Semester:
Offered:
Instructor: Morgan Day Frank
Meeting time: Tuesday, 3:00-5:00 pm
“You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war,” media baron William Randolph Hearst supposedly declared in 1897, pushing the US towards war with Spain. Although in many respects Hearst’s infamous “yellow journalism” can be understood to anticipate the media’s worst present day excesses – an early example of “fake news” – in other respects Hearst’s grand proclamations can be seen as an expression of the media’s most noble ambition: its desire to shape public opinion. This seminar will explore key moments in the history of journalism to better understand the role journalism plays in the contemporary US. For instance, we will compare political discourse in colonial America to political discourse as it’s currently practiced on Twitter. We will read abolitionist newspapers before the Civil War and investigative “muckraking” reporting at the turn of the twentieth century and consider how political and exposé journalism function today. Students will learn about American journalism’s greatest ideals, as well as its persistent failure to live up to these ideals. When did newspapers become objective? Have newspapers ever been objective? Should newspapers even aspire to objectivity? What’s wrong with American journalism? Assigned text may include articles by Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, Joan Didion, and Norman Mailer, alongside readings by Benedict Anderson, Michael Warner, Lauren Berlant, Trish Loughran, Richard Kaplan, Robert W. McChesney.