Politics and the American Press takes a fresh look at the origins of modern journalism's ideals and political practices, In particular, Richard Kaphan addresses the professional ethic of political independence and objectivity widely adopted by the US press. He shows how this philosophy emerged from a strikingly different ethic of avid formal partisanship in the early twentieth century.
The book also provides fresh insinghts into the economics of journalism and uses business paper and personal letters of publishers to explore the influence of competition, advertising, and an explosion in readership on the market strategies of the press. Kaplan documents the changes in political content of the press by a systematic content analysis of newspaper news and editorials over a span of fifty-five years. The book concluded by exploring the question of what should be the approriate political role and professional ethics of journalists in a modern democracy.
"This is the best account of the politics and economics of the American press in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Kaplan criticiizes leading views on the subject (including my own) and surpasses them in a historically well grounded and sociologically insightful synthesis."
1. Partisan news in the early Reconstruction Era: African-
American in the vortex of political publicity
2. Economic engines of partisanship
3. Rituals of partisanship: American journalism in the Gilded Age
4. The two revolutions in urban newspaper economics,1873 and
1888
5. 1896 and the political revolution in Detroit journalism