'Goodness Isn't News'
| Autor: | Ronald R. Rodgers |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2009 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Journalism History. 34:204-215 |
| ISSN: | 2641-2071 0094-7679 |
| DOI: | 10.1080/00947679.2009.12062774 |
| Popis: | The Sheldon Edition and the National Conversation Defining Journalisms Responsibility to Society This article explores the national discussion in 1900 about press responsibility, which was sparked by the Rev. Charles Sheldon, a pastor of a Congregationalist church, serving a week-long stint as editor of the Topeka (Kansas) Daily Capital. Afterward, the general consensus of the reams of commentary, from both the press and the pastorate, was that editing a daily paper from a "Christian point of view" was a failure. Nevertheless, the debate revealed the pulpit's acknowledgement of its conferral of the role of agent of education and moral uplift upon the press, making it the new arbiter of public opinion. However, it also showed the pulpit challenging the notion of journalistic objectivity as it struggled to redefine news as interpretive and advocative in order to comport with a journalistic ideal grounded in the gospel. On November 3, 1899, Topeka, Kansas, had an event occur that attracted the interest of the entire town and the inception of a week-long event about four months later that would attract the attention of the nation and of the world. The event on that day was the return home of the 20ch Kansas Infantry from fighting in the Philippines. The town turned out for a welcome-home military parade and the presentation of a sword ornamented with gold, silver, and diamonds to General Frederick Funston. During the ceremony, a group of people gathered to view the proceedings from the home of the mother-in-law of Frederick O. Popenoe, the principal owner of the Topeka Daily Capital. Included in the group was the Rev. Charles M. Sheldon, the pastor of a Topeka Congregationalist church who was famous nationally and internationally as the author of the multi-million-selling sermon novel, In His Steps or What Would Jesus Do?, which was about a group of people, including a newspaper editor, trying to live and work as Jesus would. In the course of the parade and ceremony, discussion turned to the editing of newspapers and sensational journalism, to which Sheldon, a well-know critic of the daily press, was adamantly opposed.1 The discussion was prompted by a description in his novel about an editor who tried to run his newspaper as he believed Jesus would have managed it. "It was the general opinion expressed by the friends who were discussing the subject that any such attempt was so visionary that it could not be carried out in actual practice," Sheldon wrote in his autobiography.2 At one point, Popenoe asked Sheldon if he would edit the Capital for a week. Sheldon thought he was joking, but he insisted he was in earnest and then outlined the terms under which the pastor would become the editor. The two came to an agreement, and the second week of March 1900 was designated for the experiment.3 The event, for that is certainly what it became, would ultimately garner a great deal of publicity, attract hordes of correspondents from the nation's newspapers and magazines, and push the Capitals average circulation from a little more than 1 1 ,000 to more than 363,0004 as it was printed in Topeka, Kansas City, Chicago, New York, and London and distributed all over the world.5 Its existence prompted one commentator for the secular press to describe the experiment as one of "national importance,"6 and a Christian periodical exclaimed: "In the history of American journalism, it will probably be many years before there will be another week as important as that of March 1 2 to 1 7 - the week of the Sheldon Edition of the Topeka Capital"1 But was it? Undoubtedly, one reason the writer for the Christian periodical was beaming was that an exemplar of a Christian daily newspaper had come to pass, if for only one week, as a possible harbinger of things to come. The longing for such a paper had, over the years, often been written about and discussed by the nation's pastorate and theologians as something society needed to give and what Oliver Kingsbury, treasurer of the American Tract Society, called a "picture of the daily doings of the world as those doings appear from the Christian point of view. … |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
| Externí odkaz: |
|