An Enduring Ethos

Abstract

In the twentieth century, in the United States, ideas of professional practice in journalism and journalism education grew up together. Occupational norms and professional practices were inscribed in reporting textbooks, which reflected the values of their era. They show a continuity of praxis, and an “enduring ethos” of journalistic values that survived into the 1960s and 1970s, in time to be picked up by the studies of Johnstone and then later Weaver and Wilhoit. This ethos including notions of public service, often tied to notions of objectivity, accuracy and fairness. This study includes a close reading of 34 textbooks published over a period of nearly 70 years, from the 1890s through the 1960s, drawing from a larger corpus of material that includes 69 textbooks from the same period. As sites of professional discourse making and continuity, textbooks show how journalism's values are passed down through time.

KEYWORDS:

• journalism education
• pedagogy
• professionalism
• professionalization
• public service
• textbooks

Notes

1. These issues further in a related study of more specialized business-management textbooks from the same era, as found in ‘American Journalism’ (Mari 2014).

2. “Nancy Barr Mavity, Book Editor, Dies,” Oakland Tribune, April 23, 1959; see also, Elinor Hayes, “Nancy's Now ‘Legend of Newsdom,’” Oakland Tribune, April 23, 1959, p. 4. Described by her colleagues on the Oakland Tribune as “one of the outstanding women reporters of her day,” and as having “lived a newspaper life that was pure Front Page,” Mavity had a PhD in philosophy from Cornell, and served as the paper's book editor, a reporter and a correspondent for more than 30 years. She was one of the first women to pen a textbook for journalists.

3. Porter was the day city editor at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and Luxon was assistant professor of journalism at Ohio State University after stints as the assistant city editor at the Columbus Citizen and other papers.