Times vs. Post

Paper Summary:

This paper analyzes the books "The Pillars of the Post" by Howard Bray and "Without Fear or Favor" by Harrison Salisbury. These books debate the strength of the two newspapers "The New York Times" and "The Washington Post" and discuss how these have become to be the major trendsetters in news and political analysis.

From the Paper:

"We are so accustomed to thinking of newspapers as bearing the most recent slice of history that we forget that in many cases they have their own not insubstantial history, and one that fundamentally influences the kind of newspaper that they are today. While newspapers reflect the beliefs and policies of their current owners and publishers (and to a lesser extent editors), they also reflect their own pasts. In the two books that will be discussed here, Howard Bray s The Pillars of the Post and Harrison Salisbury's Without Fear or Favor, The Washington Post and The New York Times are depicted as two such newspapers. One might well believe that any daily papers that have lasted as long as have these two would be similarly effected by their pasts). The Times and the Post are, however, in somewhat different positions than are other major American dailies in that, at least for about the past three decades, they have each become defined by a specific set of stories. These two books describe how the culture of each newspaper came to develop to the point and in the specific way in which these two sets of articles continue to both emblematize and shape the culture and the coverage of these two newspapers."

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