This paper discusses how the journalistic side of the 20th century can be defined as the struggle for democracy and an independent
media against propaganda and subservience to the state. It looks at how that struggle culminated during the first half of this century in the seizure of the means of
communication by the demagogues of the 1930s and 1940s, Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, and their Cold War reincarnation of the 1950s, Joseph McCarthy, the ghost that still haunts U.S.
journalism. It shows how modern journalism began around 1890 with the advent of a national system of communication and has had a pretty long run.