Sixty essays on American news reporters, editors, publishers, and broadcasters, including Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, and Connie Chung, whose careers significantly advanced or symbolized major changes in journalism
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In 60 essays, this volume profiles American journalists from colonial times to the present--reporters, editors, publishers, photographers, and broadcasters--whose careers reflected major developments in their profession and in the history of the United States. In a speech to Newsweekcorrespondents in 1963, publisher Philip Graham described journalism as "the first rough draft of history." These journalists confronted and helped to shape the discussion of major issues and events in American history, from the American revolution through abolition, westward expansion, the CivilWar, the civil rights movement, immigration, and the women's movement, as well as major constitutional issues involving the First Amendment protection of freedom of the press. Biographies of well-known journalists, from Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine to Walter Cronkite and Rupert Murdoch, appearalongside some who may be less familiar, such as Elias Boudinot, founder of the first Cherokee language newspaper; Abraham Cahan, editor of the Jewish Daily Forward; and Daniel Craig, who in the 1830s used carrier pigeons to ferry the news. Other subjects include Margaret Green Draper, therevolutionary printer; Claude Barnett, founder of the Associated Negro Press; photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White; war correspondent Ernie Pyle; and Allen Neuharth, founder of USA Today. Illustrations, fact boxes, and quotations from the subjects themselves make this volume an indispensablereference for students of American history as well as a fascinating read. Journalists profiled include: Horace Greeley Frederick Douglass Mark Twain Thomas Nast Joseph Pulitzer Nellie Bly William Randolph Hearst Ida Wells-Barnett H. L. Mencken Dorothy Thompson Walter Winchell Red Smith Edward R. Murrow Walter Cronkite Bernard Shaw Cokie Roberts Manuel de Dios Unanue and many more
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