The ghosts that haunt Gregory Hall at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are cast in bronze. They are forgotten silent sentinels of press freedom — pioneering Prairie State editors and publishers.
For almost a century, their busts have lined the halls of the red brick Public Works Administration building where thousands of journalism majors at the main U. of I. campus have come to study the foundations of reporting — the who, what, where, when, how and why.
This is at a crucial time in history when the world is focusing on truth and objectivity and the lies and disinformation that are haunting American media just ahead of the U.S. presidential election.
Many former students are now modern journalism icons themselves. Yet, 60 reporting students in a recent journalism history course couldn’t name even one of the nine storied members of the press whose likenesses they passed daily. The bronze busts commemorate past journalistic derring-do. They are individuals the Illinois Press Association found worthy to showcase in its Editors’ Hall of Fame at its dedication in 1930.
To be sure, this Hall of Fame lacks women and people of color, reflecting who had the economic capital, social capital, and racial and gender rights to enter and achieve in the news business. The lack of diversity in traditional U.S. newsrooms is ongoing. A 2022 Pew Research Center survey reported “76% of journalists surveyed were white, 8% identified as Hispanic, 6% as Black and only 3% as Asian.”
In Gregory Hall, even the Chicago Defender’s legendary editor, Robert Sengstacke Abbott, whose famous paper reported on and defended the Black community, would have missed the cut for the inaugural posthumous award. He was still alive in 1930. Like the mainstream press of that time, most of these newspapers not only failed to hire nonwhite people and women, but many also tended to cover these groups in trivial and sensational ways, if at all. So, what’s to learn from this fraternity of white men?
As a female journalist of color with 22 years in the industry and now a professor of journalism, I believe that obliviousness to journalism’s trailblazers — both their errors and biases and their accomplishments and innovations — leaves the media professional in a state of historical amnesia.
At a time now when journalists are sometimes attacked as “the enemy” for holding power accountable and exposing wrongdoing, it’s instructive to know that it was the shocking 1926 murder of Don Mellett, the editor of the Canton (Ohio) Daily News, that spurred the Illinois Press Association to create the Hall of Fame. Mellett had led an investigation into organized crime and politicians on the take in his city on the edge of Ohio’s Amish country.
Elijah Lovejoy, one of the first elected to the Illinois Editors’ Hall of Fame, was, like Mellett, shot to death. A Maine native, Lovejoy was assassinated in 1837 in Alton, Illinois, while defending his presses against rioters who opposed his campaign to free enslaved people. E.W. Scripps, born on a Rushville, Illinois, farm, founded a newspaper chain that included Chicago’s pro-worker The Day Book (1911-1917). Scripps’ advertising-free tabloid was alone in pushing the city to release its 1911 study of department store exploitation of young female workers, saying it would “fearlessly print the truth, no matter whom the truth hurts or harms.”
Melville E. Stone founded Chicago’s first penny newspaper, the Chicago Daily News, in 1875 to serve the masses other local papers ignored. Victor Lawson, who came from a family of Norwegian immigrants, succeeded Stone, who left to head The Associated Press. Lawson pioneered the model for foreign news bureaus.
Joseph Meharry Medill, a managing editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune, was instrumental in promoting Abraham Lincoln as the Republican candidate for president.
Others in the Hall of Fame are renowned for their work in Peoria, Springfield and elsewhere in Illinois.
Maybe in today’s digital age, the idea that there is anything to learn from chisel-jawed white men on wooden pedestals seems ludicrous. Maybe in the age of virtual reality, digital news, apps, podcasts and multiple social media platforms, a bricks-and-mortar representation — or in this case, bronzed and molded — doesn’t dazzle and glitter like modern media.
According to 2023 statistics, 5 billion people use social media worldwide, with 308 million in the U.S.
To be sure, the legacy media industry these ghosts personify is shrinking. The Pew Research Center recently reported that “two-thirds of U.S. adults at least sometimes get news in each of these ways. A little more than half (54%) at least sometimes get news from social media, and 27% say the same about podcasts.” Only 4% of adults say they prefer to get their news from print. Perhaps in the relentless emphasis on the here and now and the greatest gadget, the flow of time has been lost.
In a 1995 PBS documentary, acclaimed New Mexican author Sabine Ulibarrí put it this way: “Life, history, time is a continuum — it flows, like a river flows. We’ve tended to chop it up into past, present and future. And we’ve let the past drop out of the flow.” To live as though there was no past, while facing a future we can’t yet see, is to live in one dimension only, he concluded.
For a journalist, a life without perspective, depth and dimension — the building blocks of context — the story is dead on arrival. Likewise, failing to connect with the ghosts of Gregory Hall cuts future journalists off from a deeper understanding of the calling they pursue.
In a new age of journalism, journalists today and tomorrow need to revere the past, learn from mistakes and work to build legacies of truth.
Melita M. Garza is the Tom and June Netzel Sleeman Scholar in Business Journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a public voices fellow with The OpEd Project.
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