“We Used Every Effort to be Impartial”: The Complicated Response of Newspaper Publishers to Unions
Abstract As large employers of labor and owners of businesses that conveyed information about organized labor to a wide audience, publishers were intimately connected to the labor movement during the 1930s and 1940s. Publishers such as William Randolph Hearst were condemned for controlling a press determined to fight unionism. Newspaper owners, however, were business operators, journalists, and community leaders and these broad interests led to the creation of diverse content on organized labor in the nation's newspapers. For some publishers, civic and professional motivations encouraged an effort to remain neutral or to offer balance in reporting and commentary. Other publishers expressed support for unions, if only to claim market share. Regardless of personal views on unions, many publishers showed an honest respect for the line between opinion and news. This article examines the complex response of publishers to the growth of unions in American life.
Newspapers and Their Readers
The publication by OCLC of the United States Newspaper Program National Union List in June, 1985 is an important milestone for librarians in general as well as for participants in the Program and OCLC. The United States Newspapers Program (USNP) is a cooperative venture of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress and will eventually involve libraries in all 50 states and territories. The Program seeks to create an online data base with bibliographic records and holdings statements for all newspapers held in U.S. libraries regardless of their place of publication. To begin with U.S. newspapers are the focus. As the largest union list product produced by OCLC, this nearly 6,000- page set is impressive. However, bulk is not the most important characteristic. By providing access to bibliographic records contributed by many libraries around the nation in new ways, OCLC has responded to patron and librarian demands. The chronological, intended audience (subject), language, and place...
Reference Groups as Perspectives
In spite of ambiguity, reference group has become an increasingly popular concept, utilized in hypotheses concerning a variety of social pehnomena. The restriction of this concepts to a single referent, namely, group whose perspective is used as a frame of reference by the actor, will increase its usefulness as an analytic tool. Shared perspectives arise through participation in common communication channels, and the cultural pluralism of modern mass societies arises from the easy accessibility of a multiplicity of channels. The concept of reference group, if defined with greater precision, can greatly facilitate research on the manner in which each actor's orientation toward his world is structured.