Monday, December 03, 2012. Last Update: Fri 3:29 PM EST

Fiftieth Anniversary

  1. May/June 2002

    Caro’s Way

    Even after 2,600 pages, LBJ remains elusive

    By Scott Sherman

    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...

    Continue reading
  2. 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.

    By Charles Krohn

    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...

    Continue reading
  3. January/February 2005

    Tin Soldier

    An American Vigilante In Afghanistan, Using the Press for Profit and Glow

    By Mariah Blake

    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...

    Continue reading
  4. Summer 1965

    PM: an anniversary assessment

    Why a left-leaning New York tabloid failed

    By Lewis Donohew

    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....

    Continue reading
  5. Summer 1965

    Press agent—but still President

    No President has monitored his public image with more zeal than LBJ

    By Ben Bagdikian

    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...

    Continue reading
  6. Winter 1965

    Cold War Comics

    When "consistently propagandistic" funnies took on the Reds

    By Daniel J. Leab

    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...

    Continue reading
  7. Fall 1964

    Viet Nam reporting: three years of crisis

    “A trying and sometimes hazardous business”

    By Malcolm W. Browne

    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...

    Continue reading
  8. Summer 1964

    Case history: Wilmington’s “independent” newspapers

    Du Pont papers in a Du Pont town

    By Ben Bagdikian

    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...

    Continue reading
  9. July/August 1975

    The shadow of a gunman

    An account of a twelve-year investigation of a Kennedy assassination film

    By Maurice W. Schonfeld

    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...

    Continue reading
  10. Winter 1964

    The Assassination: The Reporters’ Story

    How journalists broke news of JFK’s death

    By The Editors

    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...

    Continue reading
  11. Summer 1963

    Birmingham: newspapers in a crisis

    ‘The papers appear to be almost as segregated as the city itself’

    By James Boylan

    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...

    Continue reading
  12. Spring 1963

    The Computeriter revolution

    A Utopian fiction

    By Edward Edelson

    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...

    Continue reading
  13. Spring 1963

    Public policy in a newspaper strike

    When New York City's presses stopped, a lot went uncovered

    By Clayton Knowles and Richard P. Hunt

    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...

    Continue reading
  14. Summer 1962

    Television—“the President’s medium”?

    How TV made JFK stronger than steel

    By Ben Bagdikian

    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...

    Continue reading
—advertisement—

Receive a FREE Issue

of Columbia Journalism Review
  • If you like the magazine, get the rest of the year for just $19.95 (6 issues in all).
  • If not, simply write cancel on the bill and return it. You will owe nothing.
Join The CJR E-mail List