Conservative News Cultures and the Future of Journalism History

Political historians have long identified a gap in the literature on US conservatism surrounding that movement’s relationship to journalism and mass media. This essay calls on journalism historians to fill this gap and theorizes why they have thus far failed to do so. It notes the field’s tendency to engage with ahistorical and anachronistic concepts, which make journalism history legible to journalism studies but also subordinates historical work to the imperatives of social science. It uses “conservative news cultures” as a historically rooted theoretical framework for narrating discrete works of journalism history that, when put into conversation, comprise an unrealized subfield. More broadly it advocates for recognizing journalism history as political history and for theorizing new, historically rooted objects of study in need of social scientific analysis.