Book Review

Journalism history rarely draws attention from other historians. Journalism historians, who mostly teach in journalism schools, tend to pose questions in ways that interest primarily scholars of journalism. Meanwhile, other historians use journalism but rarely interrogate journalism as a social practice.	1
The books under review here are welcome additions. All three break through a barrier separating journalism from larger realms of thought and practice. Still, they do so in little ways.	2
David T. Z. Mindich's Just the Facts explores the beginnings of journalistic objectivity. Mindich's book is unusual because he does not assume that journalistic objectivity is a system of thought; rather, he treats it as an assemblage of practices that have affinities for each other but are genealogically separate. Specifically, he identifies five components: detachment, nonpartisanship, the inverted pyramid structure, facticity, and balance. He proposes to trace the unlikely orgins of each.	3
Mindich gives unusual accounts, but they involve the usual suspects. Detachment and nonpartisanship begin with the penny press, especially James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald, the most usual suspect of all. Mindich offers new wrinkles, attributing detachment not to market forces, but to a reaction against the violence of the 1830s, and identifying a spectrum of positions within nonpartisanism—Bennett's "centrist" position, William Lloyd Garrison's "antipartisan" stance, and Frederick Douglass's "activist" nonpartisanism. But one might look farther back for other genealogies. Detachment has a precursor in the ideology of the "open press" associated with colonial printers, for instance, and nonpartisanism has a rich history in the various reactions against 1820s partisanism among anti-Masons and workies.	4
More interesting is Mindich's account of the origin of the inverted pyramid style. Now standard, the inverted pyramid—telling a story from end to beginning, from biggest point to smaller ones—meant a radical separation of journalism from vernacular styles of narrative. Scholars have therefore tended to associate it with ruptures in communicative practice—the introduction of the telegraph, for instance. Mindich's origin is another rupture—the Civil War—but remarkably the innovation comes, not from a news organization, but from the War Department, and specifically Edwin Stanton, whose dispatches were printed entire by most newspapers. This suggests that journalists borrowed and publicized forms from other "professional communicators" at a time when business, military, and political bureaucracies were forming. These forms conceal the processing of information and make it seem natural, and Mindich acknowledges the ominous implications.	5
Mindich's final chapter sees objectivity congeal as journalism's creed in the 1890s. He finishes off his genealogy by analyzing Ida B. Wells's antilynching campaign, which he reads as a critique of the false balance of the emergent professional stance. Wells, as an outsider but a reporter nonetheless, stands as both a defining other and a condemnation of objectivity.	. . .