Press Professionalization and Propaganda: The Rise of Journalisti ...

the Internet, professional journalism can move from a singular emphasis on finding and relaying truth to embracing “energetic and thoughtful communicators who try to keep a society attuned to itself.”¹² However, because these digital technologies are still in their infancy, the potential here is largely ill-defined. Too often, a fixation with digital media results in a focus on the possibilities of the technology, rather than on interrogating how emerging digital practices can offer opportunities to better understand traditional professional journalism and then rethink it.

In sum, there is no denying that political economy and digital media studies can offer some insights related to the public’s loss of interest in traditional journalism. Digital media increasingly provide numerous alternative options to the news consumer. Meanwhile, the political economy of commercial journalism features ownership pressures that erode newsroom resources and, consequently, diminish quality news. However, though valid, these two approaches neglect how newsroom concepts of how to determine and gather news have contributed to the press’ declining fortunes. This book examines a key period of the cultural history of journalism and provides insights into how the field of journalism developed a useful symbiosis with the emerging field of public relations. As James Carey has noted, journalism’s cultural history gave the press a “structure of feeling” for how to do journalism in such a way as to allow it to claim a distinctive relevance.¹³ The cultural history perspective offers a view of more than just the practices of the newsroom. It attempts to illustrate the consciousness that informed reporters and editors in their attempts to, in Carey’s words, “grasp reality.”¹⁴ However, complicating the news workers’ attempts to relay reality is the fact that, as Pierre Bourdieuhas pointed out, journalism as a field of practice actually has a weak degree of autonomy compared to, say, a self-regulating area of practice such as mathematics.¹⁵ Though Bourdieu’s claim may be a bit sweeping, this work resonates with that observation, finding that the press, in a post–World War I drive for renewed legitimacy, pursued a complex(and seemingly paradoxical) approximation of autonomy. During those years, journalism’s own habitus—that is, its unquestioning inclination toward practices that became seen as reasonable and sensible—treated