What is — or was — the “Golden Age” of journalism? Did the craft to which we happily dedicate part, or all, of our lives, actually have a golden age, like ancient Greece or French art? Has journalism as we know it today even been around long enough to have had an era that could meet that definition?
This question came up when Professor Jack Hamilton, head of the journalism school at Louisiana State University, delivered a lecture sponsored jointly by the OPC and the Associated Press on November 10, about his new book, Journalism’s Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting.
In the course of his talk, Professor Hamilton mentioned that many reporters and editors he had met saw themselves as having been part of a golden age, and Hamilton himself had settled on the period “between the wars” — meaning World Wars I and II — as journalism’s version of that.
This took me back three years, when I was one of a dozen AP staffers invited to write a new history of AP, titled Breaking News: How the Associated Press Covered War, Peace and Everything Else.
Delving into that project was a learning experience. In addition to determining that AP actually had been founded in 1846, not 1848, we recognized a salient historical truth — that the simultaneous invention of AP and the Morse telegraph was beyond fortuituous — the formation of a symbiotic alliance that became the foundation of American journalism and ultimately a global template.
Prior to that time, as Professor Hamilton himself noted, newspapers didn’t gather their own news. They didn’t have “reporters” as such, but filled their pages with letters, articles and essays lifted from other publications: Blogs and op-eds, 19th century style.
One might argue that’s not enough time for any human endeavor to claim a “Golden Age.” But the industrial revolution, the abolishment of long-entrenched political order and other forces moving at warp speed have effectively crammed the equivalent of several previous centuries of human events into those 160-plus years.
No earlier decades need apply.
So, back to the original idea: Journalism did have a Golden Age, at roughly the second half of the 20th century, more precisely the period between September 1, 1939 when Hitler invaded Poland and September 11, 2001, when terrorists slammed hijacked jetliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Within those 62-year bookends, many more important things happened than could be listed in this space.
Never before was so much “news” available to be witnessed, reported and analyzed. Never before was the press able to do it in such an unfettered manner, with so much access to the powerful, or to the actual occurences that made headlines.
Competition to be first or best with a story was very much a part of print journalism; television came into its own as a powerful presence in news, and photojournalism attained new levels of quality and story-telling impact.
So here’s an attempt, admittedly subjective and incomplete, to make the point that we who worked in journalism during that period were, by virtue of timing, the beneficiaries of journalism’s true Golden Age:
- The biggest war in world history was fought, and at the greatest cost ever in human lives, and the right side won.
- A Cold War followed and lasted half a century, but its threat of nuclear annihilation of mankind never occurred.
- Commercial television arrived.
- A civil rights revolution occurred in the United States, accomplishing through legal, social, political and cultural forces and actions what the Civil War had left unfinished.
- Communism dominated a large segment of the human race with false promises and ultimately failed.
- The United States, committed to seeing that happen, fought two more wars, including Vietnam, the longest war of the 20th century. (For the record, at least 75 journalists were killed or went missng, the most in any 20th century war.)
- Fidel Castro took over Cuba. The Cuban missile crisis nearly brought on WWIII.
- President Kennedy was assassinated, changing America into a different country overnight. Dr Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder took it still further.
- Men walked on the moon.
- Drug use emerged from the shadows to become a social, cultural and crime-related fact in daily life.
- Women gained dramatic advances toward equality.
- Colonialism collapsed in Africa and Asia. Israel was created by western democracies in their own image and became the flashpoint for new strife in the Middle East.
- Frank Sinatra, Rock ’n’ Roll, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Marilyn Monroe, Bogart, Brando, Volkswagen Beetle, Chevrolet Corvette.
- Computers and digital technology revolutionized the way humans communicate.
- Medical science eradicated old diseases, isolated new ones, found new ways to sustain human life and decoded DNA, the building blocks of all life.
- Anyone can fill in more blanks to fill out this amazing wave of events, good and bad — and always newsworthy.
That it ended as it began, in an orgy of violence against innocent people, suggests human beings didn’t learn much from it.
Nor was it, for better or worse, the end of history. The 9/11 attacks were not only a logical cutoff point for that era, but the menacing overture to a future that could be just as tumultuous.
Given the march of technology and other factors that rip away the romance and excitement of reporting the news, however, the journalists who cover it should not expect another Golden Age.
That belongs to those who reported, wrote and edited for a living during those six past decades of astonishing and often world-shaking events. Most would likely concur in the premise that journalism as a way of life was never as good before that, and will never be as good again.
Richard Pyle worked in news for 52 years, covered six wars, four continents and 40-plus countries.He retired from the AP on July 27, 2008, three days short of 49 years with the wire service.
Take the poll: When do you think journalism’s golden age happened?