Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
Jay Rosen sent e-mail yesterday asking me to gloss my recent post about rhetoric, ethics, and intention. I was responding to the questions raised about how the ethics of journalism may be changing now that anyone can gather and publish information easily. The cases in question involve Mayhill Fowler.
Rosen wanted me to explain a few things. What happened next was a fascinating exchange of e-mail that allowed me to completely ignore other work that I had to do yesterday and think about something I really enjoy–the intersection of rhetoric, ethics, and intention.
As long-time Rhetorica readers are surely aware, I write this blog to please myself. And I use it as a space to float ideas. Every academic essay I’ve published in the last six years has begun here as a floater.
Thanks to Rosen, I have another idea for an academic essay :-)
But, that’s not what this post is about. This post is about trying to make sense of something I floated: Just what is a “journalistic intention”? On Sunday I wrote:
But what are journalists’ intentions? This is not an easy question to answer because of the complex rhetorical situation of journalism as a social, political, and economic practice of individuals acting alone and within institutions.
Here’s where I’m going with this: I’d be a lot more comfortable with Fowler’s ethics if she admitted to something like a journalistic intention.
(But what is a journalistic intention? I’m torn between expansive and limited understandings of this concept. So let’s just move on and see what happens.)
And move on I did. That’s the part that’s interesting for me but can be frustrating for readers. Journalistic intention? I just made that up. It occurred to me that something like that must exist and have some bearing on the Fowler case and journalistic rhetoric and ethics.
Rosen did the peer-review thing can called me on it. He asked a series of questions designed to, among other things, elicit a reasonable definition of “journalistic intention.”
Here are the questions Rosen asked:
I think the post you wrote has 3-4 different interpretive communities and you are the one who knows which part is for which.
What does it mean to act with proper journalistic intention?
How do we know when someone is?
Anyone can report because everyone has the technology for capturing sound and sight and saying to the world, “here is my report”…and because anyone can put a report on the web where the search engines can get it. But what does it mean to report with journalistic intention?
How do we know when someone is doing that?
Does it mean something different when a person is reporting with journalistic intention “as merely a citizen”?
Does it mean something special when a person is reporting with journalistic intention “as a professional”?
Or is reporting with journalistic intention exactly the thing that’s exactly the same for citizens and pros and pro-ams?
What other “intentions,” not journalistic, can people report–journalize–with?
How do we know when they are doing that?
Why don’t you write a new post as a series of proposed “philosophical guidelines” for OffTheBus contributors like Mayhill Fowler?
Like my original post, my initial answers were stabs. I’ll share them later. What I want to do now is rise to the occasion offered by Rosen’s last question. That requires me to do the hard thinking about theory (which I love to do) and then do the harder thinking about how to make it practical (which I too often do not do).
Gimme a few days 
Tags: journalism, rhetoric
