: Campaign maneuvers…Complex system…
Over the next few days I’ll comment on each section of the new survey of American journalists conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. Check here for the survey methodology. Pew has conducted this survey twice before, in 1995 and 1999.
Today’s topic: Section 1, Views on Performance.
Journalism evolved into a profession in the latter 1800s, and objective methods of reporting became the norm in the early 1900s. For an excellent accounting of these changes, you should read Discovering the News, by Michael Schudson. Procedures and the values they assume arise together. These changes led to a system of professional ethics that prescribed professional behavior and normalized professional values. One of the longest enduring values of professionalization and objectivity is the notion that a free press is essential to democracy. And this value, among others, leads journalists to worry about their professional performances. This is one of the admirable traits of journalists.
Despite professionalization and objective methods, journalism remains an impossibly complex practice because, among other things, it deals with the human perception and evaluation of events and the relaying of those events in language and pictures. And at every conceivable point along the path from event to publication to consumption, journalists deal with coordination and collaboration in the production of an industrial product for two distinctly different customers–advertisers and readers. And let’s not forget bias in all its variety in the human system and the bias inherent in the structure of journalistic practice.
How could anyone be satisfied with the product of such a system?
I’m thinking of Chomsky in this context. Remember his important book of some years back, _Manufacturing Consent_ in which he seeks to demonstrate that the production of news works much like the production of any commodity in a capitalist system. News is another commodity. Audiences are created and news is adapted to meet demand. Is there a connection here?
Michael Greer
Michael…Yes, there’s a connection in the sense that an industrial institution works by a set of rules that enables the system to work. Newspapers are clearly an industrial product, but a far more complex one than, say, an automobile. There’s more science in the automobile, to be sure. But journalists deal with something far more complex than the workings of a car: human communication in socio-political contexts for multiple audiences.
Your remarks force me to reconsider a distinction which I have been dwelling on for some time: the difference between instrumental rationality and prudence. I think it is this distinct that initially troubled me about your references to rational-choice theory. Instrumental rationality was the object of the Frankfurt School; unfortunately, very little is being done to support an adequate account of prudential reasoning, though I have seen it in some works such as Tom Farrell’s _Norms of Rhetorical Culture_ and John Dunne’s neglected _Back to the Rough Ground_, works which stress the ambiguous nature of practical thinking as opposed to technical and theoretical thinking. I hope your work will continue in the tradition of pointing out how rhetoric is itself a form of inquiry, a form of knowledge.
Michael Greer
Re: “I hope your work will continue in the tradition of pointing out how rhetoric is itself a form of inquiry, a form of knowledge.”
Yes…and the trick now is bringing exactly this tradition, coming from a comp/rhet background, to my new position as a journalism professor.