Media History, Vol. 9, No. 3, 2003 American Journalism Goes to War, 1898–2001: a manifesto on media and empire RICHARD L. KAPLAN, Sociology Department, University of California War. What is it good for? … Well, perhaps the American press’s remarkable perform- ance as chief governmental propagandist and flag-waver in the ‘war against terrorism’ can provide us with insights into the real nature and identity of American journalism. Beyond a presentism that reads our most fervent hopes and most ardent beliefs back into history, I would suggest that the press’s performance in striking back at terrorism allows us to explore anew and with opened eyes the central dynamics and historical workings of the news media [1]. Anyone tuning into the 24/7 headline machine of cable news during the last months of 2001, stretching from the attack on September 11 through the October and November war against the Taliban on into 2002, would see that the press moved within a fairly restricted range of views and information [2]. Such parameters resulted from of a mix of forces that doubtlessly included the patriotic fervour of the populace [3], the government’s controls and manipulative communique´s, right-wing press watchdogs concerned to punish those who move beyond the boundaries of permissible reporting [4], and the standard journalistic-corporate constraints of limited time, money, and knowl- edge typically hampering any investigative reporting. What remained, after these forces took their toll, was a blitz(krieg) of sound bites and pseudo-facts about the USA’s war efforts against the Taliban. Decontextualized from any reality, these info-bits were reabsorbed in an all-encompassing dramatic tale of the injured and righteous nation—a country united in battle against heinous foes. The magnitude and scope of the 9/11 events do not explain journalism’s rhetorical choice in the emplotment of its stories after the tumble of the twin towers. Rather, I want to argue that the press, now as in the past, is intrinsically tied up with narratives of the national community and, more specifically, with stories of the USA in combat with enemies abroad as it goes about the business of constructing empire. It is my contention that a recognition of the press’s complicated entwinement with the national community and its imperial adventures can illuminate various ongoing features of the electronic and print media. Consider the banners and headings that became an ongoing feature of the Web, TV, and print media after September 11—‘a nation challenged’ [5], ‘America united’ [6], ‘America fights back’, ‘attack on terrorism’, ‘united we stand’. All these slogans and battle cries—trailing off into bumper stickers on the back of innumerable SUVs and into hyped-up Madison Ave. advertising campaigns—pretended to disinterest- edly designate a topic area for the news. Instead, they revealed the mix of characters, fantasy, and desire that motivated the story. They actually functioned, as headlines often do, to signal the plot; these slogans configured a supposedly neutral compilation of facts ISSN 1368-8804 print/ISSN 1469-9729 online/03/030209-11  2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1368880032000145533 210 R. L. Kaplan into a hymn of patriotism. They told the simple but potent tale of a nation united, awakened to danger, steadfast in its purpose, doing what was necessary to defeat a fanatical and dangerous foe [7]. These blaring manifestations of patriotism challenged the reader and the reporter to come up with any bit of news or analysis that failed to fit the scenario dictated, the narrative prescribed, by manipulative government, patriotic populace, greedy corporate owners, and conformist journalists [8]. We need not condemn, but only recognize, the centrality of patriotic values to the operations of the daily press. The ‘old gray lady’, the New York Times, offers one illustration of this intrusion of national values. After exhaustively printing obituaries for all the known fatalities of 9/11, the Times commenced reprinting a full-page selection of these death notices, entitled: ‘A Nation Challenged: portraits of grief’ [9]. Since the news value for such a repetition is evidently nil, we can easily appreciate the ritual significance of the Times’ gesture. It indicates the paper’s alignment with the nation and its widespread pain and anger over those needless deaths. In effect, they constructed a journalistic shrine to the memory of the terror’s victims. To account for the press’s pose and prose, an understanding of the news as a detached, impartial, factual account of the day’s most important events will not suffice. We need new theories or, at least, to dust off a variety of old and forgotten ones. In what follows, I would like to indicate three such useful theoretical manoeuvres that highlight the press’s indebtedness to empire. I will then consider how these theories illuminate the press’s role in America’s first war of overseas combat: the Spanish–American War of 1898. Further, I wish to argue that this war signalled a transformation of the press’s overall role in narrating the national identity [10]. Rites Close to 30 years ago, James Carey took to task the reigning perspective on mass communications [11]. To this end, he criticized the ‘transmission’ theory, which portrayed media history as a story of technology and its gradual conquering of time and space for the transmission of messages. Harold Lasswell, a leading representative of this perspective, posed the essential question: ‘Who says what, in which channels, to whom, and with what effect?’ [12]. In this sequence of terms, Lasswell proposed a largely linear, causal view of communication. Transmission, in fact, typically analyses communication largely from the viewpoint of the media producer, who is implicitly understood as a powerful, rational actor. The producer crafts an intended message and employs technology to send it near and far. The recipient, in contrast, is passive, isolated, and prey to symbolic control and manipulation [13]. Like a ‘magic bullet’ the message hits its target—the audience—and injects its meanings. With its linear causal understanding of a powerful communicator employing technical means to disseminate a message to isolated recipients, transmission theory detached communication from any consideration of the overarching social relations and subtending cultural traditions. Within the specific province of journalism, transmission considered news to be the expert provision of reliable, factual (albeit decontextualized) information distributed through the impersonal mechanisms of the marketplace for consideration by privatized, isolated consumers [14]. Against the transmission perspective, which conjured communication into a rigorously technical, individualistic, and privatized operation, Carey offered a ‘ritual’ account of communication. Communication and, in its trail, journalism, he claimed, should be considered a social dialogue or communal expression aimed at the maintenance of the  American Journalism Goes to War 211 cultural norms and ideals that unite society [15]. The daily news emerges out of society’s underlying, taken-for-granted web of shared cultural signifiers [16]. In this cultural perspective, news stories gain their service by thickly drawing upon this largely invisible set of orienting, evaluative meanings. Through its implicit plots and interpretive frames, the daily news takes up the community’s norms and reinforces them [17]. The press affirms the values that unite the community and spells out what must be counted as trespass. ‘Objective’ news claims to be factual information, detached from all interpretive context, and provided by uninvolved, impartial, technical experts. Instead, I would argue, the news actually consists of highly narrativized stories tailored to members of a shared community [18]. In tales of crime, scandal, and disaster, the news first spotlights the shocking violation of community standards, and, second, asks whether and when the machinery of justice—the government, the community—will right the wrong. More broadly, individual reports of wrongdoing are typically taken (if not by the press, then by the public) as symptoms of broader forces working to tear down or even destroy society and its most fundamental values. The ritual perspective, in sum, sees journalism as a largely dialogic and potentially reflexive discourse on the health of the community, by the community, and addressed to the community. Nation Rites, as cultural studies might tell us, are narratives of a specific social entity; they are tales of the ‘imagined community’ of the nation. In fact, the nation and the news are two modern, twinned entities. Born together, perhaps flailing for their independence, they are nonetheless permanently joined like Siamese twins [19]. The nation was and is pivotal to the tales told by the press, just as the press was midwife to the birth of the nation. According to Benedict Anderson, the nation depends upon the media for its essential, albeit fictitious, reality. It is the press or ‘print capitalism’ that stimulated in the minds of its readers the belief that an entity called the nation in any way existed. Nation and nationality do not consist in any primordial connections or shared bloodlines, but in a contrived, constructed identity to which the growth of media was central. Since nations consist of people whose paths will never cross and among whom all personal connection is missing, Anderson argues, they should be understood primarily as ‘imagined communi- ties’ [20]. The state is largely a state of mind. Nations, divided and distinguished by a multitude of cultural habits and forms of life, depend for their unity upon fictitious symbolic representations promulgated by the media. E pluribus unum and all that. Indeed, the shared identity of ‘Americans’ found its first fledging existence, while breaking from England, in the stories told by the press of a populace gathered in a geographical space, joined by common political destiny, and forged into union by history. While the press may create the nation, so, too, is the nation intrinsic to the press as the subject of its reports, as the underlying value that guides its judgements and plots, and as the collectivity that implicitly defines its audience. The news, at an increasing rate during the twentieth century, has come to consist of stories focusing on that central dramatis personae, the American president, who embodies the nation and stands in for the political action of the citizens [21]. Furthermore, journalism’s diverse reports take as their most basic and most entrancing story the life and times of the nation—its challenges abroad and its decay or rejuvenation at home [22]. Finally, the news implicitly addresses its readers as concerned citizens, assembled en masse to hear the state of the union. 212 R. L. Kaplan In some sense, this is the backside of a point often urged on us by advocates of Civic Journalism. The news is important, they say, only when it recalls us to our ties to the national community [23]. Journalism establishes the sense and salience of its communi- cations only in the service of a vital democratic public. In the post-cynicism era supposedly initiated by 9/11, Americans purportedly became citizens again. They dropped their Game Boys and picked up their daily paper. They tuned into reality at CNN and tuned out so-called reality shows like Survivor, Shipmates, and Big Brother. Social solidarity and public concern supposedly replaced the privatized individualism for which America is rightly famous. Media ratings soared as the concrete, visible threat to American life and lifestyle reminded the public of their obligations to the nation and their fellow citizens [24]. The public turned to the news for information, insight and reassurance in this era that, as our President’s speech writers phrased it, so tested American ‘unity and resolve’ [25]. In addition, a consideration of the nation explains not just the plots and the central mission of the press but also journalism’s narrative style and professional pose. According to Daniel Hallin, the press shifts in or out of the stance of detached objectivity depending upon how its news report articulates with the nation’s most sacred values and hierarchy of legitimate authorities [26]. If a story touches on threats to, or affirmations of, values felt to be central to the nation, such as the death of its soldiers abroad, inauguration of a new president, or execution of a reviled criminal, then it is incumbent upon the press to adopt an explicit narrative voice that aligns the journalist with the nation in praise of its core values or in condemnation of its vicious opponents. If the news report, instead, dwells on conflicts between legitimate public leaders—usually the two dominant parties—then journalism returns to its more effaced, balanced, and passionless language of objectivity [27]. In sum, the imagined community of the nation enters constitutively into the every twist and turn of the institution of journalism: into its plots, rhetoric, definition of its audience, and also its highest professional ideals. Empire If we accept, as I think we should, that the news is a tale of the nation, which commemorates and commiserates in the country’s tragedies as well as its triumphs, we should also recognize that narratives of the nation, like the nation itself, can assume a wide variety of forms [28]. Journalism’s plots and prose, I want to argue, depend upon where the USA finds its spokespersons, symbols, friends, and most importantly its foes. Indeed, the nation’s identity is centrally formed through engagement with ‘enemies’ within and without [29]. By now, it is an old lesson of American history and of post-structuralism that our sense of self depends deeply upon various ‘others’ with whom we are often conjoined by historical ties of economic and psychological dependence. We don’t need Disney’s Pocahontas to tell us that the new world’s break with the old was fostered by messy entanglements of hostility and attraction to a native population conceived as primitive and in too close contact with nature [30]. To be sure, our popular culture, in the form of Westerns, has obsessively reflected the nation’s growth as we stretched across this broad continent at the deadly expense of other peoples [31]. The news too, I wish to argue, has centrally recounted tales of terrible conflict as the nation battled threatening enemies. Richard Slotkin and John Coward have shown that nine- teenth-century journalism was often an operation justifying the government’s campaigns of pacification and extermination [32].  American Journalism Goes to War 213 1898 At the nineteenth century’s end, however, the continental frontier closed; the country reached from sea to shining sea. The ending of the frontier as ‘safety valve’ for class tensions, the fierce battles of the populists and the political establishment in the election of 1896, and the replacement of the competitive liberal market with an organized, corporate-controlled economy of mass production, all called into question the traditional story of American identity. All challenged the liberal vision of a harmonious social order based on disciplined individual striving and accomplishment. The 1890s amounted to, in the words of historian Richard Hofstadter, a national ‘psychic crisis’. And, for Hofs- tadter, this cultural crisis sparked the conflagration of war [33]. Indeed, the new century, the ‘American century’, we might say, properly began in 1898 with America’s first foray into overseas imperialism: the Spanish–American War. In the end, this war redefined national identity, served as a solution of sorts to the social divisions plaguing the American mind, and provided a paradigm for all future news reporting. War abroad, like the rising office of the ‘imperial presidency’ [34], offered a solution to the USA’s social divisions. In wars, at least in the best wars, the ‘good wars’, there flourishes the fantasy of a united nation, engaged in moral battle against a heinous foe. In the 1898 melodramatic scenario, the hero—whether American reporter or soldier— posed as the vigorous, virile defender of an innocent and vulnerable female (Cuba), who was threatened by a dark, despotic villain (Spain) [35]. In the period leading up to the exchange of hostilities with Spain, Hearst’s New York Journal ran such melodramatic headlines as: ‘Does Our Flag Protect Women?—indignities practiced by Spanish officials on board American vessels … refined young women stripped and searched by brutal Spaniards’ [36]. Especially in the 1898 conflict, reporters often seized centre stage in the war adventure and gave performances that were matched only by the histrionics of future president Theodore Roosevelt. The New York dailies decorated their war stories with portraits of their correspondents down Cuba way. Leading reporter James Creelman, known for his bravery under fire, was depicted in news illustrations as leading a battle charge. The press was crucial to this dramatic performance of male heroic virtue, allowing the military spectacle to be enacted before an entranced domestic audience [37]. The populace supposedly recovered, through vicarious participation in the army’s (or journal- ist’s) forceful actions, the freedom it had lost at home as economic producers or citizens [38]. In its purple prose, journalism ritually elaborated the ideal values and unity that supposedly defined the country. Furthermore, attributes of the Cuban conflict enhanced its transmutation into an exciting, absorbing narrative for the mass public. The war was a quick military success with ‘no defeats to sober the country, no long casualty lists to divert attention. Its history could be … called a glory story’ [39]. What John Hay, US Ambassador to England, termed a ‘splendid little war’ was more precisely a very convenient journalistic war. War provided the opportunity for submerging internal division in an effort of collective sacrifice for the common good, a battle of regeneration for lost virtues and forgotten discipline [40]. Certainly, the Spanish–American War achieved a popularity throughout the country, even if Hearst’s New York Journal and Pulitzer’s New York World tried to claim exclusive proprietary rights to the war (Fig. 1). By 1898, ‘Cuba was no longer a partisan interest in American politics, nor was there any doubt as to popular support of the revolution which had begun in 1895’ [41]. With public opinion united, dissenters were marginalized. 214 R. L. Kaplan FIG. 1. Leon Barritt’s cartoon of newspaper publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Hearst in supposed battle over proprietary rights to the war. Vim Magazine (29 June 1898). In the minds of late-nineteenth-century Mugwump critics such as E.L. Godkin, the histrionics of Pulitzer’s and Hearst’s yellow press were responsible for the 1898 war. Such a charge is disputed today, but there certainly occurred a frightful collusion of interests. On the one hand, Godkin averred, nothing sold papers like war. ‘War means daily sensation and excitement.’ On the other hand, the potent mix of governmental propaganda, elite interests, and mass sentiment compelled the press to impose a nationalistic plot upon war news. In their reporting of war and indeed of foreign affairs more generally, the press tended to reproduce simply and uncritically the government’s spin and suppress dissent [42]. With the nation (or the lives of its boys) threatened, and its most supposedly sacred values at stake, the press could not adopt a detached tone in the Cuban cause. It had to rally the citizenry to the flag. ‘In the tumult of a great war’, Godkin asserted, ‘… the rules of evidence are suspended by passion and anxiety …’ [43]. Nothing, certainly not reality, interrupted the collusive operation of press, public, and politicians in constructing a feverishly absorbing story of American virtue tested in the fires of battle. Only later, long after the propaganda dream had faded, did there surface the inevitable accounts of lives sacrificed needlessly to government incom- petence and corporate greed (most specifically in the provision to soldiers of rancid canned meat) [44]. In Godkin’s scathing assessment, then, the 1898 press largely conformed to our model of journalism as a rite of nation. In the passions of war, American newspapers emotionally enacted the fiction of a national community, a community whose unity and virtues are forged in combat in a distant military theatre. In each of the subsequent wars of the twentieth century, critics were certain to repeat Godkin’s charges of a press co-opted by government and of a hysterical distortion of news from the frontlines. Walter Lippmann’s famous 1922 volume Public Opinion coined the term ‘stereotype’ to describe the patriotic fears and fantasies that plagued reporting during the Great War. We should recognize now that, rather than representing a fundamental falling away from  American Journalism Goes to War 215 journalism’s proper professional ideal of objectivity, this frontline reporting reveals the modern news machine’s most fundamental ideals and essential nature. From 1898 to 2001, the passions of war opened and closed the American century, and war increasingly defined the problematic of journalism. Late-nineteenth-century journal- ism had typically been dominated by the agonistic battles of parties in their struggle for political mastery. The news often consisted of biased accounts of domestic competition between Democrats and Republicans over whose policies best realized the strivings of the multitude for individual property and security [45]. News of the twentieth century shifted from this recounting of internal disputation to the nation united in battle and, more specifically, to the actions of the president in confrontation with our national enemies [46]. Such a reformulation of national identity from domestic contention to military battle with threatening foes had fundamental consequences for the shape of journalism’s narratives, just as it limited the space for open public contention and dissent within the pages of the daily journal. To assess and comprehend journalism’s fundamental tales of our country and their transformations, we need to dispense with journalism’s own self-understanding as a window on the world, an independent external purveyor of facts and information. Instead, the news institution is irretrievably caught, like a fly, in the web of culture and the imaginings of that militant and increasingly military community—the nation. Correspondence: Richard L. Kaplan, Sociology Department, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA. E-mail: kaplanr@soc.ucsb.edu NOTES [1] In 1974, James Carey called for a rethinking of the terms of journalism history, proposing a ‘cultural history’. [See Eve Munson and Catherine Warren, eds, James Carey: a critical reader (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), ch. 4.] This essay proposes some key categories with which to think through such a cultural history of the US press. In his cultural accounting, Carey argued that the types of narrative employed by journalism reflect cultural assumptions grounded deeply in the nature of our social order. In essence, news narratives depend upon the cultural assumptions (or ‘cultural imaginary’) of modernity. In this imaginary, our very ideas of time and space are transformed. Society is no longer seen as subject to transcendental forces of a divine cosmology or underlying laws of nature. Instead, society exists as a process of development that reaches into an open future and is produced by human action. In this novel ‘space of history’, society determines its own conditions of existence and the terms of its identity. Narratives reflect this general reconstruction of society’s self-understanding. Narratives possess a beginning, middle, and end, and these three elements are tied together by the protagonist’s recognition of a problem or evil that must be overcome by the hero’s own actions and choices in the course of the story’s development. The story concludes with the resolution of the original problem. In this manner, narrative differs greatly from the chronicles of the Middle Ages, which were a disconnected listing of a string of occurrences, united only by their happening to the sovereign. And, it likewise differs from all those medieval stories that operated as religious allegories, prefiguring Christ’s crucifixion and then resurrection. In such religious epics, the conclusion is foretold and indeed preordained in the story’s beginning. An image of time as recursive, not opening into an indeterminate future, underlies such tales. As modern narratives, news and history are the accounts of the problems confronted and surmounted by individuals or society and its governmental representatives. The difference, then, between journalism and history proper, between the first and second drafts of history, is that modern ‘objective’ news suppresses any explicit recognition of how a (national) protagonist and (national) ideals determines the selection of the news event and its proper interpretation. Claiming that they are merely topical occurrences, journalists actually report events because they are implicitly understood as important societal problems. Furthermore, news reports tacitly address the audience not as a miscellany of individuals but as members of a shared political community, united in their concerns and tied together by fate. On narrative and history see Hayden White, The Content of the Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins 216 R. L. Kaplan University Press, 1987), chs 1–2; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983), ch. 2. And see Richard Kaplan, Politics and the American Press: the rise of objectivity, 1865–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 25–26, 49. On the ‘social imaginary’ see Mirerza Gonzalez-Velez, ‘Assessing the Conceptual Use of Social Imagination in Media Research’, Journal of Communication Inquiry, 24(4) (October 2002), 349–53. [2] Cf. Alessandra Stanley, ‘Battling the Skepticism of a Global TV Audience’, New York Times (1 November 2001), B4. [3] Dan Rather reflected on the coercive atmosphere that undermined journalism’s pursuit of its essential duties: ‘In some ways the fear is that you will be necklaced here, you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck. Now it is that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions.’ As quoted in Matthew Engel, ‘Network News Veteran Admits National Mood Caused Him to Shrink from Tough Questions on War in Afghanistan’, The Guardian (17 May 2002). Rena Golden, general manager of CNN International, confessed to censoring the news from the Afghan war. It ‘wasn’t a matter of government pressure, but a reluctance to criticize anything in a war that was obviously supported by a vast majority of the people’. See Kurt Nimmo, ‘The Lapdog Conversion of CNN’, Counterpunch (23 August 2002), http://www.mwaw.org/print.php?sid ⫽ 1463 [4] Cf. Jim Rutenberg and Bill Carter, ‘Network Coverage a Target of Fire from Conservatives’, New York Times (7 November 2001), B-2. The article makes clear that institutionalized, right-wing press watchdogs produce reports intended to pressure the press. These putatively factual analyses are channelled to sympathetic public voices, such as Russ Limbaugh or the New York Post, who are able to reach a large audience. [5] The heading for the New York Times’ B section 18 September–31 December 2001. [6] Fox Cable News. [7] Tom Engelhardt details the key elements of what he calls ‘the American war story’, which transfixed the American imagination and influenced much of our perceptions about who we were and our place in the world during the nineteenth–twenieth centuries. See his The End of Victory Culture: cold war America and the disillusioning of a generation (New York: Basic Books, 1995), chs 1–2. [8] Journalists recount how they were overwhelmed by patriotism after 9/11. Like a good soldier, CBS news anchor Dan Rather declared, ‘George Bush is the President. He makes the decisions and … as just one American, he wants me to line up, just tell me where.’ As quoted in Louise Branson, ‘US Media Pumping Patriotic Fervor’, Straits Time (Singapore) (19 December 2001). [9] For example, the New York Times (10 March 2002), 21; (31 March 2002), 14; (19 May 2002), 24; (2 June 2002), 29; (16 June 2002), 21; (25 August 2002), 21; (9 September 2002), A-25. [10] Cf. Amy Kaplan’s account of how 1898 reconfigured the nation’s identity as the USA exceeded its previously fixed, physical-continental boundaries: ‘Romancing the Empire: the embodiment of American masculinity in the popular historical novel of the 1890s’, American Literary History, 2(4) (Winter 1990). [11] James W. Carey, Communication as Culture (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), chs 1–2; and his ‘Reflections on (American) Cultural Studies’, in Peter Golding and Marjorie Ferguson, eds, Beyond Cultural Studies (London: Sage, 1997). [12] Harold Lasswell, ‘The Structure and Function of Communication in Society’, in Lyman Bryson, ed., The Communication of Ideas (New York: Harper & Row, 1948). [13] Transmission, thus, demonstrates its affinity to mass society theories that were dominant into the 1960s. Transmission emphasizes the power of those producers at the centre over the receiving audience at the periphery. It assumes a one-way relation of domination. It highlights power at the expense of culture. The opposite ritual perspective dissolves power into culture. It sees communication as either an expression of the social order as a whole or as dialogue of the community. Clearly, between these two dogmatic extremes, one needs a theory that can ascertain the presence or absence of power in communication as an empirical issue. Cf. Richard Kaplan, ‘Some Ruminations on Power in Media Theory’, paper presented to the Second Cultural Turn Conference (Santa Barbara, CA, 1999). Also see Munson and Warren, James Carey, 315–16. [14] For applications of Carey’s two approaches see John Nerone and Kevin Barnhurst, The Form of the News: a history (New York: Guilford, 2001), 2, and my Politics and the American Press, 25, 45–46, 79. [15] A useful extension of this theory of the ritual function of the news is in the delineation of media events proposed by Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, Media Events: the live broadcasting of history (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). Following Marx’s adage that ‘the anatomy of man is key to the anatomy of the ape’, we can say the extreme example of media events highlights dimensions implicit in everyday news broadcasts.  American Journalism Goes to War 217 [16] The cultural ‘lifeworld’. In Clifford Geertz’s famous formulation: ‘[M]an is an animal suspended in a web of significance he himself has spun.’ Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 5. [17] In the 1970s, the Birmingham School first insisted on the ideological construction of the news. Far from a transparent, technical representation of given, self-evident facts, the journalistic enterprise is deeply traversed by culture and power. Since then interpretive approaches to the news have multiplied. Just as cultural studies have more and more laid bare the constructed nature of the categories of social life, so too interpretive approaches have assessed the forces and conventions in play as journalism weaves everyday events into quickly consumable, seemingly natural, pleasurable narratives. Employing the diverse categories of literary and cultural theory—semiotics, stereotypes and frames, standardized narrative forms and genres, archetypal heroes and plots—media scholars have demonstrated the creative, cultural, aesthetic, and indubitably political nature of the reporter’s labours. For an overview of ‘culturalogical’ approaches see Michael Schudson’s forthcoming Sociology of the News (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002). [18] Thus the ritual account of the news differs greatly from all those Marxian-inspired perspectives, such as Walter Benjamin’s, who see the news as decontextualized information, divorced from all ‘experience’. Benjamin, like so many others, thought the form of the news reflected the broader fragmented, individualized, technical structure of capitalist society. Implicitly, modern society was seen as mass society, with atomized individuals detached from any shared cultural meanings or traditions. Cf. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, H. Arendt, ed. (New York: Shocken Books, 1968), 158–59. Benjamin did not recognize the ongoing permanence of the lifeworld, as theorized in Ju¨rgen Habermas’s work. By lifeworld I mean the ongoing, intersubjectively shared set of cultural meanings within which human life is permanently embedded and without which all humans would live an anomic and pathological form of existence. [19] I neglect a third term implicated in the formation of nation and press: the democratic public sphere. See Geoff Eley, ‘Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: placing Habermas in the nineteenth century’, in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 296; Richard Kaplan, ‘The American Press and Political Community: reporting in Detroit, 1865–1920’, Media, Culture & Society, 19(3) (July 1997); Nerone and Barnhurst, The Form of the News, ch. 2; and James W. Carey, ‘Journalism and Technology’, American Journalism, 17(4) (Fall 2000), 129–35. [20] Anderson, Imagined Communities. Perhaps to reinforce the ‘fictional’ imaginary dimensions of the nation, Anderson downplays all communal, dialogic, or political dimensions of nationalism. He draws upon Walter Benjamin’s notion of modernity in seeing the nation as occurring in and dependent upon the construction of a homogenized, secular time and space. In this space, the newspaper’s daily reports of events within a bounded territorial space creates the experience of a social ‘simultaneity’, which in turn underlies the sense of being members of a common national entity. For Anderson, the daily paper founds the notion of the nation as a ‘sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time’ (p. 26). Anderson’s spectacularized notion of the nation misses the political project, whether democratic or fundamentalist, that underlies the nation. In addition, his theory fails to register the unequal forces struggling to assure dominance of this form of identity over other local, regional, and kin attachments. For a general overview of the relevance of Anderson and also Ju¨rgen Habermas to journalism see Michael Schudson, ‘News, Public, Nation’, American Historical Review, 107(2) (April 2002). [21] Elmer E. Cornwall, Jr, ‘Presidential News: the expanding public image’, Journalism Quarterly, 36(3) (1959), 275–83; and, cf. Bruce Miroff, ‘Monopolizing the Public Space: the president as a problem for democratic politics’, in Thomas E. Cronin, ed., Rethinking the Presidency (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982). [22] Cf. Herbert Gans, Deciding What’s News (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 8–39. [23] Philip Meyer, ‘The Media Reformation: giving the agenda back to the people’, in Michael Nelson, ed., The Elections of 1992 (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1993), 93–94. [24] See Jim Rutenberg, ‘Audience for Cable News Grows’, New York Times (25 March 2002), C-8. Rutenberg reports gains for the main networks, in addition to growth for cable news. Also, Pew Research Center, ‘American Open to Dissenting Views on the War on Terrorism’ (4 October 2001), http://people- press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID ⫽ 1. And see the informative general discussion in Henry Giroux, ‘Democracy, Freedom, and Justice after September 11th’, Teachers College Record, 104(6) (September 2002), 1138–62. [25] George W. Bush, ‘State of the Union Address’ (29 January 2002). [26] Daniel Hallin, The Uncensored War: the media and Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 115–18. [27] In this context where national identity and its boundaries are not at stake. Compare Lester and Molotch’s 218 R. L. Kaplan account of the news that sees all news as a ritual working out and reinforcement of the power arrangements and values of the society, except where scandal and leaks trespass on the elite’s management of information. Against this perspective, I do not believe all political conflicts are mere ritual, nor that the ruling elite is always united on significant social issues. In the contention of political parties, significant social issues are sometimes raised and divisions among the elites are revealed. Harvey Molotch and Marilyn Lester, ‘Accidents, Scandals and Routines: resources of insurgent methodology’, in Gaye Tuchman, ed., The TV Establishment (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974). [28] See the study of Silcock, which analyses how tropes of (German) nation identity enter into story selection and construction in German television news. B. William Silicock, ‘Global News, National Stories: producers as mythmakers at Germany’s Deutsche Welle Television’, Journalism and Mass Communica- tions Quarterly, 79(2) (Summer 2002), 339–52. Gavrilos provides an example of how a specific narrative of the US nation entered into the construction of news stories during the Gulf War. Cf. Dina Gavrilos, ‘Arab Americans in a Nation’s Imagined Community’, Journal of Communication Inquiry, 24(4) (October 2002). [29] American Studies has increasingly recognized that the USA’s identity and fortunes cannot be separated from its ongoing history of colonialization and exchange with other peoples around the world. See Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, eds, Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993). [30] Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish immigrants in the Hollywood melting pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). [31] The dominant genre for movies and television from 1910 to 1960 was the Western. Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture, 34–36. [32] Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment (New York: Atheneum, 1985); John M. Coward, The Newspaper Indian: Native American identity in the press, 1820–90 (University of Illinois Press, 1999). [33] Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), ch. 5. For a general overview of the war and its context see Robert Beisner, From the Old Diplomacy to the New, 1865–1900 (New York: Harlan Davidson, 1986). Also, see Paul Kramer, ‘Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxon: race and rule between the British and United States empires, 1880–1910’, Journal of American History, 88(4) (Spring 2002), 1315–53. [34] On the rising power and symbolic centrality of the twentieth-century ‘modern’ presidency see three classics: Jeffrey Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); Samuel Kernell, Going Public: new strategies of presidential leadership (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1986); and Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: the expansion of national administrative capacities, 1877–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). [35] Cf. Karen Roggenkamp, ‘The Evangelina Cisneros Romance, Medievalist Fiction, and the Journalism that Acts’, Journal of American and Comparative Cultures, 23(2) (Summer 2000), 25–37. Doubtlessly, American understandings of the conflict were influenced by the long-standing legend of ‘Black Spain’ with its themes of Spanish backwardness and brutality. See Richard L. Kagan, ‘Prescott’s Paradigm: American historical scholarship and the decline of Spain’, American Historical Review, 101(2) (1996), 423–46. [36] Allen Churchill, Park Row (New York: Rinehart, 1958), 104–10. [37] Paul Virilio interrogates the entwined relationships of visual regimes and military endeavours in his War and Cinema: the logistics of perception (New York: Verso Books, 1997). [38] Stuart Ewen argues that the alternative ‘solution’ to this lost freedom was consumerism, imposed by a capitalist elite. See his classic analysis: Captains of Consciousness Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), 23–30, 42–43, 81–87. [39] Elmer Davis, History of the New York Times: 1851–1921 (New York: The New York Times, 1921), 228–29 and see 225–26, 245. [40] Cf. Simonetta Falasca Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: the aesthetics of power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), ch. 5; George M. Fredrickson, ‘The Strenuous Life’, in The Inner Civil War: northern intellectuals and the crisis of the union (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), ch. 11. [41] Davis, History of the New York Times, 225. [42] James Baughman, The Republic of Mass Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 32–33, 64, 112–13. [43] Cf. Edwin L. Godkin, Unforeseen Tendencies of Democracy (Westminster, UK: Archibald Constable, 1898), 204–209; Allan Nevins, The Evening Post: a century of journalism (New York: Russell & Russell, 1968 [1922]), 510–11. [44] Edward Keuchel, ‘Chemicals and Meat: the embalmed beef scandal of the Spanish–American War’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 48(2) (1974), 249–64.  American Journalism Goes to War 219 [45] On nineteenth-century partisan reporting see my Politics and the American Press, chs 1–3; and Michael McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics: the American north, 1865–1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), ch. 2. [46] See Dan Hallin who compares contemporary Italian and US journalism. While the Italian press focused its attention on internal domestic political disputes, the US media paid most attention to the president’s forays into foreign affairs and conflicts with other nations. Hallin, We Keep America on Top of the World (New York: Routledge, 1994), ch. 6.