American Journalism

Vol. 41, Issue 1
Winter 2024

ARTICLES

“A Good Honest Journeyman Newspapering:” Billboard’s Lee Zhito Exposes Editorializing at George A. Richards’s “Station of the Stars”
Madeleine Liseblad and Gregory Pitts

A 1948 journalistic scoop informed the public and broadcast regulators about misconduct on the airwaves. The investigation by Lee Zhito established Billboard—known for music coverage and song charts—as a legitimate journalism voice in the radio industry. Zhito exposed news slanting and editorializing by station owner George A. Richards, who expressed to staff his abhorrence of Blacks, Jews, Communists, and Democrats—especially Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Mayflower doctrine banned editorializing and advocated public service, yet Richards’s views shaped news and commentary airing on KMPC in Los Angeles, WJR in Detroit, and WGAR in Cleveland. Zhito’s exposé produced national ramifications, led to the first major FCC case addressing news slanting and broadcast licensee obligations, generated 18,000 transcript pages and one of the FCC legal department’s most strongly worded documents affirming broadcaster public service. Journalists revealing secret practices can have a direct impact, pressuring industry and regulators to be more serious about upholding responsibilities.

Spinning Hate: Mississippi’s Post-Brown PR Offensive and the Secret Campaign Against ‘Agitators,’ 1956-1960
Edgar Simpson

After the US Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education ruling in 1954, the Mississippi Legislature approved several laws designed to fight integration and federalize civil rights. Among the legislation was the creation of the state Sovereignty Commission, which saw preserving white supremacy as good public policy. This study examines the efforts of the agency’s first public relations director to carry out that mission through both standard public relations practices and far more nefarious methods of coercion and intimidation against those perceived as threats to segregation.

“Too Infernally Scientific”: John Wesley Powell and News Framing of Climate Policy in the Nineteenth-Century Press
Ken J. Ward and Aaron Atkins (Free Access Article)

In 1890, John Wesley Powell launched a plan to reshape land use policies in the western United States. His proposal, grounded in science, sought to protect vulnerable water rights and garnered US press attention for eight months. Using qualitative historical analysis combined with quantitative content analysis to examine the story frames used by 281 newspapers in some 798 articles covering the debate over Powell’s proposal, this study fills a conspicuous gap in researchers’ understandings of the history of climate coverage in the US. It discovers that news coverage overwhelmingly focused on a political conflict frame that deemphasized the substance both of Powell’s proposal and the alternatives offered by his opponents. Finally, it illustrates the usefulness of applying contemporary frames to historical questions and highlights the partisan sectional identity dominant in the American West in the 1890s.

Tel Ra Productions: The Unknown Story of a Philadelphia Production Company That Captured Americans’s Passion for Sports on Film in the Post-WWII Era
Daniel Marshall Haygood

During commercial television’s early years, the nation’s four networks initially featured an extensive offering of sports programming on prime-time schedules. The networks then replaced sports with entertainment programs in these prime slots, relegating sports to weekends. Independent sports producers saw this deemphasis of athletics as an opportunity. Philadelphia-based Tel Ra Productions emerged as the leading producer of syndicated sports programming, beginning in the late 1940s. Its primary program was TeleSports Digest, a thirty-minute weekly show that featured a variety of sporting events. The program comprised the most extensive offerings of sports available, featuring some of the most valuable American sports properties, including NFL football, college basketball, professional baseball, and non-traditional sports, and unique competitive activities. Ultimately, Tel Ra Productions became the most prolific producer of US sports films from 1948 to 1966, appealing to the country’s seemingly limitless appetite for athletics.

CONVERSATIONS ON JOURNALISM HISTORY

A Conversation with Pushpa Kamal Dahal, Prime Minister of Nepal
Interview by Nicholas Hirshon

BOOK REVIEWS

Magazine
Sharon Bloyd-Peshkin

Righting the American Dream: How the Media Mainstreamed Reagan’s Evangelical Vision
Cari S. Babitzke

Journalism in the Civil War Era
William E. Huntzicker

Live From The Underground: A History of College Radio
Jason Lee Guthrie

24/7 Politics: Cable Television and the Fragmenting of America from Watergate to Fox News
John McMurria

Get the Damn Story: Homer Bigart and the Great Age of American Newspapers
Thomas R. Schmidt

Children, War & Propaganda
Charles Sorrie

DIGITAL MEDIA REVIEWS

The Magnus Archive, https://rustyquill.com/show/the-magnus-archives/
Hayley McCullough