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theses

This dissertation tells the history of (MORE), a journalism review founded and run by a group of journalists who found themselves constrained by the professional norms of their employers and their profession. In telling (MORE)’s story, the dissertation tells a part of the story of the organized press in America in the bulk of the 1970s, and some of its interactions with that decade’s cultural convulsions. The dissertation takes a historical approach, telling (MORE)’s story through the use of the magazine itself as primary text; oral history interviews with surviving editors, contributors and participants in the journalism review’s six “Counter-Conventions”; primary documents, including archival material from the records of news organizations and individuals involved with (MORE); and audio recordings of parts of the Counter-Conventions. These sources are supplemented by a body of secondary literature including contemporary news reports, other works of press criticism from the era and academic studies of press criticism and the history of the 1970s. The study of (MORE) provides insight into changes in journalistic professionalism in the 1970s, a key period after the rise of what Michael Schudson calls “the critical culture”; it investigates the role of press criticism in the functioning of the press and the effects, both direct and implied, that press criticism has on mainstream publications; it will trace some of the roots of the professional press’s increasing self- awareness in response to rampant anti-intellectualism among its members; and, using the ideas of these self-aware journalists as a guide, it begins to trace the outline of an intellectual history of the 1970s. This dissertation advances four main arguments regarding (MORE) and the national and journalistic cultures in which it operated: 1. (MORE) changed the nature of press criticism, and began its diffusion into the culture. 2. (MORE) changed the way journalists thought about themselves and their profession. 3. (MORE) influenced the way the organized press practiced its trade at a time when the industry was reshaping itself. 4. (MORE) reflects broader changes in society in the 1970s.

ETD_5392

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Kevin Michael Lerner

doi:10.7282/T33X84X4

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.