Fiftieth Anniversary
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May/June 2002
Caro’s Way
Even after 2,600 pages, LBJ remains elusive
It was the most contested election in the history of Texas. On August 28, 1948, Lyndon B. Johnson, a ruthless young Texas congressman, squared off against former Governor Coke Stevenson in a brutally competitive runoff for the U.S. Senate. In the chaotic days following the election, Stevenson appeared to be victorious. STEVENSON'S MARGIN FIRM, blared The Dallas Morning News five...
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March/April 2004
A Baghdad Journal
At stake: $18.6 billion for the rebuilding of Iraq. The players: The Pentagon, the White House, the press, and one loyal public affairs officer worrying about his job. Here is his unofficial story.
Baghdad, Iraq, Sunday, December 21, 2003.
After a chilly daybreak, my mind is racing with recollections of the past few weeks, churning an irresistible urge to express them. I'm still bothered by the call yesterday from my boss, Dave Nash, announcing he's planning to quit. He's the one who brought me from the Pentagon to the presidential palace in November...
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January/February 2005
Tin Soldier
An American Vigilante In Afghanistan, Using the Press for Profit and Glow
In April 2004, a former U.S. Special Forces soldier named Jonathan Keith Idema started shopping a sizzling story to the media. He claimed terrorists in Afghanistan planned to use bomb-laden taxi cabs to kill key U.S. and Afghan officials, and that he himself intended to thwart the attack. Shortly thereafter, he headed to Afghanistan, where he spent the next two...
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Summer 1965
PM: an anniversary assessment
Why a left-leaning New York tabloid failed
PM was a liberal tabloid published in New York from 1939 to 1948. As Lewis Donohew explained in CJR’s Summer 1965 issue, it forswore advertising, tried “to be the champion of the little man,” and only made money in one year of its short life. (The profits were shared with the staff.) Still, the paper’s roster included some serious journalists—I.F....
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Summer 1965
Press agent—but still President
No President has monitored his public image with more zeal than LBJ
Ben Bagdikian, who wrote regularly from Washington for CJR in the 1960s and ’70s, explained in our Summer 1965 issue how President Lyndon Johnson personally shaped his press coverage. After Kennedy’s Camelot era, many Washington journalists grew to dislike the Johnson administration’s handling of the media. Bagdikian’s story includes an incredible transcript of a personal phone call from LBJ to...
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Winter 1965
Cold War Comics
When "consistently propagandistic" funnies took on the Reds
In our Winter 1965 issue, Daniel J. Leab, then CJR's editorial assistant, compiled nearly 20 comic strips and frames that showed how the Cold War had come to the funny pages. The collection showed the anxiety and bellicosity of the age, and lead Leab to wonder if this widely read but little examined section of the newspaper harmfully shaped mass...
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Fall 1964
Viet Nam reporting: three years of crisis
“A trying and sometimes hazardous business”
While he may be best known for the photo he took of a Buddhist monk's self-immolation, Associated Press correspondent Malcolm W. Browne’s Pulitzer-winning print work was one of America’s major windows to the Vietnam War. He told the story behind that picture in a Fall 1964 CJR article that surveyed the challenges and limitations of reporting on the conflict. His...
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Summer 1964
Case history: Wilmington’s “independent” newspapers
Du Pont papers in a Du Pont town
In 1964, Ben Bagdikian, usually CJR’s Washington correspondent, looked north to Delaware, and examined the very heavy influence of the Du Pont family on the state’s largest newspapers. Control was both literal (their holding company owned the papers) and explicit (one family member asked, in writing, that news coverage become a “house organ” for a pet cause.) The article reported...
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July/August 1975
The shadow of a gunman
An account of a twelve-year investigation of a Kennedy assassination film
What happens when a hard-nosed news organization gets a hold of an amateur film that maybe, just maybe, shows a gunman take aim on the grassy knoll. In 1975 Resse Schonfeld, who stewarded the film as an executive at United Press International’s moving pictures wing, told a true-life tale full of high-tech analysis, ex-CIA operatives, paranoia, and the sort of...
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Winter 1964
The Assassination: The Reporters’ Story
How journalists broke news of JFK’s death
Dallas: November 22, 1963. It’s a dateline that needs little introduction. But for reporters on the scene for President Kennedy’s swing through Texas, the day seemed likely to be like many others on the road. Tom Wicker, a writer for The New York Times, hadn't brought his notebook; it would be the least of his problems as he and dozens...
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Summer 1963
Birmingham: newspapers in a crisis
‘The papers appear to be almost as segregated as the city itself’
In our Summer 1963 issue, James Boylan, CJR’s founding editor, examined how local newspapers covered the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Birmingham campaign, a non-violent effort to integrate Alabama's largest city. It was not, to say the least, an attractive record. While the world saw the brutal fruits of segregation through photographs showing young black residents assaulted by attack dogs and...
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Spring 1963
The Computeriter revolution
A Utopian fiction
Our Spring 1963 issue included the only piece of science fiction CJR has ever published. Reporter Edward Edelson imagined with a mix of prescience and parody what computer automation might mean for the news business. The revolution began, dear reader, on a September day in 1967, when residents of a small Pennsylvania town awoke to find that their paper contained...
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Spring 1963
Public policy in a newspaper strike
When New York City's presses stopped, a lot went uncovered
New York city newspaper workers—including journalists, delivery truck drivers, and pressmen—went on strike on November 1, 1962. They would be off the job for 114 days. In the gap, suburban publishers produced special city editions, and New Yorkers, used to the nation’s most vibrant and diverse newspaper culture, had to turn elsewhere for news. In their appraisal of what readers...
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Summer 1962
Television—“the President’s medium”?
How TV made JFK stronger than steel
Some historians credit President Kennedy’s 1960 election to his performance in his televised debates with Richard Nixon. His mastery of the new medium continued throughout his presidency. In Ben Bagdikian’s first article for CJR (he would write regularly about Washington issues and coverage until 1974), he looked at how the president used television to win public support for his opposition...
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Desks
The Audit Business
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- Hot air Rises Above on CNBC An anchor pins a minor dip in stocks on the TV appearance of a minor politician
The Observatory Science
- Dull news from Doha UN climate summit a ho-hum affair for the press
- Highway to the danger zone Following Sandy, HuffPo and NYT dig into the folly of coastal development
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- NBC News sets good example for Medicare reporting People perspective leads to clear explanation of impact of proposed changes
- In Pennsylvania, a niche site with wide reach PoliticsPA drives political conversation in Keystone State
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