Just the Facts?
Partisanship and the Press
03.27.09
The current era of partisan news and name-calling is enough to make you wonder what happened to good old-fashioned objective reporting. But in this hour, BackStory asks: Where did the idea of media objectivity come from in the first place? Historian Marcus Daniel explains that the bitter rhetoric of editors in the 1790s played a key role in the birth of our democracy. Matthew Goodman tells the story of an elaborate hoax involving “lunar man-bats” in the early days of the penny press. And Michael Kinsley, founder of the online journal Slate, argues that opinion journalism can be more informative than so-called “objective” news.
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Further Reading
All Centuries
- Corporation for Public Broadcasting report on the history of objectivity in American journalism (PDF)
- A primer on the history of journalism ethics
- Essays on the print culture of American women
- Three centuries of broadsides and printed ephemera
18th Century
- Thomas Jefferson’s ever-changing views on freedom of the press
- Historian Jill Lepore recounts the long history of newspaper industry end-days
- The Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine by William Cobbett
- The printer & binder in colonial Virginia
- A 19th Century account of the history of printing in America
19th Century
- The original text and illustrations of The Sun’s 1835 “Great Moon Hoax“
- An interview with Matthew Goodman
- Matthew Goodman compares 19th century media hoaxes to those of today
- Media critic Bill Powers explores the similarities between today’s media landscape and that of the 19th century
- The 19th Century in Print: The Making of America in Books & Periodicals
- penny press
20th Century & Beyond
- A collection of articles for the Atlantic by Michael Kinsley
- Dean of Columbia School of Journalism on objectivity
- A wealth of reporting on objectivity from NPR’s On the Media
- Michael Schudson on saving American journalism