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

So, during the interwar years, journalistic professionalism blossomed; it concentrated on rehabilitating journalism’s credibility after the field had been too willing to sell Americans on World War I. Shortly after the end of that war, the press, largely remorseful over its susceptibility to domestic wartime propaganda, worked at establishing value systems and articulating integrity-building work practices.²⁷ Professionalism during this period was the move toward reifying journalism as a vital purveyor of truth. The key, said Lippmann in Public Opinion, was a social scientific approach to journalism that adopted a more objective and facts-based stance toward gathering news.

Lippmann’s observations connected with journalism’s desires to rehabilitate itself after its too-willing embrace of domestic propaganda during World War I. The press’ emphasis on objectivity was about more than an orientation toward gathering fact-based news; it was also about making it manifest in the newsroom writing style. Approximating the perspective of the social scientist would be effective only if journalists wrote in a detached manner.²⁸ By detaching from personal viewpoints and writing from a quasi-scientific approach, journalists could more readily avoid bias and be better able to choose and develop reliable stories. Professional journalism’s approach then, was to stress that news workers, through the professional principle of objectivity and specialized work practices emphasizing factuality and expertise, could provide a description of the day’s events that “is more accurate than any other process allows.”²⁹ This view of journalism as truth-teller called for reporters and editors to be chroniclers of verifiable material, ensuring that accounts were free from their personal tastes, agendas, and predilections. Throughout the interwar years then, journalists, editors, and publishers embarked on a vision in which, in great part, objective journalism would help revivify an autonomous and independent press.

Propaganda or Public Relations?

What of the words “propaganda” and “public relations”? Scholars see both terms as particularly descriptive of a pervasive persuasion industry