This engrossing, wide-ranging history of American journalism from
the colonial era to the present makes a tremendous contribution to
mass communication education by being that rarest kind of
textbook—one that reads like literature instead of CliffsNotes.
Covering all the bases, from the Zenger trial to the Huffington Post,
and with excursions into much lesser known histories across news
media, Covering America makes perfect and enjoyable mandatory
reading for undergraduate and graduate classes in journalism history.
Christopher Daly, an associate professor at Boston University’s
Journalism Department, approaches this monumental historical
survey with the reportorial flair appropriate for a former Associated
Press and Washington Post journalist, which sets it apart from more
pedagogical classics like Emery, Emery, and Roberts’s The Press
and America. Literally from the first line, Daly grabs the reader with
striking, cinematic details that make the past come alive. Page 1
opens with a teenage Benjamin Franklin skulking along the dark
streets of eighteenth-century Boston, trying to put one over his
brother in order to start his writing career—and the readers are
hooked, be they scholars who have been teaching colonial journalism
for years, like this reviewer, or freshmen who might have never heard
of Franklin.
Similarly intimate visual vignettes are peppered throughout the next
nearly five hundred pages, including an iconic Ed Murrow “sitting on a
bench in a White House hallway, chain-smoking Camel cigarettes” as
FDR decides how to react to just-received news of Pearl Harbor. At
the other end of the press–government relationship spectrum, we are
treated to the image of President Nixon dancing at the White House
wedding of his daughter at the very same moment when “the
typesetters and pressmen at the [New York] Times started printing”
the Pentagon Papers stories.
Most helpful for classroom use, in all these cases and across the
volume, Daly assumes no prior historical knowledge on the readers’
part, and retells the basics of U.S. history through the eyes of the
journalists and media owners who put its first draft in front of the
American people. Most chapters even conclude with short summaries
of how their main characters—from Franklin to David Halberstam—
ended up, much like the end titles in documentaries, so that no gaps
are left in a remarkably comprehensive story.
Some journalism historians might object that this volume skates very
close to the “Great Men” tradition. The narrative focus is unabashedly
on the major figures that made journalism what it is (and yes, for the
vast majority of the three hundred years covered it was mostly white
men). As Daly puts it repeatedly, social, political, economic, and
technological developments influenced the shape of journalism, but
for the major shifts to happen, “somebody had to do something.”
Since this book’s main audience is not the specialist, focusing on the
adventures of those various “somebodies” at the expense of scholarly
interpretative controversy seems an effective trade-off for terrific
storytelling that gets the major points across memorably.
In addition, the book does make two fundamental conceptual
arguments that give it depth and a unifying thread. Daly argues that
journalism has been central to the history of the country. From the
early Republic Party press all the way to today’s blogs (which, as
Daly notes, are not that different), the media history narrated in the
volume shows how journalism helped shape American life.
Sometimes, it has done so with nefarious effects, but also with a
“long tradition of service to humanity.” That service, however, has
recurrently been imperiled by the practice of journalism as a
business.
The most heartfelt, compelling question raised is the strange bed
fellowship of journalism and money. At the end of chapter 12, which
focuses on the Pentagon Papers and Watergate and is perhaps the
book’s best, Daly reflects on what he feels was the “apotheosis” of
the raison d’être for independent, aggressive journalism: “Build a big
enough audience so that you can make enough money to tell anyone
to go to hell. The risk of such an attitude is sounding arrogant, but
without it there is no real journalism.” But money, as the book shows,
is not always a journalist’s friend—not when it has meant
acquiescence to governmental or corporate interests, not when it is
intended to fatten shareholders’ wallets instead of newsgathering
operations, and not when it is made by pandering to the evil twin of
mass interest, the enduring prurient passion for celebrity scandals
and gore.
For an overview book, the level of detail is astounding, especially
since it does not detract from the narrative flow. With illuminating
forays into law, technology, and policy making, readers are
introduced to pamphleteers, editors, reporters, columnists, and
broadcasters, from Thomas Paine to Matt Drudge by way of Horace
Greeley, Ida B. Wells, Adolph Ochs, Harry Luce, and less obvious
figures, such as Harold Ross and Walter Winchell. From the smelly
printing equipment in colonial shops to the Supreme Court justices’
opinions and the account behind the iconic napalm-burned
Vietnamese girl photograph, there are no major stories left untold.
Striking quotes straight from the media—the Liberator’s opening
editorial, Ernie Pyle’s Captain Waskow’s tribute, Earl Caldwell’s
report of the King assassination—enrich the atmospheric narrative.
Until, that is, the digital era: The one major criticism of this volume is
that its treatment of what Daly calls the last major period of journalism
history, the digital revolution from the mid-1990s onward, is
unsatisfactorily perfunctory. The entire digital era gets a twenty-page
chapter that does not even mention such critical developments as the
rise of fake news shows or shattering scandals such as the Jayson
Blair affair, which is hinted at in the conclusion.
Writing what amounts to a history of the present is certainly difficult,
but the end of the book feels abrupt, and the first decade of the
twenty-first century deserves the same lively, in-depth study as the
other eras so masterfully narrated. Despite that shortcoming, this
volume is a top-choice main history textbook and reference work for
journalism educators, researchers, and students at all levels.
Prof Chris Daly's Blog 