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While Bates does acknowledge that not all of "the press" opposed the research studies that were killed, it is vital to point out that the press that Bates refers to here is the executives and editors who held power at powerful institutions. The Repeated Failures of Press Criticism The four failed studies of the press that Stephen Bates details are part of a far larger pattern of failures of press criticism. Near the end of his valuable monograph about efforts by the U.S. press to stymie large-scale public research projects into press performance, Stephen Bates quotes the man perhaps most identified with such studies, Robert Maynard Hutchins, who had led the Commission on Freedom of the Press. [Extracted from the article]

In 1974, the media and cultural studies scholar James W. Carey called for the development of a culture of press criticism, engaging with daily journalism at the same level of analysis of language that literary critics use when assessing literature. This paper examines Carey's call in light of both the developments in journalistic criticism since his writing as well as other scholarly attempts to assess press criticism. Finding a lack of humanistic approaches to assessing press criticism, this paper distills Carey's essay into a more readily usable rubric for the assessment of the critical conversations surrounding journalism, identifying six dimensions of analysis by which to judge the criticism, with a focus on the criticism of language and a dialogic relationship between the press and the public. Finally, the paper applies the rubric to a case study of the response to a New York Times profile of a white nationalist. Dozens of works of criticism—public commentary, essays by scholars, satire, and public discussion—were published in response to the piece. This paper concludes that the beginnings of Carey's culture of criticism may finally exist, aided by social media tools that allow a broader public to participate in the critical conversation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This edited discussion took place as a panel at the Fourteenth International Conference for Literary Journalism Studies, Stony Brook University, United States, in May 2019. Susan Greenberg proposed the topic for the conference as a way of exploring the question raised the previous year by the association's founding president, John S. Bak: Is literary journalism a full-blown discipline, or a more amorphous area of "studies"? One of the qualifying conditions identified by Bak was the existence of a recognizable body of doctoral work in the field. And so, the following question arises: What is the current state of doctoral-level research around the globe? To structure the response, Greenberg included doctorates in both the practice of literary journalism, and those involving research about the genre, or about related areas. She also widened the search to include all narrative nonfiction genres, and posed a few starter questions, namely: Where is doctoral research on literary journalism taking place within higher education throughout the world? How much research is being conducted? Is this still a minority interest? What kind of critical constructs are used, and how does that influence the field in general and doctoral work in particular? Each contributor drew their own conclusions, but a thread can be seen running through all four contributions: namely, the need for a critical discourse that not only informs the practice but also responds to it, in a bilateral dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores how support for journalistic anti-intellectualism is condoned in the views of emerging adults in the United States as they develop attitudes toward news, audiences, and authority. Anti-rationalism and anti-elitism as cultural expressions of anti-intellectualism correlate as expected with approval of corresponding news practices. Identification with professional roles generally fails to inoculate college students against the endorsement of journalistic anti-rationalism and anti-elitism. With the exception of the adversarial function, role identities appear to justify journalistic anti-intellectualism beyond the influence of cultural anti-intellectualism. While reflexivity is often viewed as conducive to critical thinking, affinity for transparency in news work associates with a populist suspicion of intellectuals and their ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]