Volume 52, No. 1, Spring, 2026. In this issue we reintroduce book reviews, with three pieces reviewing the latest scholarly book publications on media and history. This issue also contains an editor’s note from editor Perry Parks on the theme, Toward Reversing Epistemological Flows. There are four research articles from Justito Adiprasetio, Otávio Daros, Melissa Greene-Blye & Natalie Pursche and Will Mari.
abstracts
This study offers a critical analysis of the enduring limitations within Indonesian journalism scholarship and research, tracing their genealogy to the authoritarian legacy of the New Order regime. This regime, which ruled Indonesia from 1966 to 1998, imposed strict controls on the academic sphere, using social sciences as tools to legitimize and promote its developmental and state-centric narratives. Under the New Order’s authoritarian regime, communication and journalism studies were instrumentalized to promote state propaganda and modernization theories aligned with Western interests during the Cold War. The regime’s control over universities and the press forged a discursive formation that suppressed oppositional knowledge, depoliticized intellectual life, and narrowed journalism education into a technocratic and vocational enterprise. The article also discusses the Malari Incident, which intensified the suppression of the press and reinforced state control over journalism scholarship. The persistence of shallowness in Indonesian journalism scholarship and research is deeply rooted in historical authoritarian influence and perpetuated by ongoing structural and epistemological constraints. Despite the political reforms and the advent of the reformation era, the legacy of authoritarianism continues to shape the contours of journalism scholarship, necessitating a critical reassessment of its epistemological foundations.
LGBTQ+ Media in Latin America: From Dictatorships to Market Democracy.
Aware that a global history of LGBTQ+ media has yet to be written, this article seeks to shed light on one of its geographical chapters, that of Latin America. A particularity of the trajectory of this sector, formed by gay and lesbian periodicals, among others, is that its origins in different South American countries refer to a context marked by coups and military regimes, followed by projects of democratic opening. On the other hand, with similarities to the cases of the United States and Europe, it is argued here that the press linked to the Latin American LGBTQ+ community can be considered from at least four stages: leisure, activism, eroticism, and a more recent one defined by the convergence of these trends in digital media. In addition to offering this historical framework, the research discusses the limitations and potential for the development of what some have called gender or identity journalism.
Melissa Greene-Blye & Natalie Pursche
Inupiat journalist Jeanie Greene saw firsthand how Alaska Native issues and communities were misrepresented and misunderstood, and, at a time when these communities were organizing and advocating to protect their sovereignty and traditional rights, she was determined to do something about it. Greene created Northern Lives, a weekly segment that aired on the station where she was a news anchor, to counter misrepresentation of Alaska Native communities and the issues those communities were dealing with. The success of Northern Lives, combined with Greene’s desire to elevate Alaska Native voices, eventually led Greene to found her own production company, where she was a leader in using viewer-created content. Greene purchased camera equipment and then used her professional experience to train community members how to use that equipment to share their stories and challenges in ways that were fully informed and authentic, bypassing the stereotypes and negativity often found in non-Native media spaces. This paper examines Greene’s legacy with the goal of having her contributions as a groundbreaking Native woman and journalist recognized in the larger field of media history. It also seeks to demonstrate the importance of narrative sovereignty, the right of Indigenous people to tell their own stories.
Newsrooms and the Enduring Use of Paper: Not Just Nostalgia
This study explores how physical paper has survived into the twenty-first century in supposedly paperless digital news organizations. As Michael Stamm has shown, paper and news work have a long and complex history. But newspapers and their newsrooms were supposed to lead the way out of the world of paper with its elimination in new computerized workspaces well before the end of the twentieth century, as work by Nik Usher, Florence Le Cam, and Juliette De Mayer has also discussed. And yet paper survived (and thrived!) in the 1990s and beyond in these spaces, in the form of stylebooks, notepads, boxes, reference guides, printed e-mails, calendars, sticky notes, memos, bulletin boards, and other miscellaneous forms. The media history of this survival matters because it shows how technological transitions within information industries are long, complex and rarely ever “complete”—the resiliency of paper is indicative of other kinds of transitions, those supposedly finished and those still in process. Paper has endured for both affective and practical reasons, which this study explores.
book reviews
Mexico’s Resilient Journalists: How Reporters Manage Risk and Cope with Violence
The 157 Mexican journalists killed or missing in the first two decades of the twenty-first century suggests that local reporters in Mexico hold an occupation—domestic war correspondent—that seems an oxymoron. Yet, in Mexico’s Resilient Journalists: How Reporters Manage Risk and Cope with Violence, author Julieta Brambila offers empirical and qualitative evidence that confirms that it is not wild rhetoric but sad reality to describe Mexican reporters as working on a battlefield, albeit a local and domestic one.
Funny Because It’s True: How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire
How should news organizations cover mass shootings? The Onion has run the same headline since 2014: “No Way To Prevent This, Says Only Nation Where This Regularly happens.” The accompanying article is largely the same, with locations and death tolls replaced each time—but always in the measured tone of a news story from a wire service. The technique is a devastating take on the nation’s failure to address gun violence—and the way news organizations often cover them as a routine part of American life. It also speaks to the dark genius of The Onion.
Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography
Tom Arnold-Foster’s intellectual biography of Walter Lippmann serves as a comprehensive evaluation of Lippmann’s commentary on politics, journalism, and culture through a close analysis of his books and journalistic work. Along the way, Arnold-Foster challenges some of the common assumptions about Lippmann’s work, such as his close association with technocratic ideology and, in particular, the framing of his thinking in opposition to the more democratic John Dewey, which the field has inherited from James Carey’s influential essay “Mass Media: The Critical View” (1982). While, as Arnold-Foster acknowledges, this view has been challenged elsewhere by Michael Schudson and Sue Curry Jansen, it is an important corrective. Far from an anti-democratic technocrat, Lippmann’s work shows him to be attuned to the complexities of democracy and liberalism. While he insisted on the primacy of the public, he grappled with the problem of creating the context of valuable and trustworthy information that would produce a healthy, well-informed public opinion. In this, as in much of his theoretical work on journalism, he prefigured many of the problems that still ground the field of journalism studies.
Journalism History journal 