The role and value of America's news media are more fiercely disputed today than they have been in decades. In a febrile political environment, and with the President howling “Fake news!” to delegitimize any unwelcome reporting, a collection of essays exploring the media's role in US political history is a timely publication. As the editors of this volume, Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer, note, few political histories place the media itself centre stage. “Political historians have often relegated the mass media to supporting roles – using newspapers and advertisements as sources without studying their history, retailing well-worn stories about FDR's fireside chats or the Kennedy–Nixon debates, analysing media outlets in exclusively partisan or ideological terms” (3).

This collection sets out to correct that historiographical absence, drawing together leading scholars to trace the history of mass media from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Recognizable luminaries of political media history like David Greenberg and Nicole Hemmer offer typically engaging and insightful essays. Alongside those efforts, there are numerous contributions from scholars whose work deserves to be much better known. Julia Guarneri, for instance, offers a fascinating study of local newspapers at the turn of the twentieth century, considering “the political consequences of all portions of daily newspapers” (36, original emphasis). All local news is politics, argues Guarneri. By including articles and advertisements that reflected all aspects of urban life, municipal newspapers assumed a civic identity for the reader and fostered a sense of connection to the city's problems. Though this moment was short-lived (city newspapers would soon be supplanted by regional media), these organs were instrumental in creating “an active, civic, Progressive politics” (37).

Several themes stand out in this collection. One of the most recurrent is “objectivity,” probably the most durable and contested journalistic principle. Kathryn McGarr skilfully conjures up the clubby social world of Washington reporters in the early Cold War, where journalists and policymakers mingled in bars, on golf courses, and in dining rooms. This “widespread, institutionalized blurring of the social and the political” (80) created a “liberal consensus” in microcosm that made it unthinkable for any well-connected Washington reporter to dissent on matters of national security. In a context where the “objectivity” cult held powerful influence, McGarr shows how personal relationships delineated a Cold War consensus at the highest levels of the media. If this was “objectivity's” heyday, Matthew Pressman's essay reveals how mainstream media outlets came to reject the myth of purely “objective” journalism in the 1960s and 1970s, in the face of criticism from left and right, and began instead to seriously engage with questions of advocacy and bias and to challenge their overreliance on “establishment” sources.

Another prominent theme is the institutional and regulatory environment in which the production of news takes place, which is as vital as any factor in shaping media output. In exploring this theme, the contributors to this volume highlight some unlikely alliances. Richard R. John provides a revisionist account of the growth of antimonopoly sentiment in the 1880s, persuasively arguing that the principal agitators for antitrust legislation were not farmers and workers, but big-city merchants and the journalists who supported and amplified their complaints. In a similar vein, and leaping forward four decades, Kathryn Cramer Brownell explores the way that Richard Nixon's hostility to the “liberal media” dovetailed with an effort by the burgeoning cable-television industry to relax the regulatory restrictions on partisan broadcasting. Here political and commercial incentives converged to reshape the national media landscape.

Whether it is Kevin Lerner's painstaking reconstruction of the decision-making process that led New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal to publish the Pentagon Papers or Emilie Raymond's fascinating case study of Hollywood activism around the issue of fair housing in California at the height of the civil rights movement, the space here does not allow this reviewer to do full justice to all the essays in this rich and strikingly original collection. This reviewer hopes future scholars will take up the challenge and build on the outstanding research collected in this volume. In particular, we need more work on the Internet and new forms of social media, particularly given the outsize political role played by Donald Trump's Twitter feed and with the FCC considering the rollback of strict net neutrality rules. For now, however, this lively and provocative intervention should act as a stimulant for an unjustly neglected field of historical inquiry.