Suchergebnisse

The new chairman for courses in journalism at the University of Idaho reports on a plan for measuring the intensity of a paper's political leanings in several areas of news performance. Done as research for his Ph.D. thesis at Missouri, Dr. Price's work is a pilot study for a large-scale analysis of election news.

Labor-management relations in the newspaper industry were building up to the gravest crisis since the days of the early Guild organization in the fall of 1947 as the International Typographical Union voted a showdown on the Taft-Hartley act and the publishers' associations lined up to oppose them. The continuing rise in the cost of newsprint added to the production problems in the publishing field. In the editorial field, the formation of a new national association of editorial writers and a new continuing study of AP news reports emphasized the newspapers' interests in improved reading matter. The question of international news freedom reached the United Nations in several forms, and at once resulted in the usual lineups of opposing groups in favor of or opposed to lessened controls over information.—W. F. S.

Newsprint shortages constituted the biggest trade news in American journalism in this quarter, as a Congressional inquiry and grand jury investigations carried the search as far as Canada and Alaska. In the field of radio there was some prospect of a general revision of the Communications Act by Congress, with both radio broadcasters and the FCC arguing against certain proposed changes. The so-called Hut chins report on press freedom continued to stir controversy, and spectacular developments in mechanical production of newspapers eliminating some of the standard procedures of the present were under serious study as American journalism still sought to stabilize its postwar economic position– W. F. S.

Controversy with governmental agencies, both at home and abroad, continued to occupy individuals and institutions in the field of journalism throughout the last quarter of 1951. Tentative efforts to bridge the gap between editors and the Truman administration over the classification of governmental news broke down when newspaper groups refused to be drawn into consultation to set up categories of information. To this controversy was added a flare-up over the declaration of a truce line in Korea and a subsequent "cease-fire" order which the Associated Press tentatively attributed directly to the White House. The exchanges between President Truman and the AP for a time dwarfed the Korean war on the news wires and at the end of the period there were no reports of cease-fire orders in either the Korean or the Truman-AP "wars." Press services and correspondents came under attack also from private individuals. These sorties included General Charles Willoughby's assertion that certain reporters and newspapers had been "defeatist" and misleading in their dispatches from Korea during the retreat from the Yalu River in late 1950 while he was intelligence chief for General MacArthur's Far Eastern command. Press services were criticized for alleged inadequate coverage of vast sections of the world by several former foreign correspondents. The accused denied everything. As the new year came in, further developments were awaited in the Oatis case in Czechoslovakia and the trial of five newsmen charged with defamation of county officials and gamblers in Lake Charles, La. In the latter case testimony had been completed and the decision was under deliberation by the single judge.

Political and economic threats to press freedom constituted the most significant development in the third quarter of 1951. The farcical Czech conviction of AP Correspondent William Oatis stirred official Washington action in retaliation but by the end of the quarter had not resulted in Oatis' release. In the United States a Louisiana newspaper's efforts to expose gambling and official laxness in prosecuting it resulted in a brazen indictment of the journalists for "defaming" the officials. Amid these threats to free expression, however, a committee of Washington newsmen set an example of adherence to the principle of freedom by turning down an editors' suggestion that Tass representatives be barred from the press galleries as spies. … On the economic side, the International Typographical Union sought to counter the trend toward newspaper monopolies by starting three competing dailies. However, the threat of still higher newsprint prices was causing many dailies to go up to 10 cents a copy and the hunt for cheap and plentiful substitute raw materials for newsprint production continued.—W. F. S.

The professional aspect of journalism came in for an especial degree of discussion during the spring of 1948 as the ACEJ made its long-awaited announcement of its first list of accredited institutions. Several individual schools reported on their educational programs in the trade and professional journals, and in the newspaper field an increasing interest was shown in problems of improved news writing and readability of news copy. These seemed to be related signs of a general awareness that journalism was in a state of change. Mechanically this was reflected in continued research into "cold type" printing and related processes, the Chicago Tribune's experiment with newsprint made from straw, and the Chicago Herald-American's work in magnetic ad layout sheets. The printers' fight with publishers over the Taft-Hartley law continued indecisively, meantime. With television coverage of the national political conventions in Philadelphia, radio in the field of public events entered a major new phase of development itself, and in radio circles also there was increased interest in the professional responsibility of communications. —W. F. S.