Advocacy Newspapers

A Journalism of Ideas

Advocacy journalism is one of the two founding strains in modern journalism (the other being the provision of the commercial and political news essential to societal elites). Most early newspapers were closely tied to political and religious factions; although some were explicit campaign organs, more typically newspapers adopted a stance of impersonal journalism in which the editor advocated his cause not in a strident tone, but rather through the mix of essays, letters, minutes, poetry, and other items selected for publication. Advocacy journalism served its cause by presenting information and ideas that supported a point of view, and secondarily by serving as a forum in which political and social currents could develop to and articulate a common program.

Until fairly recently, advocacy journalism was the norm, at least in coverage of political and social issues. From the earliest colonial newspapers to the partisan press of the early 1800s, editors were actively engaged in the political struggles of their day—and indeed formed the backbone of the emerging two-party system. The partisan press is perhaps the best known expression of advocacy journalism, and the mythology of a party press run amok that is often cited as the backdrop against which more commercially oriented popular newspapers emerged in the 1830s. Partisan [Page 31]newspapers such as Boston's Daily Advertiser, the New York Courier and Enquirer, or Cincinnati's Gazette published detailed reports of the workings of government, helped mobilize voters and organize disparate interest groups into viable national political groupings, and crusaded on behalf of their party's pet nostrums—exposing the perfidy of Free Masonry, chartering the Bank of the United States, and of course singing the praises of their particular candidates. But penny papers such as the New York Tribune were every bit as politically engaged as the traditional partisan organs that served elite audiences. Tribune editor Horace Greeley rejected both “servile partisanship” and “mincing neutrality,” opening his paper's columns to a wide variety of reform schemes from the establishment of socialist communities to temperance and universal public education. While there was a steady trend toward avowed political independence during the nineteenth century, as newspaper revenues shifted from subscription-based to advertising-based, advocacy retained a prominent role in many newspapers.

The new journalism that began in the late 1870s and was the dominant newspaper form by the turn of the century, boasted of its independence from party spirit, but nonetheless pulled no punches in its relentless pursuit of what it saw to be in the public interest. In the early twentieth century, muck-rakers, similarly, were unabashed in their advocacy of greater regulation, civil service reforms, and other measures to safeguard the public from special interests and emerging corporate power. And if advocacy journalism continued to play a prominent role in the mainstream press, advocacy was central to the emerging foreign-language press and to the legions of periodicals issued by African Americans, labor unions, socialists, women's rights activists, and a host of other movement organizations. So central was journalism to these movements that when Chicago authorities set out to suppress the radical labor movement in the aftermath of the 1886 eight-hour working day movement, police raided the offices of the German-language daily Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung, arresting and ultimately hanging its editor and business manager, as well as the editor of the English-language labor weekly The Alarm. Chicago supported multiple radical labor dailies published in the various languages spoken by its immigrant workers for decades to come, as did other major cities. These newspapers published agitational and theoretical articles on a wide range of subjects, as well as cultural material and local advertising. But the heart of the newspapers was articles on local events and workers' struggles, often written by participants in the movements they served.

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