Abstract
What a reporter is and does, and does not do, and the integrity of that idea, has always been an unsettled question, interrogated on the blurred, unregulated borders between journalism and the state. In embattled liminal spaces, reporters—negotiating a nebulous terrain of high-stakes reporting that tested and revised their emerging, unstable journalistic norms—fought in war, collaborated with US intelligence, and engaged in secret diplomacy. This article, focusing on the careers of two reporters, Sylvester Scovel in Cuba and William Bayard Hale in Mexico, explains how and why reporters came to work for the state, a neglected tradition conceptualized here as “state work,” from the 1890s to 1920s. That history is an argument for scholars of journalism and political history to study what reporters did, not just what they published, to better understand the role of journalism in US democracy.
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