Shadow Press: The Myth and Making of Independent Journalism

Historians of journalism and mass media have tended to focus on journalism and news – its people and content – while neglecting the field’s broader and interconnected roles in United States history. Shadow Press: The Myth and Making of Independent Journalism explores how the extreme edges of reporting challenged and reshaped American journalism for over a century, from 1890 to 1980. 

What a reporter is and does, and does not do, and the integrity of that idea, has always been an unsettled question, interrogated on the borders between journalism and the state. There, from battlefields in Cuba, revolution in Mexico, presidential politics in Washington, D.C., and world wars in Europe, reporters – formally and informally, officially and unofficially, openly and secretly – served the state. This book explains how and why reporters, amidst the allure of patriotism, prestige, and power, came to work for the state, and then stopped, culminating with the historically aberrant ascent of modern independent journalism. 

To reclaim that history, Shadow Press spotlights famous, infamous, or previously unknown reporters whose careers reflected the usually submerged question of press-state collaboration and revealed wider changes within journalism. Part I documents how reporters traveled multiple routes into the state, including U.S. empire (the War of 1898), the Mexican Revolution, the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the domestic reform efforts of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and World War II. Part II documents how, during the Cold War, reporters, embedded within the state, separated to redefine journalism, and lobbied to establish in 1980 the uneasy policies of today that narrowly permit the CIA and FBI to impersonate reporters.

Shadow Press provides accessible plots and character-driven narrative arcs for general readers interested in American history. Moreover, journalism critics will take an interest in how the history provided in Shadow Press informs the debate over how best to do journalism today. During the last two decades, a historical caricature of news objectivity has emerged, a rigid model of amoral methodology and unacknowledged personal subjectivity that still lingers. That caricature has concealed the political activism of the self-declared objective press. Today’s “objectivity war” in journalism is a memory war. As a result, the debate about how best to cover the Republication Party, Donald Trump, and far right movements is based on a broad misunderstanding of how journalism functioned in US democracy. Combining expansive and rigorous archival investigation with the dramatic requirements of a good story, Shadow Press provides a new line of scholarly inquiry to expand the scope of journalism within US political history.