This study excavates the history of the American reporter to explicate the development of journalistic independence from the 1890s to 1980s. During the late 19th and 20th centuries, American reporters fought in wars, assisted U.S. intelligence, engaged in secret diplomacy, shaped domestic policy, and extended the arm of police and federal agencies, monitoring U.S. citizens, solving crimes, and testifying in court. Before 1945, reporters traveled multiple routes into this “state work,” including during the War of 1898, the Mexican Revolution, the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the two world wars, and domestic reform efforts. From the early Cold War to the 1980s, however, reporters increasingly sought, and mostly achieved, separation from the state. In the nineteenth century, a nonpartisan editorial stance and autonomy from party organizations defined journalistic independence. By the late 1960s, independence had evolved to prohibit reporters from engaging in military action and other forms of state collaboration, including espionage, court testimony, and propaganda, radically revising the acceptable limits of reporters’ activity to define the ideal of a modern independent reporter, which human rights groups began exporting globally in the late 1970s.
Taking the form of a collective biography, each chapter of the dissertation spotlights a famous, infamous, or previously unknown reporter whose career exposed the usually submerged question of state collaboration and revealed wider changes within journalism at home and abroad. Expanding the scope of U.S. political and journalism history to document the hidden ways reporters served as instruments of national power, State Work challenges the idealized folk theory of the free press – which casts the fourth estate as a fully autonomous check on private and public power. In so doing, this study undermines the stubbornly persistent myth of a historically weak U.S. state. By exposing the reporter as a hidden agent of governance, State Work adds a new thread to the scholarship on public-private collaboration in American political development.
Based on more than a dozen archives, including the papers of Sylvester Scovel (Missouri Historical Society), William Bayard Hale (Yale University), the New York Times Company and the Committee of Fourteen (New York Public Library), the New York World (Columbia University), Lorena Hickok, Ruby Black, and Harry L. Hopkins (Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library), Woodrow Wilson (Library of Congress), Office of Strategic Services (National Archives), the Associated Press (AP headquarters in New York City) and others, State Work contributes to the ongoing reinterpretation of U.S. political and journalism history. / 2026-06-30T00:00:00Z
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/46369 |
| Date | 16 June 2023 |
| Creators | DeFraia, Daniel |
| Contributors | Schulman, Bruce J., Daly, Christopher B. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/ |
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