudson’s Discovering the News appeared at a moment when the metropolitan newspaper remained on center stage and its critics on the periphery. With the unexpected defeat of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, it might well appear as if center and periphery have switched places. The inevitability of a Clinton victory, it is worth recalling, was an article of faith within the mainstream media for several months prior to the election, while the Clinton-Kaine ticket received the endorsement of almost every newspaper in the country. Fake news today is ubiquitous while the mainstream media is for many a term of reproach. Media and Public Life helps explain the origins of this “unsupervised” media ecology, providing media scholars with a lucid and compelling history of the role of the media in American public life for the Age of Trump.