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The article discusses the 19th century U.S. newspaper the "Imperialist." It describes the role of U.S. journalist William L. Alden in the publication of the newspaper, the reaction to the monarchistic stance of the newspaper throughout the U.S. and particularly the U.S. South, and the concept of the centralization of government power advocated by the newspaper. The article also discusses how U.S. southern conservatives utilized the newspaper to oppose democratic reform.

The article discusses the significant contributions of American author Rebecca Harding Davis to the literary and journalistic history of the U.S. Topics explored include the way Davis addressed 19th century social issues affecting women such as prostitution in her writings, the use of creative storytelling by Davis in her news journalism, and the preservation of history through the literary journalism attributed to Davis.

During the secession crisis in 1860–61, the American South was far from unified. Contrary to the idea that the South constituted a single distinct region, this analysis of secession news in Southern newspapers demonstrates the slave states consisted of a constellation of Souths rather than one unified South. Through their decisions about what to print, Southern editors serving unique localities contributed to the social construction of sectionally distinct visions of nationhood. Their decisions about which news and opinion they would reprint and how news was framed made them integral agents in the news ecosystem. This study examines 822 newspaper articles covering secession in the weeks before, during, and after South Carolina's secession in the Charleston Mercury, New Orleans Picayune, Alexandria Gazette, and Macon Telegraph. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically, major American newspapers have rarely printed expletives, obscenities, and vulgarities. When newspapers have deviated from that norm, it has usually been for one of four reasons: to report on a political figure cursing publicly; to convey realism in a story about a marginalized group (often a racial minority); to express the emotions of people in traumatic situations; or to quote faithfully from a book or film. Using digitized historical newspapers, industry publications, and archival sources, it is possible to analyze how the press's standards and practices on profanity have shifted from the 1960s to the Donald Trump era. The changes at the Associated Press and the New York Times are especially noteworthy, because their guidelines provide the model for many other news organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes discourse about journalists' privilege and libel law from 1894 to 1897 to explain how the press articulated the public policy rationale for legal protection at a pivotal moment in journalism history. To illuminate the relationship between emerging professional values and ideas about law, it applies the analytical lens of institutionalism. The study argues that the public policy rationale that appeared in the legal discourse surrounding these key legal issues was both a function of principled professional identity–building and a means of "institutional maintenance" intended to protect the press's social status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biography has long played an important role within American life, and yet mass-market biographies remain underexamined. Theorizing so-called "popular biography" within twentieth-century American popular nonfiction and celebrity journalism, this article analyzes the genre's conventions and its centrality to celebrity discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Einstein's later years, although his contributions to physics became increasingly marginal and abstract, the press continued to trumpet his far-flung unification schemes as if they were confirmed scientific breakthroughs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Instead of a single muckraking movement, four shades of muckraking existed during the Progressive Era. While all muckrakers were involved in exposure of wrongdoing, they differed, sometimes drastically, in how they exposed. Realist muckrakers, such as Ray Stannard Baker and Ida Tarbell, presented multiple sides of an issue, avoided inflammatory language, and tended to abstain from editorializing. Yellow muckrakers, including Thomas Lawson and David Graham Phillips, used sensational language, ridiculed and demonized their opponents, and treated their own opinions as if they were certainties. Prosecutorial muckrakers, such as Mark Sullivan and Norman Hapgood, wrote like prosecutors--telling restrained but one-sided stories that were based on a strategic and partial selection of facts. Radical muckrakers, including Upton Sinclair and Charles Edward Russell, infused their journalism with their ideology, giving voice to investigative journalism that preached revolutionary socialism. Drawing on the ideas of John Dewey and Walter Lippmann, I argue that those journalistic distinctions are important because journalists not only share information with the public, but they also share their epistemology and model public discourse. This monograph clarifies an influential moment in journalism history and helps us recognize how different types of journalism can advance or hinder a democratic culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the critical year of 1917, the suffrage movement gained the momentum it needed to secure a federal amendment granting women the right to vote. During this turning point, the mainstream local and regional press covered opponents of woman suffrage. Examination of the press portrayals of this countermovement, by means of social movement theory, reveal that most coverage situated the anti-suffrage debate in the context of World War I. News reports provided limited framing of anti-suffragist arguments that centered on negative, emotional rhetoric, while suffrage supporters were framed as providing researched arguments that emphasized their opponents' contradictions. An emphasis on episodic rather than thematic framing diminished the complexity of the suffrage debate, creating a divide of public fear versus progressive advocacy that illustrates the challenges and shortfalls in news coverage of countermovements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

W. T. Stead, the journalist and editor, is known primarily for his knight-errant crusade on behalf of women and girls in the sensational investigative articles 'The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon' (1885). The controversial success of these articles could not have been achieved without Stead's study and adoption of American journalistic techniques. Stead's importance to nineteenth-century periodicals must be informed by an understanding of Stead as a mediating force between British and American print culture. This premise is developed here through exploration of the terms 'New Journalism' and 'Americanization'. Drawing from every stage of his career including his amateur yet dynamic beginnings as an unpaid contributor to the Northern Echo, I will examine Stead's unofficial title as the father of New Journalism and the extent to which this title is directly attributable to his relationship with America, or, to use Stead's term, his Americanization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians’ frequent use of a nineteenth-century murder case as a pivotal moment in histories of American journalism and sexuality reveals historiographical complications arising from the co-constitution of journalism and history. The journalistic constitution of the “facts” of this story—and any news story—can be viewed as both shaping and reflecting contemporary understandings of the case. Analyzing the ways in which historians use and contextualize the journalism surrounding the murder complicates many received notions of journalism history, regarding such issues as objectivity and sensationalism. By reading journalism texts as evidence of professional, political, and socioeconomic practices, critical historians can better elaborate the social and cultural construction of many historical subjects, focusing less on what happened and more on how sense was made of what happened. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 1911 to 1929, Victor Berger edited the Milwaukee Leader, a Socialist Party daily newspaper. Berger advocated a peaceful transition to socialism via the ballot box. When the Leader opposed World War I, it lost its mailing privileges and Berger faced prison. This article examines the daily operations of the Leader and Berger's belief that a free press was crucial in fostering socialism. It argues that Berger's temperament and his business methods were unsuited to the capital-intensive world of daily newspapering in the 1920s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the July 6, 1970, cover story, Newsweek magazine asked six prominent historians to each write a 2,500-word essay on the "Crisis of the American Spirit." This editorial decision responded not only to the anxieties produced by a continuing wave of violence sweeping the nation, but also a fraught journalistic context. As the social and political upheaval that marked the end of the Sixties decade bled into the first months of the Seventies, both journalists and historians found their fields undergoing remarkably similar transitions. A new bottom-up social history mirrored many of the same characteristics of a so-called "new journalism." By allowing the divergent views of six historians who spanned both generational and political differences to occupy sixteen pages of its magazine, Newsweek pushed back on the Nixon administration's charges of liberal bias and nearby rival Time's propensity to embrace a more traditional concept of the "American Spirit." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early years of the Great Depression, as Laredo's annual Washington Birthday Celebration entered its third decade, the bilingual Laredo Times crusaded for the cash-strapped city it served to keep staging yearly commemorations of the first U.S. president. This article analyzes 339 articles, photos, columns, cartoons, and advertisements that appeared in the Times between 1929 and 1934 to show how the newspaper created a cross-border public memory of George Washington for its increasingly desperate imagined community of transnational readers. Moreover, this article demonstrates the role of the Times in transforming the Washington celebration from its origins as an 1898 Americanization tactic of Anglo city fathers into a twentieth century regional, cultural, and economic vehicle that conceptualized "American" liberty as English and Spanish and Mexican and American. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A case study is presented exploring how U.S. Surgeon General Thoms Parran Jr. addressed the outbreak of venereal diseases (VD) during the Great Depression era of the 1930s. It discusses how Parran used media relations and legislative lobbying to achieve organizational goals through an understanding of public relations.

This study analyzes how business and editorial staff members at US newspapers rhetorically construct or deconstruct the metaphoric norm of a wall or line of separation between news and advertising functions. The study is based on 18 in-depth interviews with news and advertising professionals at middle-market US newspapers and the subsequent analysis of their rhetoric about the relationship between the news and advertising sides of their organizations. The study seeks to understand the rhetorical construction of an institutional norm and our observations are focused on the organization level. This study aids understanding of two related phenomena: how institutional norms are rhetorically constructed and how norms are rhetorically renegotiated or deconstructed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fake news is hardly new in journalism, and a sense of historical perspective is clarifying. A thumbnail history in Columbia Journalism Review pointed to some superficial similarities in hoaxing over the ages "in editorial motive or public gullibility, not to mention the blurred lines between deliberate and accidental flimflam." It cautions that "the great fake news panic of 2016" is an overreaction to "macro-level trends" that do not indicate real, significant changes in the media. But before agreeing to shrug off the significance of the 2016 spate of hoaxing, it is worth reviewing the history more carefully. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's views on several articles criticizing his work on the history of journalism in the U.S. which are published within the issue. These articles include one by Christoph Raetzch, another by Brian McNair, and one by Erik Neveu. Topics include the sociology of knowledge, technological determinism, and the distinction between information journalism and story journalism. Also discussed are his career background and achievements.

Thee article talks about farmer and confederate veteran Joseph Noah Rogers who started the "Rural Citizen" newspaper in Texas and his role as a key figure in the first phase of the Texas Farmers' Alliance's official involvement with journal­ism. Topics discussed include the newspaper serving as the official journal of the Texas Farmers' Alliance from 1882 to 1886 and Rogers' abandonment of the order in 1886 as the populist movement of the alliance threatened the interests of his patrons.

Previous scholarship has demonstrated that Orientalist stereotypes pervade US and European photojournalism of the Middle East in general, and specifically of coverage of conflict, yet little work has investigated whether such ideology has been transmitted to audiences and incorporated into their personal worldviews. Therefore, this project investigates how media consumers negotiate Orientalist depictions of Iraqis. This qualitative analysis of focus group discussions between US college students at a large urban university sheds light on how media visuals shape consumers’ perceptions about these groups. Understanding if and how Orientalist stereotypes are transmitted to audiences is an essential first step in trying to eliminate them from photography and from US society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the aftermath of World War I and the Peace Conference of 1919, the American public's interest in foreign affairs increased. The Wilson administration's wartime program, the New Diplomacy, contributed to this interest. It called for open diplomacy among statesmen and diplomats in the settlement of international conflicts, and press access to and publicity of their deliberations. The goal was an internationalized public opinion that would aid both concepts. With the prospect of an enlarged role for the United States in foreign affairs, prominent newspaper publishers and editors supported a robust coverage of foreign news, marked by a modern narrative consisting of the facts and an interpretation of their meaning. The New York Evening Post's David Lawrence and Simeon Strunsky promoted the New Diplomacy and explained its ramifications for American foreign policy and press relations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the aftermath of World War I and the Peace Conference of 1919, the American public's interest in foreign affairs increased. The Wilson administration's wartime program, the NewDiplomacy, contributed to this interest. It called for open diplomacy among statesmen and diplomats in the settlement of international conflicts, and press access to and publicity of their deliberations. The goal was an internationalized public opinion that would aid both concepts. With the prospect of an enlarged role for the United States in foreign affairs, prominent newspaper publishers and editors supported a robust coverage of foreign news, marked by a modern narrative consisting of the facts and an interpretation of their meaning. The New York Evening Post's David Lawrence and Simeon Strunsky promoted the New Diplomacy and explained its ramifications for American foreign policy and press relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the horizons for teaching journalism history focusing on the multimedia approaches to convergence culture and technological innovations. Topics include monopolization of media technology, media convergence, and history of American journalism. Also discussed are dissertations on socialism and the Christian press, studies in MediaHistory and Culture, and roles of journalism in a democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on stasis theory, this essay explores how the debate frame functions within U.S. journalism. Using the news coverage of Marissa Mayer's coinciding pregnancy and promotion to Yahoo! CEO and the reportage of Hillary Clinton's upcoming grandchild during the 2016 precampaign as case studies, I develop a two-part argument. First, by analyzing the rhetorical mechanisms within this media debate, I demonstrate how the debate frame makes facts themselves infinitely debatable, thereby stagnating this public debate at the stasis of fact. This ultimately perpetuates the "having it all" debate--and its sexist assumptions. Second, I consider the escape routes out of this dominant discourse, analyzing how arguments maneuver beyond the stasis of fact to consider policy reforms regarding women in the workplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the importance of studying television news history by journalism historians in their research on American journalism. Topics include example of news coverage of assassination of former president John Kennedy and response received, author's experience of studying journalism history, study of periodical "Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly" from 1990 to 1999.

The journalism of Thomas Waring Jr., editor of The News and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina, opens a window into the interrelationship of segregationist fears of integration and communism in the South of the late 1950s. This study explores Waring’s campaign, in both editorials and news reporting, against the pro-integration Highlander Folk School and, by association, the faculty of his alma mater, the University of the South. Owing to his unrelenting defense of a segregationist conception of white democracy, Waring himself became the focus of controversy in 1961, when the University of the South awarded him an honorary doctorate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1972, The New York Times adopted the policy of running daily corrections in a fixed part of the paper. The idea of corrections, and a call for increased accountability more generally, had been circulating for a few years. This article examines internal communication from the Times that sheds light on how the paper’s editor, A.M. Rosenthal, made the decision to turn the idea into policy. A number of factors, including an essay by Daniel Patrick Moynihan and prodding by the journalism reviews (MORE) and The Columbia Journalism Review, influenced Rosenthal. Wendy Wyatt’s discursive theory of press criticism and Daniel Hallin’s spheres of consensus, controversy, and deviance inform this article’s discussion of how outside influence works. Coming from the “paper of record,” the Times’s decision to enact the corrections policy had a snowball effect, and within a few years, running a regular corrections box became commonplace among American newspapers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article situates the work of American press critic George Henry Seldes within the broader muckraking traditions in order to consider the ways in which he sustained critical and investigative journalism practices during the 1930s and 1940s. Seldes's journalism is compared with the early twentieth-century muckraking movement associated with national magazines, which positioned journalists as national cultural entities concerned with the common good and able to shape public opinion and political action through their investigations of government and business wrongdoing. An examination of Seldes's critiques and a review of the reception to his work reveal how the corporatization of the press and advances in technology transformed muckraking journalism. Muckrakers continued to use investigative techniques to highlight injustice and justify reform, but Seldes's work demonstrates that those who crusaded too vehemently ran the danger of violating standards of impartiality and objectivity and having their work cast as radical and subversive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As journalists from around the world descended on the South during the civil rights movement, the local southern press served largely as an ally to segregationists and the campaign for massive resistance to integration. Despite the best efforts of pro-segregation propagandists, the visiting press often presented perspectives and realities deemed a threat to the “southern way of life.” In response, outside journalists and news organizations became the targets of segregationist backlash, including sustained editorial attacks from within the southern press aimed at their alleged integrationist anti-southern agendas, affiliations, and motives. As outside journalists repeatedly experienced intimidation, ridicule, and even violence while covering the movement, southern editorials cultivated and fanned the flames of this already hostile environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'The Great Society' denotes, variously: a slogan or shorthand, a utopia, a means, an end, an era, and a set of normative claims. This article tracks the changing meanings of The Great Society in order to clarify and formalize scholarly claims about the Johnson administration. Employing Edward Sapir's conception of 'condensation symbols' and Keith Donnellan's distinction between 'referential' and 'attributive' descriptions, I create a typology of six Great Societies and trace the origins and deployment of these six meanings through qualitative textual analysis of presidential speeches, newspapers, and scholarly writings. Attributive uses of the term gave way to referential uses in the late 1960s, as radical movements and practical implementation problems eclipsed utopian visions of a great society. The analysis illuminates Johnson's character and contributes to the literature on the rhetorical presidency by demonstrating the importance of context, ambiguity, and the attribution of descriptive content to political slogans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The period that spanned the Gilded Age to the onset of the Great Depression saw the rise and relative decline of the US labor movement. The salient events of labor movements over these years undoubtedly shaped public perception about labor issues, and some scholars have been attempting to unpack the mechanisms through which depictions and characterizations of the ‘labor problem’ were produced in authoritative venues that could have shaped the future of the movement. This study goes beyond the standard practice of explaining news report volume to feature the political valance of the reports on the labor problem over a 63-year time period. The aforementioned period also saw significant changes in news reporting practices, with the rise of objective informational writing and the embrace of journalism as a profession. The change within journalism itself could potentially shape the depiction of the labor problem, yet such change has been overlooked by existing literature pertaining to the topic. This research makes a theoretical case for integrating social processes central to the labor movement and journalism from 1870 to 1932 and explains patterns in the cultural production of the labor problem in theNew York Timesby analyzing these two tracks of history in conjunction using both qualitative and quantitative data. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Teresa Howard Dean was an early master of the rising art of human-interest writing, but her adventurous nature drew her to cover subjects sometimes dangerous and other times very down to earth. She covered the Lakota Sioux shortly after Wounded Knee, for instance, but then wrote about the reactions of ordinary people to the Chicago World's Fair. Eventually she would become a household name and cover the Spanish-American War, rebellions in Mexico and Cuba, and the Boxer Rebellion in China. This study finds Howard to represent Jung's trickster and wanderer archetypes, as during Howard's journeys she sought personal enlightenment but only within the boundaries of contemporaneous middle-class customs and norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a speech by Erika Pribanic-Smith, president of American Journalism Historians Association (AJHA) at the AJHA Convention, Oklahoma on October 8, 2015. It discusses Dr. David Sloan's research in American journalism history and several AJHA conferences. Topics include public relations, media law and history research, and narrative feature writing.

Debates over Senator Joseph McCarthy and about the American Establishment illustrated the issues at the heart of the ideological battle that took place among conservative and liberal intellectuals during the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing on published materials and archival sources, this study explored the publication of four prominent books about the senator in the 1950s and intellectuals’ reactions to each and the connection of the McCarthy debate to discussion in the late 1950s and early 1960s of the Establishment. It found a direct relationship between the ideological debate over McCarthy and the development of the concept of an American Establishment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author presents a personal narrative of his experience as a historian dealing with readership related topics on the history of American journalism, mass communication research, and history of religious publishing.

After more than 20 years of holding regular off-the-record briefings with government officials, the American Society of Newspaper Editors abandoned the practice in favor of a new commitment to freedom of information, signified most prominently by the organization’s sponsorship of Harold Cross’s 1953 book The People’s Right to Know. This article draws on archival research to trace the evolution of daily newspaper editors’ commitment to the public interest, after stridently defending their desire for secret information from federal and military leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the life of American newspaper editor and politician William Allen White dealing with his writings and the impact of World War I in Russia and the Russian Revolution. Topics include 1919 Prinkipo Conference, role of U.S. government and journalism during the war, and White's friendship with professor Samuel Harper. Also discussed are topics like Bolshevism and negotiations with the Russian Bolshevik government.

An essay is presented on the uses of visual history or broadcast media and issues in broadcast journalism. It offers a history of American journalism and the advancements in visual culture in the twentieth century and deals with the stories of civil rights, role of television, and history of communication and journalism. The author also discusses the social, political, and cultural role of visual culture and it's connection with communication and journalism history in media studies.

This is an exploratory study of sporting news in selected issues of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper from 1885 to 1895. Asking how the illustrated press portrayed sports and sporting events in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the authors analyzed pictorial content to understand how the ethos of realism was employed in pictorial representations of sports. During this period in journalism history, visual journalism was in transition. Photographic reproduction in newspapers was still being developed and perfected, so illustrating pictorial news content was still widely practiced. Using Thomas Connery's "paradigm of actuality" thesis, the researchers developed an "actuality" scale to help identify how realism was used to report on both amateur and professional sports in illustrated news reporting. In this exploratory study, the authors attempt to reveal how pictorial news about sports changed over time and suggest how connections between actuality and the cultural messages found in late nineteenth-century pictorial sports reporting can provide clues to intended audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectivity has been regarded as a central ideal of American journalism in the early twentieth century. The concurrent emergence of photography in the press is rarely associated with this development. The article explores the photographic legacy of journalistic objectivity by discussing a crucial phase in the development of reproduction media for images, the transition from wood engravings to halftones. The former was the dominant mode of ‘illustrated journalism’, the latter became the dominant mode of reproducing photojournalism in print in the twentieth century. The halftone process introduced an equivalence between photographs and their reproductions, obliterating the mediation that had taken place in a code of reproduction that was almost imperceptible. In the contested adoption of the halftone process, it is argued, a shifting valuation of photographs can be observed that prefigures the formulation of objectivity as a transparent code of mediation in journalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In examining Hunter S. Thompson's Gonzo journalism, other themes and aspects have perhaps over-shadowed the consideration of Gonzo as/and sports journalism. Through looking at Gonzo's relationship with sport, and its prominent exploration of the place of sport within wider American cultural contexts, this article examines the ways in which Gonzo differentiates itself as a type of more critical sports journalism, more concerned with the exploitative, corrupt and negative aspects of sports. By comparing and contrasting Gonzo with conventions of sports journalism, and wider conventions governing the presentation of elite sport in America, Gonzo is used to illustrate ways in which ideological deployments of sport are contested, particularly in terms of the complex tensions between mercenary ideas of sport, and myths of sport reliant on ideas of passion, loyalty and emotion. These elements support an argument that the stylistic methods associated with Gonzo journalism facilitate a hybrid form of sports journalism which, though highly subjective, is nonetheless strongly tied to critical social and political commentary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the tensions brought to the relationship between two of the major figures of post-war American journalism, Cyrus L. Sulzberger and Harrison E. Salisbury, during the late 1970s by the accusation that Sulzberger had been a long-standing 'asset' of the CIA. The relentless efforts of Salisbury to pursue the story during the research for his 1980 book Without Fear or Favor, which dealt with the recent history of the New York Times, brought his previous friendship with Sulzberger to a breaking point, but also produced the revelation that Salisbury himself had once been regarded by the CIA as a willing and cooperative source of information on the communist bloc. This personal story serves to bring out the wider themes of the ambiguous relationship between journalism and intelligence and the connections between the CIA and the media that began to be exposed during the 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between secret services and the press is an enduring one. Although the CIA did not seek the kind of salient media profile enjoyed by the FBI, it nevertheless maintained an informal press office from its foundation in 1947. Directors of the CIA and their senior staff devoted significant time to the public profile of the Agency. Their efforts to engage with the world of newspapers divided journalists. Some saw it as their patriotic duty to assist the Agency, even reporting for it overseas, while other saw it as their constitutional role to oppose the Agency. This was especially true during the Vietnam War and Watergate. Thereafter, a more nuanced relationship developed in which the press saw themselves as an informal wing of new accountability processes that provided the intelligence community with oversight. This was ambiguous terrain and its complexities are explored here by focusing on the example of the prominent New York Times journalist Tad Szulc, whose complex relationship with the CIA spanned several decades and connected closely with the vexed issue of Kennedy and Cuba. Szulc played a number of roles including outrider, renegade and overseer, but there was confusion about who was servant and who was master. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the authors discuss various reports within the issue on topics including the history of American journalism, the role of contemporary news media in promoting democracy and market fundamentalism.

This study examines the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times press coverage of contraception during one key period: 1873–1917. The first 30 years after the passage of the Comstock Act in 1873 were difficult for contraception advocates. The New York Times narrative reflected a battle between those who supported the Comstock Act and the men and women who opposed it. Conversely, the Los Angeles Times narrative portrayed the birth control debate as a wide-ranging battle of ideas occurring in a variety of venues. Press coverage revealed that the use of birth control was common and the real debate was over who had access and whether the information should be publicly available. The battle that began in 1873 is not over as contemporary press coverage reveals the debate over birth control continues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the concept of materiality in relation to the history of U.S. journalism. It warns of the potential disadvantages of romanticizing materiality as theory, approach, and method based on the views of several individuals including Finn Brunton and Gabriella Coleman. It also examines the problem of ink rub-off and newspapers in the 1960s.