Abstract
Media historians generally trace the rise of politically slanted news to the collapse of FCC regulations in the 1980s, the emergence of 24-hour cable (Fox, MSNBC) in the 1990s, and, more recently, the decline of mass-targeted print newspapers. Taking the New York Times’s Tom Wicker as a historical case study, this paper suggests—inspired by Matthew Pressman foundational research in On Press: The Liberal Values that Shaped the News (Harvard UP, 2018)—that we look earlier, to the pivotal moment when American newspapers faced the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, ultimately realizing the viability of carefully framed, non-neutral reporting. The Times has historically strived for centrism, and they resisted “biased” advocacy reporting on controversial topics such as Vietnam, feminism, and the counterculture that were the purview of New Journalists such as Norman Mailer and Joan Didion. One exception, though, was their columnist Tom Wicker, whose work was specifically intended to express a point of view. Drawing on Wicker’s published work and his papers held at the New York Public Library, and taking his engagement with the 1971 Attica Prison uprising as a tipping point moment, I argue that Wicker was the closest the Times would come to embracing (or perhaps merely tolerating) the politically engaged and openly opinionated New Journalism. The Wicker case, I contend, is not only of tremendous historical interest but also offers valuable political and historical context for understanding today’s opinion reporting and punditry.
Presenters
Heather HendershotCardiss Collins Professor of Communication Studies and Journalism, School of Communication and Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University, Illinois, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
JOURNALISM HISTORY, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, NEWSPAPERS, ARCHIVAL RESEARCH
