Historical Authority and the ‘Potent Journalistic Reputation’: A Longer View of Legacy-Making in American News Media

Abstract

The peak moment of American journalism’s power and prestige is debatable, but many observers would be likely to place it somewhere in the middle decades of the twentieth century, a time when a handful of high-profile newsmen and major news institutions had the visibility, resources and reach to make them important historic actors. In his 1969 book The Kingdom and the Power, Gay Talese described the influence of the one news institution he held above all: … each day, barring labor strikes or hydrogen bombs, it would appear in 11,464 cities around the nation and in all the capitals of the world, 50 copies going to the White House, 39 copies to Moscow, a few smuggled into Beijing, and a thick Sunday edition to the foreign minister in Taiwan, because he required the Times as necessary proof of the earth’s existence, a barometer of its pressure, an assessor of its sanity. If the world did indeed still exist, he knew, it would be duly recorded each day in the Times.(Talese, 1969: 72) This tribute to the New York Times is recited in the narration of Page One: Inside the New York Times, a 2011 documentary film by Andrew Rossi in which the newspaper’s media reporters discuss the current ‘crisis’ in newspaper journalism.