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the offerings of the emerging field of public relations as a vehicle for substantiating a more credible journalism based on facticity through authoritative sources.16
As such, this book details how the rise of domestic propaganda during the interwar years was a significant cultural influence on journalism’s own consciousness as an emerging profession. In fact, during that period, propaganda provided the material “stuff” (facts, data, expert sources) that helped journalism’s consciousness more readily reify its drive to create a new reality for the press. Propaganda played into the press impetus for renewed gravitas. It was a peculiar symbiosis that grew over the interwar years, and it endured, presenting significant implications for the credibility of the press to this day.
During the years between the world wars, journalists professed disenchantment with the role they had played in relaying the domestic World War I propaganda of the U.S. government’s Committee on Public Information (CPI). Accordingly, journalism became professionalized, emphasizing an objective, fact-based style of news gathering as a defense against the manipulations of the propagandist. This approach to reporting stressed turning to officials and experts who could help news workers gather and contextualize information. Beginning in the early 1920s, the emerging public relations profession stepped in to meet this newsroom orientation by providing story angles, contacts, data, and message points. In the process, by the late 1930s professional journalism’s own rhetorical tussle with propagandists about manipulations and distortions had gradually diminished. As World War II approached, journalists still maintained that they were objective and unbiased seekers of truthful accounts. However, they had also become accustomed to the contacts and information offered by the PR industry and often found public relations practitioners useful for constructing their stories. As this book shows, press adaptation to the helping hand of propaganda has played a profound role in how journalists construct supposedly authoritative accounts.
This book, then, examines key moments during the interwar years that demonstrate journalism’s development of a double-mindedness about pro