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

this conjunction through the prism of political economy of the media or journalists’ overt attempts to rationalize using propaganda, this work is more concerned about how the interwar years established a sociological link between the two fields that persists to this day. In fact, tracking the germination of such a dynamic presents particularly rich opportunities for unpacking how propaganda became, through press workroom practices, translated into news. During the interwar years, newsroom acceptance of propaganda developed as a gradual habit, a mostly unconscious association that this work substantiates as continuing today.

With such a historical grounding we find that contemporary mainstream journalism has long been acclimated to materials and sources offered by the public relations industry. PR practitioners provide valuable data, facts, quotations, and contacts to expose newsrooms to their clients’ points of view. As is further discussed in chapter 1, the web of information and sources provided to the traditional press by public relations people are geared for a mass distribution of a client’s concern. When the PR industry engages in such a one-way orientation, it is practicing a propagandistic approach that was clearly mastered by the end of the interwar years. Although it is clear that the press in the United States is not compelled to use any propaganda, journalism’s own orientation toward what constitutes credible news accounts makes it susceptible to propagandistic material. The professional press places a premium on the authoritativeness of expert contacts, statistics, and verifiable accounts that are the stock-in-trade of PR offerings to the newsroom. Even though the press finds much of this information useful, it nonetheless continues to maintain through the practices of professional journalism that it presents to news consumers an objective, fact-based account of the day’s happenings. What results is a peculiar incoherence in today’s press. More specifically, modern journalism exhibits a “double-mindedness.” It asserts a professional paradigm that stresses a facts-as-contextualized-through-experts orientation. However, too often this approach is conducive to newsroom acceptance of propaganda as news, contributing to inauthentic, and sometimes irrelevant, news stories.

Not surprisingly, citizens have revealed that, over time, they see traditional journalism outlets as less pertinent to their daily lives. One of the