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December 30, 2005
Okay, one more grumble...
Michael Lenehan gets off a good rant in the Chicago Reader with a modest proposal that no journalism be committed by the pros in 2006 in order to show the necessity of the professional product to civic life:
I think it’s time for actual journalists to drive this point home. Today, therefore, I am proposing a yearlong journalism strike. I am urging reporters and editors around the world to put down their notebooks, close their laptops, hang up their phones. Lie down and be counted! Let’s have no reporting, no editing, no application of any human intelligence whatsoever to events public or private till January 1, 2007. I’m calling it the Year Without Journalism. Let’s all relax, let go, and float blissfully in the information-free state (excuse me, I mean free-information state) that our public awaits so eagerly. Let one of those news robots handle the hired truck scandal and further crimes of the Daley administration. Let’s see if Wonkette can deal with the devious bastards in the executive branch any better than Judith Miller did. Let’s have some of those citizen journalists call Burt Natarus and see if they can figure out what the hell he’s talking about. With no news to aggregate, no facts to ruminate, the algorithms and the bedroom pundits will turn on each other like mirrors, producing a perfect regression of narcissistic selfreflection, repeating endlessly, adding nothing, ever shrinking, ad infinitum.
Yes, the professional product is important and will remain important (and should remain important). But two things:
1. About 75 percent of all civic news comes from the PR activities of powerful civic actors, not shoe-leather reporting by journalists (I have the citation for this at my office and will post it here next week). Shoe-leather reporting may certainly flesh out these PR efforts, but owing to the current he-said/she-said reporting model (based on a false notion of journalistic objectivity) that's not saying much. That journalists are able to get information the public is not normally able to get has much to do with journalists' institutional legitimacy. If I work for The New York Times, it's pretty easy to get powerful civic actors to speak with me. If I "work" for the Local Pajama-clad Weblog, I'm lucky if the secretary's secretary doesn't laugh at me as she hangs up the phone.
2. An "application of any human intelligence" should indicate more than a warm body taking a quote correctly (a real talent, BTW). It should also indicate something more important than institutional legitimacy. To my way of thinking, the application of human intelligence by journalists should mean their acting as custodians of fact with a discipline of verification. If we measure journalism's product (especially political reporting) by this standard, much of the profession (especially television) has already been "on strike" for a very long time.
Journalism is more than a craft or profession (noun defs. #2 and #3) practiced by those who are paid to do it for news organizations. Journalism is a way of knowing the world and a way of talking about the world. The absence of the professional product would not create the regression of narcissistic self-reflection Lenehan supposes. After a turbulent period of epistemological and rhetorical struggle, new forms of journalistic legitimacy would emerge from the narcissism and bombast of the worst new media practices--exactly the process we're now experiencing.
Posted by acline at December 30, 2005 4:04 PM | | Spotlight