James L. Baughman (January 10, 1952 - March 26, 2016) was an American
mass communication
Mass communication is the process of imparting and exchanging information through mass media to large segments of the population. It is usually understood for relating to various forms of media, as its technologies are used for the dissemination o ...
historian, and the Fetzer-Bascom Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison
A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, the ...
.
Early life and education
James L. Baughman was born in
Warren, Ohio
Warren is a city in and the county seat of Trumbull County, Ohio, United States. Located in northeastern Ohio, Warren lies approximately northwest of Youngstown and southeast of Cleveland. The population was 39,201 at the 2020 census. The his ...
on January 10, 1952, the son of Lewis E. and Ann B. Baughman.
Baughman grew up in Warren and attended the Warren City Schools.
He was a lifelong and passionate fan of the
Cleveland Indians
The Cleveland Guardians are an American professional baseball team based in Cleveland. The Guardians compete in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a member club of the American League (AL) Central division. Since , they have played at Progressive F ...
.
Baughman received his BA in history from
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
in 1974.
[ ] He attended graduate school at
Columbia University
Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...
, where he obtained his M.A., M.Phil and Ph.D. degrees, all in history.
His doctoral adviser at Columbia was the renowned historian
William E. Leuchtenburg.
Academic career
James Baughman taught at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison
A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, the ...
from 1979 until 2016.
He served as Director of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication from 2003 to 2009.
An exceptionally popular professor with students,
he won th
Chancellor's Distinguished Teaching Awardin 2003.
He looked the part of a professor, always wearing a jacket and tie to class.
[ He smoked a pipe and liked to tell funny stories or do impressions of historical figures over a glass of scotch.][ He believed deeply in the power of the written word. When students or friends experienced major life challenges or traumatic events, he always encouraged them to "write about it."][
During his long career at the University of Wisconsin, he authored four books on the history of mass communication in the United States. His 1992 boo]
The Republic of Mass Culture: Journalism, Filmmaking, and Broadcasting in America since 1941
explained how the advent of television transformed mass culture in the United States. Baughman argued that television had a greater impact on its rivals—such as newspapers, radio broadcasters, and the film industry—than it did on society as a whole.[Baughman, Republic of Mass Culture, p. xvii] As he put it:
::"Indeed, the effects f televisionthat can be demonstrated are institutional, not social. Some of TV's rivals adjusted quickly to the challenge of the home screen; others showed what in retrospect appears to have been an almost self-destructive indifference. But nearly all came to adopt a common anti-TV strategy. Recognizing television's capture of the mass audience, most began cultivating the subgroup, segments of the audience denoted by such factors as class, education or age."
Baughman's 2007 book
Same Time, Same Station: Creating American Television, 1948-1961
' described how the American television industry became fixated on commercial advertising and high ratings. As he explained:
::"Commercial television gradually stopped caring. In the late 1960s, Congress reluctantly created the Public Broadcasting Service
The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcaster and non-commercial, free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virginia. PBS is a publicly funded nonprofit organization and the most prominent provider of educati ...
. Over time, PBS relieved the networks of the cultural production attempted a decade earlier. It also marked the beginning of a segregation, cemented by the diffusion of cable television
Cable television is a system of delivering television programming to consumers via radio frequency (RF) signals transmitted through coaxial cables, or in more recent systems, light pulses through fibre-optic cables. This contrasts with broa ...
in the 1980s, of taste. The networks felt increasingly free to drop programming intended to please cultural and political elites."
Reviewing the book in the April 30, 2007 issue of The New Yorker
''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...
, Nicholas Lemann
Nicholas Berthelot Lemann is an American writer and academic, the Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Professor of Journalism and Dean Emeritus of the Faculty of Journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He has be ...
observed:
"As the television audience grew larger and took in people from small towns and the middle of the country, it became obvious that Americans wanted predictable, familiar entertainment, featuring, as Baughman astutely observes, stock situations and stars who had unusually expressive faces that lent themselves to cartoonish mugging shown in closeup. The results were often terrific, but never uplifting."
But Baughman harbored no pretensions of cultural superiority. As he noted in the introduction to ''Same Time, Same Station'', "I will confess to consuming much more ESPN
ESPN (originally an initialism for Entertainment and Sports Programming Network) is an American international basic cable sports channel owned by ESPN Inc., owned jointly by The Walt Disney Company (80%) and Hearst Communications (20%). The ...
than C-SPAN
Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network (C-SPAN ) is an American cable and satellite television network that was created in 1979 by the cable television industry as a nonprofit public service. It televises many proceedings of the United States ...
."
In addition to his academic career, Baughman served as a member of the Wisconsin Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (CCR) is a bipartisan, independent commission of the United States federal government, created by the Civil Rights Act of 1957 during the Eisenhower administration, that is charged with the responsibility for ...
from 1985 to 1992.
James Baughman Day
Baughman died of lung cancer on March 26, 2016. He was survived by his wife and best friend, Michele "Mickey" Michuda.
He continued teaching until two weeks before he succumbed to cancer.[ Shortly before Baughman passed away, ]Madison Madison may refer to:
People
* Madison (name), a given name and a surname
* James Madison (1751–1836), fourth president of the United States
Place names
* Madison, Wisconsin, the state capital of Wisconsin and the largest city known by this ...
Mayor Paul Soglin
Paul R. Soglin (born April 22, 1945) is an American politician and former three-time Mayor of Madison, Wisconsin, having served a total of 22 years in that office between 1973 and 2019. A member of the Democratic Party, he was a candidate for Gov ...
declared March 26 James Baughman Day for "the love and intellectual passion he has inspired in his current and former students, and for his contributions to scholarship, history, journalism and education."[ On the day Baughman died, th]
University of Wisconsin School of Journalism and Mass Communication
announced: "The journalism school lost a lion this morning."
Selected publications
* ''Television's Guardians: The FCC and the Politics of Programming, 1958-1967''. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985.
* ''Henry R. Luce and the Rise of the American News Media''. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987.
* ''The Republic of Mass Culture: Journalism, Filmmaking, and Broadcasting in America since 1941''. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
* ''Same Time, Same Station: Creating American Television, 1948-1961''. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Baughman, James L.
1952 births
2016 deaths
University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty
People from Warren, Ohio
Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni
Harvard College alumni