Summer 2024

Volume 50, No. 2, Summer 2024

This issue contains the final editor’s note from outgoing editor Pam Parry and five research articles by Gregory Svirnovskiy & Jon Marshall, Aram Goudsouzian, Jonathan Daniel Wells, Mara Arts, and Daniel Defraia. Interested in reading these articles? Get information on subscribing here.

Article Abstracts

“‘Tin Cans and String’: Democrats’ Failed Attempts to Challenge Conservative Talk Radio from 1994 to 1996,” Gregory Svirnovskiy & Jon Marshall
In the mid-1990s, Democratic Party leaders attempted to counter the popularity of Rush Limbaugh and other conservative talk radio hosts following the Republican sweep of the 1994 midterm elections. President Bill Clinton appeared on shows around the country, his White House began a national radio outreach initiative, party strategists proposed creating their own radio program, and some congressional Democrats visited popular shows such as Imus in the Morning. Meanwhile, former Senator Gary Hart of Colorado and former governors Mario Cuomo of New York and L. Douglas Wilder of Virginia launched their own talk radio shows, while former New York City Mayor Ed Koch continued his program. This study examines the impetus for these Democratic broadcast efforts between 1994 and 1996, the content and style of the different shows, and the reasons they failed to overcome the Republican advantage in talk radio.

“Alvin Dark and the Chipmunks: Racism, Baseball, and the Press in 1964,” Aram Goudsouzian
In 1964, Newsday columnist Stan Isaacs quoted San Francisco Giants manager Alvin Dark making disparaging comments about his team’s Black and Latino players. This article analyzes the controversy over the Newsday column, with a focus on the interpretations of sports journalists. Most baseball writers excused Dark and attacked Isaacs, who was one of the “Chipmunks”—a cohort of young, socially conscious columnists for East Coast afternoon newspapers. The San Francisco press protected Dark out of regional identification, while New York’s veteran writers resented the style of the upstarts. The mainstream press muffled the genuine grievances of Black and Latino players, and it manipulated the statements and actions of superstars Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays. Although Black columnists saw Dark’s comments as indicative of racism in sports, most sportswriters downplayed the conflict, reflecting baseball’s prevalent biases in this era.

“The National Union of Journalists and Journalism Education in Interwar Britain,” Mara Arts
Are journalists born or made? During the interwar period (1919–1939), the British National Union of Journalists (NUJ) grappled with this question, as the first university course for journalism was founded and more university-educated staff entered newsrooms. This article is the first to consider interwar journalists’ opinions on whether and how British journalists should be educated. Debates on journalism education continued until the 1990s, when university education became the norm for British journalists. This article explores the emergence of this contentious argument. Through the articles published in the pages of the NUJ’s monthly member magazine the Journalist, two strands of the NUJ’s activities on education are explored: the Union’s stance on the University of London Diploma for Journalism and the work of the NUJ’s Education Committee. During the interwar period, the National Union of Journalists developed educational output for its members. Unlike other British trade unions, the NUJ focused on providing its members with education that was directly related to their careers. These activities raised fundamental questions that went to the heart of the profession during a period when journalism’s professional identity in Britain was still evolving.

“Crime and Reform: An Underworld of Journalism,” Daniel Defraia
This article reconstructs the shrouded career of undercover reporter Natalie de Bogory (mostly from 1911–1922) to illustrate how reporters collaborated with public-private networks to regulate real or perceived crime and extend the reach of the security state, before the practice later expanded within the FBI. De Bogory was twice a guide. Undercover for newspapers, she escorted readers through an urban working-class underworld of dance, sex, and employed single women. Her journalism, however, obscured her more covert work. For private reformers who partnered with city officials, she investigated social issues, including allegations of “White slavery,” the alleged sex trafficking of immigrant women. That work, during the nativist hysteria of World War I, drew de Bogory into a scheme to promote the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a forged anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that was later dubbed a “Warrant for Genocide.” This history of de Bogory is an argument for studying the careers of relatively unknown journalists who often worked multiple jobs to understand their impact, and expose the interconnectivity of journalism with other professions and institutions. This article reconstructs de Bogory’s career to reclaim the tradition of reporters collaborating with reformist public-private networks. Then, that neglected history is framed as a model for Henry Ford’s newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, which publicized the Protocols.