Worker’s Struggles, Ideological Struggle and the News: How National Imaginary and Anticommunism Defined Journalistic Professionalism and Identity in the West

So far, there seems to be a partial picture of the history of journalism objectivity. One that tends to ignore important social dynamics that surround the emergence and consolidation of this notion as a universal and core value among prevalent news cultures. This piece intends to offer an alternative interpretation, one that argues how worker’s struggles during the 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly those that took place in the aftermath of the Civil War in the United States and of the Soviet Revolution of 1917, played a key role in shaping and defining journalistic objectivity as way of subduing the role of the media in relation to political mobilization. This thesis presented here aims at challenging current assumptions around journalism objectivity that argue that these debates happen only in the West -or the United States for that matter- and that later went to shape the values and cultures of journalism around the world. Instead, this piece suggests that there were dynamics and fluid conversations that flow in several directions across the globe.