PressThink: A Western Civ Course in What's Gone Wrong With the Press

A Western Civ Course in What's Gone Wrong With the Press

For ideas that illuminate the rage out there journalists have to go outside their comfort zones, including the "liberal" zones in press thought. They have to find other sources of insight, and listen to explanations that may at first sound alien. Here are a few from the New Criterion...

“At a public meeting in Jackson, Miss., last week, a listener to NPR programs on Mississippi Public Broadcasting asked me if I had detected a sense of outrage growing in the country,” wrote Jeffrey Dvorkin, ombudsman for NPR (March 8). “If my inbox is anything to go by, I certainly have.”

Not just Dvorkin, but probably every ombudsman (male and female) could give the same report: a rising hostility pours in through the inbox. “The reasons for this cyber-outrage might be worth pondering,” he said.

Yes, the reasons. Who really knows how to explain the kind of rage and discontent—primarily about “bias”—that visits the ombudsman’s inbox anywhere there is such a box in the American news media today? If it’s deserved, how did journalists come to deserve it? If it’s not, how did so many Americans come to believe it?

Dvorkin’s reasons are semi-plausible— and totally familiar: “AM talk radio and cable television slugfests have given many the sense that this is what journalism should be.” Or: “E-mail makes our natural sense of impatience more pronounced.” These I would call factors. They are a long way from an understanding of causes, a long way from any why.

Calling for a more civil dialogue, as Dvorkin does, is perfectly well-intentioned. But it is not a reply to a sense of outrage growing in the country. Complaints about bias have mutated into something far more serious today: a campaign to discredit the liberal media, marginalize the national press, and deny professional journalism any hold on the public interest. I’ve been writing about it— and objecting. So have others. David Shaw of the Los Angeles Times says we’re paranoid.

A whole front in the Culture War is now devoted to these activities of disqualifying the traditional press, and raising substitutes like Jeff Gannon. That is action from the Right, but the Left often feels equally enraged at the failures of Big Journalism, and it is stupified by the success of the “liberal media” charge. What Liberal Media? as Eric Alterman put it (2003). Oh That Liberal Media, as the “reply blog” says back.

How did things get to this point?

For ideas that might illuminate the matter journalists have to go outside their comfort zones, including the “liberal” zones in current press think. They have to find other sources of insight, and listen to explanations that may at first sound alien. Better ideas to explain the rage about bias aren’t going to come from the ombudsman’s inbox because they aren’t revealed in the rage. You can listen forever to that and not know why it’s coming.

In the matter of how did we come to be attacked for being biased? I have an excursion to recommend. It’s not topical. It’s not typical. The tone is in fact classical; the frame of reference is the whole history and literature of the West. Journalism: Power without responsibility is an essay by Kenneth Minogue, who writes in the old school style of the learned man taking in a large subject and tracing things back to their roots. I found it in an obscure corner of the publishing world, Hilton Kramer’s literary and cultural magazine, New Criterion, “a monthly review of the arts and intellectual life.” (UPDATE, March 15: As I explained, “obscure corner” was a dumb way of introducing the magazine. Austin Bay agrees.)

Minogue’s excursion is a challenging read. It will not sound familiar to working journalists, unless they took a great books curriculum in college. He writes in a tradition of culturally conservative criticism (you could also say high-mindedness) that looks with disdain on “sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll.” Liberation into appetite is not his idea of social progress. But then progress is not his idea of what to expect from life.

This is not my tradition— at all. But today it has powerful voices speaking for it, and it always has. (The ur-text is Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses in 1930.) For a journalist wondering, “where is this rage coming from?” Minogue offers a unique vantage point. To caricature it, but only slightly: It’s like a Western Civ course in what went wrong in the press.

If we go back as far as we can without losing the thread, where do the roots of today’s bias wars lie? This is the matter Minogue spreads out on the table.

Critics conservative about culture let it be known that they mistrusted the modern media (as they distrusted the modern mass) well before the 1960s. They were reacting in part to the media diet of sensationalism, novelty, news, and scandal, which promised a kind of daily revelation. This was a false claim, they felt. Revelation was the business of religion, of the Church.

The ancient conservative complaint about the media is not liberal bias. It is the rising power of an institution celebrating novelty and change, and promising to reveal the secrets of the world through news reports about it. This conflicts with “the religious assumption that the essential truths of life have been revealed, but that the human world is dark and devious, and the connection between events is obscure.”

Does anyone recall that jingle for Time magazine?

Throughout your world
Throughout your land
Time puts it all
Right in your hand
Read Time and understand!

“We might sometimes imagine that it is merely the stuff we read in the newspapers every day, but actually journalism is a mode in which we think,” Minogue writes. “It indelibly marks our first response to everything.”

But religion was supposed to do that: indelibly mark our first response to everything. Now it’s the news. Now it’s Katie Couric. “A passion to follow the actual events of the world seems to have continually grown,” he writes of the period from 1600s to now. “The steady diffusion of a journalistic interest in what is going on affects our consciousness of the world we live in.”

People sense this about the news, its effect on consciousness just by being all around us. But what language do they have for discussing it with members of the press? None. There is no language and there is no place. There’s only “bias,” and what is by now politicized rage.

Hegel said it: in his time, the newspaper habit was replacing morning prayer. The conservative mind began hating journalism right there. “Journalistic consciousness is imperialistic,” Minogue writes, in echo of this moment. “It invades every sphere of life and takes it over.”

He is trying to explain, to a much finer point than out current debates permit, the disdain that he and others of like mind feel for Big Journalism today, which in his view “has lost such integrity as it ever had and is being used to nudge us towards some version of right thinking.” What’s different is that he never—or almost never—simplifies. And in old school fashion he goes back many times to origins:

Historically, journalism emerged from the specific interests of princes, merchants, and administrators. A prince needed to know something of foreign powers, and his ambassador sent him back reports, just as a merchant needed to know of profitable opportunities and conditions of trade.

This is accurate. Among the first correspondents was “the ambassador writing to his prince.” What’s different today is that the part of prince is played by the national public. Rather than a specific interest, it is thought to have a general stake in news (which is where “the public’s right to know” comes from.) Minogue realizes how modern a generalized demand for news is:

No life can avoid gossip, ritual, and response to overriding events such as war or famine, but most people, especially if they are illiterate, have hitherto been interested in little beyond what affects them directly. Journalism is the cultivation of concern for things that are for the most part remote from us.

And there is a connection between that remoteness and the willingness to rage at the news criers.

Here, however, I have to point out that political business transacted at court or in the capital has always affected people directly and indirectly, regardless of whether they knew much about it. Literate and informed, or illiterate and out of touch, the great mass of people do have an interest—a very legitimate one—in things that are “for the most part remote from us” because they take place within the power structure that runs our world, allegedly on our behalf.

Suppose we believe in “trustee” government. How else can we know if it’s behaving responsibly, if not through news reports from an independent source? There’s an interest in following “remote” events that is inseparable from a modern citizen’s duty to hold elected government accountable. It can’t be “wrong” unless popular sovereignty itself is wrong.

But the conservative temper trusts little in what the mind loves immediately to know. An appetite for news involves a “lust to see and know things of no concern to us,” says Minogue (who would smile knowingly at a pop term like “news junkie.”) But he also says that the kind of curiosity modern journalism satisfies is “a distant relative of the ‘wonder’ thought to be the source of philosophy and science.” The DNA of the Enlightenment is thus involved.

And he further says that journalism is essential; we feel we can’t live without knowing of distant and nearby events. We depend on news to get our bearings in the world. But this is not incompatible with rage and may even increase it. Thus: “our addiction to journalism is virtually inseparable from our dislike of it.”

Contrary to what most are taught in journalism school, Minogue sees disaster in the “social responsibility” theory of a professionalized press. (A flash point.) He would name that a wrong turn. It was a disaster, he thinks, when it happened in education. “Teachers came to think that, because they were custodians of the minds of the rising generation, they held the key to social progress.”

Something similar happened in journalism, which began to acquire “the affectations of an elite possessed of saving knowledge.”

The Salvationism in this doctrine consisted in the belief that in being skeptical of all universal claims, the journalist as critical thinker was revealing a sophistication superior to that of the average voter. The test of such critical sophistication was that the journalist held opinions liberated from the influence of his or her milieu…

That’s true, I think. But here the argument takes one wrong turn and gets lost in a critique of academic fashion—the “everything’s a construction” school of thought—which is a whole chapter in the Culture Wars, and in the American university’s recent past. And while that chapter is important in the world of the New Criterion (and important generally, I believe) it has little to do with professional training or identity in journalism.

His theory: because journalists became university-educated after World War II, and universities allegedly fell captive to social constructionists and tenured radicals who “took over” the campus, the ideas absorbed in college help explain liberal bias in the press.

Plausible from a distance. The truth is most journalists remained hostile to those ideas, and to reading the books in which they were found. The J-School, throughout the entire post-war period, remained a “boot camp” experience— the opposite of a book club. The professional culture of the press generally despises “academic” ideas about itself, reacts to jargon as if it were an S.T.D., and treats a name like Michel Foucault as a synonym for gobbledygook. Many times in my career I have been asked, by college-educated journalists, what I could possibly know about journalism since I never worked in a newsroom.

If Minogue was more familiar with that creature Newsroom Joe he would be quite impressed with how much overt loathing and intelligent resistance there is for “academic sophistication.” The reason is simple. Journalists like facts. They’re empiricists in the sense that currency, for them, is the verifiable fact not yet publicly known. They don’t want to become social constructionists and lose that.

And so journalists in the United States held on to ideas about objectivity and factuality that were under assault in other disciplines because in those ideas they found refuge from the criticism they knew would come their way. The notorious example is the mechanical “He Said, She Said” formula in newswriting. (See my post about it.) Useless for truthtelling but not bad in serving as refuge.

So Minogue gets it wrong about journalism and “academic sophistication.” The professional model for training young journalists, coupled with their introduction to workaday attitudes in internships and student newspapers, reinforced by the professional culture they immediately find on the job, prevented the “fall” of objectivity and old fashioned ideas like accuracy, verifiability, balance, fairness. At times Minogue seems to realize this.

The crudest way of formulating our dislike would be to say that the picture of the world presented in newspapers and television programs jars with our political opinions. The discontent is greater among those on “the right” than those on “the left” but both share it. And here the discontent must seem odd, because journalists pride themselves on covering, or trying to cover, all points of view.

Here at the “crudest” level, the bias wars rage indefinitely, filling the inboxes.

Minogue tries to explain the anger as a reaction to another cultural “formation” in mainstream journalism. Sometimes called the watchdog press, it’s the image of an adversarial system pitting journalists against officials and authorities. Included are the heroic figure of the investigative reporter, the pride taken in the “crap-detecting” skills that are native to the reporter’s craft, and the battle to reveal secrets that reaches its historic and dramatic high point in Watergate.

All were supposed to be “innocent” methods (and fair) because the skepticism applied to both sides, one’s friends and one’s foes. But this ignores the way skepticism of that type takes sides against authority itself, which always has something to hide— even when legitimate. Not even the most pious man fully practices what he preaches, and so there is always something to “reveal.”

And so the kind of revelation offered in journalism (“…further revelations today in the story of…”) is a degraded form— to some. A cultural conservative might be highly aware of this, while the mainstream journalist remains oblivious.

Minogue slows things down. He tries to pick out the point where suspicion becomes a pose and loses contact with political realities, with the situation of the ambassador writing to his prince. After pointing to some “philosophers of suspicion,” (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud) he says that “in journalism we find suspicion as the constitutive passion of an entire practice.” Journalists will thus fight for their chosen identity as society’s free-range crap-detectors. He says:

The rational basis of modern journalism, its claim to our attention as bringing us knowledge of the world, thus turns out to be the practice of revealing what other people want to hide from us. This is, of course, particularly true of what authority wants to hide.
The First World War was a watershed in the growth of cynicism about authority. People came to think that the official account of almost anything was generally wrong. Here then we find the beginnings of the journalistic posture of indignation as the reporter demands “full disclosure” of whatever the public might be thought to have a right to know.

That posture, he suggests, has hurt the press. And indeed there are journalists (I’ve met them) who define news as “what somebody wants to keep out of the papers.” Minogue traces the mythology of exposure back to the 19th Century realists in literature:

Novelists such as Dickens and Zola were certainly not the first to explore “low life,” but they extended the boundaries of social understanding in order to incorporate the experiences of socially insignificant people into the materials of drama, and also to reveal some of the realities—usually poverty, vice, and oppression—“behind” the facades of the time.
The crucial ideas of this literary movement were those of journalists themselves—indeed both Dickens and Zola had been journalists in their time. The basic idea of literary realism is that life is a theater put on for show, and that reality is what you find when you go behind the scenes. Reality, in other words, is something concealed by those whose interest lies in concealment. The posture of the journalist is thus that of the investigator debunking institutions by exposing secrets.

After Watergate, this became a method for generating authority in journalism. One of its most stylized forms is, of course, the CBS program Sixty Minutes.

Indeed, journalism exposes things that perhaps ought to be exposed, and prevents evils, but by that very token, it becomes a practical player in the world, and thus finds itself in contradiction with its own posture as a critic above the battles of partisans.

True. And that contradiction, left unresolved, has been a big factor in the rage. Now we come closer to where the power of the essay lies. It begins with a strange observation about pleasure and pain, opinion and news:

To hold an opinion is to mortgage a certain amount of pleasure and pain to the turn of events. What confirms one’s opinion gives pleasure, what seems to refute it, pain.

Maybe it explains some of the inbox: Those people are in pain! This idea resembles the explanation most popular with journalists: “your anger is with a world that refuted your hopes, but you’ve directed it at us, the news criers, because we delivered the message.”

For example, one day the new criers might say: “Sorry, Republicans, but a new and credible study doesn’t support your hope that Charter Schools deliver a better education. Turns out the kids in Charter schools aren’t doing any better than kids in other schools, and some are worse off. Now here are the facts…”

And what Republicans then interpret as a contest of opinion (their own vs. the journalist’s) the journalist treats as a conflict between opinion and actual knowledge— reality in the form of a news report based on it. The critics, cast as true believers, cannot accept reality (bad news); that is why they rage at media “bias,” according to this view.

There was a deadly complacency in this attitude, for it gave a warrant to ignore what critics were saying. Minogue remarks on the dangers of what I have called the View From Nowhere, which only seems to be the safe position for a mainstream journalist to hold. It hasn’t turned out that way. (On this see my recent post, The Abyss of Observation Alone.) Minogue:

The journalist, living amidst opinions, knows by instinct the pains of being caught out holding a vulnerable opinion. The first move in his professionalization, as it were, must therefore be to evacuate any position that might be explained by others as arising from his own interest: anything having to do with class, nationality, or civilization: all such inherited baggage must be abandoned by the journalist. The problem is that whoever abandons interests—which have about them a certain discussable reality, where compromise is possible—finds that his stock of opinions consists of abstract ideas. These will usually take an ethical form, and that impels them towards righteousness. Any such package of opinions is likely to irritate patriots and partisans of all kinds. The holder of such a position is usually enormously self-satisfied, because, having arrived there by the process of identifying extremes as things to be challenged and questioned, he fancies himself as having all the rationality of an Aristotelian mean.

“Reality is what you find when you go behind the scenes.” The self-satisfaction in being the skeptic to everyone else’s true believer. The righteousness among society’s free-range crap-detectors. The self-image as balancer while “you and him fight.” The tendency to shout out abstractions when asked, “what are your interests in the matter?” “A sophistication superior to that of the average voter.” The hollowness of the view from nowhere. The arid rationality in trying to be an Aristotelian mean.

These are some of Kenneth Minogue’s suggestions for how things got to where they are between the cultural right and journalism. I don’t buy all of it, but then I am not a cultural conservative in the New Criterion mold. I do recommend reading Journalism: Power without responsibility. In fact, I recommend struggling with it.

And after that, go here to struggle some more.

After Matter: Notes, reactions and links…

David Shaw, the Pulitzer Prize-winning media critic for the Los Angeles Times, takes on the de-certification of the press argument (and my defense of it) in: Is Bush really implementing a full-court press on media? His answer is no. Yet the argument is “one of the most interesting and provocative (and paranoid) of those espoused in recent weeks.”

Chris Satullo’s answer is yes, there is an attempt to discredit, intimidate and marginalize journalism. He’s the editorial page editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer:

My craft is in deep trouble. Our only coin of value, credibility, is plummeting.
These Romulans are smart; they know our weaknesses. And we keep handing them ammunition. So they are pressing their attack on the very idea of an independent press.

An independent press. A lofty abstraction. But if you are a person who would like to pick up a paper, flip on CNN, or surf the Net with reasonable confidence that the information you get is as accurate as possible, and untainted by hidden agenda, you might want to help us resist the assault.

Also see Satullo in the comments on Kenneth Minogue “nailing it.” (Or at least part of it.)

The New Criterion has a weblog, called Armavirumque. See James Panero’s response, The J-don weighs in. (“Well worth reading, both for Rosen’s insights into Minogue’s article as well as for what I detect to be a few moments of genuine surprise as a courtier learns that his Sun King might be fallible after all.”) See also this National Review column about Hilton Kramer and The New Criterion.

AKM Adam, theologian and “Random Thoughts” blogger, e-mails:

AKMA: “Give voice to the truth, and we show ourselves responsible.”
My theological vocation suggests that “revelation” doesn’t stand in opposition to “investigation,” but that our apprehension of the truth always requires of its suitors a humility and reticence alien to both the insatiable curiosity to which Minogue points and the boisterous confidence of many partisans (right, left, and center). The truth, so understood, offers itself to theologian and journalist alike, and unfolds itself to those who attend patiently to the complexities that truth entails.

Responsible journalists (academics, theologians, et al.) address themselves to the truth by eschewing both arrant axe-grinding and heedless novelty-mongering.

Here Minogue’s criticism of the appearance of even-handedness strikes home: justice entails not Aristotle’s mean between extremes, but a comprehensive commitment to that which is just — to the truth, in other words.

Minogue supposes that the disjunction between journalism and truth arises because journalists have assimilated a lukewarm epistemological relativism. It seems more likely to me, though, that journalists’ work has been undone by commercial motivation than by intellectual pretension.

Minogue asks twice, “How much truth can any human activity sustain?” Is he equivocating subtly? Does he mean that we by our activities sustain a truth that might perish without us, or that our activities cannot endure long when saturated with truthfulness? Whatever his intent, I must rejoin it is only to the extent that our activities address and give voice to the truth, that we show ourselves responsible — as journalists, critics, philosophers, or theologians.

PressThink (Jan. 7, 2004), Journalism Is Itself a Religion (Special Essay on Launch of The Revealer.) “The newsroom is a nest of believers if we include believers in journalism itself. There is a religion of the press. There is also a priesthood. And there can be a crisis of faith.”

Tom Matrullo at IMproPRrieTies responds to this post:

These discussions invariably seem to take as given that what we understand as “journalism” is sufficiently uncontested to allow us to fruitfully discuss it.
In other words, the moment in which a piece of journalism, or several pieces, are actually read, is not there. Jay Rosen does spend a lot of time exploring Minogue’s think piece, to very good effect. But where do we see the same attention given to actual works of journalism? That moment is elided, in order to get to the fray of opinion about its place, its role, its trajectory, biases, and failings.

What does this elision possibly foreclose? What purpose does it serve?

Basically, he’s right. That’s the weakness of this style of essay, and blog post.

Scott Rosenberg of Salon in comments: “Minogue may have no interest in rationalizing his critique of journalism with the structure of the contemporary world economy. But for those of us who live and work in it, and try to manage our lives so that we can be comfortable and take care of ourselves and our families, paying attention to the news is not mere fad or cult of novelty or sick pop obsession; it is a survival trait.”

Here’s a first: I am described as a “white blogger” today at Romenesko. Jeff Jarvis, also named as “white blogger,” has a post about it: Blogging White Male. Chris Nolan explains it best. Doc Searls: “Nobody dominates the blogosphere. What makes the ‘sphere is indomitability. Of anyone. By anyone else.” Suffette (Lisa Stone) is doing something about it: A Bloggercon for women. Dave Winer is thinking on it.

Steve Lovelady, the boss over at CJR Daily, in comments:

It was Lord Northcliffe, founder of the London Daily Mail and London Daily Mirror who first propounded, almost 100 years ago exactly, that: “News is anything that someone somewhere wishes to suppress; all the rest is advertising.”
That’s been the operating principle for a century, in newsrooms ranging in size from three employees up to 1,200.

It will be quite interesting if we are indeed now in the process of thrashing out a replacement operating prinicple for the next 100 years — or if we’re only going through the motions.

The State of the News Media 2005. Major report from the Project on Excellence in Journalism. The final lines of the Conclusion are exquisitely apt: “Somehow journalism needs to prove that it is acting on behalf of the public, if it is to save itself.”

Posted by Jay Rosen at March 14, 2005 12:59 AM Print

Thanks for pointing out Minogue's article, Jay. As someone who did take her undergrad degree in perhaps the best known and most mature Great Books program currently active, I do find his form and style of argument familiar. So forgive me if, in typical Johnnie style, I go back to his actual text to critique your interpretation.

Minogue notes that the ubiquity of "the vast publishing industry of ... popularized understanding" presents two different problems, which function at very different levels. His argument will be distorted if those levels are confused.

The deeper level is that journalism has become and feeds a distortion of our civilization at its roots. Here Minogue is correct, I think, to say that journalism is both the surface symptom and the carrier of the disease of reactivity to the daily that makes attention to the lasting so difficult in our society. My own childhood in the Eastern Orthodox church makes the contrast vivid for me: when entering the liturgy, I entered a space and time outside of the Brownian motion of daily events which demand our attention from all directions. The language, chant and icons of the liturgy change only very slowly, not because they are themselves idolized, but in order to provide a context within which to reflect on meaning and value. The liturgy shapes those who participate in it, in deep ways that can be hard to discern at any particular point in time.

The Divine Liturgy (from the classical Greek lais and ergos, i.e. 'work of the people') of the Orthodox church, and other religious traditions as well, are rooted in a concern for meaning. They form the context within which to judge the value of events, choices, options from a framework that critiques all that is transient.

But as Minogue notes, journalism has its roots in the search for economic and political power - a different matter entirely. Whether the reports that Renaissance princes needed of foreign powers, or the business reports that underlay the rise of trade networks and capitalism (described in rich detail by the great French historian Fernand Braudel in his majesterial 3 volume Civilisation, économie et capitalisme, XV e XVIII siècle - a work whose English translations are very accessible) or Burke's description of the Fourth Estate, journalism inherently is tied to ongoing events in which there are winners and losers, in which power of various sorts is nearly always at stake.

It is perhaps inevitable, therefore, that (as Minogue writes about the second level of problem with journalism):

the perfectly respectable and certainly necessary trade of informing us about the world has lost its integrity and become, in some degree, a parody of truth -- in a word, pathological ... Journalistic consciousness is imperialistic. It invades every sphere of life and takes it over.

There is a paradox here, which Minogue notes. To some degree, the journalistic mindset flows out of the great achievements of 16th through 20th century Western thought - the Cartesian attempt to distance ourselves from phenomena, the Newtonian focus on mathematical prediction of outcomes which both empowers science and technology and also shifts our attention away from meaning. It is also informed, perhaps to a greater degree than you might acknowledge, Jay, by a fairly shallow reading of the post-Newtonian, post-Cartesian thought of the late 19th and 20th century: the schools of comparative literature, depth psychology, non-Euclidean mathematics; the paradoxes of quantum mechanics and relativity.

If that were the only soil from which contemporary journalism sprang, then I might buy the idea that rage against journalism is simply displaced rage in response to the sense that we no longer have a fixed place in the world, a dogma to comfort us in the face of stark truth.

But as Minogue notes, and you acknowledge, the seed and soil for journalism is first and foremost currect events as they affect power. And that is where the hubris of the press, especially around and since the 1970s embrace of a superficial reading of literary and cultural criticism, has proven deadly. For the (cultural) Marxist apologia for placing political considerations at the center of all action and speech has led, in a fairly straight line in the course of one generation, to "fake but true" justification for (in the case of Dan Rather) a highly political action in the form of an attempted damanging story in the runup to a presidential election.

The last third of Minogue's article argues that journalism taken as a something that claims value in its own right (as opposed to an activity incident to other disciplines), is built on self-contradictory terms. A journalism which pretends not to be build on concerns of power inevitably descended into partisanship precisely because it attempted to displace the role that religion more rightly claims: namely to convey meaning and to judge the value of human events, choices and options.

Finally, Jay, I agree with you that most journalists don't evidence an academic mindset that is really steeped in the intellectual millieu of our day in any fundamental way. Whatever superficial acquaintance most reporters and commentators have with critical theory or other 20th century schools of thought, they clearly have not absorbed the lessons of Shroedinger or Godel. The paradoxes of quantum mechanics include the fact that to measure the state of a particle is in fact to affect it. And Godel showed that we bring assumptions about meaning to even the most formal the attempt to adopt an analytic, axiomatic approach to mathematics. Insofar as journalists have sought to report objectively, they inevitably come up against their embeddedness in the events they cover and the fact that their reports are inevitably filtered through a whole lot of (often unexamined) personal beliefs and assumptions.

That that is true is simply to say they're human. But that they did not acknowledge that limitation has proven fatal. One of the *practical* values of most religious traditions is that they attempt to foster humility. Those who lack that virtue are in danger of provoking rage in return.

Posted by: Robin Burk at March 14, 2005 11:53 AM | Permalink

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A Most Useful Definition of Citizen Journalism "It's mine, but it should be yours. Can we take the quote marks off now? Can we remove the 'so-called' from in front? With video!." More...

The Master Narrative in Journalism: "Were 'winning' to somehow be removed or retired as the operating system for news, campaign reporting would immediately become harder to do, not because there would be no news, but rather no common, repeatable instructions for deciding what is a key development in the story, a turning point, a surprise, a trend. Master narratives are thus harder to alter than they are to apprehend. For how do you keep the story running while a switch is made?" More...

He Said, She Said Journalism: Lame Formula in the Land of the Active User "Any good blogger, competing journalist or alert press critic can spot and publicize false balance and the lame acceptance of fact-free spin. Do users really want to be left helpless in sorting out who's faking it more? The he said, she said form says they do, but I say decline has set in." More...

Users-Know-More-than-We-Do Journalism: "It's a "put up or shut up" moment for open source methods in public interest reporting. Can we take good ideas like... distributed knowledge, social networks, collaborative editing, the wisdom of crowds, citizen journalism, pro-am reporting... and put them to work to break news?" More...

Introducing NewAssignment.Net: "Enterprise reporting goes pro-am. Assignments are open sourced. They begin online. Reporters working with smart users and blogging editors get the story the pack wouldn't, couldn't or didn't." More...

What I Learned from Assignment Zero "Here are my coordinates for the territory we need to be searching. I got them from doing a distributed trend story with Wired.com and thinking through the results." More...

If Bloggers Had No Ethics Blogging Would Have Failed, But it Didn't. So Let's Get a Clue: "Those in journalism who want to bring ethics to blogging ought to start with why people trust (some) bloggers, not with an ethics template made for a prior platform operating as a closed system in a one-to-many world." More...

The View From Nowhere: "Occupy the reasonable middle between two markers for 'vocal critic,' and critics look ridiculous charging you with bias. Their symmetrical existence feels like proof of an underlying hysteria. Their mutually incompatible charges seem to cancel each other out. The minute evidence they marshall even shows a touch of fanaticism." More...

Rollback: "This White House doesn't settle for managing the news--what used to be called 'feeding the beast'--because there is a larger aim: to roll back the press as a player within the executive branch, to make it less important in running the White House and governing the country." More...

Retreat from Empiricism: On Ron Suskind's Scoop: ""Realist, a classic term in foreign policy debates, and reality-based, which is not a classic term but more of an instant classic, are different ideas. We shouldn't fuzz them up. The press is capable of doing that because it never came to terms with what Suskind reported in 2004." More...

Karl Rove and the Religion of the Washington Press: "Savviness--that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, 'with it,' and unsentimental in all things political--is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it. And it was this cult that Karl Rove understood and exploited for political gain." More...

Journalism Is Itself a Religion: "We're headed, I think, for schism, tumult and divide as the religion of the American press meets the upheavals in global politics and public media that are well underway. Changing around us are the terms on which authority can be established by journalists. The Net is opening things up, shifting the power to publish around. Consumers are becoming producers, readers can be writers." More...

News Turns from a Lecture to a Conversation: "Some of the pressure the blogs are putting on journalists shows up, then, in the demand for "news as conversation," more of a back-and-forth, less of a pronouncement. This is an idea with long roots in academic journalism that suddenly (as in this year) jumped the track to become part of the news industry's internal dialogue." More...

Two Washington Posts May Be Better Than One: "They're not equals, but Washington and Arlington have their own spheres. Over the newspaper and reporting beats Len Downie is king. Over the website Jim Brady is sovereign. Over the userï¿½s experience no one has total control. There's tension because there's supposed to be tension." More...

Laying the Newspaper Gently Down to Die: "An industry that won't move until it is certain of days as good as its golden past is effectively dead, from a strategic point of view. Besides, there is an alternative if you don't have the faith or will or courage needed to accept reality and deal. The alternative is to drive the property to a profitable demise." More...

Grokking Woodward: "Woodward and Bernstein of 1972-74 didn't have such access, and this probably influenced--for the better--their view of what Nixon and his men were capable of. Watergate wasn't broken by reporters who had entree to the inner corridors of power. It was two guys on the Metro Desk." More...

Maybe Media Bias Has Become a Dumb Debate: "This here is a post for practically everyone in the game of seizing on media bias and denouncing it, which is part of our popular culture, and of course a loud part of our politics. And this is especially for the 'we're fair and balanced, you're not' crowd, wherever I may have located you." More...

Bill O'Reilly and the Paranoid Style in News: "O'Reilly feeds off his own resentments--the establishment sneering at Inside Edition--and like Howard Beale, the 'mad prophet of the airwaves,' his resentments are enlarged by the medium into public grievances among a mass of Americans unfairly denied voice." More...

Thoughts on the Killing of a Young Correspondent: "Among foreign correspondents, there is a phrase: 'parachuting in.' That's when a reporter drops into foreign territory during an emergency, without much preparation, staying only as long as the story remains big. The high profile people who might parachute in are called Bigfoots in the jargon of network news. The problem with being a Bigfoot, of course, is that it's hard to walk in other people's shoes." More...

The News From Iraq is Not Too Negative. But it is Too Narrow: "The bias charges are getting more serious lately as the stakes rise in Iraq and the election. But there is something lacking in press coverage, and it may be time for wise journalists to assess it. The re-building story has gone missing. And without it, how can we judge the job Bush is doing?." More...

The Abyss of Observation Alone. "There are hidden moral hazards in the ethic of neutral observation and the belief in a professional 'role' that transcends other loyalties. I think there is an abyss to observation alone. And I feel it has something to do with why more people don't trust journalists. They don't trust that abyss." More...

"Find Some New Information and Put it Into Your Post." Standards for Pro-Am Journalism at OffTheBus: "Opinion based on information 'everyone' has is less valuable than opinion journalism based on information that you dug up, originated, or pieced together. So it’s not important to us that contributors keep opinion out. What’s important is that they put new information in. More...

Out in the Great Wide Open: Maybe you heard about the implosion of Wide Open, a political blog started by the Cleveland Plain Dealer with four "outside" voices brought in from the ranks of Ohio bloggers: two left, two right. Twelve points you may not have seen elsewhere." More...

Some Bloggers Meet the Bosses From Big Media: "What capacity for product development do news organizations show? Zip. How are they on nurturing innovation? Terrible. Is there an entreprenurial spirit in newsrooms? No. Do smart young people ever come in and overturn everything? Never." More...

Notes and Comment on BlogHer 2005 "I think the happiest conference goers at BlogHer were probably the newbies, people who want to start blogging or just did. They got a lot of good information and advice. Some of the best information was actually dispensed in response to the fears provoked by blogging, which shouldnï¿½t be avoided, the sages said, but examined, turned around, defused, and creatively shrunk.." More...

Top Ten List: What's Radical About the Weblog Form in Journalism? "The weblog comes out of the gift economy, whereas most of today's journalism comes out of the market economy." More...

A Second Top Ten List: What's Conservative About the Weblog Form in Journalism? "The quality of any weblog in journalism depends greatly on its fidelity to age old newsroom commandments like check facts, check links, spell things correctly, be accurate, be timely, quote fairly." More...

Blogging is About Making and Changing Minds: "Sure, weblogs are good for making statements, big and small. But they also force re-statement. Yes, they're opinion forming. But they are equally good at unforming opinion, breaking it down, stretching it out." More...

The Weblog: An Extremely Democratic Form in Journalism "It's pirate radio, legalized; it's public access coming closer to life. Inside the borders of Blogistan (a real place with all the problems of a real place) we're closer to a vision of 'producer democracy' than we are to any of the consumerist views that long ago took hold in the mass media, including much of the journalism presented on that platform." More...

No One Owns Journalism: "And Big Media doesn't entirely own the press, because if it did then the First Amendment, which mentions the press, would belong to Big Media. And it doesn't. These things were always true. The weblog doesn't change them. It just opens up an outlet to the sea. Which in turn extends 'the press' to the desk in the bedroom of the suburban mom, where she blogs at night." More...

Brain Food for BloggerCon: Journalism and Weblogging in Their Corrected Fullness "Blogging is one universe. Its standard unit is the post, its strengths are the link and the low costs of entry, which means lots of voices. Jounalism is another universe. Its standard unit is "the story." Its strengths are in reporting, verification and access-- as in getting your calls returned." More...

Dispatches From the Un-Journalists: "Journalists think good information leads to opinion and argument. It's a logical sequence. Bloggers think that good argument and strong opinion cause people to seek information, an equally logical sequence. What do the bloggers bring to this? My short answer to the press is: everything you have removed."More...

Political Jihad and the American Blog: Chris Satullo Raises the Stakes "Journalists, you can stop worrying about bloggers 'replacing' the traditional news media. We're grist for their mill, says Satullo, a mill that doesn't run without us. Bloggers consume and extend the shelf life of our reporting, and they scrutinize it at a new level of intensity.."More...

Raze Spin Alley, That Strange Creation of the Press: "Spin Alley, an invention of the American press and politicos, shows that the system we have is in certain ways a partnership between the press and insiders in politics. They come together to mount the ritual. An intelligent nation is entitled to ask if the partners are engaged in public service when they bring to life their invention... Alternative thesis: they are in a pact of mutual convenience that serves no intelligible public good." More...

Horse Race Now! Horse Race Tomorrow! Horse Race Forever!: "How is it you know you're the press? Because you have a pass that says PRESS, and people open the gate. The locker room doors admit you. The story must be inside that gate; that's why they give us credentials. We get closer. We tell the fans what's going on. And if this was your logic, Bill James tried to bust it. Fellahs, said he to the baseball press, you have to realize that you are the gate." More...

Psst.... The Press is a Player: "The answer, I think, involves an open secret in political journalism that has been recognized for at least 20 years. But it is never dealt with, probably because the costs of facing it head on seem larger than the light tax on honesty any open secret demands. The secret is this: pssst... the press is a player in the campaign. And even though it knows this, as everyone knows it, the professional code of the journalist contains no instructions in what the press could or should be playing for?" More...

Die, Strategy News: "I think it's a bankrupt form. It serves no clear purpose, has no sensible rationale. The journalists who offer us strategy news do not know what public service they are providing, why they are providing it, for whom it is intended, or how we are supposed to use this strange variety of news."More...

He Said, She Said, We Said: "When journalists avoid drawing open conclusions, they are more vulnerable to charges of covert bias, of having a concealed agenda, of not being up front about their perspective, of unfairly building a case (for, against) while pretending only to report 'what happened.'" More...

If Religion Writers Rode the Campaign Bus: "Maybe irony, backstage peaking and "de-mystify the process" only get you so far, and past that point they explain nothing. Puzzling through the convention story, because I'm heading right into it myself, made me to realize that journalism's contempt for ritual was deeply involved here. Ritual is newsless; therefore it must be meaningless. But is that really true?."More...

Convention Coverage is a Failed Regime and Bloggers Have Their Credentials: "No one knows what a political convention actually is, anymore, or why it takes 15,000 people to report on it. Two successive regimes for making sense of the event have collapsed; a third has not emerged. That's a good starting point for the webloggers credentialed in Boston. No investment in the old regime and its ironizing." More...

Philip Gourevitch: Campaign Reporting as Foreign Beat: "'A presidential election is a like a gigantic moving television show,' he said. It is the extreme opposite of an overlooked event. The show takes place inside a bubble, which is a security perimeter overseen by the Secret Service. If you go outside the bubble for any reason, you become a security risk until you are screened again by hand."More...

What Time is it in Political Journalism? "Adam Gopnik argued ten years ago that the press did not know who it was within politics, or what it stood for. There was a vacuum in journalism where political argument and imagination should be. Now there are signs that this absence of thought is ending." More...

Off the Grid Journalism: “The assignment was straightforward enough,” writes Marjie Lundstrom of the Sacramento Bee, “talk to people.” When a writer dissents from it or departs from it, the master narrative is a very real thing. Here are two examples: one from politics, one from music. More...

Questions and Answers About PressThink "The Web is good for many opposite things. For quick hitting information. For clicking across a field. For talk and interaction. It's also a depth finder, a memory device, a library, an editor. Not to use a weblog for extended analysis (because most users won't pick that option) is Web dumb but media smart. What's strange is that I try to write short, snappy things, but they turn into long ones." More...

To the RH Jay Rosen:
I believe this thread may turn quite a number of heads by the end. Great subject and great article by Minogue...and a grateful thanks for the reference of Ortega y Gassett's Revolt of the Masses( a primer for those most interested in the beginnings and process and culminations of WWII...a far better read than Foucalt(more periods in the former and more commas and semi-colons in the latter!).
I think both sides will find an illumination with the article...and that is a good thing.

Posted by: cal-boy at March 14, 2005 1:45 AM | Permalink

Someone said (Robert Bly?) that way back when most people believed the gods controlled nature, people would also get angry -- even furious -- at the gods for letting them down.

But the gods were unaccountable. Humans are not.

In this secular age, institutions have replaced the gods as "the authorities that control everything" (of course I don't mean literally control everything). The press, until very recently, was one such institution -- and it used to consider itself more or less unaccountable.

Journalists can be terribly arrogant towards "ordinary people"; I have witnessed it firsthand. With the combination of power and unaccountability, is it any wonder they get arrogant?

Journalists were a kind of secular oracles. And then came the Internet.

What happens when a higher authority is torn down? There is a lot of anger. People sense, rationally or not, that they have been cheated: "So Dan Rather was not infallible after all!" Of course, it was silly to worship at the altar of journalism in the first place. Jeez, people, how can you expect anything but disappointment if you worship the evening news or the morning paper as The Truth?

The anger and resentment at the press will subside when everybody has realized that the press isn't an unaccountable authority anymore. But until then we'll probably see a lot more anger...

-A.R.Yngve
http://yngve.bravehost.com

Posted by: A.R.Yngve at March 14, 2005 7:05 AM | Permalink

Jay, one of your best posts ever.

I can almost see how this rage starts. If everyone is a crap-dectector suddenly you start feeling like everyone is telling you all of the world is crap. This is the opposite of prayer which is an attempt to accept the world for what it is with the hope it will become better. Are we assuming that mankind (as a species) isn't fundementally different than the way he was back in the Middle Ages? The peasant-surf or middle-class merchant really isn't all that different from the suburban family or blue-collar worker? Try telling someone from the Middle Ages that God didn't exist and the Church was just a huge conspiracy to keep him oppressed and take his money? The kind of agitation might hint at where the "rage" from journalism source is.

Jay, in your mind, is there such as thing as a "fact?"

I find this part most intriquing:

For example, one day the new criers might say: "Sorry, Republicans, a new and credible study doesn't support your hope that Charter Schools deliver a better education. Turns out the kids in Charter schools aren't doing any better than kids in other schools, and some are worse off. Now here are the facts..."

And what Republicans interpret as a contest of opinion (their own vs. the journalist's) the journalist treats as a conflict between opinion and actual knowledge-- reality in the form of a news report based on it. The critics, cast as true believers, cannot accept reality (bad news); that is why they rage at media "bias," according to this view.

This sort of gets back to my thoughts about the Midevil Church. One "fact" is that it was designed to keep the populace under its control and take its money. But that is one facet of what "Church" and "religion" is. (Fact). If this miscross of the critics and the public means what it means, what is the news crier to do? What could they say in their story about Charter Schools to lessen the disconnect between story intent and reader intrepration?

Posted by: catrina at March 14, 2005 8:07 AM | Permalink

First thoughts: The general is the enemy of the specific, the specific is the enemy of the general, and one exclusive of the other is the enemy of understanding. Slipping easily between levels -- to parse the singular into the subsets for specifics -- keeps people from talking past each other by nailing down what is necessary to improve.

Minogue says, The rational basis of modern journalism, its claim to our attention as bringing us knowledge of the world, thus turns out to be the practice of revealing what other people want to hide from us. This is, of course, particularly true of what authority wants to hide. Consider the subset of the White House press at the gaggle Garrett Graff attended. There are some answers the press should not expect -- negotiations between Congress and the Executive will are not likely to take place on the front page. Diplomacy between Syria and our government are not likly to take place on the front page. But most of the gaggle is taken up with reporters asking exactly the questions to try to make that happen. Their frustration over being rebuffed is entirely misplaced.

Another example is the subset of activist press. Jay writes, Contrary to what most are taught in journalism school, Minogue sees disaster in the "social responsibility" theory of a professionalized press. He would name that a wrong turn. It was a disaster, he thinks, when it happened in education. "Teachers came to think that, because they were custodians of the minds of the rising generation, they held the key to social progress." This is addressed in "Activism undermines journalism", and is nothing less than "We have done your thinking for you and we have the answer."

After doing readers the service of introducing Minogue's perspective, Jay remarks, Maybe this explains some of the inbox: Those people are in pain! It resembles the explanation most popular with journalists: "your anger is with a world that refuted your hopes, but you've directed it at us, the news criers, because we delivered that message." but, thankfully, he does not necessarily agree with it. Baldly, this rationalization would set journalists up to ignore the criticisms itemized earlier in the essay. Besides, the rage of readers is yet another subset that needs consideration independent of the faults of the press and that, for our own safety's sake, shouldn't draw the eye from improving coverage of the news. Each subset has its problems. Each of those problems needs to be addressed.

Posted by: sbw at March 14, 2005 8:34 AM | Permalink

This seems like a very long post for an explanation of something fairly obvious: people are more comfortable lately being quite rude to one another. Part of this may be that journalism has fallen off some lofty pedestal (I tend to think there wasn't one, but that's me), partly it has to do with the atmosphere fostered by a largely opinion driven (and therefore to some extent emotion driven) information climate, which is more than talk radio and Fox News, but has everything to do with them - the Crossfire-ization of Everything. I think e-mail (and posting) tend to mask how utterly thoughtless and unkind some comments can be, at least for some people writing them. Some things are really just not worth saying (which is not the same, or as first amendment bashing, as some things should not be said - though I believe that, too). But you wouldn't know it from the way some people go on in their e-mails and comments. Despite the occasional brickbats - I'm a regular liberal poster at Lucianne.com, trust me I know the pain of flaming - I've decided it matters, ultimately, whether or not you are nice to others. I wish more people tried harder.

Posted by: weboy at March 14, 2005 9:18 AM | Permalink

How silly.

Time for a trip back thru the looking glass to the real world. Republicans are pissed at journalists because they try real hard to slant the news in order to help Democrats get elected. Don't believe me? Fine. Michael Barone (who spent years of his life working to elect Democrats) says so. Another nationally prominent journalist, Evan Thomas (son of the Socialist candidate for president) says so.

Anyone who compares the coverage of the economy under Clinton and Bush knows it. Liberal economist, Ray Fair of Yale has an econometric model which he has used for years to predict elections based on the state of the economy. The economy was so strong that his model predicted Bush would win a landslide with 58% of the vote. Yet the MSM had worked so hard and so long buttressing the Democrats' ridiculous charge that the economy was the worst since the Depression (recalling their earlier 1992 efforts supporting Clinton's charge of the "worst economy in 50 years") that voters were convinced that the economy was in bad shape.

Why did so many voters believe a lie? Was the MSM incompetent in its reporting? Or corrupt?

Posted by: stan at March 14, 2005 9:59 AM | Permalink

Jay, allow me a suggestion: the reason people think the main stream media is full of liberal bias is because the MSM is full of liberal bias. And the reason they are so angry is because the MSM is keeps denying the obvious.

An example: when Mary Mapes received the forged Killian memos, her method of deciding they were genuine was that they "meshed" with what she believed she already knew. By that criterion, I could sit down and forge anything I pleased on some historical subject, and have it judged genuine because it fit in with what is already believed (e.g., if you think Roosevelt knew an attack was coming at Pearl Harbor, I'll forge some memos that shows he knew, basing it on the contents of books that argue the case, and it will "mesh" with what is already "known" about Roosevelt's "betrayal.")

News organizations spent years trying to prove Bush lied about his TANG service. Meanwhile, those same news organizations blindly accepted John Kerry's claim to have taken his Swift Boat into Cambodia. Kerry claimed for years that he'd done this on Christmas Eve, 1968, and nobody checked his assertions. When the SwiftVets challenged the claim, Kerry shut up about it, while his campaign claimed that he had been in Cambodia, but not over Christmas.

THAT story was quickly dropped by the MSM, even though every member of Kerry's boat crew interviewed said they were never in Cambodia, and his superiors said they never ordered anyone into Cambodia.

To any disinterested observer, that's a case of deliberate MSM bias, ignoring damaging information about Kerry while searching endlessly for something with which to hurt Bush. The MSM's response is to look innocent, shrug, and say 'Well, we asked Kerry to sign form 180, releasing all his records, but he refuses, so what are we to do? Bush, though, we'll pursue endlessly.'

Another enraging thing is editorializing disguised as reporting. Yesterday, I read this article on health care from the New York Times Sunday Magazine. It's by Roger Lowenstein, and concerns the ideas of David Cutler, of the Clinton Health Care Task Force.

At one point, Lowenstein writes, "Health care ''lefties,'' as Cutler refers to some of his colleagues, favor a European system -- universal insurance financed by a single payer (the government) and some sort of rationing to hold down the screaming increase in high-tech procedures." Fine, no problem with that. But later Lowenstein gives us "Right-wingers go for a market approach." Note, not 'The people Cutler refers to as "right-wingers." ' Does Cutler refer to people as "right-wingers?" I don't know, and Lowenstein doesn't tell us. Maybe that's Lowenstein's characterization.

If Cutler does call some people "right-wingers", why is Cutler's opinion that some people are "lefties" so qualified, while his opinion that some are "right-wingers" is presented as bald fact?

Lowenstein continues "it's not the technology they object to, but people's cheap access to it. If people paid for their own angioplasties, so the theory goes, they would have fewer of them." And whose theory is this, exactly? No names are given, or sources. I've never seen any such suggestion by any 'right-winger' discussing health care reform. Instead, they argue that there's too much defensive medicine, too many lawsuits, too little attention paid to preventing waste.

It's a fundamental axiom of law that you aren't fit to be judge in your own case. If you want to figure out whether you are biased, try getting some people who disagree with you politically, then have them review your stories before publication. Then try to rewrite them to give the same facts while removing the perceived bias. I think you'd get an eye-opener.

Posted by: Stephen M. St. Onge at March 14, 2005 11:10 AM | Permalink

One of the lines of conflict you find in this debate is between the simplifiers and the complexifiers. Look at how many have already told me that I am over-doing it because the "why?" part is clear, simple, irrefutable, obvious.

What do we call that "war?"

Posted by: Jay Rosen at March 14, 2005 11:24 AM | Permalink

"The rational basis of modern journalism, its claim to our attention as bringing us knowledge of the world, thus turns out to be the practice of revealing what other people want to hide from us. This is, of course, particularly true of what authority wants to hide."
-- Minogue.
The man is, of course, correct. His miscalculation lies in for how long he thinks that sentiment has been the guiding force behind most journalism. The answer is, since long before Minogue, long before 1930, and, for that matter, since well before World War I.
It was Lord Northcliffe, founder of the London Daily Mail and London Daily Mirror who first propounded, almost 100 years ago exactly, that:
"News is anything that someone somewhere wishes to suppress; all the rest is advertising."
That's been the operating principle for a century, in newsrooms ranging in size from three employees up to 1,200.
It will be quite interesting if we are indeed now in the process of thrashing out a replacement operating prinicple for the next 100 years -- or if we're only going through the motions. But only our children will know; those of us wrestling with the tarbaby will be long gone before the answer is apparent.

Posted by: Steve Lovelady at March 14, 2005 11:31 AM | Permalink

For your information, "Jonas", I am published not only with the "vanity press"(that was back in 2000) but also with a legitimate Swedish publisher (in 2004).

But go ahead -- flame all you want. I am sure it will boost your argument...
:)

Posted by: A.R.Yngve at March 14, 2005 11:59 AM | Permalink

Premodernism: I believe, therefore I understand.
Modernism: I think, therefore I understand.
Postmodernism: I experience, therefore I understand.

Posted by: Terry Heaton at March 14, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

Wonderful stuff, Robin. Thanks for adding that. I should have emphasized that mainstream journalism tends to ignore all academic currents of the 20th century. Witn one exception: polling and political behaviorism.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at March 14, 2005 12:04 PM | Permalink

What "us", Jonas? What "them"?
Am I "us"? Are you "us"?
What on earth are you talking about??

The revolution was yesterday.
There IS no "Us" anymore.
There IS no "Them" anymore.

It no longer serves a point to make the distinction between those who produce news and those who receive news. Blogs ended that dicotomy.

There is only media, and those who use it.
WE are the media -- journalists, readers, everybody. Let's think hard about how to live in this new world.

Posted by: A.R.Yngve at March 14, 2005 12:40 PM | Permalink

Interesting stuff. I haven't had time to read the New Criterion piece yet, so I'm only going on your presentation of its arguments, but based on that it strikes me that it leaves out one of the most basic roles journalism has come to assume in the last century. Market capitalism is the dominant global ideology, and economists tell us that markets need good information to function; without a reasonably reliable flow of "news" and timely information you simply can't have a functioning market. And if everyone -- even the Social Security pensioner! -- is going to be an investor, then everyone better become a consumer of news, and it better be extremely timely and accurate news, too, or you will lose your shirt. Of course, cultural conservatives of the New Criterion ilk are often just as hostile to free-market ideology as their counterparts on the left. Minogue may have no interest in rationalizing his critique of journalism with the structure of the contemporary world economy. But for those of us who live and work in it, and try to manage our lives so that we can be comfortable and take care of ourselves and our families, paying attention to the news is not mere fad or cult of novelty or sick pop obsession; it is a survival trait.

Posted by: Scott Rosenberg at March 14, 2005 1:13 PM | Permalink

To the RH Jay Rosen:
It might prove helpful to the thread(and as a continuation of The RHette Robin Burk's post) if you could post/link the curricula(sp?) of one pursuing a journalism degree today - and how has it changed over the past 100 years or so ie what classes were required as to what classes are taken today.

Posted by: cal-boy at March 14, 2005 1:20 PM | Permalink

As a conservative, Minogue starts from the assumption that modern journalism is "pathological", either inherently (based on the rather novel idea that a person who concentrates on reality rather than the myths and superstitions that make up 'religion' is "pathological") or has devolved into propaganda and is thus "pathological". Having assumed that there is a disease, he then sets out to explain the symptoms and progression of the disease that are consistent with his "diagnosis".

This isn't analysis, its projected hypochondria.

He presents the "reporting" done to princes and merchants as if it were something unique that represents the origins of journalism, when in fact people have always "reported" to each other, and decisions have always been made based upon such "reporting".

He even goes so far as to attribute modern consciousness to "journalism" as if journalism itself is creating the demand for novelty, rather than meeting the demand created by a "leisure/consumer" culture. (He never considers that the demand for novelty exists because people are perpetually assaulted with advertizing messages telling them that they can't be truly happy unless they buy the right laundry detergent, and require “novelty” as a distraction from their own fears that their whites aren’t white enough, and their colors aren’t bright enough.)

In sum, Minogue's article is basically a Free Republic "left-wing media conspiracy" rant in intelligensia drag.

Posted by: p.lukasiak at March 14, 2005 2:51 PM | Permalink

Jim K., a personal anecdote on Journalism curricula. Upon winning a full scholarship to Syracuse University, I met with the then chairman of their Newhouse School of Communications. He asked where I had applied to college and if I knew whether or not I would pursue journalism, the family business. I mentioned another good liberal arts school and said that I wasn't sure if I would go in to journalism.

He said, "Get your liberal arts degree. We can teach you the rest of it later on, if you need it."

Posted by: sbw at March 14, 2005 3:22 PM | Permalink

To the Rh Jim K. Smith:
Thanks for the post.
It is obvious by the your post- and this is the point of the thread as it relates To the RHette Robin Burk and the article by Minogue- that the training in regular subjects does not give reporter/journalists the AUTOMATIC academic acumen to insert their opinion or verbage on the subject, as it often happens. For example, a reporter who inserts their opinion on the future Geopolitical ramifications for the Middle East as it relates to the Iraqi War, because they took one class on "World Views from the Middle East" in college. All of a sudden, the four books they read in college on the Middle East has made them a diplomatic genius. Oh! If only the Administation would follow my advice!
Now, what class in jouranlism school teaches its' students to inject what they think is happening or to add something or fulfill the "expectations" the newsroom editor because he/she thinks the paper should orient itself in a certain political manner?... all in the name of objectivity of course. As phil bennet of the WaPo explained to us today.
No one debates or makes "false assumptions" that journalists do not take some regular classes but we do hotly dispute their assumed erudition from taking a limited number of classes as opposed to one who has majored in a subject. And yes, not all jouranlists have degrees in journalism but other subjects as well and I find that far more refreshing even if I disagree with them ala Krugman.
More to the point, the regular posters on this site who tend to the Left give me and others virtually no credibility- and belittle us and our education and our military training- on such matters as political science and history and I have a degree in European and Russian History from Berkeley. All this condescencion simply because we approach certain matters from the Right. It doesnt compute that because I have a history degree.. that all knowledge in history flows from me. I simple desire to have others view journalists/reporters in the same light.
However, if I had a journalism degree and had taken one class in Russian studies and tended to the Left on certain matters they would hail me as others hailed Duranty...and that's the problem I see with the MSM- their approach stems from the "personal is political and the political is personal" and thus it all commences from there i.e. Rather and the NYT's "The TANG documents are fake yet accurate"....because it really has to be true doesnt it? i.e. Our politics are going to drive the story regardless if a story is there or has peetered out. And the attempt to keep a story alive when it is obvious that there is no story or really nothing to it gives rise to the general viewership out there of a certain type of bias.
As I have posted before, we just want journalists to journal....why is that so much to ask?
The blogs/internet are allowing users to become their own journalist/reporter and simply reporting to themselves- whether for good or bad-we'll have to see. And it is obvious the MSM is failing a generous portion of the country for some reason.
Sorry for the rambling- I couldnt seem to put it together in the manner I wished to because of all the hubbub of offers and counteroffers of buying a home...but finally it is done..whew!

Posted by: cal-boy at March 14, 2005 3:44 PM | Permalink

Attributed political (and other) labels are amusing. One liberal commenter recently called me (and African American female blogger La Shawn Barber) "KKK moms", ignoring the very real differences between the positions the two of us have taken on a varity of topics.

Michelle Malkin OTOH puts me in her "Liberal / Centrist" list of female bloggers.

And I won't tell you what the Larouche foot soldier called me after he read on WoC that I went to St. Johns .... Heh.

Can someone remind me what 'Rh' stands for here?

Posted by: Robin Burk at March 14, 2005 4:02 PM | Permalink

To the RH JKS:
I dont say that journalist=liberal. I do believe most MSM journalists/reporters in the limelight are(when 90% of journalists vote one way that sounds like pretty good evidence).
1. The MSM is being challenged with other news mediums whether you or I like/hate them- and I believe they are being challenged because they do not have the ability- through bias or prejudice or whatever- to cover stories with in any other way than what they have been taught whether in the newsroom or at a university(think elite institutions with nothing in common with the average joe)- and that tends to the Left. Fine- but it isnt "objective" reporting.
2. The Daily newspaper and the nightly news is history either eight hours or one day old! I read it all yesterday on the Internet. The printing of a newspaper takes too long when I can read it now.
And why wait till 5 pm to have Dan Rather and CBS inform me of what they deem important- and that tends to the Left.
3. The Newspapers and nightly news is finite in time and print space- we have no worries of that here so the stories dont have to be of the "blood leads" or the constant harp of Prez. Bush TANG documents. We can read an article on Iraq and then google 'History of Iraq" and get a second opinion if you will. All without being told how we should view a story or stop looking for a second opinion because a reporter has already told us so.
4. The Blogs/Internet empowers individuals and gives them a vast array of any information and a sense of being heard- not possible in the old news world where it is an exclusive club. Andy Warhol's maxim is a maxim for the old news world.
15 minutes is a lifetime on the Internet.

Posted by: cal-boy at March 14, 2005 4:19 PM | Permalink

Thanks!

BTW, St. John's has two different masters degrees, one in liberal arts that reprises the Western undergrad curriculum (mostly) and one in Eastern Classics, with your choice of emphasis on Sanskrit or Chinese as the core language. Just in case you want to spend several semesters in Annapolis or Santa Fe .... ;-)

Posted by: Robin Burk at March 14, 2005 4:31 PM | Permalink

Jim K. Under those circumstances one can make up their own qualifications.

Did you misunderstand the appreciation of the head of a prominent School of Journalism that a Liberal Arts degree was an excellent foundation for journalism?

Or were you just being cute?

Posted by: sbw at March 14, 2005 4:52 PM | Permalink

It's amusing.
The complaint of Minogue, the conservative classicist, is that (unlike himself) journalists too often proceed in a value-free manner, which causes him considerable distress and also causes him to see journalism itself as a destroyer of values, traditions and first principles, like some sort of blind bulldozer operator run amok in the city of Socrates, Aristotle and Plato.
Whereas the complaint of the more here-and-now-rooted conservatives. who want turn every discussion on this site into a right-left dispute, is the exact opposite of Minogue's complaint: They see a world of Trotksy-ite editors and reporters fixated by wrongheaded and dangerous values and trying to impose them everywhere.
Somewhere along the way, the argument of the restrained classicist gets not just bastardized and bowdlerized by the rabble (that's us, guys), but actually turned inside out !
I hope, for his own sake, that the poor old gentleman (Minogue) doesn't read this thread; he might choke to death on his own tea and crumpets.

Posted by: Steve Lovelady at March 14, 2005 5:12 PM | Permalink

Now that's a little more like what I expected.

Minogue's is not an argument I see having many friends, although it will claim some. That, to my mind, is what makes it valuable. But I quite understand the more impatient and perhaps dismissive responses.

I always liked Western Civ. Even when I was contemplating its limitations.

Jeff Sharlet, editor of The Revealer: A Daily Review of Religion and the Press (I'm the publisher, along with NYU) tells me that I should not have described New Criterion as "obscure" but elite. I think he's right.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at March 14, 2005 5:22 PM | Permalink

Actually, Steve Loveday misreads Minogue a bit, I think.

Minogue sees journalism as thinking it is proceeding in a value-free way, while in fact acting from destructive values at two levels: valuing the concerns of business and politics over deeper human concerns and also becoming entangled, inevitably, with power and economics to the detriment of their objectivity, such as it could be.

A much more subtle and far-reaching critique than Lovejoy seems to realize. And a more devastating one as well.

Posted by: Robin Burk at March 14, 2005 5:39 PM | Permalink

Minogue weaves many criticisms of "news" journalism together. I certainly agree with Robin Burk's analysis.

I would add also the criticism of both shallowness, both in treatment of a topic and in it's longevity.

Minogue: "A journalist is the master of the gist of things, and gist is king of the world."

Steve Lovelady ... Trivia quiz! Who said this?

"Journalism, a profession whose business is to explain to others what it personally does not understand."

-----------
"Journalism, a knowledge deficit meets an attention span deficiency." *

Posted by: Sisyphus at March 14, 2005 5:48 PM | Permalink

There's an obvious place where the cultural conservative and the contemporary left come together and that is a disgust with consumerist ideology in the media, particularly the creation of viewing appetites that are then "satisfied" by what the media has available.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at March 14, 2005 6:04 PM | Permalink

I have to say that this Minogue excerpt that Jay cites ...

"The problem is that whoever abandons interests—which have about them a certain discussable reality, where compromise is possible—finds that his stock of opinions consists of abstract ideas. These will usually take an ethical form, and that impels them towards righteousness. Any such package of opinions is likely to irritate patriots and partisans of all kinds. The holder of such a position is usually enormously self-satisfied .."

... just about nails it. that is the syndrome I struggle with. i believe in the abstract ethical concepts of journalism; i just wrote an essay defending them. but i recognize they strike many of our critics as pathetically besides the point -in precisely the way Minogue predicts.
What's painful, I can see their point, while also valuing my own.
and there's a sad conundrum all wrapped up in one sentence.

chris satullo

Posted by: Chris Satullo at March 14, 2005 6:05 PM | Permalink

Jay: I always liked Western Civ. Even when I was contemplating its limitations.

Jay, if you haven't read Denby, please put "Great Books" on your audiobooks list. Ed Asner makes it a good listen while you are driviing.

Chris: i believe in the abstract ethical concepts of journalism; i just wrote an essay defending them.

Chris, a pointer please? ... or at least tell us what you think those concepts are.

Posted by: sbw at March 14, 2005 6:27 PM | Permalink

Sisyphus, you ask:
Steve Lovelady ... Trivia quiz! Who said this?

"Journalism, a profession whose business is to explain to others what it personally does not understand."
-----------
Lord Northcliffe, of course, who also said "News is anything anyone anywhere wants to supress; all the rest is advertising."

And to think, he said it all 100 years before this thread. Proving once again, that there is nothing new under the sun.

(Clue: That's a conservative sentiment, not a liberal one, despite the throngs of right-wing blogs out there who think they have fastened on a new thing.)

Posted by: Steve Lovelady at March 14, 2005 7:07 PM | Permalink

Jay Rosen:

But the conservative temper trusts little in what the mind loves immediately to know. An appetite for news involves a "lust to see and know things of no concern to us," says Minogue (who would smile knowingly at a pop term like "news junkie.") But he also says that the kind of curiosity modern journalism satisfies is "a distant relative of the 'wonder' thought to be the source of philosophy and science." The DNA of the Enlightenment is thus involved.

Perhaps a conservative would re-write that thus:

But the conservative temper trusts little what the mind lusts immediately to know, is only fleeting in value, and unsatisfying in an addictive way.

In that way, the analogy is clearer ....

love:lust::"wonder":curiousity
love:lust::knowledge:news

That way the conservative rage at "news criers" over trivialized, sensationalized news (even concerning "remote" events) can be better compared to, perhaps, conservative rage over casual sex?

Then we can also have fun pointing out conservatives who utilize the news in the same way they might also engage in casual sex?

Posted by: Sisyphus at March 14, 2005 7:10 PM | Permalink

Steve Lovelady,

Thanks! One way to look at "news" over the ages, perhaps, is as a force of anti-Enlightenment.

News journalists, as masters of the gist of things, provide the grist for automatic thinking.

Automatic thinking is certainly anti-Enlightenment but very "evolutionary".

But if the "rage" is a reaction to news which contradicts automatic thinking, than what is the "gist" of news?

Posted by: Sisyphus at March 14, 2005 7:21 PM | Permalink

Steve, my apologies for referring to you in the 3rd person above - I dashed that off on the way out of my office and didn't stop to check its tone.

One thing none of us has commented on is that Minogue has, I think, a fair amount of sympathy for journalists. As I read him, he sees journalists as both the product and the producer, as part of a system that feeds on itself, of a certain driveness, a felt need to focus on and react to immediate events.

And when it steps outside of that, it is faced with exactly the values paradox cited above.

This, of course, could be read as true of Western thought itself after the latter half of the 20th century. As I am neither a political conservative in the current sense nor a fundamentalist believer, I too have great sympathy with the dilemma that journalists face. My main criticism comes from watching those in my own generation embrace a certain self-righteousness which not only ill-became them, but which also has in many cases lead to tendentious reporting.

In many cases - but in no means all cases. I do believe that, the fact that I blog notwithstanding.

Posted by: Robin Burk at March 14, 2005 7:32 PM | Permalink

To the RH Sisyphus and RH Steve Lovelady:
The same questions comes up when I read your post-
Has the Press ever been unbiased?
Are we simply witnessing a change in the guard? Was Yellow Journalism of the late 1800's/early 1900's considered conservative or liberal in their bias. Just curious.

Posted by: cal-boy at March 14, 2005 7:34 PM | Permalink

From Robin Burk:

"Minogue sees journalism ... valuing the concerns of business and politics over deeper human concerns and also becoming entangled, inevitably, with power and economics to the detriment of their objectivity, such as it could be."

Robin, that is assuredly true ... but if you imagine that the Wall Street Journal, or the New York Times, or the Washington Post, or MSNBC, or CNN, or Fox, or 99% of all bloggers, or for that matter 99% of the participants in this thread, are going to disentangle themselves from "the concerns of business and politics" in favor of "deeper human concerns," you are as sadly out of touch as Minogue is. It would be nice if we could all sit around the acropolis discussing first principles while someone else did the work of digging the aqueducts and the canals that kept the empire going, but those days are long gone.
By the way, the name is Lovelady, not "Lovejoy" nor even "Loveday." (But not to worry; once after five months of paychecks made out to "Loveday," I gave up in despair and actually tried to convince my bank that that was my real name.)

Posted by: Steve Lovelady at March 14, 2005 7:46 PM | Permalink

To the RH Earnest Hemingway Blogging From Heaven:
Technology is moving at a rapid pace! Who is Tim as no one has posted under that name on this Thread?

Posted by: cal-boy at March 14, 2005 7:46 PM | Permalink

Cal-boy:
"Was Yellow Journalism of the late 1800's/early 1900's considered conservative or liberal in their bias. Just curious."

The Yellow Journalism of the late 1800's/early 1900's was a device to sell newspapers, willing to adopt any bias that served that purpose (much as the British press is today.)
When faced with a telegraph from a reporter in Puerto Rico reading, "No war here," it was William Randolph Hearst who telegraphed back the legendary response: "You supply the words, I'll supply the war."
And he did.

Posted by: Steve Lovelady at March 14, 2005 8:03 PM | Permalink

"Just spell my name right ..." Too busy a day for me today - I shouldn't be posting when I can't get your name right, Steve, or correct typos in a long post before sending it off. Apologies and sympathy both - I've long since have stopped correcting people who insist my own surname, adopted at marriage, is "Burke". At least I associated joy with you LOL.

As far as sitting on the acropolis discussing first principles, count me among those who lack the leisure to do that regularly. I spent many years writing and managing the development of software that does things like keep airplanes in the air, move cargo containers through the Port of Long Beach and control other sorts of machines.

Now that my hair is ... ahem ... 'silver' ... I am trying my hand at teaching but I'm afraid that the subject is still rather technical and practical in nature.

Still, the St. John's motto - loosely translated: "I make free adults out of youths by means of a book (the classical liberal arts) and a scales (science)" - does resonate with me. Whatever I might bring to being a citizen in a democracy is shaped to a good degree by the habits of reflection I learned there and by the discipline it taught of stepping into another way of thinking in order to look back critically and with appreciation at my own time and culture.

It makes me a weird blogger but I'm not entirely alone in that habit and a fair number of our regular commenters at Winds of Change seem willing to engage in thoughtful discussion of current events.

Posted by: Robin Burk at March 14, 2005 8:10 PM | Permalink

Cal-Boy, with respect to your question, I'm no expert and others may be able to chime in. But I believe that journalism of the late 1800s and early 1900s was strongly populist: Anti-corporate, sensationalistic, pro-worker, "comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable."

E.W. Scripps: "I have only one principle and that is represented by an effort to make it harder for the rich to grow richer and easier for the poor to keep from growing poorer."

A Pulitzer editorial: "Tax luxuries, inheritances, monopolies ... the privileged corporation."

A Hearst editorial: "Shall organized capital control the people, or shall the people control capital and limit its power? ... The trusts ... are teaching us that it is feasible and necessary for the nation eventually to take possession and manage its own properties, industrial as well as others." (quotes from Bagdikian)

There are odd contradictions in the mix: Powerful plutocrats declaring war against powerful plutocrats, and selling it all through base dependence on news of crime and scandal. And how much of that populist stance arose out of genuine conviction and how much out of a perception that this was what working people wanted to buy is impossible for me to say. But until second newspapers began dying out in cities all over America in the 20th century, readers usually could pick their political flavor.

Posted by: David Crisp at March 14, 2005 9:07 PM | Permalink

Just added: AKM Adam, theologian and "Random Thoughts" blogger, e-mails with:

AKMA: "Give voice to the truth, and we show ourselves responsible."
My theological vocation suggests that "revelation" doesn't stand in opposition to "investigation," but that our apprehension of the truth always requires of its suitors a humility and reticence alien to both the insatiable curiosity to which Minogue points and the boisterous confidence of many partisans (right, left, and center). The truth, so understood, offers itself to theologian and journalist alike, and unfolds itself to those who attend patiently to the complexities that truth entails.

Responsible journalists (academics, theologians, et al.) address themselves to the truth by eschewing both arrant axe-grinding and heedless novelty-mongering.

Here Minogue's criticism of the appearance of even-handedness strikes home: justice entails not Aristotle's mean between extremes, but a comprehensive commitment to that which is just -- to the truth, in other words.

Minogue supposes that the disjunction between journalism and truth arises because journalists have assimilated a lukewarm epistemological relativism. It seems more likely to me, though, that journalists' work has been undone by commercial motivation than by intellectual pretension.

Minogue asks twice, "How much truth can any human activity sustain?" Is he equivocating subtly? Does he mean that we by our activities sustain a truth that might perish without us, or that our activities cannot endure long when saturated with truthfulness? Whatever his intent, I must rejoin it is only to the extent that or activities address and give voice to the truth, that we show ourselves responsible -- as journalists, critics, philosophers, or theologians.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at March 14, 2005 9:17 PM | Permalink

To the RH Steve Lovelady:
Thanks! I am curious because Yellow Journalism was around/during the Gilded Age and the Progressive movement and wondered how the Press in our times view it from a political perspective- Was the Press considered to be conservatively biased back then?.
What 'color' would today's media be???
I am asking because I am trying to get a larger picture of the media overall and not more of the snapshot of the past 30 years where I would consider the Press to drift/tend more to the Left.

Posted by: cal-boy at March 14, 2005 9:19 PM | Permalink

Steve Lovelady: "if you imagine ... 99% of the participants in this thread, are going to disentangle themselves from "the concerns of business and politics" in favor of "deeper human concerns," you are as sadly out of touch as Minogue is.

Then count me in the 1%. I cannot disassociate the one from the other. Are deeper human concerns not deep human concerns? Perhaps you could help me understand more clearly.

Posted by: sbw at March 14, 2005 9:27 PM | Permalink

To the RH Blog:
Does anyone know the educational/class background of the typical reporter/journalist during the times of Yellow Journalism or even before that?
Yes, I know I can search for it but some of you are quicker on your fingers -more so than I ,and you can link stuff. Thanks!
I know Winston Churchill went on excursions to report/write books but was he an anomaly?

Posted by: cal-boy at March 14, 2005 9:43 PM | Permalink

Cal-boy:
I don't know about the educational/class background of the "typical" reporter/journalist during times of Yellow Journalism, but I can give you a few examples of the finest lights of the late 19th-century:
Mark Twain, Jack London, Stephen Crane, Ambrose Bierce:
High school dropouts, all. And I'd wager you cannot find a current journalist who can match their body of work, hard as you try.
And, despite the popular image of journalism's invasion by Ivy Leaguers, not that much has changed. Let me give you a sample from my own experience, all people with whom I have worked:
-- Gene Roberts, New York Times Southern correspondent during the civil rights era, later New York Times Saigon bureau chief, New York Times national editor, Philadelphia Inquirer executive editor (during which time he brought home 17 Pulitzer Prizes in 18 years); and, ultimately, New York Times managing editor:
Graduate, Mars Hill (North Carolina) Junior College.
-- Gil Spencer, editor first of the Trenton (NJ) Times, then the Philadelphia Daily News, then the New York Daily News, then the Denver Post:
11th-grade dropout.
-- Mike Gartner, page one editor of the Wall Street Journal, editor, then publisher of the Des Moines Register; publisher of the Louisville Courier, then president of NBC News:
Bachelor of arts degree from, as he used to call it, "little-known but highly-regarded Carleton College."
I could add Peter Jennings (high school dropout) and Tom Brokaw (South Dakota State?) to this list, but I suspect you're beginning to see the picture. They all came from nowhere and they all surged past all the Yalies and Harvard summa cum laudes in their midst.
A true meritocracy, while it lasted.

Posted by: Steve Lovelady at March 14, 2005 10:09 PM | Permalink

Excellent list Steve. The myth of the Ivy League reporter busted. A college degree from anywhere will work as training. Of course clips from somewhere are necessary and online posts don't count so there's that little detail to contend with.

In those days one could start as a copy boy like Mencken. No more.

Posted by: Gus Folsom at March 14, 2005 11:45 PM | Permalink

To the RH David Crisp and RH Steve LoveLady:
Thanks so much!
My questions and wonderings are leading me to consider(I hope I can word this right) that those who suffered(correct word?) or experienced the more populist or true version of what it meant to be American/part of the downtrodden/whatever at that time in history allowed themselves(the journalists/reporters) to experience a level of humanity and humility that may be lacking in today's media.
Has the increase in today's media elevating and matriculating themselves through the university system account for what is considered today as 'liberal bias' i.e. they have distanced themselves(from the progenitors of American journalism) over the years from the people they originally intended or purported to help by means of exposing the ills of society and ways of country/government /politics
etc?
Are they too far removed from the everyday American to be objective in a generalized American way anymore???
Good Night..Love you all..

Posted by: cal-boy at March 15, 2005 1:35 AM | Permalink

Jay: "Jeff Sharlet, editor of The Revealer: A Daily Review of Religion and the Press (I'm the publisher, along with NYU) tells me that I should not have described New Criterion as "obscure" but elite. I think he's right."

While we're debating how to characterize New Criterion, it is probably worth noting that it is the home of the editorial column of the militantly right Mark Steyn, pride of the Power Line masthead.

"Multiculturalism is really a suicide cult conceived by the Western elites not to celebrate
all cultures, but to deny their own. And that's particularly unworthy of the British, whose
language, culture and law have been the single greatest force for good in this world.
- from Britain's "Daily Telegraph"

You're definitely right about the "elite" part--as in elitist. Not in itself a reflection on Minogue, but certainly relevant to whether the New Criterion is "obscure" or "elite"--or a cheerleader for Imperialism as the best thing that ever happened to the planet.

Posted by: Mark Anderson at March 15, 2005 11:32 AM | Permalink

Robin Burk: "But as Minogue notes, and you acknowledge, the seed and soil for journalism is first and foremost currect events as they affect power. And that is where the hubris of the press, especially around and since the 1970s embrace of a superficial reading of literary and cultural criticism, has proven deadly. For the (cultural) Marxist apologia for placing political considerations at the center of all action and speech has led, in a fairly straight line in the course of one generation, to "fake but true" justification for (in the case of Dan Rather) a highly political action in the form of an attempted damanging story in the runup to a presidential election."

So putting man rather than god at the center of questions of SOCIAL reform is incompatible with morality of any kind? And CBS is the stalking horse of secular humanism exposed and defeated? And it's ultimately all Karl Marx's fault? How many right wing hobby horses can we fit on the head of a single pin?
Allan Bloom and Leo Strauss (and the Claremont Institute) would be proud, particularly of the unqualified opposition between modernity and morality per se.

Posted by: Mark Anderson at March 15, 2005 11:46 AM | Permalink

Cal-Boy:
I think journalists disconnect from ordinary Americans in several ways:

1. At the lower ends of journalism, reporters make too little money and have to move too often. They don't own homes or have kids in school, so they don't worry about property taxes and school boards. They simply have no stake in day-to-day concerns of ordinary Americans.

2. At the upper ends, probably some of the elitism kicks in that you read so much about on the internet. But what would I know about that?

3. Journalists work a lot of odd hours and weekends.

4. They can't get involved in politics or some other kinds of civic activity.

5. The nature of their job makes them suspect in social settings. Years ago, I quit counting how many times people have said, "Oh, I can't tell you; you'll put it in the paper."

6. Journalism has, to some extent, become a profession. Count me among the legions with no journalism degree, but I suspect our ranks are declining. The days when a smart young kid with a feel for the community and a nose for news could walk in off the street and sweet talk a city editor into a job (probably always exaggerated) have just about disappeared.

Posted by: David Crisp at March 15, 2005 1:09 PM | Permalink

Jay,
Minogue raises the issue of the status of spirituality in consumer culture in an unusually evocative way. Nevertheless, by the end of the article he veers lamely to the right in two respects: 1) the distinction he draws between religiosity and social engagement and, 2) the equation he makes between the secular (the "journalistic") and nihilism. There are deeply spiritual people engaged in social reform. There are deeply moral people who do not practice religion. Minogue's position refuses to imagine that either possibility is even conceivable.

Steve Lovelady: "The complaint of Minogue, the conservative classicist, is that (unlike himself) journalists too often proceed in a value-free manner, which causes him considerable distress and also causes him to see journalism itself as a destroyer of values, traditions and first principles, like some sort of blind bulldozer operator run amok in the city of Socrates, Aristotle and Plato.
Whereas the complaint of the more here-and-now-rooted conservatives. who want turn every discussion on this site into a right-left dispute, is the exact opposite of Minogue's complaint: They see a world of Trotksy-ite editors and reporters fixated by wrongheaded and dangerous values and trying to impose them everywhere.
Somewhere along the way, the argument of the restrained classicist gets not just bastardized and bowdlerized by the rabble (that's us, guys), but actually turned inside out !
I hope, for his own sake, that the poor old gentleman (Minogue) doesn't read this thread; he might choke to death on his own tea and crumpets."

I think the complaints of Kenneth Minogue and of here and now conservatives are ultimately one and the same. Minogue himself is a here and now conservative of an anti-social sort. Leo Strauss never suggested that secularists needed to appreciate that they are bulldozing over non-religious values to effectively do so. On the contrary, for Strauss and Minogue, their minds have been colonized. Secularists/Journalists advance the agenda as zombies of modernity.

Minogue:
"Universities depend on finding themselves in a dark and obscure corner of social life largely free from social pressures. Were they to be forced to explain themselves partially or prematurely, they would sound foolish and pretentious, and scholarship would be diverted into righteousness. The ceaseless glare of light from journalism illuminates the dark places in our civilization—and sterilizes many of them. No doubt a significant part of this illumination may prevent evils and expose things that ought to be exposed, but it also takes some immemorial human activities to the brink of extinction."

When Minogue says journalism, he means secular culture. In effect, he aligns academia and the monastery in opposition to "business" and "politics" and the "entertainment industry."

The difference between Minogue and the bogeymen of the right wing bias wars Lovelady refers to is Minogue's refusal to recognize secular humanists as having any values at all. Literary naturalism and secularism are synonyms for nihilism. In other words, he claims that "journalism", that is "secular humanism," is the erasure of all values.

This is where Friederich Nietzsche, Leo Strauss, and Kenneth Minogue meet for an amiable lunch together. Given Nietzsche's sensitivity to caffeine, probably not with tea.

Posted by: Mark Anderson at March 15, 2005 1:13 PM | Permalink

I wonderedwhen Leo Strauss would be invoked here. It took nearly 60 comments - impressive.

Mark, I have a Larouchite to introduce you to. He sees Strauss everytime someone actually argues from a classically liberal position too.

Posted by: Robin Burk at March 15, 2005 1:23 PM | Permalink

Robin,
What about the ideas, Robin?

How might we distinguish Minogue's position from that of Strauss? Where has my analysis gone wrong?

Posted by: Mark Anderson at March 15, 2005 1:29 PM | Permalink

James Kurth:
"The rejection of the Christian faith by Western elites does not mean that they have rejected all faiths. Despite the claims and conceits of rationalists and scientists, every human being believes in some things that cannot be proven (and therefore cannot be established by reason) or that cannot be seen (and therefore cannot be established by science) and that therefore have to be taken on faith. Ever since the coming of the Enlightenment, Western elites have adhered to a variety of secularist and universalist faiths, which in effect have been religions without God. Kenneth Minogue has identified these as (1) the idea of progress, (2) Marxism, and (3) "Olympianism," which is the contemporary belief that an enlightened intellectual elite can and should bring about "human betterment ... on a global scale by forcing the peoples of the world into a single community based on the universal enjoyment of appropriate human rights." As Minogue demonstrates, each of these secular religions has identified Christianity as its enemy. Indeed, the Olympianism that dominates in our time sees the very idea of Western civilization itself to be an obstacle to its grand global and universalist project..."

"The best defense against the new barbarians will be found in the Christian religion, for with it, Western civilization became the most creative, indeed the highest, civilization in human history. With a revival of the Christian tradition, Western civilization would not only prevail over the new barbarians, but it would become more truly civilized."
Kurth, Western Civilization and Christianity, The American Conservative
http://www.grecoreport.com/western_civilization_and_christianity.htm

Posted by: Mark Anderson at March 15, 2005 1:43 PM | Permalink

Despite the depth of agreement, Strauss is not Christian enough for followers of Minogue like Kurth:
"One would expect conservatives to like and support tradition. But among purported conservatives, it is important to make a distinction between traditional and neoconservatives. From their origins (be it followers of Leon Trotsky or of Leo Strauss), neoconservatives have seen the Christian tradition as an alien, even a threatening, one. As for the classical tradition, their view of it has been formed by the decidedly untraditional interpretation of classical philosophy given by Strauss. The only Western tradition that neoconservatives want to defend is the Enlightenment. In recent years, they have wanted to advance it in the rest of the world with the establishment of a kind of American empire. This is not a conservative project but a radical and revolutionary one."

Apparently he hasn't read Harry Jaffa.

http://www.grecoreport.com/western_civilization_and_christianity.htm

Posted by: Mark Anderson at March 15, 2005 1:49 PM | Permalink

No, Mark... I meant what did you think of the ideas in his essay, not their connection to the pre-disapproved categories you would sort them into. If I want to know what route you take to Minogue's ultimate dismissal as yet another Staussian or latter day right winger in "culture's" clothes, then I will consult your last two posts.

Take this, for example:

Contrary to what most are taught in journalism school, Minogue sees disaster in the "social responsibility" theory of a professionalized press. (A flash point.) He would name that a wrong turn. It was a disaster, he thinks, when it happened in education. "Teachers came to think that, because they were custodians of the minds of the rising generation, they held the key to social progress."

Is he right or wrong about "social responsibility" being a wrong turn in professional journalism?

Is he right or wrong about the insidious dangers of this?

The first move in his professionalization, as it were, must therefore be to evacuate any position that might be explained by others as arising from his own interest: anything having to do with class, nationality, or civilization: all such inherited baggage must be abandoned by the journalist.

That's what I mean by "his ideas."

Posted by: Jay Rosen at March 15, 2005 2:21 PM | Permalink

I slogged through it. My opinion? Worth reading. An interesting starting point... but:

"If Kenneth Minogue were a journalist, I'd send his piece back to rewrite. But he is not. He's a retired professor of government studies at the London School of Economics, so, instead, let's see if we can summarize his view to extract what might be useful.
. . .

"Minogue claims, 'A journalist is the master of the gist of things, and gist is king of the world', but journalism well done is really the practice of just-in-time understanding that relegates academics like Minogue to the bench, called to play only in time of need. ..."

For the rest, see: Critique of 'Journalism: Power without responsibility'.

Posted by: sbw at March 15, 2005 2:44 PM | Permalink

I still find Minogue totally at odds with himself.
On the one hand, he worries that when journalists ipso facto assume a burden of "social responsibility," all is lost.
On the other, he also seems alarmed, when as the first step in professionalization, journalists "evacuate any position that . . . having to do with class, nationality, or civilization: all such inherited baggage must be abandoned by the journalist."
Putting aside the man's proclivity for exaggeration -- I personally know of no workaday journalist who ever told himself or his fellows, "I must step above and aside from the principles of civilization" -- Minogue can't seem to decide what he wants.
First, he worries about the concept of "social responsibility" (as personified most recently, by the way, by the ideas of "civic journalism," as propounded by Rosen et. al.) But he's just as repelled by journalists "evacuating" traditional values (as personified by Jack Shafer of Slate wisecracking not so long ago that "We are not in the democracy racket.")
Anyone else see the contradiction ? Rosen's vision may be a tragic turn for journalism, or (more likely) it may be that Shafer's vision is the tragic turn ... but BOTH of them a terrible denouement ?
I don't think so...

Posted by: Steve Lovelady at March 15, 2005 3:01 PM | Permalink

[Off-topic. FYI (and please spare me the "right wing" boilerplate comments. After all, it's only a link.)] None of the News That's Fit to Print:

In the intro. to this week's Good News from Iraq Arthur Chrenkoff quotes Bret Stephens' "Media in the Quagmire" - which points out the big, big developing stories that the mainstream media missed over the last 30 years: the collapse of the Soviet empire (and, I would add, the nature of that empire), the rise of Osama bin Laden, the declining US crime rate, the economic eclipse of Japan and Germany, the outbreak of democratic enthusiasm in the Arab world, etc.

Posted by: sbw at March 15, 2005 3:12 PM | Permalink

Jay,
The point is that they go together.

If we agree with Minogue that taking one's social responsibility seriously is a rejection of Christianity for the sake of false religions such as Progress or Marxism, than it is our duty to reject socially concerned journalism. Christianity, according to Minogue, would have us focus more on other-worldly, "immemorial" things.

If you think, like I do, that it is a right-wing canard to opppose religion to social responsibility, than it is a category mistake for Minogue to claim that journalism's concern for social welfare is immoral or nihilist. Unless you completely reject the Enlightenment as an alien subversion of Western civilization, it is nothing of the kind.

I would offer Chris Hedges as a living refutation of Minogue's straw man (the author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning). Hedges is a man of faith who does journalism and it is precisely his faith and values that DEMAND he take up journalism with a sense of social responsibility. He wants to improve the lot of god's children on earth and reduce the odds of more evil being done in the future. Chris Hedges is a logical impossibility in Kenneth Minogue's world because for him socially responsible journalism is by definition the rejection of supramundane values. Minogue's ideas ABOUT JOURNALISM are narrow and mistaken here as a direct consequence of his crippled definition of RELIGION as quietism.

The four of us (Minogue, Yourself, Hedges, and myself) agree on this point: the pretense of writing from nowhere is disingenuous, incoherent, and ultimately delegitimating or decertifying.

Where we disagree is on the consequences of this observation. Minogue insists that the answer is to reject false gods such as the Enlightenment in favor of an anti-social right-wing Christianity. We should teach journalists to report in such a way that affairs of this world aren't presented as of greater importance than those of the next.

Hedges claims it is his faith that requires him to embrace journalism in its connection to social responsibility. God calls him to judge the very POLITICAL matters Minogue demands we ignore because they are EVIL in the eyes of god and a sincere Christian must try to support good and obstruct evil. For Hedges, journalism must become MORE seriously socially reponsible and that will be the test of the sincerity of its faith.

Like Ben Franklin, I praise the good works of Christianity by men such as Chris Hedges, and oppose the work of Christians I see as obstructing good, such as Minogue's call for quietism as good religion and mutually exclusive of the practice of journalism.

Insofar as the ability to question class, nationality, and civilization (a very traditional Enlightenment act) is consistently related to recognizing evil in the world, I am all for this ability. I support the Enlightenment. Minogue laments it.

I refuse to let Minogue get away with the claim that right-wing Christian critique of the contemporary world is the heart of liberal education, but gaining reflective distance from one's class, nation, and civilization (by emulating Enlightenment figures such as Voltaire or Jefferson, for example) is a form of arrogance and an insidious danger. I insist that emulating Voltaire and Jefferson are at the heart of liberal education. In effect, Minogue thinks the Enlightenment is an insidious danger. I think that's a bad idea for journalism and a bad idea for the future of Western and World civilization.

Posted by: Mark Anderson at March 15, 2005 3:14 PM | Permalink

Requirements are different, depending on the size of the newspaper. The smaller the newspaper, the more likely "Should have" may not mean "Must have". Also, 5,000 weeklies in the United States are an opportunity to generate experience.

With the advent of "contributing readers" at more newspapers, I think it will be easier to generate a track record that will convince editors to consider giving you a shot.

Posted by: sbw at March 15, 2005 4:29 PM | Permalink

GREAT comments by Robin, thanks so much.

Yet I think you have cause and effect reversed when you say: "A journalism which pretends not to be build on concerns of power inevitably descended into partisanship precisely because it attempted to displace the role that religion more rightly claims: namely to convey meaning and to judge the value of human events, choices and options."

The Secular Humanism that Mark A. is talking about so cogently (yes, I'm surprised), seems to me to have become the dominant neo-religion of journalists before they descended into anti-Christian partisanship.

Further, it is only AFTER some 90% of the reporters became humanist activists that their "social responsibility" became a wrong turn. (Answer of Jay's Q to Mark.) This is because the secularists supported their abstract ideal theory over facts on the ground.

On education, for instance, I remember Teacher Unions calling for more money to improve teaching. In 1968. And in 72; in 76; in 80. They often struck, they almost always got more cash -- but test scores went down. Vouchers? Charters? Homes? Something Else? NO -- more cash to gov't schools, the only way: in 84, 88, 92, 96, 2000. And Leftist Teachers got more cash, and test scores went down (STOP the testing! Like Don Quioxite!) [I notice, Jay, you didn't link to the bad news on Charter Schools.]

Mark A is totally wrong to ignore Michael Novak, who is certainly one of the more Christian neoconservatives; and, I'd argue, more influential than Strauss. I don't know Hedges, but if he's among the 10% believers rather than the 90% unbelievers who do reporting, I'd be surprised if he wasn't interested in social responsibility.

Funny how Mark seems against what he admires in Hedges, that a "sincere Christian must try to support good and obstruct evil." When it comes to Irq, Mark's prior posts seemed to oppose the obstruction of Saddam's evil.

"The facts are Liberal." Ha ha ha! Like the fact that Kerry has not signed the not-to-be-named form?

The fact that Sudan's government was given a UN global test -- and they passed? (no genocide, no global action.)

The fact that total mortality studies of women seem to show that having an abortion increases the risk of death (by all causes, including suicide) in the following 5 years? Or that abortion is a risk factor for breast cancer?

The fact that children from nuclear families, husband and wife committed in marriage, do better in school, and in life?

The facts that unemployment is so low, AND inflation is low, AND interest rates are low -- economic times are fine!

I think the Leftist rage is partly that when the secular theories are translated into policy, the results of the policy are usually worse than the Christian oriented policy. The facts, like the election in Iraq, are not co-operating with the anti-Bush (anti-Christian) PC line.

I just read a European Voice article on WHO and Prevention of AIDs. Two full columns. Lots of mention of sex education, and promotion of condoms. It did include a mention of Uganda, as being successful in dropping their rate, thru education. No mention of the Ugandan ABC policy:
Abstinence, Being faithful, Condoms. Two of three strongly Christian success factors -- ignored by the pro-sex press.

When, and only when, the MSM press can report the facts that show their own abstract secular theories to be wrong, they can retun to respectability. Unfortunately, the PC thought nazi attack on Larry Summers shows that much of Academia is following (if not leading) the "PC theory INSTEAD of facts" standard.

I'll try to turn my Rep rage against the media into laughter. So I'll laugh at you Jay, when you wonder where the respect for facts went but never wonder why the press doesn't hound the Dems for the facts about Kerry, or Hillary.

And "news" is certainly not only, or even mostly, what those in power want to hide. It's mostly speculation about the future: will Hillary run in 2008? What will her position on X issue be? And every one of her words becomes "news" insofar as it might affect whether she runs, and whether she wins. Infotainment fortune telling.

Posted by: Tom Grey - Liberty Dad at March 15, 2005 7:53 PM | Permalink

Steve: I can understand why you see Minogue's various statements about journalism as incoherent, but do you not think it wise, when making that assessment, to keep in mind how incoherent Big Journalism can be in some of its claims and fulminations? One that has fascinated me is the incoherence of being a player and always saying you are not a player because it's not Kosher to say that. (And even if you did what would you ever say you, the press, were playing for?) To describe a system that is itself incoherent or circular at key moments is harder than perhaps you have estimated.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at March 15, 2005 9:58 PM | Permalink

Some of Minogue's points overlap with a view that journalism is not primarily a mode of discovering knowledge (the Enlightenment model), but rather a mode of persuasion (the Classical Age model).

The fact that most reporters don't realize they are basically rhetors (to use the ancient Greek word), using classical formulas to get reader buy-in to the stories they tell, only shows they are doing so unconsciously, according to this view.

My friend Andy Cline at Rhetorica.net is doing fascinating work in this area. He says journalists who ply their trade without knowing how their language functions as rhetoric are "playing with dynamite."

Andy's view, however, as I understand it, is subtly different from the one summarized above, namely that journalists are persuaders as opposed to truth-seekers whether they are conscious of it or not.

He says that a better way to understand rhetoric is not as simply as persuasion, but rather as a complex social means of producing new knowledge. He says rhetoric creates new knowledge through conversation.

"Knowledge is more than simply 'out there' to be found," Andy wrote in extended comments to my interview with him at Local
Man. "We have a complex relationship with reality. We sense it and think about and talk about it. It is in the talking about it that we create the complex understandings we call knowledge because it takes two to tango (the social part). That’s a process of persuasion."

This is a long way from the "revealed" knowledge that Minogue discusses. Or, if knowledge can be revealed through conversation, it is a rhetorical form that traditional journalism has been manifestly unskilled at for some time.

Maybe this, generating knowledge through conversation, is the human hunger that blogging and other forms of Internet journalism is tapping into.

"It takes two to tango," Andy says. But the American press is losing its old dancing partners. They are moving away to find new partners to dance a new knowledge with.

Posted by: Doug McGill at March 15, 2005 10:10 PM | Permalink

So, I got me a White House correspondent, or at least an occasional daily gaggle/briefing correspondent to represent BTC News. He'll be attending his first showing tomorrow morning and blogging about it tomorrow afternoon/evening. Tell all your friends.

What I hope to have happen is for Eric to spend some time identifying the various species in the press room. He says he's ready to pop a question, too. We settled on some that are both factual and polemical. Polemical facts. We'll see.

Posted by: weldon berger at March 15, 2005 10:17 PM | Permalink

Well, we'll see. That's a good little rant by Noah. I wish, as I think someone else mentioned somewhere in one of these threads, more reporters would report the questions that aren't being answered. Among other reasons, I think it would have the effect of sharpening some of the questions.

Posted by: weldon berger at March 16, 2005 1:39 AM | Permalink

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Jay, your filter has gone berzerk.

Posted by: sbw at March 16, 2005 10:14 AM | Permalink

Paraphrasing the filter's rejected language: If you summarize Minogue's central arguments and analyze what is left, only thin opinion and little substance remains. So the reporter from CRJ Daily and Doug McGill might be correct. I'm writing a replacement.

Posted by: sbw at March 16, 2005 10:19 AM | Permalink

Doug --
Of course journalists are in the business of persuasion.
I have told my reporters for years that any time they sit down at the keyboard they are engaged in two simultaneous acts of persuasion.
First, they are trying to persuade the reader that the premise of their story, their thesis, holds up.
Second, they must write so well, or so compellingly, that their prose captures the reader, who is always looking for an excuse to stop reading, and pulls him through the piece. This too is an act of persuasion. And it's more important than # 1, because if the reporter fails at # 2, no one is going to read # 1.

Posted by: Steve Lovelady at March 16, 2005 10:31 AM | Permalink

Steve,

I'm genuinely curious, when you tell your reporters about persuasive requirements #1 and #2, do you then go on to explain the range of strategies they might adopt to achieve these goals, as well as the upsides and downsides of each strategy from a civic perspective?

Let's take what you say is the most important of the two persuasion requirements, #2: "They must write so well, or so compellingly, that their prose captures the reader, who is always looking for an excuse to stop reading, and pulls him through the piece."

In the interest of being compelling, you say to yourself as a reporter, "I'm here to explain or tell people something important, but unless I get their attention, I'll lose them. So I'll throw in just a pinch of good ol' tabloid prose right at the start to grab 'em -- a fancy eye-catching word, a shocking statement (that I'll later subtly retract once I've got their attenion), a reference to a figure presently in the news, a reference to a figure of awesome authority (even God), or a shot of blood, sex, rock'n'roll.

In other words, you're gonna grab 'em by the balls. Fine. We do it all the time.

But what is the civic consequence of grabbing 'em by the balls all the time? Of using that particular rhetorical strategy so much of the time?

Of succumbing so fully to the imperative to get the reader's attention, that we basically stoop to tabloid tactics even for the space of one short lead? After all, it is the lead we are talking about. These are the few short lines that set the tone and frame the entire story. If we give the lead to Gennifer Flowers, how are we different really from the Star? From Geraldo? From the hated Hannity?

I like sex as much as the next guy, and I'm not saying we should ban it anywhere in society, much less the leads of all news stories. But I am saying, I see a serious issue to bat around a bit here. The MSM for years now has become more tabloid in tone, content, and every other way. It happens story by story, lead by lead.

"We didn't break the story, we are only reporting what started in the National Enquirer but now is an indisputable page one national story." We rue it as we say it, but as reporters we also secretly thank the newspaper gods that we'll get our story on page one that day, without breaking a sweat.

Maybe rhetoric is a useful intellectual framework from which to analyze and critique the problems of today's press.

Any of the writing strategies mentioned above (using a $10 word, citing a figure in the news, inflaming passions with loaded language), are rhetorical strategies of ancient pedigree. Aside from the consequences of pushing the "erotema" button all the time, maybe it would be helpful for us Newsroom Joes to know exactly what we are doing when we borrow just enough tabloid language to "get attention" to our "important" content.

My hunch is that many of the press breakdowns of recent years, especially of the trust between journalism and citizens, relates to people basically know they are having their buttons pushed all the time. They resent it, and oddly, the people who are doing it, namely us, are surprised at their resentment.

Maybe we wouldn't be surprised if we knew more about what it is, really, that we are doing, when we attempt to convey a reality in words.

Posted by: Doug McGill at March 16, 2005 1:47 PM | Permalink

The value of Jay's post to me is the way it reframes many of our practical choices. I've believed for some time now that (for most of us) politics is a vague proxy for a deeper set of responses to the world. Now I can add bias claims to my list of cultural proxies.

Here's part of the disconnect: Bias means one thing to right-wing critics, another thing to left-wing critics, but only ONE thing to journalists. Consequently, we don't quite understand what people are telling us, and our responses tend to fall flat. We are literally speaking a different language.

Jay's earlier post on "Decertifying the Press" made the case that the current ruling party has taken this discontent with the media and turned it into a means of extending its power. Combine that post with this one and one can see how the anger against our profession may not be rooted in political-bias arguments, but political interests are actively and callously fueling that discontent.

Is the answer to our problem, therefore, turning press coverage to the right so as to find some nebulous center? Nope. Grassroots conservative critics dislike the media on a level that goes deeper than politics, and the political campaign against the press isn't about policy but about control.

I'm not sure where that leaves us, but at least we're defining the subject in more meaningful terms.

Posted by: Daniel Conover at March 16, 2005 2:08 PM | Permalink

What Minogue presents is not news, insofar as it does not help us understand the world the better to decide what to do. That's why I wrote, Interpreting the problems of journalism:

For news, people want from journalists what they are interested in -- whether the objects of interest are either entertainment or intelligence. . . . Journalists give people up to four kinds of information that passes as news:
What they feel the reader needs to know,
What they believe the reader is interested in,
What they feel will sell,
What they pass for news even if it isn't. . . .

Posted by: sbw at March 16, 2005 2:44 PM | Permalink

Whoah, Doug.
How did this conversation turn to ". . . tabloid prose . . . shocking statements . . . God . . . blood . . . sex . . . 'n . . . rock 'n roll . . . ?"
You're attaching a lot of excess and loaded (in both senses of the word) baggage to the imperative to entice the reader from one paragraph, to the next, to the next.
Silly me, I was thinking more along the lines of . . . convincing example . . . compelling logic . . . holding an object up to new light . . . connecting dots no one has connected before . . . and implicitly (if not explicitly) answering the reader's eternal question, "Why do I care?"
It wasn't Rupert Murdoch, or even William Randolph Hearst who said, "The reader is looking for an excuse to stop reading at the end of every sentence and every paragraph; don't give it to him."
It was Barney Kilgore, inventor not just of the post-World War II Wall Street Journal but also of its famously sophisticated and thoroughly reported front page.
Nothing is more tragic than an unread insight; that's what he meant then, and that's what I mean now.
And while I don't succeed every time out, as a writer and an editor I keep that in mind, whether I'm laboring for the Atlantic, CJR Daily, PressThink, my block association's humble newsletter, or an email correspondent. And I think I do it without reminding anyone of the depths (or the heights) of the New York Post.
However, let me be the first to second your observation that the MSM for years now has become more tabloid in tone, story by story and lede by lede. (Who could deny it ?)
But juvenile ledes on the front page of the New York Times or hopelessly cornball headlines in the Washington Post represent a failure of imagination, not an indictment of Kilgore's premise.
The principle holds: Words are about persuasion; they aren't about anything else.

Posted by: Steve Lovelady at March 16, 2005 3:09 PM | Permalink

You're right, I think, Steve, that it isn't always explictly about sex, blood, gore, and rock'n'roll. A lot of times -- maybe most of the time if it's The New York Times, the Atlantic, and your other fine examples -- it is just about picking the $10 word that gets the blood flowing, instead of the solid $1 word that describes the basic facts.

In other words, meretricious writing. (And as Gore Vidal once said, "Meretricious and a Happy New Year!")

The Times piece about Wolfowitz today says his choice was greeted with "quiet anguish" in Europe. Wow! The new World Bank chief candidate is throwing European diplomats into fits of existential angst! Must be a very important story, not only about diplomacy and bureaucracy but about deep human drama and emotion.

Mountain from molehill? Well, mountains are made from molehills, and we don't spend enough time on the molehills, the actual single words and phrases we use, in journalism, IMHO.

The tendency to quickly dismiss this line of thinking as petty and ridiculous, is just the problem that I'm talking about. A truly deep look at language and its workings is deeply challenging to journalism. A sex word and the word "anguish" are in fact closely related. I know that would elicit snickers in the newsroom where I spent ten years. Part of me snickers at the idea myself. Nevertheless, it's true, at least based on the lessons of my own sex life.

You asked at the beginning of your post, "Whoaaa! How did this conversation turn to tabloid prose, shocking statements, etc." We got there because my argument is that what you call "persuasion," I call "waving ones arms and yelling loudly just to attract attention. Or, using elegant but meretricious writing to get attention."

I just don't see all of that "compelling logic" and "connecting dots no one connected before," that you claim to see in the best of the press.

I see a lot more simple goosing going on of readers and of viewers, including on the front page of The New York Times and the rest of the elite press, than you do.

Did anyone say "Pre-war WMD coverage by The New York Times, the Washington Post, CBS, ABC, NBC, not to mention Fox, MSNBC, etc etc." On the biggest story by far in our day, where in our elite media was "holding an object up to a new light, compelling logic, connecting dots, etc."?

One answer is, all those ideals were absent because our elite journalists were too interested in 1) getting on page one, 2) going to Iraq so they could get "courageous foreign correspondent" added to their resume, 3) making sure they captured the once-in-a-lifetime "drama" and "epic sweep" of imminent war in their writing, 4) proving their patriotism (plenty of $10 words there, right?), and 5) being careful not to upset President Bush & Co. in print, because to do so would mean losing access to power.

We aren't getting the big things right in journalism today, because we aren't getting the small things right, is my argument. And the small things are words. Simple and single words. Single phrases. How they work. Why they work. How we might use them more responsibly.

Thanks for your really helpful and interesting comments.

Posted by: Doug McGill at March 16, 2005 4:06 PM | Permalink

Very interesting dialogue.

Daniel: Thank you especially for putting those pieces together, and your comments generally. I love your phrase, "a vague proxy for a deeper set of responses to the world." And yes, add bias to the list of cultural proxies. My sense is these things are all related, but I have to admit I don't know exactly how.

In this respect, I thought it was significant that David Shaw--a liberal journalist--called de-certifying the press a paranoid line of thought.

Equally interesting to me (maybe only me...) is that the LATimes.com once again--it's happened before--was unable, unwilling, uninterested in having a simple link to Pressthink when Shaw, a columnist, is writing for the purpose of arguing with a PressThink post. I find that a fascinating statement about where that newspaper is in its evolution (which seems to be a decision not to evolve.)

Doug: I think what you are saying is there are ethical choices journalists do make that elude entirely the territory officially marked off and labeled "ethics." These choices do not appear either in the average journalist's informal sense of the ethics of the business.

A good example is any "you have to get them into the tent..." device. We may think of it this way: We know there are costs when you have to compete for attention (eyeballs.) But there are also costs when you win. Each time you grab me, you bid up by a tiny amount the "price" to grab me again like that. You make me mistrust you a little too-- after all, you had to grab me to get me. If these costs are rendered invisible, because the "ethics" system does not define them as real, and if no one thinks about it, because they have attention to grab, then it becomes a hidden factor waiting to play a part in your demise.

I believe that mainstream American journalism rendered too much of itself invisible to itself in just this way. Instead of trying to find those lost nuances of practice and turn on the lights, the profession is listening in fear and awe to the dark roar of the bias rage. That will never illuminate anything.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at March 16, 2005 4:43 PM | Permalink

Doug --
You write (compellingly, I might add, thus making my point about persuasion) that:
"One answer is, all those ideals were absent because our elite journalists were too interested in 1) getting on page one, 2) going to Iraq so they could get "courageous foreign correspondent" added to their resume, 3) making sure they captured the once-in-a-lifetime "drama" and "epic sweep" of imminent war in their writing, 4) proving their patriotism (plenty of $10 words there, right?), and 5) being careful not to upset President Bush & Co. in print, because to do so would mean losing access to power."

Ouch !!

Over the years, I've broken bread with many dozens of NYT employees and former employees, and they're invariably scarred and, to some degree, disillusioned by the experience. (I'm married to one.)
But I can't recall EVER running into one who is quite as jaded as the author of that passage above.
Personally, my own impression is still that on any given day the true problem is that the gray lady still earns her doleful name -- not that she's behaving like some tricked-up 43d St hooker.
However, I cede the floor, and the point, to the man who has been there.

All best,
Steve

Posted by: Steve Lovelady at March 16, 2005 5:13 PM | Permalink

While it's certainly interesting to discuss what journalism "should" be, it's safe to say that blogging is not destroying journalism -- it's expanding journalism.

Every blogger abroad is an acting (or potential) foreign correspondent. Every person with a phone-camera or camcorder is a potential on-the-spot live-coverage roving reporter.

Blogging is, first and foremost, a new and ubiquitous technology. Let's not stare ourselves blind at the supposed "philosophy" of the press. The ruling principle of "the press" is its technology: the printing press and distribution system. From this technology, the attitudes and working methods of newspaper journalism were shaped.

Both the printing press and the newspaper distribution system are obsolete and doomed.

And when an obsolete technology defines how you think about your job, you're in trouble. Just the word: "the press"! It's like talking about music and saying "the LP". Even the term "journalist" is outmoded; "reporter" is better.

Here's a suggestion to worried newspapermen: stop thinking doom and gloom. See the opportunity that new technology offers you. There is an enormous hunger for exclusive information in the world, for news that you can't find anywhere else, and an ever-growing source of potential "freelance reporters". A market for actual news exists, and a new, dirt-cheap distribution system. Use them.

But first, newspapers must cast off the shackles of old technology, and discard their printing presses. Yes, I said discard. In 20 years or less, those printing presses will have to be sold as scrap metal anyway.

Somewhere, Marshall McLuhan is smiling...

-A.R.Yngve
http://aryngve.blogspot.com

Posted by: A.R.Yngve at March 16, 2005 7:07 PM | Permalink

A.R. Ynge:
You wrote:
"But first, newspapers must cast off the shackles of old technology, and discard their printing presses.Yes, I said discard. In 20 years or less, those printing presses will have to be sold as scrap metal anyway.
Somewhere, Marshall McLuhan is smiling..."

I first heard those words...... "in 20 years or less there will be no printing presses" ......20 years ago.
No, come to think of it, it was 30 years ago.
Meantime, the new millineum is here, and newspapers who scrimp on their reporting and shortchange their communities continue to rake in 25% to 35% profit margins. (By way of comparison, supermarkets, which are in the same business -- delivering a mass product to a mass audience -- are happy if they achieve even a 2% profit margin.)
So permit me to revise your conclusion:
Somewhere, Marshall McLuhan is dead, and Tony Ridder is smiling.

Posted by: Steve Lovelady at March 16, 2005 8:18 PM | Permalink

A.R.Yngve, you seem to think that a newspaper is about the press. That's silly. And, Steve, I've never seen a profit margin like that... but, then, we put money into the newsroom. Our brand identification is "Reliable Community News". Our franchise is local news and local advertising -- whatever the distribution media.

Our job, using new technology, is, along with paid editors and reporters, to gather community readers into a vortex where they are proud to contribute using journalistic standards so our brand, "Reliable Community News", expands to be "Your Reliable Community News" reflecting the community back on itself more thoroughly and more affordably than ever before.

Posted by: sbw at March 16, 2005 9:42 PM | Permalink

To the RH Blog:
I think we are forgetting that the majority of Americans like what comes out of the MSM i.e. theatre, local stuff, travel, food(like the NYT- which is exceptional) ..it is when the MSM starts delving into national political matters with their political opinions and bias ala todays press conference with Prez. Bush :
(Question: Paul Wolfowitz, who was the- a chief architect of one of the most unpopular wars in our history..")..I mean c'mon, do you have to lead the question with a pithy comment like that...what does it prove ....what does it accomplish...other than further more stereotypes about the MSM? Dammit...just ask a pertinent question that is relevant to the matter at hand, not what is broiling and simmering in your head because you do not like a certain policy??
It is bothersome when any reporter deems it necessary to preface a question like that whether the Prez. is Dem. or Repub.- it demeans the office!!!
Do your job and journal!!
P.S. gobears is cal-boy because I couldnt get through for some reason today.

Posted by: gobears at March 17, 2005 1:03 AM | Permalink

Marshall McLuhan also wrote:
"If it works, it's obsolete."

I insist: it really IS about the technology. If the Internet hadn't arrived, this discussion about the press wouldn't even exist. 20 years ago, there was no competing technology. (Radio? Telephone? Those are different media. They don't compete for the same mental space.)

And, if the profit margins for printed newspapers are so fantastic -- and 25-35% does really sound impressive -- then everything is hunky-dory, right? No need for me to intrude on this philosophical-political debate. Newspaper journalism can continue just like it has before.
Nothing has changed. I'll be quiet now. Sorry to disturb.

Posted by: A.R.Yngve at March 17, 2005 4:28 AM | Permalink

The "persuasion" argument seems to gloss over a key element that results in perceptions of "bias" --- journalism is in the business of pointing out problems. Even when the news is good, the potential pitfalls to be avoided in the future are always described. (e.g. stories about lower unemployment are almost always accompanied with mentions of 'inflationary pressures').

By its very nature, journalism demands that actions be taken and that changes be made (even if those changes are necessary to ensure that the good news keeps coming.) Journalism insists that problems be fixed, and progress be achieved.

(And this itself is simply probably a reflection of human nature and/or cultural assumptions and conditions. In a society where fullinging ones potential and 'being all that you can be' is a cultural imperative, it would be anomolous if journalism did not reflect the need to make things better.)

And this is probably where the accusations of bias originate from, because journalism deals in issues that affect the overall community --- be it a neighborhood, or the international community --- and the thus the solution to any problem is a communal one. The default on communal solutions is government intervention -- be it installing a new traffic light at a dangerous intersection, or restriction CO2 emmissions to address global warming.

Because we now all share a national consciousness and a national media that addresses that consciousness, all problems tend to be defined as "national problems" that need to be addressed on a national level. If too many people are dying in traffic accidents, a national safety bill gets passed even if the real problem is bad roads on a state and local level. If national math test scores are falling, a national educational bill gets passed even though the problem is bad local schools.

A "national" media is essential for the creation and maintenance of a national consciousness and national consensus. But because a national media by definition presents everything from a national perspective, all problems are presented in a "national" context, and all solutions are "national" solutions. The perceived ideological bias of the national media is simply a necessary by-product of the United States evolving from a collection of co-operating nation-states to a single nation where "states" are arbitrary administrative divisions.

Posted by: p.lukasiak at March 17, 2005 8:07 AM | Permalink

Yngve: I insist: it really IS about the technology.

No. It really is about your mind -- how you choose to work -- which stands independent of technology. This is about process. This is about integrating feedback constructively into decisionmaking. This is about establishing trust -- factchecking the snot out of things. But where do you learn to do that? Show me where it fits in your state's educational standards.

Yngve: 20 years ago, there was no competing technology

Do some research: Google Ted Nelson and Xanadu. I worked with your "new" technology -- hypertext links -- more than 30 years ago with computer scientists from Brown University. Rather than technology, this is about how you relate to information -- intellectual tools -- not the hardware you use to do so.

Posted by: sbw at March 17, 2005 8:13 AM | Permalink

Yngyve is more correct -- it *IS* technology, but he left out the clincher...
at a very low price.

Books existed before Gutenberg, but were too expensive.
"We" went to the moon 35 years ago, but space travel is still too expensive.
We know how to generate electricity by solar power -- but it's too expensive.
The tech revolutions come with new tech AND low enough cost to make it a mass market.

On trust, great example of non-news anti-Bush bias in the NYT. Why should I trust them?

Stiglitz just wrote a mildly anti-Wolfie screed, too, including calling for the anti-Iraq war to oppose:
"They were right to be sceptical about US claims of imminent danger from weapons of mass destruction."
Of course, Bush clearly said he was not going to wait for it to be an imminent danger, though perhaps others said it already was, yet Bush led and Bush's words were NOT imminent.
Stiglitz's is basically repeating an anti-Bush "lie", in a deniable form.

But I see journalists as having evolved:
1) in favor of the poor; pointing out the injustices by the rich & powerful (capitalists and gov't)
2) supporting active programs to reduce the problems,
3) personally supporting the Democratic Party because they promise to reduce the problems,
4) actively promoting the Dems, whether the Dem party "solutions" work, or not,
5) choosing stories, and slants on stories, to promote the Dems.

Caring > Activism > Ideology > Partisanship (bias)

Adding pro-life Christians to the newsroom seems the most likely step to reduce the journalist rot. Editors insisting that bad results of Dem policies be publicized, like Clinton's "no genocide in Rwanda" results, would also help.

Posted by: Tom Grey - Liberty Dad at March 17, 2005 9:37 AM | Permalink

Tom: Adding pro-life Christians to the newsroom seems the most likely step to reduce the journalist rot.

Your assignment for a thought experiment -- and the answer need not appear here, because it is only peripheral -- is to produce a framework for decisionmaking that is cross-cultural. In other words, can you construct a working system independent of religion. Not everyone is religious. Not everyone who is religious is Christian. But everyone needs to function within that framework. One cannot depend on Christianity to reduce the journalistic rot, however much it might help, because not everyone buys its merit.

Posted by: sbw at March 17, 2005 9:58 AM | Permalink

Here's another name from Western Civ that's relevant to this thread: Faust.

From Minogue: "The journalist, living amidst opinions, knows by instinct the pains of being caught out holding a vulnerable opinion. The first move in his professionalization, as it were, must therefore be to evacuate any position that might be explained by others as arising from his own interest: anything having to do with class, nationality, or civilization: all such inherited baggage must be abandoned by the journalist."

So a journalist gets access to power, but only in return for sacrificing right of access to his own conscience and values. Bum deal.

Posted by: Doug McGill at March 17, 2005 2:37 PM | Permalink

[Pointer] From The Chronicle of Higher Education [Hat tip to instapundit.com]:
"THE SHORT LIST: Misunderstood Concepts. "We asked four scholars to discuss the most misunderstood concepts in their fields."

History: "The most misunderstood concept in history is objectivity." -- Robert J. Norrell

"Postmodernist thought in the 80s continued to undermine historians' notions of objectivity, and for many younger historians, the pursuit of truth held about the same importance as looking for the Loch Ness monster. ...

"The problem was that the academy's dismissal of objectivity set us against the larger public that likes to read history and think historically. The average nonacademic person believes that historical truth can be established, or at least approximated, and that the value of history is its ability to teach us actually what our experience has been. This divide between academic history and what the public understands about the past has resulted from the intellectuals' too-casual dismissal of the human capacity to seek truth, which has undermined our ability to shape understandings of the past outside the academy."

Posted by: sbw at March 17, 2005 5:11 PM | Permalink

To follow up Doug McGill, two more names to add to the list: Carl Schmitt and Christopher Lasch.

Paul Gottfried:
"According to Schmitt, political groups are essentially life-and-death associations...a number of Schmitt's disciples have advocated regional and populist solutions to the erosion of nation-states...Until recently democracy did mean...the act of self-government by a people united by culture and history...

On a similar note, Christopher Lasch attacks the wayward American elite that has neither a sense of place nor loyalty to anything beyond career ambition. He attributes the present fragility of the American state to the overthrow of the traditional Western bourgeoisie by New Class social planners...

Lasch believes that only blue-collar Americans have not been touched by the treasonous elites, because of their relative isolation from the yuppie gravediggers of traditional culture and morality...Lasch appeals to Middle American virtue against the entrenched elites...

Lasch is correct in claiming that New Class power is linked to globalist projects which demand the blurring of, among other things, regional distinctions. It may therefore by useful to strengthen such distinctions as a counterweight to New Class power. Within politically viable regions there should be controls concerning the franchise, eligibility for welfare assistance and immigration...there is a genuine call for a politically decentralized America, refounded on self-government...

The populist revolt Lasch calls for cannot succeed within the friend-enemy grouping established and dominated by the New Class."

Paul Gottfried, "Reconfiguring the Political Landscape," Telos, no.103, Spring 1995, pp.111-116.

Posted by: Mark Anderson at March 18, 2005 2:21 AM | Permalink

[Pointer] From Reporting from Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps by Donald A. Ritchie:

On Michael Crichton, warning National Press Club journalists in 1993: "'To my mind, it is likely that what we now understand as the mass media will be gone within ten years--vanished without a trace,' Crichton forecast. he envisioned a future that appeared on computer screens linked by the World Wide Web. Advocates believed that the Internet would empower users by providing them 'unfiltered news,' from verbatim transcripts to videos, and turn audiences from passive recipients into interactive participants." - Pg. 270.

On marginalizing the White House press: "Clinton came to office assuming that talk shows and cable television represented the wave of the future, which would free him from wasting time on such 'old modes' of communication as televised press conferences. Sidney Blumenthal wrote in the New Yorker that Clinton's staff atempted to tap 'every media outlet except the Washington correspondents.'" -Pp. 277-8.

On their Pulitzer Prize winning effort: "'What that story [9/11] did, what good newspapering does,' wrote [Wall Street] Journal staff member David Henninger, 'is take the chaos that is the Information Highway and submit it to an organizing intelligence--first the reporters and after them a series of editors and copy editors who have the skills, in a few hours, to make that chaos coherent.'" Pg. 294.

Posted by: sbw at March 18, 2005 8:51 AM | Permalink

My favorite valid argument in favor of the "liberal media bias" proposition undergirds Tom Gray's "Caring > Activism > Ideology > Partisanship (bias)" progression: That too many journalists fail to grasp the indirect functionality of conservative thought. This has been true at times, and at times still is.

To be able to understand the case conservatives make for their policies, one must understand certain classical ideas about economics/human nature, etc. Without that understanding, then the conservative position always seems callous and uncaring -- when in fact many sincere conservatives are merely hoping for the same result as activist liberals, but with a different understand of government's role. Classic liberalism tends to see direct government action as the answer, and that's easier to grasp; Classic conservatism may have similar goals, but its mechanisms run deeper and are more subtle.

Fine.

Now, having grasped and applied that understanding to my thinking long ago, may I please move on to the next level of analysis? Not every claim to classical conservative validation is sincere or rational. Instead, I would say that most of the problems afoot in the country today are the result of policies that claim the mantle of conservatism but are in fact wildly anti-conservative (in the sense that they do not conserve and preserve the founding ideas of our republic). To think critically about faux-conservatism is not liberal bias.

I think Gray's solution (adding "pro-life Christians" to the newsroom as remedy for "journalistic rot") cuts straight to the heart of the cultural disconnect Jay describes in this post: If Gray had suggested "free-market economists," that recommendation would have followed rationally from his earlier statement. Instead, he recommends adding a particular flavor of religion to the mix.

Journalists are accused of not understanding conservative thought and therefore failing to frame our stories in a non-biased way. Yet the deeper issue appears to be one of cultural affiliation. We try (and yes, I acknowledge that we often fail) not to pick a side so that we may serve the same function to all sides. But our cultural critics tend to come from a religious tradition that teaches one may not serve more than one master (and that by rejecting God, one serves his enemy).

Hence, I borrow Gray's model to make a new one -- One possible construction of the religious view of "liberal media bias":

"Intellectual hubris > cultural arrogance > Ideology > Partisanship (Satanism)"

Clearly this is not the view of all conservatives or all Christians, but one only has to listen to those pulpit messages linking journalists to the godless cultural elites to see this rhetorical chain reaction at work. "Not like us = evil."

Posted by: Daniel Conover at March 18, 2005 10:08 AM | Permalink

Jay,
You probably don't want to go here, but Daniel's remarks suggest to me a further parallel between your thesis of a conscious policy to decertify the press as a means of changing the political battlefield, and the self-conscious PNAC neo-con agenda of delegitimizing the United Nations.

Both positions insist that control over the will of a political community must not be ceded to institutions invested in legalistic control: one at the level of the domestic state, the other at the level of the Wilsonian United Nations. They reject heretofore hegemonic legal definitions of the welfare state and international law as illegitimate usurpers of communal sovereignty.

To the degree that reporters as representatives of the Enlightenment stand on the side of reason as opposed to group self-interest defined in communal terms, they effectively sustain the legitimacy of the previously hegemonic system. Reporters who are not actively challenging the legitimacy of the welfare state and international law are thus instruments of the enemy, obstacles to the anti-liberal Republican revolution.

One layer of astonishing incoherence steps in when Bush Republicans take up the mantle of anti-fascist justice in the name of the challenge to liberal legalism that DEFINED fascism and its Asian allies. They effectively say, "We must reject the legitimacy of international law by starting an unprovoked war of aggression in order to bring to justice those who are or will be guilty of crimes against humanity such as starting a war of aggression in the manner of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan." Liberal legalism is categorically rejected as inadequate to the task of saving itself. It must be overthrown it must be overthrown for the sake of its own salvation.

Under international law, Bush has undertaken exactly what Nuremburg and Tokyo War Crimes tribunals found Nazi Germany and Militarist Japan of: Instigating unprovoked wars of aggression and therefore crimes against humanity.

The self-righteousness of the cloak of the Second World War Bush wants to take into battle against "Terror" (and not coincidentally ideologically strip from the Keynesian welfare state types who actually organized and fought it), is grounded in the very principles of international liberal legalism that the neo-con PNAC imperial project rejects as illegitimate. Bush waves the mantle of the very liberal legal system he rejects both natinally and internationally (Ads with Roosevelt against Social Security are another perfect analogy). Rejection is salvation, delegitimization is constructive reform.

Reporters who have a coherent enough personal identity to acknowledge facts of more than a few hours ago are by definition obstructionist wrenches in this system of blatant "up-is-downism." They are framed as New Class hegemons who obstruct the anti-liberal revolution insofar as they continue to imagine democracy involves checks and balances, debate rather than marching orders and obedience. From this point of view, if they are covering enemies legal concerns are category mistakes and aid and comfort to the enemy. The very subject of international law is thus anathema, and counter-revolutionary from the radical Bushite perspective.

A further key element of confusion is that prominent cheerleader allies of Bushite strategy at home and abroad, such as Joseph Lieberman and Thomas Friedman, make the case for these very same anti-liberal offensives IN LIBERAL DEMOCRATIC TERMS. Challenging the welfare state is necessary for economic freedom, military expansion is liberation.

The strategies are rationalized on the grounds of communitarian particularism AND universal humanism AT ONE AND THE SAME TIME.

The fact that the latter enable an anti-liberal, anti-humanist revolution of de-certification is a strategic side-effect that both Lieberman and Friedman seem to be completely oblivious to. In other words, Lieberman and Friedman are cheerleading the de-legitimization of liberal humanism in the name of liberal humanism.

Posted by: Mark Anderson at March 18, 2005 11:40 AM | Permalink

To the RH Mark Anderson:
I believe you have effectively ended your argument and this thread by your incessant use of -isms, -ists, and -tions.

Posted by: gobears at March 19, 2005 1:10 AM | Permalink

"Equally interesting to me (maybe only me...) is that the LATimes.com once again--it's happened before--was unable, unwilling, uninterested in having a simple link to Pressthink when Shaw, a columnist, is writing for the purpose of arguing with a PressThink post."

Darn it. I was about to post that sublime quote on my blog when I spotted this link to the LA Times (which you don't have to subscribe to to read) which does contain a url (though not a clickable link) for Press Think: link

Maybe the link was added after Mr. Rosen wrote that line. But don't ask me, because I also (paranoically or not) believe in the de-certification of the Press argument.

Posted by: Ron Brynaert at March 19, 2005 5:57 AM | Permalink

I hope that Jay (if he isn't already thinking along these lines) will consider expanding these postings on decertification into a full-length book. And quickly.

This stuff is occurring in real time, and a book would focus attention on the subject. These ideas need to flow out of this tight little circle and start perculating through the public.

I actually woke up in the middle of the night thinking about this -- Are there presidential analogies out there that would undo Jay's thesis? Undermine it? Weaken it?

Just working from memory and other comments here, I think the answers are No, Maybe and Yes. Which is why a book is necessary: in book format, it's easy to collect the things that might argue against the thesis and examine them, rather than confronting them sequentially in a posting format.

I think the example of Clinton and his bypassing of the MSM in 1992 is a helpful one: It helps define the point I take from Jay. Decertification isn't the act of using other media, it's the act of fencing off and destroying the traditional press. The old image was of the press as barbarians beseiging the White House. Now the press is beseiged. Brilliant.

This understanding is essential if the press is to regain and promote its original values, theoretical though they may be. And we must begin by confronting the issue of bias. As a software engineer posted on my blog:

An accusation of bias is assumed to be true and is very difficult to disprove. It immediately changes the discussion from a debate of ideas to a defense of credibility of the accused. It would be especially useful if your opponent has a point that you can't or don't want to refute. It's like calling your opponent a witch in 1692's Salem or a Communist in 1950's Hollywood.

Reflection and reform are necessary, but it's time to get off the defensive.

Posted by: Daniel Conover at March 19, 2005 9:36 AM | Permalink

Ron: A link to me means a working link-- you know, click and it takes you there? (Example: New Criterion.) The Shaw column does not have a working link; it prints the url for PressThink. That's like saying: here's the address, but don't go there.

Which can easily cost me 1,000 readers, people who would have chosen to see for themselves what "de-certification" and my writing are all about, but aren't here because the LAT refuses to link, doesn't know how to link, employs people who don't understand what a link is.

Well, those 1,000 readers are important to me. In fact, they're important to the LA Times too; where do you think rule number one: don't link out comes from? Dave Winer calls it sharing the flow. Where does this newspaper get off thinking it has no duty whatsoever to link out to what it is discussing? What idea is in charge there, or is it simple incompetence?

After all, I do send readers to the Los Angeles Times, the kind they may one day monetize, so it's not like my request is for their charity. It's parity. When you are you going to bring your professional operation up to par with the standard set by amateurs and individual developers?

Keep in mind. Shaw wrote two of his weekly columns off my blog posts and failed to link to any of the arguments he was rejecting. Keep in mind: it's simple Web competence we ask for-- nothing special. The situation is one of majestic indifference to links, as if they said nothing about the LAT.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at March 19, 2005 12:34 PM | Permalink

Daniel: The trouble is I am writing a book, but it's not about de-certification.

Waking up in the middle of the night, thinking "is there a legitimizing principle I overlooked in..." That's something I have done. I don't think it's necessarily normal behavior.

Thanks for your reflections on de-certification of the press. (Which I think is happening, whatever you choose to call it.) It's not like I know exactly how it's working. I don't. I am trying to figure out a pattern and the tools for its description at the same time.

Journalists (all exceptions admitted) rely too much on a crude definition of history as a series of firsts. Therefore if I say the Bush Team is making history, it gets auto-read as a series of claims about "firsts." To check if the claim is true, (or are Boehlert and Rosen exaggerating?) you "go back," and see if you can find earlier firsts to burst the bubble on my attempted firsts, and usually you can find some good poppers that way, and from there the column writes itself, "The Bush Adminstration is hardly the first to..."

This is not likely to produce any real historical understanding.

As I wrote several comment threads back: The Bush invention is simply in the coherence and totality of the overall approach, not in "things that have never been done before."

De-certify and marginalize the press is an innovation that has theory. (No fourth estate, no check and balance, press is a special interest.) It has practice (don't answer their questions, it just encourages them). It has leaders (Bush, Cheney, Card, Ashcroft, Limbaugh, Hewett.) It has followers, and chumps (HHS hiring Karen Ryan, Education Department buying Armstrong Williams, Ketchum corrupting itself). It has culture. It has politics. It has rhythm. It's some of the easiest radio ever made.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at March 19, 2005 3:55 PM | Permalink

Jay, I changed out of Political Science as a major because it mostly dealt with little-T truths. Those things that may be true but peripheral. If you are on a mission to write a book from the point of view of decertification, go ahead. And I'd buy a copy and ask you to autograph it for me. -- Stephen, with a P-H.

But, unhappily, I think there is more traction to be had writing about why that press might have deserved it, avoided it, and proceeded in spite of it.

In other words, the small-t truth is the reaction of the Bush administration; the big-T truth holds a mirror to journalism to help it transform to be more effective.

Posted by: sbw at March 19, 2005 4:21 PM | Permalink

I love this entry from a blogging copy editor at the Houston Chroncile, setting a link to this post:

Thumbsucker about the state of journalism. Actually, the word "thumbsucker" is one of the problems with journalism.

So true.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at March 19, 2005 9:14 PM | Permalink

Great topic, Jay. Wanted to note ">http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/20/nyregion/20families.html?pagewanted=all&oref=login> this and pass it along:
“Arnold Roth, whose 15-year-old daughter, Malki, died in a suicide bombing in Jerusalem, said he was appalled when television news producers wanted to pair him in interviews with the father of the bomber who killed his daughter.
"It is an entirely bogus comparison, creating a false symmetry between the person who did the killing and the victim," he said. "It betrays a factual and moral confusion in the media that leads to the dehumanization of the victims."

Posted by: Ken Ormes at March 20, 2005 9:42 AM | Permalink

Jeff Sharlet, editor of The Revealer, takes on Minogue's essay:

The problem with big corporate media, in Minogue's mind, is not that it creates and enforces a lowest common denominator, but that it caters to the base urges of those uncouth creatures afflicted by "curiousity," the desire to know things we do not need to know.
Of course, many media haters rage precisely because they feel as if theyâ€™ve been pressed into the service of a narrative crafted by those who think themselves superior; class goes a long way toward justifying the fury of those who loathe the swells and the slicks of TV news.

And yet, it is corporate media that is described nearly perfectly by Minogueâ€™s over-broad condemnation of journalism in general...

Posted by: Jay Rosen at March 20, 2005 2:13 PM | Permalink

On why no link to PressThink from the Times article about it -

You're assuming that the sole purpose of newspapers today is to inform their readers. To quote from someone who works at one: "...newspapers aren't too happy to publicize the 'competition' (the phrase 'buy an ad!' comes to mind)"

Also, for the paper to link to something it's pontificating about is to risk that the reader might actually go there and discover that the pontificator has his head in an anatomically incorrect location. Pontificators hate it when that happens.

A couple months back in our nearby big paper a story appeared which was about writings in a different paper. The reporter used a he-said-she-said approach in describing these writings, and chose not to link to them even though they were freely available online.
Afterwards I asked him "why didn't you provide links so your readers could evaluate the evidence themselves?" - the answer given was basically "well, if any readers are curious they can search and find it".
(AIRC the article itself did not mention that the columns were available)

So what we have is the writer as performer and influence-monger, rather than as informer.

Posted by: Anna at March 20, 2005 6:06 PM | Permalink

You know, sometimes we're just dumbasses. I know it's hard to believe in this forum, but there are senior newspaper people who actually don't know what the phrase "HTML tag" means. I'd bet $100 that if you asked the top editors at the top 100 U.S. newspapers the question "What does the command 'a href=' initiate?" more than half would not know.

There's another issue here when it comes to newspapers online, and I ask everyone to consider it: Online culture is intimidating to people who are not tech savvy, and after a while we tend to forget that people who don't understand what we're talking about are the majority in this country.

Yes, there are 32 million Americans who read blogs at the end of 2004, but that figure overshadows this one: more than 60 percent of adult Americans in that same survey didn't know what a blog was. Three weeks ago, probably 85 percent of the people in my newsroom had never heard of a podcast. In December, I didn't know what RSS was.

This ignorance plays out in a variety of ways, from budgeting to policies to the way newspaper people treat online sources. I'm not defending such behavior, but I do view such transgressions in a different context. We're talking about an industry that is flirting with charging for online content again. They just don't begin to get it, and when it comes to Nettiquete, they're not even in the game.

Posted by: Daniel Conover at March 20, 2005 6:59 PM | Permalink

Anna: Allow me to introduce you to a distinction between "expecting" and "assuming." I don't assume that "the sole purpose of newspapers today is to inform their readers," but I expect newspapers to behave as if the information needs of their readers come first. Having high expectations is part of what critics do. It doesn't mean we assume things will work out that way.

If I have expectations of excellence for the Los Angeles Times, that is simply judging the Times by its own aspirations. In case you haven't noticed, the people there think they are pretty damn good. Online their performance is pathetic, and to me it is always worth pointing out that kind of discrepancy.

Expecting journalists at a newspaper with national aspirations to know what a link is in 2005-- I don't think that's out of line, Daniel. If we make excuses for them, they will never get with it.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at March 20, 2005 7:37 PM | Permalink

So, Daniel, you have expressed your exasperation and your parsimony. But you haven't explained what is it worth for you not to have to do everything yourself or how much you value your time? You haven't explained whether you value the skill David Henninger described above as taking "chaos that is the Information Highway and submit[ing] it to an organizing intelligence."

Who was it that described one as knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing? We may have a whole generation of 'em!

Posted by: sbw at March 20, 2005 8:00 PM | Permalink

Anna, allow me to introduce you to a distinction between "expecting" and "assuming."

Jay, thanks for the introduction.
:-}

Daniel:
...more than 60 percent of adult Americans in that same survey didn't know what a blog was. Three weeks ago, probably 85 percent of the people in my newsroom had never heard of a podcast.

OK, we bloggizens occupy a niche of which journalists are largely ignorant, so their seemingly rude and non-reader-serving behavior can in part be ascribed to lack of familiarity with the norms and strengths of our culture.

But it would be nice if there were a "press cultural imperative" to learn about these things, and to recognize that - ahem - we are the authorites in this realm.

Minor pedantic case in point: I tried to introduce a new newspaper blogger to the distinction between "blog" and "post", noting that his "read past blogs" link was semantically incorrect. But it stayed that way for weeks or months afterwards.

(BTW Daniel you deserve much credit for being the sort of aware and enquiring journalist that I'm lamenting the lack of - please, go forth and multiply, or at least continue to transmit.)

Here's a question: how do we test the hypothesis that the "lack of linking" is due to ignorance rather than stubbornness?
("stubbornness" might not be the right word here, so if anyone wants to introduce me to more distinctions, feel free.)

Posted by: Anna at March 20, 2005 8:43 PM | Permalink

I'm not quite sure what all this brouhaha over the LA Times links is about.

Shaw did include the URL, which means that all that all the reader had to do was cut-and-paste to get here.

Yesterday, I read an article in the washington post about a study by an economist named shiller that examined the whole "privatization of social security" issue. It mentioned that the piece appeared on Schiller's website i.e. IrrationalExuberance.com . I had no problem cutting and pasting that information, and finding Shiller's full paper --- nor did I feel that I was being required to do too much work to get to the paper on which the article was based.

And despite the fact that I've been on-line for well over a decade, like the overwhelming majority of Americans I've never once (successfully) typed in an "href" tag -- I tried a couple of times in various places, but I must have screwed up the highly specific and idiosyncratic syntax of such tags, because they didn't create the link that I expected them to. So I've just said "the hell with it", and if I write something and want to include a link to the original source, I just copy the URL into the text.

The point here is that Shaw was discussing ideas, and did what was necessary to enable his audience to quickly and easily find the source of the topic he was discussing. It took me about 40 years to realize that just because people don't know what I know, and don't share my priorities about what people should know. doesn't mean that they are necessarily stupid or lazy or incompetent.

PS... Shaw's email address appears at the bottom of the article. But its not a link.

Posted by: p.lukasiak at March 20, 2005 8:45 PM | Permalink

Jay -- Slate published for whom its editorial staff was voting in the last election. With almost no exception, everyone was voting for Kerry. I applauded Slate's honesty. Having in various professional guises been in close contact with some of the largest news operations in the country, I'd be surprised to learn that the voting preferences of the vast majority of the MSM does not mirror those of the Slate staff. For 30 plus years, we've had "one party" journalism. The other party has found ways to speak, crudely at first via talk radio, and now with great sophistication via the Internet and the new popularity and vigor of its intellectual journals. Americans as a general rule dislike one-party anything and being told what to think. The press couldn't help itself--that's what happens when you constitute an intellectual vaccum. The rage, on the center-right, is merely a lot of people learning how duped they've been; the rage coming from the left is not, by contrast, center-left...it is far left; it is the wackiness that always exists at the fringes, from both sides, and I don't think the two "rages" can be equated.

Posted by: Lee Kane at March 20, 2005 9:13 PM | Permalink