Breaking Secrets in Wartime

In a 1944 poll, the Washington press corps rated Drew Pearson as the columnist who exerted the greatest influence over national opinion but ranked him lower for reliability and fairness. A better measure of his influence was the anguish that his columns caused inside the White House, State Department, Pentagon, and even the British cabinet. During World War II, the FBI tapped his phones, naval intelligence officers tailed him, and foreign operatives spied on him. His publication of British secrets would have led to his prosecution under the UK’s Official Secrets Act, but the First Amendment protected him in United States. Pearson took sole control over the column after Robert Allen joined the army. The column and his weekly radio programs gave him immense influence, but he still had to struggle with the government’s wartime censorship of the news.

Nothing to Fear

Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal provided a bonanza for the “Washington Merry-Go-Round.” The president and his cabinet members showered the columnists with strategic leaks, often to test the waters before making official announcements. This enabled Drew Pearson and Robert Allen to scoop the rest of the press corps on pending appointments and other issues. Although Pearson admired Roosevelt and his liberal policies, he resisted playing propagandist. He criticized the administration and irritated Roosevelt by revealing news the president was not yet ready to release. Roosevelt retaliated by prompting General Douglas MacArthur to file a libel suit against the columnists, and by denouncing Pearson as a “chronic liar.” Pearson used the column to attack his father’s critic, Senator Millard Tydings, which Robert Allen regarded as vindictive. The pressures of reporting eventually caused strains between the two columnists, leading Allen to quit the column after Pearson revealed damaging information about General George S. Patton during World War II.

Launching the Column

The bestselling book Washington Merry-Go-Round prompted its two anonymous authors, Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen, to launch a nationally syndicated column in 1932. The urbane and elegant Pearson differed markedly from the brusque and pugnacious Allen, but they shared a belief that the rest of the Washington press corps was often too timid to show how government really worked. Pearson grew up in the Quaker community of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, where his father taught speech and ran a Chautauqua tent show. After he toured the world as a reporter, Drew Pearson married the daughter of Washington publisher Eleanor “Cissy” Patterson and entered the capital’s high society, making valuable contacts. Unabashedly provocative, Pearson and Allen chose to specialize in unauthorized information and drummed the word “leaks” into Americans’ everyday vocabulary.

Gender matters in questioning presidents

This paper traces the increasing prominence of women in the White House press corps over the latter half of the 20th century, and considers how this trend toward greater gender balance has impacted the questioning of presidents. Modest gender differences are documented in the topical content of questions, with women journalists slightly favoring domestic policy and private-sphere topics relative to men. More substantial differences are documented in aggressiveness, with women journalists asking more adversarial questions, and more assertive questions at least in the earlier years of the sampling period. The topical content differences are broadly aligned with traditional conceptions of gender, but the stronger differences in aggressiveness run contrary to such conceptions.

Children’s media as a conduit for “unbiased” news: Critical reflections on the coverage of Trump’s presidential campaign

On 8 November 2016, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. During his campaign, Trump put on display long held sexist, racist, and bigoted views on women; people of color; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning/queer, intersex peoples, and Others. Media coverage in the U.S. and around the world was not limited to news cycles intended for adult audiences only. Scholastic News Kids Press Corps, a free online publication for and ‘by kids’ ages 10 to 14, joined the conversation in 2015. This article shares analysis of Scholastic News Kids Press Corps’ coverage of Trump’s campaign, theorized through a critical, women of color feminist lens. Major themes that emerged include teaching children how to be unbiased reporters; the importance of being part of the political process and voting; social and policy issues; and Trump’s disposition/sexism. While news content broached issues from varying perspectives, it often stopped short of providing critical reflections and historical context of the issues being reported. Possibilities are discussed for expanding how news media for and by children can be conceptualized, in addition to how educators can engage in critical media literacy with children across multiple age groups, including the early years.

Political Journalists and Their Social Media Audiences: New Power Relations

Social media use is now commonplace across journalism, in spite of lingering unease about the impact the networked, real-time logic of leading social media platforms may have on the quality of journalistic coverage. As a result, distinct journalistic voices are forced to compete more directly with experts, commentators, sources, and other stakeholders within the same space. Such shifting power relations may be observed also in the interactions between political journalists and their audiences on major social media platforms. This article therefore pursues a cross-national comparison of interactions between political journalists and their audiences on Twitter in Germany and Australia, documenting how the differences in the status of Twitter in each country’s media environment manifest in activities and network interactions. In each country, we observed Twitter interactions around the national parliamentary press corps (the Bundespressekonferenz and the Federal Press Gallery), gathering all public tweets by and directed at the journalists’ accounts during 2017. We examine overall activity and engagement patterns and highlight significant differences between the two national groups; and we conduct further network analysis to examine the prevalent connections and engagement between press corps journalists themselves, and between journalists, their audiences, and other interlocutors on Twitter. New structures of information flows, of influence, and thus ultimately of power relations become evident in this analysis.