Just the Facts: How "Objectivity" Came to Define American Journalism

Bibliographic Essay

177 Bibliographic Essay Journalists call journalism the “first draft of history,” and this is true, both in terms of its importance as a historical record and in its unfinished, often sketchy quality. Much of my time researching this book was spent in front of microfilm machines viewing nineteenth century newspapers, or in the New York Historical Society and other libraries, thumbing through the actual copies. Over the years I looked at most of the press run of the New York Herald from 1835 to 1865. Michael Schudson’s Discovering the News still provides the primary conceptual frame in journalism history. If I have argued a great deal with this book it is only because of its importance. Three other press histories were especially helpful: Mitchell Stephens, A History of News; Frank L. Mott, American Journalism; and the first draft of journalism histories, Frederic Hudson, Journalism in the United States, from 1690 to 1872. Stephens’s book, Hazel Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America, and articles by James Carey are important models of the kind of intellectual history of journalism that this book seeks to emulate.        1 Bennett’s New York Herald and Webb’s Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer are undervalued but rich resources for historians of the Jacksonian period. For the history of the Jacksonian period, the best synthesis is still Edward Pessen, Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics, a thorough rebuttal to Schlesinger and the “progressive” historians . Another valuable (and more recent) synthesis is Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution : Jacksonian America, 1815–1846. Other books helped to clarify the inequalities and violence of the era, notably Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860; Kenneth S. Greenberg, Masters and Statesmen: The Political Culture of American Slavery; Richard Ellis, The Union at Risk: Jackson Democracy, States’ Rights, and the Nullification Crisis; Paul A. Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1783–1834; and Leonard L. Richards, “Gentlemen of Property and Standing”: AntiAbolition Mobs in Jacksonian America. Dan Schiller, Objectivity and the News: The Public and the Rise of Commercial Journalism offers a good rebuttal to some of Schudson’s views on the Jacksonian promise. James L. Crouthamel, Bennett’s New York Herald and the Rise of the Popular Press and 178 | Bibliographic Essay James Watson Webb: A Biography are the best biographies of the two editors, even though Crouthamel himself points out that most of what we know of Bennett comes from the editor’s own columns.        2 James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald, William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, and Frederick Douglass’s North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper provide the best examples of their conflicting views about party and their common mistrust of partisanship. For background on the three journalists, James L. Crouthamel, Bennett’s New York Herald and the Rise of the Popular Press; Walter McIntosh Merrill, Against Wind and Tide: A Biography of William Lloyd Garrison; and William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass were invaluable. For the abolition movement and a response to it, Ronald G. Walters, The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism after 1830; and Leonard Richards, “Gentlemen of Property and Standing”: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America were helpful in filling in missing pieces. For the African American press one work was extremely helpful: Carter Bryan, “Negro Journalism in America before Emancipation.” An excellent analysis of presidential politics can be found in Richard McCormick, The Presidential Game: The Origins of American Presidential Politics. Two books that address nineteenth-century journalism are Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic; and Gerald J. Baldasty, The Commercialization of the News in the Nineteenth Century.        3 The chief sources for this chapter are a one-hundred-volume compilation of the dispatches of the Civil War commanders, including all Stanton’s dispatches to Dix, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies; the New York Herald and other dailies during the Civil War period; Stanton’s papers, held in the Library of Congress; and the War Department’s handwritten dispatches in the National Archives. Diaries and autobiographies from military figures provided important primary sources, notably U. S. Grant, Memoirs and Selected Letters; the Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman; Charles A. Dana, Recollections of the Civil War: With the Leaders at Washington and in the Field in the Sixties; and the voluminous Diary of Gideon Welles: Secretary of the Navy...