Silent Spring, Loud Legacy: How Elite Media Helped Establish an Environmentalist Icon

Abstract

Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, is widely credited with altering Americans’ environmental consciousness and changing people’s relationship with nature, science, and government. One means by which the book, which chronicled the dangers of pesticides, has attained and reinforced its symbolic status in collective memory is through newspaper coverage, which remained persistent through its first five decades. This study of 50 years of Silent Spring in two elite newspapers traces how news media can help elevate a situated artifact into an enduring icon with contemporary power—not just through thoughtful, well-researched journalism but also through numerous instrumental decisions by copy editors, agate clerks, and calendar compilers.

Textbook News Values: Stable Concepts, Changing Choices

“…(MacDougall, 1938, p. 14) McDougall's appeal coincides with increasing standardization of content across local outlets through syndicates and chains, which left newspapers "a bit unmoored from their urban context" (Guarneri, 2017, p. 4) in which small stories portraying vivid city life had mostly thrived. The transition to rational, systematic reporting continued through the century with journalism's embrace of quasi-social science methods (e.g., Meyer, 1991), coinciding with the epistemic dominance of technocratic scientific policymaking following World War II (Parks, 2017;Waisbord, 2018).…”

‘Audubonis not Audubon’: Journalism as communicative logic in the pages of an NGO-produced magazine, 1960–1976

“…The National Audubon Society experienced the largest growth, starting the decade with 32,000 members and ending it with almost 250,000 and growing (Mitchell et al, 1991). This popular groundswell has been attributed to a number of causes, such as post-war affluence contributing to an American population with more capacity for environmental concern (Hays, 1987), the publication of Silent Spring (Parks, 2017), and a series of high-profile environmental disasters that captured the public imagination (Sale, 1993).…”

Journalism as an Advocacy Tool: Negotiating Boundaries of Professionalism in the 20th-Century American Environmental Movement

“…The looming threat of nuclear war in addition to the increasingly visible negative effects of a chemicals-heavy lifestyle contributed to an American public that was ready to hear Rachel Carson’s (1962) central message in Silent Spring : that human domination over nature did not represent unequivocally positive progress, but rather endangered the very future of humanity and the planet (Sale, 1993). Although it is an oversimplification to credit Carson with the launch of the modern environmental movement, the book’s release was a major cultural moment that thrust simmering questions about humanity’s relationship to the natural world into the spotlight (Parks, 2017). Bipartisan, grassroots energy for environmental issues exploded, culminating in the first Earth Day in 1970 drawing up to 20 million people in what was then the largest demonstration in American history (Rome, 2010).…”