Labor's New Deal for journalism---the Newspaper Guild in the 1930s

Abstract

The Depression and the New Deal brought together a variety of conditions and social forces that set up a formative clash over the institution of professional journalism. At the heart of that fight was the rise of the American Newspaper Guild and its battle for control over the trusteeship of the freedom of the press. The experience in the news industry in the 1930s displayed the collective shortcomings and the aspirations of democratic journalism up to that point in time, and it set in motion a reconstruction of a model of American journalism that has dominated until the present day tumult over the future of the news. The Progressive Era's failure to establish a public sphere inhabited by autonomous journalists and constrained capitalists produced a crisis in the press system and a window of opportunity for the burgeoning union movement during the New Deal. The ANG stepped into that historical moment and attempted to formulate a new idea of professional journalism, an institution sustained by a labor union, rather than a commercial trusteeship. It was an attempt to achieve, cultivate, and protect a true institution of professional journalism operating on the majoritarian view of the First Amendment through real social, political, and economic change from the bottom up. The concluding chapter of the dissertation takes up the question of what the history of the Guild in the 1930s means for the broader history of American journalism from the post-war to the present.

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