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Dillon, Michael
About the author: Michael Dillon a member of the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Duquesne University. Before embarking on an academic career, he was a newspaper reporter and editor and won fifteen awards for journalistic excellence before earning his PhD at Penn State. His recent essays have appeared in New York Newsday, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Dallas Morning News, and Primo magazine. Dillon is co-author (with Howard Good) of Media Ethics Goes to the Movies (Praeger, 2002).
2003 0-7734-6615-0Edward H. Butler was emblematic of the late 19th-century new journalists who built the modern press by wrenching civic discourse from its narrow partisan roots and carving out vital new cultural, social, economic and political roles for newspapers. The trajectory of Butler’s career arcs through this important transitional period in the development of American journalism and civic culture. The central conflict in contemporary journalism between democratic duty and financial prerogatives grew from paradoxes rooted in the Gilded Age press. A deeper understanding of the forces that made and unmade the ‘new journalism’ sheds light not only on journalism’s past, but on its future. In addition to the biography itself, the study examines the Buffalo News’s impact on local and national levels, including the paper’s crusade to improve the terrible Polish immigrant tenements of the time, its backing of the Pan-American Exposition at which President McKinley was assassinated, and the struggle of labor unions.