JOURNALISM 501
The Social Responsibility of Journalism
Bruce J. Evensen
Winter 2015
Monday, 5:45-9:00 pm
Office Hours: Monday & Wednesday, 4:45-5:30
Daley Building, Room 1125
e-mail: [email protected]
Course Design and History:
When we were developing an MA in Journalism that would emphasize the ethical
obligations of writers, reporters, producers and editors working in journalism’s new
online landscape, we decided a core course for such a curriculum would be a class
focusing on the social responsibility of journalists to give citizens news they need to
know that makes democracy and self-governance possible. Convergence has created new
opportunities for journalists to gather and present information, while posing new
challenges to the values that undergird the profession. Journalism is the only profession
in American life that has the Constitutional protection that government “shall make no
law abridging” its freedom. This freedom has its obligations. It is rooted in the
Enlightenment certainty that citizens can be trusted to make the right decisions when they
have the necessary information. The role of the press is to not only to make money for
shareholders, but public service.
Course Purpose:
This course will explore the current and historic role journalists have played in meeting
their social responsibility to the American and world community. That responsibility,
through the public journalism movement of the late 20th century and the use of social
media in the early 21st century, has been to not only report facts, but the truth behind facts
that give them meaning. Journalists, however, have not always lived up to their
responsibility. No profession has fallen further faster in public estimation than
journalism. Yet, Americans continue to rely on journalists in unprecedented numbers to
give them a picture of the world which becomes the basis of personal and collective
action. We now daily connect to the information grid. It is how we do life and create
community. Journalists as content providers and producers are the architects of that grid.
Students will finish this course with a better understanding of how to be good architects,
who help create and maintain an informed civil society.
Course Readings:
Readings for this course are on electronic reserve through DePaul University’s library
webpage. There is no textbook for this course. Students should choose THREE of the
readings for each week. Each of these readings will be equally helpful when students
write their papers and final essays.
Method of Evaluation:
One-third of the final grade comes from five two-page papers on assigned readings.
These papers are due when you present on them in class.
One-third of the final grade comes from three research papers of three pages apiece with
each paper focusing on the arguments of three authors and three video clips we analyzed
in class. The first paper is due by week four; the second by week seven; and the third by
week 10.
One-third of the final grade comes from a take home final exam that will be given out on
the last day of class and will be due one week later on Monday, March 16 at 6:30 pm.
This is a firm deadline. No extensions will be granted under any circumstances.
Standard Policies:
This class conforms to university policy on plagiarism and sexual harassment. Students
unaware of these policies should consult DePaul’s student handbook. Assignment
deadlines will be strictly enforced. Extensions will not be given. Students who are to miss
class for valid medical reasons must contact the professor before class.
Reading Schedule
Week One Social Responsibility in the Digital Age
Week Two The Social Responsibility of the Press:
9/11 and the “War on Terror”
Goran Leth, “A Protestant Public Sphere: The Early European Newspaper Press,” in
Michael Harris, ed., Studies in Newspaper and Periodical History: 1993 Annual
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), 67-90.
Richard A. Schwarzlose, “The Marketplace of Ideas: A Measure of Free Expression,”
Journalism Monographs 118, December 1989.
Stephen Bates, Realigning Journalism with Democracy: The Hutchins Commission, Its
Times, and Ours (Washington, D.C.: Annenberg Policy Studies, 1995).
Fred Blevins, “The Hutchins Commission Turns 50: Recurring Themes in Today’s Public
and Civic Journalism,” a paper given in April 1997 at the third annual conference on
Intellectual Freedom.
Bruce J. Evensen, The Responsible Reporter, third edition (Northport, AL: Vision Press,
2008), chapter one, “What’s New in the News?”
Amy Reynolds and Brooke Bennett, “This Just In…How National TV News Handled the
Breaking ‘Live’ Coverage of September 11,” Journalism & Mass Communication
Quarterly 80, No. 4, Autumn 2003.
Barb Palser, “Not So Bad: The Performance of On Line News Sites on September 11,”
American Journalism Review, November 2001.
Michael Boyle, Mike Schmierbach and Cory L. Armstrong, “Information Seeking and
Emotional Reactions to the September 11 Terrorist Attacks,” Journalism & Mass
Communication Quarterly 81, No. 4, September 2004.
Chris Mooney, “The Editorial Pages and the Case for War,” Columbia Journalism
Review, March/April 2004.
Terence Smith, “The Real-Time War: Hard Lessons,” Columbia Journalism Review,
May/June 2003.
Michael Pfau, Michael Haigh, Mitchell Gettle and Mike Donnelly, “Embedding
Journalists in Military Combat Units: Impact on Newspaper Story Frames and Tone,”
Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, September 2004.
Week Three War Reporting
Carol Sue Humphrey, “The Revolutionary Press, 1765-1783,” in Wm. David Sloan, ed.,
The Media in America: A History, sixth edition (Northport, AL: Vision Press, 2005), 5168.
J. William Snorgrass, “The Sectional Press and the Civil War, 1820-1865,” in Wm.
David Sloan and James G. Stovall, eds., The Media in America: A History (Worthington,
OH: Publishing Horizons, 1989), 142-162.
Susan Thompson, “The Press and the War of 1812,” a paper presented at the Tulsa,
Oklahoma meeting of the American Journalism Historians Association, October 1995.
Pamela A. Brown, “The Media and National Crises, 1917-1945,” in Wm. David Sloan,
ed., The Age of Mass Communication (Northport, AL: Vision Press, 1998), 355-372.
A.M. Sperber, Murrow: His Life and Times (New York: Freundlich Books, 1986), 157187.
Ronald Bishop, “To Protect and Serve: The Guard Dog Function of Journalism in
Coverage of the Japanese-American Internment,” Journalism & Communication
Monographs 2, No. 2, Summer 2000, 65-103.
James Tobin, Ernie Pyle’s War: America’s Eyewitness to World War II (New York: The
Free Press, 1997), 254-270.
Patrick S. Washburn, “The Office of Censorship’s Attempt to Control Press Coverage of
the Atomic Bomb during World War II,” Journalism Monographs 120, April 1990.
Michael D. Sherer, “Vietnam War Photos and Public Opinion,” Journalism Quarterly,
Summer 1989, 391-395 and 530.
Janet E. Steele, “Experts and the Operational Bias of TV News,” Journalism & Mass
Communication Quarterly 72, No. 4, Winter 1995, 799-812.
Michael Griffin and Jongsoo Lee, “Picturing the Gulf War in Time, Newsweek, and U.S.
News & World Report,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 72, No. 4, Winter
1995, 813-825.
Christina Jesson, “The Military,” in Wm. David Sloan and Jenn Burleson Mackay, Media
Bias: Finding It, Fixing It (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007), 161-174.
Week Four The Press and the Political Process
Hiley H. Ward, “The Media and Political Values,” in James D. Startt and Wm. David
Sloan, eds., The Significance of the Media in American History (Northport, AL: Vision
Press, 1994), 129-146.
John Y. Simon, “Grant: Hero Falters as Reluctant President,” Media History Digest 12,
No. 1, Spring-Summer 1992, 27-31 and 42.
Doris A. Graber, The President & The Public (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of
Human Issues, 1982), 1-14.
Bruce J. Evensen, “The Limits of Presidential Leadership: Truman at War with Zionists,
the Press, Public Opinion and His Own State Department over Palestine,” Presidential
Studies Quarterly 23, No. 2, Spring 1993, 269-287.
Douglass Cater, The Fourth Branch of Government (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959),
chapter 2, “The President and the Press,” 22-46.
Edwin Diamond and Stephen Bates, The Spot: The Rise of Political Advertising
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992), chapter 6, “Kennedy, Kennedy, Ken-ne-dy,” 93-112.
Dean E. Alger, “The Media in Elections: Evidence on the Role of the Impact,” in Doris
A. Graber, Media Power in Politics (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1990),
147-160.
Martha Joynt Kumar and Michael Baruch Grossman, “Establishing an Administration:
The Place of Communications,” in James P. Pfiffner and R. Gordon Hoxie, eds., The
Presidency in Transition (Washington, D.C,: Center for the Study of the Presidency,
1989), 305-320.
Leon V. Sigal, “Sources Make the News,” in Robert Karl Manoff and Michael Schudson,
eds., Reading the News (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 9-37.
W. Russell Neuman, Marion R. Just and Ann N. Crigler, Common Knowledge: News and
the Construction of Political Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1992), 110-122.
Thomas E. Patterson, Out of Order (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 134-175.
Lawrence K. Grossman, The Electronic Republic: Reshaping Democracy in the
Information Age (New York: Viking Press, 1995), 9-21.
Week Five Tabloid Journalism
Guy Reel, “This Wicked World: Masculinities and the Portrayals of Sex, Crime, and
Sports in the National Police Gazette, 1879-1906,” American Journalism 22, No. 1,
2005, 61-94.
W. Joseph Campbell, The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash
of Paradigms (New York: Routledge, 2006), 1-30.
Gerald J. Baldasty, Vigilante Newspapers: A Tale of Sex, Religion, and Murder in the
Northwest (Seattle: University of Washington, 2005), 3-14.
Phyllis Abramson, Sob Sister Journalism (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), chapter
4, “Sad Butterfly,” 49-78.
Marvin N. Olasky, “Journalists and the Great Monkey Trial,” in Wm. David Sloan, ed.,
Media and Religion in American History (Northport, AL: Vision Press, 2000), 217-228.
John D. Stevens, Shaping the First Amendment: The Development of Free Expression
(Beverly Hills: Sage, 1982), 77-92.
Carl Bybee, “Can Democracy Survive in the Post-Factual Age?: A Return to the
Lippman-Dewey Debate about the Politics of News,” Journalism & Communication
Monographs 1, No. 1, Spring 1999, 29-66.
Brooke Barnett, “Guilty and Threatening: Visual Bias in Television News Crime
Stories,” Journalism & Communication Monographs 5, No. 3, Autumn 2003, 105-155.
Glenn W. Muschert and Dawn Carr, “Media Salience and Frame Changing Across
Events: Coverage of Nine School Shootings, 1997-2001,” Journalism & Mass
Communication Quarterly 83, No. 4, Winter 2006, 747-766.
Matthew C. Ehrlich, “The Journalism of Outrageousness: Tabloid Television News vs.
Investigative News,” Journalism & Mass Communication Monographs 155, February
1996.
Erica Sharrer, Lisa M. Weidman, and Kimberly L. Bissell, “Pointing the Finger of
Blame: News Media Coverage of Popular-Culture Culpability,” Journalism &
Communication Monographs 5, No. 2, Summer 2003, 49-98.
Week Six Journalism and Reform
Jean Folkerts and Dwight L. Teeter, Jr., Voices of a Nation: A History of Mass Media in
the United States (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2002), chapter 8, “Modernization and
Printed Products,” 207-242.
Bruce J. Evensen, “The Greatest Day That Our City Has Ever Seen,: Moody, Medill, and
Chicago’s Gilded Age Revival,” Journal of Media and Religion 1, No. 4, 2002, 231-249.
Nellie Bly, “Ten Days in the Madhouse,” in Wm. David Sloan and Cheryl S. Wray, eds.,
Masterpieces of Reporting (Northport, AL: Vision Press, 1997), 305-319.
Bruce J. Evensen, “The Evangelical Origins of the Muckrakers,” in American Journalism
6, No. 1, 1989, 5-29.
Bruce J. Evensen, “Progressivism, Muckraking, and Objectivity,” in Steven R. Knowlton
and Karen L. Freeman, eds., Fair & Balanced: A History of Journalistic Objectivity
(Northport: Vision Press, 2005), 136-148.
James Kates, “Small-town Editor, Big-time Fight,” in Robert Miraldi, ed., The
Muckrakers: Evangelical Crusaders (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000), 107-129.
Tessa Hermans, “Robert Abbott’s Defender: The Strongest Weapon,” Media History
Digest 13, No. 1, Spring-Summer 1993, 38-42 and 64.
Robert W. McChesney, “Labor and the Marketplace of Ideas: WCFL and the Battle for
Labor Radio Broadcasting, 1927-1934,” Journalism Monographs 134, August 1992.
Karen Miller, “Smoking Up a Storm: Public Relations and Advertising in the
Construction of the Cigarette Problem, 1953-1954,” Journalism Monographs 136,
December 1992.
Everett M. Rogers, James W. Dearing, and Soonbum Chang, “AIDS in the 1980s: The
Agenda-Setting Process for a Public Issue,” Journalism Monographs 126, April 1991.
Jo Ellen Fair, “The Body Politic, the Bodies of Women, and the Politics of Famine in
U.S. Television Coverage of Famine in the Horn of Africa,” Journalism & Mass
Communication Monographs 158, August 1996.
Week Seven The Sports Section
Lawrence Strout, “Say It Ain’t So, Joe and Pete: Reporting on Fallen Idols,” Media
History Digest 12, No. 2, Fall-Winter 1992, 2-9 and 23.
Bruce J. Evensen, “Jazz Age Journalism’s Battle over Professionalism, Circulation, and
the Sports Page,” Journal of Sport History 20, No. 3, Winter 1993, 229-246.
Michael Oriard, Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American
Spectacle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1993), 191-216.
“Grantland Rice Creates the Four Horsemen Legend,” in Wm. David Sloan and Cheryl S.
Wray, Masterpieces of Reporting (Northport, AL: Vision Press, 1997), 391-397.
Mark Inabinett, Grantland Rice and His Heroes: The Sportswriter as Mythmaker in the
1920s (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994), chapter four, “Babe Ruth,” 3749 and 112-113.
William B. Anderson, “Crafting the National Pastime’s Image: The History of Major
League Baseball Public Relations,” Journalism & Communication Monographs 5, No. 1,
Spring 2003.
Bruce J. Evensen, “Sports Journalism: Baseball,” in Stephen Vaughn, Bruce Evensen,
and Jim Landers, eds., Encyclopedia of American Journalism History (New York:
Routledge, 2007).
Brian Carroll, “From Fraternity to Fracture: Black Press Coverage of and Involvement in
Negro League Baseball in the 1920s,” American Journalism 23, No. 2, 69-95.
Michael R. Real, Mass-Mediated Culture (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: 1977), “The Super
Bowl: Mythic Spectacle.”
Judy Polumbaum and Stephen G. Wieting, “Stories of Sport and the Moral Order:
Unraveling the Cultural Construction of Tiger Woods,” Journalism & Communication
Monographs 1, No. 2, Summer 1999.
Week Eight Political Scandal
Daniel Schorr, Clearing the Air (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), chapter 3, “White
House and Black Rock.”
James Reston, Deadline: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1991), chapter 43, “The
Man Who Trusted Nobody.”
Gladys Engel Lang and Kurt Lang, The Battle for Public Opinion: The President, the
Press and Polls during Watergate (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), “The
Media and Watergate.”
David Halberstam, “Richard Nixon’s Last Campaign,” Columbia Journalism Review,
July/August 1994.
Sam Smith, “A Revised Reconsideration of Clinton,” Presidential Studies Quarterly,
Winter 1997.
Sinead O’Brien, “In the Midst of the Whirlwind,” American Journalism Review, March
1998.
Sherry Ricchiardi, “Double Vision,” American Journalism Review, April 1998.
Neil Hickey, “After Monica, Next What?” Columbia Journalism Review,
November/December 1998.
Arthur H. Miller, “Sex, Politics, and Public Opinion: What Political Scientists Really
Learned from the Clinton-Lewinsky Scandal,” PS, December 1999.
Stephen J. Wayne, “Clinton’s Legacy: The Clinton Persona,” PS, September 1999.
Fred I. Greenstein, “The Qualities of Effective Presidents: An Overview from FDR to
Bill Clinton,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, March 2000.
Week Nine The News Online
George Rodman, Mass Media in a Changing World (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2006), 297311.
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, “The World Wide Web,” in David Crowley and
Paul Heyer, eds., Communication in History: Technology, Culture, Society, fifth edition
(Boston: Pearson, 2007), 328-335.
Eric S. Fredin, “Rethinking the News Story for the Internet: Hyperstory Prototypes and a
Model of the User,” Journalism & Mass Communication Monographs 163, September
1997.
Brian C. Anderson, “We’re Not Losing the Culture Wars Anymore,” in Joan Gorham,
ed., Mass Media 05/06 (Dubuque, IA: McGraw-Hill/Dushkin, 2005), 40-47.
Anya Kamenetz, “Will NPR Save the News?” Fast Company.com, March 18, 2009
Farhad Manjoo, “Satellite Diss,” Slate, February 12, 2009.
Leonard Downie, Jr. and Michael Schudson, “The Reconstruction of American
Journalism,” American Journalism Review, October 19, 2009
Laura Oliver, “Chicago Tribune: Bringing News Innovators on Board, Drawing the
Audience In,” www.journalism.co.uk, posted July 29, 2009.
Sally Duros, “LC3s: For-Profit Financing with a Soul,” Community Media Workshop,
June 13, 2009.
Craig Kanalley, “Breaking Tweets: How a Blog from a Chicago Apartment Gained a
Global Following,” (2013).
Week Ten Our Digital Future
Sam Schulhofer-Wohl and Miguel Garrido, “Do Newspapers Matter? Evidence from the
Closure of The Cincinnati Post,” Princeton University: Discussion Papers in Economics,
March 2009
David Klein, “Good Newspapers Can Survive if They Break Their Old Culture,”
Advertising Age, September 14, 2009.
Arianna Huffington, “The Future of Newspapers Is Uncertain; Not So the Future of
Journalism,” Chicagotribune.com, September 27, 2013.
Ken Doctor, “The Newsonomics of NYT Now,” Nieman Journalism Lab, March 27,
2014.
Seth Porges, “Are J-Schools Today Taking the Wrong Approach?” Editor & Publisher,
April 3, 2009.
Paul Fahri, “The Twitter Explosion,” American Journalism Review, April/May 2009.
Jay Rosen, “Rosen’s Flying Seminar in the Future of News,” Press Think, March 26,
2009.
Ken Doctor, “The Newsomanics of Why Everyone Seems to Be Starting a New Site,”
Nieman Journalism Lab (Jan. 24, 2014).
David Carr, “Risks Abound as Reporters Play in Traffic,” New York Times (March 24,
2014).
Justin Ellis, “New Technology, New Money, New Newsrooms, Old Questions: The State
of the News Media in 2014,” Nieman Journalism Lab, March 26, 2014.
Alan Murray, “Seven Reasons for Optimism about the News Business,” Wall Street
Journal (March 26, 2014)
Take Home Final Exams are due Monday,
March 16, 2015 by 6:30 p.m.
(This is a hard deadline. There are no extensions under any circumstances.)