Communication scholars have analyzed how such pivotal historical and political events as tear, assassination, and the rise and fall of nations and political regimes have functioned to shape and shore up the legitimacy of particular news institutions. This paper explores the role played by an early twentieth-century sex-related social and moral panic over `white slavery "in transforming news practices. Beginning in 1907, stories proliferated in the U.S. mass media of White women kidnapped and sold into prostitution by organized bands of immigrants, often alleged to be conspiring with top city officials. A diachronic textual analysis of New York Times coverage of a 1910 white slavery investigation finds that reporters initially drew from a stock ofsentimental narratives to describe the investigation's findings. However, as the investigation grew increasingly problematic, the Times developed a detached orientation toward its object, similar to that demanded of professional journalists today. I examine how the Times engaged in paradigm repair and significant historical revision to account for and defend its earlier articles on this controversial phenomenon

The work ofErving Goffman has been influential in media studies, primarily via adaptations of selected concepts like "region" and `game. "However, relatively little attention has been paid by media researchers to Goffman's own theoretical work on the mass media. Taking its lead from the later work of Goffman, this essay shows how it contains elements of a theoretical framework for mass-mediated communication, through the concepts of `hyper-ritualization"and `dramatic scriptings. "I emphasize the way that Goffman situates mass communication in relation to the interpersonal realm as a model version of the latter, as mass communication is crafted, concentrated, and planned to a degree that interpersonal communication is not. I conclude that Goffman's critical approach to informality in broadcast talk and interaction is a valuable tool for the researcher in a time when the rhetoric of informality has become a dominant mode of legitimation in broadcasting