Encyclopedia of American Journalism

Stephen L. Vaughn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415969505
• eBook ISBN: 9781135880194
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Encyclopedia of American Journalism explores the distinctions found in print media, radio, television, and the internet. This work seeks to document the role of these different forms of journalism in the formation of America's understanding and reaction to political campaigns, war, peace, protest, slavery, consumer rights, civil rights, immigration, unionism, feminism, environmentalism, globalization, and more. This work also explores the intersections between journalism and other phenomena in American Society, such as law, crime, business, and consumption. The evolution of journalism's ethical standards is discussed, as well as the important libel and defamation trials that have influenced journalistic practice, its legal protection, and legal responsibilities.
Topics covered include:
Associations and Organizations; Historical Overview and Practice; Individuals; Journalism in American History; Laws, Acts, and Legislation; Print, Broadcast, Newsgroups, and Corporations; Technologies.

P

Pacifica NEWS

The listener financed Pacifica Foundation began its radio operations in 1949, when it signed on KPFA in Berkeley California. Fifty years later, Pacifica owned and operated additional radio stations in New York (WBAI), Los Angeles (KPFK), Washington (WPFW), and Houston (KPFT) and supplied national programming to about seventy-five other non-commercial “community” or public radio stations throughout the country.

As its name suggests, the Pacifica Foundation seeks to promote a more pacific world, “peace and understanding among nations, races, creeds and colors,” to cite its mission statement. Pacifica ’s founder, World War II conscientious objector Lewis Hill, urged Pacifica to examine the roots of conflict that grow from injustices in our political and economic systems. At the same time, he promised to assemble news from sources “not commonly brought together in the same medium,” in order to produce “accurate, objective, comprehensive news” lacking in media driven by the profit motive. In the Cold War era, presenting news from “alternative” sources meshed well with Hill’s pacifist agenda.

In its early history, Pacifica gained notoriety for its commentaries and discussions by a wide range of intellectuals, mostly from the left, among them American Marxists Herbert Aptheker and William Mandel, black leaders W.E.B DuBois and Langston Hughes, Socialist Norman Thomas, and the leftist editor of The Nation, Carey McWilliams. The regular appearances of future Reagan defense secretary Casper Weinberger on behalf of the California Republican Party did not dissuade critics who saw Pacifica as a subversive organization. In its early history, Pacifica found itself under investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee and faced revocation of its broadcast licenses by the Federal Communications Commission.

When portable equipment allowed radio to leave the studio in the late 1950s and 1960s, Pacifica became a prime source of pointed documentaries on social and political issues. One reporter’s unauthorized trip to North Vietnam during the war produced a documentary controversial not only for its content but for the fact that it was produced at all. It represented, however, a perfect example of the Pacifica goal of promoting “peace through understanding among nations” and of presenting news from sources not normally heard in American media. In the same era, Paci-fi ca broadcast live from Congressional hearings and protest demonstrations of the civil rights, free speech, and anti-war movements. Some regarded Pacifica as the “voice” of those movements, although the voice could not be heard in most parts of the country.

In the 1970s, Pacifica stations modifi ed their focus, providing voice for a variety of newly conscious identity groups—feminists, ethnic and racial minorities, and gays— on the assumption that understanding among groups leads to peace and that certain voices cannot find expression in the mainstream media. Disputes among those groups and with the Pacifica management sometimes led to ferocious conflicts within the organization, even as it sought to promote peace in the world at large.

Later in that decade, Pacifica Network News sought to apply Pacifica ’s alternative philosophy to a half hour of daily journalism. Reporters provided more depth than commercial radio or television and tackled issues and points-of-view that commercial broadcasting often ignored or minimized. For some Pacifica Network News staff, National Public Radio’s successful news programs All Things Considered and Morning Edition provided models to be emulated; for others, NPR served as an example of what happens when an “alternative” medium seeks wide listener acceptance. For most of its history, Pacifica Network News endured heated ideological struggles over such issues, of vital importance to those on the inside but often bewildering to those on the outside.

These philosophical differences combined with serious financial problems caused the enterprise to explode in the year 2000. Perceiving themselves under attack from Paci-fi ca management that sought larger audiences and financial stability, news staffers went out on strike. Pacifica Network News never really recovered, but the upheaval spawned two new organizations that carry on the Pacifica legacy outside the formal Pacifica structure, Free Speech Radio and Democracy Now.

Some of the strikers from Pacifica Network News created Free Speech Radio News to continue producing a daily half hour program of “incisive news and analysis in the service of peace and justice.” Produced independently from Pacifica , the freestanding organization sold its product to community radio stations across the country, including those owned by Pacifica . In a sense, the Pacifica news philosophy survived outside of Pacifica when it could not prevail inside.

Other Pacifica staff members, led by veteran Pacifica journalist Amy Goodwin, took their Democracy Now program out of Pacifica in the name of saving Hill’s philosophy of news. Goodwin had begun Democracy Now as a series of daily broadcasts on the Pacifica stations during the 1996 presidential election. The well-received special series remained on the air after the election and became Pacifica ’s most widely recognized public affairs offering. As producer and host of Democracy Now, Goodwin broke new ground with her award-winning coverage of American oil interests in Nigeria. She took the program to Seattle for eight days in 1999, where her broadcast became a center piece for the “Battle of Seattle,” between opponents of corporate globalization and police during a meeting of the World Trade Organization.

When Goodman and her Democracy Now staff broke with Pacifica during the conflicts of 2000, she found refuge in a community television center, from which she continued to produce the daily program, making it available to Pacifica and other stations as an independent production. The new location in a television facility allowed Democracy Now to greatly expand its reach by adding community access cable stations and television satellite direct to home viewers. The program, now co-hosted by Juan Gonzalez, continues to look and sound like a radio program, however. The cameras just eavesdrop on it.

Pacifica itself has since established a level of financial and structural stability that suggest it will continue as a voice of diverse and disadvantaged voices and a creative outlet for partisans of a wide range of cultural traditions, even as the most dynamic examples of its journalistic tradition pursue their alternative approaches from the outside.

Further Readings

Engleman, Ralph. Public Radio and Television in America, A Political History. Thousand Oaks CA: SAGE Publications, 1996.

Land, Jeff. Pacifica ’s Brash Experiment. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Lasar, Matthew. Pacifica Radio: The Rise of an Alternative Network. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999.

Mitchell, Jack. Listener Supported, the Culture and History of Public Radio. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005.

Pacifica Radio Archive: A Living History. http://www.Pacificaradioarchives.org/ (accessed April 5, 2007).

JACK W. MITCHELL

PACIFIST PRESS

Leading historians of the peace movement such as Charles DeBenedetti, Peter Brock, and Lawrence S. Wittner agree that the most central reform movement in United States history is peace advocacy. Since the early nineteenth century when the first organized peace societies developed, both reformers and radicals have worked to realize world peace, often through advocacy writing and editing. They have benefited from First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and press in the United States that have protected such communication, even during wartimes when pacifist perspectives were in the minority.

As early as the 1830s, when he made his famous visit to America, Alexis DeTocqueville noted Americans’ propensity to organize themselves into associations and social movements that emphasized the publication of pamphlets and newspapers to maintain their cohesion and achieve their goals of changing society. This context is useful in understanding the Pacifist press throughout its history.

The Pacifist press’s perspectives and approaches vary. Peace advocacy can take a variety of forms, for example in its most thoroughgoing approach, embracing absolute pacifism-nonresistance (to the point of non-cooperation with the state, even the withholding of the portion of one’s income tax that is thought to support war making activities directly) to a more moderate position of acceptance of “defensive” war. And, a primarily religious perspective characterizes members of the historic peace churches, the Quakers, the Mennonites, and the Church of the Brethren (among others), while another approach distinguishes the many nonsectarian peace advocacy groups such as the American Peace Society (started in 1828), the League of Universal Brotherhood (1846), the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (U.S. branch, 1915), and the War Resisters League (1923).

All have recognized the potential power of the written word to sway public opinion on issues of war and peace, starting with the very first early nineteenth-century periodicals such as the American Peace Society’s Advocate of Peace. Harnessing improvements in printing technology and transportation, early nineteenth century peace advocates published millions of pages of tracts, books, and pamphlets devoted to the cause of peace. Their periodical press was equally vigorous and targeted a twofold audience: believers and yet-to-be-converted. Often containing the sermons and speeches that were also printed in tract form, serials such as the American Peace Society’s Advocate of Peace, Calumet, and Harbinger of Peace published in addition annual reports that suggest a spirited, active membership— and one that was frequently represented in other antebellum reform movements such as abolition, women’s rights, and temperance.

Other early nineteenth-century leaders include the Connecticut Peace Society’s American Advocate of Peace, the Pennsylvania Peace Society’s Advocate of Peace and Christian Patriot, and the Friend of Peace of the Massachusetts Peace Society. By the end of 1821, the latter had distributed, along with its auxiliaries, 7,155 copies of the Friend of Peace. This was fairly characteristic of the circulation size of the Pacifist press in the pre-1850 period, paralleling the typical mainstream magazine circulation. Many copies were passed along to multiple readers, thus boosting real circulation. Pacifist press publishers frequently acknowledged their efforts to get these periodicals into libraries and to opinion leaders (as their often published subscription lists attest).

Typically, content emphasized an Enlightenment-based belief in rationality, that “A few well written remarks on the subject of war may occasion thousands to reflect, and eventually save thousands from untimely death by murderous hands,” as the Friend of Peace wrote in its August 18, 1819, issue.

With the approach of the Civil War, nonsectarian periodicals such as the New England Non-Resistance Society’s Liberator, the Journal of the Times, and the Non-Resistant became prominent. The League of Universal Brotherhood, founded in 1846, sponsored the Bond of Brotherhood and Burritt’s Christian Citizen and the Universal Peace Union (1866) published in succession the Bond of Peace, Voice of Peace, and Peacemaker.

Less influential at this time were the periodicals of the historic peace churches. The German Baptist Brethren devoted no coverage to their peace testimony until the mid-nineteenth century. The Mennonite press was just developing in the 1850s and in any case, as Mennonites were separatists, it did not try to proselytize outsiders. The few nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Mennonite periodicals started included the Gospel Herald, Gospel Witness, Herald of Truth, and the Mennonite Quarterly Review.

Meanwhile, the Quaker weekly press started in 1827 with the Philadelphia Friend and then the Friends’ Weekly Intelligencer (1844). However, the amount of original content devoted to peace topics during this period was small. Other Quaker periodicals started during the nineteenth century include the American Friend, the Christian Worker, Friends’ Review, the Herald of Peace, the Moral Advocate, and the Messenger of Peace (published by the Peace Association of Friends in America, a Quaker group founded 1866).

A dynamic subset of the nineteenth-century peace advocacy press included the periodicals of utopian religious communitarians who emphasized peace as one of their tenets, such as the Circular of the Oneida Community in upstate New York. Other utopian and religious publications included the New Harmony Gazette of the Owenite New Harmony group, the Shaker Manifesto of the Shakers, the Adventists’ Review and Herald and the World’s Crisis, and the Disciples of Christ’s American Christian Review, Christian Baptist, and the Millenial Harbinger.

Also, the peace departments of many of the major women’s organizations such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union published peace advocacy materials in the late nineteenth century. Often these were included as inserts in publications such as the Quaker Messenger of Peace.

In the twentieth century, peace advocacy periodicals have built upon this foundation, producing full-color publications and fully harnessing contemporary desktop and digital publishing technology. The historic peace churches continue well-established periodicals such as Friends Journal (established 1955); Mennonite Life (founded 1946), and Brethren Life and Thought (dating from 1955). Friends Journal, for example, has a paid circulation of about eighty-five hundred and regularly receives recognition from the Associated Church Press and other professional organizations.

A leader among the religious peace advocacy publications is the Catholic Worker, founded in 1933 in New York City by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, with a current circulation of about eighty-nine thousand. Since its founding it has advocated pacifism, of a thoroughgoing, nonresistant sort akin to that advocated by Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. It has also inspired scores of similar, localized newspapers associated with Catholic Worker Houses of Hospitality throughout the United States and also abroad.

Other religious-based pacifist presses include Fellowship: A Magazine of Peacemaking, established in 1918 and published by the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, with a 2006 paid circulation of about nine thousand; Shalom: The Jewish Peace Letter, published since 1962 by the Jewish Peace Fellowship (2006 circulation, about 3,000); Peacework: Global Thought and Action for Nonviolent Social Change, published since 1972 by the New England Regional Office of the American Friends Service Committee; and Catholic Peace Voice, issued since 1975 by Pax Christi USA.

As a group, modern peace periodicals vary in perspective and tone, including emphases that range from nonresistant to internationalist and antinuclear. Each war period has generated its own set of pacifist periodicals, with some longstanding examples such as the Catholic Worker providing antiwar perspectives on a consistent and continuous basis, since its inception in 1933. During World War I, for instance, Max Eastman’s The Masses opposed the war, for which the government shut it down under the provisions of the 1917 Espionage Act. During the Cold War, Liberation (1956–1977) sought to keep alive Pacifist ideals and recruited as editors such peace movement leaders as the minister A.J. Muste, David ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ASSOCIATE EDITORS
• CONTRIBUTORS
• ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ENTRIES
• THEMATIC LIST OF ENTRIES
• INTRODUCTION
• A
• B
• C
• D
• E
• F
• G
• H
• I
• J
• K
• L
• M
• N
• O
• P
• S
• T
• U
• V
• W
• Y
• Z