What do you think?
Rate this book
Discovering The News: A Social History Of American Newspapers
This instructive and entertaining social history of American newspapers shows that the very idea of impartial, objective “news” was the social product of the democratization of political, economic, and social life in the nineteenth century. Professor Schudson analyzes the shifts in reportorial style over the years and explains why the belief among journalists and readers alike that newspapers must be objective still lives on.
228 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1978
12 people are currently reading
290 people want to read
About the author
Michael Schudson
42 books14 followersMichael Schudson grew up in Milwaukee, Wisc. He received a B.A. from Swarthmore College and M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard. He taught at the University of Chicago from 1976 to 1980 and at the University of California, San Diego from 1980 to 2009. From 2005 on, he split his teaching between UCSD and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, becoming a full-time member of the Columbia faculty in 2009.
He is the author of seven books and co-editor of three others concerning the history and sociology of the American news media, advertising, popular culture, Watergate and cultural memory. He is the recipient of a number of honors; he has been a Guggenheim fellow, a resident fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Palo Alto, and a MacArthur Foundation "genius" fellow. In 2004, he received the Murray Edelman distinguished career award from the political communication section of the American Political Science Association and the International Communication Association.
Schudson's articles have appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, Wilson Quarterly, and The American Prospect, and he has published op-eds in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, the Financial Times, and The San Diego Union.
He is the author of seven books and co-editor of three others concerning the history and sociology of the American news media, advertising, popular culture, Watergate and cultural memory. He is the recipient of a number of honors; he has been a Guggenheim fellow, a resident fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Palo Alto, and a MacArthur Foundation "genius" fellow. In 2004, he received the Murray Edelman distinguished career award from the political communication section of the American Political Science Association and the International Communication Association.
Schudson's articles have appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, Wilson Quarterly, and The American Prospect, and he has published op-eds in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, the Financial Times, and The San Diego Union.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
February 11, 2025
my brain is fried and i’m lacking proper insight.
i like it 😀 it was good 😀
read if you like news 😀 and interested in the roots of journalism 😀
i like it 😀 it was good 😀
read if you like news 😀 and interested in the roots of journalism 😀
November 22, 2023
GR ate my prior review, so I’ll keep this short: good, in-the-sources coverage of the development of the news industry in the US up to about 1900. After that, it becomes increasingly superficial until we reach the post-Watergate era (Schudson’s book was published in 1978), with harried, 2-3 page treatments of the “new journalism” and “adversary culture” filling the gap until something better comes out. That said, what’s there, particularly in the early half of the book, is excellent and highly recommended. My own dissertation turned out precisely this way, because I was rushing to accept a tenure-track job, so I know how it goes.
December 31, 2022
This is a really enlightening and entertaining history of newspapers. Schudson essentially asks: Where does objectivity come from and why? How did this cornerstone of modern journalism develop, and what does it even mean?
For Schudson, objectivity claims to be free from values, yet objectivity is itself a value – a "faith" even, which is an interesting term given the comments from Silk and Lule about journalism more or less affirming traditional modes of storytelling, incluidng religious ones.
Schudson describes the history of American newspapers, from the rise of the penny press to Watergate, and tells it as a history of how the news evolved alongside the norms of middle- and upper-class Americans. Schudson points out that objectivity is both a "moral philosophy" and a "political commitment" (8).
In Chaoter 1, Schudson rejects technological explanations for the rise of the penny press and instead argues that the new style of journalism, with its focus on events and crime and politics rather than the more expensive commerce-focused six-penny sheets, arose because the cities they served changed. Readers became more diverse and more middle-class, and new papers arose to serve their interests, starting in NYC then quickly spreading to Boston, Philly, and other big cities.
He argues that a key part of this transition was the extension of political and economic rights in the early 19th century away from a landholding elite class to a broader segment of middle- and even working-class men, which drove literacy, which drove greater demand for things to read. Thus "modern journalism ... had its origins in the emergence of a democratic market society" (57) – and as a result has a vested, if unexamined, interest in propping up the institutions that underlie that society (including the religious ones).
In Chapter 2, Schudson examines the rise of the reporter and the end of the party publication in favor of a more scientific or fact-based reporting of the news. As experts and scientists grew in status, and literary realism took over the culture, scientific journalistic realism also became the industry standard.
In Chapter 3, Schudson describes a split in the way journalists saw their role: some remained focused on hard news, "just the facts," while others began seeing themselves as storytellers, interpreting the news. Schudson identifies the distinction between these two approaches as owing to class: "There is a connection between the educated middle class and information and a connection between the middle and working classes and the story ideal" (90). Thus Joseph Pulitzer's *New York World* became the working class, story-based paper, and the *New York Times* evolved into the paper of the elites after beginning as a penny press publication. For the *World*, the introduction of display headlines and illustrations, as well as larger ads, reflected the rise of consumer capitalism as the dominant expression of American economic lfie (100). "The newspapers not only recorded social change; they were part of it" (106).
Schudson in Chapter 4 identifies a sea change, both within journalism and in the culture at large: the post-WW1 erosion of positivism. The war itself, but also the establishment of the neo-Darwinian synthesis and psychological insights, unsettled the idea that facts were anything other than culturally constructed phenomena. Empiricism and the philosophies it undergirded gave way before a pervasive skepticism. "Objectivity" as a mental attitude arose in this context, as a reaction to the loss of empirical agreement, a way to establish authority in an age when traditional and institutional authorities were questioned like never before. "The liberation into a new culture marked the rapid disintegration of the old," thus ending two centuries of Enlightenment "common sense" realism and ushering in an age of skeptical individualist postmodernism.
Along with these changes came the rise of public relations and news management, and the philosophical crisis these sparked as journalism became more reliant on them to fill newspaper space. Part of this crisis involved redefining the notion of "the public" – once trusted as rational and wise when limited to White men, the introduction of women and ethnic minorities into the concept led elites, including in journalism, to redefine the concept as irrational and untrustworthy. This eroded the primacy of facts as "news" became increasingly the product of interpreters and manipulators attempting to influence a capricious and irrational public, most acutely during the war. Reporters moved from using facts to puncture public illusions to "see[ing] *everything* as an illusion, since it was so self evidently the product of self-conscious artists of illusion" (142).
Objectivity became the response to this crisis in the reliability of facts. But alongside its establishment came the critique: objectivity itself is not immune to the inevitability of subjectivity; "from the beginning, then, criticism of the 'myth' of objectivity has accompanied its enunciation" (157). And: "Journalists came to believe in objectivity, to the extent that they did, because they wanted to, needed to, were forced by ordinary human aspiration to seek escape from their own deep convictions of doubt and drift" (159).
As the 20th century moved on, however, criticism of objectivity as inherently political, inherently in collusion with the power structures that it both supported and masked, became pronounced. Schudson discusses this mid-century crisis in Chapter 5. The "social structure of news gathering ... reinforced official viewpoints of social reality" (163) and used objectivity to hide that fact behind a sense of inevitability and neutrality. This criticism, born in the antiestablishment 1960s and allowed by the cooling of the Cold War, encouraged and justified the rise of investigative journalism and news analysis and the increasing rejection of reflexive, unquestioning reporting, which had been discredited by the government's increasing willingness to simply lie to the press about what it was doing. The catastrophe of Vietnam destroyed the trust between government and reporters, and encouraged reporters to see "objectivity" as requiring deeper examination of the facts, statements, and circumstances they reported. "If events themselves are constructed, and constructed by the individuals and institutions with the greatest walth and power in society, then reporting the news is not just an incomplete approach to the truth but a distorted one" (176).
Objectivity itself, then, became a value, an institution, subject to critique. It was based on "political assumptions" – and might a scholar of religion argue religious ones? – that it served to bolster and mask. "The form of the news story incorporates its own bias" by hiding institutional power behind a seemingly neutral formula that in fact supports and justifies that power (184-85). Since *Discovering the News* was published in 1978, the story ends at a moment of uncertainty, one that has only become more acute in the ensuing four decades. Indeed, if journalism never fully resolved its uneasiness with its own myths and values, it added to it the disaster of technological and financial revolutions that undermined its ability to survive within the system it has so assiduously protected for the past two centuries.
Overall, a great book, but pretty dated at this point. An update would be really interesting, given the significant changes in newspapers over the past 45 years.
For Schudson, objectivity claims to be free from values, yet objectivity is itself a value – a "faith" even, which is an interesting term given the comments from Silk and Lule about journalism more or less affirming traditional modes of storytelling, incluidng religious ones.
Schudson describes the history of American newspapers, from the rise of the penny press to Watergate, and tells it as a history of how the news evolved alongside the norms of middle- and upper-class Americans. Schudson points out that objectivity is both a "moral philosophy" and a "political commitment" (8).
In Chaoter 1, Schudson rejects technological explanations for the rise of the penny press and instead argues that the new style of journalism, with its focus on events and crime and politics rather than the more expensive commerce-focused six-penny sheets, arose because the cities they served changed. Readers became more diverse and more middle-class, and new papers arose to serve their interests, starting in NYC then quickly spreading to Boston, Philly, and other big cities.
He argues that a key part of this transition was the extension of political and economic rights in the early 19th century away from a landholding elite class to a broader segment of middle- and even working-class men, which drove literacy, which drove greater demand for things to read. Thus "modern journalism ... had its origins in the emergence of a democratic market society" (57) – and as a result has a vested, if unexamined, interest in propping up the institutions that underlie that society (including the religious ones).
In Chapter 2, Schudson examines the rise of the reporter and the end of the party publication in favor of a more scientific or fact-based reporting of the news. As experts and scientists grew in status, and literary realism took over the culture, scientific journalistic realism also became the industry standard.
In Chapter 3, Schudson describes a split in the way journalists saw their role: some remained focused on hard news, "just the facts," while others began seeing themselves as storytellers, interpreting the news. Schudson identifies the distinction between these two approaches as owing to class: "There is a connection between the educated middle class and information and a connection between the middle and working classes and the story ideal" (90). Thus Joseph Pulitzer's *New York World* became the working class, story-based paper, and the *New York Times* evolved into the paper of the elites after beginning as a penny press publication. For the *World*, the introduction of display headlines and illustrations, as well as larger ads, reflected the rise of consumer capitalism as the dominant expression of American economic lfie (100). "The newspapers not only recorded social change; they were part of it" (106).
Schudson in Chapter 4 identifies a sea change, both within journalism and in the culture at large: the post-WW1 erosion of positivism. The war itself, but also the establishment of the neo-Darwinian synthesis and psychological insights, unsettled the idea that facts were anything other than culturally constructed phenomena. Empiricism and the philosophies it undergirded gave way before a pervasive skepticism. "Objectivity" as a mental attitude arose in this context, as a reaction to the loss of empirical agreement, a way to establish authority in an age when traditional and institutional authorities were questioned like never before. "The liberation into a new culture marked the rapid disintegration of the old," thus ending two centuries of Enlightenment "common sense" realism and ushering in an age of skeptical individualist postmodernism.
Along with these changes came the rise of public relations and news management, and the philosophical crisis these sparked as journalism became more reliant on them to fill newspaper space. Part of this crisis involved redefining the notion of "the public" – once trusted as rational and wise when limited to White men, the introduction of women and ethnic minorities into the concept led elites, including in journalism, to redefine the concept as irrational and untrustworthy. This eroded the primacy of facts as "news" became increasingly the product of interpreters and manipulators attempting to influence a capricious and irrational public, most acutely during the war. Reporters moved from using facts to puncture public illusions to "see[ing] *everything* as an illusion, since it was so self evidently the product of self-conscious artists of illusion" (142).
Objectivity became the response to this crisis in the reliability of facts. But alongside its establishment came the critique: objectivity itself is not immune to the inevitability of subjectivity; "from the beginning, then, criticism of the 'myth' of objectivity has accompanied its enunciation" (157). And: "Journalists came to believe in objectivity, to the extent that they did, because they wanted to, needed to, were forced by ordinary human aspiration to seek escape from their own deep convictions of doubt and drift" (159).
As the 20th century moved on, however, criticism of objectivity as inherently political, inherently in collusion with the power structures that it both supported and masked, became pronounced. Schudson discusses this mid-century crisis in Chapter 5. The "social structure of news gathering ... reinforced official viewpoints of social reality" (163) and used objectivity to hide that fact behind a sense of inevitability and neutrality. This criticism, born in the antiestablishment 1960s and allowed by the cooling of the Cold War, encouraged and justified the rise of investigative journalism and news analysis and the increasing rejection of reflexive, unquestioning reporting, which had been discredited by the government's increasing willingness to simply lie to the press about what it was doing. The catastrophe of Vietnam destroyed the trust between government and reporters, and encouraged reporters to see "objectivity" as requiring deeper examination of the facts, statements, and circumstances they reported. "If events themselves are constructed, and constructed by the individuals and institutions with the greatest walth and power in society, then reporting the news is not just an incomplete approach to the truth but a distorted one" (176).
Objectivity itself, then, became a value, an institution, subject to critique. It was based on "political assumptions" – and might a scholar of religion argue religious ones? – that it served to bolster and mask. "The form of the news story incorporates its own bias" by hiding institutional power behind a seemingly neutral formula that in fact supports and justifies that power (184-85). Since *Discovering the News* was published in 1978, the story ends at a moment of uncertainty, one that has only become more acute in the ensuing four decades. Indeed, if journalism never fully resolved its uneasiness with its own myths and values, it added to it the disaster of technological and financial revolutions that undermined its ability to survive within the system it has so assiduously protected for the past two centuries.
Overall, a great book, but pretty dated at this point. An update would be really interesting, given the significant changes in newspapers over the past 45 years.
September 12, 2007
Excellent social history of the news, with a particularly insightful discussion of the invention of "objectivity" in U.S. journalism. In tracing the history of an idea, Schudson challenges the assumption that objectivity in journalism has always existed and that is always worth striving for.
March 2, 2017
A bit thin in several sections of chapters, the book makes some compelling claims and fills in some important gaps in our understanding of the social history of newspapers.
August 23, 2017
This is as the title suggests as history of American newspapers from the early days of independence when newspapers tended to be printed almost exclusively for commercial interests, e.g. shipping arrivals, departures & lading & local commercial messages. It details the successive interpretations of what purpose newspapers served & how journalism was defined which to a large extent consisted of the variation from "just the facts: who or what, where, & when" to the need for context & interpretation to the byline era with columnists & the star system. American newspapers were mainly influence by NYC's "penny press" of the early 19th Century & rellected the styles of such giants of journalism as Bennet, Pulitzer, Hearst, & Ochs. For many years, the New York Times has set the standard for American journalism.
December 2, 2023
Li a edição em português (Editora Vozes, 2010) e achei louvável o esforço de pesquisa do autor, visível em tantas referências de pesquisa que ele traz tanto nas notas de rodapé quanto no corpo do texto. Contudo, esse também se torna o maior empecilho para uma leitura fluida e agradável. Muitas vezes o autor entra em assuntos que deixa inacabados, sem deixar muito claro porque trouxe determinado tópico ou exemplo. Acredito que a maioria dos dados quantitativos também poderia estar nas notas de rodapé.
A pesquisa como um todo, abarca o período que vai de 1890 até os anos 1990, aproximadamente. O foco está na transição dos modelos de jornalismo no fim do século XIX e as definições adotadas no início do século XX. É um ótimo livro para quem está interessado em saber sobre as penny press e pesquisar mais sobre a objetividade enquanto conceito.
A pesquisa como um todo, abarca o período que vai de 1890 até os anos 1990, aproximadamente. O foco está na transição dos modelos de jornalismo no fim do século XIX e as definições adotadas no início do século XX. É um ótimo livro para quem está interessado em saber sobre as penny press e pesquisar mais sobre a objetividade enquanto conceito.
October 3, 2024
While the book might have accomplished what the author set out to do in the late 1970s, almost 50 years later, readers, including myself, find much lacking. Black Americans were only mentioned twice and only once directly in the entire book. Black and Latino newspapers, journalists, or publications were not mentioned, not even as footnotes. The history frames the development of newspapers and concepts such as objectively only as urban, white class conflicts without the dignity to call them so.
June 14, 2017
Every single journalism student and media-minded person should be required to read this book. It is a brilliant, timely, and expansive social history of journalism as an industry and as a social institution. Many, if not all, of the problems and issues that have discussed and debated in recent years are either mentioned or addressed in this prophetic work by Schudson.
Read
January 26, 2022Incredible history of the development of the news. It's amazing to see how so much of what we take for granted about the institution developed and to see similar trends working themselves out now.
March 4, 2017
This is a seminal work on the history of news. It is a crucial work these days when people are asking about fake news.
November 11, 2019
Very dry read that never redeemed itself.
January 17, 2010
It's useful to look back at a time of great change in journalism. One of the most useful sections describes Walter Lippmann's role in the establishment of the objectivity standard that has defined modern US journalism.
January 16, 2009
Schudson is a phenomenal sociologist and makes such compelling points about the nature of objectivity and the role newspapers played in the development of our cities.
June 21, 2013
A goldmine of info on the creation of modern concepts of news and its ties to middle class identity.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews