Pressing Matters: Media Crusades before the Nickelodeons

Media crusades leveled at moving-picture exhibition in penny arcades and nickel shows are surprisingly consistent in their tropes and rhetorical strategies from the inaugural campaign in the San Francisco Call in 1899 to the famous one in the Chicago Tribune in 1907. This essay situates this emerging discourse on visual “corruption” alongside many other “evils” in the larger context of media activism. The critical tenet is the historiographic usefulness of mobilizing journalism as a day-to-day negotiation of media culture’s functions in modernity’s cityscape.