: Above politics…New realities…
Jay Rosen is a member in good standing of a new blogging fraternity: Those who make their readers work harder. In other words, he’s a blogger who takes his readers seriously, i.e. he understands that serious ideas cannot be adequately proposed in the blogging equivalent of a sound bite.
(And, I get this warm, fuzzy feeling inside when I see academics take blogging seriously.)
Today, Dr. Rosen suggests that new beats may be emerging from new political campaign realities. I see in Rosen’s recognition of new “beats,” or narratives, exactly the attitude I describe above applied to journalism. Take a look at his list of story lines that journalists could be following in the new campaign reality:
1. The Control Revolution
2. Donating Talent
3. Distributed Ownership
4. The Inactive Switch Sides
5. Campaign as Curriculum
6. The New Sociability in Politics
7. The Discovery of Voice
8. The Self Informing Citizenry
9. It’s a Two Way World
Does this list map onto anything you’ve seen from the press so far in Campaign 2004? I can think of only a few examples.
A few items on this list seem to identify a higher class of horse-race coverage. While the coverage would be interesting, I wonder, for example, about the political utility of the information derived from #1. By “wonder” I mean exactly this: This list is worth my time to think about, to write about, and to offer what I hope is cogent commentary for the purpose of seeing it refined and grown.
Rosen’s concept of the usefulness of this list is broad. I am encouraged by the scope of his inclusiveness. He says that anyone, including citizens, students, bloggers, journalists, writers, linkers, etc., “can follow them to find important and interesting stories that show us there is something happening in presidential politics.”
But a big part of me hopes that print journalists lead the way, although I’m not very optimistic about that happening.
I have my own ideas as to why print journalists have utterly failed to inform us in any meaningful way, but I would like to know why you still have hope that print journos will emerge from their quagmire and why you are not optimistic as to the outcome.
The short version…
Why I have hope: Print journalists work with the best medium for presenting propositional content. With their large audience, they are uniquely positioned to make an impact by following the story lines Rosen suggests.
Why I despair: Because too many journalists still do not understand the structure (those biases I talk about) of their own profession. The profession remains under-theorized and, therefore, at the mercy of any cultural/technological wind that blows.
I’m curious: how would more study of these structural biases help journalists? A reporter still needs to quote official sources, there is a finite amount of time available to report stories, there are inevitable fiscal pressures that discourage more authoritative reporting, and the audience’s attention span gets smaller by the day.
The journalism we have feels like an organic reflection of the environment we live in. Maybe my own blindness to the profession’s “under-theorized” tendencies is another of your structural biases … I wouldn’t deny there’s a sense that we know all we need to know about how to report the news, and that the stuff we need to fix its failings simply is not available.
I suspect most working newsies would say, “don’t give me more theory; just give me more time, talent and money.”
re: “I suspect most working newsies would say, “don’t give me more theory; just give me more time, talent and money.”
That’s an excellent statement of the problem as I see it. To paraphrase Rummy, many journalists don’t know what it is they don’t know.
It seems to me your second paragraph answers your first, although I would challenge the assertion that “the stuff we need to fix its failings simply is not available.” I do believe the stuff we need to fix its failings may be found in challenging “organic reflection” (although I may certainly be mistaken).
Now, how do you do that?
Here are two examples:
1) Resist the more simplistic notions of narration, e.g. that news “stories” have a natural narrative structure and are populated by set characters. Resisting master narratives about the presidential candidates and acknowledging that the primaries are stable and predictable political events would be a good place to start.
2) Become true language experts. Many journalists believe themselves to be language experts of a sort because they write for a living. But few have ever had any education in rhetoric, linguistics, or semiotics (semantics, syntactics, and pragmatics). Such education would challenge the objectivist noetic field of the profession–that “organic reflection” you mentioned.
I appreciate your asking a very good question. And I apologize for these sketchy answers. Part of what Rhetorica is about is working all of this out.
I suppose a simpler way to put this: Greater understanding of practice (theory: the how/why of practice) offers the practitioner choices.
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