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Just the Facts?: Partisanship and the Press
The current era of partisan news and name-calling is enough to make you wonder what happened to good old-fashioned objective reporting. But in this hour, BackStory asks: Where did the idea of media objectivity come from in the first place? Historian Marcus Daniel explains that the bitter rhetoric of editors in the 1790s played a key role in the birth of our democracy. Matthew Goodman tells the story of an elaborate hoax involving “lunar…
Contagion: Responding to Infectious Disease
Vaccination poster for the Chicago Department of Health produced by the WPA c. 1936-1941. (LOC) When yellow fever struck Philadelphia in 1793, the entire federal government picked up and left town, leaving individuals to fend for themselves. A hundred years later, the pendulum had swung sharply in the other direction. Health workers took extreme measures to contain disease – imprisoning the sick, burning entire districts, and vaccinating…
