Chapter 13, May 5th

     Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal was known as one of the most wide spread political corruptions revealed in American history. Only new reporters and courageous newspapers covered the piece about this shocking abuse of power.

     The section More than a Third-Rate Burglary goes into depth on how being the president in a scandal was unheard of, and the Watergate scandal that had burglary and theft stories circling was too much for the White House. Flushing Out the Evidence was about Woodward and Bernstein who got there first break by exposing the address books in the case. Pushing the Limits of Investigative Reporting was about the young reporters teaming up and becoming a force of journalism. This case would have a lot of new coming journalists making their mark in the industry. The section Standing Firm was about the dates of June 1972 to 1973, the workers and journalists on the Watergate situation, and how the 15^th Street in Washington, D.C. is where the committed journalism took place. The White House Collapses is fairly simple in the way that it talks about Nixon being accused of destroying the evidence of his knowledge of the criminals breaking in.

     The last section was titled Reporters as All-American Heroes because there were many journalists like Woodstein who were built on this case because they brought the information to the public. If I had lived in this era, I would also want the information that they, along with a lot of other reporters brought.

 www.epltalk.com/portsmouth-should-go-into-adm...



www.xtimeline.com/evt/view.aspx?id=31373

Chapter 6, April 26th

During the late Nineteenth century, the economy started to expand a large amount of business. The energy that America was showing was one that had never been seen before. The country had also been establishing the founding fathers and laissez-faire policies had been adopted.

The section about attacking municipal corruption spoke about how Lincoln Steffens was the first muckraker and his career writing at the New York Evening Post covering and muckraking Wall Street and the politics in New York. In the section Busting the Trusts, Ida Tarbell's history of him being surrounded by derricks, tanks, and pipelines. She created the series "History of the Standard Oil Company." Tarbell has been called the queen of muckraking by the public. Awakening the Public to Dangerous Foods and Drugs was an in-depth look at the journalistic approach at presenting the public with the information of drug and really health awareness in general. The power that the press had was finally being combined with new information about dangerous issues. Exposing "Treason" in the U.S. Senate was a section that spoke about the earlier years of the twentieth century and how the upper house Congress was widely known as the body of America to take action and actually have major reactions. Lastly, Muckraking: An Unparalleled Legacy raps up the chapter with a section that speaks about the era of muckraking.

I think that Muckraking was a necessary form of journalism at the time. The public needed to know what was really going on in their own states and was interested to know the opinions of the writers and the journalists were happy to do that. If I lived in that era, I would probably want to see more muckraking going on because it was a more raw interesting form of news at that time.

 

 www.ask.com/wiki/Charles_Edward_Russell

www.mattblake.net/322/8.html

Chapter 4, April 5th

     The chapter is titled Attacking Municipal Corruption. It starts off explaining how Thomas Nast illustrations in Harper's Weekly attacked William Marcy Tweed, showing off how much authority a political piece of art can bring. I think that even compared to today's news papers, political cartoons are extremely important. It is issues like these that opened the door for the future of artistic expression for elections and politics.

     In the section Heyday of Corruption, it explains how the aftermath of the Civil War caused urbanization, industrialization, and immigration, and created the Gilded Ages. Tweed's history was explained to show why he was such a major part of this movement. The next section was Pictures Confront Politics, which talked about Thomas Nast and how his visual political arts brought something to the table. Focusing more on his Civil War cartoons. The next section was The New York Times Joins the Crusades, which was showing how James B. Taylor stepped in and made sure The New York Times could not speak against Tweed, when Taylor became powerful enough. Help from an Insider, a section talking about James O'Brien's secret campaign against Tweed. Reaching the Masses had the interesting statistic of it being printed 200,00 times in that era, but Harper's Weekly was better at getting there paper out to an audience. The Journalistic Legacy raps up the chapter by giving credit where credit is due. The two papers were both very compelling, brave, and informative to the public.

     I chose this chapter because political cartoons are still very important to politics. It is interesting to show how that started and the drama behind the first few cartoons. A picture is worth a thousand words, until it is about politics, because then it is worth millions.



The image is from web.utk.edu/~glenn//Symbols.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YildL_ilQFY An excerpt from the 1999 Documentary Film on New York by Ric Burns.

March 10th

For the homework I read the Introduction to Mightier Than The Sword. A few key subjects I would like to bring up from the reading is when the Ku Klux Klan was being defeated by the news papers and radio. Rodger Streitmatter also explained how this book would give a good understanding to the American media and American culture through his past education and what he has learned. In chapter 1, great historic writers such as Sam Adams and Thomas Paine were metioned and how their ratical movements through writing that touched upon taxing and other negative subjects from their time. Also the Boston Massacre was explained in some detail to farther explain the era that the chapter was about.
A well known picture of the Boston Massacre. This is used in text books and exams today.