Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception-How the Media Failed to Cover the War on Iraq
2004; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 30; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2161-430X
Autores Tópico(s)Australian History and Society
ResumoSmythe, Ted Curtis. Gilded Age Press, 1865-1900. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2003. 240 pp. $79.95. In Gilded Age Press, 1865-1900, the fourth volume in the History of American Journalism series edited by W. William Sloan and James D. Startt, Ted Curds Smythe covers familiar biographical information about the founders of modern American commercial journalism who became prominent during the industrialization following the Civil War. He offers extended profiles of such icons as James Gordon Bennett, Jr. of the New York Herald; Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune; Charles Dana of the New York Sun; James E. Scripps of the Detroit Evening News and his brother E. W. Scripps of the Scripps-McRae League of papers concentrated in Ohio; Joseph Pulitzer of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and New York World; Melville Stone of the Chicago Evening Daily News and later founding manager of the modern Associated Press; and, of course, William Randolph Hearst of the San Francisco Examiner and New York Journal. These profiles of the editors and publishers, who largely were responsible for developing the editorial formulae for a commercial newspaper driven by advertising revenues, make this a useful reference work for inclusion in university libraries. Smythe's review, however, of the transformation of newspapers from small- circulation and partisan sheets to mass-circulation and nonpartisan or independent publications is an explanatory work of American history, far richer than any reference guide or textbook. Gilded Age Press places the icons of nineteenth-century journalism in a nuanced context that describes the evolution of modern commercial journalism; the technologies and market conditions that fostered the commercial press; the editorial variations spawned by that commercialism; and the professionalism, organization, and specialization in newsgathering that accompanied a new journalism freed of the control of political parties. Particularly helpful are three nicely developed chapters in this volume. In Rural and Regional Journalism, Smythe discusses the promotional role of weekly papers and their business practices, a topic ignored in media histories that focus mostly on a few major daily papers and their innovative publishers. Here, though, Smythe finds another foundation of the commercial press in cooperative ready print publishing syndicates and chain newspapering designed to control the costs of newsgathering, printing, and advertising procurement. In The Commercial Press and New Technologies, he concentrates on the commercializing effects of web-fed rotary presses, electricity, wood-pulp paper, the Linotype, photography, halftone production and stereotyping, expanded rail networks, and telegraphy and telephony. …
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