MAKING HISTORY TODAY: Media and U.S. Politics - Matthew Pressman on the Liberal Values that Shaped the News

Making History Today, produced by the History program at Fitchburg State University, connects the classroom to historians working in their fields. In these conversations, students discuss works assigned in class and develop questions for the authors, which are then posed in these episodes.

The first series of conversations emerges from Prof. Katherine Jewell's graduate course in Fitchburg State's online Master's program in History in summer 2023 on Media and U.S. Politics.

In this episode, Dr. Matthew Pressman of Seton Hall responds to students questions about his book, On Press: The Liberal Values that Shaped the News, published in 2018 by Harvard University Press. As a professor of journalism at Seton Hall, he teaches courses on Writing for the Media, Contemporary Issues in Sports Journalism, Feature Writing, and American Journalism.

Pressman explores the evolution of journalism’s core values, business practices, and how the news and politics intertwine.  On Press  won the History Book Award from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) and the PROSE Award from the Association of American Publishers. As he discusses in this episode, Pressman’s next book will explore the history of the New York Daily News.

Episode transcript can be found here.

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This episode was edited and sound mixed by Adam Fournier, a member of the Perseverantia staff and a student in the Communications Media department.

Click here to learn more about Perseverantia . Join us for programming updates on Instagram. Or reach out with ideas or suggestions at podcasts@fitchburgstate.edu.

Transcript

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Prof. Katherine Jewell: Matthew Pressman is Assistant Professor of Journalism at Seton Hall University.  Pressman’s research focuses on journalistic values, the business of news, and the intersection between journalism and politics. He is the author of On Press: The Liberal Values That Shaped the News from Harvard University Press in 2018, which won the History Book Award from the Association for Education and Journalism and Mass Communication and the Prose Award from the Association of American Publishers, in which he discusses in this episode.

Prior to his academic career, Pressman worked for eight years at Vanity Fair magazine, where he was an assistant editor and online columnist. In addition to publishing and academic journals, he writes for mass media outlets, including The Atlantic, Time, and the Washington Post. 

Here's Matthew Edgerly discussing On Press.

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Matt Edgerly: Hey y'all, my name is Matt Edgerly and I had the pleasure of participating in our graduate course, Media and Politics, through Fitchburg State University. I'm a history teacher at North Quincy High School. 

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Prior to teaching at the high school, I taught seven years at a middle school in Quincy, teaching seventh graders, as well as a stint as the acting assistant principal.  I also coach the varsity baseball team at North Quincy. I live in Weymouth, Massachusetts with my wife, Erin, and I have three boys Hank, Mac, and Chuck. 

I signed up to review On Press The Liberal Values that Shaped the News by Matthew Pressman.  The topic that Pressman addressed was objectivity in the press.

The line that really stood out to me came in his introduction when Pressman stated quote, " in 1960, the New York Times had reported allegations of wrongdoing against public officials only when they were formally charged. In 1980, the paper's own reporters were the ones asking the transit chief tough questions, pointing out inconsistencies in his answers and levying informal charges."

When speaking of objectivity, questioning the media's bias when it comes to reporting, Pressman points out that the line of demarcation was in the 60s through the 70s. Chapter 6 talks about how conservatives felt attacked by the press, mainly Richard Nixon. And Pressman appropriately titled this chapter, “The Press and the Powerful, From Allies to Adversaries.” 

Overall, I really enjoyed the book and one line continued to come back to me that was not included in the book, but I continued to think of it. And this was from the late Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She said, "a great man once said that the true symbol of the United States was not the bald eagle. It is the pendulum, and when the pendulum swings too far in one direction, it will go back." Pressman looked at objectivity in the press over the past, calling it 70 years, and how the press at times overcompensates when it comes to attacking the left or the right. However, the pattern that I read throughout the book was that this pendulum that always swung back. 

Objectivity is impossible to attain reporting, especially in the year 2023, but objectivity is forever swaying between liberal and conservative, depending on the reader's bias.

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Prof. Katherine Jewell:  Welcome, Professor Matthew Pressman. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your work? 

Dr. Matthew Pressman: Hi, thanks for having me. I'm an associate professor of journalism at Seton Hall University, and my research focuses on the history of American journalism, especially the news business, journalism values, journalism and politics. 

Prof. Katherine Jewell: Students were interested in the relationship between journalism and the changing ways that people are reading and consuming news and the broader contexts that shape changes in journalistic values and practices that you write about in your book.

So could you tell us a little bit about what are some of the broader changes going on in the United States that shape these journalistic practices and changes within them.

Dr. Matthew Pressman:The main moment of change that I look at in my book, which is called On Press, The Liberal Values That Shaped The News, the main period of change I look at there is in the 1960s and 70s. And I think the main drivers of change in journalism are both the business environment and the more general cultural and political environment of the time. So a few of the major changes that I focus on in the book, the first one has to do with the change in the way that newspaper stories were reported and presented.

And they become a lot more interpretive, more analytical, as opposed to just presenting a dry recitation of who said and did what the day before. And then this in turn, leads to some other important changes one of which is that old chestnut of objectivity gets re examined. And on the one hand, many people are opposed to interpretation, especially many people on the right, because they think it's a sort of Trojan horse to let opinion seep into the news.

And especially opinion on the part of journalists who tend to be left leaning, especially in the 1960s and 70s. Journalists who came out of the student movement, felt very strongly about the anti war movement. And at the same time, you have, because of those movements on the left mostly this big revolt against objectivity as an ideal.

I talk about how you have these two conflicting views of what's wrong with journalism based around objectivity, where you have a lot of people on the right saying objectivity has been abandoned, and instead we've gotten liberal bias, and you have people on the left saying objectivity has not been abandoned, but it should be abandoned because the way it's practiced leads to a bias in favor of the establishment, the status quo conservatism.

So you've got all this political conflict over how the news gets delivered, but there's also an economic crisis happening in the news business. Some of this will probably sound familiar to people thinking about our media ecosystem today. At that point, the economic crisis has more to do with the growth of television news, but lots of other factors are really making it difficult for newspapers to survive and thrive and turn a profit and grow.

You also have suburbanization, you have rising costs, you have increased competition from magazines, from community newspapers. There's a lot going on. In addition to this political conflict, you have at the same time newspapers trying to give people a little bit more of what they want, trying to cater to them provide, more sort of reader service, more about leisure interests, new sections that are not going to be about hard news, but are going to be things that people read or purchase because they enjoy them or find it useful in their everyday lives. So these are some of the changes that are happening in this 1960s, 70s period that have really important and long lasting repercussions.

Prof. Katherine Jewell:  Students were really interested in this idea about causality and what's driving these shifts in journalistic practices. And one student, Mason, wanted to drill into this question of profits. Could you unpack this relationship between the need for these companies to make a profit and serving the democratic needs of a free press and providing information. 

Dr. Matthew Pressman:  It's a great question. And it's an ever- present question throughout the history of journalism and up to today. It's always interesting to me to reflect on the fact that there's only one private commercial enterprise mentioned in the constitution, and it's the press. And yeah, the press enjoys this First Amendment protection.

And, that comes with the presumption that it's going to be serving some higher purpose to uphold democratic ideals. It's also a business. Sometimes it's maybe a non profit, but in any case, it's a business that needs to be able to support and sustain itself in some way, wherever the funding is coming from.

That tension absolutely always exists. I think the way it gets resolved depends on who's running the news organization. One important factor that happens in the period of the 60s and 70s that I'm looking at is most newspaper companies --and other media companies as well-- they go from being privately held corporations to publicly listed companies. They have initial public offerings. Before 1963, no newspaper company was publicly traded. By 1971 pretty much all of the largest newspaper companies in the country are part of public companies, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Gannett Papers, Knight Papers Chicago Tribune. It's a long list. 

That's going to be a big change because a privately held company, or even a newspaper company that has a dual stock structure, where you have family owners: the New York Times is still this way, which may in some measure account for its success, where the family has an outsize voting share.

If you're a private company or if the family has control, they can say we accept that our profit margins aren't going to be as large as they could be, or they might not have to grow by X amount each year for us to be satisfied with the return because we also want to serve this higher ideal.

But when you're part of a publicly traded company, shareholders have expectations and those expectations are constant profits and constant growth. And yeah, it's definitely an unavoidable tension. It's evident in every little thing, even the little stuff I've talked about in the book, like where the editor of one section, the view section of the Los Angeles Times, which had traditionally been a section that was read more by women readers and sometimes looked down upon by the rest of the staff, but also a really popular, very widely read section.

But it was getting stuffed with advertisements. The ratio of advertising content to news content was really high, much higher than in the rest of the paper, something like 85 percent of the pages were advertising content, only 15 percent for news. And the editor's constantly pushing back on that and she's talking about how she's exhausted from having to fight this battle all the time.

Dr. Matthew Pressman: And it really was at every level a battle between the desire to do right by readers and by the journalistic mission and the reality of needing to produce consistent profits and growth. 

Prof. Katherine Jewell:  So this idea of objectivity comes up a lot and I think the students are really wrestling with the meaning of it.

Timothy brought up this question of the ideal of the media being apolitical. [00:10:00] How would you explain this ideal of objectivity in relationship to a concept of being apolitical or perhaps the notions of bias or perspective? 

Dr. Matthew Pressman: That's a big question. And I want to clarify that I don't think that for most of American history, certainly, for most of global history, very few, news organizations or journalistic organizations have tried to be apolitical. In this mid to late 20th century period you had relatively few news outlets because of consolidation, people consumed news through one or two major newspapers in their geographic area, a few national television networks.

I saw Timothy's question was about the conclusion of the book where I wrote that I think in the sixties and seventies, many successful newspapers tried to report with honesty and toughness, but still not taking political sides.

I do think that works for some, it's not necessarily the right position for all. As I mentioned before we started recording that my next book project is about the New York Daily News, which is a tabloid newspaper and that's a more opinionated kind of news product.

 I wouldn't say, then or now, that a paper like the Daily News should try to be unbiased and decline to take sides. Sometimes you've got to take sides. The question was about the Trump era as well. I wrote that before January 6, 2021, and if I were looking at again now, I might write something different.

And certainly I think that every news outlet that considers itself a responsible and tough news outlet should take a side for democratic values and the institutions of American democracy that have stood for almost 250 years.

Prof. Katherine Jewell:   Griffin focused on this question of local news and how important it is for U.S. residents to have access to high quality local news.

But with consolidation and the city that our university is located in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, is another of these where the local newspaper is now owned by a larger conglomerate, and the local newsroom has really been hollowed out. And as we embark upon a podcasting endeavor, we have dearth of local news on our minds.

So how do you approach this question of the problem or the potential of local news? And what do you see as some of the key problems and opportunities at this moment? 

Dr. Matthew Pressman: Local news the situation's really dire. It really is. And local news has been hit harder than any other area of news by the changing dynamics that we've seen in the internet age.

The number of journalists covering news at the local level, whether it's big cities, smaller towns, rural areas, it's just a small fraction of what it was . Probably the 1990s was the moment where you had the most journalists covering local news and this is mainly a result of those changing dynamics of the internet, where people are not paying for news the way they used to. We have so many choices to get news for free.

And if people are paying for news, they're generally subscribing, whether it's in print or digital, they're generally subscribing to the larger national outlets. Local outlets have really struggled to attract paying digital subscribers. There's been some growth in hyperlocal outlets, networks like Tap Into and Patch, but they're very thinly staffed.

They just don't have the resources generally to do any kind of enterprise journalism, so few people, although there's a lot of hardworking people doing it, but what it winds up being in many cases is just rewriting press releases from local organizations and businesses, and that's definitely a problem.

There's been a rise in recent years, a more encouraging trend, a rise in some nonprofit local newsrooms that rely on reader support, on foundation grants, that aren't strictly reliant on Internet advertising, because that brings in so little revenue that it can't support any kind of robust news gathering operation.

So to me, that's the most promising development. But it's not been enough. Unless there's a lot more growth, it probably won't be enough to offset the losses from traditional local newspapers, local magazines, community publications, places like that. 

Prof. Katherine Jewell:   The students were interested in how journalistic outlets, press outlets are responding to changing technology, in particular, the rise of the Internet. How does that changing technological landscape change some of the imperatives and the roles that the press plays, particularly when it comes to things like whistleblowing or exposes. 

How do you see this change in context, technologically or politically shifting the imperatives on the press national to local?

Dr. Matthew Pressman: I think the number of outlets that have the resources to go after those bigger stories is much smaller than it used to be. Even the larger local newspapers that remain, they've had to cut back on investigative work. If something lands in their lap and they get a whistleblower who delivers an incredible scoop to them, then, yeah, I think most would still go with that. But you know, the sort of, uh, investigative teams that many local newspapers used to have, have often been disbanded. 

There's certainly been a large diminution in the watchdog function of the press. It's still there at the national level, I think, but at the local level, and even at the state level apart from some of the most populous states like New York and California and Florida, yeah, in smaller states, there's not nearly as many reporters just watching what the peoples' elected representatives and unelected representatives are doing with public resources and with the faith that's been entrusted in them.

Prof. Katherine Jewell:   I'm wondering specifically about this role of social media on the consumption side that, I heard somebody refer to Twitter as that it's no longer the place that people go to when news is happening.

And there's this sense that social media was this place that people started to go to, to find the most relevant information, starting locally and even hyper locally, but that's really how twitter grew, but that role is shifted. Did social media distract people from seeing this decline in journalism. Is there a relationship? 

Dr. Matthew Pressman: There's definitely a relationship and it's not just or it's not even primarily, I think, a matter of people turning to social media when there's a breaking news story, it's more question of where are people spending their time, right?

Traditionally most news outlets have been supported primarily by advertising rather than by reader or listener or viewer revenue. And so what they're selling is people's attention, right? And people's attention has shifted dramatically over the last decade and a half, especially, to social media.

And so that's where the ad dollars are going. And most publications have not been able to capture that same kind of attention and engagement. That's why there's been a major trend in the past five plus years, even longer than that, for the publications that can manage it to try to get more revenue from their audience rather than from advertising. But, as I mentioned before, the larger national publications with big brand recognition have been able to do that a lot more effectively than the smaller local ones. 

Prof. Katherine Jewell: As a historian of journalism Alison, wanted to ask and I'll read her question: What newspapers, if any, do you read regularly? Which newspaper do you think currently does the best job at publishing in depth, but fair reporting and why? 

Dr. Matthew Pressman: I'll admit I don't read any in print regularly, but I do read many of them online as most other people do. There's a lot of publications out there doing great work, and I think better to read, almost any professional news outlet with high journalistic standards than it is to rely primarily on social media for news.

I also want to give a shout out and a lot of people think, oh that's all paywalled. And so I'm going to get, I get my news for free on social media. It's so much easier, but there are a lot of really high quality outlets that are not paywalled. At least not yet. 

But, a couple, a few of the ones that I always tout: NPR does not have a paywall. The Associated Press does not have a paywall. BBC News does not have a paywall. Those are all great outlets. As for me I probably, I'm sure I'm not alone in this among journalism professors especially, I spend more time reading the New York Times than any other publication. I think they've got lots of faults. 

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As, as again, most journalism professors will probably be happy to point out to you. But I think, overall, they do the best job, the most in depth, in the most different areas, and they've held that title for a long time, and it's an impressive achievement.

Prof. Katherine Jewell: Any final thoughts for our students, or key things that you want our listeners to take away about the history of journalism and the future of journalism? 

[ 21min 40sec ]

Dr. Matthew Pressman:  Seek out quality journalism,  – [ Classroom Stories theme fades in ] – be a critical but not cynical consumer of news, and support local journalism if you can.

Prof. Katherine Jewell: Thank you, Matt Pressman for joining us.

Dr. Matthew Pressman: Thank you. It was my pleasure. I appreciate it.

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[ 22min 00sec ]

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Vincent Colavita (Game Design, Class of ‘24):  This is Vincent Colavita, a senior at Fitchburg State, and you're listening to Perseverantia Fitchburg State Podcast Network.

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