**Winner of the 2025 American Journalism Historians Association Book of the Year AwardWinner of the 2025 Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC)'s Tankard Book Award and the AEJMC's** History Division Book AwardWhen the civil rights movement began to challenge Jim Crow laws, the white southern press reframed the coverage of racism and segregation as a debate over journalism standards. Many white southern editors, for instance,...

Using case studies and historical analysis, this book traces changes in ways that journalists understood their ethical responsibilities during the pre-internet twentieth century. Each chapter in this book explores a historical development in the evolution of journalists’ perceptions of their role as professionals.