Quarterly Progress Report for Period Ending April 30, 1951

Miller, E.C.; Bridges, W.H. ed.

doi:10.2172/4234714

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“…Another woman in St Paul, Minnesota, reflecting a common disdain for the UN, wrote Davis that, “People are getting to the point where they figure Truman-Acheson and the U.N. are just as big a threat to our freedom and survival as Russia and may be before we try to fight Russia we will have to march on Washington and Lake Success and clean out our enemies there who are selling us out to Russia and No. 10 Downing Street” (Miller, 1951). In this period, at the height of the Second Red Scare, being sold out to the British could seem as bad as being sold out to the Soviets for many of these listeners.…”

Section: Analysis Of Hate Mail Tropesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“The right to voice your opinions”: A historical case study in audience members’ emotional hostility to radio journalists

McGarr

2022

Journalism

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A focus on political consensus in the United States in the early 1950s has created a false sense of a period of national unity and of the press in that period as a trusted institution. This article uses listener hate mail to radio reporters during a divisive moment—President Harry Truman’s removal of General Douglas MacArthur from his command in the Korean War in April 1951—to identify a politically rancorous discourse, aimed at the press. This period of high emotion for Americans provides a case study in audience members’ sometimes hostile relationship with journalists and does so at an early moment in the creation of a truly mass national news audience. I analyze hundreds of unpublished, archival letters, from a time when public opinion polling was relatively new and still problematic, to rethink what our baseline measurement is for media trust and better contextualize claims about its trajectory. I find three tropes that are especially resonant in the present day and became more visible parts of the public discourse with the presidency of Donald Trump: anti-press attitudes, isolationism, and antisemitism.

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Section: Analysis Of Hate Mail Tropesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“The right to voice your opinions”: A historical case study in audience members’ emotional hostility to radio journalists

McGarr

2022

Journalism

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Quarterly Progress Report for Period Ending April 30, 1951

Cited by 1 publication

References 0 publications

“The right to voice your opinions”: A historical case study in audience members’ emotional hostility to radio journalists

“The right to voice your opinions”: A historical case study in audience members’ emotional hostility to radio journalists

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