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By the 1920s, people began wondering whether the impartial approach to news reporting was sufficient for helping readers understand complex national and global developments. As one news scholar contended, it was partly as a result of “drab, factual, objective reporting” that “the American people were utterly amazed when [World War I] broke out in August 1914, as they had no understanding of the foreign scene to prepare them for it.”⁵ Such concerns triggered the rise of interpretive journalism, which aims to explain the ramifications of key issues or events and place them in a broader historical or social context.

Editor and columnist Walter Lippmann insisted that while objectivity should serve as journalism’s foundation, the press should do more. He ranked three press responsibilities: (1) “to make a current record”; (2) “to make a running analysis of it”; and (3) “on the basis of both, to suggest plans.”⁶

In the 1930s, the Great Depression and the Nazi threat further spurred newsmagazines and radio commentary to provide more rigorous analysis of global events. First developed in the partisan era, editorial pages also made a strong comeback. More significant, political opinion columns proliferated. Between 1930 and 1934 alone, more than 150 syndicated columns sprang up. Yet newspapers began carefully separating news and opinion pages, so readers could more easily distinguish between them.

The rise of radio in the 1930s intensified tensions between the objective and interpretive models of print journalism. As radio gained in popularity, broadcasters increasingly took their news directly from papers and wire services. Seeking to maintain their dominion over “the facts,” some newspaper editors and lobbyists argued that radio should provide only interpretive commentary. Other print journalists argued that it was interpretive stories, not objective reports, that could best help newspapers compete against radio. However, most U.S. dailies continued relegating interpretive content to a few editorial and opinion pages.

It wasn’t until the 1950s—with the outbreak of the Korean War, the development of atomic power, the deepening of the Cold War, and the U.S. anticommunist movement—that newspapers began providing more interpretive journalism. They did so in part to compete with the latest news medium: television. And their interpretive material often took the form of an “op-ed” page—which appeared opposite the traditional editorial page. The op-ed page offered a wider variety of columns, news analyses, and letters to the editor.