Changes

News over the Wires contains an argument about longer-term American political and social development. It makes a nice companion piece to Michael McGerr's The Decline of Popular Politics, which illustrates the shift from a classic nineteenth-century model of high voter turnout, intense partisanship, political machines and pageantry, to a new politics characterized by "education" (intellectual arguments about policy, widely distributed), advertising, and sensational mass journalism. Blondheim sees the AP replacing the old partisan journalism with a new, "objective," rationalized, mass-market form of knowledge, lacking in regional curiosities. "The wire service was not a local institution," he notes. AP leaders emphasized facts, unjudged, and considered information to be a commodity like any other. Blondheim acknowledges that this regime of supposed neutrality tended to favor Republicans, business, and anti-labor politics, and may have influenced key elections along the way, but he does not account for how the intensely biased media institutions of distinctive personalities like Pulitzer and Hearst grew up alongside this so-called monopoly of singular general knowledge.