“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.
Labor Reporting and Its Critics in the CIO Years
This monograph examines daily newspaper coverage of organized labor during the burst of union activity that began in the early 1930s. Three factors influenced labor reporting during this period: the dramatic rise of unions as a political, economic, and cultural force in the New Deal; trends in journalism, including the dominance of objectivity as an operating norm and the shift toward interpretive reporting; and journalists, their sources in labor leadership, and the emergence of the American Newspaper Guild. Union leaders were highly critical of the general circulation press and its coverage of labor issues. I argue that labor news was biased against unions, but that bias was not the result of a deliberate attempt to discredit unions. Despite prounion inclinations of some journalists, news values, news gathering routines, and newsroom practices shaped labor reporting in a way that emphasized organized labor’s role in repeatedly challenging and disrupting the status quo.
Urban Identities and Catastrophe: Izmir and Salonica at the End of the Ottoman Empire*
Two huge fires dramatically influenced the urban development of Salonica and Izmir, in 1917 and in 1922, respectively. These catastrophes occurred after the Ottoman Empire fell, and Salonica and Izmir had shifted into new national contexts. The fires mainly destroyed the districts that were transformed during the late‐Ottoman period. These districts became the cosmopolitan façades of modern Izmir and Salonica. The post‐fires' tabula rasa provided an opportunity for Greek and Turkish politicians and European planners to change the urban identity of both cities. Moreover, the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 transformed their multicultural societies also. Reconstruction plans had been thought to de‐Ottomanize and remove the previous idea of the towns and their multiplicity, interpreting new cultural and nationalist feeling. Here, I emphasize how modernity was interpreted before and after the fires, and point out contradictions between ideological aspects of planning and how the first urban districts were built during the 1920s.