Journalism reviews

Definition: Periodicals specializing in coverage of journalism issues

Significance: As watchdogs of journalism, these reviews have historically been a minor force for and against subtle forms of censorship

If there is a censorship continuum running from complete suppression to absolute freedom, the experience of journalism reviews as forces for—and victims of—censorship probably falls in the middle, according to insiders and observers. Journalism reviews as press-criticism publications began around 1900. At that time they were a slight censorship factor as a result of their influencing or chilling press performance, and a censorship casualty as a result of suffering limited access to sources and pressures from the trade they covered.

According to Staci Kramer, a member of the advisory board of the St. Louis Journalism Review, censorship issues that journalism reviews deal with are self-censorship and editing. Kramer has pointed out that contributors to journals censor themselves because they think certain information or points of view may offend someone or because they anticipate cuts by an editor. Editors, as every contributor discovers, do make cuts, for all sorts of reasons—style, content, taste, and substance— and that can anger contributors. It is debatable whether such edits are overt censorship. More troubling, according to Kramer, is the occasional practice of newspapers’ telling journalists that they cannot contribute articles to a journalism review, or of newspapers’ prohibiting a source from talking to a review reporter.

Commerce also can be a force for censorship, according to the head of a self-described anticensorship organization, the media watchdog group, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), which publishes the journalism review Extra! According to FAIR member Jeff Cohen, the main culprits of censorship in North American society are the corporations that own the media. According to Cohen, censorship in the media is caused less by government or religion than by business interests.

The market for criticism by journalism reviews is limited. Tom Goldstein’s Killing the Messenger: 100 Years of Media Criticism (1989) argues that the media respond about as positively to criticism as any other large institution. George Seldes, who from 1940 to 1950 published the respected journalism review In fact, said that press critics can hold the news media accountable, but that it is not easy. According to Seldes, the critic can help keep the press honest. Newspapers, he argues, “like kings, pretend they can do no wrong.”

Journalism reviews and press critics have included series of magazine articles and books by Will Irwin and Upton Sinclair in the early twentieth century and the New Yorker column “The Wayward Press,” launched in 1927 by editor Robert Benchley. According to H. Eugene Goodwin in Groping For Ethics in Journalism (1983), journalists have resisted critical appraisals out of concern that such appraisals might diminish press freedom. In the United States, there is no systematic audit of the performance of the press or of its fulfillment of its duty to keep the public informed about vital national issues.

A list of late twentieth century U.S. journalism reviews include Accuracy in Media Report, American Journalism Review, Columbia Journalism Review, Extra!, Forbes MediaCritic, Lies of Our Times, Media Culture Review and St. Louis Journalism Review. Although some fear that a review organization of the news media would be the first step toward censorship, Kramer, the St. Louis Journalism Review reporter and editor, has argued that censorship by or upon journalism reviews is rare. Rather, reviews have functioned as a conscience upon the news industry.