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

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 |