Abstract

Writing in 1893, New York Times editor Charles Ransom Miller launched an attack on the critics of newspapers. “The bearing and denunciation of the press has become a sort of cult in this country,” he noted in Forum (Miller, 1893, p. 714). His remark was quite fitting; with the rise of mass papers in general, and yellow journalism in particular, voices across the United States condemned the effect these publications could have on family morals. While many hailed the new mass medium as an empowering and democratizing tool, others saw in newspapers an alarming threat to US family values (Dabbous, 2010).