Journalism and Public Perception

Abstract

Beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the revival of investigative journalism and the advent of New Journalism, a literary movement stressing social activism, popularized journalism as a consumer product and as a prospective occupation. Counterculture and political flashpoints like the Vietnam War and the Watergate Scandal increased public interest in the news. The concurrent growth of television ownership and satellite broadcasting—alongside an already robust bank of national magazines and newspapers—expanded the audience. “Journalism was previously viewed as a ‘below-stairs’ profession,” one Marshall from the 1970s recalls. “Watergate changed that.” After 1972, the rate of Marshalls pursuing full-time journalism nearly tripled, with an additional surge in popularity in the 1990s. Anne Applebaum (’86), a Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign affairs columnist for The Washington Post, attributes the latter expansion to the transition toward Internet-based consumption.