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Introduction
The South is strongly influenced by college football, which grew in the 1920s both regionally and nationally (Doyle 28-51; Borucki 477-94). Its growth was such that the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching produced a report, American College Athletics, proposing to answer two questions posed by Foundation President Henry Pritchett in the preface: "What has organized sport to do with the work of an intellectual agency which the university and the college are conceived to be? And how can college boys find the time or the money to maintain so costly a display for popular entertainment?" (Pritchett viii). The report unleashed a flood of response—not only within the higher education community, but also from the newspapers that covered college sports, particularly football. At a time when sports journalists, like the rest of the profession, were beginning to address ethical and professional questions, the Carnegie Foundation report included a chapter on sports journalism that challenged the excessive coverage devoted to college sports. Thus, sports writers were reporting on a movement that addressed their excesses as much as those within college athletics. How did that affect coverage of the report and the broader debate it encouraged?
This article will analyze coverage in four newspapers (New York Times, Charleston News and Courier, Chicago Tribune, and Washington Post) that published articles about the Carnegie Foundation report and the accompanying discussion within the academy. The three larger newspapers were recognized as elite, authoritative news sources during this period; the Post and Courier was selected because it provided a perspective from the South, as the oldest daily newspaper in the South. Newspaper coverage of the report's proposals was not only crucial to the proposals' acceptance, but also reflective of how important media outlets were framing the issues. The title of this article, "Taming the Monster," refers not only to the Carnegie Foundation's efforts to check the influence of college football, but also to the transgressions of sports journalism that the profession itself was trying to check-conflicting values that were displayed clearly, in content and in style, on sports pages in 1929.
Background
American collegiate football has been around for a century and a half. However, the game has not always been played with the same...