Summary Of Stories That Changed America By Carl Jensen

“This just in, journalism is not dead.” Judy Muller gave an interview with C­span News to talk about her new book “Emus loose in Egnar”. Muller first talked about where she got the name for her book saying there was a man breeding Emus in his backyard and when they escaped people panicked. “They either called the sheriff, or they stopped drinking.” However, Emus weren’t the main topic of her interview nor her book.

Molly Ivins was born in Monterey, California in 1944. Her family moved a year after to Houston, Texas where she was raised (Reader 7). While she attends high school, she interns for the Houston Chronicles and is assigned to the Complaint Department (Reader 9). It is in this department that Ivins ' recognizes what customers are interested in reading—what attracts readers, what they expect from journalists’ and their articles (Reader 10). Eventually, Ivins gets a job as a police reporter for the Minneapolis Tribune.

The tradition begun by the journalists in Jensen’s book still continues today. Greg Palast is one such journalist who is following in the footsteps of the muckrakers. He has been called the “most important investigative reporter of our time” by The Guardian and has been responsible for writing front page stories for influential news outlets such as “BBC Television Newsnight, The Guardian, Nation Magazine, Rolling Stone and Harper's Magazine”. His area of expertise is corporate fraud and he has gone undercover to conduct his investigations on five continents. He is responsible for writing influential stories such as “BP's Deepwater Horizon blow-out”, the U.S. role in the coup against Hugo Chavez, Enron’s attempt to buy favors from the British government, and the U.S. Presidential election theft in 2000 in

At the turn of the twentieth century a new part of America’s political culture was beginning to emerge due to the country’s advances in technology and specifically in the creation of mass magazine publications. These publications were able to reach largely the country’s growing middle class. These journalists soon noticed that their readers’ yearned for magazine articles that investigated the numerous dilemmas that plagued the American society at that time. The ground breaking journalists were labeled as “muckrakers” by President Roosevelt and often became a source of controversy within America’s political culture. Most muckrakers used their skills of descriptive writing to paint vivid and disturbing pictures of the lives many Americans were

Imagine a world in which everyone was honest and trustful. This world may sound like the world that people are living in, but in reality, people have something to hide or lie about. Although it is not possible to make someone tell the truth, it is possible to investigate and discover whether someone is lying or not. However, it is easier now than ever to find out whether someone is lying with modern technology, such as polygraphs. Some people believe that it is unethical to know so much about people and that people should have more freedom.

For example: During 1902, Lincoln Steffens investigated and examined the urban politics in municipal governments and exposed the political corruption that existed and were practiced between the corrupt government and big businesses and industries in a series of article named “The Shame of the Cities” in McClure’s magazine which later was also published as a book ‘Shame of the Cities’ in 1904. Steffens in his articles urged the fellow American people to act upon these corruptions and evil politics and save their homes and cities. His work of exposing the reality to the public led the cities to begin using city commissions and city managers as a measure to end the corruption. Similarly, Upton Sinclair in considered another muckraker who investigated the large canning factories in Chicago where the workers were exposed to dangerous working conditions and sanitation was disregarded in the meat handling and packaging industry. As a result, during 1906 the Meat Inspection Act as well as Pure Food and Drug Act were

American journalist and politician, Clare Boothe Luce, in her opening speech at the 1960 Women’s National Press Club meeting, prepares her audience, qualifying and defending her forthcoming criticism. Luce’s purpose is to provoke thought in the journalist’s minds on what journalism is really about at its core. She adopts a frank and humorous tone to best capture the attention of her intended audience of female journalists. Through, appealing to the ethos, logos, and pathos with flattery, syllogism, and rhetorical questioning to prepare the audience for her message: “the tendency of the American press to sacrifice journalistic integrity in favor of the perceived public demand for sensationalist stories.” In the first paragraph of her speech, Luce assures the audience that “[she is] happy and flattered to be a guest of honor…”

In 1975, the non-profit organization Investigative Reporters and Editors was founded to provide training in the same investigative techniques that Woodward and Bernstein so skillfully employed in their Watergate investigation and and vouch for reporters’ rights. Congress strengthened legislation to aid journalists, like the Freedom of Information Act of 1974, which forced federal organizations to respond to information requests from newspapers and journals within 10 days of their filing. In the mid- to late-1970s, the number of students seeking journalism degrees increased exponentially and numerous newspapers and TV stations formed investigative sectors. IRE Director Brant Houston said Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting not only “solidified the critical importance of investigative reporting,” but also “provided the inspiration for thousands of young people to become investigative journalists who wanted to make a difference.” Their glory and success also triggered an upwards trend in the American public’s faith in the press.

Perseverance: The American way of Journalism The media works hard everyday to create new, interesting, and important stories for their readers, but most consumers don’t see the significant difficulties that the journalists, reporters, and others working in media face. The movie All the President’s Men depicts to the viewer the struggles Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein faced while trying to uncover the truth of the Watergate scandal through investigative reporting. Thanks to their hard work and perseverance, when all others tried to deny it, the truth of the Watergate scandal was revealed to the American people and the appropriate actions were taken to punish those who had participated in the crimes.

Glenn Greenwald's book No Place to Hide is in part a first-person narrative on the history of the events leading to the greatest intelligence material leak in the US history, and in part an attempt to assess the impact and ethics of that leak. His previous publication like How Would a Patriot Act? and A Tragic Legacy proves him as someone dedicated to fight against abuse of power. In this book, he posits that converting the Internet from tool for freedom to a tool for surveillance, NSA has produced the “most extreme and oppressive weapon of state intrusion human history has ever seen” (Greenwald 6). The author not only reveals the greatest leak in the US history, but also brings home the state of the Media in twenty-first century.

Media bias is not a new practice. Thomas Jefferson, prior to his presidency, stated in a letter to Edward Carrington (1787): " And were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them." Jefferson was for the press and believed it was a great tool to inform the general public.

The strides the press has made over the years is quite amazing. How today government is has, what I would call, an unhealthy relationship with the reporters from any media outlet. Even before Trump coined the phrase, “Fake News”; the associated press had a hard time getting in with high powered government functions. In the 50’s and 60’s, reporters and politicians went everywhere together. Vacations, family events, even just going to each others house for friendly gatherings; a complete 180 degrees change from what its like today.

The publication businesses grow in remarkable number and opened employment for careers that are useful in these businesses. Commercial changes have impact not just to the economy but to the society as a whole. Such is always been the case through the entire development of the journalism profession which includes 19th-century development. Journalism has been evolving into many transformations as a commercial endeavor, profession, and socio-technical phenomenon (Carlson & Lewis, 2005). Change has accelerated in the past years which affected some practices in our daily lives.

Thank you, thank you very much. Please have a sit, everyone. Good afternoon everyone. First of all, I want to applaud the amazing reporters and authors of America that have made their precious time to come here. I did not expect a tremendous amount of people here – I am thrilled.

The past century has witnessed the rise of technology that connects one person to another. From the telegraph to the radio, from the radio to television, and from television to the internet, the world has increasingly shrunk. With this change in how we communicate comes fundamental changes in how we govern ourselves. In particular, the rise of television in the decades after World War 2 was heralded as a hero of democracy, bringing the leadership and citizens closer in ways never seen before. As the years drag on, we find such thoughts are increasingly naïve.