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9780195037197

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The most perceptive and provocative study of the history of the press to appear in some years.... An intelligent and powerful way to think about that central but elusive topic, the power of the press. --Michael Schudson, The Philadelphia Inquirer. An important and radically new history of American political journalism.... Splendid. --Los Angeles Times. A stimulating and imaginative interpretive history.... Scholars of muckraking should find his analysis of the first investigative journalists fascinating.... Offers journalism historians a book that they and their students can argue with, and learn from. --Journalism History.<br>

<br> The most perceptive and provocative study of the history of the press to appear in some years.... An intelligent and powerful way to think about that central but elusive topic, the power of the press. --Michael Schudson, The Philadelphia Inquirer. An important and radically new history of American political journalism.... Splendid. --Los Angeles Times. A stimulating and imaginative interpretive history.... Scholars of muckraking should find his analysis of the first investigative journalists fascinating.... Offers journalism historians a book that they and their students can argue with, and learn from. --Journalism History.<br>

The whole of this inquiry into the origins and implications of political reportage in the US is less than the sum of its frequently fascinating parts. Using a somewhat discontinuous series of case histories, Leonard (journalism/California, Berkeley) traces the emergence of political reporting that gave form and weight to new attitudes about government, from pre-Revolutionary days through the early years of the 20th century. Among the pioneers, he cites James Franklin (Ben's older brother), who broke with the Colonial press's tradition of local boosterism by using his Boston-based Courant to crusade against inoculation during the plague year of 1721. Subsequently, both before and during the struggle for independence, newspaper owners fostered greater interest in political issues, mainly by relating abstractions and remote events to workaday happenings. In the formative years of the republic (whose leaders were far from reconciled to full disclosure), the author asserts journalism was the business of upstarts. As one result, he notes, the press tended to cooperate with politicians, allowing them to edit their remarks for publication. By the mid-1850's, however, factionalism led to unfeeling accuracy in the reporting of statements by elected officials, hence a breakdown in the collaborative system. During the post-Civil-War period, Leonard recounts, Thomas Nast's political cartoons (some are included in the text) helped Harper's Weekly and its newspaper allies bring down New York City's Boss Tweed and his Tammany Hall cronies by adding a pictorial dimension to civic corruption. In a 1906 expose of the Senate, Hearst's Cosmopolitan achieved even greater impact with unposed photographs (snapshots) of target legislators. In the meantime, sensational police-beat reporting (initiated by James Gordon Bennett in his New York Herald) sharpened journalists' forensic skills and accustomed the reading public to investigatory stories, which paved the way for muckrakers like Lincoln Steffens. Typically, these socioeconomic critics would report on local scandals in nationally distributed periodicals - American Magazine, Collier's et al. Ironically, the author observes, the widespread availability of essentially nonpartisan political coverage during progressivism's heyday was accompanied by a coincident decline in public participation in the electoral process. In his less-than-satisfactory and largely undocumented explanation of this apparent paradox, Leonard speculates that most Americans were not experienced consumers of political revelations. In the absence of insights on how the political system worked, he concludes, the mass of facts detailing ways in which it could - and did - misfire alienated large numbers of voters. Whether a breakdown in communication, informational overload, or other factors is the primary cause of voter apathy remains an open question. Nonetheless, Leonard's selective history of political reporting's long, halting advance in the pre-broadcast era offers rewarding perspectives for both consumers and providers of news. (Kirkus Reviews)

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Thomas C. Leonard is Associate Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, and author of Above the Battle: War-Making in America from Appomattax to Versailles.

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