Abstract
In this excellent new book, Geoffrey Baym tells the story of late 20th-century American political news in much the way that reporters once sought to tell the stories of American politics – in an authoritative, erudite and philosophically informed manner, such that the average educated reader can understand.
Baym’s starting point is that political news on the ‘big three’ networks has devolved into profit-driven spectacle and cynicism – though this in itself is not news. The book’s contribution comes from his analysis of the ‘fake news’ on the alternative network Comedy Central – Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert’s The Colbert Report – and the comparison of them with their predecessors in both the early days of network news and the late 20th century. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, Baym argues, are the only network newscasts fulfilling the journalistic mandate of speaking truth to power. For example, whereas traditional reporters’ response to the growing sophistication with which politicians manipulate the news has been to relativize all political statements – no matter how obviously untrue – as equal, Stewart and Colbert use humor and irony to highlight the ridiculousness of what now often passes for political discourse.
Baym divides the relatively brief history of television broadcast news (his medium of emphasis) into the high-modern, postmodern and neo-modern eras. He wisely does not insist on stark demarcations between them but rather shows how they overlap and continue to inform the present. The high-modern era of news, as it was first characterized by Daniel Hallin (1992), was both a period of time – from roughly the end of World War II to the late 20th century – and a paradigm, during which television anchors such as Walter Cronkite confidently told us ‘the way it is’. Due to the relative scarcity of news outlets, newscasts during this period drew huge audiences, including the politically motivated and only casually interested alike. Perhaps because of this, network executives of the 1960s and 1970s, such as CBS’s Richard Salant, had the luxury of envisioning the news as ‘something that [the network] owed to the public and to its conscience’ (p. 11), drawing a stark distinction between ‘political-normative’ and ‘aesthetic-expressive’ modes of address. This dichotomy is important in Baym’s narrative: the former represents constructive criticism and democratic responsibility, while the latter emphasizes story, drama and emotion.
Postmodern journalism, which began in the mid 1980s, is dominated by the aesthetic-expressive, and is what happens when journalism becomes ‘a corporate product pitching drama, story, and character and no longer willing, or perhaps unable, to meet the responsibilities of the Fourth Estate’ (p. 62). With the postmodern era came a much-needed broadening of the voices in the news, but also a relativism that makes it impossible to distinguish truth from spin. In theoretical terms, postmodern news is a product of ‘the epistemological relativism that rejects the possibility of objectivity while suspecting that all normative standards are culturally located and historically contingent’ (p. 15). News on the three legacy networks – and, by extension, all legacy news – has fallen into this trap, and has thus become unable to provide citizens with the information they need to understand contemporary politics.
In the neo-modern paradigm, journalists – if we may call them that – such as Stewart and Colbert synthesize the dichotomy between the political-normative and the aesthetic-expressive by ‘inject[ing] politics into previously nonpolitical spaces, but more importantly harnessing the power of entertainment in pursuit of high-modern ideals’ (p. 173). The neo-modern era is not a simple return to high modernism, though it does invoke some of its most important principles. Neo-modern news, according to Baym, responds to a political sphere ruled by the manipulation of information, intense partisanship and a fragmented audience by continually decoding the euphemism and spin that makes up most political discourse. In a sense, neo-modern news, with its irreverence towards politicians who nevertheless feel compelled to come on the shows to be interviewed, is the result of the maturation of journalism – it recognizes that politicians need it just as much as it needs them, and therefore paradoxically functions ‘very much outside any parameters of the media or the government’ (p. 167).
Using a series of case studies, including a comparison of Nixon impeachment coverage to Clinton impeachment coverage, Baym demonstrates the fundamental changes in news form and language over time. Within the first 25 pages, Baym cites theorists such as Habermas, Postman, Foucault, Bakhtin and Carey, but uses them in a way that makes this topic accessible to graduate, and even undergraduate students. Indeed, this light-handed use of such rich sources may be one of the few aspects of the book to attract critiques from theory-oriented scholars. Yet this is not a lightweight account; Baym has fleshed out Hallin’s fundamental – yet largely ignored – observation that the broadcast era was the high-modern era, arguing that ‘the changes in form between the high-modern and postmodern moments of television news … speak to a deeper reconceptualization of public inquiry and social knowledge itself’ (p. 42).
Perhaps the most important aspect of this reconceptualization concerns the raison d’etre of news. The indexical nature of high-modern news was not problematic (or was relatively less problematic) because the news fulfilled a deliberative function. The postmodern era, in turn, saw the validation of many more political voices as legitimate; the downside of this emergent pluralism was that there was a profound loss of authority for the voices that had previously told us ‘the way it was’. These voices – all white, all male – had certainly not represented the diversity in demographics or viewpoints of our country, but they had provided a touchstone for political reality, and a point to push back on. In an era when no voice has ultimate authority, there is nothing to push back on; power is obfuscated behind stagecraft. Baym does not ignore this point, but he fails to make a strong argument as to whether we are better off in a decidedly pluralistic public sphere that lacks any authoritative viewpoint or in need of a new cohort of Cronkites (though he seems to prefer the latter).
The best hope – in addition to ‘fake news’ – may be the types of news programs described in chapter 5, targeted toward women, African Americans and twenty-somethings. Despite flaws in each model (most having to do with trivializing the issues), these programs speak to different segments of the population about politics on their terms and about issues that are important to them. Indeed, Stewart and Colbert can be seen as just another instance of telling the news the way a specific demographic wants to hear it. However, the niche-ification of political reality – and the problems this causes in terms of insularity and partisanship – remain unresolved.
This critique aside, Baym’s book will join the canon of critical histories of American news, alongside such books as Baldasty’s The Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth Century (1992), Kaplan’s Politics and the American Press (2002) and Schudson’s Discovering the News (1978). Those wishing to use it as a resource for teaching the critical history of news will find it a manageable introduction to key theorists and important historical moments in American politics.