What Walter Saw

Abstract

The sale of The New York World in 1931 to the Scripps-Howard chain marked the end of what many viewed as a “newspaperman's newspaper,” one that, particularly after the arrival of Walter Lippmann in 1921, had become a literate defender of liberal values for many New Yorkers. But while the death of The World is often attributed to poor business practices, an equally significant contributor to its decline was the changing demands of a readership that had in the interwar period lost its taste for liberal homilies. Lippmann responded to these new reader demands by seeking to inculcate at The World a scientific approach to advocacy that would, by probing what Lippmann called the “twilight zone of news” where important causal forces and normative considerations resided, bridge the news-opinion dichotomy in a way that would allow the paper to honor its crusading past while satisfying the demands of its readership for a more fact-based journalism.

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Ronald P. Seyb

RONALD P. SEYB is the Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. Chair in Government at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. He studies the American presidency and the development of the press as a political institution.