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propaganda. It examines how, during World War I, the U.S. government’s Committee on Public Information (CPI) developed an unparalleled nationwide government propaganda campaign in America. This massive campaign was successful in generating wide public support for the role of the U.S. in the war, conveying the Wilson administration’s vision that success in the endeavor would bring forth a new era of more harmonious relationships between nations. However, by the war’s end, Americans found that the CPI’s claims rang hollow, and journalists expressed disillusionment that the government had co-opted the press into using often-misleading propaganda. By the end of this chapter, we see how these events laid the foundation for the eventual rise of the public relations industry and the concurrent drive to professionalize journalism—two key ingredients in the rise of journalistic double-mindedness during the interwar years.
Chapter 3, “Postwar Journalistic Professionalization and the Anti-Publicity Movement,” explores how, in the decade after the war, journalists mobilized a professional orientation that was designed to assert a renewed integrity for the field. Walter Lippmann’s 1922 book Public Opinion was notable in particular for its argument for a more fact-oriented journalism that sought insights from experts. The field institutionalized some of these rehabilitative principles and practices through professional organizations. By the early 1920s, news workers formed the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE)—both organizations provided guidelines to standardize how journalists could report with credibility. More universities offered journalism programs, and more books directed toward journalists provided advice on how to do journalism ethically and resist the influence of propaganda. The bulk of this chapter explores this reification of professionalism by examining how newspaper publishers and editors, through the American Newspaper Publishers Association’s (ANPA) anti-publicity bulletins, aggressively called on news workers to resist publicity-seekers who were undermining the ad-based economic model of the newspaper.
By the late 1920s the tension increased between the professionalizing press and the nascent PR industry. Chapter 4, “Journalistic Truth Versus