Some thoughts on American journalism

These are some responses to the readings in my critical perspectives of journalism class. I would love some feedback. I realize these thoughts might seem incomplete or underdeveloped, but the length requirement was four to five pages.

As the press in the United States has changed and grown, its role and its characteristics have been re-imagined from time to time. The readings for this week highlight major conceptions about the press’s existence through history, its role as arbiter and mediator between the public and its government, as well as various perspectives on the tone and tenor of its purpose. Some of these essays address the current media ecology with scant attention to the global picture and its implications for American journalism; some of these essays, such as McComb’s rehashing of agenda-setting, fail to account for these issues entirely. Trade liberalization, technological advance, erosion of public institutions, and the growing power of transnational corporations have changed our relationship with the world. Overall, commercialization enabled the growth of professionalism in American journalism, providing social space for the role and function to change and expand. However, the tension between commercialization and professionalism remain at odds, with commercialization overpowering professionalism within journalism. Journalism’s role in American society needs revision, given the current media landscape as well as changes globally.
Schudson and Tifft indicate with their essay that commercialization, which is essentially freedom of ownership, has safeguarded and promoted the exchange of information, and became an integral part of the press in political life. Over the years, journalism’s role begins to take on meanings in American society, as journalists respond to their industry and the world around them. Schudson and Tifft point out the adversarial culture adopted by the press following Watergate and Vietnam, as well as the culture of objectivity that began as aspiration and turned eventually into “ideology”. The commercial aspect of the press was adopted by Oliver Wendell Holmes, and was used to illustrate how the merit of ideas can be adopted or rejected (Schmul & Picard. As Holmes wrote: “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market” (p. 144).
Commercialization and professionalization have come to a head, and as newspapers have been absorbed into larger media companies, whose primary objective is to make money, journalism’s role in America’s democracy has begun to wane. If lapses in coverage and ethical breeches fail to convey the severity of the problem, then we should turn our attention lack of attention that the average American devotes to issues related to politics. By why are these issues so important?
Each of these essays alluded to a larger function that has grown over the years: its function to keep people in the know about their government. It is this conceptualization of the press should give us cause to pause and evaluate the journalism’s job at certain points in history. It is also this idea that required scholars and journalists to assess who has participated in the marketplace of ideas. The press’s power, while its degree of effect is a matter of contention, is seen in its ability to set the public agenda (McCombs). However, agenda setting only accounts for media influence on the public agenda but fails to address a more pervasive trend. Increasingly those in power find ways to manipulate or bypass the press completely. Bush’s executive order to create the Office of Homeland Security, which subsequently led to the largest government reorganization since Truman, occurred with little discussion in the media. The need for assessment and revision of American journalism is not farfetched.
Changes in social fabric, especially in media landscape, have contributed to changes in its role and function. As indicated earlier, Schudson and Tifft indicate a number of ways in which journalism grew into a profession. The perspectives of journalism are far from uniform. Zelizer begins by using the “frame of mind” (p. 66) explanation of journalism but eventually concludes the journalist should be one who can step outside of himself or herself to see events in a different light (p. 77). One of the most contentious roles resides in the press’s role as watchdog. As Bennett and Serrin argue, watchdog journalists scrutinize, document, investigate, and relate matters of public concern (p. 169). While they offer ways to strengthen the watchdog role as a time when the press is “embattled”, they indicate in their essay not all journalists engage in these activities. Even if journalists do not engage in investigative journalism, Patterson and Seib argue the journalists must do more to “encourage citizens to think about what they are seeing and hearing” (p. 199). Thorson argues news use indicates strongly positive attitudes toward civic engagement, and education still remains a strong indicator of news use. However, young Americans have disengaged on many levels.
These roles are not embraced by all of journalism’s professionals, and as Patterson and Seib illustrate, journalism must compete with numerous sources of information. Credibility and reliability then becomes suspect because none of us really know how to filter and evaluate the thousands of sources of information on the Web. If the marketplace is an apt metaphor for ideas, then we should conceptualize it now as the dusty streets of Mumbai, where noisy merchants compete for attention, not as a place that follows Smith’s idea of market economics. It is a place where finding useful items requires critical and thoughtful strategy. We must think of Smith’s ideas of market economics similarly to Einstein’s re-imagination of Newton’s Law of Gravity. When the idea failed to encompass the phenomena completely, Keynes and others re-imagined the market economics to include the idea of supply and demand. The concept had not occurred to Smith because it was beyond his realm of possibility as he walked the streets of London. The metaphor is a social space that can be reworked. And journalism is just that. It is a space and like other spaces we imagine its function. Over the years its function has been re-imagined and reassessed to reflect changes in society and the media landscape. As part of the larger system, we are socialized to its function, as students, as professionals. As human beings, we make sense of it.
Changes have now dramatically altered how our world operates as well as how we experience the world. Many of these essays illustrate that we are amidst change; Schudson and Tifft wrote as their essay drew to a close that “(F)ewer Americans appeared to value the media’s role as surrogates for the public or its function as a filter through which inaccuracy, imbalance, and unfairness are sifted out” (Schudson & Tifft, p. 42). Curran also points out that many Americans turn to other organizations, institutions, or groups to facilitate mediation with the government. While Schmul and Picard end on a positive note, they do argue that “Rampant commercialization and underlying changes in the economics of media that remove incentives for many firms to make expenditures for costly and less profitable content that serves the marketplace of ideas” (p. 152).
Change is invariably part of life, especially with respect to humankind. Although the death of newspapers might well be an exaggeration, our society has changed. We experience time and space much differently than ever before. We have connectivity with one another that is much more pronounced than ever before. We think of our freedom not only in terms of free will but with respect to fast food, brand names, and cell phone usage. We have more information about most places around the globe, but we have rarely think about WHAT WE ACTUALLY KNOW about these places. We are consistently bombarded with media messages that are incomplete and/or decontextualized.

What has happened to the nation’s news media is not complex, as the Project for Journalism Excellence suggests. At a time when America’s role abroad has taken on global proportions, the nation’s media and their global reach has receded, relying only on a few information wholesalers. At a time when global capitalism’s sway holds more weight than public institutions within the realm of the sovereign nation-state, journalism has a surprising lack of insight on how these shifts in power affect people around the globe. At a time when transparency is desperately needed, corporations have taken hold of the press. While tried and true journalists might still exist, they live in an increasingly noisy media ecology, which tailors to younger audiences who simply ignore information and news rather than trying to filter out what they need. Our demands as a society are much different.
If journalism helps us make sense of our world and by doing so enables greater participation in self-governance, then certainly the way in which we think of journalism should be re-imagined. By providing a partial and decontextualized picture of the world, it becomes difficult to discern what changes in our world might mean, particularly when they derive from something as complex as globalization. It stands to reason many journalists possess a less than adequate understanding of these processes. We cannot argue that journalism should remain the course if journalism functions as a bridge between the public and its government. If journalists provide necessary awareness about the operations of government to enable self-governance, then our role as journalists must fit within the tools necessary for citizens to person the task. However, we cannot begin to assess the media landscape and understand our place without first acknowledging fundamental shifts in how we are governed, and the powers that exist to do so, whether they are elected or not.

*All readings come from the reader, The Press. Particularly Chapters 2, 4, 7 through 12. If you haven't picked it up, by all means, buy it yourself. Don't take my word for it.