Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Mightier Than the Sword (Chaps. 1-5)
What, in reading about the history of American journalism, surprised you the most? A particular incident? A particular personage? A particular development or trend? Briefly explain why (but in more than one hurried sentence). Please post your response by 4 p.m., Monday, Nov. 8.
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The passage titled "Journal of Occurrences" as New Service was the most interesting to me. I guess I have this preconceived opinion about the past that people weren't as gossip oriented or as opinionated through the press as our society today is. So when I read about this newspaper compared to our Associated Press it did surprise me. Apparently Sam Adams was the Perez Hilton of 1768.. kind of. He wrote about his hatred towards the British soldiers and he really wasn't scared about offending anyone. Comparing him to Perez Hilton might be far fetched but it almost relates because he posted his thoughts in a diary-like manner through his paper, and that's definitely similar to what Perez does. Sam Adam's content was more intelligent and had much more of an impact on society.. but to some people they could say that about Perez.
Anyway, this passage definitely surprised me. I was never a history buff and I genuinely never really cared to be, but it caught my attention how audacious people were through the press, especially because it was a relatively new idea. Adams included the most gruesome of entries, including stories of rape, extortion, and mistreatment of citizens by the British soldiers. Even today news articles regarding rape are looked at as vulgar, so I can only imagine how people reacted to Adam's journal entries in 1768.
I was actually surprised to see that the early Revolutionaries were propagandists, but in a positive way. Reading about how they dramatized the Boston Massacre, and the rapes of women by the stationed British soldiers. However, in retrospect, it seems that without the papers reverting to propaganda, the reaction of the masses would have been much harder to propel. So does that justify the 'immoral' motives of the newspapers? Or do the ends justify the means?
I think they are a few drastic cases where newspapers need to take a radical stand. In the case of Sam Adams, and the early American Revolutionaries, a subjective newspaper wasn't even in existence, and their origin was based on informing the public about mistreatment around the colonies to spark defiance and establish a free state from England.
All the cases, however, showed me how much power the media actually has... whether its defying the Tweed corruption, or neglecting the Suffrage movement, the media's opinion can stall or encourage political, or social progression. I'm not surprised in knowing how much power news media has, but more surprised in knowing how they've affected history in so many instances.
It was very interesting to learn that not only were the revolutionaries using the written word by way of newspapers, pamphlets and sheets posted on doors to spread word of the revolution, but that much of which was false. Sam Adams, although meaning well, ended up writing fabricated statements about days occurrences with red coats that he stated were absolute truth. He thought it was for the good of the people, but I see no difference between this and some of the stories current news networks run either for their party or against the opposition.
He used extreme examples of sex and violence to captivate the attention of the literate crowd, who then read aloud the travesties that Adams recounted. Fantasy, theater and a smoke screen built a fairly solid foundation against the British and helped spark the Revolution. As much as I appreciate not having the Queen on our money, I can't help but think that it was just propagandized to the point that commoners had no choice but to rebel. It sounds like something we would complain about today.
Reading "Mightier Than the Sword," I would have to say what surprised me the most was the extent to which journalists went to help shape our society. Back in the 19th century, journalists were the ones who had the power to expose problems to society and they had no choice but to pay attention to those problems. When I think about slavery I think to myself "What a horrible thing. How can OUR society have done such cruel things to human beings?" But what I don't think about is how that was an actual way of life. That is how people in the South lived and they knew no other way. They saw it as THEIR civil liberties to use free labor for their tobacco or cotton industries. Without tobacco or cotton they had no livelihood and would have been forced to live like those in the North.
During the pre-Civil War era, tensions were obviously high between the North and the South. Journalists thrusts themselves right in the middle of it and did so without a gun or the intention of killing anybody. Reverend Elijah P. Lovejoy waged a campaign in opposition to slavery and he gave his life for the cause. This opened many eyes and showed that everybody's civil liberties were in danger, no matter the color of their skin. This launched thousands of people into the Abolition Movement and tot he eventual end of slavery. It just goes to show how important journalists are to not only analyzing our lifestyles but shaping the future as well.
"Accuracy is to a newspaper what virtue is to a woman," said Joseph Pulitzer.
That this had to be shoe-horned into Journalism was probably the most surprising for me. It comes at an odd time in the book as well. After the list of successful campaigns that Streitmatter lists in the previous chapters, it seems odd that accuracy was something of an afterthought. Though it makes sense after the discussion in class about journalism becoming a profession, there is something exciting as to how Pulitzer changed journalism to what we recognize it to be today (ideally).
But what's even more interesting is that Pulitzer also introduced articles about home decorating and romantic advice into the newspaper in order to draw in advertising funds. Which is to say that the complexities of the newspaper have always been there. Hard news apparently always has been (since Pulitzer came into play) and always will be sustained by fluff. I guess that's just the way the world works.
After reading the first part of "Mightier Than the Sword," by Rodger Streitmatter, I was able to understand more about the early history of America. What really got my attention was that it was passion that drove the colonists to rebel and revolutionize American history. Streitmatter states "Revolutions don't occur because of logic. They require passion." People back then who wanted to see a change really believed in their cause. They put so much effort into making a difference. Without that strive and passion for revolution, our history would be very different.
This made me wonder about all the possibilities that could become a reality today if people truly were passionate about their cause. That passion for freedom that fueled our ancestors has disappeared because we are so comfortable with our daily routines. This current reality is deceiving though because the convenience and leisure of our lives is masking our prevalent problems. These hidden problems are only snowballing, becoming bigger and bigger, but because everyone is hypnotized by their luxurious lives, their passion for change has diminished. People are going to have to re-connect with that passion and emotion for change in order to solve any one of the problems circulating today.
The most interesting thing about the beginning of "Mightier Than the Sword" to me is the difference in the integrity of journalism from then to now.
Someone like Sam Adams blatantly sensationalized news in order to grab people's attention and to keep people informed. It is most interesting, I think, because a journalist now who did what Adams did then would be lambasted, probably fired from his job and would have a stigma attached to him for a long time. At least in traditional news reporting.
The other thing that stems out of this is that there are still news outlets who practice what Adams practices. However, they are often considered the lowest forms of journalism, or not even considered true journalism at all.
I think this is most interesting because what Adams did was important to the shaping of our country. It was important that he did what he did, despite the fact that looking back, most would say he "technically" should not have gone about it the way he did.
It is always interesting to look back and say "that was wrong," when in real time it helped shaped the future you are currently living in.
I believe what I found most shocking is what we covered in class today, about the total lack of journalistic ideals which we cling to so tightly nowadays.
It seems that back in the day the press was more of a tool used to shape public opinion, rather than an "unbiased" restatement of events. So it seems that when we complain today about the clear lack of journalistic responsibility on the part of news TV and papers, we are at tensions with the old establishment of journalism. And everyone knows it's really hard to change tradition. I am not saying that we should not try to change tradition, we should still trudge on. But understanding that journalism's original intentions were not that of the pure idealistic view we have/want of it today may help us deal with the fact that it really hasn't changed at all.
Also, to people who feel that the propagandists were positive and such, we only feel like that because they were on the side that won. Propaganda is propaganda, there is no such thing as good propaganda. There is just propaganda that belongs to a winning side and a losing side. Whichever side you happen to be on will color your opinion of everything else.
If the British had won, Sam Adams and his cohorts would be seen as terrorists. All I'm asking is to keep yourselves in perspective.
“The number of women who have a solid judgment is very small”. This sentence triggered a slew of thoughts to run through my head. How is it possible that there was a time where people really held that sentence true. I'm not naive, I’m sure there are still people out there who think that, but this was the general consensus at the time. I don’t consider myself a feminist but this chapter definitely put things in a different light.
First off I was very surprised, impressed and proud to find out that in 1777 Mary Katherine Goddard was sought out to print the first official copy of the Declaration of Independence. Learning this one fact gave me hope that people will soon no longer discriminate against any minority. Although there was still discrimination of women, the fact that someones skill could get them respected in such a time of neglect and hatred, made me smile.
This also made me think about Keen and our argument of the professional or lack there of. Women were obviously not looked at as professionals being that they barely had any rights but they were still “respected” for doing good work. The opinion of the women didn't matter, but it definitely should have
I also thought it was interesting that although there were women's magazines out there a lot of them were promoting things that weren't helping them out. There were articles that were telling women how to be more allegiant to their husbands and to not do things for themselves but for the men in their lives. This now sounds ridiculous because women, for the most part, have equal rights, or by law should, but in a way the press helped women eventually have more solid judgment in society.
Journalism needs women, I mean after all they are the bigger yentas.
In “Mightier than the Sword,” the history behind the rise of journalism was interesting. Journalism was started by Sam Adams, John Adams cousin who participated in the Boston Tea Party. Adams also printed 300 journal entries or diaries of incidents whenever British officers attacked colonists in Boston. This publication called The Journal of Occurrences was printed and sent to Boston for ten months so British troops would leave Boston. By August 1769, the officers left Boston and Adams’ radical writing triumphed. Although, it was later discovered that not all of it was true, the main purpose was for Adams to incite readers to want to rebel and get angry. This type of writing is an early form of sensationalism or yellow journalism which completely goes against the ethical rules of journalism.
Another incident that inspired the American Revolution was after the Boston Massacre. This incident sparked an outcry trend in print and through spoken word. Adams wrote his comments on the Boston Gazette, saying that the British officers who killed the five colonists and wounded six men were, “barbarous & cruel, infamously mean & base.” A passage such as Broadsides was a one page communiqué which was better than a multipage pamphlet for radicals because it enabled the word to get out faster. Adams comments were eventually posted on houses, taverns, by hand to hand, read aloud and word of mouth. This development of communication kept the fight for liberty and fueled the public desire for revenge.
These examples of early journalism are important to American history because it was the backbone and the ideas for publishing the Declaration of Independence which eventually led to the American Revolution. These comments and journals were a way to communicate to colonists that they weren’t the only ones who were being treated poorly by the British government. It was a way for people to unite and think together from a far distance. The printing press made distance communication possible so that revolution was only a few steps away.
Like many of my classmates, I was also most surprised by the role journalists took in the revolution. It seems like back then, journalists had passion, as on of my classmates pointed out. I think that passion is what drove people to write and to put their work out there. I can't help but to think of the "flattening of our culture" and how different it is today. Today, people can write and put their work out on the internet for everyone to see just out of mere boredom if they wanted to. In the 1770's it took a lot of hard work to get what you had to say out there. I was also surprised to find out how much of what Sam Adams said was made up in order to spark something in the American people. As I was reading, I kept comparing what he had done to some of the case studies that I have read in Media Ethics. If that was going on right now, I feel as though we would be looking at it in class talking about how wrong it is- yet it started the revolution. It is was got this country to where it is. I also started to think about the role of a journalist which as we have stated multiple times this semester is : to seek out the truth and report it. After reading Bobby's post I started thinking, were journalists then seeking the truth and reporting it? I feel like to some extent they were setting the standards for truth. I also think that a higher priority on their lists (especially when it comes to Sam Adams) was to spark passion within others around them, to get people to care about something. We talk in class about how people in America today don;t care about anything, besides technology. Maybe the role of a journalists should transform a little bit in today's society to get people thinking and get them to feel, have some passion towards something again.
The thing that has surprised me the most in "Mightier Than the Sword" so far is the part about the press's role in the Spanish-American War. I knew the press played a role in the war and that yellow journalism was ramped at the time. But, Streitmatter mentions the Spanish-American War most likely would have been avoided entirely if it wasn't for Hearst and his antics.
I'm not so much surprised the accounts that started the war and kept it going were sensationalized and often made up completely. I'm more surprised newspapers got away with this kind of thing and no one ever checked up on it until it was way too late. The function of the press has changed so much as compared to now. Now every journalist is sacred to sound bias and God forbid you misquote someone, well then you could be in a lot of trouble.
After reading the beginning of Mightier Than the Sword the chapter about women’s rights triggered many thoughts in my head. It amazed me, as Eden stated, how in 1777 Mary Katherine Goddard was the one to print the first copy of the Declaration of Independence. Its amazing how throughout this chapter is talks about all the hatred and neglect women faced during the eighteenth and nineteenth century, but how a woman was the one who wrote the first official copy of the Declaration of Independence even while experiencing such abhorrence. I was proud, as a woman, to hear that!
I also found it interesting how the magazines written for women were all portraying negative ideas and attributes of women. The newspapers and magazines would portray the American woman as they had throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as “a physical and intellectual cripple who had to be cared for and protected.”
In addition, what intrigued me the most was how as a result of the press and the movement itself, the publications brought women from all different locations together to create this social movement. The existence of a journal, and the ability to write what you wanted provided a way to reach out to women and allow them to be informed about what was happen and what they could do, if anything.
I thought that one of the most interesting chapters so far was the one concerning women's suffrage. The amount of bias that used to be in the press was shocking to me. The fact that so little favored women's rights and the role the press had creating and maintaining that negative image of women. The press mainly made clear they were against women's rights and repeatedly insulted those in charge of the movement and the female sex as a whole.
It amazes me that so few women's right papers were successful. That shows how powerful the mainstream press was at the time, and it amazes me how it has completely flipped in our society.
On a side note- It makes me so mad that women were satisfied with their inferiority. They choose to read "Ladies Magazine" - a magazine devoted to convincing women that they are nothing without a man and they should devote their lives to their husbands- their owners.
What surprised me most about the history of American journalism is the story of Thomas Nast, a political cartoonist who's pictures were the direct cause of a crusade against Willaim Tweed during the late 1800s.
William Tweed and his cronies at Tammany Hall (whose nicknames could be mistaken for mobsters, which they kind of were) dabbled in extortion, fraud, payoffs,etc. Tweed and his associates were stealing money from taxpayers for years until Nast began to draw cartoons for Harper's Weekly. The pictures used Tweed's high status and power to shed light on the actual abuse and criminal activity Tweed engaged in, often depicting him in striped suits to resemble prison uniforms. Tweed did everything in his power to stop Nast; he tried to bribe and threaten the cartoonist and even tried to destroy the company that owned Harper's weekly. When the Times joined the fight, Tweed tried to do the same. Although Tweed was re-elected due to ballot fraud, the press and Nast ultimately prevailed because the public was made aware of what the Tammany ring was up to and did not vote for them. Thomas Nasts' drawings were directly responsible for the demise of a broken government. We could really use a guy like that today.
The aspect of the reading that surprised me the most was the lack of professionalism in early Journalism. I assumed that there had always been a tradition of professional journalism spanning from before who I would consider the greats (Hemmingway, Orwell, Crane).
I never took a step back to realize that these people were other things as well and considered journalism just another skill on their resume. While they may not have had that exact approach to the field, none of them were JUST journalists. That’s something that I was surprised to learn, came much later.
Identifying as a Journalist is something I take great pride in. I couldn’t imagine living in a time when journalism was just another literary style, where no profession or institution is attached to the style.
I believe Journalism as a whole benefits from its institution. Through the competition that institutional publications and professionals create for themselves, standards for the ethical and literary content of the work are improved. Direct competition raises the bar, so to speak, in the Journalistic world. With out competition and the possibility of getting scooped by your competitors, standards we see today in journalism simply would not exist.
I too was most surprised by the fact that journalism lacked certain standards of integrity so long ago and that it is not the recent development that it feels like. The use of propaganda to motivate the commoners and fuel their "passion" (or perhaps, create it?) is something we don't often learn about as students growing up in America. As Colin points out, it simply isn't seen as propaganda by our historians because it was carried out by the winning side; the word propaganda has a negative connotation and no sixth grade history class is going to teach that famous American patriots used it as a tool to rally the common-folk into action.
I don't find it particularly surprising in hindsight, but I find it interested that a name that is celebrated in American culture (Sam Adams) would just have easily been considered a terrorist, as Colin said, had England won the war. That paradox alone brings into question the integrity with which news is reported in our world because, no matter what, the reporter or outlet providing news/information is on some "side" and holds certain values and beliefs that will influence how they color their report - terrorist or hero? for example.
I'm not saying Sam Adams was a terrorist, of course. Just that it's interesting that an action such as blatantly exaggerating and sensationalizing, if not fabricating, information in hopes of eliciting a certain response form the masses can be celebrated when the side he inspires wins yet would be very much condemned by the writers of history had the other side won. And likewise, had Sam Adams been a propagandist for the British he would be a villain in American history.
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