Baibie Zelizer_Journalism and the Academy

29 3 Journalism and the Academy Barbie Zelizer Journalism’s place in the academy is a project rife with various and sundry complications. As the recognizable forms of journalism take on new dimensions to accommodate the changing circum- stances in which journalism exists, the question of journalism’s study has developed along an un- even route fi lled with isolated pockets of disciplinary knowledge. The result is that we have little consensus about the two key terms at the focus of our attention, agreeing only marginally about what journalism is and generating even less agreement about what the academy’s relationship with it should be. This chapter discusses the various sources of existential uncertainty underly- ing journalism’s coexistence with the academy and offers a number of suggestions to make their uneven and often symbiotic relationship more mutually aware and fruitful. THE SHAPE OF JOURNALISM AND ITS STUDY In an era when journalism stretches from personalized blogs to satirical relays on late night television and its study appears in places as diverse as communication, literature, business and sociology, considering journalism’s place in the academy from anew might seem like an unneces- sary attempt to generate alarm about the future viability of a phenomenon that seems to be every- where. However, in being everywhere, journalism and its study are in fact nowhere. On the one hand, journalism’s development has produced a long line of repetitive and unresolved laments over which form, practice or convention might be better suited than their alternatives to qualify as newsmaking convention. On the other hand, its study has not kept step with the wide-ranging and often unanticipated nature of its evolution over time. The dissonance between journalism and the academy echoes a broader disjunction charac- terizing journalism’s uneven and spotty existence with the world. When George Orwell added newspaper quotations to his fi rst book, critics accused him of “turning what might have been a good book into journalism” (Orwell, 1946, cited in Bromley, 2003), and his collected works were compiled decades later under the unambivalent title Smothered Under Journalism, 1946 (Orwell, 1999). Similar stories dot the journalistic backgrounds of literary giants like Charles Dickens, Samuel Johnson, John Dos Passos, Andre Malraux, Dylan Thomas and John Hersey. Reactions like these proliferate despite a profound reliance on journalism not only to situate us vis à vis the larger collective but to use that situation as a starting point for more elaborated ways of position- ing ourselves and understanding the world. 30 ZELIZER This is curious, because much of our situated knowledge rests in part on journalism. Where would history be without journalism? What would literature look like? How could we understand the workings of the polity? As a phenomenon, journalism stretches in various forms across all of the ways in which we come together as a collective, and yet the “it’s just journalism” rejoinder persists. Journalism’s coexistence with the academy rests on various sources of existential uncertain- ty that build from this tension. The most obvious uncertainty stems from the pragmatic questions that underlie journalism’s practice, by which its very defi nition is tweaked each time supposed interlopers—blogs, citizen journalists, late night TV comedians or reality television—come close to its imagined borders. A second source of uncertainty draws from the pedagogic dimensions surrounding journalism and the academy. How we teach what we think we know is a question with a litany of answers, particularly as journalism’s contours change. And yet those who teach what counts and does not count as journalistic practice and convention have tended to be behind rather than ahead of its rapidly altering parameters. And fi nally one of the most signifi cant sourc- es of uncertainty surrounds the conceptual dimensions of the relationship—what we study when we think about journalism. In that over the years academics have invoked a variety of prisms through which to consider journalism—among them its craft, its effect, its performance and its technology—they have not yet produced a scholarly picture of journalism that combines all of these prisms into a coherent refl ection of all that journalism is and could be. Instead, the study of journalism remains incomplete, partial and divided, leavings its practitioners uncertain about what it means to think about journalism, writ broadly. This chapter addresses these sources of uncertainty and in so doing thinks through some important challenges facing the study of contemporary journalism. It argues for a space of refl ec- tion, both about the backdrop status of journalism’s practice and study and about the degree to which the default assumptions that comprise it correspond with the full picture of contemporary journalism. What about journalism and its study has been privileged, and what has been side- stepped? These questions are particularly critical when thinking about journalism studies in its global context, where variance has not been accommodated or even recognized as much as it exists on the ground. INTERPRETIVE COMMUNITIES AND THINKING ABOUT JOURNALISM What academics think relies upon how they think and with whom, and perhaps nowhere has this been as developed as in the sociology of knowledge. Thomas Kuhn (1964) was most directly as- sociated with the now somewhat fundamental notion that inquiry depends on consensus building, on developing shared paradigms that name and characterize problems and procedures in ways that are recognized by the collective. On the way to establishing consensus, individuals favoring competing insights battle over defi nitions, terms of reference and boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. Once consensus is established, new phenomena tend to be classifi ed by already proven lines. In other words, what we think has a predetermined shape and life-line, which privileges community, solidarity and power. This notion goes far beyond the work of Kuhn, and it has been implicated in scholarship by Emile Durkheim (1965 [1915]), Robert Park (1940), Michel Foucault (1972), Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966), and Nelson Goodman (1978)—all of whom maintained in different ways that the social group is critical to establishing ways of knowing the world. The idea of interpretive communities, originally suggested by Stanley Fish (1980) and developed in conjunc- tion with journalism by Zelizer (1993), Berkowitz (2000) and others, helps situate the strategies 3. JOURNALISM AND THE ACADEMY 31 that go into the sharing of knowledge as integral to the knowledge that results. Recognizing that groups with shared ways of interpreting evidence shed light on the way that questions of value are settled and resettled, the persons, organizations, institutions and fi elds of inquiry engaged in journalism’s analysis become central to understanding what journalism is. As the anthropologist Mary Douglas (1986, p. 8) argued, “true solidarity is only possible to the extent that individuals share the categories of their thought.” Inquiry, then, is not just an intellectual act but a social one too. What this suggests for journalism’s study is an invitation to think about the forces involved in giving it shape. In this sense, no one voice in journalism’s study is better or more authoritative than the others; nor is there any one unitary vision of journalism to be found. Rather, different voices offer more—and more complete—ways to understand what journalism is, each having evolved in conjunction with its own set of premises about what matters and in which ways. As an area of inquiry, journalism’s study has always been somewhat untenable. Negotiated across three populations—journalists, journalism educators and journalism scholars, the shared concern for journalism that is independently central to each group has not remained at the fore- front of their collective endeavors. Rather, journalism’s centrality and viability have been way- laid as lamentations have been aired contending that the others fail to understand what is most important: journalists say journalism scholars and educators have no business airing their dirty laundry; journalism scholars say journalists and journalism educators are not theoretical enough; journalism educators say journalists have their heads in the sand and journalism scholars have their heads in the clouds. As each has fi xated on who will be best heard above the din of compet- ing voices, the concern for journalism has often been shunted to the side. Underlying the ability to speak about journalism, then, have been tensions about who can mobilize the right to speak over others and who is best positioned to maintain that right. The alternate voices in journalism’s study each constitute an interpretive community of sorts. Each has defi ned journalism according to its own aims and then has set strategies for how to think about it in conjunction with those aims. JOURNALISTS Journalists are individuals who engage in a broad range of activities associated with newsmak- ing, including, in Stuart Adam’s (1993, p. 12) view, “reporting, criticism, editorializing and the conferral of judgment on the shape of things.” Journalism’s importance has been undeniable, and while it has been the target of ongoing discourse both in support and critique of its performance, no existing conversation about it has suggested its irrelevance. Rather, contemporary conditions have insisted on journalism’s centrality and the crucial role it can play in helping people make sense both of their daily lives and of the ways in which they connect to the larger body politic. However, not all of journalism’s potential has borne out in practice. Contemporary journal- ists have been under siege from numerous quarters. They live in an economic environment in which falling revenues, fragmentation, branding and bottom-line pressures keep forcing the news to act as a shaky for-profi t enterprise across an increased number of outlets. These outlets have not necessarily produced a broader scope of coverage, and many journalists have taken to multi- tasking the same story in ways that previous generations would not recognize. In the United States, every media sector but the ethnic press—mainstream newspapers, broadcast and cable news, the alternative press—is losing its public. Entering a “new era of shrinking ambitions,” contemporary journalism is no longer a dependable economic enterprise (Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2007). 32 ZELIZER Politically, journalists have come under attack from both the left and right, which have argued for different defi nitions of so-called journalistic performance alongside a political environment that has undercut the journalist’s capacity to function in old ways. While the competing and con- tradictory expectations from left and right have paralyzed aspects of journalism’s performance in more stable political systems, the demise of the nation-state in many areas of the world has raised additional questions regarding journalism’s optimum operation. All of this has produced an un- tenable situation for journalists, who have been caught in various kinds of questionable embraces with government, local interests and the military and who, in the United States, have gravitated toward coverage that plays to “safe” political spaces, producing news that is characterized by heightened localism, personalization and oversimplifi cation (State of the News Media, 2007). Journalists have learned to follow various models of practice, not always thoughtfully and none of which have been fully suited to the complexities of today’s global political environments. Technically, journalists have faced new challenges from the blogosphere and other venues, which have made the very accomplishment of newswork tenuous. How journalists cover the news has faded in importance alongside the fact of coverage. Alternative sites like late night television comedy, blogs and online sites like Global Voices have taken the lead in gatekeeping, with jour- nalism “becoming a smaller part of people’s information mix” (State of the News Media, 2007). In that regard, people watching sites like Comedy Central’s The Daily Show have been thought to be better informed about public events than those who watched mainstream news (State of the News Media, 2007). Lastly, moral scandals involving journalists have abounded. Incidents involving Judith Mill- er or Jayson Blair in the United States or the Gilligan Affair in Britain have all raised questions about the moral fi ber of journalists, paving the way for an insistence on homemade media, or citi- zen journalism, by which journalists’ function is being increasingly taken over and performed by private citizens. That same trend has also meant that the public can see journalism’s limitations more easily, leading them to argue, at least in the US case, that the news media are “less accurate, less caring, less moral and more inclined to cover up rather than correct mistakes” (State of the News Media, 2007). All of this suggests that journalists have not been as effective as they might have been in communicating to the world journalism’s centrality and importance. Questions persist about changing defi nitions of who is a journalist: Does one include Sharon Osbourne or the Weather Channel? Questions also underlie the issue of which technologies are bona fi de instruments of newsmaking: Does one include cellular camera phones or reality television? And fi nally, the fundamental question of what journalism is for has no clear answer. Is its function to only pro- vide information or to more aggressively meld community and public citizenship? Journalism’s different functioning in different parts of the world—as in the distinctions separating the devel- opmental journalism prevalent in parts of Asia from the partisan models popular in Southern Europe—has made the question more diffi cult to answer. Part of this has derived from the fact that there are a number of competing visions at the core of journalism’s self defi nition. Is it a craft, a profession, a set of practices, a collective of individuals, an industry, an institution, a business or a mindset? In that it is probably a bit of all of these things, there is a need to better fi gure out how they work off of and sometimes against each other. This is critical, for even basic questions about journalistic tools have really never been ad- dressed and journalism’s tools have not been equally valued. Images in particular are one aspect of news that has been unevenly executed, with pictures regularly appearing without captions, without credits and with no identifi able relation to the texts at their side. Yet the turn to images in times of crisis—by which there are more images, more prominent images, bolder images, and larger images—has been poorly matched to the uneven conventions by which images act as news 3. JOURNALISM AND THE ACADEMY 33 relays. Following both the terror attacks of September 11 and the launching of the US war on Iraq, there were two and a half times the number of photos in the front sections of a paper like the New York Times than it regularly featured in peacetime (Zelizer, 2004). The lack of a clear development of standards, then, is problematic, because visuals have taken over the forefront of journalism’s relays even if they have not been suffi ciently addressed. Moreover, because their so called “correct usage” has not been fi gured out, the image’s presentation has become an open fi eld, with people crying foul every time journalism’s pictures grate their nerves. This means that journalism’s hesitancy about doing its job has allowed others—politicians, lobbyists, concerned citizens, bereaved parents, even members of militias—to make the calls instead, and they do so in journalism’s name but without journalism’s sanction. Similarly undervalued has been the degree to which crisis has become the default setting for much of journalistic practice. In that there has been much in the news that takes shape on the backs of improvisation, sheer good or bad fortune, and ennui than is typically admitted, the evolution of crisis as the rule rather than the exception of journalism suggests a need to be clearer about how such impulses play into newsmaking. For in leaving crisis out of the picture, journal- ism has seemed to be a far more predictable and manageable place than it is in actuality. All of this has rendered journalists a group somewhat out of touch with itself, its critics and its public. Givens such as the needs of the audience, the changing circumstances of newsmaking or the stuff at the margins of the newsroom—like inspiration and creativity—have remained rela- tively unaddressed. It is no surprise, then, that in the US journalists rank at the bottom of nearly every opinion poll of those whom the public trusts. JOURNALISM EDUCATORS The journalism educators have come together around a strong need to educate novices into the craft of journalism. Although vernacular education has differed across locations, it has exhibited similar tendencies regardless of specifi c locale. In the United States, teaching a vernacular craft began in the humanities around 1900, where newswriting and the history of journalism moved from English departments into the beginnings of a journalism education that eventually expanded into ethics and the law. Other efforts developed in the late 1920s in the social sciences, where the impulse to establish a science of journalism positioned craft—commonly called “skills” cours- es—as one quarter of a curriculum offering courses in economics, psychology, public opinion and survey research. Journalism educators were thus caught in the tensions between the humani- ties and social sciences as to which type of inquiry could best teach journalists to be journalists. For many this split still proliferates, refl ected in the so-called quantitative/qualitative distinction in approaches to news. In the United Kingdom, journalism education was set against a longstanding tradition of learning through apprenticeship and a prevalent view that journalism’s “technical elements” were “lacking in academic rigor” (Bromley, 1997, p. 334). Practical journalism did not appear on the curriculum until 1937 but only became a setting worthy of academic investigation once sociology and political science, largely through the work of Jeremy Tunstall (1970, 1971), arrived in the late 1960s. In Germany and Latin America, an academic interest was evident fi rst in the social sciences, which pushed journalism education toward sociology and notions of professionalism (Marques de Melo, 1988; Weber, 1948). In each case, the academic interest among educators helped link journalists to the outside world, but it also did enormous damage to the craft, leveling it down to what James Carey (2000, p. 21) called a “signaling system.” At fi rst offering an old-fashioned apprenticeship, journalism 34 ZELIZER educators over time came to address journalism by dividing it into technologies of production, separating newspapers, magazines, television and radio from each other. Lost in this was a place where all of journalism could be thought of as a whole with many disparate parts. And the re- sulting curriculum, again in Carey’s view, in many cases came to lack “historical understanding, criticism or self-consciousness” (p. 13). In this regard, journalism education generated disso- nance across the larger university curriculum. In the humanities it came to be seen as part of “the vernacular, the vulgate” (p. 22). In the social