Posts Tagged ‘Newspapers’
“Language brings with it an identity and a culture, or at least the perception of it.”*…
Liz Tracey on Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language— and the way that it declared Americans free from the tyranny of British institutions and their vocabularies…
Sometimes, a dictionary is more than just words and definitions—it may be intended to serve as a declaration of linguistic independence. When Noah Webster’s first edition of the American Dictionary of the English Language was published in April 1828, it held 70,000 words, 12,000 of which were making their first appearance in dictionary form. Webster’s goals for the work were grand: “to furnish a standard of our vernacular tongue, which we shall not be ashamed to bequeath to three hundred millions of people, who are destined to occupy, and I hope, to adorn the vast territory within our jurisdiction.”
Noah Webster’s roles in the formation of the early United States were manifold: editor of the Federalist Papers, owner and editor of the first American daily newspaper [see below], textbook author, a founder of Amherst College, promoter of the first US copyright laws, and author of one of the first works on epidemiology, used by nineteenth-century medical schools.
But his 1828 dictionary is what he’s remembered for, coming at a tremendous personal cost: twenty-one years invested, and a lifelong struggle with debt. In his preface to the three-volume work, he writes of his hopes that the dictionary will result in his fellow Americans’ “improvement and their happiness; and for the continued increase of the wealth, the learning, the moral and religious elevation of character, and the glory of my country.”…
More at: “Webster’s Dictionary 1828: Annotated,” from @liztracey in @JSTOR_Daily.
* Trevor Noah, Born a Crime
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As we vindicate vernacular, we might recall that it was on this date in 1846 that the first edition of the Cambridge Chronicle was published. One of the earliest weeklies in the U.S., it served the newly-incorporated city of Cambridge, MA– using language consistent with Webster’s dictionary. (Nearby Boston was home to the first U.S. newspaper, the Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, which was founded in 1690 (albeit short-lived).
The Cambridge Chronicle is technically the longest continuously-published weekly newspaper in the U.S… though it ceased original serving up original content in 2022, after being purchased by Gannett. It now re-publishes regional stories from other Gannett papers.
As for Webster, he began his journalistic career in 1779, writing articles for New England newspapers justifying the Revolutionary War. In 1793, Alexander Hamilton recruited him to edit the leading Federalist Party newspaper; then in December of that year, Webster founded New York’s (and the new American nation’s) first daily newspaper American Minerva, later renamed the Commercial Advertiser, which he edited for four years (writing the equivalent of 20 volumes of articles and editorials).
“Every time a newspaper dies, even a bad one, the country moves a little closer to authoritarianism”*…
The state of local journalism in the U.S. is an altogether justified topic of concern.
Since 2005, the country has lost more than a fourth of its newspapers (2,500) and is on track to lose a third by 2025. Even though the pandemic was not the catastrophic “extinction-level event” some feared, the country lost more than 360 newspapers between the waning pre-pandemic months of late 2019 and the end of May 2022. All but 24 of those papers were weeklies, serving communities ranging in size from a few hundred people to tens of thousands. Most communities that lose a newspaper do not get a digital or print replacement. The country has 6,380 surviving papers: 1,230 dailies and 5,150 weeklies…
The State of Local News 2022
Research suggests that when newspapers disappear from communities, civic engagement declines (as do voting rates), partisan divides worsen, economic development suffers, and (absent oversight) the costs of local government rise… very sound reasons for concern.
But, as Rachel Matthews suggests, there is another reason to worry. Her focus is on the U.K., but sadly, her point is only too relevant to the U.S….
While we might take issue with the idea that there is less local news, it is undeniable that there is a decline in the legacy local newspaper with which we associate its delivery. This decline is in the numbers of titles and also, significantly, in their visibility. The move to digital has put papers online and also removed the surrounding trappings, such as town centre offices or newspaper sellers, from our streets. Financial pressures mean fewer staff, who are reliant on remote methods of communication rather than being visible in communities.
This loss of the physical newspaper is significant to the historian because the local newspaper’s physical legacy is that most often accessed by both professional and amateur historians…
How will we study the local past when we can’t read all about it? “What do historians lose with the decline of local news?“, from @ProvNewsHistory in @HistoryToday.
[Image above: source]
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As we read all about it, we might send informative birthday greetings to Robert Conley; he was born on this date in 1928. A newspaper, television, and radio reporter, he served a foreign correspondent for The New York Times and NBC News.
But Conley is probably best remembered as the founding host of NPR’s news and cultural program All Things Considered. His (and the show’s) first episode was inducted into the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress in 2016.
“I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed”*…
Perhaps because they– we– are not, there has arisen a culture of shaming. Charlie Tyson considers the rise of online humiliation…
“Men punish with shame,” wrote the sixteenth-century poet Thomas Wyatt. It is the “greatest punishment on earth, yea! greater than death.” Other forms of punishment—torture, solitary confinement—may do more to break the body and spirit. But the primitive power of shaming, and the reliability with which shame punishments are administered informally by the community as well as formally by the state, make it an especially disturbing mode of discipline. The ubiquity of shame punishments across many cultures—from the penal tattooing of slaves and criminals in ancient Rome to the stocks, pillory, and cucking stool of early modern England to the practice in modern China, only recently outlawed, of roping together suspected sex workers and forcing them to march barefoot through the streets—alerts us to the likelihood that we are dealing with a human propensity that can never be banished, only contained.
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An ambient culture of shame saturates the online social environment. On such platforms as Twitter or TikTok or YouTube the risk of humiliation is ever present. Some online performers have neutralized the threat of cringe through stylized self-embarrassment: comedians riff on their own narcissism; dancers engage in cartoonish slapstick, reminiscent of Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin (as if, on the internet, the history of cinema is replaying itself ), ensuring that they pie themselves in the face before anyone else can. The rest of us, fated to play “ourselves” before an unknown and fickle audience, must improvise other defenses.
Cancel culture, callouts, online harassment, mob justice, accountability: all of these terms refer to structurally similar phenomena (the targeting of the one by the many, in front of an audience), yet none offers a neutral description. What is decried as “cancel culture” is sometimes just spirited criticism; what is endorsed as “accountability” is sometimes gratuitous and cruel. Given the confusion and sophistry that mar discussion of online shaming, it is worth keeping two facts in mind. The first is that, regardless of one’s views about the merits of shaming in any one case, we have devised a social-technological structure in which persons can be selected virtually at random and held up for the scorn of thousands, as in the cases Jon Ronson recounted in his 2015 book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. The second is that these shame-storms occur not in a public square, as Twitter is sometimes misleadingly dubbed, but in spaces controlled by private capital. “Egged on by algorithms,” Cathy O’Neil writes in her book The Shame Machine, “millions of us participate in these dramas, providing the tech giants with free labor.” Pile-ons increase engagement. Our fury pads the purses of tech capitalists.
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Skepticism about public shaming was once widely shared by leftists and liberals, on the grounds that shaming threatens dignity and tends to target stigmatized groups. Article 12 of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that people deserve protection from attacks on their “honour and reputation.” Shame campaigns might be deployed effectively, and justly, in response to harms committed by corporations or governments. But shaming citizens was another matter. A good society was supposed to defend its members from humiliation.
These days, shaming is more in vogue. Many commentators on the left, while rejecting the shaming of vulnerable groups (queer people, poor people, people with disabilities), see the technique as a valuable way of shoring up social norms. Some argue that it’s an effective response to racist and sexist behavior. Tressie McMillan Cottom recently argued in The New York Times that shaming is a corrective to a white-dominated culture: against the backdrop of a more open and diverse public square, “shame is evidence of a democratic society operating democratically.”
Yet in its insistence on conformity, shaming, even when harnessed for ostensibly progressive ends, has a conservative flavor. Indeed, though the American right may complain about cancel culture, it has an undeniable taste for public shaming. The right-wing Twitter account Libs of TikTok, for instance, has gained more than a million followers by holding up queer and trans people as objects of disgust. The account’s method is to rip videos from TikTok (featuring, say, gender-fluid teenagers talking about their pronouns), a strategy that should remind us that our theater of shame is not a single toxic website but an entire networked architecture. Conservatives have also enlisted the force of law to shame transgender people, as with bills mandating genital exams for young athletes whose gender is disputed. The ascent of Donald Trump, whose principal qualifications seemed to be his immunity to shame and his gusto for shaming others (as when he mocked a reporter’s disability and taunted Michael Bloomberg for being short), confirms the political resonance of shame in our present moment.
Structural problems in how the online world is organized have also deformed our thinking about shame. The most popular social-media sites are commercial platforms flooded with advertising and propaganda and run by black-box algorithms that exploit shaming campaigns to boost user engagement. A neutral public square this is not. The wide reach of digital life means that one’s reputation can be muddied in a matter of minutes; the speed and scale at which this can take place make today’s online shaming dynamics different from past forms of shame punishment. Technology companies have handed us weapons of reputational damage that are invariably set to hair-trigger alert. The result is an atmosphere of surveillance in which the threat of humiliation has emerged as an effective tool of social control…
A provocative analysis, eminently worth reading in full: “Theater of Shame,’ from @CharlieTyson1 in @YaleReview.
(Image above: source)
* Jonathan Swift
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As we mind our manners, we might recall that it was on this date in 1896 that Richard F. Outcault‘s comic strip Hogan’s Alley— featuring “the Yellow Kid” (Mickey Dugan)– debuted in William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. While “the Yellow Kid” had appeared irregularly before, it was the first the first full-color comic to be printed regularly (many historians suggest), and one of the earliest in the history of the comic; Outcault’s use of word balloons in the Yellow Kid influenced the basic appearance and use of balloons in subsequent newspaper comic strips and comic books. Outcault’s work aimed at humor and social commentary; but (perhaps ironically) the concept of “yellow journalism” referred to stories which were sensationalized for the sake of selling papers (as in the publications of Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, an earlier home to sporadic appearances of the Yellow Kid) and was so named after the “Yellow Kid” cartoons.
“I suppose illustration tends to live in the streets, rather than in the hermetically sealed atmosphere of the museum, and consequently it has come to be taken less seriously”*…
But surely, it shouldn’t necessarily be so. Consider Tom Gauld (@tomgauld). He’s probably best known for his work for The New Yorker (e.g.) and The New York Times (e.g.); but he’s also an accomplished cartoonist. Your correspondent’s favorites are his on-going contributions to The Guardian Review (above and below)
… and The New Scientist…
See more of his marvelous work at his site.
* master illustrator Quentin Blake.
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As we visualize it, we might send carefully limned birthday greetings to Richard McClure Scarry; he was born on this date in 1919. A children’s author and illustrator, he published over 300 books with total sales of over 100 million worldwide.
“We all know that an angry electorate is a voting electorate”*…
Further to yesterday’s post…
The final vote tallies still aren’t known, but the media verdict of this presidential election is in: it’s 2016 all over again. Four years ago, in the hours after Donald Trump declared victory on the strength of 306 Electoral College votes and the ballots of nearly sixty-three million Americans, I wrote a column about the failures of the press throughout that campaign, and declared that “journalism’s moment of reckoning” had arrived. “Reporters’ eagerness first to ridicule Trump and his supporters, then to dismiss them, and finally to actively lobby and argue for their defeat have led us to a moment when the entire journalistic enterprise needs to be rethought and rebuilt,” I wrote then.
It is astonishing, today, how little we seem to have learned since. Once again, opinion polls were overhyped and under-scrutinized. Some of them were also wildly off—and, though that’s different from 2016, when the polls were largely accurate but widely misunderstood, it doesn’t let media organizations off the hook for their treatment of the numbers. Newsrooms leaned too heavily on polls as a substitute for on-the-ground reporting, and they were led astray. Journalists spent too much time talking to each other on Twitter, inhabiting an alternate algorithmic reality that bore little resemblance to the life of the country. And major media institutions made it all but impossible to envision that, despite the wealth of reporting on the president’s lies and his racism and his circus—nearly half the country remains beholden to the man and his beliefs. “We can’t go back to assuming, just because we think Donald Trump is an outlier, that he is not connecting to a lot of American people in ways that, frankly, a lot of us cannot understand,” Claire McCaskill, a former Missouri senator, said Wednesday morning on MSNBC. The feeling of déjà vu, and of lost journalistic opportunity, is inescapable…
Kyle Pope (@kylepope), editor of the Columbia Journalism Review on lessons unlearned: “What the polls show, and the press missed, again.”
On the problem(s) with polls, pair with “Of course Trump’s voters lie to pollsters. You call us all racists” (with an eye to the phenomenon it addresses– and the questions raised by the rationale it offers…)
For one (very compelling) account of why Pope’s project matters, see Fintan O’Toole’s “Democracy’s Afterlife.” (For more, see also Ron Brownstein, Roxane Gay, and George Packer on the same family of issues… there are lots of diagnoses abroad in the infosphere at the moment; these are among the best your correspondent has found.)
And for a resonant but different take on the necessary role of “honest journalism” going forward, see also Jay Rosen’s “America’s Press and the Asymmetric War for Truth.”
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As we look more deeply, we might recall that it was on this date (18 Brumaire in the French Republican Calendar) in 1799 that thirty-year-old Corsican General Napoleon Bonaparte overthrew the Directory in France and established the Consulate, ending the power of the revolutionary oligarchy and creating himself as First Consul… or dictator.
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