Westbrook Pegler and the Rise of the Syndicated Columnist

Abstract

The syndicated political columnist emerged as a fixture of American newspapers in the 1930s. By the end of the decade, the partisan views of a few journalists were placed before millions of potential readers. Columnists offered readers an alternative to the event-based, source-driven reporting style of the day. They offered publishers an inexpensive source of politically sophisticated content that they could use to advance their ideological interests or to demonstrate fairmindedness on the opinion pages. Conservative columnist Westbrook Pegler was among the best known and most divisive newspaper writers of the day. He was a sharp critic of the Roosevelt administration, organized labor, and liberals, and his work as a regular contributor to daily newspapers was followed by supporters and detractors alike.

Notes

1 Clara Goldmann to Westbrook Pegler, March 22, 1943, with clipping from Aero News, March 19, 1943, criticizing Goldmann’s father, John, as a “parasite,” Westbrook Pegler papers, box 78, “Unions, Abuses & Rackets, Defense Work, 1943, January–August” folder, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa.

2 On Pegler’s campaign against organized labor and his influence as a columnist, see David Witwer, Shadow of the Racketeer: Scandal in Organized Labor (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009). On his perceived role as a standard-bearer for the conservative press, also see David Witwer, “Westbrook Pegler and the Anti-Union Movement,” Journal of American History 92, no. 2 (2005): 527–2.

3 Oswald Garrison Villard, The Disappearing Daily: Chapters in the Evolution of American Newspapers (New York: Knopf, 1944), 76. For critical assessments of Pegler, see Oliver Pilat, Pegler: Angry Man of the Press (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1963); and Charles Fisher, The Columnists (New York: Howell, Soskin, 1944), 166–96.

4 Claude Kimball to Westbrook Pegler, June 1, 1940, Pegler papers, box 80, “Unions, American Newspaper Guild, 1940, January–June” folder.

5 On the development of political columns, see Donald A. Ritchie, Reporting from Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 131–58; Lynn D. Gordon, “Why Dorothy Thompson Lost Her Job: Political Columnists and the Press Wars of the 1930s and 1940s,” History of Education Quarterly 34, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 281–303; Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 150–51; and Ray Leonard Teel, The Public Press, 1900–1945 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006), 137–39.

6 Teel, The Public Press, 130–01. On the criticism of business reporting, see John F. Roche, “Bright Future for Business Writers,” Editor and Publisher, February 20, 1932, 9.

7 For an account of how newspapers responded to the economic challenge of radio and also to the threat of being usurped as the primary source of news for Americans, see Michael Stamm, Sound Business: Newspaper, Radio, and the Politics of New Media (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 59–81. For one editor’s assessment of the threat of radio and the need to respond with better writing, more aggressive reporting, and engaging storytelling, see George Olds, “Eliminate ‘Bunk’ Editor Tells Staff,” Editor and Publisher, February 13, 1932, 7.

8 James L. Baughman, Henry R. Luce and the Rise of the American News Media (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 37–61.

9 Curtis D. MacDougall, Interpretative Reporting (New York: MacMillan, 1938), 14.

10 Carolyn Bronstein and Stephen Vaughn, “Willard G. Bleyer and the Relevance of Journalism Education,” Journalism and Mass Communication Monographs 166 (June 1998).

11 Margaret A. Blanchard, “The Hutchins Commission, the Press and the Responsibility Concept,” Journalism Monographs 49 (May 1977). See also Victor Pickard, America’s Battle for Media Democracy: The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 124–89.

12 Marquis Childs, “The Interpretive Reporter’s Role in a Troubled World,” Journalism Quarterly 27 (Spring 1950): 138. On Childs, see Robert A. Rabe, “Reporter in a Troubled World: Marquis W. Childs and the Rise and Fall of Postwar Liberalism” (PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 2013).

13 Bagdikian applied the term to the 1960s, but by then it had been underway for a generation. See Ben H. Bagdikian, “The Golden Age of Oracles,” Columbia Journalism Review 4, no. 4 (Winter 1966): 11–16.

14 Charles Fisher, The Columnists (New York: Howell, Soskin, 1944), 2.

15 Michael Schudson, “Persistence of Vision: Partisan Journalism in the Mainstream Press,” in A History of the Book in America Vol. 4. Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940, edited by Carl F. Kaestle and Janice Radway (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 146.

16 A. J. Bauer argued that journalism historians have not fully considered the conservative critique of the media, including that of Pegler’s contemporary Fulton Lewis Jr. A. J. Bauer, “Journalism History and the Conservative Erasure,” American Journalism 35, no. 1 (Winter 2018): 2–26.

17 Frank Luther Mott, “Trends in Newspaper Content,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 219 (1942): 61.

18 Harold L. Ickes, America’s House of Lords: An Inquiry into the Freedom of the Press (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939), 96. Total daily circulation in 1939 was 39.4 million. 1940 N. W. Ayer and Son’s Directory of Newspapers and Periodicals (Philadelphia: N.W. Ayer, 1940), 11. Also see Margaret Marshall, “Columnists on Parade,” Nation, February 26, 1938, 246; and “Exclusive Set Gathers Capital News,” Literary Digest, March 6, 1937, 28–30.

19 Fisher, The Columnists, 2.

20 Morris L. Ernst, The First Freedom (New York: MacMillan, 1946), 91–94. Quotation at 93. On this, also see Pickard, America’s Battle, 124–51.

21 Rabe, Reporter in a Troubled World, 14.

22 On Johnson and Roosevelt, see Delbert Clark, Washington Dateline (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1941), 202–03; Teel, The Public Press, 164.

23 Ickes, America’s House of Lords, 102–03.

24 Karen S. Miller, The Voice of Business: Hill & Knowlton and Postwar Public Relations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 18.

25 See, for example, George E. Sokolsky, The Labor Crisis in the United States (Bridgeport, CT: Braunworth, 1938).

26 George Seldes, Lords of the Press (New York: Julian Messner, 1938), 342.

27 Curtis D. MacDougall, “Newspaper Syndication and Its Social Significance,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 219 (1942): 81.

28 David Welky, Everything Was Better in America: Print Culture in the Great Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 22.

29 Daniel J. Leab, A Union of Individuals: The Formation of the American Newspaper Guild, 1933–1936 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 46.

30 Villard, The Disappearing Daily, 72.

31 Teel, The Public Press, 138.

32 Leab, A Union of Individuals, 108.

33 In 1938, top scale minimums for reporters with five or more years of experience under Guild contract ranged from $35 to $58. Reporter salary figures from American Newspaper Guild Survey of Agreements and Bulletin Board Statements Covering Wages, Hours and Working Conditions in Effect on June 1, 1938, found in William T. Evjue papers, box 3, folder 4, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, WI, hereafter WHS; Lippmann’s estimated earnings from Ickes, America’s House of Lords, 96; and Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 342.

34 “Exclusive Set Gathers Capital News,” Literary Digest, March 6, 1937, 28–30.

35 Fisher, The Columnists, 151–52 and 167–168. Equivalency calculation at https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm.

36 Ernest Kirschten, “What’s Sacred about Columnists,” Bulletin of the American Society of Newspaper Editors 265, August 1, 1945, unnumbered pages, found in Evjue papers, box 5, folder 7.

37 MacDougall, “Newspaper Syndication and Its Social Significance,” 81.

38 Marshall, “Columnists on Parade,” Nation, February 26, 1938, 246.

39 Ritchie, Reporting from Washington, 134.

40 Ludwell Denny to John Sorrells, typescript, September 22, 1936, Ludwell Denny papers, WHS, box 2, folder 4.

41 “Newspapers, too, a New York Marvel,” advertisement, Fortune, July 1939, 55.

42 On the political leanings of columnists, see Villard, The Disappearing Daily, 70–77. Also see Edwin Emery and Henry Ladd Smith, The Press and America (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1954), 567–70; and Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History: 1690–1960, 3rd ed. (New York: MacMillan, 1962), 691–93, 791–92.

43 Roy W. Howard to All Editors, December 13, 1932, Ludwell Denny papers, Box 2, folder 3.

44 Roy W. Howard, “Scripps-Howard Formula,” in Newsmen Speak: Journalists on their Craft, edited by Edmond D. Coblentz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954), 62.

45 “To What Extent Are Newspaper Columnists Read?: A Statistical Analysis of 1435 Columns from 102 Newspapers,” typescript report prepared by the Bureau of Applied Social Research, Columbia University, New York, March 1947, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, director, WHS. Data from pages 2, 24.

46 Bernard Berelson, “What ‘Missing the Newspaper’ Means,” in Mass Communication and American Social Thought: Key Texts, 1919–1968, edited by John Durham Peters and Peter Simonson (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 257.

47 Gordon, “Why Dorothy Thompson Lost Her Job,” 301.

48 C. Edmonds Allen to John S. Knight, December 15, 1939, John S. Knight papers, box B9, folder 34, Archival Services, University Libraries, University of Akron, Akron, OH.

49 Malcolm W. Bingay to Glenn Adcox, Jan. 21, 1949; Adcox to Bingay, January 27, 1949, Knight papers, box B5, folder 28. On Riesel, see Philip M. Glende, “Victor Riesel: Labor’s Worst Friend,” Journalism History 44, no. 4 (Winter 2019): 241–51.

50 Donald A. Ritchie, Press Gallery: Congress and the Washington Correspondents (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 219–20.

51 For a discussion of syndicate costs in the 1940s, see MacDougall, “Newspaper Syndication and Its Social Significance,” 77–78.

52 George Northridge to Victor Riesel, October 8, 1951, Victor Riesel papers, box 9a, folder 2, Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, Tamiment Library, New York University, New York, NY.

53 United Feature Syndicate royalty statement, January 30, 1944–February 26, 1944, in Walker Stone papers, box 17, folder 8, WHS.

54 George A. Carlin to Walker Stone, October 20, 1944, Stone papers, box 13, folder 1.

55 Stokes had been a Scripps-Howard employee before being syndicated. Scripps-Howard did not renew the purchase agreement for a second year and left it to individual papers to decide whether to buy Stokes’s column. John H. Sorrells to George Carlin, November 21, 1945, Stone papers, box 8, folder 11.

56 Helen M. Staunton to Robert S. Allen, September 6, 1949, Robert Allen papers, box 25, folder 24, WHS.

57 Helen M. Staunton to Robert S. Allen, December 13, 1950, Allen papers, box 25, folder 24.

58 Robert S. Allen to Robert Hall, May 7, 1951; and Robert M. Hall to Robert S. Allen, May 11, 1951, both in Allen papers, box 25, folder 24.

59 John N. Wheeler, “What Part Do Features Play in a Newspaper?” in Newsmen Speak, 176–77.

60 Ritchie, Reporting from Washington, 139.

61 Robert P. Scripps to G. B. Parker, Stone papers, box 12, folder 2.

62 Gordon, “Why Dorothy Thompson Lost Her Job,” 287–90. Quotation at 290.

63 Villard, The Disappearing Daily, 72.

64 Maurice Sherman, “The Editor and the Columnist,” Public Opinion Quarterly 9, no. 3 (1945): 280.

65 “Problems in Journalism,” Proceedings of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, 1948, 54.

66 “Problems in Journalism,” Proceedings of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, 1947, 117–24.

67 Silas Bent, Newspaper Crusaders: A Neglected Story (New York: Whittlesey House, 1939), 271.

68 Karl Bickel, New Empires: The Newspaper and the Radio (Philadelphia: J.P. Lippincott, 1930), 39.

69 Carl Kaestle, “Standardization and Diversity in American Print Culture, 1880 to the Present,” in Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading Since 1880, edited by Carl F. Kaestle et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 284.

70 Virginius Dabney, “The Press and the Election,” Public Opinion Quarterly 1, no. 2 (1937): 125.

71 Marquis Childs to James Wechsler, April 9, 1953; Wechsler to Childs, April 13, 1953, James Wechsler papers, box 2, “Childs” folder, WHS.

72 James Wechsler to Marquis Childs, June 28, 1949, Wechsler papers, box 2, “Childs” folder.

73 Robert S. Allen to Robert M. Hall, May 24, 1951; and Robert M. Hall to Robert S. Allen, May 22, 1951, Allen papers, box 25, folder 24.

74 Drew Pearson to James Wechsler, April 27, 1951, Wechsler papers, box 7, “Pearson” folder.

75 Villard, The Disappearing Daily, 77.

76 Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 296.

77 Gordon, “Why Dorothy Thompson Lost Her Job,” 282–85. On Thompson, also see Fisher, The Columnists, 49.

78 B. M. McKelway quoted in “Ickes Keeps Congress Informed,” New York Post, December 12, 1947, 12.

79 James Batal et al., Your Newspaper: A Blueprint for a Better Press, edited by Leon Svirsky (New York: MacMillan, 1947), 150.

80 Fisher, The Columnists, 167.

81 “Headliners’ Club Lists 1940 Awards,” New York Times, June 21, 1940.

82 “Sherwood Winner for Third Time,” New York Times, May 6, 1941.

83 “Editors Vote ‘Times’ World’s Greatest Paper; Best Comics and Columnists Also Selected,” New York Times, May 5, 1942.

84 Witwer, “Westbrook Pegler and the Anti-Union Movement,” is focused primarily on Pegler’s conservative politics and his influence, but also see Finis Farr, Fair Enough: The Life of Westbrook Pegler (New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1975).

85 Ray Gibbons Doyle, “Forty-odd New Notches in the Stock of Mr. Pegler’s Ready Gun,” New York Times, September 13, 1942.

86 Pegler, “Fair Enough,” New York World-Telegram, December 18, 1939, 21.

87 Pegler, “Fair Enough,” New York World-Telegram, December 1, 1939, 31.

88 “Pegler Denounces ‘Drive’ into Unions,” New York Times, February 25, 1941.

89 “End Labor Disputes, Pegler Counsels,” New York Times, December 11, 1941.

90 Roy W. Howard to Westbrook Pegler, July 13, 1942, Roy W. Howard Archive, Indiana University, “Letters and Articles, June through December, 1942” folder.

91 Typescript news release, August 19, 1944, Howard papers, “Letters and Articles, April through December, 1944” folder.

92 Pegler, “As Pegler Sees It,” New York Journal American, December 3, 1947, 3. See also December 2, 4, and 16, 1947, for other columns critical of Teamsters’ leadership.

93 Pegler, “As Pegler Sees It,” New York Journal American, December 17, 1947, 3.

94 Pegler, “As Pegler Sees It,” New York Journal American, December 19, 1947, 3.

95 Advertisement, Editor and Publisher, June 28, 1947, 38–39. The advertisement also noted Pegler’s campaigns against “crooks” and the “cocky abuse of power” by union officials.

96 Ickes, America’s House of Lords, 105–08. Quotation at 108. In fact, Ickes and Pegler earned equal treatment in an examination of political invective. See Fon W. Boardman Jr., “Political Name Calling,” American Speech 15, no. 4 (1940): 353–56.

97 Margaret Marshall, “Columnists on Parade: Westbrook Pegler,” Nation, March 5, 1938, 273.

98 “Guild Opposes Pegler,” New York Times, May 23, 1942.

99 Miles Powell to Westbrook Pegler, June 12, 1942; one-page, undated, mimeographed sheet under the headline “Ban Westbrook Pegler;” Pegler papers, box 81, “Unions, Attacks on Pegler, 1942” folder.

100 “NMU Pickets Stage Pegler Protest,” New York Times, August 20, 1943; and “Los Angeles Newspaper Picketed,” New York Times, September 18, 1943.

101 Daniel J. Tobin, “Green Ignores Critical Columnists,” International Teamster, July 1946, 13–14.

102 “CIO Sec.-Treas. Carey Declines to Help Westbrook Pegler out of ‘Embarrassing Situation,’” news release, CIO, August 26, 1951, Congress of Industrial Organizations, Office of the Secretary-Treasurer, box 23, “Correspondence, Pegler, Westbrook” folder, Walter Reuther Library, Detroit, Mich.

103 Pegler quoted in Pilat, Pegler: Angry Man of the Press, 1. For more on Pegler’s readers, see Philip M. Glende, “Letters from Readers Support Pegler’s Anti-Union Crusade,” Newspaper Research Journal 34, no. 1 (2013): 6–21.

104 George A. Kerwan to Westbrook Pegler, November 26, 1947, Pegler papers, box 76, “Unions, Abuses & Rackets, General, 1945–1948” folder.

105 (Miss) B. E. Bettinger to Westbrook Pegler, Pegler papers, box 80, “Unions, American Newspaper Guild, 1940, January–June” folder.

106 Edouard F. Henriques to Westbrook Pegler, June 29, 1949, Pegler papers, box 76, “Unions, Abuses & Rackets, General, 1949, January–June” folder.

107 See, for example, John Marcum to Westbrook Pegler, July 7, 1942, with clipping from the Wayne County Outlook, Monticello, KY, July 2, 1942, on a report of a worker beaten by a union business agent. Pegler papers, box 77, “Unions, Abuses & Rackets, Defense Work, 1942, May–July” folder.

108 J. Gordon Hecker to Westbrook Pegler, November 24, 1944, with clipping of letter to the editor, Milwaukee Journal, November 21, 1944, Pegler papers, box 78, “Unions, Abuses & Rackets, Defense Work, 1944–1947” folder.

109 Woodson W. Holst to Westbrook Pegler, February 2, [1941], with photographs, and clipping from the Washington Post, “3 Men Indicted for Attack in Union Dispute,” November 21, 1940, Pegler papers, box 77, “Unions, Abuses & Rackets, Defense Work, 1940” folder.

110 Marjorie Maule to Westbrook Pegler, October 18, 1943; clippings from Toledo Blade, “Speed Cost Her War Plant Job, Woman Charges,” October 1, 1943, and “The Way of the World,” a local column on Maule, October 14, 1943; unsigned notation reported “several people” had submitted the clipping; all in Pegler papers, box 78, “Unions, Abuses & Rackets, Defense Work, 1943, September–December” folder.

111 “The Press and the People: A Survey,” Fortune, August 1939, 70.

112 MacDougall, “Newspaper Syndication and Its Social Significance,” 80.

113 In The Continuing Study of Newspaper Reading: 100-Study Summary (New York: Advertising Research Foundation, 1946), the Advertising Research Foundation summarized 100 studies of readership at daily newspapers during the past seven years. The papers ranged in circulation from 8,570 to 264,287.

114 Continuing Study of Newspaper Reading, 54. The range for Lippmann’s readership was 16 percent to 47 percent, and the median was 25 percent.

115 Continuing Study of Newspaper Reading, 55. For Sokolsky, the range was 8 percent to 35 percent, and the median was 20 percent.

116 “Fortune Survey: Have You a Favorite Columnist?” Fortune, January 1937, 156.

117 Ibid., 162.

118 Villard, The Disappearing Daily, 70–77.

119 Clark, Washington Dateline, 188.

120 Ritchie, Reporting from Washington, 142.

121 James Wechsler to Drew Pearson, May 2, 1951, Wechsler papers, box 7, “Pearson” folder.

122 Graham White, FDR and the Press (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 121–40; Ickes, America’s House of Lords, 96–122.

123 Ickes, America’s House of Lords, 98.

124 See Albert C. Gunther, “Biased Press or Biased Public? Attitudes toward Media Coverage of Social Groups,” Public Opinion Quarterly 56, no. 2 (1992): 147–67. The tendency to believe that bias in news accounts might be influencing others is examined in W. Phillips Davison, “The Third-person Effect in Communication,” Public Opinion Quarterly 47, no. 1 (1983): 1–15.

125 On the overtly pro–New Deal political orientation of the paper and its brief life under the editorial direction of Ralph Ingersoll, with the financial support of Marshall Field, see Paul Milkman, PM: New Deal in Journalism, 1940–1948 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997).

126 Bertrand Weaver to Westbrook Pegler, September 23, 1943, Pegler papers, box 81, “Unions, Attacks on Pegler, 1943–1957 & undated” folder.

127 Hunter Price Lovelace to Westbrook Pegler, May 10, 1953, Pegler papers, box 84, “Unions, Communist Infiltration, Lovestone and Brown, 1951–1953” folder.

128 Staley A. Cook to Westbrook Pegler, June 15, 1955, Pegler papers, box 80 “Unions, American Newspaper Guild, 1942–1955” folder.

129 Mrs. M. W. Lindsey to Westbrook Pegler, November 28, 1941, Pegler papers, box 76, “Unions, Abuses & Rackets, General, 1939–1944” folder. Underlining in original.

130 Horace C. Boren to Westbrook Pegler, February 2, 1949, Pegler papers, box 76, “Unions, Abuses & Rackets, General, 1949, January–June” folder.

131 Michael Griffin to Westbrook Pegler, June 5, 1944; clipping “Carrier’s Death Laid to Head Blows,” Louisville Courier-Journal, June 5, 1944; both in Pegler papers, box 76, “Unions, Abuses & Rackets, General, 1939–1944” folder.

132 Gordon Meek to Westbrook Pegler, October 20, 1942; clippings from Cleveland Press, October 9, 10, 15, 1942; Pegler papers, box 78, “Unions, Abuses & Rackets, Defense Work, 1942, October” folder.

133 William B. Covert to Frank Waldrop, August 27, 1952, and October 18, 1952; William B. Covert to William Green, August 18, 1952; all found in Pegler papers, box 89, “Unions, International Typographical Union, 1952–1954” folder.

134 H. E. Neave to Westbrook Pegler, May 11, 1942, Pegler papers, box 77, “Unions, Abuses & Rackets, Defense Work, 1942, May–July” folder.

135 Henry Balch to Westbrook Pegler, December 4, 1952; telegram from Westbrook Pegler to Balch, December 15, 1952, both in Pegler papers, box 77, “Unions, Abuses & Rackets, General, 1952–1968” folder.

136 Edward M. Pooley to Westbrook Pegler, December 26, 1940, Pegler papers, box 77, “Unions, Abuses & Rackets, Defense Work, 1940” folder.

137 Philip W. Porter to Westbrook Pegler, August. 6, 1942; clipping of Porter, “The Inside of the News in Cleveland,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, July 15, 1942; in Pegler papers, box 81, “Unions, Attacks on Pegler, 1942” folder.

138 George B. Parker to Westbrook Pegler, Stone papers, box 8, folder 11.

139 Roy W. Howard to John H. Sorrels, August 12, 1937, Howard papers, “Letters and Articles, 1937” folder.

140 Stephen Ward identified three characteristics that distinguished journalistic objectivity in the early twentieth century from the past: a more distinct line between news and opinion, work practices and story content standards that reduced the possibility of subjective elements in stories, and elevation of fact-gathering into a mark of professional conduct. See Stephen J. A. Ward, The Invention of Journalism Ethics: The Path of Objectivity and Beyond (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 216–19.

141 Address of Carl Ackerman, April 29, 1933, to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, in Proceedings, Eleventh Annual Convention, American Society of Newspaper Editors, Washington, DC, 51–62. Quotation at 53.

142 On the forces that prodded journalism toward interpretive and explanatory reporting in the 1930s, see Kathy Roberts Forde, “Discovering the Explanatory Report in American Newspapers,” Journalism Practice 1, no 2 (2007): 230–31.

143 On the development of objectivity as a practice and the claim of professional status for journalists, see John Nerone, The Media and Public Life: A History (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2015), 167–74.

144 Childs, “The Interpretive Reporter’s Role in a Troubled World,” 134.

145 Clark, Washington Dateline, 188–89.

146 Schudson, “Persistence of Vision,” 150.

147 MacDougall, “Newspaper Syndication,” 81.