New Journalism

The Penny Papers marked the very beginning of American journalism. They were usually funded by politicians and businesses so this brought up suspicions regarding their neutrality. During the mid-nineteenth century objectivity became more of a factor. The associated press need objectivity to be profitable.

The first “new journalism” was the Yellow Press in the late nineteenth century. There was a big rival between the New York Journal and the New York World. The press used “sensationalism”  - huge emotive headlines with big striking pictures, not too dissimilar from The Sun on Sunday. They focused on exclusive, dramatic, romantic stories to really attract their audience and draw them in. Many referred to Yellow Journalism as New Journalism without a soul. All the stories were about sin, sex and violence.

The 1960s was a very turbulent time, the great hope of JFK was destroyed with his assassination in 1963. There was also the disastrous war in Vietnam and there was a lot of controversy surrounding the draft, Muhammad Ali refused to be conscripted. The baby boom also had a big effect. It created a powerful youth culture as the baby boomers hit their teens in the 1960s. It was a big period of revolution; the sexual revolution with  the pill becoming available, civil rights, and black power. LSD was introduced by the CIA and was used to access the altered thinking of the counter culture. Universities became the centre of radical politics. Music was central to the culture, it was a full frontal attack on the norms. It was drug fuelled and anti-establishment, protest songs were very popular.

The ideas of the time were informed by existentialism. Heidegger’s “authenticity” and Sartre’s “bad faith”. The key ideas are freedom and choice. For example Fanons view of a path to freedom via accelerated choice (i.e. violence). For Fanon, the act of violence is essentially an extreme expression of choice. It is choice with a real immediate impact. There is a real anti-establishment feeling, “there is a policeman inside your head, he must be destroyed”. This idea seeped into journalism. Journalists began to question whether basing stories on press releases and press conferences was really objective. Journalists began to focus on plots, quotes, settings, feelings and images, whilst still being extremely thorough with their facts. This alternative journalism was personal and expressed an individual point of view.