Thomas Nast 1892.

Chicago Fox news anchor Robin Robinson played the Grinch this week by advising parents to tell children the “truth” about Santa Claus.  (At about 3:30 on the video).

“Stop trying to convince your kids that Santa is Santa,” Robinson said on the air.  “That’s why they have these high expectations. They know you can’t afford it, so what do they do? Just ask some man in a red suit. There is no Santa. (Tell them) as soon as they can talk — There… Is … No … San… Ta …”

Outraged parents threatened to roast her like a chestnut if she didn’t rein it in.

One viewer said:  “For somebody who has been on a major news channel for so long, (she) should know what to say and what not to say.” Another said: “My jaw dropped when I heard her say that there was no Santa.”

Robinson abjectly apologized the following night. “For any damage I did, I wish I could un-ring the bell.” And she took cameras out on the street to ask people  just how bad they thought it was to tell kids the “truth” about Santa.  Pretty bad, apparently. She didn’t get much sympathy. “You’re in trouble,” one said. “People will have to tell their children that you lied to them.”

The trouble could have been avoided if she had remembered a little media history from J-school.

Confronted with a similar dilemma in 1897,   New  York Sun editor Francis P. Church wrote a response to a letter from eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon, in which he famously declared:   “Yes, Virginia, There Is A Santa Claus.”

How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished…

In the spirit of the season, and as a Christmas bonus, Robinson was forgiven and got to keep her job — but only on the condition, said co-anchor Bob Sirott, that she complete the following  assignments:

• Watch the Twilight Zone Christmas episode with Art Carney, the Tom Hanks film Polar Express,  and  Miracle on 34th Street with Edmund Gwenn.
• Go interview the tooth fairy.

FOOTNOTE:  The Cincinnati Enquirer, in an interesting twist on the old “Yes, Virginia” theme, assured Santa that there were still a few who still believed. Read: “Yes, Santa Claus, there is a Virginia.” 

Years ago,  when I worked as a reporter at the Charleston SC News & Courier, I would often look out over the bay and think about Joseph Pulitzer.  

Out there, where the muddy Cooper River met the great blue Atlantic,  Pulitzer died 100 years ago this week ( Oct. 29,  1911).

He was hidden away on his yacht, as usual, suffering from an extreme hyper-sensitivity to sound.  According to biographers, even the sound of a person’s voice was painful, and his last words were to ask that an assistant reading to him speak more softly.

Pulitzer’s sickness is astonishing — for a journalist, at least.  Most editors and many reporters have the opposite problem. Their lack of sensitivity, in both physical and moral terms, approaches outright deafness.

Back in the  1980s, the Charleston newsroom was a high-volume marketplace of small ideas,  filled with hoarse shouting and clattering typewriters.  Reporters yelled into telephones and editors bellowed commands at subordinates.
Along with the sound of two hundred typewriters clattering all at once, the din was worse than the factory floor of an iron foundry.

They were likeable enough as people, but as servants of the public interest, they were thick skinned,  priggish, bull-headed and downright dangerous in their insensitivity.

True story:  One day I was assigned to cover a civil rights demonstration only a few blocks away from Charleston’s old harbor. Don’t write about what the demonstrators say,  Mac, the managing editor, told me. Just write about any violence that might take place.  But when I arrived and took stock of a peaceful but angry crowd ,  police chief Rubin Greenberg said he was glad to see me: “The more you do your job,” he said, poking a finger at me, “the less I have to do mine.”

Of course I wrote the story, even though there was no violence, because I thought everyone deserved to be heard in a democracy and because I thought the police chief was right.  And, as I tell journalism students, my loyalty was to a sense of professional ethics rather than to my job.  Anyway, the story never ran in the paper. The editors said they wouldn’t dignify the ranting of civil rights demonstrators. And frankly, my dear, they didn’t give a damn what the police chief thought or said. (Fortunately, the New York Times covered the story, as they always did when Southern newspapers refused a civil rights story).

Not long after that, I found myself on the shores of Charleston Bay with Neil Frank, the no-nonsense crew-cut director of the National Hurricane Center. He showed me a terrifying hurricane map. It had a timetable of how quickly roads from the barrier islands would close up if a Category 5 killer hurricane hit Charleston at high tide, with roads flooding over much sooner than people expected.  What Frank wanted was a very strong warning on the front page of the daily newspaper.

But when I got back to the newsroom, the editors were horrified.  They asked: Are you trying to scare people?  The story, watered down considerably, ran with the Category 3 map. The message?  Plenty of time, no need to panic, folks. Frank was furious.

I wondered what Pulitzer would have thought.  Did people object that he was trying to scare readers with stories about typhoid and cholera in the slums of New York?   Was he trying to frighten people when he wrote about the bribery and corruption in government?

Pulitzer’s brand of responsible journalism almost always meant having to push the edges of what people find comfortable. Pulitzer himself didn’t live up to his ideals all the time, but he knew when he had fallen short, and wasn’t afraid to admit it.

That’s quite a contrast with Charleston’s style of mush and milk journalism, makeovers of the month,  and celebrity crime escapades that are so much more comfortable for a dying newspaper medium.

And so it always seemed to me that Charleston was the perfect place for Pulitzer to die, because that was where a proud tradition of responsible journalism had passed with the changing of the tides.

On Sept. 7, 1811, Hezekiah  Niles published the first of a series of weekly news  summaries that would grow to 75 volumes and 30,000 pages by the publication’s end in 1849.   As a paper of record for news in the United States, it is only matched by the New York Times, founded in 1851.

Great credit goes to Bill Earle, a Maryland historian who has spent years cataloging and researching the Register.   Earle’s publication history of the Register and other online resources have proven extraordinarily useful.  

As Bill Earle says:

In addition to the sheer volume of material, there were two other outstanding aspects of the Register which recommended it.

First was its scope.  While the Register emphasized political, commercial, agricultural, and industrial news, and paid only limited attention to cultural or social issues, it reported on events worldwide…

Hezekiah Niles

Second was its evenhandedness.  Niles’  pledge in the first issue of the Register to avoid party politics distinguished the paper from much of the American journalism of the era.  Many newspapers in that day represented parties, or factions within parties, or

even particular candidates, and political reportage was usually one-sided and strident.  The Register, however, ignored the petty disputes between “the ins and the outs.”  Niles’ own politics were clearly and repeatedly stated:  he was a Whig of the Henry Clay school, committed to the American System of protective tariff, industrial development, and internal improvements; he was also pro-American and anti-British, pro-republican and anti-royalist, and a rationalist who opposed “superstition” in religion or in public affairs.

His own views were always identified as such, however, and he advanced them as logical arguments, not partisan invective.  As a result, there is a balanced quality to the Register that gave it an authority no other publication of its time could match.

This  description of the Register’s value also says a great deal about Earle’s many long years getting to know the man and the publication, which I think deserve more credit  than my own insights into Niles’ concerns about the Civil War.

Unfortunately, the Baltimore Sun’s recent article on the Niles anniversary, while relatively apt, omitted Earle and only quoted one of several historians who have been fascinated with this prototype of modern journalism.

In the interest of  balance and fairness, or as Niles would say, “magnanimous disputation,” Earle and others ought to get credit for keeping the memory of this great public servant alive.

The Wayzgoose printers holiday was August 24

The centuries-old holiday has largely been forgotten in the late 20^th century, but it was still very much alive a generation or two ago among printing unions in the UK.

The holiday has its origins in the feast day for St. Bartholomew, the patron saint of scribes and, later, of printers and writers.

The odd name for the holiday, Wayzgoose, refers to the centerpiece of this holiday meal: a goose that had been fattened on stubble (or wayz) from a harvested field of grain.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the Wayzgoose was

An entertainment given by a master-printer to his workmen ‘about Bartholomew-tide’ (24 August), marking the beginning of the season of working by candle-light. In later use, an annual festivity held in summer by the employees of a printing establishment, consisting of a dinner and (usually) an excursion into the country.

The celebration would be held at the master printer’s home, or in later centuries, as part of an excursion into the country.

The Wayzgoose was often the occasion for the introduction of new apprentices, the promotion of older apprentices to journeymen, and speeches about the virtues of the profession.

A speech by the company’s owner or master printer might include a reminder   that printers had much in common with the monks who once laboriously copied books by hand.

He (or sometimes she) might tell them that the printing company was still called a chapel, the foreman was still called the sextant, and the apprentices were still called printers devils.  The owner might also say that people in the publishing industries were bound together like pages in a book, in a brotherhood of printing, with the duty to promote both faith and reason.

The speech might be concluded with a toast “to the music of the press,” which would set off a loud thumping, rumbling and hammering of mugs on tables, in a kind of inebriated mock imitation of the daily sounds of the printing shop.

It would be followed by dancing and music and great quantities of ale and whiskey.

The Wayzgoose is worth remembering because, until recently, printing involved a strong living culture at the heart of European and American society. It’s possible to get an impression of  this by reading the description of the Wayzgoose (also called Way-goose) in Joseph Moxon’s printing manual of 1683:

Way-gooses are always kept about Bartholomew-tide… The Master Printer … makes [the workers] a good Feast, and not only entertains them at his own House, but besides, gives them Money to spend at the Ale-house or Tavern at Night; And to this Feast, they invite the Correcter, Founder, Smith, Joyner and Inck-maker… And till the Master Printer have given this Way-goose, the Journey-men do not use to Work by Candle Light.

REFERENCES

Moxon, Joseph.  Mechanick Exercises: Or, the Doctrine of Handy Works Applied to the Art of Printing, London, 2^nd edition, 1683. See Ancient Customs of the Chapel p. 361 (GB pdf p. 198).

The Wayzgoose – Part of a history project of Scottish printing, these pages show a photo of men on a holiday excursion in the mid-20th century.

Definition of Wayzgoose at World Wide Words

Today, Yale University and Seattle’s School of Visual Concepts still celebrate the craft printing tradition with a Wayzgoose.

The Oxford English Dictionary also contains these references to the Wayzgoose:

1731    N. Bailey Universal Etymol. Eng. Dict. (ed. 5) ,   Wayz, a Bundle of Straw. Wayz~goose, a Stubble-Goose, an Entertainment given to Journey~men at the beginning of Winter.

1833    Temperley Songs of the Press 23 (note) ,   Way Goose.— The derivation of this term is not generally known. It is from the old English word wayz, stubble. A wayz Goose was the head dish at the annual feast of the forefathers of our fraternity. ‘Wayz Goose, a stubble Goose, an entertainment given to journeymen at the beginning of Winter.’—Bailey.]

1875    J. Southward Dict. Typogr. 137   The wayzgoose generally consists of a trip into the country, open air amusements, a good dinner, and speeches and toasts afterwards.

1895    Surrey Mirror 23 Aug. 2/7   The members of the typographical staffs of the Surrey Advertiser (Guildford) and the Surrey Mirror (Redhill) had their wayzgoose on Saturday last, when they journeyed to Brighton.

1880    F. T. Buckland Notes & Jottings (1882) 39   London printers generally have a ‘wayzgoose’ dinner in the autumn.

1897    F. T. Bullen Cruise ‘Cachalot’ 372   Carriages were chartered, an enormous quantity of eatables and drinkables provided, and away we went, a regular wayzgoose or bean~feast party.

Journalists bribing security guards.  Tapping cell  phones. Hacking computers. Spying on emails.

And not just once in a while, like the Cincinnati newspaper’s  Chiquita banana episode in 1997, or the Chicago Mirage Bar sting of 1974.

But permanently, as part of an ongoing operation, with an A-list of  targets including British prime ministers, rock stars, crime victims, even the royal family. Like Watergate in reverse gear.

The unprecedented, unmitigated  gall of News Corp. and its cheesy tabloid:  To run a private spy agency and dress it up as a newsroom.

This week  The Nation magazine quoted  Dan Cooper, formerly of Fox:

Deep in the bowels of 1211 Avenue of the Americas, News Corporation’s New York headquarters, was … the Brain Room. Most people thought it was simply the research department of Fox News. But unlike virtually everybody else, because I had to design and build the Brain Room, I knew it also housed a counterintelligence and black ops office. So accessing phone records was easy pie.

This is fairly well unprecedented in media history, but there are a few interesting flashbacks. The Guardian probably did the best job explaining similar behavior of Lords Northcliffe, Rothemere and Beaverbrook, late of Britain’s Fleet Street.

But for my money, the most grandiose vision was William T. Stead’s 1886 idea of “government by journalism.”  Stead once said:

The telegraph and the printing-press have converted Great Britain into a vast agora, or assembly of the whole community, in which the discussion of the affairs of State is carried on from day to day in the hearing of the whole people…

So why not, Stead asked, just go ahead and replace the House of Commons with the press?  Stead’s vision went nowhere, probably because of a lack of  technology. The mercurial editor turned to other projects like world peace.

Rupert Murdoch’s vision  is similar to Stead’s, and like Northcliffe, Rothemere and Beaverbrook, he has tried to rule government with journalism. Using inside information, Murdoch pulled the strings in the world’s second largest news empire, helping the rise and fall of politicians and keeping public discourse tightly inside his own narrow boundaries.

If you’d asked Murdoch and his editors, they might well have compared their operation to Stieg Larssen’s Millenium epic. In that three-part story about investigative journalism in Sweden, first published in 2004 and made into a terrific film trilogy in 2009-2011, a brilliant but abused young woman named Lisbeth Salander has an almost superhuman ability to hack into cell phones, emails and computers files.  The exact details of all private lives, even Sweden’s secret service, are at her fingertips. She shares them with editor Mikael Blomkvist, who uses the power to track down serial killers.

But how did News of the World use its “Brain  Room?”   To spy on the Prime Minister and learn what he was bidding for a townhouse; to find out how many pounds the Dutchess of York had gained;  to spy on 911 victims; to write malicious celebrity sob stories.

It’s an astounding abuse of power gone awry, almost like a science fiction experiment.  Imagine mad scientist TV’s Frank proposing an experiment: Hey, let’s give a few media bimbos a major national publication, along with their own private spy agency,  and see what they do with it while they paste in the Page 3 cheesecake girl.

In one of those weird life -imitates -art -imitating -life coincidences, the big  item is flying around the UK blogosphere recently was that former News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks insisted that a reporter covering a Harry Potter press conference  dress up like a wizard.  The date was Sept. 12, 2001 — the day after the 911 attacks. The reporter checked with the boss, who backed Brooks up. Then he called in sick.

Yes, Britain’s tabloid press is a sick piece of work.  And if you’re under age 21, you grew up knowing it.  One of its prime victims,  J.K. Rowling, is the author of  the  Harry Potter books.   And as any 12 year old reader will tell you, journalism is a profession where you will find disreputable characters without the slightest sense of personal honor or common decency.

Just as Britain’s News of the World and the US Fox News became famous for playing “gotcha” as a blood sport, Rita Skeeter, reporter for the Daily Prophet in the Harry Potter books, proudly wears the mantle of sensationalistic arrogance.    In one book,  Skeeter is looking for an angle to skewer Potter. She asks him:

Speaking of your parents, were they alive, how do you think they’d feel? Proud? Or concerned that your attitude shows, at best, a pathological need for attention? The worst, a psychotic death wish?

Rita Skeeter has her own personal eavesdropping technology — She can magically transform into a bug in order to overhear private conversations.

But she gets caught. In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Hermione Granger catches Rita spying on the Quiddich match and threatens to expose her if she doesn’t stop. Later Hermione tells friends:

 Rita Skeeter isn’t going to be writing anything at all for a while. Not unless she wants me to spill the beans on her… I found out how she was listening in on private conversations when she wasn’t supposed to be coming into the grounds…

A 2008 study in American Communication Journal observed with alarm that the Potter series had:

… three main frames in which media is viewed: Government Control of Journalism, Misleading Journalism, and Unethical Means of Gathering Information. Based on these frames, researchers argue the Harry Potter series does not put the media in a positive light.

Unethical information gathering?  Like … the News of the World?

Additional reading: 

Rob Cox and Richard Beales, Murdoch Schadenfreude has worrying downside, too,  Reuters Breakingviews, July 12, 2011.

Watchdog: Congress must probe Murdoch media, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 11, 2011

The Trouble with Rupert, Save the News, July 12, 2011

Susan Paterno,  The lying game  American Journalism Review, May, 1997.

Robert Lissit, Gotcha, American Journalism Review, March 1995.  (About good and bad TV undercover work).

Barroom Sting, Time Magazine, Jan. 23, 1978. (About the Mirage Bar)

Amanda Sturgill, Jessica Winney  and Tina Libhart, Harry Potter and Children’s perceptions of the news media, American Communication Journal, Spring 2008.

As a snapshot of the current situation, the report contains excellent statistics. For instance, it notes that the number of professional news reporters has declined from 55,000 in 2006 to 41,600 in 2010.

And it observes with appropriate concern, as did the Miller and Knight reports in recent years, that a loss of journalism is a loss of civic accountability:

The shortage of local, professional accountability reporting…  is likely to lead to more government waste, more local corruption, worse schools, a less-informed electorate, and other serious problems in communities. In some cases, the loss of reporting capacity has meant a power shift away from citizens toward government and other institutions.

Among the report’s conclusions and recommendations:

• There’s no magic bullet
• The government should remove minor obstacles to innovation
• End the Fairness Doctrine once and for all
• Reconsider cross ownership TV – newspapers
• Disclose pay-for-play and video press releases on TV news, but dont regulate
• Don’t fund an AmeriCorps journalism program
• Journalism should rely more on philanthropy
• Clear up tax status of non-profit news organizations
• Promote more openness in government
• Build stronger community libraries
• Above all, don’t expect the FCC to encourage media reform

“The primary goal should not be to provide the FCC with tools for license-renewal denials, but to provide communities the data they need to understand what their local TV stations are doing …”   In other words, more transparency, but no reform efforts along the lines of the WLBT case of the 1960s.

Despite blue-ribbon credentialed authors and its sobering statistical analysis of the current situation, the report fails to explain the history, motivations or potential trajectories of the digital media revolution.

The report quotes a few observers who note that radio and TV do not live up to their public responsibilities, but only in passing, and hardly in the strong context of social responsibility that was the keynote of the Hutchins Commission of 1947 and many other subsequent criticisms of the American media.

Nor does the report deal with the trend of circumvention by technology, or connect it with the problem raised 100 years ago by Will Irwin:

It is the mouthpiece of an older stock. It lags behind the thought of its times. . . . To us of this younger generation, our daily press is speaking, for the most part, with a dead voice, because the supreme power resides in men of that older generation.

The new FCC report provides an excellent list of symptoms, but no real diagnosis, prognosis or treatment options for a rapidly dying commercial media.

It is, in the end, a panegyric to the same-old, same-old.

However, if you are interested in a new take on the problem, read Washington Post editor Raju Narisetti’s Why Free is Very Expensive:

What the prolonged and knee-jerk debate about free vs. paid inside our news organizations shows is that we still have what led us here in the first place: An imagination deficit. Rather than apply an ‘all or nothing’ approach focused, perhaps wrongly, on just our Web sites, we should be willing to make creative bets on our business model. We continue to make what is being consumed–in large quantities. It is time we figured out how to make it easier, more engaging and useful. Despite their soaring valuations, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter don’t create much, if anything at all, by way of original content. And, for that matter, neither do Google or YouTube. They simply make it easy, useful and engaging to their audiences. These are incredibly disruptive times and one thing is clear to me: There isn’t time or room for incrementalism at major news organizations.

Some years back, Newport News Daily Press publisher Digby Solomon had the idea that the news media should react to “category killers” (like the end of classified advertising) by working to help consumers cut out the “middle men.” For instance, instead of just selling advertising for real estate, it should connect real estate customers and buyers — saving each the five percent that goes to the realtors. It’s the kind of  idea we need to be considering.

“This has caused great joy among some uber-liberals who object to free speech,” said Bill O’Reilly.  Of course he had to leave, said John Stewart.  “Thirty percent of his viewers have abandoned him, his audience’s median age is now dead of natural causes.”

Beck has been called a lot of things in his two-year run on national television, but he is most often compared to Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest whose syndicated radio program reached 16 million listeners weekly at the height of his popularity in the 1930s.

Dana Millbank wrote in the Washington Post that the end of Glen Beck’s Fox TV show was similar to the way Coughlin was pushed off the radio in 1939.

Beck, in losing his mass-media perch, is repeating the history of Father Charles Coughlin, the radio priest of the Great Depression. Economic hardship gave him an audience even greater than Beck’s, but as his calls to drive “the money changers from the temple” became more vitriolic, his broadcast sponsors dropped him. He gradually faded from relevance as his angry themes lost their hold on Americans and his anti-Semitism became more pronounced.

Beck  denied the comparison to the radio priest  in 2010.

It’s a deep insult to be compared to [Coughlin]. But it’s hysterical because it’s …  so ridiculously inaccurate, it doesn’t even make sense. Yes, Father Coughlin was against communism. Yes, he was on the radio, like me. Yes, he was against the sitting president, FDR.  But it’s weird, because that’s where it ends — because he was initially a supporter of FDR. He was also wildly anti-Semitic — not me. He was for big unions. You know how I much I love the unions. And he’s also for — and this is my favorite this is his magazine, an original copy from the day — he’s also for “Social Justice,” the union man. Yes. That’s me in a nutshell, isn’t it?

Well, yes and no.

Like Coughlin, Beck’s comments have raised  accusations of anti-semitism.  The comparison is  apt in other ways. Beck and Coughlin both  fought job-creating programs, called democrats communists, threatened violence and spread bizarre conspiracy theories on the air.

Beck is wrong when he says Coughlin  promoted “social justice” and he doesn’t.   Social justice didn’t mean then what it does now. It was a code word back then, often used by right-wing, populist demagogues. Beck uses code words too, but not the same ones. He is very much  from the same tradition as Coughlin. He’s a right-wing radio speaker appealing to deep seated fears and offering simplistic solutions. A demagogue.

Beck is correct in saying that Coughlin started out as a democrat, a union supporter and a champion of the oppressed working class. It’s true that, by the middle of the 1930s, Coughlin had become so disgusted with Depression-era capitalism that he embraced fascism and anti-Semitic rhetoric, for example, calling FDR’s “New Deal” the “Jew Deal.”   In the summer of 1938, throwing his arm out in a Nazi salute, he told a rally of supporters: “When we get through with the Jews in America, they’ll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing” (Manchester, 1974, p. 176).

The reasons that Beck and Coughlin left the air are not the same. For Coughlin, there was a particular incident that precipitated his exit.  On the night of November of 9, 1938,  Nazi party members destroyed synagogues and killed Jewish people across Germany in a pogrom called “Kristallnacht.” Coughlin tried to defend it, saying that persecution was only natural since Jews had been “numerous among radical leaders” on the left, and that many Christians had been persecuted by communists in Russia.

Following that broadcast, NBC and CBS networks announced they would refuse  to allow “errors of fact” on the radio and would demand Coughlin’s advance  scripts from that point forward. Coughlin refused, and continued his broadcasts through independent radio stations for another year. The Nazis trumpeted the censorship, saying Coughlin was not being allowed to broadcast the truth — an odd claim from a government that was imposing the most draconian censorship the world has ever seen.

We don’t know what the breaking point was for Fox News in 2011. Possibly it was a large combination of things, or, as a New Yorker columnist suggested, a desire to appear “less crazy” in the run-up to the 2012 elections.

We do know what was on the minds of the Federal Communications Commission, and the president, in the fall of 1938.  As news from Europe became ever more threatening, a young theater director named Orson Wells staged a Halloween prank with a radio broadcast of the War of the Worlds  that made millions of people think the country was being invaded.  By Martians. The idea that a childish radio program could panic millions of people was an indication that more sinister activities could have a deeper impact.

A few weeks later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt attacked Coughlin (although not by name):   “To permit radio to become a medium for selfish propaganda of any character would be shamefully and wrongfully to abuse a great agent of public service. Radio broadcasting should be maintained on a equality of freedom which has been and is the keynote of the American press.” (The New York Times, “Seeking a Code,” November 20, 1938, p. 174).

In FCC hearings in 1938, regulators talked about “the right of free speech and liberty of thought.” The FCC chairman said censorship was “impracticable and definitely objectionable,” and then called for self-regulation of radio as the only traditional American way to avoid a plague of innumerable and unimaginable evils.

The National Association of Broadcasters obliged with changes in its voluntary code of conduct in 1939, effectively taking Father Coughlin off the air. While controversial ideas would still be heard on the air, they would be part of news programs or balanced panel discussions.  “This new rule closed the one loophole that remained in the networks’ and stations’ ability to censor controversial opinion: the dollar loophole,” said historian Michelle Hilmes. “The ability to pay was no longer [enough] . . . In fact, now broadcasters had an obligation to restrict all those outside the broad mainstream of political views” (Hilmes, 2006).

A few months later, in January of 1940, the FBI raided a Nazi spy ring in New York and arrested 17 armed saboteurs who were associated with Coughlin’s Social Justice group. As it turns out, the FBI had long been aware of the many links between Coughlin and the Nazi propaganda ministry in Berlin.  They knew he had repeated word-for-word, propaganda screeds coming out of Berlin. And they knew he was secretly taking money from the Nazis. (Warren, 1995).

Outraged at the FBI, Coughlin  tried to defend the “Social Justice” group on his now faltering radio show. But it was clear that he had totally misunderstood American public opinion.  His presence on the air ended when the  church told him that he would have to choose between priesthood and the radio.

If there is a similarity between Beck and Coughlin, it may be one of style, and perhaps also a misunderstanding of American public opinion as well.

However,  the substance of  Coughlin’s activities were far more subversive. No one has ever suggested that Glen Beck has taken money from foreign agents at a time when war seemed imminent.

So Coughlin comes off as a far more dangerous figure at a time when radio was not understood and war was breaking out across Europe. Like a number of American conservatives and industrialists at the time, Coughlin was betting  on a fascist future, and he landed on the wrong side of history.

Not everyone who disliked Coughlin was happy with the way he was marginalized by network regulation. Some felt, at the very least, that Americans needed to understand what they would soon be fighting.  “The American people are not boobs,” as one pundit picturesquely said (Saerchinger, 1940). They could be trusted to make up their own minds.

Or as Thomas Jefferson said in 1804:

No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found is the freedom of the press. It is, therefore, the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions.

The experiment endures, in spite of Father Coughlin and a rather different character named Glenn Beck.

——-

Hilmes, Michelle. Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States (New York: Wadsworth, 2006), p. 129.

Saerchinger, Cesar. “Radio, Censorship and Neutrality,” Foreign Affairs, January 1940,  337.

Shannon, Warren. “Confronting the Nazis: Americans and German Propaganda,”
Ph.D. Dissertation, Washington State University, 1995.

Mysterious Ukrainian newspaper photo c. 1925

This mysterious propaganda photo was taken in the Ukraine during the early period of Soviet control, probably around 1925.  The photo was collected in WWII by the Farm Security Administration and was found at the Library of Congress.

The photo raises questions. Would journalists really set type on the back of a truck in the middle of a wheat field?  Was it staged, or faked, or part of a serious effort to get journalists close to the people? Do the shadows in the truck line  up with the shadows on the field? Were two photos cut in together?

We do know a few things about the photo.

The banner at the side of the truck reads: “Mobile news room of the … newspaper  Kolhoznik  …at the harvest in the cooperative Leninist  Village of (unknown).”  The banner behind the typesetters reads: “Let us secure the financial basis, For socialist way of life…”

The title of the newspaper means “Agricultural cooperative member,” according to Ivanka Knezevic of the University of Toronoto. The Kolhozi were peasants’ cooperatives, as distinct from state-owned agricultural enterprises (sovhozi). The photograph seems to be from about the 1920s, she said.  The journalists are dressed in the usual urban-working-class clothing (most were recruited from the working class). They would start looking better dressed in the 1930s, after the NEP.

Ben Franklin would have looked at these pictures and guffawed, as would anyone who has set type by hand.  Deploying type cases in the field is not remotely practical. The cases are shallow and filled with very small pieces of type, and any jostling will scatter the type on the ground (or truck bed), and hours will be spent trying to redistribute the type back into the proper compartments.  No, this is just propaganda.

A similar photo from Russia in WWII.

Still, it’s not the kind of Soviet propaganda usually seen the west, which is another reason that it’s interesting. For example, the Newseum’s display of Russian communist photos emphasizes the constant erasure of politically inconvenient figures from the pages of history. Those erasures were only a small reflection of the horror of the Soviet rule, and an inspiration for the protagonist in George  Orwell’s 1984, who was employed by the Ministry of Truth to revise history.

However, these photos of typesetting in the field ask us to use a different frame of reference.  They reflect the strange optimism of the early communist state, and they’re valuable because they give a glimpse into the question of why many Americans like John Reed (author), Dalton Trumbo (screen writer),  Walter Duranty (journalist), and Paul Robeson (actor) were initially attracted to the communist cause.

It’s worth remembering what George F. Kennan said about these idealists. Speaking of John Reed, Kennan said that his “blazing honesty and a purity of idealism .. did unintended credit to the American society that produced him, the merits of which he himself understood so poorly.”

Questions about the impact of vitriolic political debate, including incitement to violence, are often found in media history.  Possibly the most infamous episode was William Randolph Hearst’s call for the assassination of President William McKinley in 1900. 

Historical perspective helps us understand the reaction to the  Jan. 8, 2011  attack on Arizona Congresswoman  Gabrielle Giffords, in which six people were killed and a dozen others, including the Congresswoman, were seriously injured.

Strong rhetoric during political campaigns, including calls for  “second amendment (gun rights) remedies,” along with graphics depicted Giffords district an a “target” of the “tea party,” were seen as inciting the perpetrator.

For example,  Fox News’ Glen Beck said this on June 9, 2010:

(American Democrats) believe in communism. They believe and have called for a revolution. You’re going to have to shoot them in the head. But warning, they may shoot you. They are dangerous because they believe. Karl Marx is their George Washington. You will never change their mind. And if they feel you have lied to them — they’re revolutionaries. Nancy Pelosi, those are the people you should be worried about.

And on Feb. 27, 2011,   House Speaker John Boehner kept up the heated rhetoric by saying:

We’ve given [public employees] a machine gun and put it right at the heads of the local officials and they really have their hands tied.

Under US legal tradition, even the most disgusting, unpleasant, sharp and caustic remarks are protected by First Amendment.  (For those who have taken a media law class, you might recall the New York Times v. Sullivan decision of 1964).

In US history,  the most  controversial incident of media incitement to violence involved newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst and his calls for the assassination of William McKinley during the election of 1900. McKinley was running for a second term in office with a new vice president (Theodore Roosevelt).  During the campaign, Hearst’s New York Journal and other newspapers  set up a drum-beat of extreme political criticism. At one point the Journal labeled McKinley “the most hated creature on the American continent” and said:

“If bad institutions and bad men must be got rid of only by killing, then the killing must be done.”

A similar call for McKinley’s assassination was seen in a doggerel poem written by a then-famous writer named Ambrose Bierce. (To understand the poem, note that William Goebel was elected governor of Kentucky and mortally wounded as he took office in February 1900. The extent of the assassination plot was never uncovered.  Also, a “bier” is a platform for a coffin).

The bullet that pierced Goebel’s breast
Can not be found in all the West;
Good reason, it is speeding here
To lay McKinley on his bier.

So when McKinley actually was assassinated in September of 1901, Theodore Roosevelt and his cabinet members personally  blamed Hearst for McKinley’s assassination.  Speaking of the incident later, Senator Lewis Schwellenbach said the attacks were “the most cowardly in all the sordid career of journalism which that man (Hearst) has pursued.”

Hearst was never criminally charged in the McKinley assassination, but he was  widely discredited, and this ruined his political ambitions. The controversy trailed him for the rest of his life.  It was one reason why Orson Wells thought he was such an inviting target when he produced “Citizen Kane” some 40 years later.

There are many other incidents of strong media rhetoric or grossly misleading images that seemed to justify violence in media history. For example, the 1915 film “Birth of a Nation” falsely depicting African Americans during the Reconstruction era in the worst possible light.  The film apparently triggered a wave of lynchings.

“Media-promulgated stereotypes of various and diverse groups of people cause harm in both direct and indirect ways by presenting oversimplified, mostly negative, and often deceptive depictions,” said historian Paul Martin Lester. The 1998 murder of a gay University of Wyoming student, Matthew Shepard, is often seen as one example of the impacts stereotypes can have.

The problem is hardly confined to the United States. Crimes against humanity are nearly always preceded by campaigns of hatred in the mass media.   When the Nazis took over Germany in the 1930s, for instance, some of the most infamous films and newspaper articles in history directly targeted Jewish people.

One newspaper was Der Stürmer, which specialized in crude, vivid and vicious  antisemitism.  “Jewish murder plan against Gentile humanity” was one particularly virulent headline. The only solution, Der Stürmer often said, was “the extermination of the people whose father is the devil.” The newspaper was published between 1922 and February, 1945, after which its editor, Julius Streicher, was sentenced to death for crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal in 1946.  The Tribunal said his advocacy of murder and extermination  “clearly constitutes persecution on political and racial grounds … a crime against humanity.”

Nothing like Der Stürmer was seen again on the world scene until the newspaper Kangura, published in Rwanda in the early 1990s,  openly advocated genocide of Tutsi people. In 1994, an estimate 800,000 were killed by Hutus at the urging of Kangura and Radio Rwanda.  Kangura’s editor, Hassan Ngeze, along with broadcast colleagues, was convicted of crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and sentenced to life imprisonment, re-affirming the international legal principle that leaders of the mass media organizations can be held responsible for inciting genocide.

While the level of political rhetoric in the United States in recent decades has been heated, it has certainly not approached the Der Stürmer  or Kangura level of incitement.

Nevertheless, many people feel that the bright red line between political rhetoric and open incitement to violence has been smudged, if not crossed, by cross-hairs on political districts; by calls for “Second Amendment remedies” against liberals in Congress; by gun-toting extremists at political rallies; and by politicians who “take aim” against liberals in their televised campaign ads.

Clearly, the climate of violent rhetoric in the US accelerated in the Obama years. Whether or not the Tuscon massacre of 2011 was directly connected, there is an historical connection between violent rhetoric and violent acts.

In an age when ordinary people have to express extreme views to get media attention, there is a need to advocate more peaceful rhetoric. One place to start is Marshall Rosenberg’s ideas about nonviolent communication.