EOTO Reaction: Early Journalism Heroes

In our class' presentations on early heroes in journalism, I was most inspired by Mary McBride. She was a radio host, free-lance magazine writer, and reporter / journalist. She used to write for the Cleveland Press, along with the new York Evening Mail for a few months each. Although her time as a reporter was short, she managed to make waves in the industry. As a magazine writer, her work appeared across many different magazine companies ranging from the Saturday Evening Post to Cosmo. She was also an extremely successful publisher in the 1920s - 30s, publishing books with authors like Paul Whiteman, Alexander Williams, and Helen Josephy.

Between the years of 1934 - 1940, McBride worked under a pen name, Martha Deane; with her daily program "Mary Margaret and Her Guests" airing on WOR radio station. Her show was just advice for women., and grew a great audience in appreciation of her grandmotherly kindness and cleverness. I found this very interesting, as her radio show name is her actual name, but she is speaking under an alias. Why is that? And at the same time, she had a different weekly radio program where she did use her given name. It switched off being broadcast from NBC, CBS, and ABC. The audience for this show particularly enjoyed her off-the-cuff commentary and celebrity interviews. It was also impressive because her target listeners were primarily women, but she managed to reach a male audience.

To conclude, I found Margaret McBride to be extremely interesting as I haven't really been focusing on any radio personnel in class, but rather primarily journalists. I loved learning about how she made switches from different types of reporting and was able to multi-task throughout her life. She proved to be a very influential voice in the radio world, breaking down barriers for women in this field. Her approach to daytime radio programming made it possible to make a profit without drama and soap opera fare. She was an uplifting, inspiring figure for women in the way she spoke opposed to others. She treated her audience with respect, no matter what society viewed them as, and it paid off as her audience was estimated to be over eight million people at it's height.

Final EOTO: Dorothy Thompson

Dorothy Thompson was born in 1893, to British immigrants in Lancaster, New York; she studied at Syracuse University. She got married to a novelist named Sinclair Lewis in 1927, and divorced him later in 1937. She died at age 67 in Lisbon, Portugal of a heart attack in 1961. She was also considered to be one of the most influential female journalists in American history.

She started out her career working for the New York State Woman Suffrage Party, becoming a journalist shortly after the ratification of the 19th Amendment. She exhibited traits of the Girl Reporters of the late Nineteenth-Century in her reporting tactics. In 1921, she was the only journalist to report from the inside of former King Karl I's castle, by posing as a Red Cross nurse. It's how she established her reputation, got to become the Vienna correspondent, and the central European Bureau Chief for the Philadelphia Public Ledger and the New York Evening Post. This made her the first woman to head a foreign news bureau of any stature. After her wedding in 1928, she split her time between a domestic life in Vermont, and going international for reporting assignments. Dorothy was one of the leading journalists when it come to reporting on the National Socialism in Germany, she was able to have a sit down interview with Adolf Hitler himself, and published a book in 1931, "I Saw Hitler!" Here she described him as "formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill poised and insecure. He is the very prototype of the little man." The very obvious, fiery hate for Hitler led to her being sent back to America by the German government in 1934 as a warning to other journalists that critique of Hitler would not be tolerated. Her coverage on Hitler is what gave her the nickname of "the First Lady of American Journalism" in the United States. 

Thompson was later offered an opportunity as a radio broadcaster with the New York Herald Tribune, by Helen Rogers Reid in 1936 under their newspaper "Woman's Voice." She created a column that talked about a variety of topics, ranging from national to foreign politics, intellectual trends, social habits, cultural innovations, and historical change; she titled it "On the Record." This skyrocketed her to fame becoming known for her provocative articles, and using Grouse as a motif, satirical character. What really put her at the top of the news cycle though, was her ridiculing the speaker at a German American Bund Rally in 1939, but her intense stance on anti-zionism is also what lost her many followers postwar. She couldn't do it alone though, behind her was a team of three women secretaries and research assistants, along with a trusted group of male friends on retainer for insight or corrections on foreign affairs. This was highly unusual for a female reporter, but it might just be what separated Dorothy from the masses, and allowed her to shine so bright. 

Dorothy Thompson sought change in the world, she expressed her concerned for fascism in America, condemned anti-semitism, and extreme nationalism. In the 1930s and 40s she was urging her American audiences to turn their attention onto Nazi Germany and what was happening to democracy and Europe's Jews. She believed that the state was a "predatory instrument" and had an enlightening point of view on what work meant: "Work is an essential of life itself as necessary as bread and love...the chance to choose one's work, and pursue it, is the chance to become a more effective human being." She engrained this mantra in her soul, and was working til the very day she died. By 1937 she had received six honorary university degrees, invitations to speak at important forums, clubs, dinners, and commencements attended by hundreds of people. Her work ethic and strong moral code is her greatest strength, but when it came to keeping a job with the New York Tribune it was her weakness. Reid, the woman that originally offered Thompson the job, suppressed a column she had written when she switched her support from Willkie to Roosevelt in presidential election of 1940. Starting then she was urged to focus on nonpolitical subjects, which caused her to move to the New York Post saying that she felt "an unbridgeable hostility" towards her at the Tribune. 

Overall, Dorothy Thompson was a powerhouse of a woman, and will forever be remembered as one of the few people who saw the evil and danger in Hitler and the Nazis from the very beginning. She saw them for what they were, and did everything she could to make it known to the rest of the world. She was a fighter for good, and believed that "indulging in hatred and revenge would do more harm to oneself than to the enemy."

Good Night & Good Luck

In class we watched the movie “Good Night, and Good Luck” (2005) which was directed by none other than George Clooney. It’s set during the McCarthy Era, the Red Scare, and times of communist mistrust, and was based on an entirely true story from the 1950s. The main purpose of the movie is to display to the audience how the government’s involvement has turned into the government silencing the media. It also highlights the issues within media companies, and how corporate and editorial tend to butt heads on many points. 

The film follows the storyline of the main character, Edward Murrow (David Strathairn), he’s a reporter at CBS and was famous for going after one of the biggest stories, McCarthy. Despite the rumors swirling around Murrow being a part of the communist party, he decides to lead a charge against McCarthy and the government, calling them out for corruption and fabrications of McCarthy. Following the lead of McCarthysim, ignoring the threats of losing his prime time slot, he created a show with his colleagues that exposed all of McCarthy’s malpractices. 

Once the news broke, the movie shows how quick other news companies picked up the story and ran with it, each giving an opposing viewpoint on Edward Murrow’s actions. One calls them brave, while the other says they spew propaganda in a machiavellian manner. But the main purpose was to bait Senator McCarthy into coming onto the show himself. It was an ingenious plan, as the senator went in for the interview, threw out a bunch of nonsense, and left. Following his appearance Murrow went live, naming true or false on everything said prior, which got the senate to open up an investigation. His determination and lack of fear of communism and the government is what contributed to his success in exposing Senator Joseph McCarthy for his corruption and lies. 

Going off some of the talking points from the discussion class, this movie shows how with keeping the press and government separate, bad people can be pushed out of office. That the press is in place as a check on the government and their job is to critique and comment on the actions of the government. It also points out how the press censor themselves, or rather their writers, and how pushing past that is crucial even if your job is put in jeopardy. It also explains that just because higher ups don’t say no, it doesn’t mean they aren’t censoring or silencing in different ways; the example being pulling Murrow’s show. 

Trying to find similarities in the Red Scare and today’s political climate is difficult, we aren’t in a time where anyone really thinks about communism, and I feel like we are past our witch hunt days. But, what we are experiencing is possibly the press abusing their ability to check the government as they’ve begun to check everyone, through cancel culture. 

I'm assuming you’re confused, why is the press checking random people? Well they aren’t, they are checking up on all the high profile people in our society: celebrities, politicians, business owners, etc. They take deep dives into their online posts from years past, comment on their political beliefs, and tear them apart for basic beliefs that they have every right to hold - whether it’s politically correct or not. This has leaked into ordinary people’s lives, and they’ve begun checking or rather canceling each other. 

Connecting this back to our timelines in class, and figuring out what to name this era - one so heavily littered with cancel culture, and social media obsessed consumers. I would name this era, The Instant Media Era, because I think it captures multiple aspects of our time period in one word. If you say the wrong thing, you have instant consequences, and vice versa if you do something right, you are instantly celebrated. Celebrities come and go in an instant, and politicians' entire careers can be destroyed or created in a snap of a finger. The news stories are posted as soon as they come out, and updates are happening live. Everything is at our fingertips, and knowledge could be ours at a moment’s notice. Thus, the Instant Media Era.

The Women's Pages.

 The Women's Pages was a Late Nineteenth-Century publisher's dream. It was a cheap, innovative way of hiring female writers, gaining advertisements, appealing to a wider audience, all while bringing in copious amounts of money. Nicknamed "Mrs. Consumers", it was clear by the 1930s that this was the key to success in the American economy. 

The content of this page, was in its essence sexist. It only talked about topics / stories pertaining to beauty, housekeeping, parental advice, and serial fiction. It worked to reinforce gender norms, feeding directly into female audiences, portraying the myth of the "Ideal American Woman" as a financially comfortable, white woman rooted in her housework. These newspapers explicitly expressed values of white supremacy, but also served as a platform for women to speak to each other on topics of substance under the nose of doubting men. It was a paradox, both limiting and liberating, because it created a separate sphere in the paper. It started off small, with new features, different genres, visual motifs, and topics, with the addition of interactive columns where women shared recipes, advice, etc. The Women's Pages were also the influence for stunt reporting and celebrity gossip as new genres in papers we still see today. 

There were also different versions of the Women's Pages across different newspapers, some of which helped cultivate bonds of affinity between women. One example is from a Yiddish Women's Pages, where they wrote about their own ideological agendas, where they figured out how to "fuse normal women's content with either socialism or religious orthodoxy." It was all done sneakily, as male editors saw these columns as trivial, so women used their ignorance to covertly talk about their own politics, such as suffrage, workplace harassment, etc. 

An interesting example of women run, written, and released Women's Pages is one called the Chicago Defender. It was written by African American women, with a strictly feminist, pro-women approach to content. One of the writers for the paper was Vauleda Hill Strodder, who wrote under the pen name of Princess Mysteria. Her column was named "Advice to the Wise and Otherwise", where she discussed current events, societal expectations, and was a true inspiration to other women. She covered a lot on the roles of wives and mothers, along with a high dosage of high society news. But, the real intrigue to Princess Mysteria was her interaction with fan letters about their own life, she would write back sometimes publishing her response. A quote from one of these occurrences is "This guy is not worth your time. He has an unfixable flaw." 

Another newspaper of importance was the Pensacola Journal, running from January 1905 - December 1914. It had a society page geared towards offering insight into national cultural concerns for women, a page dedicated to "People and Events" highlighting social events with paragraph long descriptions. One of the writers for the paper, Mrs. Elizabeth Thompson who's articles in "Heart and Home Problems" provided practical advice to fans writing to her, on topics ranging from hygiene, to courtship, to achieving a better education. Women's Pages as a whole also tackled the topics related to the body - inside and out; with fashion and beauty addressed in the form of editorials, news reports, and advertisements. Some of the advertisements included products related to problems typically experienced by women, such as how to take care of the sick, or new advancements in the cooking world; but beyond that these ads also made false promises in curing "womanly troubles" through random, unrelated products. In "The Journal's Daily Fashion Feature" authors included drawings and descriptions of the up and coming clothing styles emerging from and around the United States and European countries. 

Overall, the Women's Pages were pivotal in providing a place for women in journalism. Whether they were writing about beauty and home, or suffrage and abortions, it was and still is an extremely important moment in journalism history.