How America Gets the News

Ford Risley is a distinguished professor in the Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State University. He is the author or editor of four books, including Civil War Journalism (Praeger, 2012) and Abolition and the Press: The Moral Struggle Against Slavery (Northwestern, 2008).Ashley Walter is an assistant professor of journalism and media at Saint Louis University. She is an expert in women’s media history. Her work has been published in Journalism History, American Journalism, and The Women’s Media Center.

Risley and Walter deliver a taut, clear overview of American journalism. Their book chronologically presents what the authors call the founding, public, commercial, expanding, alternative, and digital presses. Licensing, literacy, newspapers, censorship, prior restraint, Benjamin Franklin, and the Zenger trial impacted Colonial journalism. Revolutionary and early republican publications led to the party press. From the early 1830s through the Civil War, the penny press, telegraph, Associated Press, and magazines flourished, along with the abolitionist and Black presses. Highly successful commercial newspapers, including yellow journalism and the muckraking stripe, followed. American journalism expanded through 1950 via tabloids and suffrage, Black, and foreign-language presses. Henry Luce’s media empire thrived, as did leading newspaper columnists. Radio, television, and, eventually, digital news coverage became powerful media forces, both in peacetime and during conflagrations. An interesting section on the alternative press covers McCarthyism, the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, Watergate, feminism, PBS, and CNN…. Recommended. General readers.