From Sasha Issenberg’s “On Notice” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2005):
Just over 50 percent of Americans say they read the newspaper in an average week. That may seem like a formidable number, but it is in steady decline, down from 77 percent in 1970.
Newspaper readership declining Read More »
From Sasha Issenberg’s “On Notice” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2005):
In the Middle Ages, the Crown designated a half-dozen sites in London where a herald would read proclamations from the king. These announcements first found their way into print in 1665 when the London Gazette, considered the first English-language newspaper (at least as we now understand the term), began publishing. It was the Crown that put out the Gazette, and thus the newspaper was little more than a broadsheet filled with public notices.
In the 1690s, private competition reached the London newsstand. Yet even those newspapers that were not published directly by the government continued to seek its consent and imprimatur. In 1704, across the Atlantic, a newspaper called The Boston Newsletter hit the streets of the Hub; like many early American newspapers, it bore the slogan, “Published by Authority.” Though newspapers had ceased to exist merely for the purpose of publishing government decrees, they continued to run the notices as proof of the papers’ journalistic credibility. “Unlike in our day, it was looked at as an act of authenticity,” says Charles Clark, a professor emeritus of history at the University of New Hampshire who wrote about early American newspapering in a book called The Public Prints.
Sometimes these announcements appeared under the rubric “Proclamations for Royal Government,” Clark explained, but usually papers “just printed the notices in what we would think of as the news columns – even though that distinction is a bit of a stretch for those days. In many instances the notices constituted the news.” (Toward the end of the 18th century, according to Clark, newspapers also began to feature private-sector legal announcements: creditors demanding payment were popular. “The most frequent things,” Clark said, chuckling, “are men putting in notices: ‘My wife is leaving my bed and board. I shall no longer be responsible for her debt.’ “) …
In 1789, among the acts of the first session of the Congress was a directive to the secretary of state to publish all bills, orders, resolutions, and votes in at least three newspapers.
For its efforts at transparency, the fledgling government was rewarded with an increasingly suspicious press. During the 1790s, the Philadelphia-based Gazette of the United States made it clear that government would not be left to speak for itself through notices; the paper placed a correspondent in Congress. “He reported what he saw, not the official words,” Clark said. After the election of George Washington, the colonial press that had cuddled with government gradually became American media that sought to establish distance from it. In addition to soliciting the government for announcements, the press began to cover the government journalistically. …
A history of the public notice Read More »
From Dashka Slater’s “Lights, Camera, Lockdown” (Legal Affairs: May/June 2003):
The first two Alcatraz films, Alcatraz Island and The Last Gangster, arrived in theaters in 1937; the most recent, Half Past Dead, came out last November. In the 65 years in between, Alcatraz has been the subject of some two dozen movies and has made guest appearances in many more. There have been prison movies, horror movies, comedies, romances, action films, cartoons, and even porn flicks set on Alcatraz. It’s rare for a Hollywood set to last even a few weeks after a film is complete, but the prison is so popular with filmmakers that a meticulous replica of its cellblock, first created for the Clint Eastwood film Escape From Alcatraz, has resided on a Culver City soundstage for more than 20 years. It has provided penal ambience for hundreds of movies, television shows, commercials, and music videos. …
THE FEDERAL PENITENTIARY AT ALCATRAZ opened on August 22, 1934. It was to be a prison like no other, a high-tech, escape-proof, super-maximum warehouse for the nation’s most incorrigible bad guys. …
The secrecy had been designed to deflate the celebrity reputations of gangsters like Al Capone, who had enjoyed special treatment at other prisons. James A. Johnston, the prison’s first warden, believed that egoism was the chief failing of recidivists. His prescription was total isolation and total anonymity. At Alcatraz, he promised, Capone and his ilk would become “forgotten men.” …
The articles emphasized the prison’s harshness and brutality, chronicling its excruciating rule of silence, which required prisoners to stay mute except during a two-hour recreation period on Sundays, and describing the dank “Spanish dungeons” where prisoners were sent for disobeying rules.
Many of these accounts were embellished, and some of the more lurid tales were pure fabrications. Alcatraz was tough but not barbaric. Inmates were guaranteed the basics of food, shelter, clothing, and medical attention; everything else – work, exercise, visitors – had to be earned. Minor infractions – failing to finish the food on your plate, talking while in the cellhouse, sassing a guard – brought a swift reduction in privileges. More serious violations, like taking a swing at a guard, sent prisoners to the chilly darkness of “the hole.” Particularly obstreperous prisoners were hosed down with cold water from the bay, a practice that earned the warden the nickname “Saltwater” Johnston.
Alcatraz was hardly a country club, but it was still one of the better-run prisons in the United States. Inmates had their own cells, an improvement over bunking with another con. These five-by-nine-foot cells were cramped, but each had its own light and running water, and prisoners could order as many books as they wanted from the prison library. The cellblock was kept at a comfortable 70 degrees and the food was considered some of the best in the prison system. …
Throughout the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, films like Train to Alcatraz, Prison Train, King of Alcatraz, San Francisco Docks, and The House Across the Bay picked up the mythology of the “Inside Alcatraz” accounts and ran with it, depicting the prison as a place that made even hardened cons quake in their leg irons. …
… fewer than 300 prisoners [were] kept there at any one time …
The island’s reputation was increasingly out of step with the times, and the prison was facing more tangible problems as well. After years of exposure to the salt air, the fortress was literally falling apart, and the cost of repairs was prohibitive. The prison closed in 1963 …
IN 1972, AFTER LANGUISHING IN BUREAUCRATIC LIMBO for nearly a decade, Alcatraz became a national park, a move that allowed Hollywood to begin making movies on the Rock itself. …
The Park Service originally thought interest in the prison would peter out within five years. Instead, the park receives 1.5 million visitors a year, about five times as many as Antietam or Little Big Horn and nearly as many as Mt. Rushmore. …
Hollywood is responsible, in large part, for making the former penitentiary recognizable as a prison rather than just a decaying collection of empty Depression-era buildings. Escape From Alcatraz brought fresh coats of paint to the mess hall and D block, as well as the yellow stripes (which never existed when the prison was open) that now run down the main cellhouse corridor. Murder in the First funded the restoration of a guard tower on the dock, and The Rock paid for the removal of hazardous waste. Leftover Hollywood props – metal detectors, cell cots, benches, even pillows – have stayed on as permanent adornments, giving tourists a sense of what the penitentiary was like when it was operating. Over time it has become difficult to distinguish Hollywood’s Alcatraz from the real one.
Alcatraz: reality & Hollywood Read More »
From Caleb Crain’s “In Search Of Lost Crime” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2002):
In American cities in the 1830s, 1- and 2-cent newspapers for the working class abruptly challenged 6-cent newspapers published for merchants and political parties. As Patricia Cline Cohen explains in The Murder of Helen Jewett, an account of the 1836 killing of a New York City prostitute, the penny papers transformed the reporting of murder trials. To satisfy their unsqueamish readers, editors for the first time actively investigated crimes. James Gordon Bennett of The New York Herald pioneered by visiting Jewett’s brothel and tracking down witnesses who had not yet found their way to the police station or the courtroom. While the Herald was running the Jewett story on its front page, circulation tripled.
For a sensational trial, the penny papers sent reporters to the courtroom every day. During the trial they published daily installments, which they collected and issued as a pamphlet once it was over. The trial pamphlet blossomed. The most vivid and novelistic pamphlets are of trials that took place between 1830 and 1875: the trial of Richard P. Robinson for the murder of Helen Jewett, the court-martial of Alexander Slidell Mackenzie for his role in the so-called Somers mutiny (1843), the trial of the Harvard professor John Webster for the murder of a Harvard benefactor named George Parkman (1849), and the trial of the Lincoln assassination conspirators (1865), among others.
When newspapers began to cover trials Read More »
From Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville (190):
As a southern gentleman [Lloyd Tilghman] believed there were only three events in a man’s life which warranted the printing of his name [in the newspapers] without permission: his birth, his marriage, and his death.
When to have your name in the newspapers Read More »
From Edward R. Murrow’s 15 October 1958 speech to the Radio-Television News Directors Association:
One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business, advertising and news. Each of the three is a rather bizarre and demanding profession. And when you get all three under one roof, the dust never settles. The top management of the networks with a few notable exceptions, has been trained in advertising, research, sales or show business. But by the nature of the coporate structure, they also make the final and crucial decisions having to do with news and public affairs. Frequently they have neither the time nor the competence to do this. It is not easy for the same small group of men to decide whether to buy a new station for millions of dollars, build a new building, alter the rate card, buy a new Western, sell a soap opera, decide what defensive line to take in connection with the latest Congressional inquiry, how much money to spend on promoting a new program, what additions or deletions should be made in the existing covey or clutch of vice-presidents, and at the same time– frequently on the same long day–to give mature, thoughtful consideration to the manifold problems that confront those who are charged with the responsibility for news and public affairs.
Edward R. Murrow on the business of news Read More »