The Invention of Journalism Ethics, Second Edition by Ward Stephen J. A.;

Author:Ward, Stephen J. A.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: 2015-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Calls for professionalism were also a reply to press criticism, which became popular in the nineteenth century. A trickle of articles on journalism early in the century swelled into a stream of books, magazine articles, and speeches by the late 1880s. Early American commentators, like their British counterparts, talked idealistically about the press. Whereas British critics tended to accept partisanship, US critics argued that it tainted journalism. Edwin Godkin, founder of the Nation, noted in 1865 that the reporter should give to civilization “a plain, unvarnished, and veracious account of itself.”82

The first full book of criticism appeared in 1859. It was Our Press Gang or A Complete Exposition of the Corruptions and Crimes of the American Newspapers, by veteran journalist Lambert Wilmer. Wilmer accused the press of provoking violence among the “rabble,” and he decried press subservience to corrupt, monied interests. The first article of American press criticism to use the word “ethics” in its title appeared in 1889 – “The Ethics of Journalism.”83

In Britain, conservative periodicals worried about the press’s abuses, its effect on morals and on women, and the influence of its “unrestrained discussion of public affairs” on the masses. These concerns were part of a long tradition of elite criticism. From the 1850s on, many intellectuals, politicians, and editors of an elite press poured scorn on a cheaper labour press. Then they turned on the popular papers, which addressed readers who were neither fully respectable nor radical. Elite editors such as J.F. Stephen rejected the “new journalism” for pandering to a busy public with intellectual mincemeat: “Their food must be chopped up small before they eat it; and it must be so prepared as at once to tempt the appetite, and assist the digestion.”84 Matthew Arnold, as we saw above, called the popular press “feather-brained.” John Ruskin rejected the “dirty printed falsehood every morning at breakfast.” When Charles Dickens visited the United States in 1842, he objected to popular journalism as an “evil” power spreading “odium.”85 Anthony Trollope satirized the “fourth estate” as a Mount Olympus that issued “the only known infallible bulls for the guidance of British souls and bodies.”86 The same criticism surfaced against other forms of mass media as they appeared – the music hall, cinema, phonograph, and radio.

Media commentary turned bitter as the century ended. Over 100 magazine articles on the press appeared in the United States during the 1890s. Shuman’s Steps condemned “independent journalism” for selling out standards for profits. Had the free press exchanged one master, the political party, for another, the corporate interest? Had the sensational press abandoned its liberal heritage of acting as a serious educator?

Major assumptions of the liberal theory of the press were in question. One could no longer assume a free press would propagate elevating opinion. Also, it was no longer evident that the formulation of public opinion through the press would lead to the triumph of the most rational, progressive ideas. The liberal paper was no longer omnipotent or extravagantly praised. A magazine article said in 1902: “No other profession is so wept over.

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