Making meaning with journalism…
“…you never quite know how verified it is.” –Maureen Dowd
No, she’s not commenting on the state of opinion journalism, although she could be (and regular news reporting these days). From lowly student columnists to the pundit stratosphere, the discipline of verification appears to be just another minor annoyance on the route to scoring partisan points.
Dowd is commenting on bloggers. And while bloggers do not operate with a journalistic discipline of verification (that must include an editorial process), they do operate within a web of interested interlocutors and with a rhetoric of conversation such that correction may occur within a given discourse community’s understanding. “Correction” may not be the best term; it is a journalistic term and a positivist term. Rhetoric is social and epistemic, so its function/use conflates persuasion and meaning-making.
Facts certainly play a role in this, but not always or necessarily a commanding role. We do not argue about facts (unless we are absurd). We argue about what facts mean. What facts mean, and how they get to mean it, is one function of rhetoric within a discourse community.
Bloggers are comfortable with their form of meaning-making–bound up as it is in a medium that privileges conversation and cross-connection (not to mention ease of participation). I wonder, however, how comfortable journalists are with their form of meaning-making as they watch circulation decline. And as they watch the public turn toward conversation and participation.
Journalism must foster conversation and participation to remain relevant to civic discourse. But it will surely fail if it does not reinvigorate its discipline of verification–a discipline that bloggers, individually and ideologically, cannot hope to imitate, a discipline necessary to the journalistic mission.
