Chapter Title: The Problem of Journalism History

Book Title: James Carey

Book Subtitle: A Critical Reader
Book Editor(s): Eve Stryker Munson and Catherine A. Warren
Published by: University of Minnesota Press

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4 / The Problem of Journalism History
First published in 1974

The study of journalism history remains something of an embarrass-

ment. Can it be justified as a form of knowledge, an entry into the cur-
riculum, an activity to which one can usefully devote one's professional
life? By our behavior we answer the question affirmatively and yet a
doubt remains. Each generation of journalism historians has been dis-
satisfied with the nature of our knowledge and the forms of our pre-
sentation. Writing in a short-lived newsletter, Cor onto, about 1950,
Ted Peterson argued:
In many schools and departments of journalism, history of journal-
ism is the least rewarding course in the curriculum. The reasons are
various. One is that all too often history is the orphan, or at least
the grubby little cousin, who must depend on charity for its care and
feeding. Young instructors teach it from sufferance; senior faculty
members teach it because they have worked up a set of notes that it's
a shame to waste. They drone about the dull, dead past and somno-
lent students cache away a store of names, dates, and places to see
them through the cheerless examination season.
Peterson finally concluded that the trouble was not intrinsic to the
subject matter, but in the way journalism historians had handled their
material. He argued that Frank Luther Mott had laid down a solid fac-
tual foundation for the field and that we now needed "interpretive
studies utilizing the factual information about the press, per se, that
Mott and his predecessors have given us." Peterson in Magazines in the
Twentieth Century and Edwin Emery in The Press and America have

86

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 The Problem of Journalism History I 87

attempted just that: building an interpretation on the raw data, I think

it is fair to say, Ralph Casey's elucidation of the great interpersonal
forces affecting the press as the spine of their story.
Despite these achievements, and there are others that might be
cited, the thought remains that our subject matter has not been domes-
ticated, or to invert the metaphor, has been so tamed that all vitality
has been drained from the enterprise. It has recently been argued that
journalism history is dull and unimaginative, excessively trivial in the
problems chosen for study, oppressively chronological, divorced from
the major current of contemporary historiography, and needlessly pre-
occupied with the production of biographies of editors and publishers.
As in 1950, the persistent apathy of student response to historical stud-
ies is offered as proof of the criticism.
There is truth in all these charges, though I think they often mis-
take the fish story for the fish. For example, student response to all
history, not just journalism history, has been in decline. This is because
the American sense of history has always been lamentably thin and
students are drawn, for reasons Tocqueville recognized, to the more
abstract and generalizing social sciences. Our major response to this
must be to accept a challenge: the major problem with American social
thought is its scientific and ahistorical character, and our dual task
remains a thoroughgoing critique of the behavioral sciences and the
permeation of our studies and our students' thought with historical
consciousness.
Furthermore, the existing critiques of journalism history are super-
ficial: they fail to get at a deeper set of historiographical problems. For
example, we have defined our craft both too narrowly and too mod-
estly, and, therefore, constricted the range of problems we study and
the claims we make for our knowledge. We have, in general, failed to
base our work on an adequate sense of historical time, and we have
likewise ignored the most fruitful research of modern historians that
might serve as the basis of fresh interpretations of our subject matter.
I cannot here deal with all these problems. However, one paradox-
ical issue can be treated, namely, that the most fundamental failing in
journalism history is but the reverse of our success. Our field has been
dominated by one implicit paradigm of interpretation—an interpreta-
tion I will call, following Herbert Butterfield, a Whig interpretation of
journalism history. This interpretation, which is absorbed in the invisi-
ble culture of graduate school, has so exclusively dominated the field

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88 / The Problem of Journalism History

that we do not even have, to mention the most obvious example, a

thoroughgoing Marxist interpretation of press history.
Herbert Butterfield used the notion of a Whig interpretation to de-
scribe the marriage of the doctrine of progress with the idea of history.
The Whig interpretation of journalism history, to put it all too briefly,
views journalism history as the slow, steady expansion of freedom and
knowledge from the political press to the commercial press, the set-
backs into sensationalism and yellow journalism, the forward thrust
into muckraking and social responsibility. Sometimes written in classic
terms as the expansion of individual rights, sometimes in modern terms
as growth of the public's right to know, the entire story is framed by
those large impersonal faces buffeting the press: industrialization, ur-
banization, and mass democracy.
The problem with this interpretation, and the endless studies and
biographies executed within its frame, is simply that it is exhausted;
it has done its intellectual work. One more history written against
the background of the Whig interpretation would not be wrong—just
redundant.
Much journalism history is now devoted to proving the indubitable.
In art the solemn reproduction of the achievements of the past is called
academism. And that is the term that describes much journalism his-
tory. It is not that the Whig interpretation was wrong or failed to teach
us anything, but it is moribund and to pursue it further is to guarantee
dead ends and the solemn reproduction of the achieved. Our historians
are so set on this interpretation that they largely rewrite one another,
adding a literary cupola here, a vaulted arch there, but fail to look at
the evidence anew and afresh. We are suffering from what, in another
context, Morris Janowitz has called "the dead hand of competence."
Our studies need to be ventilated, then, by fresh perspectives and
new interpretations even more than by additional data. I would like to
suggest that developing the cultural history of journalism might inspire
such a ventilation. In fact, I take the absence of any systematic cultural
history of journalism to be the major deficiency in our teaching and
research.
I place an emphasis on cultural history because I think we should
consider anew the objectives of our historical effort and the materials
of our craft. We often think of our efforts as aimed at reconstructing
the events, actions, institutions, and organizations of the past. We wish
to know when a particular newspaper was founded, the progression of

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 The Problem of Journalism History I 89

its editors and editorial policies, when and how particular technology
was innovated and diffused, when particular judicial decisions or leg-
islative acts affecting the press were promulgated, under what circum-
stances and with what effect. There are innumerable such studies,
which, knitted together into a general history, create that documentary
record known as journalism history. This documentary record, when
subject to certain rules of interpretation, forms the positive content of
the discipline: an interpreted record of the events and actions of the
past. This is, in general, what we choose to remember of the past.
However, there is another dimension of the past, related to this
documentary record, but not simply derivable from it. This dimension
we call cultural, and I illustrate it with an artlessly simple example
drawn from John William Ward.
The documentary record of military history includes an attempt to
determine, for example, how, when, and under what circumstances
Caesar crossed the Rubicon. But this is not the only dimension of that
event and, for many purposes, not the most important dimension
either. The cultural history of that event is an attempt to reconstruct
what Caesar felt in crossing the Rubicon: the particular constellation of
attitudes, emotions, motives, and expectations that were experienced
in that act.1 To verify that Caesar crossed the Rubicon is to say nothing
of the significance of the event, a significance that derived from Cae-
sar's defiance of a convention giving Republican law authority over the
soldiers of the state.
Cultural history is not concerned merely with events but with the
thought within them. Cultural history is, in this sense, the study of con-
sciousness in the past.2 As such, it derives from three assumptions: first,
that consciousness has a history; second, that as Charles Cooley never
tired of arguing, the solid facts of society are the imaginations we have
of one another; and third, that while human actions illustrate in a gen-
eral way a certain uniformity across time and space, the imaginations
behind such actions illustrate a considerably wider variety. Most peo-
ple make love and war, have children and die, are educated and work
constrained by the physical limits of biology, nature, and technology.
But for us to understand these events we must penetrate beyond mere
appearance to the structure of imagination that gives them their signif-
icance. If most men march off to war, they do so in the grip of quite dif-
ferent imaginations: some march to recover holy lands for their god,
others to protect their nations from foreign devils, others reluctantly

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90 / The Problem of Journalism History

and sullenly as the exploited slaves of an imperial power. The facts of

warfare give none of this information directly, but the significance of
military action lies in how it is imagined.
The task of cultural history, then, is this recovery of past forms of
imagination, of historical consciousness. The objective is not merely to
recover articulate ideas or what psychologists nowadays call cognitions
but rather the entire "structure of feeling": "The most difficult thing to
get hold of, in studying any past period, is this felt sense of the quality
of life at a particular time and place: a sense of the ways in which the
particular activities combined into a way of thinking and living."3 We
want to show, in short, how action made sense from the standpoint of
historical actors: how did it feel to live and act in a particular period of
human history?
How does all this relate to journalism history? Our failure to de-
velop the cultural history of journalism has led us to exclude from our
literature any serious attention to what I believe is the central history
story we have to tell, namely, the history of reporting. We have legal
histories of the press, institutional histories, technical histories, even
some economic history of the press. But the history of reporting re-
mains not only unwritten but also largely unconceived. The central
story in journalism has been largely banished from our remembrance
of things past.
Prior—both logically and chronologically—to journalism's being
an institution, or business, or set of rights, or body of technology, jour-
nalism is a cultural act, a literary act. The technology of journalism ex-
isted prior to news or newspapers. Journalism is essentially a state of
consciousness, a way of apprehending, of experiencing the world. The
central idea in journalism is the "idea of a report" and the changing no-
tions of what has been taken to be an adequate report of the world. Be-
cause we are a news-saturated people it may seem strange to argue that
the desire to know, understand, and experience the world by getting
news or reports about it is really a rather strange appetite. But it is less
obtuse to suggest that there is a vast difference between what is taken
to be an adequate report of the world by those who queue up before
Tom Wolfe and the new journalism versus those readers wholly satis-
fied by the New York Times. In fact, our failure to understand journal-
ism as a cultural form has left us virtually bereft of intelligent commen-
tary on the "new journalism."
The central and as yet unwritten history of journalism is the his-

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 The Problem of Journalism History I 91

tory of the idea of a report: its emergence among a certain group of

people as a desirable form of rendering reality, its changing fortunes,
definitions, and redefinitions over time (that is, the creation and dis-
appearance of successive stylistic waves of reporting), and eventually, I
suppose, its disappearance or radical reduction as an aspect of human
consciousness.
I call this a cultural history for the following reason. By culture I
merely mean the organization of social experience in human conscious-
ness manifested in symbolic action. Journalism is then a particular so-
cial form, a highly particular type of consciousness, a particular orga-
nization of social experience. This form of consciousness can only be
grasped by its history and by comparing it to older forms of conscious-
ness (mythic, religious) that it partially displaced and with other forms
with which it emerged and has interacted—the scientific report, the
essay, and aesthetic realism.
When we grasp the history of journalism, we grasp one form of
human imagination, one form—shared by writer and reader—in which
reality has entered consciousness in an aesthetically satisfying way.
When we study changes in journalism over time, we are grasping a sig-
nificant portion of the changes that have taken place in modern con-
sciousness since the Enlightenment. But to do this we must temporarily
put aside our received views of what journalism is and examine it
afresh as a cultural form, a literary act, parallel to the novel, the essay,
and the scientific report. Like these other works, journalism is a cre-
ative and imaginative work, a symbolic strategy; journalism sizes up
situations, names their elements, and names them in a way that contains
an attitude toward them. Journalism provides what Kenneth Burke
calls strategies for situations—"strategies for selecting enemies and al-
lies, for socializing losses, for warding off evil eye, for purification, pro-
pitiation and desanctification, consolation, and vengeance, admonition
and exhortation, implicit commands or instructions of one sort or an-
other." Journalism provides audiences with models for action and feel-
ing, with ways to size up situations, and it shares these qualities with all
literary acts.
Journalism is not only literary art: it is industrial art. Stylistic de-
vices such as, for example, the inverted pyramid, the five-W (who,
what, when, where, and why) lead, and associated techniques are as
much a product of industrialization as tin cans. The methods, proce-
dures, and canons of journalism were developed not only to satisfy the

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92 / The Problem of Journalism History

demands of the profession but also to meet the needs of industry and to
turn out a mass-produced commodity. These canons are enshrined in
the profession as rules of communication. They are, like the methods of
the novelists, determiners of what can be written and in what way. In
this sense the techniques of journalism define what is considered to be
real: what can be written about and how it can be understood. From
the standpoint of the audience the techniques of journalism determine
what the audience can think—the range of what is taken to be real on a
given day. If something happens that cannot be packaged by the indus-
trial formula, then, in a fundamental sense, it has not happened: it can-
not be brought to the attention of the audience or can be presented
only in distorted fashion.
When we study the history of journalism we are principally study-
ing a way in which people in the past have grasped reality. We are
searching out the intersection of journalistic style and vocabulary,
created systems of meaning, and standards of reality shared by writer
and audience. We are trying to root out a portion of the history of
consciousness.
Journalism as a cultural form is not fixed and unchanging. Jour-
nalism has changed as it has reflected and reconstituted human con-
sciousness. Journalism not only reveals the structure of feeling of previ-
ous eras, it is the structure of feeling of past eras, or at least significant
portions of it.
For example, my colleague Albert Kreiling has tried to show how
the history of the black press is much more than the documentary
records of black papers and editors, successes and failures, or quarrels
among black editors and writers. He has tried to describe the black
press first and foremost as a record of black consciousness—its origins
and transformation—in modern times. We do not study the black press
because it passively reflects black consciousness; the press is not merely
a source of data about black social history. Black consciousness is
forged in, it exists in the black press: the arena where black conscious-
ness is created and controlled by the canons of black journalism. It is
not the only place, of course: one need not derogate art, pulpit, and
politics to show that black journalism does not passively reflect black
consciousness. To study the history of the black press or any other
press is to recover the consciousness of people in the past and to relate
that record to the present.

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 The Problem of Journalism. History I 93

There is, however, another and better explored side to the cultural
history of the press. The press itself is an expression of human con-
sciousness. Whether we think of the press as an institution, a set of
legal prerogatives regarding expression, or a body of technology, it is,
first of all, an expression of a certain ethos, temper, or imagination. The
press embodies a structure of feeling derived from the past, and as this
underlying structure of feeling changes, the press itself is altered. The
press should be viewed as the embodiment of consciousness. Our his-
tories in turn must unpack how a general consciousness becomes insti-
tutionalized in procedures for news gathering and reporting, forms of
press organization, and definitions of rights and freedoms.
We have made some progress here for we have realized that any un-
derstanding of the freedom and rights of journalists must take into ac-
count the changing fortunes of general legal consciousness identified by
terms such as natural law, legal realism, and sociological jurisprudence.
That body of literature often called "four theories of the press" has
also attempted to show how general patterns of consciousness iden-
tified by political handles such as liberalism and Marxism have been
institutionalized into specific patterns of press organization, news per-
formance, and definitions of freedoms and rights. However, this work
has never gone far enough, either historically or comparatively, and
suffers from an overly intellectualistic cast. It has not shown how forms
of consciousness shared in narrow intellectual circles have become
generally shared and how they have been altered in this process of
democratization.
The cultural history of journalism would attempt to capture that
reflexive process wherein modern consciousness has been created in the
symbolic form known as the report and how in turn modern con-
sciousness finds institutionalized expression in journalism.
Our major calling is to look at journalism as a text that said some-
thing about something to someone: to grasp the forms of conscious-
ness, the imaginations, the interpretations of reality journalism has
contained. When we do this the presumed dullness and triviality of our
subject matter evaporates and we are left with an important corner of
the most vital human odyssey: the story of the growth and transforma-
tion of the human mind as formed and expressed by one of the most
significant forms in which the mind has conceived and expressed itself
during the past three hundred years—the journalistic report.

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94 / The Problem of Journalism History

Notes
1. John William Ward, Red, White and Blue (New York: Oxford University Press,
1969), 4-5.
2. To do this requires that we overcome the prejudice against consciousness as a his-
torical fact. A useful place to begin this task is with Erich Neumann's The Origins and
History of Consciousness (New York: Pantheon, 1954).
3. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (New York: Harper and Row,
1966), 47.

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