Journalism 100 Years Ago Versus Today - Page 3

Similarities

But in some areas there is not much difference between 2006 and 1906. Take, for example, the relationship between the news media and the government.

The investigative journalism in recent years that finds dirt and scandals in politicians’ lives does not sound too different from the muckrakers or the critical remarks of someone like Mencken. Put another way, there is a contentious, at times adversarial, relationship between the government and the news media.

An anecdote about Mencken brought to mind the flap when Vice President Dick Cheney cussed out a reporter and not only didn't apologize the next day but said it felt good to say what was on his mind. That does not sound too different from when President Franklin Roosevelt spoke at the Gridiron Club in December 1934.

Roosevelt got back at all of Mencken's written assaults on him by reading a speech that was nothing but excerpts from acerbic remarks Mencken had made over the years about reporters and editors. And this is, mind you, at a dinner consisting mainly of reporters and editors and politicians.

But while the relationship between the fourth estate and the president remains amicable at times, combative at others, 100 years ago and now, the actual technology used by the reporters has changed enormously during that century.

Differences

Reporters of today use cell phones, laptop computers, pagers, and faxes. That is in major contrast to the conditions under which H.L. Mencken worked, which were described this way:

“Even by comparison with the old-fashioned newsrooms immortalized by Hollywood, the Herald’s fifth-floor city room would strike a modern-day visitor as primitive. It contained two telephones, no teletypes and few typewriters — much of the paper’s copy was still written by hand — though each desk had its own spittoon, a modern convenience of which Mencken made regular use, then and later.”

There is another significant difference between then and now for investigative reporters, says Hamill:

In my experience, most of today’s investigative reporters have vague politics. In that sense, they don’t resemble the great generation of muckrakers at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who were men and women with an idealistic, mainly socialistic vision of the America that would emerge from their labors. Today’s investigators have an almost permanent skepticism about human virtue, political or otherwise.

Another major change has been who owns the actual newspapers.

Article Author: Scott Butki

Scott Butki was a newspaper reporter for more than 10 years before making a career change into education.

He is an in-house media critic, a recovering Tetris addict and a proud uncle.

Visit Scott Butki's author page — Scott Butki's Blog