ABSTRACT
The first decades of the twentieth century led to a period of high modernism1 in (American) journalism because of the increasing professionalization of journalists and the consolidation of a shared occupational ideology, as authors such as Hallin (1992; 2006) and Zelizer (2004a) have argued. Hallin shows that both political and economic factors contributed to the virtually uncontested status of journalism in providing what was accepted as truthful and direct access to reality. Even though journalism remained ‘caught between the competing imperatives of “freedom of the press” and the “laws of the market”’ (Champagne, 2009: 48), these tensions did not seem to affect the truth claims of high-modernist journalism. Indeed, characteristic of journalists’ attitudes towards their work during the era of high modernism were an apparent self-confidence and an ‘absence of a sense of doubt or contradiction’ (Hallin, 1992: 14).
