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need, and even if that original need has faded with time.18 His observations resonate with a major proposition of this book: what was understandable in the interwar years—professionalizing news workers gradually turning to useful fact-based and authoritative information from PR sources—is a dynamic that is too often harmful to journalism’s credibility and calls for a more reflexive journalism.
In the meantime, such an ingrained link between both the consciousness offered by the ostensibly “objective” newsroom and the subjective advocacy offered by propaganda sources has profound implications for the traditional press. As Carey said,
From a wider cultural perspective, Carey describes how journalism and society mutually constitute a consciousness through the structure of the news report. However, this work highlights a vital precursor to news construction: Journalism’s “report” has often first been greatly shaped by the hand of propaganda. Propaganda, by meeting professional journalism’s drive for fact-based and expert-contextualized information, has had a significant role in helping the press form its consciousness of news before we, as news consumers, receive it. As this book shows, the press’ awareness of this interplay was spotty during the interwar years, and ultimately press vigilance about propaganda diminished as acclimation rose. Despite what Ray Stannard Baker had written decades earlier, the press during the interwar years had come to see propaganda material as a way to inform without deceiving. The practices and routines of press professionalism would, in effect, sanctify certain uses of propaganda information. This work provides both an evidentiary and theoretical tracing of how this peculiar double-mindedness developed—and currently persists—in American newsrooms.