Dorothy Thompson (1893 -1961)

 

Dorothy Thompson (1893 -1961)

Background

Dorothy Thompson was born on July 9, 1893, Lancaster, New York, to British immigrants.  She grew up in a religious household, her father was  a Methodist minister and frequently took her to visit to parishioners across the suburbs of upstate New York.  according to https://exhibitions.ushmm.org/americans-and-the-holocaust/personal-story/dorothy-thompson  At age 7, her mother died of sepsis. Soon after, her father remarried. However, Thompson and her stepmother didn’t see eye to eye. A few years later Thompson went to live with her aunts in Chicago , where she attended junior college called the Lewis Institute.

 

Thompson was a very bright student, and showed a passion for literature and discourse. She continued her education at Syracuse University and in 1914, she received her Bachelors degree. Thompson devoted herself to feminist pursuits. Her first job straight out of college was stuffing envelopes for the women's suffrage party,

 

         

Interesting Facts

In 1920, the 19th Amendment(granted women the right to vote), was ratified. Dorothy then decided to become a journalist and headed to Europe to look for a good story. In 1921, Thompson posed as a Red Cross medical assistant and infiltrated the inner circle of  the former King Karl I, a Hapsburg (German royal family) who sought to reclaim the Hungarian throne. She was the only journalist to report on the event from the inside. She accepted a full-time job as the Vienna correspondent and central European bureau chief for the Philadelphia Public Ledger.

 

In 1925, Thompson became the  New York Evening Post’s European bureau chief. She wrote aggressively insightful articles about the unstable political situation on the continent, specifically on the rise of  the emerging dictator of the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party  Adolf Hitler.

 

Thompson married novelist Sinclair Lewis, Thompson was stuck between a pastoral life with him at a farmhouse in Vermont and international assignments for the Evening Post. She was fascinated by the situation in Germany. By 1931 she spent much of her time writing, and extensively researched, incisive articles about the explosive rise of national socialism in Germany. Later that year, the Nazi party invited Thompson to interview Hitler for the Cosmopolitan Magazine.  She expanded the interview, publishing it along with her impressions in a book, I Saw Hitler!, which was released before Hitler was appointed German chancellor in 1933. She critised Hitler saying  that the interview was difficult because one could not carry a conversation with Hitler. She also stated that he always spoke as if  he were addressing a mass meeting .A hysterical note creeped into his voice, which rose sometimes almost to a scream.  She described him as giving  the impression of a man in a trance.

 

Thompson’s harsh criticism angered Hitler, he ordered her to leave Nazi Germany in 1934. She was the first American journalist to be expelled from the country by the Nazi regime. Back in America, Thompson devoted herself to publicly opposing the Nazis, and continued to take risks to oppose Nazism. In 1939, she disrupted a rally of American Nazi sympathizers, the German-American Bund, laughing during their speeches. She eventually had to be rescued by police. Thompson toured the country, lecturing the American public about the situation in Europe and passionately denouncing fascism in her popular radio broadcasts. She wrote a hugely popular political column, “On The Record,” three times each week from 1936 until 1958, and established herself as what one biographer has called “the leading American voice in the war against fascism.”

 

Her legacy

Thompson’s despair  affected what she wrote in her Ladies’ Home Journal column, the one public place where she wrote about gender roles, though only occasionally even there. Although as a professional journalist Thompson always downplayed the pertinence of sex to individual capacity or achievement, she identified deeply as a woman and believed women and men had essentially different needs and roles to play in sexual and family relationships.

 

Through the 1930s she energetically opposed the damaging (and misplaced Depression-provoked outcry against married women stealing men’s jobs and insisted eloquently on wives’ need and right to have paid employment of their own. American efforts to eliminate married women’s public and private employment fed her suspicions about creeping fascism.

 

Although  She became obsessed with the dangers of Hitler and fascism and advocated immediate American involvement in the war. Her voice was powerful. From 1936-1958 Thompson’s newspaper column ‘On the Record’ ran three times a week in over 170 papers, reaching an estimated audience of ten million people.  In 1958 Thompson was called the First Lady of American Journalism and began her memoirs, but got no further than her school years. She died on January 20, 1961 in Lisbon, Portugal, while visiting her grandsons.

Sources :

https://exhibitions.ushmm.org/americans-and-the-holocaust/personal-story/dorothy-thompson

https://legacyprojectchicago.org/person/dorothy-thompson#:~:text=She%20became%20obsessed%20with%20the,audience%20of%20ten%20million%20people.

https://lithub.com/a-good-journalist-understands-that-fascism-can-happen-anywhere-anytime/

 

 

 

EOTO#3 Women Pages

 

Women’ pages

The first women’s page appeared in the New York World in the 1890s.

Women’s pages quickly became essential for newspapers that featured society coverage, food and fashion.

By the 1950s and 60s, a new breed of women’s page editors arrived on the scene. There were journalists such as Dorothy Journey, Vivian Castleberry and Marj Paxson. These women remade the women’s pages giving them a “political bite.”

“Fake news”

Molly Iving told Mills that Castleberry and her Dallas Times-Herald reporters “got away with murder because the male editors never bothered to read it.”

Woman’s pages were writing about birth control and abortion but it wasn’t considered ‘real news’.

 According to Kimberley Voss, an associated professor of journalism at the University of Central Florida, “Woman’s Pages were simply fluff”. However, Voss also points out that they were doing good journalism, they were just wearing hats and white gloves because that’s what society required of them. Voss believes that women pages were quite revolutionary because, “they found a way to  play by the rules and get things done”. Voss said. However, the  growing feminist movement felt that women’s issues were as important as the stories on newspapers’ front pages. One example of this is when  Gloria Steinem  complained when she was profiled by a women’s page editor though . Voss also  notes that two years after Steinem spoke out against the women’s page, she admitted that she had been wrong, that there was a place for women’s pages.

The Transitions

 The first paper to transition was the Washington Post, on January 6, 1969. Ben Bradlee, editor at the Post, told mills that the reason for the change was to “treat women as people and not as appendages to men,” as well as organize the paper between work and leisure, rather than men and women .

Jean Taylor who became the editor of the Los Angeles Times “view” section a year after its 1970 founding, complained to Mills that it was women who considered her section as unimportant. “We artificially had to put esteem into women's sections by bringing men in, by running stories all people would be interested in.'' This also included hiring male writers. Marj Paxson was laid off in 1970, after getting an award for her work at the St. Petersburg Times’s women’s section [now the Tampa Bay Times]. She was then hired as women’s editor of the Philadelphia Bulletin. However her job there  disappeared in favor of a “Focus” section with a male editor. She told Mills, “We were not considered capable of directing this new kind of feature section. That was man’s work.”

Feminist Movement

Feminist continue  to rightly complain of being pushed out of the more “serious” sections and worry about being discussed alongside the day’s fashions leads to more focus on their clothes and makeup, than their ideas, and stories on “woman's issues” that hit front pages are often still written by men. They provide space for women to talk to each other, since we’re still too often left out of the conversation in front of male audiences.

 

 

 

 

Good Night and Good Luck

 Good Night, And Good Luck 

The movie we watched during our last class was phenomenal. There were several reasons why I thought that this film was good.

 

          One of the reasons why this film stood out to me was that it was filmed in mostly black and white, it focused strictly on those few months in 1954, it also highlights Edward Murrow, along with his courage, and high standards,  and took place indoors mostly within the CBS headquarters in NY. However, the film has some of its flaws. The film showed nothing about Murrow's early background, or his private life at that time.

 

Based on what I saw in the film, it is safe to say that McCarthy was betrayed as an arrogant, deceitful figure. The film then transitioned to October 1953. Murrow and his news team which includes producer and Fred Friendly, come upon a story from Dexter, which is about the Air Force choosing to discharge lieutenant, Milo Radulovich because his father was accused of communist ties.

Overall, the purpose of “Good Night and Good Luck in my opinion was solely focused on Murrow’s hesitations about the misuse of technology is true in today’s era of informational misrepresentation. The film ends with Murrow's iconic welcome, “Good night, and good luck.” However, as Murrow underlines to his audience at the banquet that bookends the film, the responsibility to demand truth from political turmoil ultimately rests on citizens themselves. Perhaps “good luck” is a nod to this dual responsibility and privilege that individuals possess to demand more from the systems and institutions that surround them.

The film holds great significance because it takes place during the early days of broadcast journalism in the 1950s. It records the real-life conflict between television newsman Edward R. Murrow  and Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Permanent Sub-committee on Investigations (Government Operations Committee). With a desire to report the facts and enlighten the public, Murrow, and his dedicated staff – headed by his producer Fred Friendly (George Clooney) and Joe Wershba (Robert Downey Jr.) in the CBS newsroom resisting corporate and sponsorship pressures to examine the lies and scaremongering tactics perpetrated by McCarthy during his communist ‘witch-hunts.’

EOTO reflections the black press

 EOTO Continued 

Based on all of the presentations we launched for our second EOTO project , there was at least one presentation that stood out to me 

If I recall, there were two groups that did a presentation on a topic called “The Black Press”. Based on the information that I gathered from watching two presentations there were some important things that I learned. The Black Press advanced black literature, reported black crimes, advocated for the African American community, sought to increase literacy and awareness of world events for black people, advertised black products, and hired influential writers. although  publications only lasted for 2 years, the black press reached 11 states and other editorials focused on antislavery, racial discrimination, and other injustices, more importantly, the black press depicted African Americans in a intellectual and positive light. 

This press is generally defined as black-owned and operated newspapers that focus on the interests and concerns of African Americans. In recent years, the black press has been the topic of books, scholarly and trade articles, monographs, and television documentaries. The press black paved the way for the establishment for over 40 black publishers by the start of the civil war. What makes the black press really essential is that they embraced the newspapers as a sign of their freedom, and as a source of information about their people and their communities. The black press of the Reconstruction era dedicated itself to building communities the of free black men and women in both the North and South.

Other most fascinating facts

According to https://nnpa.org/black-press-history over the years there were a list of publishers, editors, journalists, and cartoonists which included the greatest names in American history, such as  Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Ida B. Wells Barnett, Langston Hughes, Romare Bearden, James Weldon Johnson, Mary McLeod Bethune and Daisy Bates.

Frederick Douglass The North Star, 1847

According tohttps://niemanreports.org/articles/timeline-of-the-black-press/

The North star was founded by Fredrick Douglass and Martin Delany. Published in Rochester, New York, the North Star advocated for the abolition of enslavement and covered politics in Europe, as well as literature and culture. other important papers included, The California Eagle, founded by John J. Neimore, and Charlette Bass became the owner and publisher of the Los Angeles-based paper in 1912, making her the first female African-American newspaper publisher in the U.S. She established an activist tradition  campaigning   against D.W. Griffith’s film “The Birth of a Nation.” The Eagle also advocated for an end to segregation in housing, jobs, and transportation.

EOTO#2 journalism Heros

 

EOTO#2 journalism Heros 

 At the end of the nineteenth century, a wave of women rethought what journalism could say, sound like, and do. “Sensational : The Hidden History of America’s ‘Girl Stunt Reporters’” Kim Todd evokes a league of women casting their lessons of truth.  In the second half of the nineteenth century, Todd argues that a new wave of journalists emerged. 

Kim Todd’s “Sensational : The Hidden History of America’s ‘Girl Stunt Reporters’” unfolds the years following the Civil War as a defining era of experimenting with what a newspaper, a nation, or even a woman might be. 

She was one of the nation's “girl stunt reporters “ who pioneered a new genre of investigative journalism, going undercover to reveal societal ills. Her name was Nellie Bly.

Nellie bly was born 1864, in Cochran's Mills, Pennsylvania. Her father was an influential judge, and he also was a role model for will and determination. Nellie Bly learned the art of standing out from the crowd from her mother. When Nellie was six years old, her father died unexpectedly. Her mother then remarried, however her new husband was abusive and incapable of supporting the family. The marriage ended six years later.

At age fourteen, Nellie was called upon to testify at her mother’s divorce trial. During the miserable years of her mother’s second marriage, Nellie then realized that she was not going to depend on herself. At age sixteen, Nellie and her family moved to Pittsburgh. Her brothers quickly found white collar jobs. However, jobs that were available to girls and women were in factories and  sweatshops.Teaching was one of the few professions  that were opened to women and becoming a teacher would allow her to make her way into the world. After only one semester the money ran out.

Throughout the 1880’s and 90’s women from Colorado to Missouri to Massechustes dressed in shabby clothes, sneaked into textile mills to report on factory conditions, and slipped behind the scenes at adoption agencies that were corrupt.  

At the time, a revolution in printing technology made putting paper out cheaper than ever, before a flood of immigrants offered a mesmerizing new audience. Newspaper rooms from San Francisco’s  the examiner, to New York’s  world, battled viciously for market share with weapons of scandal and innovation. However, advances in printing technology made mass publishing more affordable as inmigrantes were pouring into the United States “offered new audiences” for letters, and industrialization, a rich source of narrative drama, was creating both wealth and misery.

When Nellie Bly’s 1887 “Inside the Madhouse” series for the World hit the streets of New York, readers couldn’t get enough. She had faked insanity to get committed to the asylum at Blackwell’s Island so she could document the starvation and abuse of patients. However, writing by women has historically been devalued and the nineteenth century was no exception. 

Stunt reporters challenged the views of what women should be. Even Though they could not cast a ballot, women reporters could interview presidential candidates. They could not sit in juries, but the world could enrolled 12 female reporters and editors to offer their perspective on certain court cases.

Antiwar post: Civil War Propaganda and New England by George Winston Smith

antiwar post: Civil War Propaganda and New England by George Winston Smith 

 

According to George Winston Smith, Northern civilizations made the American civil war their own. It was very critical politicians and general a like, were quivering between hopes of victory and terrifying pre- directions of the future, calling for repair against uncorrected wrongs, people of the North wrote letters to the press, also sent petitions to congress, and staged mass meetings and gathered in  private groups to analyze almost every policy that was related to conflict. Because of an ineffective and mostly periodic censorship, the military was common knowledge. However, to a great extent the direction of public opinion became the function of  non- governmental agencies .

 

With american tendencies for joining together in organizations, it became very clear that organizations such as clubs, leagues, and societies especially for the” enlightenment”, for fellow citizens through the “diffusion”, of “correct” information and in Boston it was a successful merchant in China trade and railroad capitalist, John Murray Forbes who led such a movement. During the summer of 1862 Forbes began to select important editorials from the daily editors such as the New York Evening post and the Boston Advertiser which led to stalwarts among the antislavery press. Businessmen and civil leaders were already aware of the issues. The masses were instructed that the war was a struggle between aristocracy and popular government. During the fourth week in January, 1863, Forbes drew up a “ rough sketch of a club for republishing”and sent it to his friend Samual J Ward. 

 

James B Thayer, a young Boston lawyer of literary bent, who was nearly ten years away from his profession in law school. However,although Loweel  took no direct part in the society, he maintained close friendship with Norton, who later became the editor of this publication. Thayer and his sister Sara worked as a clerk, and were soon installed in an office, which was a general clearing house for correspondence and the scene for editorial work for Norton, carefully reading layers of news papers, clippings, attaching editorial headings, even writing dozens of leading articles himself. However voluntary subscriptions did not equal the amount in which Forbes needed to carry out other far reaching propaganda plans but there was an appreciation of the need for influencing opinion among a sufficient number of Boston businessmen. However the executive committee  in addition to Forbes, Norton and Thayer, also consisted of Reverend Edward Everette Hale, a unitarian clergyman, who had tried to win Kansas for “free labor “ in the 1850’s.  

 

         However,  Boston merchants Henry B. Rogers and William Endicott Jr, also served on the committee ( the latter also as Treasurer), and was elected president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Forbes , the New England loyal publication society at first distributed printed slips that were sent to newspapers. However, within a short amount of time it was publishing its own broadsides, and eventually some of them were paper size printed on one side good  rag- content “white” paper with a banner on top, carrying the society’s name.  

EOTO( 1)BLOG

 

The AP (Associated Press)

 

         The Associated Press is a non profit newsgathering cooperative whose content is seen by half of the world’s population daily. The AP provides news and graphics by wire to over 1,700 member newspapers and 6,000 member television and radio stations in the United states.

 

         According to https://www.encyclopedia.com,  the Associated Press was first established in 1848. Six of the most important daily newspapers in  New York City decided to fund their resources in order to cut costs. Representatives of the Journal of Commerce, the New York Sun, the Herald, the Counter, the Enquire, the Txpress, and the New York Tribune, were able to put aside their competitive differences and the Associated Press of New York was born.

 

In the beginning the purpose of the organization was strictly for financial reasons. By distributing all news that arrived by the telegraph wire and dividing the expenses evenly. Each member was given the dangers of losing information to a higher bidder. By 1850, the group had its first paying customers, the Philadelphia public Ledger and Baltimore sun, were given access to AP dispatchers for a fee without becoming actual members. However over the next several years, the number of newspapers outside of New York grew, and the AP was able to recover half of its expenses through its sale of news. In 1862, the Western Associated Press (WAP), was created by a group of Midwestern daily newspapers. As WAP gained strength, friction developed between them and their New York origin. The Western papers felt that they were being overcharged for European news, which by the 1860s was flowing steadily to the United States by underwater telegraph cable. However, in 1882, the first serious rival emerged, when  the United Press (UP), led by William M. Laffan of the New York Sun, was formed. From 1925 to 1945, the AP grew into an enormous international news machine under Kent Cooper. According to  https://www.encyclopedia.com, Cooper saw countless ways to improve the organization’s methods of collecting and distributing information. One of his most important moves was his ongoing battle to free the AP from its obligations to import European news.Cooper saw that news from European agencies was often slanted in favor of their home governments. He believed that the only way for the AP to receive accurate accounts of events abroad was to use its own reporters.The AP opened bureaus in Great Britain, France, and Germany in 1929, and until 1934, the Ap completely broke away from those confining arrangements. During the 1970’s technological progress continued to improve AP services. One of its breakthroughs during this period was the Laserphoto news picture system, developed jointly with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The Laserphoto system allowed the AP to transmit photographs of a much higher quality than was previously possible to both print and broadcast members. Between 1995 and 1999 further growth and change developed.According to  https://www.encyclopedia.com, In 1995 came the introduction of AP AdSEND, a digital advertising delivery service. For a small per-use fee, advertisers could upload copy and images into an AP database, which could then be downloaded by newspapers and other users.The system saved both time and money for advertisers, and enabled wider and easier distribution of advertising messages.

In 1998 AP celebrated its 150th anniversary. The company's video service was expanded during the year with the purchase of the Worldwide Television News agency from ABC. APTV was subsequently renamed APTN, or Associated Press Television News.