Book Review: Covering America: A Narrative History of a Nation’s Journalism

Abstract

Covering America: A Narrative History of a Nation's Journalism. Christopher B. Daly. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012. 576 pp. $49.95 hbk.This engrossing, wide-ranging history of American journalism from colonial era to present makes a tremendous contribution to mass communication education by being that rarest kind of textbook-one that reads like literature instead of CliffsNotes. Covering all bases, from Zenger trial to Huffington Post, and with excursions into much lesser known histories across news media, Covering America makes perfect and enjoyable mandatory reading for undergraduate and graduate classes in journalism history.Christopher Daly, an associate professor at Boston University's Journalism Department, approaches this monumental historical survey with reportorial flair appropriate for a former Associated Press and Washington Post journalist, which sets it apart from more pedagogical classics like Emery, Emery, and Roberts's The Press and America. Literally from first line, Daly grabs reader with striking, cinematic details that make past come alive. Page 1 opens with a teenage Benjamin Franklin skulking along dark streets of eighteenth-century Boston, trying to put one over his brother in order to start his writing career-and readers are hooked, be they scholars who have been teaching colonial journalism for years, like this reviewer, or freshmen who might have never heard of Franklin.Similarly intimate visual vignettes are peppered throughout next nearly five hundred pages, including an iconic Ed Murrow sitting on a bench in a White House hallway, chain-smoking Camel cigarettes as FDR decides how to react to justreceived news of Pearl Harbor. At other end of press-government relationship spectrum, we are treated to image of President Nixon dancing at White House wedding of his daughter at very same moment when the typesetters and pressmen at [New York] Times started printing Pentagon Papers stories.Most helpful for classroom use, in all these cases and across volume, Daly assumes no prior historical knowledge on readers' part, and retells basics of U.S. history through eyes of journalists and media owners who put its first draftin front of American people. Most chapters even conclude with short summaries of how their main characters-from Franklin to David Halberstam-ended up, much like end titles in documentaries, so that no gaps are leftin a remarkably comprehensive story.Some journalism historians might object that this volume skates very close to Great Men tradition. The narrative focus is unabashedly on major figures that made journalism what it is (and yes, for vast majority of three hundred years covered it was mostly white men). As Daly puts it repeatedly, social, political, economic, and technological developments influenced shape of journalism, but for major shifts to happen, somebody had to do something. Since this book's main audience is not specialist, focusing on adventures of those various somebodies at expense of scholarly interpretative controversy seems an effective trade-offfor terrific storytelling that gets major points across memorably.In addition, book does make two fundamental conceptual arguments that give it depth and a unifying thread. …