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Gilbert Murray wrote or co-signed almost three hundred letters to the Editor of The Times. His topics ranged from Liberal politics and the League of Nations to reform of the national diet, simplification of English spelling, the humane treatment of animals, and the banning of smoking in cinemas. Excerpts from this formidable corpus suggests the range of Murray's epistolary art, force of argument, ready literary technique, and dry wit. To encourage reassessment of Murray as writer-activist, this chapter reviews letters illustrating Murray's hard-won eminence as professor, writer, Hellenist, politician, and citizen.

Shilts joins The San Francisco Chronicle as its first openly gay reporter on the newsroom staff. Hired to cover the “gay beat” in San Francisco, Shilts also is given general assignment stories. Shilts coordinates Chronicle coverage of the deadly October 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Newsroom colleagues overcome suspicions of the new “gay reporter” as Shilts lobbies publishers for non-discrimination policies and domestic partner benefits. Shilts picks up on rumors of a “gay cancer” affecting gay men in the Castro district. Reporting includes very first stories attempting to link exotic immune system related diseases with homosexual men in San Francisco and elsewhere. Shilts is becomes convinced the AIDS story is a major story and devotes himself nearly full-time to the subject.

Shilts steps out as a spokesman against gay bathhouses, admitting he once patronized them himself. ACT-UP members focus their vitriol on Shilts, Shilts turns his criticism on ACT-UP tactics. Although tapped to host a public television special, “Wrestling with AIDS,” Shilts ends a prolific year of writing about AIDS by announcing he was leaving the beat at the start of 1990. Shilts criticizes “lavender fascists” involved with the National Gay & Lesbian Journalists Association. Shilts states opposition to outing unless under specific circumstances. Shilts keeps focus on elimination promiscuous sexual contact among gay men as a means to stop AIDS crisis.

Chapter 6 analyzes the posttrial reaction, covering the period from September 24, 1955, through the responses to the January 24, 1956, publication of “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi”–Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam’s confession to the lynching of Emmett Till. Key to the analysis is an investigation of firsthand accounts of experiences covering the Emmett Till trial. Out of fear for their safety, attendees reported these biographical recollections only after they left Mississippi. Also included in this chapter is an investigation into continued efforts on the part of the Deep South mainstream press, particularly the Jackson (MS) Daily News, to discredit the Till family through disparaging reports about trial witnesses, the NAACP, Mamie Till-Mobley, and Emmett’s father, Louis Till. Despite relentless attempts to defame black people and assuage white guilt, Emmett Till’s brutal murder galvanized a generation of activists to speak out against racial injustices.

Chapter 3 analyzes how the U.S. news media made a significant and devastating shift from targeting a mass audience to an upscale, middle class audience beginning in the late 1960s. The chapter draws on dozens of images of the newspapers’ own advertising aimed at corporate advertisers in the long-time industry publication Editor and Publisher, which illustrate the newspaper industry’s change in direction.

Frederick Douglass stood outside the nation because his race excluded him from citizenship. In his antislavery lectures in Ireland and Britain from 1845 to 1847, Douglass acted as an unofficial statesman, urging foreign countries to intervene in American affairs. He used the transatlantic press to structure his critique of American nationality, insisting that ‘[t]houghts expressed on one side of the Atlantic are distinctly heard on the other.’ As the founding editor of The North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper, Douglass called attention to the ties between the sovereignty of the nation and the preservation of slavery. By focusing on his professional identities as an editor and diplomat instead of his familiar role as an autobiographer, this chapter illuminates Douglass’s investments in international politics and African American freedom.

Walt Whitman celebrated the pluralistic nature of American society, which he called a ‘teeming nation of nations.’ Whitman claimed that his poetry was a transparent ‘reflection and representation’ of the nation, and most scholars have taken Whitman at his word by reading his poetry as a chronicle of United States culture. However, Whitman looked more nationally representative from abroad. He secured his professional reputation as a uniquely American poet with the help of positive responses from British writers such as William Michael Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and D. H. Lawrence. By studying its roots in his training as a newspaper editor, in his reviews of his own work, and in his transatlantic publicity campaigns, this chapter exposes Whitman’s American identity as an elaborate international fiction.

This chapter explores the “market-driven news” movement that began to spread throughout the newspaper industry in the late 1970s. By reviewing accounts of the movement from journalists and researchers and in trade journals such as Presstime and Editor and Publisher, the chapter reconstructs how the market-driven newspaper movement took form as a culture of production that had a wide-ranging influence on U.S. news. Industry leaders felt that newspapers had to undergo a fundamental shift in their editorial philosophy—that newspapers could no longer define and prioritize news solely based on the professional judgment of editors and journalists. Instead, they proposed that papers needed to reimagine their role as servants not to an abstract public interest, but to their readers' professed interests and desires.