Book Review: Prophets of the Fourth Estate: Broadsides by Press Critics of the Progressive Era and Radio Utopia: Postwar Audio Documentary in the Public Interest

Amy Reynolds and Gary R. Hicks Prophets of the Fourth Estate: Broadsides by Press Critics of the Progressive Era. Los Angeles, CA: Litwin Books, 2011. 218 pp.Matthew C. Ehrlich Radio Utopia: Postwar Audio Documentary in the Public Interest. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2011.Journalism often disappoints its audience. That was true during the buildup to the Iraq war in 2002-2003. Even when journalists and news organizations have tried to rectify the shortcomings that critics have identified, journalists have failed to sustain those reform efforts.Prophets of the Fourth Estate, by Amy Reynolds and Gary R. Hicks, demonstrates the longevity of many criticisms of the press, and Matthew C. Ehrlich's Radio Utopia examines how one medium tried to provide better journalism and why that effort faded after a few years.Reynolds and Hicks focus on press critics of the early twentieth century, with a special emphasis on Charles Edward Russell, Moorfield Storey, and Oswald Garrison Villard. For the most part, the authors allow these critics to speak for themselves, reprinting in part or in full essays the critics published early in the twentieth century. Many complaints have as much force today as they did one hundred years ago.Russell, who had worked for both Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, complained in a 1914 piece for Pearson's Magazine that the control of the press was not vested in the reporters and editors but in advertisers and financiers. Newspapers were reluctant to publish stories that might offend advertisers, who provided most of their revenue. Financiers controlled access to capital that news organizations needed to acquire modern machinery and pay production costs. Publications that offended financial interests could find themselves starved of capital. Even the Chautauqua movement, the talk radio of the World War I era, was vulnerable to commercial pressures. Speakers favorable to the interests of wealthy businesses were subsidized.For Storey, one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and its first president and legal director, sensationalism was undermining the value of news media. Instead of enlightening the public about the problems of labor, taxation, foreign policy, and other complexities of the twentieth century, news reporters were pursuing stories about the prurient details of private lives.Villard, who owned the New York Evening Post and The Nation, worried about the growing concentration of media ownership. Some cities, he noted in a 1919 piece published in The Atlantic Monthly, had only one morning newspaper. And the number of companies providing features and editorial material to weekly newspapers was dwindling rapidly.Other essays in Prophets of the Fourth Estate examine threats to the press posed by wartime government censorship, increases in postal fees, and public relations. In every case, contemporary parallels come to mind easily.The authors provide brief but helpful biographical information about Russell, Storey, and Villard, but other writers included in the book have little or no identifying information about them. One excerpt is a piece by Robert L. Duffus about an advertising campaign by a meatpacking company to rebuild its reputation after a Federal Trade Commission investigation, but the authors provide no information about Duffus or about where or when the article was published.Sometimes Reynolds and Hicks introduce an essay with background information. An unsigned editorial from a 1918 edition of The Public, an opinion magazine, on the impact of postal rate reform followed almost seven pages of background information on the history of postal rates for newspapers and magazines and the effects of changes in those rates on the industry.Elsewhere, however, explanation is missing. One Russell piece mentions "General Otis" and "the McNamaras. …