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This chapter focuses on the image of journalism's past that is presented by popular culture. Some historians have argued that journalism history too often has served only to celebrate the press rather than providing critical insight into its problems. Pop culture regularly depicts journalism's history through simple, linear, dramatic tales that use the past to speak to the present and that adopt partisan viewpoints on historical issues. As such, it both mythologizes and demythologizes the press, at once celebrating and parodying well-known figures and happenings in journalism's past. Yet pop culture has also presented a less heroic picture at times by casting a skeptical and even mocking eye toward journalism history and by highlighting more sordid aspects that the conventional histories have sometimes downplayed or overlooked.

Using Deborah Brandt’s theory of literacy sponsorship, this chapter examines newspaper editors’ efforts to cultivate an imagined community of readers. It illustrates the ways in which the editors taught, modeled, and regulated literacy via discussions of appropriate reading and writing practices. It also argues that advertisements for texts of all kinds debunk the idea of a textless Appalachia and discusses what the editors’ choices of advertisements suggest about how they imagined their audiences.

This introductory chapter advocates for a newly concerted interdisciplinary research agenda focused on right-wing or conservative news. It provides a brief history of right-wing media and conservative news in the United States from the early twentieth century to the present. It suggests that scholars of history, rhetoric, political communication, journalism studies, and media sociology ought to converge around the study of historical and contemporary “conservative news cultures,” defined as the consistent practices or patterns of meaning making that emerge between and among the sites of production, circulation, and consumption of conservative news. It notes that journalism studies scholars have a unique role to play in developing the burgeoning subfield of conservative news studies, and suggests that foregrounding conservative news will contribute to long-standing themes in journalism and political communication research, including shifting conceptions of journalistic professionalism, the cultural authority and legitimacy of the press, and the history of political polarization.

This chapter details the demise of a black newspaper, the Lighthouse and Informer, and the role of white newspapers in the rise of massive resistance to civil rights in South Carolina. John McCray’s newspaper had always depended financially on help from fellow activist Modjeska Simkins and her family, but a growing feud between the two civil rights activists eventually doomed the black newspaper. The rising pressure exerted by the white massive resistance movement contributed to the collapse of the newspaper and the decline in black activism in the late 1950s. Charleston News and Courier editor Thomas R. Waring Jr. and his chief political reporter, William D. Workman Jr., played central roles in establishing the white citizens’ council movement and using anti-communist rhetoric to undermine the civil rights effort.

Timing played a key role in all of Shilts’s success, and failures. His reporting and books on cutting-edge issues in the emerging gay liberation movement withstood strong push back on his work while establishing himself as an openly gay reporter in mainstream journalism. Shilts unapologetically approached his reporting as he had approached his earlier life – that information granted power and understanding and journalists played a key role in conveying that information. Important questions remain about whether Shilts helped or hindered the understanding of AIDS in the context of the gay community, with serious reservations raised about his use of the “Patient Zero” posit. He was praised, however, for advocacy for gay rights via Conduct Unbecoming.

This chapter describes the archival project of the book and the methodology employed. It explains how the study defines literacy, how the newspapers it used were selected, and in what ways its findings can be seen as representative of the region as a whole. The chapter also provides a brief overview of each newspaper surveyed in the study.

This chapter examines community writing, the most direct evidence in the newspapers of community literacy practices. Because each paper relied on local correspondents to write in with news from far-flung communities, the correspondent columns offer a glimpse into what local writers viewed as particularly important events. In these reports, there is ample representation of literacy practices, and the attention with which these are reported illustrates the value placed on literacy in these communities. The chapter also considers how the correspondents interacted with one another and with the editor. The editors served as recruiters and enablers of literacy, to use Deborah Brandt’s terms, but also as suppressors who ultimately exercised control over what correspondents could say in print.

This chapter reviews the conceptual underpinnings of the relationships between truth and politics, how truth is both conveyed and interpreted, and how it can fall subject to distortion and misinterpretation. These patterns are presented from a historical vantage point and considered in juxtaposition to the contemporary technological age. The chapter argues that we live in a real world where people living and acting together produce facts and events that even the powerful must reckon with. It is a hard lesson to learn—that three things are simultaneously true: (1) that reality is socially constructed; and (2) that facts are hard to hold steadily in view when we approach them, as we do, through paradigms and perspectives and prior knowledge and prior ignorance and prior interpretations and prior beliefs as we all, always, inevitably do; and (3) that there are facts.

This chapter details the rise of McCray’s Lighthouse and Informer newspaper. It chronicles the role of civil rights activists Modjeska Monteith Simkins and Osceola E. McKaine in persuading McCray to link his newspaper to the NAACP and the push for civil rights. McCray moves the newspaper to the state capital of Columbia and uses its statewide distribution to rally support for the NAACP and overcomew cautious accommodationism in the African-American community. The chapter provides a detailed look at the early days of the Lighthouse and Informer, when McCray’s paper pushed the boundaries of what a black newspaper could publish in a Deep South state. By 1945, the civil rights movement had gained traction and won a resounding victory: a court decision demanding equal pay for black and white public school teachers.

This chapter maps several lines of academic inquiry that speak to the yet unrealized field of conservative news studies. The chapter explores how scholars have approached the notion of “liberal bias” and conservative news; three different approaches to studying the influence of conservative media—as propaganda, as media effects, and as “deep stories”; and the place of media in historical accounts of the growth of modern conservatism in the United States. Scholars have been researching various components of conservative news cultures for decades, but disciplinary silos, differing methodological assumptions, and a lack of standardized terminology have precluded the sort of focused scholarly dialogue that typically constitutes a field. This chapter highlights the extant disciplinary and interdisciplinary debates that a field of conservative news studies would ideally weave together and build upon.

This chapter examines the sources of T. Thomas Fortune's vision for founding a long-term national organization to lead the struggle for racial justice on a wide range of fronts. It looks at the legal principles Fortune learned from the jurisprudence of John Mercer Langston, founding dean of Howard Law School, which Fortune attended. It explores Fortune's political ideology, which was motivated by the principles of democratic socialism, and analyzes his many journalistic commentaries on civil rights matters topical at the time in order to trace the origins of Fortune's ideas for the National Afro-American League's founding issue platform.

This chapter examines the growth of the “liberal media” discourse by analyzing its historical formation in terms of public sphere theory. The chapter advances a discursive institutionalist approach to conservative news that is rooted in sustained analysis of the actors, ideas, and institutions that give conservative news its cultural form and force. Conservative journalists, commentators, and media activists began conceptualizing the “liberal media” within the institutions of the conservative countersphere by the 1950s and early 1960s. Once this discourse had been crystalized and legitimized among conservative commentators and their audiences, Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, and other prominent Republican voices promoted its circulation far beyond the conservative countersphere, as it moved into the national public sphere at large.

This chapter analyzes US conservative media as it expanded into new forms in the 1970s. While a first generation of conservative media activists invested in more or less traditional media enterprises (e.g. magazines, newsletters, radio programming), by the 1970s movement activists associated with the New Right were investing in think tanks and foundations—not only diversifying the conservative movement infrastructure but also complicating the variegated means of sourcing and circulating conservative news and commentary. The chapter shows how the movement’s turn toward nonprofit organizational structures in the 1970s enabled its institutional proliferation. The result was a dizzying array of funders, organizations, publications, and activists whose efforts continue to wield outsized influence over both the conservative movement and the news cultures that surround it.

This chapter analyzes the National Review’s shifting narratives and historical memories of the contentious relationship between the modern conservative movement, Martin Luther King Jr., and the US civil rights movement. National Review writers largely opposed the civil rights movement up until the mid-1960s, casting Black freedom activists and their goals as threats to civilized order and the spirit of the US Constitution. Yet, the National Review would ultimately take on a leading role in reconsidering the conservative movement’s animosity toward King and civil rights—drawing parallels between conservative principles and civil rights claims, and even making fraught color-blind conservative claims to King’s legacy.

This chapter traces the origins of the “the Establishment” as a rhetorical figure appropriated by National Review writers, who successfully used it to construct a unifying, besieged mentality that opened space for the nascent conservative media countersphere. William F. Buckley and other National Review writers placed a critique of media bias within a broader narrative of a smug and elite “liberal Establishment” that operated across many institutions as a gatekeeper of acceptable opinions. The chapter documents that National Review writers made a case of liberal bias in media that was not solely tied to a critique of professional objectivity. Critics writing in the magazine saw purportedly objective professional coverage as tainted with the same bias as liberal journals of opinion that demanded conformity to liberal views.