Political historians have long identified a gap in the literature on US conservatism surrounding that movement’s relationship to journalism and mass media. This essay calls on journalism historians to fill this gap and theorizes why they have thus far failed to do so. It notes the field’s tendency to engage with ahistorical and anachronistic concepts, which make journalism history legible to journalism studies but also subordinates historical work to the imperatives of social science. It uses “conservative news cultures” as a historically rooted theoretical framework for narrating discrete works of journalism history that, when put into conversation, comprise an unrealized subfield. More broadly it advocates for recognizing journalism history as political history and for theorizing new, historically rooted objects of study in need of social scientific analysis.

The popular anecdote that Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai once declared it “too soon to tell” the significance of the French Revolution of 1789 is clearly recognizable as a meme and has followed a winding path through media history. While the story was seemingly debunked in 2011, when it was revealed that Zhou had meant the 1968 unrest in Paris—rather than the French Revolution—it is argued this was merely another stage in its hundred-year evolution. Regardless of whether the quip had an actual Chinese author or not, its early spread in mainstream media was the result of an educated and globally minded Western audience shaped by orientalism and rhetoric surrounding the dangers of radical revolution. This study examines how, when China began opening to the world in the 1970s, the people involved in this process began to be written into the meme, with the Zhou Enlai variant only becoming consolidated in the 1990s. In tracing the story’s development, this article examines how quips—or memes—propagate and evolve over time, particularly in pre-digital environments, where texts benefit from the interplay of different formats and genres.

A chronological examination of historical newspapers of the late-eighteenth, nineteenth, and early-twentieth century reveals that representations of Mihšihkinaahkwa—popularly known as Little Turtle—a Myaamia, or Miami, tribal leader shifted from that of a fierce warrior, actively battling the army of the United States, to a “friend of the president,” a diplomatic leader who supported assimilationist policies, and was, “surpassed for bravery and intelligence, perhaps, by none of his race.” Important questions remain about the how and why newspaper framing of Little Turtle changed over time and what his conversion from foe to friend tells us about the role of the press in constructing collective memory specifically as it relates to Indigenous issues and individuals. This study examined press representation of Little Turtle using the lens of critical media discourse to examine the ways in which select “exemplar Indians” were created as part of the process of building collective memory within the larger process of nation-building.

More than two decades after journalism historians proposed an international or global turn in how to study the interconnected histories of journalism and information cultures, much has been achieved. This essay is an invitation to scrutinize the relationship between propaganda and journalism history more fully, specifically, by exploring the intellectual, cultural, and global dimensions of press-propaganda activities during wars and democratic crises. Building on ongoing work to internationalize the field of journalism history, future scholarship could analyze the multidirectional flows of global information; how journalists work as propagandists both willingly and unwillingly; how reporters expose lies, half-truths, or circumvent censorship; how communities engage in counterpropaganda via the press; and the role of visual narratives in modern media. This essay draws on findings from international and transnational press-propaganda scholarship and offers methodological considerations for researching and writing that history.