« The Medium is the Message | Main | Ombudsmen Can Be Important to Journalism »

March 24, 2008

What Will Be the Fate of Newspapers?

Eric Alterman, writing in The New Yorker, examines the history and fate of American newspapers. The whole essay is worth your time. I found this bit near the end particularly interesting:

And so we are about to enter a fractured, chaotic world of news, characterized by superior community conversation but a decidedly diminished level of first-rate journalism. The transformation of newspapers from enterprises devoted to objective reporting to a cluster of communities, each engaged in its own kind of “news”––and each with its own set of “truths” upon which to base debate and discussion––will mean the loss of a single national narrative and agreed-upon set of “facts” by which to conduct our politics. News will become increasingly “red” or “blue.” This is not utterly new. Before Adolph Ochs took over the Times, in 1896, and issued his famous “without fear or favor” declaration, the American scene was dominated by brazenly partisan newspapers. And the news cultures of many European nations long ago embraced the notion of competing narratives for different political communities, with individual newspapers reflecting the views of each faction. It may not be entirely coincidental that these nations enjoy a level of political engagement that dwarfs that of the United States.

I generally agree with this except for the part about losing "a single national narrative and agreed-upon set of 'facts' by which to conduct our politics." No such thing has ever existed, although creating a single narrative and set of "facts" has certainly been an unstated goal of establishment journalism since the early 20th century.

The craft that journalists learn and attempt to practice is founded on a particular epistemology that understands the world as knowable in a particular way. This particular way demands that journalists create a fictional general audience; such an audience does not in fact exist. It is the creation of a fictional audience that is partly responsible for the notion that a single national narrative can and should exist.

In this system: Who gets to say what the narrative is? Why do they get to say? Answers: Journalists. And because the journalism establishment has largely enjoyed, up until the invention of the internet, a communicative monopoly made possible by non-interactive media. The communicative mode is changing, however, from lecture to conversation.

Professional journalism will play a very important role in whatever brave new world is coming. That set of "facts" that Alterman mentions does in fact exist. What facts mean is always open to debate and interpretation. But it offends logic to suppose that any of us get to have our own set of facts. At the moment, journalists enjoy a particular (and somewhat uncomfortable) edge over citizens in gathering facts. There is no governmental sanction or licensing of journalism in America, but just try getting government official to talk to you on the record outside the aegis of a news organization.

(This situation may change somewhat over time. Evidence: Life of Jason in Springfield, Missouri.)

What if professional journalists concentrated on being custodians of fact who operate with a discipline of verification? Might that give all those people tapping away on the internet something worth thinking about, something worth acting upon?

There is no way to scrub narrative from journalism because humans understand the world in terms of narrative. What I have said of journalism is actually true of most human communication: We apply a narrative structure to ambiguous events in order to create a coherent and causal sense of events. To truly understand that assertion is to understand that any given narrative is a human construct that can be re-constructed.

The problem with journalism is that journalists too often create only one narrative per news event, thus they alienate those who do not see themselves in the story or, as is the case now, see themselves as empowered to construct their own narratives.



Posted by acline at March 24, 2008 9:10 AM | | Spotlight