Page 70 - Historical Dictionary of Political Communication in the United States

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GREELEY,
teaching
and began HORACE at several Chicago-area schools, settling at the University
of Illinois at Chicago in 1963.
Her best-known research has been on information processing—how people
choose, interpret, and retain information from the news media. Graber draws
heavily on "schema" theory in her work, arguing that people evaluate new
information according to their preexisting belief structures. Her 1984 book on
this subject, Processing the News: How People Tame the Information Tide, was
released in a third edition in 1994. Graber also contributed to a major study of
the agenda-setting function of the media, which was published in the 1993 book
Media Agenda Setting in a Presidential Campaign. Her 1980 book, Mass Media
and American Politics, released in a fifth edition in 1997, is a compendium of
current knowledge on the subject. In 1984, she edited a companion volume,
Media Power in Politics, which was released in a third edition in 1994.
When the American Political Science Association and the International Com-
munication Association began joint publication of the scholarly journal Political
Communication in 1992, Graber was chosen as its first editor.
SOURCES: Contemporary Authors (CD-ROM); Douglas M. McLeod, Women in Com-
munication, 1994.
Marc Edge

GREELEY, HORACE (1811-1872) was truly a legend in his own time. Born
to a large, poor family in New Hampshire, he was self-educated. Yet, with assets
of $3,000 he started what would become the best-known newspaper of his time
and became a major figure in national politics. He went to New York City in
1830 to be a reporter, and three years later he and a friend started the Morning
Post. It lasted three weeks, but a year later he started a weekly, the New Yorker.
Then in 1841, at the age of 30, he started the New York Tribune. It was a
success from the start, and from it sprang the Weekly Tribune, which circulated
nationally and achieved a circulation of 200,000.
He was an idealist and a reformer. He was a proponent of Fourierism, a type
of collectivism. He was for labor unions and against capital punishment and had
some success on both issues. He also favored high tariffs and free homesteads.
He was a strong abolitionist. His newspaper was a strong advocate on all these
issues and thus different from most of its contemporaries.
He was a supporter of the Whig Party and became one of the founders of the
Republican Party. Yet in 1872, disillusioned with the Republicans and President
Grant, he ran for president on the Democratic ticket. Grant won easily, and
Greeley, crushed by that and the death of his wife just before the election, died
later that month.

SOURCES: Joseph McKerns, Biographical Dictionary of American Journalism, 1989;
Kenneth Stewart and John Tebbel, Makers of Modern Journalism, 1952.
Guido H. Stempel HI