Covering Suburbia: Newspapers, Suburbanization, and Social Change in the Postwar Philadelphia Region, 1945-1982

Abstract

My dissertation, "Covering Suburbia: Newspapers, Suburbanization, and Social Change in the Postwar Philadelphia Region, 1945-1982," uses the Philadelphia metropolitan area as a representative case study of the ways in which suburban daily newspapers influenced suburbanites' attitudes and actions during the post-World War II era. It argues that the demographic and economic changes that swept through the United States during the second half of the twentieth century made it nearly impossible for urban daily newspapers to maintain their hegemony over local news and made possible the rise of numerous profitable and competitive suburban dailies. More importantly, the dissertation argues that, serving as suburbanites' preferred source for local news during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, enabled the suburban newspapers to directly influence the social, cultural, and physical development of the suburbs. Their emergence also altered the manner in which urban newspapers covered the news and played an instrumental role in the demise of several of the nation's most prominent evening papers during the 1970s and early 1980s, including Philadelphia's Evening Bulletin. This dissertation contributes to the growing body of innovative scholarly studies examining the development of America's suburbs during the post-World War II era; works which have placed suburbanites at the center of national debates regarding public housing, integration, and urban sprawl, but, to this point, have ignored the central role that suburban newspapers played in influencing how people who had only recently moved to the rapidly growing suburbs understood and reacted to these issues through their coverage of local events. In its totality, my dissertation provides a counter to the prevailing scholarly emphasis on the mass media's power and argues that local suburban newspapers played a primary role in shaping suburbanites' ideals, attitudes, and actions during the postwar era.