Tributes to Fallen Journalists: the Evolution of the Hero Myth in Journalistic Practice

ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: TRIBUTES TO FALLEN JOURNALISTS: THE EVOLUTION OF THE HERO MYTH IN JOURNALISTIC PRACTICE Raymond McCaffrey, Doctor of Philosophy, 2013 Dissertation directed by: Associate Dean Ira Chinoy Philip Merrill College of Journalism This dissertation explores a hero mythology in newspaper tributes to fallen journalists and examines whether these stories implicitly or explicitly encouraged risk- taking by reporters and discouraged them from acknowledging the psychological consequences of that behavior. This historical case study uses qualitative methods to analyze New York Times tributes to U.S. journalists who died from 1854 to 2012 and whose names appeared on the Journalists Memorial at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. This study finds that the Times wrote about 274 of the 362 fallen journalists and depicted one in four in heroic terms, with their stories invoking themes often found in classic hero myths. Eighty percent of these hero journalists were on foreign assignments that typically involved covering war. Virtually all of these hero journalists killed in the United States were targeted because of their journalistic work. These journalists were seen as answering a call and giving their lives in service to a greater cause often tied to normative journalistic values, such as pursuing the truth. The tributes for 27 percent of these journalists mentioned qualities associated with risk-taking, such as courage. One in ten of these journalists embodied a type of stoicism that involved them downplaying personal hardship. A central finding of this study suggests that this hero mythology emerged in the mid-1920s, immediately after the adoption of state and national journalism ethics codes and the opening of the first journalism schools in the United States. Consequently, this mythology served as vital part of American journalism’s professional movement, melding tacit journalistic codes with the tales of heroic fallen journalists. These hero myths evolved, reaching their zenith during World War II, when the U.S. government assisted in this idolatry. This hero mythology then ebbed until resurfacing sporadically during the Vietnam War and Watergate era with antihero journalists whose work seemed to be in direct opposition to the authorities who once celebrated them. The post 9/11-era saw a resurgence of the hero myth despite the advent of research that questioned whether journalism’s so-called macho code discouraged journalists from seeking treatment for occupational mental health risks such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. TRIBUTES TO FALLEN JOURNALISTS: THE ROLE OF THE HERO MYTH IN JOURNALISTIC PRACTICE by Raymond McCaffrey Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2013 Advisory Committee: Associate Dean Ira Chinoy, Chair Professor Emerita Maurine Beasley Assistant Professor Kalyani Chadha Professor Mark Feldstein Professor Carl Lejuez © Copyright by Raymond McCaffrey 2013 Preface Like many other journalists, I grew up in newsrooms. By that, I mean I spent many of the formative years of my life in them, learning what it meant to be a journalist, and a person for that matter, since for many years they were one and the same. How I learned, I can’t say, since there was no discernible lesson plan, or – most of the time - any signs of adult supervision. Newsrooms always were unruly places, at least in the beginning, and the less unruly they became, the less most of us reporters liked them. There were editors screaming above the din of police scanners. There were often reporters screaming back, at least in the early days before jobs became scarcer and everyone grew more timid. There were copy editors, shuffling in to work around sundown, sullen and detached, cursing their lot in life and ready to take out that hatred on our stories. Newsrooms were tense places. There was not even the faintest notion of privacy, desks literally stacked side by side. There was griping and moaning, flashes of anger and occasional tears, mostly long periods of inactivity when reporters were waiting for leads to materialize in their heads, or sources to call them back, or – more often than not – just any kind of news to happen; and then, when it did, the griping and moaning immediately ceased, and the most unruly people in the world attained a kind of laser-like focus that allowed them to confront impossible situations and meet unforgiving deadlines. The people I met in newsrooms were some of the noblest I’ve ever known, and the most impossible. Nobody seemed to have anything resembling a personal life, and nobody much wanted one. We dated one another, feuded, sometimes married, then ii divorced, watched children grow, continued to run out on stories, and, at the end of the day, commiserate together, mainly in bars. In the after-hours, we often complained and moaned some more, except on the nights after big stories, where someone on the night desk would invariably arrive with thick stacks of the next day’s paper quite literally hot off the presses, and we would tear through them, fresh ink smudging our hands, and survey the product of our work with something that resembled pride. We also talked about stories in the making: One young reporter would stop in each night on the way home from spending the day with a family he was following: the two young children had been horribly disfigured in a propane explosion that he had covered as a cop reporter. He recounted what he had seen that day, and the reporters told him what seemed right – what scenes were important. Many months later, these very same reporters stood with him, raising their glasses as they celebrated the fact that he had won the first Pulitzer Prize in the paper’s history. One of these nights, a Sunday, we all gathered in our regular haunt after spending the entirety of the day covering the crash of a United Airlines jet in a nearby park, the deadliest plane crash to occur in the city’s history. As we tried to put behind us a day spent standing near the crater in the park and the scattered remains of plane’s fuselage, or knocking on the doors of those who had lost family members in the crash, a pay phone in the bar rang. On the other end was an editor back at the paper reporting that the police scanner had just carried a call about a major fire at a local nursing home. The first two reporters at the scene arrived to find the bodies being lined up outside, nine elderly women in all. One of the reporters broke down in tears, and the other gently told her that it was not the time for that, there was work to do. And so they continued on together, iii until most of the newsroom joined in to cover what would become the deadliest fire in the city’s history. We believed in the same things, though we never quite identified what they were. Certainly, they were not written down; and just as certainly they were not dictated by management. These codes seemed to be about journalism or news, at least about how you behaved while gathering it, how you dealt with sources you encountered, and – perhaps most importantly – how we treated each other. Indefinable as they were, these beliefs were not vague notions. Once, we all rallied in defense of a fellow reporter – the same one who had consoled her colleague outside the smoldering nursing home – after she objected to the orders of an unpopular city editor to interview a woman whose husband had suffered an apparent fatal heart attack at a peep show. Reporters confronted the managing editor outside in the parking lot as he was trying to enter his car and leave for home. This wasn’t news, we said, among other things. Suffice it to say that the interview never happened, and no related story ever ran - and the unpopular editor later lost his job. In essence, newsrooms were magical places – or at least they engender magical thinking in the people who remember them. When I finally left the newsroom where I spent those formative years, I carried with me the knowledge that I would miss that place and those people every day for the rest of my life – and, in a sense, I was right. Yet, recently, while I returned to that city to visit a close friend still at the paper, I declined his invitation to come inside that same newsroom to say hello. Part of me knew that what I missed was no longer there; another part feared the realization that, in a certain sense, it had never existed at all. iv Later, after I had left the profession for good and embarked on a career in academia, I heard a classmate say, rather derisively, that journalists liked to think of themselves as heroes. My thought was: Never that. If anything, the journalists I knew never talked about the qualities that they found admirable in other journalists. Yes, they would talk about the old days, the impossible bosses, the clownish publishers - the things that made us laugh. But few words were shared about the time in the trenches, the things we had seen, and the people we had interviewed, often on the worst days of their lives. Some of these people were heroes; but not us. If anything, there was a bit of survivor's guilt, if guilt over surviving something second-hand made any sense. This knowledge didn’t make it any easier to understand this world that I came from and now sought to study.

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