Media Historians Research Articles

A Historical Case Study of Alternative News Media and Labor Activism: The Dubuque Leader 1935–1939

Identifying Alternative Media in Media History This study contributes the historical dimension of the literature addressing alternative media in the United States through a close consideration of the Dubuque Leader's reorganization in the mid 1930s as a collectively owned and independently operated newspaper, the challenges the newspaper faced as an alternative medium, and its role in cultivating progressive social change in the city and region. A weekly newspaper controlled by a cooperative of several hundred working-class shareholders involved in or supportive of the labor union movement, the Leader became an important forum for Dubuque, Iowa's working-class community, while its editorial abandon made it a frequently controversial outlet. As the Leader established itself as a social conscience of the community, so did its journalistic voice foster action toward the increased civic and economic enfranchisement of Dubuque's craft and industrial workers. In comparison the circulation of other labor and progressive journals of the period published in larger metropolitan locales, the Leader's peak weekly circulation of 3,350 during the late 1930s1 was modest, yet close historical exploration of the paper's formative years reveals not only an unusual discursive element within the social microcosm of Dubuque proper, but also many of the facets which constituted Midwestern working-class culture and community in the 1930s. At the same time the Leader is illustrative of the constraints facing journalists that are still encountered by independent news media this day. In fact, the Dubuque Leader's formation as non-profit organ correspondingly informs a central problem encountered by news media and addressed by journalists and scholars throughout the twentieth century: a commercial modus operandi versus genuine editorial freedom.2 This fundamental problem driven much of the media criticism in the United States3 and is of marked concern at the present historical moment where a networked world spawned a multiplicity of alternative news outlets and what become a genuine movement toward media reform.4 As John Downing noted many years ago, the problem of media access not been endemic the United States, and his studies have thus been driven by one crucial question which informs the present work: What are the possibilities people have for constructing their own media, independently of capital, the state, the church, and other agencies of oppressive power?5 One means of significantly responding this question is through historical examples of alternative media that illustrate under what specific social and historical conditions such possibilities were realized in a pre-information based era.6 While historical instances of alternative, independent, or community-based news media are essential a greater understanding of media and the potential for democratic social movements, media scholars have largely overlooked the histories of working-class newspapers with small circulations and similar alternative media. Detailed documentation of the difficulties encountered by them, however, is rich in its implications for a greater comprehension of not just alternative media forms, but also of the media terrain in general.7 As Nick Couldry and James Curran observe, The process we call 'media' is the historic result of countless local battles over who the power represent the reality of others. Once such battles are won, they generally cease being remembered as battles.8 Chris Atton also notes how recent scholarship has had little say about the historical conditions under which [alternative] media enact their journalism.9 Media historians' neglect of these struggles over representation, according Jon Bekken, signifies a missed opportunity to grapple with such vital questions as press freedom (both political and economic) and the nature of the relationship between the media and the publics they serve. …

Home Meets Heimat

Home Meets Heimat

The London Broadcasting Company (LBC) and Independent Radio News (IRN) Archive

UK commercial radio was formally launched in October 1973 when LBC went on air. Its sister station, IRN, began providing a news service at the same time for the growing number of ‘Independent Local Radio’ stations. During the period 1973-1996 these two organisations assembled an archive of over 7,000 reel-to-reel tapes which now represent the largest commercial radio archive in Britain. For historians of the media, and of the twentieth century more generally, the collection is a rich and varied source of social, cultural and political evidence. Media historians, including historians of journalism, can hear examples of a more populist and innovative style of reporting (or ‘reportage’) than was to be heard on the BBC. For the first time the phone-in was an integral part of the schedule and a more opinionated style of presentation was pioneered by Brian Hayes and others. The archive, soon to be digitised and made available online, contains a radio history of the period which started slightly before Margaret Thatcher's election as Leader of the Conservative Party and finished a few years after the end of premiership. New clips, current affairs series like Decision Makers, parliamentary debates (made by the LBC parliamentary unit) and phone-ins all covered the major news stories of the time. There are, to take a notable example, 62 tapes on the Falklands War including 778 individual news items. The archive is an important and hitherto largely neglected source for future historians of the period.

Filling in Holes : Television Music as a Recuperation of Popular Music on Television

When it comes to the scholarly study of popular music, television, in its various global, historical, and industrial manifestations, has a bad reputation. For example, in a 2002 Popular Music article, Simon Frith, after documenting rock music's debt to British television for spreading and popularizing it, determines that 'TV, for all its influence on rock performance, was never really part of its culture.' (Frith 2002, p. 288) That academic critics and journalists believe this to be true is indicated by the scant amount of engaging and potentially productive work about the combination of the two media and their industries.1 This critical lacuna may just speak to the newness of the discipline of popular music studies, although I fear that it emanates from the effect of the ideology of authenticity that, like it or not, continues to inform scholarship in the field.The study of popular music on television now faces challenges from another front, as what media historian Michele Hilmes describes as the 'always emerging, never emerged' field of sound studies may have finally surfaced (Hilmes 2005). Sound studies conferences, interest groups within larger scholarly organizations, and anthologies proliferate. This is a welcome development. Of concern is the possible submergence of the specificity and materiality of popular music under the more abstract notion of 'sound', and the potential development of a scholarly hierarchy in which film sound will once again trump television sound. In this scenario, it is possible if not likely that the study of popular music and television runs the risk of further marginalization. More optimistically, the institutionalization of sound studies could open the door for greater legitimization of popular music as an object of study within and through fields that study visual culture in all of its incarnations, including television, film, and new media. It could also, as will be discussed toward the conclusion, solidify popular music's status as media.The nature of audience engagement with both television and music is changing, as both are at the same time more portable and bigger than ever. Television viewing is no longer an 'event' that requires participation and attention at a particular time in a particular place. Digital technology makes television programming mobile and frees it more than ever from synchronous time. As television hardware and transmission technology advances, so does its sound quality. Devices such as the iPod miniaturize video programming as well as music, and store them both on the same piece of hardware that governs their use and access with the same metaphors (e.g. playlists). Concurrently, television is more an event than ever, and sound is very much invited to the party. High-definition television technology spawns high-definition sound technology, and both meet at the 50 LCD or plasma screen connected to a state of the art surroundsound system, all in the comfort of one's home. New media, which I interpret to mean digital or digitally-enhanced technologies, therefore threaten to render the boundary between popular music and television meaningless. The time is right to approach the study of music and television with fresh ideas and without ideological baggage. Changing the terms of analysis is a move in the right direction.For example, much qualitative research about the intersection of popular music and television focuses upon music video or music television, or uses them as reference points. Often this leads to work that is the scholarly equivalent of comparing apples to oranges by de-historicizing both popular music and television in the service of making them conform to a current model of their relationship.2 Music video usually refers to what are essentially commercials for new radio-friendly releases by bands signed to major labels. Music television refers to the cable television networks that (used to) air these commercials, but the two terms are often used interchangeably. …

The Production of Outrage: The Iraq War and the Radical Documentary Tradition

Now we are engaged in two wars. And we may not think that there are two them because they are inextricable. The first conflict is the one seen in what is seen (and thought to be stored) in still and moving images. We speak explosions, armored vehicles, and Baghdad streets as caught by digital video cameras. This is the imaged conflict, a conflict which in one historical moment might have been understood as of war, inhumanity and deprivation. Images of? Forty years ago, critical theory began to insist on moving as representations, and in the following decades academics have talked about the ideological standing-in function the while ordinary people talked about violence on the screen. Now both mindsets seem hopelessly off the mark. Today we must talk about the infinitude moving on, around, through, under, and over the U.S. engagement in Iraq. This is the Iraq war imaged everywhere on every media outlet, and always available in all formats and by means every conceivable device. It is, as we know, a most infuriatingly stupid and wasteful war and I would like nothing more than to rage against it for the next several pages, but that is not my topic. The two wars, or the inextricable conflicts that define our time, are not, however, equally available. The one war, that one thought to have been caught, (thought to now exist in imaged form), is available everywhere to be seen; the other war, the one over the imaged war, is not exactly viewable. It is not on view because it is the war about how we view-how we see what we see as well as what we make the that we see and what they make us. It is a question the conditions everyday engagement that make the imaged war accessible or inaccessible, available or unavailable; that determine dissemination or distribution. It is about digital delivery systems that are themselves systems delivery. It is these systems, as they carry these war images, that are undergoing something cataclysmic. The systems question taken up by both media historians and corporate media industries sometimes goes by the name convergence.1 Here, I want to put on hold the contemporary question convergence, the sometimes scary collapse everything into the digital (which may or may not be the right question), in order to return to a longer history critical discourse about the and in relation to the real historical events they reference, which still has relevance. These are events with which, in the radical documentary film tradition, filmmakers have been passionately engaged. To some degree, it is the same old war, this war against images. There is the public distrust that has to be re-educated, a distrust earlier educated by a suspicious academic elite, suffering perhaps from what Martin Jay identified as iconophobia.2 I put more stress, however, on the high- over low-culture hierarchy here. Think the high modernist conception the as too given, too lazily over-dependent on the world.3 Somewhere in the melange common sense, this image-as-excessive notion meets mindlessness, barbarism and chaos. Think, for instance, the way people speak being by images. The terminology itself is a dead giveaway. It is so often said that we are bombarded with images and much less often with or assaulted by words. Why? Words belong to a long tradition letters and literacy still defined against the that so easily reaches the letterless, so-called illiterate. One might think that the realization the new ubiquity moving devices would make suspicion (really image bashing) obsolete. But we are still in transition, living the paradox. Thus, in the technologically uneven and asymmetrical moment, are both distrusted and declared harbingers a brave new world instantaneity and supra-intelligence.4 A telling example the war against comes from the New York Times Magazine, an ideal source for taking the temperature an elite public antagonism toward high circulation images. …

Projecting the visual: British newsreels, soccer and popular culture 1918–39

Between the wars soccer was the leading national sport in Britain. But far more watched the brief depictions of ‘celluloid’ soccer on the newsreels in the cinema than ever watched football on the pitch. Newsreels were a central cultural feature, yet their broader social, historical and ideological significance has been overlooked by both sports and media historians. This study draws on an extensive body of surviving newsreel material. It begins by exploring the complex nature of the inter-war cinema audiences, their responses to sporting newsreels and the cultural competencies they brought to their watching. Examination of newsreel content reveals the changing nature and highly varied coverage of professional and amateur soccer over the period, including significant attention devoted to women's soccer even after its banning from English Football Association grounds in 1921. The day to day practices of newsreel soccer coverage provide fascinating insights into the British sporting values and identities, contained, encouraged or prevented by its representations, codes and conventions. Soccer newsreels produced by the leading companies, while largely conservative in tone, were also highly ideologically charged. Through the ways in which they addressed notions of class, gender, politics, region and identity they had a major cultural impact on broader British society.

Beginning and development of Media Archaeology

Erkki Huhtamo és un historiador dels media relacionat amb el grup d'investigadors que estudien la història de l'art dels media des d'un punt de vista arqueològic. En aquesta conversa, Huhtamo parla del concepte d'arqueologia dels media , centrant-se principalment en la idea d'aportar simplicitat a la interacció, com ell diu, perquè es creï una vertadera interacció entre la cultura dels media actuals i les formes dels media del passat. Aquest punt de vista arqueològic també es fixa en els sistemes, materials i tecnologia dels media , però sempre des d'un punt de vista cultural, social i ideològic.Erkki Huhtamo és professor adjunt en el departament de Disseny d'Art Multimèdia a la Universitat de Califòrnia, Los Angeles (UCLA). És historiador dels media , investigador, escriptor i conservador. Entre els seus llibres escrits en finès hi ha The Archaeology of Virtuality (1995), The Archaeology of the Moving Image (1996) and Phantasmagoria (2000). Vull veure el vídeo de l'entrevista [YouTube - 13 min]

The Wicked Problem of Collaboration

The Wicked Problem of Collaboration

Revisiting and Remixing Black Cinema

The goal of Within Our Gates: Revisited and Remixed was to create a new way to critically read Oscar Micheaux's film, a way that refused the arbitrary divide between the past and the present, between the analog and the digital. Our creative collaborative was a combination of academics and community-based musicians, artists and scholars who sought to use musical improvisation and spoken word performance to rethink the exhibition of silent film. Within an institutional context of interdisciplinary cooperation, we brought to life theories of artistic collaboration, critical historiography, and multimedia exhibition in order to rescore this historically important film in a new reception context. Sociologists, film theorists, media historians, filmmakers, and local musicians worked together to mobilize public space and new media forms in order to reanimate a politically important film for a contemporary, heterogeneous audience.1 Within Our Gates Revisited and Remixed was a historical first for Ithaca College: a commission to a local composer to score and accompany a silent film for live performance. Founded in 1892 as a music conservatory, Ithaca College houses a preeminent school of music. It also has the well-known Roy H. Park School of Communications, which includes a film school that has existed for over thirty years. As a comprehensive college that mixes the liberal arts with professional schools such as music, communications, health sciences and human performance, and business, Ithaca College is not the typical small, liberal arts college. Rather, for most of its existence, Ithaca College has had high barriers among the six different schools and divisions, each of which is distinctive in its own educational mission and na-

Whose finger on the button? british television and the politics of cultural control

‘The study of television’, John Corner suggests, ‘has suffered from a lack of historical studies’. This was ‘a particular problem in Britain’, where studies of television were prone to ‘privileging questions of policy and organisation’ rather than obtaining a sense of the power of television as a medium, assessing its cultural content and reception by viewers or the status and meaning of the medium, the television set and activity of watching it. Corner's own work on television history has broached such matters, but exceptions like Tim O'Sullivan's exploration through audience research and oral testimony of cultures of televiewing (in everyday life and as civic ritual around national events) in a Corner-edited volume apart, has not induced many others to do so.1 Corner has hit upon a broader debate about the predilections of post-1945 British history that necessarily impacts upon writing about television more than radio, since television only became a mass activity in the mid-1950s. Critics charge that co...

Lockouts, Protests, and Scabs: A Critical Assessment of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner Strike

This essay uses the case of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner strike, 1967–1977, to show how a critical labor perspective offers historically grounded, politically informed, and culturally situated analyses of media practices and uses. The decade-long strike analyzed here, which has been virtually ignored by media historians, highlights the devastating economic consequences for both the newspaper and the Guild. This essay focuses on the political and cultural implications of class conflict, read through the power struggle between Los Angeles Newspaper Guild members and the Hearst-owned Herald Examiner over issues of identity, work, and economics.

Closer to the masses: Stalinist culture, social revolution, and Soviet newspapers

Loon-Dermota, Ken.... And Well Tied Down: Chile's Press Under Democracy. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003.193 pp. $64.95. Ken Leon-Dermota's analysis is a case study of Chile's press and the effects wrought by a concentration of media ownership into corporate hands of an emphatically narrow ideological stance. It is a study relevant to historians of American and European media, where a similar trend in consolidated ownership is occurring. Officially, Chile is a democracy with a free press. Its current elected government evolved from a U.S.-backed military coup in 1973 that brought to power dictator Augusto Pinochet. coup had ejected from office Socialist President Salvadore Allende. Prior to and during Allcnde's rule, the Chilean media, under diversified ownership, vigorously debated political ideas. Political parties, from communist and socialist to marginally democratic and fascist, had newspapers and radio stations that presented their respective views. Allende owned a significant share of Radio Portales, which regularly broadcast his government's views. ElMercurio, the nation's most powerful newspaper, led the opposition. Free-market economists, trained at the University of Chicago and given a forum at E/ Mermrio, teamed with conservatives at Catholic University, in the business community, and in the aristocracy to create the public perceptions necessary for a coup. During Pinochet's iron-fisted rule, opposition news media were at first closed or purchased, but eventually the news media environment loosened, and opposition media appeared. Opposition newspapers regularly printed investigative reports on the dictatorship, though not always without government reprisals. Indeed, the news media were instrumental in convincing Pinochet to call elections, which put the dictator out of the presidency though his collaborators in the media, in the business community, at Catholic University, and in the aristocracy remained in control of the country. conservative elite in Chile retains its strong grip on the country largely by manipulation of public opinion through its control of the media, Leon-Dermota discovered during a year-long investigation. He shows that as Pinochet was leaving the presidential palace in 1990, a few wealthy Pinochet friends and collaborators engineered the purchase of the nation's newspapers, radio stations, and magazines using public funds (Chile's television stations remain in the hands of the state or are otherwise co-opted.). The owners of these media control the practice of journalism and manipulate public perceptions so as to perpetuate the ideals of the dictatorship, even under democracy, he concludes. …

Weblogs and the Epistemology of the News: Some Trends in Online Journalism

Journalism has been slow to develop distinctive forms in response to the new contexts provided by the internet. One rapidly developing form, unique to the world wide web, is the weblog. This article reviews the claims made by proponents of the form and explores, through the case study of a weblog produced by the British Guardian newspaper, epistemological differences to the dominant Anglo-American news form. The article argues that the rearticulation in this institutional product of the relation between journalists and users, of the claim to authority made in the news text and of the news text as product, provides historians of both journalism and new media with a case study of the adaptation of journalism to new contexts.

Notes from the Editors, June 2004

» Notes from the EditorsIn 2000 I agreed to become coeditor of Monthly Review along with my dear friend John Bellamy Foster. I had been reading MR since 1972 when I was a teenager and had been educated, enlightened, and inspired by it, and the work of editors Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff. I had introduced John to the magazine soon after I discovered it. By the 1990s I had become a regular contributor to MR. When John and Harry asked me to join them as a coeditor I initially balked. I already had a very full schedule and there was no sign it would abate. Plus, I was a media historian and critic; not an economist. But John, in particular, insisted that my involvement was necessary to bring MR through a difficult transition editorially and financially. He promised me that he would do most of the work. I agreed with an understanding that I would have to revisit the situation in due time.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Updating the Standard for the Next Generation of Electronic Media Historians

(2003). Updating the Standard for the Next Generation of Electronic Media Historians. Review of Communication: Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 227-235.

“Securing the Affections of Those People at This Critical Juncture”: Newspapers, Native Americans, and the French and Indian War, 1754–1763

In 1754, the American colonies faced a threat to their existence as French invaders and their Native American allies mounted a series of attacks on British American settlements. News of these attacks and the war that was known as the French and Indian War became vital to Americans, and newspapers covered these events in a depth never before required of printers, creating what one media historian has called “the great running story of the era.” Central to news of the war was information about Native Americans. This study looks at the extensive coverage of the role Native Americans played in the war as both allies and enemies of the colonies as it explores the changing nature of newspapers in America.

Herman Lynn Womack

Although media historians have broadly chronicled the struggle for press freedom in the United States, they have done little to document the lives and contributions of pornographers. This article seeks to begin filling that void by illuminating the life, work, and First Amendment struggles of Herman Lynn Womack, a publisher who specialized in materials designed to titillate and appeal to gay men. His battles against the efforts of the U. S. Post Office to halt the circulation of his publications are chronicled, and the social and legal ramifications of his ultimate victory in a landmark 1962 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court are examined The ruling in Manual Enterprises Inc. v. J. Edward Day expanded the limits of First Amendment protection and began erasing the social stigma imposed on homosexuality.

Pounding Brass for the Associated Press: Delivering News by Telegraph in a Pre-Teletype Era

The humble origins of the Associated Press as a news cooperative linked by telegraph wires has been well documented, but media historians have avoided a key player in building this news gathering tradition: the press telegrapher. The AP once had an army of fifteen hundred telegraph operators who dispatched news copy to member newspapers in the days preceding the teletype machine. This article provides insight into this all-but-forgotten profession through the recollections of the late Aubrey Keel of Kansas City, Missouri, a former AP telegrapher, who provided a firsthand account of various aspects of press telegraphy, including training, daily routines, professional standards, and the eventual displacement caused by the industry's conversion to teletype technology.

News Before Newspapers

From 1513 to 1640, news pamphlets informed and entertained the English. Such publications have been difficult to identify and little has been written about them. More than 1,200 pamphlets were identified by reviewing entries in the Short Title Catalogue. They were then analyzed by numbers produced and subject matter. Factors that news pamphlets may share with modern news formats - including subject matter, sales methods, and newsgathering techniques - are described. Their characteristic tone is also examined. It is suggested that news pamphlets may help media historians examine what is universal about the news and what is culturally influenced.

War die Weitergabe von morphologischem Wissen in Schrift und Bild ein Kommunikationsziel für Plinius Secundus?

The 25th book of Plinius’ Historia Naturalis is one of our most important sources for the history of tradition of knowledge during the Antiquity. Many media historians have worked with this text in reconstructing communicative relations and techniques of the ancient times. All of them state the lack in descriptions of visual experience. The author argues that this state of affairs was not meant to be a default in Plinius’ view. Communication about the visible world without interaction, based exclusively on writing and images, was not conceivable then. The conditions for this communicative goal, so evident to us, were only created in the Renaissance, 1500 years later.