How the Professional Media Creates Its Own Reality

Americans trying to take a collective deep breath after September 11, 2001, found themselves the very next fall unexpectedly confronting another form of terror.  Over a harrowing period of three weeks in October 2002, in and around Washington D.C, anonymous snipers trained their high powered lenses on thirteen individuals, stalking them in a series of random attacks as they performed everyday chores. These episodic attacks focused the lenses of local, national and world media in a deluge of wall to wall coverage that rekindled the anxieties of an already fearful nation.  Although not every media outlet ratcheted up fears, overall the press embraced the fearful aspects of this story.  

No type of coverage encouraged anxiety more than a continuous television focus.   During what may well have been the epitome of the hysteria, the shooting of a thirteen year old child at a middle school in Bowie, Maryland resulted in parents arriving by droves to escort their children home.  Then, before this episode being played out on live TV could run its course, a bevy of unnerved reporters left the scene to chase a phalanx of police cars to cover what one reporter had mistakenly unearthed as yet another attack at a local Wal-Mart.  The competitive juices of broadcast media were clearly on display, as were the very impacts they had on the reality they were reporting.  Frustrated by what seemed to be implicit police ineptitude, reporters themselves began hyping false alarms as anxiety fed fear.

Such broadcasts reveal much about the dynamics of contemporary journalism and how the press can create its own reality simply in the way it covers a story.  A forthcoming historical analysis unpacks the nuances of the sniper melodrama by examining how and why the press behaved as it did.  By illuminating how basic press instincts function in an apolitical environment, the book provides a methodology for investigating how factors other than politics are often at the root of press behavior.  By focusing on how reporters tried to go about their business in uncovering the latest scoops in this sensational story, the analysis suggests that those seeking to ascribe political biases to reporters on more politically charged stories might do well to examine more fundamental “professional” factors that drive journalistic behaviors. 

Wall to wall coverage is now common when sensational events occur.  The news channels in particular are known for their slogan “Breaking News.”  Broadcast media seem driven by their need to uncover the latest scoop.  They leave it for others to interpret its significance in the blogosphere, on talk radio, or on cable news shows filled with “expert” panels.  Unable to compete successfully at this level, the print media have increasingly searched for their own “market niche.”  Newspapers have discovered a new reality of appealing to a readership already well aware of what is happening in “real time.” 

But is this transitional phenomenon unique to contemporary journalism?  From a historical perspective, similar tensions emerging from a press in competitive transition during the sniper episode are evident in another incident that caused anxiety in the nation’s capital a century before.  During a period of similar tumultuous transition in journalism, Ohio businessman Jacob Coxey marched a group of largely unemployed men from Massillon, Ohio to the steps of the nation’s capital.  In the spring of 1894, over three million Americans remained unemployed from the Panic of 1893.  Coxey had the idea that government funding of a program to build ‘good roads” would put the unemployed back to work.  So in this first March to Washington he carried a petition to establish a publicly funded Good Roads Program.

A new analysis of the Coxey phenomenon, “Marching through Time: The Spectacle of Coxey’s March” (Ph.D. dissertation in preparation at George Mason University), examines the coverage by reporters embedded in the march in the context of Gilded Age journalism.  The press coverage of the March created opportunities for an increasingly professional journalistic corps to deliver a compelling human interest narrative that unfolded day by day.  Replete with a stunning array of eccentric characters, the reportage focused more on the progress of the march and the reaction in Washington, than it did on the substance of Coxey’s cause.  The speeches Coxey gave each night largely went ignored.  What compelled journalists were intriguing incidents involving characters with colorful names such as “Cyclone Kirkland.”  Newspapers, no longer merely the tools of political parties, engaged their readership with human interest stories.  The Coxey spectacle, which often resembled a circus parade with its banners and characters on full display, provided fodder for this “new journalism.” 

On the eve of the yellow journalism phenomenon, reporters scrambled to outdo each other.  Paid by the word and with new printing technology now able to produce large volumes of newsprint, reporters along the march vied for control of the telegraph wires to get their latest episode to a hungry readership.  Much like the sniper story, this late nineteenth century version of wall to wall coverage assumed its own reality and created the specter of unrest in an anxious capital.  Attorney General Olney was assigned to take the precautions necessary to tame a march innocently titled The Commonweal of Christ.

While the parallels between these two episodes may be overdrawn, the comparison makes fundamental the question about journalism’s contribution to the historical record. Both these analyses suggest that journalists’ own professional credo, more than any political biases of their editors may drive coverage.  Moreover, both of these episodes suggest how press coverage can significantly create its own reality and certainly the corpus of an historical record.  Therefore, when using press accounts to reconstruct events, historians need to be fully aware of the context of how journalists do their job. In both of these periods, newspaper reporters were under substantial professional pressures and the way they covered these stories reflects how they responded.