PROOF

10
Journalism
John Nerone

Taylor & Francis

“Journalism” has two meanings in common usage. It refers to both news and the discipline of

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reporting news. In the irst usage, journalism is the stuff produced by the news system or by the
press. In the second meaning, journalism is a particular set of norms, standards, and procedures
that govern the proper production of news. The irst usage is relatively non-discriminatory. You
can refer to virtually any news as journalism in that usage. It is that usage that John Hartley
(1996) implies when he calls journalism “the primary sense-making practice of modernity.” The
second usage is fundamentally discriminatory. Journalism in that usage is the professional, or re-
sponsible, or expert production of news, and is always to be distinguished from other, non-expert,
irresponsible, or unprofessional news practices. In fact, in the second usage, journalism derives
its very meaning from its contrast with vernacular news. Journalism is the opposite of gossip,
rumor, sensationalism, partisanism, and so forth.
In this chapter, journalism will refer to the discipline that governs reporting. I will discuss
the history of particularly the modern form of professional journalism, as it developed in the early
modern West, was reined and packaged in the UK and the United States, and then was exported
to the rest of the world. I will also discuss key moments in the scholarly study of journalism and
of journalism history.
News is ancient and omnipresent: every society has some system for generating accounts of
matters characterized by novelty and deviance because every society has a need for monitoring
its environment. In that sense, news has no history, although news formats, like the newspaper,
do. Journalism in its modern sense, on the other hand, can be said to have a history. Journalism
as we understand it is a fairly recent phenomenon that originated only in the second half of the
nineteenth century.

ORIGINS OF JOURNALISM

Modern formats for presenting the news appeared in the years following the European invention
of the printing press. There had long been handwritten versions of news, including the ancient
Roman Acta Diurna, inscribed oficial announcements posted in public places and sometimes
copied on parchment for dissemination in the provinces. Imperial China and Korea both circulated
handwritten bulletins of court information; in Korea, these came to be printed at one point in
1577, giving Korea a claim to having produced the irst printed newspaper (Kim 2013).

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In addition to these quasi-oficial digests of news for the governing class, similar newsletters
containing inancial information began to circulate in Renaissance Europe. The most famous of
these were handwritten avvisi produced in Venice during its imperial years (de Vivo 2007, 80-85;
Kittler 2009, 87–88). Mostly compiled out of merchants’ private letters, these circulated primar-
ily among subscribers in trade centers beginning in the irst decade of the sixteenth century. As
the wars of religion following the Protestant Reformation increased in intensity, news of the con-
licts became more common. Some of these came to be compiled and printed in pamphlet form.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century in Germany, the Netherlands and England, regu-
larly issued corantos were printed and sold. Histories of news usually cite these as the irst real
newspapers, based on the twin facts that they were printed regularly, usually weekly, and that
they contained information for a general public.
The initial rise of news in print is sometimes credited to the European invention of printing.
This is only somewhat true. News circulated in handwritten form long after printing had diffused

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throughout the continent. At the same time, news was one of the less compelling uses of print for
the irst century and a half after Gutenberg. Instead, it might be more accurate to link the rise of
news to the rise of postal systems, which were a necessary infrastructure for both newsgathering
and distribution, and to the rise of the sorts of actors that came to reliably produce news: nation-

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states, Parliaments, and armies.
Once news began to appear in printed form, it prompted attempts by states and churches to
control it. In England, the Tudor monarchs created an elaborate system of licensing that enfran-
chised not just the crown but also the Church of England and the Stationers’ Company, the private
guild of printers and booksellers, which enjoyed a licensed monopoly on print production and
sale. But printing was a relatively portable technology that could be deployed in small productive
units, so it was dificult to control. Dissidents (in England, Puritans and Catholics) with ready
cash could ind printers willing to defy regulation. (Siebert 1952)
The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) caused tremendous growth in printed news. Demand for
news was elevated by dramatic events, and the usual systems of government control were strained
by conlict. In England, the Revolution and Civil War of the 1640s produced a total collapse of
print regulation (Raymond 2005). When the revolutionary Parliament restored licensing, John
Milton argued against it in Areopagitica, later cited as the irst mature formulation of a philoso-
phy of freedom of the press.
These 17th-century eruptions of news culture did not prove durable in the short run. When
order was restored (for instance, with the 1660 Restoration in England), systems of regulation
succeeded in largely suppressing news publications beyond intra-elite communication and of-
icial announcements. Serious people believed that public discussion should be regulated, even
if they disagreed on who should do the regulating. From time to time, a practical incapacity to
regulate opened a space for a “temporary public sphere” (Briggs and Burke 2009, 73). In Eng-
land, the rise of continuing party politics made it impossible for Parliament to continue censor-
ship in 1695. Still, elites could agree that news culture should be restricted on a class basis if not
on an ideological one; a stamp tax enacted in 1712 effectively made a legal working-class press
inancially unsustainable.
Only with the eighteenth century bourgeois revolutions, especially in the United States and
France, did news culture come to seem to the leading classes as a positive good. The practicali-
ties of revolution, which required mobilizing the general population, interacted with a tradition
of political theory about government by consent to produce a norm of public deliberation as the
source of legitimate government. An expanded press was both a cause and an effect of those revo-
lutions. Printers and pamphleteers were essential participants in revolutionary movements, and,
although during revolutions themselves leaders used any means necessary to control the press,

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198 JOHN NERONE

after a revolution freedom of the press came to be embraced as an abstract good, as for instance
in the U.S. guarantee of freedom of the press (alongside religion, speech, petition, and assembly)
in the First Amendment in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights. The basis for this guarantee was the
asserted need for free discussion in establishing consent for government. Freedom of the press
earned constitutional protection as a means to good governance, suggesting that future regulation
and support of media systems could be justiied on the same grounds (Amar 2000). In the United
States, this positive notion of the value of the press led to the creation of a federally inanced
infrastructure in the postal system, a huge self-conscious social investment in subsidizing the
operation of newspapers (McChesney and Nichols 2010).
The press of the eighteenth century did not feature what moderns would call “journalism.”
News was gathered out of a browsing of letters, government documents, and other newspapers,
and assembled by practical printers with minimal editing (Clark 1994; Wilke 2003). The word
“journalism” came into use in the wake of the eighteenth-century revolutions to describe political

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argumentation, not newsgathering. Journalists were controversialists. Ironically, because the press
was supposed to be an instrument of public deliberation, such journalists were sometimes seen as
a danger to the useful freedom of the press. Closer to the modern notion of the journalist in these
newspapers was the “correspondent,” a term which referred to a person loosely associated with

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a newspaper who sent in letters containing news from distant locations, like national capitals or
commercial centers. Correspondents typically did this as an avocation, sometimes receiving pay
per piece, but often writing for free, perhaps with the interest of a future literary career.
News reporting as an occupation became more common with the commoditization of news
in the nineteenth century (Chalaby 1998). A combination of cheaper production costs, increased
advertising revenue opportunities, relaxed government regulation, and the growth of potential
audiences encouraged larger circulations and expanded content. News organizations began hiring
“reporters” to provide content. The term “reporter” was borrowed from legal usage, where court
reporters transcribed proceedings, and the volumes in which court proceedings were published
were titled “Reporter.” The reporters that newspapers hired similarly were expected to transcribe
facts—the proceedings at criminal courts and public meetings, the ships entering a port, the
prices of commodities, the names of people dying, being born, getting married, and checking into
hotels. Reporters, like correspondents, were not called “journalists” until later in the nineteenth
century.
The commercialized newspapers appearing in the irst half of the nineteenth century sup-
ported a vibrant populist press culture. News markets expanded rapidly, and in local markets
multiple newspapers competed for a variety of niche audiences. Commentators lamented some
elements of this competition, including episodes of hyperpartisanism (leading in the U.S. to the
Civil War); subsequent historians would romanticize the press of this period, especially the so-
called “penny press,” as embodying “democratic market culture” (Schudson 1978; Nerone 1987).

JOURNALISM AS AN IDEOLOGY

The development of journalism as a discipline occurred at the end of the nineteenth century
in response to the appearance of bottlenecks in the news system. This complicated story had
roots in both the economics of the news business and in political and cultural developments in
Western societies. Economically, industrialization transformed the news business in a number of
ways. New print technologies made it possible to vastly expand capacity—printing more copies
with more pages—and to include graphic elements, appealing to a broader audience, segmented
demographically along lines that were supported by streams of advertising revenue. If earlier

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newspapers were meant to be read by undifferentiated citizens (who happened to be propertied

white males), modern newspapers were meant to be read by a variety of consumers of various
classes, genders, and ethnicities.
This industrialized newspaper was a big business. In local markets, industrialized newspa-
pers featured economies of scale that eventually would produce elements of natural monopoly. It
also introduced disciplined production into what were now called “newsrooms.” The newsroom
in an industrialized newspaper resembled a textile establishment, with workers occupying a large
shared space, seated in front of machines—sewing machines for textiles, typewriters for report-
ers. The conditions of newsroom labor became an element in the invention of journalism. By the
late nineteenth century, this industrialized press had become an object of scholarly scrutiny in
some Western countries. In Germany, for instance, sociologists like Knies and Weber had under-
taken signiicant studies of the power of the press (Hardt 2001). The most important of the early
U.S. trade newspapers, The Journalist (est. 1884), was full of complaints from “space writers,”

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reporters working in industrialized newspapers who were paid by the line or by the column inch,
and whose income could shrink radically depending on the judgment of the copydesk (Smythe
2003). The disgruntlement of newsworkers would intersect with pressure from a suspicious pub-
lic to help produce a drive for professionalization.

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The public was aware of the industrialization of the news industry. In the United States, this
awareness took the form of outrage on several fronts. Populist and progressive activists feared the
takeover of the press by the “money power,” a fear embodied especially in railroad magnate Jay
Gould’s takeover of the telegraph monopoly Western Union, which also gave him leverage over
the Associated Press, the bottleneck for the low of national and international news. Gould, whose
political exploits included backing the notorious Tweed Ring, New York Mayor William Marcy
Tweed’s spectacularly corrupt circle of cronies, was not very subtle in his attempts to inluence
public opinion, having bought newspapers, including the New York World, to promote his busi-
ness interests (John 2010). Gould’s generation of “robber barons” was matched by a generation
of self-interested media moguls, like William Randolph Hearst, who parlayed wealth inherited
from his father’s mining companies into the irst and perhaps still most powerful media empire,
which he put to work supporting his own political ambitions (Nasaw 2000). Hearst doubled as a
villain for patricians and other cultural conservatives. As a practitioner of the journalism of sensa-
tion, Hearst represented for them the potential of news as a mass medium to debase popular tastes
and morals and undermine the citizen virtue necessary for self-government.
Public suspicions demanding responsible behavior from the press interacted with the work
interests of newsworkers and the self-interest of publishers to produce a drive toward profes-
sionalization. The public demanded a more transparent and less self-serving news system. In
the United States, one landmark of this demand was the passage of the Truth in Publishing Act
of 1912, which required newspapers to publicly state their owners, among other things (Lawson
1993). This modest achievement depended on a massive popular interest in changing the relation-
ship of the press to private power. Publishers recognized the force of this critique. They placated
the public, and at the same time elevated the prestige of their ield, by conferring signiicant
autonomy on their own newsworkers. The newsworkers embraced this autonomy, seeing it as
ammunition in their continuing war with the copy desk, but also as promising increased prestige
and income. One marker of the progress of professionalization in journalism was the appear-
ance and growth of journalism courses and degree programs in colleges and universities. The
irst degree-granting journalism schools appeared in the irst decade of the twentieth century in
the United States at the University of Missouri and at Columbia University. European countries
were slower to develop journalism education, though a school was established in France in 1899
(Josephi 2009).

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Modern journalism emerged out of this conjuncture. It presented itself as an expert and
detached explanation of true events, not simply a recording or a description. This understanding
of journalism merged the tasks of correspondence and reporting. The journalist would have a
voice, much like the correspondent’s, but would not opine like a correspondent. He (normatively,
the journalist was gendered male, though notable journalists happened to be women) certiied
that his explanations were factually based, though he did not conine himself, like the reporter,
to recording facts. Journalism presented itself as a “discipline of veriication” (Kovach and
Rosenstiel 2001, 5), and presented its work as active, not passive. The journalist certiied his
agency with his byline, which worked in a fashion similar to a claim of authorship, but with a
signiicant difference. The byline told the reader that the journalist took responsibility for the
account, but not in the sense that he guaranteed its originality, as an author would; rather, in the
sense that he certiied that any other expert observer would have compiled a similar account. The
byline was a claim to non-authorship (Barnhurst and Nerone 2001, 249)

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The genealogy of modern journalism underscores its instability. Journalism as a discipline of
veriication was invented as a kind of negotiated settlement to a complicated three-way struggle
between the public, publishers, and newsworkers. It entailed a professionalization project. But
the professionalization of journalism could never fully be achieved because journalism lacks

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some of the essential elements of a profession. These can be summarized simply as science,
independence, and autonomy. Medicine is the best example of a classic profession. Physicians
enjoy independence: they can work in a one-on-one, unmediated relationship with the public
because the “means of production” of medicine can be contained by a practitioner in one’s head,
hands, and ofice. They also enjoy autonomy: to become a doctor, one must pass a battery of
tests, administered by the state, that are designed in the irst place by other doctors. Both the
autonomy and the independence of the physician are rooted in science. The arcane, theoretical
body of medical knowledge requires years of study to master, cannot be learned by just anyone,
and promises and delivers tangible beneits.
Journalism does not have such a body of knowledge, and therefore does not have autonomy.
The knowledge of journalists is not arcane: it is meant to be shared, and, if not made public,
undermines the social and political function of journalism. It is also not theoretical; rather,
it consists of a messy accumulation of stuff that every citizen should know. This is relected
in journalism education, which tends to be oriented toward craft skills, on the one hand, and
miscellaneous grounding in the humanities and social sciences on the other, and usually results
in a bachelor’s degree rather than a graduate degree. Such a knowledge base cannot authorize the
sort of state licensing that physicians enjoy. In most Western countries such licensing would be
considered a form of censorship or government interference with a free press.
In addition, journalists have rarely enjoyed independence. With few exceptions, journalists
must be employed by a news organization that is owned and usually controlled by non-
journalists. Journalists require the news organization to intermediate—to give them access to
the public. Indeed, the news organization gives the journalist authority. The public’s recognition
of the credibility or power of the BBC or the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung confers power and
credibility on the work of the journalists they employ.
The halfway professionalization of journalism affects its work in many ways. It gives it in-
suficient protection against external inluence. Because journalists lack their own “science,” they
tend to assimilate to the nearest available professional science. Crime reporters, for instance, tend
to adopt the professional knowledge of police and lawyers. Business journalists tend to adopt the
science of economists. Lacking the credibility and training to critique these parallel professions,
journalists risk simply parroting them. The requirement of neutrality that professionalism carries
makes it dificult for journalists to convey valid judgments of controversies. When reporting on a

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controversy, professional journalists display neutrality by balancing sources, offering an opinion

from “Expert A” and balancing it with a rebuttal from “Expert Not A.” Habits of sourcing render
journalists vulnerable to “subsidized” information offered by experts for hire, often through the
ministrations of public relations oficer and other “parajournalists” (Schudson 2011, xv).
The vulnerabilities of professional journalism were recognized even as professional journal-
ism came into existence. The development of a large body of “journalism ethics” testiies to the
awareness of both journalists and the public of threats to independence from both within and
without the news organization. Early codes of ethics, including the 1923 code of the American
Society of Newspaper Editors, emphasize independence as a key value, behind freedom of the
press but ahead of neutrality, accuracy, and “fair play” (Pratte 1995, appendix B). A critic might
regard this as testimony of the weakness of the profession. Indeed, journalism is unusual among
the professions for the sheer number of statements of codes of ethics. Many news organizations
have crafted their own, as well as every professional organization and many nations. The number

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and variety of such statements indicates the looseness of the professional identity of journalism.
“Objectivity” is the master term in many of these codes. Scholars recognize journalistic
objectivity as characteristically American in origin. It had emerged as the deining value for U.S.
journalists by the middle of the twentieth century. (It was still novel enough to be mentioned in

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quotation marks in the report of the Hutchins Commission in 1947: Commission on Freedom
of the Press 1947, 13.) In some defenses of the professionalization project, objectivity and its
techniques stand in for legitimating science—it is objectivity you need to go to college to learn.
Critics have long noted that the term is dificult to deine precisely. Mindich (1998) argues that it
is an assemblage of a series of techniques—the “inverted pyramid” structure, neutrality, balanc-
ing, and so forth—each of which has its origins in the nineteenth century.
It is a commonplace to attribute objectivity to the rise of the telegraph as a tool of news
transmission. There do seem to be technological and commercial reasons for telegraphic news to
require some of the elements of objectivity. Cost concerns would encourage telegraphic reports to
be terse. Eficiency would also dictate the inverted pyramid structure, which eases editing by al-
lowing the newspaper’s telegraph editor to simply snip the story after a few paragraphs. The busi-
ness model of wire services, which had clients of various political persuasions, would seem to
dictate neutrality. The historical record does not conirm this explanation, however. Wire service
news was not actually politically neutral in the second half of the nineteenth century, but tended
to have a Republican bias (Summers 1994; Blondheim 1994). Telegraphic news might tend to-
ward terseness, but news copy overall was notoriously verbose (Tucher 2001). The inverted pyra-
mid structure is perhaps better explained as an adoption of bureaucratic styles of communication
(Nerone 2008). Business conditions coupled with changes in the political environment seemed
to produce an inclination toward neutrality only after the climactic presidential election of 1896
(Kaplan 2002).
Journalism inched toward an embrace of objectivity as an explicit professional ideology
in the 1920s and 1930s. The best account of this development remains Schudson’s (1978). He
argues that the naïve empiricism of nineteenth-century reporting encountered an antithetical cri-
tique in the age of industrialization, when critics of journalism, citing the insidious inluence of
the “money power,” of advertising and the emerging public relations profession, of parties and
of government news management, suggested that the news was fundamentally untrustworthy.
When this critique merged with the insights of the infant discipline of psychology, it produced
a position that Schudson calls “radical subjectivism.” Objectivity emerged out of this conlict of
antitheses. It recognized the irreducible subjectivity of the journalist, and the artiicial nature of
news, but proposed that news might yet be rendered meaningfully objective if journalists accept-
ed the responsibility of policing their own values and separating them out from their newswork.

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Schudson’s account has the virtue of locating objectivity proper in the twentieth century rather
than reading it back into the very different news practices of nineteenth-century reporters and
correspondents.
Objectivity was an important part of the culture of an institutionalizing news industry. Cook
(1998) has pointed out that the news media in the second half of the twentieth century should
be considered an institution and thought about as part of the governing process. Although some
would say that this role is already suggested in the tradition of viewing the press as a “fourth
estate” of government (Carlyle 1838, vol. 1, 227), in the original version of the fourth estate char-
acterization, the press consisted of partisan advocates arguing as if they constituted a legislature
outside of the government. The institutionalized press is supposed to look like the Department of
Agriculture, not the Parliament. It is supposed to consist of independent and neutral experts who
provide the consensual version of reality that interested parties must reckon with.
Just how the press became an institution of this nature is easily understood in the abstract. It

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is not, however, well described in historical work. There is a well-known narrative of normative
discussion about the responsibilities of the press in a modern society. This narrative starts with
Walter Lippmann’s (1922) indictment of the problem of public opinion, which he saw as rooted
in both the cognitive limitations of ordinary people and the defective organization of the news

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system, which intensiied bad habits like thinking in stereotypes. It proceeds through revelations
of untoward press performance in the years encompassing the two world wars: vulnerability to
and complicity in propaganda, subservience to business interests, hostility to labor and the work-
ing class, and pandering to the public’s appetite for sex, violence, and sensationalism. It advances
through John Dewey’s response to Lippmann (1927; see also Czitrom 1982), in which he hopes
the press can help create the “Great Community” to give cultural coherence to the Great Society
that industrialization has brought into being. It then culminates in the injunctions of national and
international commissions at the end of World War II.
The postwar order envisioned the internationalization of a particular Western press system.
This Western hegemonic journalism insisted on the formal autonomy of news organizations from
government, imagined the most independent news organizations to be the ones most fully based
in the marketplace, expected journalists within such news organizations to have substantial au-
tonomy from the speciic economic and political interests of their owners, and saw that autonomy
enabling journalists to function as supercitizens. One particularly inluential and articulate ver-
sion of this set of assumptions was the inal report of the Hutchins Commission (Commission on
Freedom of the Press 1947). The report, titled A Free and Responsible Press, began by recogniz-
ing the problem of the press in modern societies. Because of their complexity, modern societies
required institutions of “mass communication,” itself a novel term, unfamiliar before the end
of the 1930s. But, because these “mass media” (another novel term) were large, powerful, and
privately controlled enterprises, they posed a threat to democracy, which, as a system of govern-
ment, anticipates ordinary individuals exercising judgment based on sound information. This
contradiction between the media and democracy invited one of two solutions. One, chosen by
both the fascist powers in the 1930s and the communist systems of the Soviet bloc, was for the
government to take over the media system and operate it in the name of the people. Nominally
democratic, such regimes produced monstrous results. The alternative was for the media to as-
sume the responsibility to steward the public sphere. The media could do that by recognizing the
“requirements” of the society: for a truthful and accurate account of the news of the day, for an
open and balanced forum for comment and criticism, for the fair representation of the constituent
groups in the society, for the clariication of the goals and values of the society, and for full access
to the public sphere for all citizens (paraphrasing the requirements as presented in Commission
on Freedom of the Press 1947, ch. 2.) By fulilling these requirements, the press could present

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a simulacrum of the open public sphere that earlier democracies provided naturally (McIntyre
1987).
A marker of this normative framework for the press was the coining of the term “market-
place of ideas.” Like the other neologisms of the period—objectivity, mass communication, mass
media—the marketplace of ideas seemed like an old term. As a concept, its genealogy is often
credited to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s dissenting opinion in Abrams v US (1919, 630), where he
argues that “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competi-
tion of the market.” But the precise phrase “marketplace of ideas” is very hard to ind in published
material before World War II (Peters 2004). Then it appears in the Hutchins Commission report
already as a cliché (1947, 15). Its invention seems rooted in the rise of a communication system
dominated by mass media. In an age of smaller media, the media marketplace was the market-
place of ideas. Competition among a vast number of small publications supported vigorous de-
bate among competing views. But in the system of mass communication, the actual marketplace

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was monopolized. Because the market did not produce competition, it was necessary for the
media themselves to produce a virtual marketplace, the marketplace of ideas.
Journalists undertook tremendous responsibilities in the system of mass communication. It
fell to each reporter to try to serve the requirements in every report. Journalists assumed responsi-

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bility not just for informing the public but moreover for representing the public. They were to do
this in two ways. First, they were to act as the delegates of the public—for instance, in question-
ing authorities. Second, they were to depict the public, as in providing a representative picture
of the common sense of ordinary people, in showing what they care about. Journalists in this
normative system took responsibility for gatekeeping (White 1950), agenda-setting (McCombs
and Shaw 1972), and framing (Entman 1993).
These responsibilities presupposed capacities. For journalists to have the role of framing
news in a way that gives it meaning within an ongoing civic conversation, journalists need to
have the capacity to understand, judge, and present the news within those frames. Lacking that
capacity, the role of the journalist in framing is passive, and amounts to selecting from a small
set of frames proffered by interested parties. Lacking the capacity to set an agenda, journalists
will be passive endorsers of the agendas of the powerful, and public knowledge will be “indexed”
to intra-elite argument. (Bennett 1990) The gap between the responsibilities and the capacities
of journalists suggests that the press as an institution functions to reinforce power rather than
to share and rationalize it, a critique that supported resistance to the global export of Western
hegemonic journalism.

WESTERN HEGEMONIC JOURNALISM AND THE REST OF THE WORLD

The nations of the modern West share a history of the development of journalism. The Anglo-
American tradition ran slightly ahead of other national journalisms, but all followed a similar
pattern: an established press serving speciic merchant and governmental elites yielding to a
politicized and commercialized competitive press system, with industrialization encouraging
professionalization. In some countries, this history was strongly inlected by the state, either as
censor or as sponsor of a vigorous public service institution, like a national broadcaster. Daniel
Hallin and Paolo Mancini (2004) identify three different traditions in the modern West: the Lib-
eral market-based model of the North Atlantic, the Democratic Corporatist public service model
of central and northern Europe, and the Mediterranean Polarized Pluralist or partisan model. But
this variation occurs within a broadly shared set of norms, practices, and institutions.
The professionalization of journalism in the modern West rendered it exportable. The early

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journalism schools, especially Missouri’s and Columbia’s, hosted students and journalists from
around the world, who then copied and translated curricula and textbooks. The low of Western
journalism outward to the world followed paths cleared by the wire services, the diffusion of
technologies like printing presses and telegraphy, networks of commerce, the diffusion of educa-
tional systems, and the process of decolonization. This complex history has been written episodi-
cally but the general outlines are clear. The case of east Asia is particularly interesting. Western
journalism was imported irst in the form of English-language newspapers aimed at a commercial
elite. In some cases, these were the irst local newspapers, but in others a tradition of news for a
governing bureaucracy or local elites already existed. Western journalism offered increased pres-
tige and independence for local journalists. Two Chinese students were attending the University
of Missouri’s journalism classes in 1912, and the irst journalism classes in a Chinese university
were taught by a Missouri graduate (Merrill and Ibold 2008, 227). Missouri’s restless chief,
Walter Williams, toured the world promoting journalism education (Farrar 1998). Such students

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became evangelists for Western journalism in Japan, China, and Korea.
In the postwar period, Western countries exported journalism with increasing conviction to
the rest of the world. The creation of a new world order in the form of the United Nations and its
subsidiary organizations was one mechanism of this. The United Nations Educational, Scientiic,

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and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) crafted and adopted a Universal Declaration of Human
Rights that included in Article XIX the right to “freedom of opinion and expression; this right
includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart informa-
tion and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” Western liberals have interpreted
this as an endorsement of what the inluential book Four Theories of the Press has called “the lib-
ertarian model” of the press, in which market based media serve the right to opinion and expres-
sion (Siebert, Schramm, Peterson 1956). Immediately after World War II, the United States
and other occupying powers built libertarian press systems in West Germany, Japan, Korea, and
elsewhere, and exerted themselves to protect the markets of Western wire services (Blanchard
1986). Under the guise of democratic modernization, the Western powers encouraged the ex-
port of Western media, arguing that media use builds “empathy,” helps overcome “traditional”
inequalities, and leads to habits of “high mass consumption” that are integral to full economic
development (Lerner 1958; Rostow 1960).
Western hegemonic journalism encountered strong resistance. A counterhegemonic tradition
already existed in the socialist states, including the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of
China, where journalism was charged with leading the formation of socialist consciousness and
given the function of self-criticism. It also encountered resistance from the Non-Aligned Move-
ment of states seeking a third way between the Western powers and the Soviet bloc. In the 1970s,
these states were the chief sponsors of a movement for a New World Information and Commu-
nication Order, which found a forum in UNESCO and expression in the report of the MacBride
Commission (International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems 1980). The
MacBride Commission forwarded proposals to redress persistent imbalances and inequalities in
the global media system, including the dominance of the north in news lows, the pervasiveness
of a news system that emphasized events and especially catastrophes at the expense of structural
and positive information favoring development, and the dominance of entertainment media from
the west and north that relected and reinforced economic inequalities. The West denounced the
MacBride commission, with the United States under President Ronald Reagan and Great Britain
under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher withdrawing from UNESCO in protest. The movement
ebbed after the 1980s.
Beginning in the 1990s and accelerating through the following decades, a new set of issues
replaced the classic mid-twentieth-century formation of journalism problems. These older issues

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JOURNALISM 205

waned as a result of three large structural changes. First was the palpable weakening of the au-
tonomy of journalism in the face of corporate ownership. Second was the increasing porousness
of the line between the professional journalist and the citizen. Third, and perhaps most striking
,was the rise of a global and transnational sphere of journalism. Each of these developments in-
vites a rethinking of journalism history.
The press criticism of the 1930s and earlier was full of indictments of the money power.
Professionalization was a proposed answer to those criticisms. For a generation, the rise of pub-
licly-held news chains coincided with an increase in the economic health of news organizations
to produce a semblance of professional autonomy for reporters. Because news markets were
becoming natural monopolies, and because owning a newspaper, a broadcast station or network,
or a news service promised a secure and very proitable revenue stream, it was good policy to
invest in news resources. But, beginning in the 1970s, marketing common sense steered news
organizations away from mass working-class audiences and toward niche audiences desirable

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to advertisers (Leonard 1995). As circulation and viewership began to fall, a round of cutbacks
struck newsrooms. Corporate interests had gone from friend to foe for journalists. In the “creative
destruction” that followed a wave of takeovers fueled by new debt, the corporate form was said
to inlict an economic logic fundamentally at odds with the values of professional journalism.

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The development of digital and web-based news further undermined the autonomy of jour-
nalists. The web increased the decline of audiences for legacy media as readers sought out new
news sites, some of which simply aggregated traditional news output, while others offered com-
peting personal or enterprise journalism. Traditional journalists welcomed the ways digital media
afforded feedback from readers, but were dismayed by the ways in which their value as news
gatekeepers was challenged by bloggers and citizen journalists.
As the twenty-irst century began, a series of crises underscored the interconnectedness of
the globe. New digital media allowed for communication and organization without regard to
national borders, promising a new age of “mass self-communication” (Castells 2009). It also
implied a new age of Empire (Hardt and Negri 2001).

CONCLUSION

Structural transformations explain the rise of journalism as a discipline of news. The appearance
of mass media with elements of monopoly required the creation of an explanation of the sorts of
power that such organizations could wield. A side effect of this development was the adoption of
a hegemonic model of journalism that was exported to the world. With the collapse of the Soviet
bloc late in the twentieth century, this notion of journalism seemed poised to grow globally.
But the conditions that encouraged its rise in the West have shifted and altered. In the sup-
posedly most developed parts of the world, professional journalism has begun to seem quaint. It
has not been around that long, and many think it is about to die.
It is unlikely that journalism as a discipline of news will cease to exist, however. There re-
mains a need for a consensual view of reality that can govern the conlicts and deliberations of
empowered groups. Journalism has been the provider of that. A different journalism—a different
discipline of news—may need to be developed now to answer to new structural elements of the
media environment. Like the invention of the previous forms of journalism, this one looks to be
messy.
When a new journalism comes into focus, it will probably also call into existence a new
form of journalism history. Existing forms of journalism history appeared as called forth by the
curricula of journalism schools, and grew as the available archival materials and publication

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206 JOHN NERONE

formats allowed (Nerone 2010; 2011). In the United States, this meant that journalism histories
were primarily concerned with progress toward professional independence, the tale told by the
classic encyclopedic narratives of Willard Bleyer, Edwin Emery, and Frank Luther Mott. This
whiggish narrative always existed alongside a less popular and one could argue less useful socio-
logical narrative of the news industry (Lee 1937). In the 1970s, scholars criticized the dominant
progressive narrative, calling for something more in line with the social history project that was
then transforming the work of history departments. The result was a series of innovative studies
of the culture of news (see for example Schudson 1978; Schiller 1981.) Journalism history as a
ield remained captured by grand narratives of progress, on the one hand, and focused studies that
relied upon archived iles of newspapers or personal papers of editors and journalists on the other.
At the present moment, the decay of the professional model of journalism promises to in-
teract with the rise of new forms of archives to create an opportunity for journalism historians to
turn their attention to the history of the news system. The passing of the high modern moment

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of professional journalism reduces the need for journalism historians to shape their narratives
around the rise of the journalist as an independent universal observer; instead, they can refocus on
the news system as part of the infrastructure of the public sphere. At the same time, the digitiza-
tion of news archives allows journalism historians to ask and answer questions about the low of

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text and information across news media organizations.

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