American Journalism Research Articles

George Kennan as a Prototype of the Englishman in the Novel Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy

This article is based on the hypothesis that George Kennan, the American journalist, traveler, and writer, who visited Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana in summer of 1886, was one of the prototypes of the Englishman in Tolstoy’s novel Resurrection. The book Siberia and the Exile System by George Kennan was one of the sources of Resurrection. We can trace the certain parallels in the description of the Siberian prison stage, some exiles whom Kennan met, the hotels in Irkutsk where he used to stay. Though earlier there were some speculations about the missionary F.W. Baedeker and the journalist Harry de Windt as the possible models of the Englishman in Resurrection. Yet the research of the draft versions of Resurrection, archival and other sources testify to the fact that still Kennan, if not the only one, but one of the most feasible prototypes of the Englishman in Resurrection.

The 2024 Presidential Address. The power of humility.

Physicians generally underestimate their potential to influence social progress, despite substantial precedents for medical professionals leading important societal transformations. The author believes that our times require we challenge the notion that physicians have limited influence beyond clinical settings. Our voice is powerful and important. It needs to be heard. In light of these considerations, the author chose "What Matters" as the theme of the 2024 American Association of Neurological Surgeons (AANS) Annual Scientific Meeting held in Chicago on May 3-6. The topic was reflective of his personal conviction that physicians, by virtue of the public respect and goodwill maintained through their dedication to the art and science of medicine, possess unparalleled potential to enhance both individual and societal health and well-being. The 2024 AANS scientific program committee determined to create an unprecedented program that would allow the community of neurosurgery to engage with some of the greatest minds in American medicine, academics, journalism, technology and public life. All contributors were invited to weave their insights regarding what truly matters into a broad, thought-provoking intellectual and spiritual tapestry. Universally resonant themes such as empathy, innovation, resilience, leadership, value, trust and equity framed the cooperative dialogues, emphasizing our shared humanity and the core values uniting us-despite our differences. The objectives for the 2024 Annual Meeting were ambitious: to consider as a professional community themes of utmost importance to our professional and personal lives; to catalyze a profound reevaluation of our collective objectives; to envision an expanded common mission; and to inspire visionary leaders to collaborate on creating lasting value-both for the patients who are the principal focus of our shared devotion, and for society writ large.

Psychological capital and safety in Global North-South cooperation: A field analysis of collaborative investigative journalism across the U.S.-Mexico border

This article builds on a field theoretical analysis of collaborative investigative journalism across the U.S-Mexico (Global North-South) border. The article examines contents produced in investigative collaboration between Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Mexican, and U.S. journalists, exposing human rights violations, crime, and corruption. The article elaborates on the concept of psychological capital and argues for its relevance in the study of cross-border collaborative investigative journalism. A key finding resulting from this research is that in most collaborative projects, psychological and other capital of the Central American and Mexican journalists was outweighed by the capital of the U.S. journalists. The psychological, social, and cultural capital of the Southern journalistic fields were highly relevant for the successful implementation of the examined projects, but not explicitly recognized in most reporting. The article also suggests the Southern journalists did not feel safe enough to suggest critical perspectives challenging the position of their Northern partners, who funded and supervised the collaborations. However, three projects, in which Northern and Southern journalists worked in Central America and Mexico side by side, manifested exemplary solidarity and recognition of the psychological and other capital of the Southern fields. Hence, it seems that witnessing the dangers affecting the region’s journalists firsthand can enable Northern journalists to better understand and appreciate the circumstances in which their Southern partners are living and working, reflected in more genuine appreciation of their psychological, cultural, and social capital.

A New(s) Copyright Balancing Act: How American Journalism Institutions Approached the Early Era of Artificial Intelligence and Fair Use

ABSTRACT Given the significant investment needed to gather the news, American journalism institutions have historically sought to protect their copyrights. The legal principle of fair use interplays with the ability of users to reshape portions of cultural products to make transformative works. As Large Language Models that empower Artificial Intelligence platforms can be built upon news artifacts, copyright considerations have, to date, evolved faster than legal and regulatory frameworks can respond. Examining public comments submitted to the U.S. Copyright Office in 2023, this study provides a historical snapshot of how copyright was conceptualized by American journalism institutions in the earliest era of AI adoption within newsrooms. This study finds that this set of journalism institutions largely endorsed licensing arrangements for the legal (re)use of journalistic works. At the same time, as viewed through the lens of metajournalistic discourse, the comments provided another public forum for journalism institutions to publicly debate and define the boundaries of the news profession itself.

Jordana Cox. Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project’s Living Newspapers in New York

In Staged News, Jordana Cox offers an insightful and innovative analysis of Living Newspaper productions during the Federal Theatre Project within the context of the history of American journalism.

Innovation and Determination: How Local American TV Journalists Told the COVID-19 “Story of a Lifetime”

Innovation and Determination: How Local American TV Journalists Told the COVID-19 “Story of a Lifetime”

Conspiracy theorists are not the problem; Conspiracy liars are

ABSTRACT In an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times (08/06/2022), entitled Alex Jones is no kind of ‘theorist’, LZ Granderson writes that although the ubiquitous recent ‘conspiracy theorist’ of American journalism is Alex Jones, that appellation is not appropriate. He argues that Jones rarely ‘theorizes’ about events; he simply lies about them. In past work, I have argued that the starting points of many conspiracy theories are two forms of errant data: ‘unaccounted for’ data and ‘contradictory’ data. But Granderson’s critique raises two additional starting points, both of which are forms of falsehood: lies and what I call fabricated facts. Many conspiracy theories take as their starting point various forms of falsehood; this source points to a kind of conspiracy theory that is pernicious precisely because it is not offered in good faith as a theoretical explanation of events. I compare conspiratorial explanations to scientific explanations to see whether similar erroneous starting points exist there. I conclude that they do, and as with conspiracy theories, they often reflect a guiding influence of value-laden agenda that go beyond a mere attempt to accurately explain target phenomena.

American journalism coverage of the airport incident, an analytical study of articles in (New york Times and New York Post) from 1/ 3/ 2020 to 7/3/2020

American journalism coverage of the airport incident, an analytical study of articles in (New york Times and New York Post) from 1/ 3/ 2020 to 7/3/2020

What We Talk about When We Talk about Women: Benevolent Sexism in Historical Studies of Women Journalists, 1974–2023

ABSTRACT This article examines histories of women journalists published in our field’s two leading journals, American Journalism and Journalism History, to understand how these women and their work have been described by historians like us throughout the course of their publication. This article argues that much like the women journalists they study, many historians of women journalists have infused their work with “benevolent sexism,” a term that describes seemingly positive, yet covertly diminishing language reflective of the neoliberal, individualist, merit-based feminism many female academics have adopted to fit in with a male-dominated academy. Through a sociolinguistic analysis of ninety-five journal articles published about historical women journalists, this article identifies systemic problems in how we write about women and offers practical solutions to improve our work going forward.

“Old-Time Negroes”: Nostalgic Ex-Slave Narratives in New York Newspapers of the Gilded Age

In the field of social memory of slavery, a growing body of scholarship on the Jim Crow North has complicated the notion of white supremacy as a specifically Southern ideology, locating what historians view as a “missing link” in the history of race in America. This study examines a corollary gap in American journalism history—the role that white Northern newspapers played a generation after Emancipation in softening white memory of slavery and hardening discourse toward African Americans. This article applies narrative analysis to sample five large-circulation white New York City newspapers from 1889 to 1910, along with a contemporary Black city newspaper. The study concludes that white newspapers, by perpetuating racist tropes upstreamed from literature, cultivated Jim Crow ideology beyond the former Confederacy. The findings shed light on the timeline of Black Americans’ struggle for mass media representation and demonstrate journalism’s intertextual role in shaping social memory.

25th Jan Revolution in the Articles of New York Times: A Study in Critical Discourse Analysis

Journalists have covered the 25th January Egyptian revolution analyzing and expressing opinions. The thesis is concerned with the inconsistency of their stances and positions. More specifically, it investigates shifts in the political stances of American journalists during and post the January 25th Egyptian Revolution. The thesis adopts Fairclough’s (1992, 2010) three-dimension framework of discourse, together with, Fairclough & Fairclough’s (2012) argumentation model to investigate the corpus of the current work. The corpus incorporates ten articles, seven editorials and three op-ed articles, that are published in the American newspaper New York Times on the Egyptian revolution from January 25th, 2011 to March 31st, 2011. Analysis is conducted on three levels; textual, discursive and social. Results indicate that writers are bias, taking sides and changing them according to the changes of the events. Thus, the articles witness a gradual change of stance from the pro-Mubarak and anti-revolution stances to the anti-Mubarak and pro-revolution stances.

Unraveling the Tet Offensive: Impact on American Journalism, Politics, and Nixon's Era

This essay delves into the Tet Offensive's far-reaching impact on American journalism, political landscapes during the Vietnam War, and its implications for subsequent eras, primarily examining its direct influence on Lyndon B. Johnson's presidency and Nixons era. Through a comprehensive analysis, this study scrutinizes how the Tet Offensive reshaped journalistic methodologies, altered public perception of distant conflicts, and indirectly influenced political dynamics during the Nixon era. Revealing the Tet Offensive's role in reshaping journalistic practices and blurring realities through selective media portrayal, the analysis underscores its significant contribution to political shifts in the Vietnam War era. While its direct impact on the Nixon era was limited, the aftermath resonated, highlighting enduring media influence on societal narratives. Ultimately, this exploration emphasizes the Tet Offensive's enduring legacy despite its indirect influence on subsequent political epochs, highlighting the sustained power of media in shaping historical narratives.

Wandering through the exotic battle zone; American journalists’ travel accounts of Indonesia during the Dutch-Indonesian war

This study analyses rarely examined English-language reportage and travel accounts on Indonesia created by two American journalists, Johnny Florea (Life) and Robert Sherrod (Time), after their visits to Indonesia between late-1945 and early-1946. The study finds that the travel accounts deliver a commentary on the course of the Dutch-Indonesian war and reveal the journalists’ fascination with Indonesian society and nature as well as their sympathy with Indonesians’ struggle for independence. However, the accounts also show that, as Westerners, they are guilty of various inaccuracies, a lack of knowledge, and cultural judgements rooted in the colonial past. It contributes to a new perspective on travel writing on Indonesia: war-zone travel writing, by explaining how foreign journalists’ travel accounts to war-torn Indonesia played a role as channels for foreigners, especially Americans, to understand Indonesia as a recently born alien “Other” in the midst of the raging war and binary division of West and East.

Relations Between the Soviet Union and the Vatican, According to Soviet Documents

If Stalin’s religious policy underwent radical changes after 1943, when the Moscow Patriarchate was re-established, in the context of post- war international relations and the configuration of spheres of influence, Nikita Khrushchev returns to the attitude of persecuting the Orthodox Church in the Soviet Union since year 1958, the reasons being completely different from those of Stalin. But, towards the middle of the 1960s, a change in the anti-religious attitude took shape in Khrushchevs case as well. An example in this sense are two documents from the Soviet archives, which show Khrushchevs position towards the establishment of relations between the Vatican and the Soviet Union, reflected in the instructions sent by the Soviet leader to the USSR ambassador in Cuba and the meeting with the American journalist Norman Cousins, on which occasion he the issue of the release of the Greek-Catholic archbishop Slipyi was addressed in particular.

Reimagining and Revolutionizing Media History Research: Problems and Possibilities

Organizations like the American Journalism Historians Association, publications like American Journalism, and many individual scholars have begun efforts to make media history more diverse, equitable, and inclusive. Yet despite these group and individual efforts, methodological approaches remain tied to systems and norms that are inherently inequitable. This essay argues for a paradigm shift in how media history research is done by delineating methodological hurdles faced by one researcher, discussion of the problems media historians face, and an acknowledgment of the work being done to make the field more equitable.

Lexical, Grammatical and Stylistic Features of the Sports News Journalism (Based on the Material of the English Language).

The article presents an analysis of English-language sports news journalism from the point of view of the implementation of lexical-grammatical and stylistic means of speech expressiveness in the texts. The research is conducted on the material of modern American journalism presented in the Internet and is focused on the search for the most frequent and active stylistic means that allow to reveal the mechanisms of influence of information material on the consumer, whose impression of the provided information is formed depending on the degree of accuracy of transmission and emotional presentation of the material. The article includes a theoretical section, which is devoted to the specifics of sports discourse in general, its functions, the main means of conveying the expressiveness of the text, as well as the research part, which includes the analysis of the main lexical-grammatical and stylistic means, statistics of their use and linguistic features, supported by many examples. The main result of the research has been the conclusion that stylistic means of expressiveness account for about 50% of all existing techniques. The most active are metonymy and epithets. Grammatical means are represented to a much lesser extent.

The beginnings of American forensic medicine and criminalistics in the journalistic interpretation of Bruce Goldfarb - review of the book „18 Tiny Deaths: The Untold Story of Frances Glessner Lee and the Invention of Modern Forensics”

American forensic medicine is about 100 years younger than the European one. It was in Europe that at the beginning of the 20th century, American doctors were trained and gradually expanded the field of science and expertise in forensic medicine and criminalistics. This area, for several centuries under the English law, which was in force there, had been successively „mummified” by coroners who worked for years to earn their bad reputation. The outstanding American journalist Bruce Goldfarb writes about the emergence of forensic medicine and criminalistics in the reality of the United States of America and the pioneering role of the „forensic architect” Frances Glessner Lee in his book entitled „18 Tiny Deaths: The Untold Story of Frances Glessner Lee and the Invention of Modern Forensics”. This is an extremely interesting book worth recommending to anyone interested in expanding their knowledge in this area of science.

Book Review: Provoking the press: [MORE] Magazine and the Crisis of Confidence in American Journalism by Kevin M. Lerner

Book Review: <i>Provoking the press: [MORE] Magazine and the Crisis of Confidence in American Journalism</i> by Kevin M. Lerner

DEMOGRAPHIC, OCCUPATIONAL AND PROFESSIONAL PREDICTORS OF TWEET DELETION AMONG U.S. JOURNALISTS

Twitter and other social media platforms have become a key infrastructure for contemporary journalism (Kleis Nielsen &amp; Ganter, 2018). Journalists use Twitter to gather information (Powers &amp; Vera-Zambrano, 2017). They employ it to maintain a relationship with their audiences and sources and through that to cultivate their individual personal and professional brand as well as their employer’s brand (Molyneux et al., 2018). They also communicate with journalistic peers and hence participate in the ongoing production of aN interpretive community (Carlson, 2016). While most research has focused on journalists’ publication practices, much less work has examined their decision to delete content they have already published on social media, an action that could have a meaningful impact on Twitter as a repository of public knowledge. In in-depth interviews, American journalists reported deleting tweets frequently. They also claimed such practices were common among their peers (Ringel &amp; Davidson, 2022). In this study, we examine how journalists’ demographic identity, occupational status, and professional standing might be related to their tendency to delete tweets.

Venture Philanthropy, Local News, and the Murky Promise of Innovation

As local news has grown as a research and policy concern, venture philanthropy organizations, like the Google News Initiative, Meta Journalism Project, and American Journalism Project, have forwarded a capacious vision of innovation as offering a broad set of revenue-based solutions to local news’ crises. This article analyzes materials produced by these organizations as a form of metajournalistic discourse to understand how venture philanthropists’ focus on local news and innovation buttresses their authority to intervene in journalistic cultures and articulate visions for the future. Venture philanthropy organizations have claimed a broad and granular authority to define the directions of local journalism’s future, recursively justifying their role as stewards of tech industry largesse by declaring which problems, practices, and innovations are worthy of investment and attention.