Impudent Snobs: The Liebling Counter-Convention and the Rise of the Elite of American Journalism

• In Event: ICA Interactive Paper/Poster Session II
  In Interactive Poster Session: Communication History Interactive Poster Session

Abstract

In 1972, the anti-institutional journalism review (MORE) held the first A.J. Liebling Counter-Convention. During the 1960s, an elite, college-educated group of journalists had been filtering into the newsrooms of the United States, only to find themselves stifled by strict routines governed by a kind of institutional objectivity. In fact, when Vice President Spiro Agnew condemned the American press as “an effete corps of impudent snobs,” he was criticizing a phantom. American news institutions were still fundamentally conservative. But the Liebling convention gave these reporters a collective, national, trans-institutional voice for the first time, gathering them in one place to discuss questions of pressing concern that these journalists could make no headway on as individuals. Many of these reporters would go on to form the core of journalistic institutions in the U.S. as their ideas were co-opted by the mainstream press they had originally intended to critique.

Author

• Kevin M. Lerner, Marist College