Why journalism’s default neglect of temporality is a problem

Why temporality matters in institutions, and why it matters more in journalism?

The current digital provision of new measures of technological instantaneity, unprecedented degrees of access to both message production and consumption, and robust capabilities of storage, retrieval and remediation encourages individuals in many kinds of institutions to work unmindfully from deep-seated default temporal assumptions. In journalism, where journalists accomplish work-related tasks in high risk, unpredictable and stress-ridden conditions, the undeveloped regard for time has special significance. Its default accommodation makes it possible, even preferable, to temporally shrink and automate the time frame in which journalistic value judgments of importance, relevance, impact and interest can be rendered. It also hastens and foreshortens journalism’s provision of more complicated responses to complex issues and events. This largely unquestioned reliance on entrenched assumptions about temporality in the news makes journalism’s temporal practices a productive landscape for addressing institutional authority in the digital age.

For the neglect of time is not typical of journalists alone but of practitioners across many institutions in the West. In the move from modernity to late modernity, temporality in institutional settings has tended to function as a blank slate or unremarked background, where particular temporal engagements continue unabated as technology puts its stamp on the movement of time forward. Goal-directed in nature yet responding to the combined effects of globalization and digital technology’s spread, western time is thought to oscillate between being linear and cyclical, unitary and mixed, rational and emotional, deliberative and argumentative (i.e. Fabian, 1983; Latour, 1993). Yet its unremarked status persists, long understood by philosophers of time via one of two main philosophical positions: the a-theory of presentism, which positions time as a series of sequential temporal positions that progress from past to present to future, and the b-theory of eternalism, which sees time as tenseless and reality as unchanging (McTaggart, 1908). In both perspectives, temporality is presumed to take shape reactively, where it primarily adapts to the attributes of complex institutional settings.

At the heart of such activity is the present. As Koselleck (2004: 3) noted, the more “a particular time is experienced as a new temporality (e.g. as modernity), the more that demands made of the future increase. Special attention is then devoted to the present.” Being in the present provides the essential positioning from which other temporal activity ensues, and this remains the case for most practitioners in western institutional settings, regardless of how aware they are of it.

Time is of particular relevance to the news. Journalism is constituted as a primarily temporal enterprise that is heavily invested in the present. Under the oft-cited moniker of “history’s first draft,” journalists are presumed to turn over to historians the fruits of their interventions in current events so that they might receive more prolonged and thoughtful attention. With journalism’s initial processing of events transformed into the raw material of someone else’s lasting record, journalists are expected to neither speak explicitly of the past without a link to the present nor consider the past part of the journalistic purview.

By the same token, journalism’s engagement with time is generally presumed to stop short of an investment in the future. Though certain forms of journalism identify more explicitly with a future-oriented, teleological narrativity, such as socialist television (Mihelj and Huxtable, 2018), by and large prognostications and predictions are considered more fruitfully left to those who trade in them, such as pollsters, futurologists, policy analysts, and forecasters. The consideration of future-oriented “options, possibilities for change, different entry points into understanding a particular long-term problem” (Moll, 2001) are generally envisioned as beyond the work of journalists.

Journalism’s engagement with the present is thereby an exemplar of western institutional temporality. As Barnhurst (2011) argued, time sensibilities drive journalism with little correspondence to the time in which news unfolds, with different media following different temporal regimes. But across all regimes, for journalists to improvise order and sequencing in establishing the relation of events to each other, it is the present that guides their activity. And this larger nod to the present helps keep journalists in a time crunch. Acutely focused on the here-and-now and paying less attention to what came before or what is to come after, they constitute one of the most pronounced examples of what time looks like for practitioners in today’s complex institutional settings.

Given the creeping authoritarian darkness now settling around many of those same institutions, it is worth considering how, when and where time stays recognizable and under which conditions it does not. Because the adherence to the present drives individuals regardless of the degree to which they pay it heed, a default stance of neglect facilitates the morphing of old practices to new technology without instating corresponding changes in the larger environment. This makes it easy for practitioners in institutional settings, particularly those in the West, to unnecessarily falter because of an unmindful relationship to time, unable to intercede in unexpectedly troubled times even when called upon to do so.

Nowness and the news

No relationship to temporality can take shape without a corresponding set of beliefs or interpretive strategies that guide ensuing practice. As Douglas (1986) offered long ago, institutional modes of thinking come into being because thought communities are in place to collectively admit or reject their development.

The belief systems typical of interpretive communities offer ways for people to come together in shared interpretations of what goes on around them (Hymes, 1980: 2; Zelizer, 1993). Defined as “a configuration of ideas and attitudes in which the elements are bound together by some form of constraint or functional interdependence” (Converse, 2006: 3), belief systems support the interpretive strategies that individuals use in figuring out with others when to assess value, what to emphasize and how to act. Though they appear to suggest fixity, such belief systems in fact reflect ongoing strategies of giving form to the emergent and continually changing challenges at hand. The conditions typical of complex environments require an understanding of belief systems as more akin to ideologies or mindsets, where power dynamics necessarily shape what ensues. Interpretive communities store these complex but shared perceptions that individuals build and sustain in making sense of their surround. With temporality a central driver of that surround, individuals develop patterned ways for collectively understanding how temporal beliefs and practices need to operate in the institutional settings in which they reside.

Key to journalists’ belief systems about temporality is the notion of nowness, a firm and largely unquestioned regard for the importance of what is transpiring now. Journalists’ investment in topicality, recency, novelty, proximity and instantaneity, in meeting rapidly overturning deadlines and delivering exclusives and scoops caters to the here-and-now and makes the there-and-then seem like it resides on another planet. As Patterson (1998: 55) phrased it, “the news is deliberately short-sighted, is rooted in novelty rather than precision, and focuses on fastbreaking events rather than enduring issues.”

Nowness legitimates and drives journalistic efforts to control time, where they focus on time’s most current and at-hand dimensions. Efforts parse across all aspects of newsmaking, including what gets selected as news, how resources are allocated and organized, which aspects of a story are included in coverage and how coverage is distributed. The news in this regard becomes a grocery list of not only what is happening now but also of what is happening most quickly, obviously, and dramatically. Help usually comes in the form of activity that is pre-planned or staged by others, such as press briefings, press consults and photo opportunities, as both Tuchman (1978) and Molotch and Lester (1974) established long ago. The symbiosis that connects journalism with other institutional settings—politics, law, education, the market—accommodates consonance across their temporal practices.

Though nowness has been deftly addressed in the philosophical literature on time (i.e. Grunbaum, 1969, 1971), it has rarely been applied to journalism (an exception is Sheller, 2015). Nor has it been fully problematized for its impact on the news. But being sandwiched between past and future, the time crunch created by journalism’s near-absolute regard for the here-and-now is of critical emblematic importance. When journalists have little temporal freedom to diverge either backward or forward in engaging with public events, issues and figures, the news begins to look like it is set in an automatic repeat cycle. As the same motifs, explanations and interpretations emerge over and over again, the broader ephemerality of the news helps re-entrench the cycle even as the particulars of each news story change.

However, the simple temporal landscape implied by journalists’ embrace of nowness does not reflect the full picture of how time works in journalism. A journalist’s engagement with a topic takes place over multiple unmeasurable moments—points of inspiration, curiosity, confirmation, recharting, beginning anew—all before a news story actually takes on activity and attributes recognizable to others. Digital news fosters incremental updates that occur in previously unrecognized temporal regimes (Usher, 2018), and journalism’s digital form generates “accumulated contemporaneity,” seguing between chronicling and archiving on its way to taking on meaning (Bodker, 2016).

Nor are journalists the only ones who decide how temporal action unfolds. Though time drives much of what they do, the range of temporal activity that shapes the news is vast and multi-dimensional, and it comes from unexpected and multiple quarters: institutional settings, politicians, infrastructures, activists, organizations, the public, among others.

Moreover, despite their claims to the contrary, journalists regularly and repeatedly look both backward and forward in collecting information, rendering judgment and packaging it into usable presentational forms. Journalistic activity relies necessarily on both an understanding of what came before and an assessment of what might come next. As Schudson (1986: 89) argued long ago, “as time passes, the story grows, the ripples spread out into the past and future, the reverberations to past and future become the new context for the story.”

Journalism’s nod backward can be found in retrospectives, commemorative and anniversary journalism, and numerous sources of mnemonic work in the news (Zelizer and Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2014). It surfaces in the ongoing comparisons, historical analogies and precedents that comprise journalistic judgment (Edy, 1999). It lingers in the ongoing assessments that journalists make about what constitutes newsworthy judgment (Deacon, 2012; Kitch, 2005). Coverage is not unilaterally time-oriented: References to the “simple past,” for instance, contain built-in increments of recency (Tenenboim-Weinblatt and Neiger, 2015).

At the same time, journalists engage all the time in anticipatory action to ongoing stimuli. Journalists regularly premediate the future following traumatic events (Grusin, 2010). They are expected regularly to orient forward—anticipating events, predicting resources, pitching stories and seeking feedback. The news record often acts as society’s prospective memory of what collectively needs to be done (Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2013), and headlines regularly espouse cues of speculation (Neiger, 2007). Nods to the present are thus rarely entrenched without a look backward or forward.

To compress the time of journalism into primarily nowness is thus to grossly simplify how journalists work. This is critical because how journalists invoke time generates broader questions about how journalism—or any institution—can make a difference in increasingly dark times.

Firstness and the news

All belief systems need carriers, and journalism’s nowness relies on technological contours that help enunciate journalists’ investment in the here-and-now. With accelerated time one of the hallmark attributes of late modernity (Virilio, 1986 [1977]), accelerated news cycles most directly embody the embrace of speed and the firstness that accompanies it. Though speed has been with journalism from its onset and each new technology’s arrival heralds faster newsmaking and distribution, the digital age amplifies its centrality. As journalists capitalize on speed’s capacity to make them first with the news, the tools available to them have come to foster firstness to an unprecedented degree over time’s other dimensions.

Firstness is not only defined by agile tempo or pacing. With it comes a nod to timeliness, liveness and immediacy. Faster news gets equated with better news, more important news and more urgent news, rendering the celebration of journalistic speed an understandable corollary to successful task accomplishment. Worthy of praise is the immediate access that digital journalism gives message production, consumption, storage, retrieval, and remediation. Because firstness helps sharpen journalists’ orientation to the here-and-now, it acts as a keeper of the journalistic faith.

This has demonstrable effect on what journalism looks like. It is common knowledge that immediacy and liveness shrink the time for doing journalism. While quick delivery might ensure information dissemination, it diminishes and simplifies what results—sacrificing accuracy and context, intensifying information overload and muddying the potential for productive deliberation.

Yet just like nowness does not reflect the full temporal landscape of journalists’ belief systems, firstness does not reflect the full operational picture of the technologically-driven temporal practices of the news.

Additional temporal impulses other than firstness have always accompanied journalism’s orientation to time. As Franciscato (2005) chronicled, even the technologies most heralded for speeding up newsmaking and news distribution brought with them additional temporal sensibilities: newspapers forged a sense of simultaneity (Anderson, 1991), telephones a sense of instantaneity (Fedler, 2000), daily newspapers a sense of periodicity (Raymond, 1996) and 17th century newsbooks a sense of novelty (Woolf, 2001). The digital is no exception in this regard.

Firstness also has its downside. Because it makes possible the ongoing dissemination of information, journalists can give the public bits of information that keep it in the loop about little more than the fact that news seems to be happening. Although the illusion of important, timely and breaking news draws public attention, pieces of coverage do not cohere into a greater news story unless specific efforts are made in that regard. Following the insights of Carey (1986) about news as a curriculum, the news often arrives with a declaration of importance or relevance but without a larger picture through which to make sense of it. To quote Fromm (1955: 118):

Facts lose the specific quality which they can have only as parts of a structuralized whole and retain merely an abstract, quantitative meaning; each fact is just another fact and all that matters is whether we know more or less.

What surfaces first, then, can be often as far as coverage goes.

Thus, the combination of nowness and firstness appears to validate journalistic authority through time’s tight accommodation, but it falls short of a productive temporality by failing to complicate journalism’s investment in the present. As with other institutional settings, the simplified temporality that ensues in many cases ends up muting the authority of its practitioners. It both generates an image of journalism as an institution riddled with temporal neglect and casts shadows on its ability to give the public a fuller understanding of the news.

Trump time ¹

Perhaps nowhere is this as evident as in US journalism’s failings under the current Trump administration. Though the digital tenor of journalism’s engagement with Trump might have promoted a more proximate, immediate and intimate view of his administration, the beleaguered tone set already from the beginning promised a different path ahead.

Trump and US journalists got off from the beginning to a nasty start. Building atop a disconnect established already during the presidential campaign between much of the media and certain sectors of the public, the existence of digital filter bubbles and the anxiety over fake news and alternative facts, the link between the administration and the media began as a troubled enterprise. Trump’s play to conspiracy thinking, strategic handling of the media and excessive, often rogue use of Twitter ensured from day one that the longstanding linkage between administration and media would take unprecedented turns.

To be sure, the start of each new US presidential administration requires an adjustment of prior journalistic routines, for the tenor of relations that ensues depends largely on the priorities and decisions of each incoming US president. Perhaps surprisingly, the predispositions surrounding the consequent relationships have not followed longstanding divides between liberal/conservative, Democrat/Republican or extremist/centrist. George Washington was well-known for hating the press and known to repeatedly lobby verbal attacks on reporters. Both Teddy Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson bantered with journalists while attending to personal grooming. John F. Kennedy seduced the media while keeping key aspects of his personal life secret. Franklin Roosevelt was the first to expertly bypass journalists through radio addresses to the public, while Dwight Eisenhower did the same through televised fireside chats.

However, Trump has distinguished himself for generating unprecedentedly antagonistic relations with the news media. Trump’s dismissive, aggressive and demeaning regard for US journalists became evident from the earliest days of his administration. Labeling them the “Enemy of the People” already in February of 2017, he targeted the main media outlets—CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, ABC, CBS, and NBC—as fake news, and a continual barrage of insults was to follow. Calling them “crooked,” “very dishonest,” “evil,” and “out of control,” he insulted and ridiculed individual reporters—notably a disabled New York Times reporter—and banned specific journalists and news outlets from press conferences, using the formal platforms for connecting the media and the White House to breed divisiveness among the press corps. It was not long before CNN’s Brian Stetler was lamenting “the vanishing White House press”:

The White House is in a constant state of crisis. Trump routinely contradicts himself, distorts the truth and sparks world-rattling controversies. Sometimes he undercuts in tweets the things that Sanders says at her briefings. And his frequent cries of “fake news” are evidence that he doesn’t care about the work the press does to inform the public (Stetler, 2018).

This particular mix of nowness and firstness that constitutes journalism’s default temporal background has easily exacerbated journalism’s precarity under Trump, compounding miscalls, misjudgments and missed opportunities in journalists’ coverage.

Nowness under Trump

Journalists covering Trump display their adherence to nowness by privileging now over whenever. Though this temporal predilection is typically helped along by formal events pre-planned by others, privileging nowness goes by different rules with Trump. As Cillizza (2018) noted in May, the White House “is increasingly disinterested in answering questions from reporters in any sort of structured environment.” Thus, attending to nowness has meant taking part in a sparring duel with the President or his staff, by which Trump orchestrates unpredictable antics to show that he is tougher. Such orchestration backs off of the recognized forums for connecting the media and the White House, replacing their relative reliability with social media barrages, unanticipated appearances, and an erratic set of punitive measures.

Trump’s media strategy pivots on repeated disruptions of conventional routine, all of which are amply covered by journalists. Because Trump regularly takes the media off their game by speaking out of turn, appearing in surprising places, shrinking expected access, having unexpected outbursts and threatening conventional norms, his disruptions become the way that journalists organize their workload.

With journalists generally unable to gain the upper hand in these interactions, coverage has been filled with ongoing laments about being blocked, censured, and ridiculed. A Google search for “Trump insults journalists” turns up close to 10 million posts, and examples are widespread: “Trump Began His Morning by Attacking a Times Reporter on Twitter,” quipped Mother Jones in response to a verbal attack on reporter Maggie Haberman (Michael, 2018), while Buzzfeed, covering Trump in Singapore, reported that he “appeared to complain, or at least joke, about the free press in front of Kim Jong Un during their summit” (Champion, 2018). Noting that Trump’s presidency was “unlike any other that’s come before,” the Washington Post began a podcast titled “Can He Do That?” And when Jon Stewart went on The Daily Show to ask journalists to “stop your whining,” he noted that

This breakup with Donald Trump has given you, the media, an amazing opportunity for self-reflection and improvement. Instead of worrying about whether Trump is un-American, or if he thinks you’re the enemy, or if he’s being mean to you, or if he’s going to let you go back into the briefings, do something for yourself. Self-improvement! Take up a hobby. I recommend journalism” (Slane, 2017).

While Trump’s insults are a critical obstruction of media freedom—the Committee to Protect Journalists went on record already in May of 2016 with a powerful retort to his aggressive rhetoric (Ellerback, 2016)—journalists’ laments have achieved little. Because Trump ratchets up the news narrative while disrupting, his upsets continue to pay off. Disruption under Trump has thus become journalism’s organizing principle and its way of attending to nowness, even if it undermines the news.

Belief systems that privilege now over whenever also undo mindful engagement with the past. Though multiple parallels in history offer generative examples for understanding Trump—Weimar Germany, the 1930s, the US presidencies of Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson or Richard Nixon and the rise of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela are a few that come to mind—history has not seen much play in Trump administration coverage. This is surprising, given that Trump’s own slogan—Make America Great Again—necessitates a return to the 1950s as a source of splendor.

The same temporal neglect has had a problematic impact on journalism itself. In one view, “the press’s default position” continues “to represent various points of view with equal weight, to be swayed by the pomp of the presidential office. To act as if everything is just a variation on a theme—something we’ve seen before but maybe in a slightly paler shade” (Sullivan, 2018). When a Reuters missive in January of 2017 counseled reporters that they did not realize how well they already knew to cover the Trump administration—citing governments in the Philippines, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Thailand, China, Zimbabwe and Russia—the advice to “follow the same ideas that govern our work anywhere” (Adler, 2017) was not followed.

That is because much of journalism’s response to the Trump administration comes from earlier times, specifically the Cold War (Zelizer, n.d.). Not only does that mindset celebrate US exceptionalism, but journalists unthinkingly continue to embrace the tired norms of objectivity, neutrality, false equivalences, euphemism, deference, moderation, balance, simplicity, stereotypy, cronyism and no values reporting. How journalists of the Cold War era rationalized their news-making—accepting dogma, underestimating impact, pursuing value-free coverage while claiming consonance with an imaginary core—is very much at play in coverage of Trump. So is the fundamental trope of enemy formation, which draws stridently from Cold War years and has reemerged as an internal split managed and feted by Trump himself (Zelizer, 2018).

These stubborn aspects of a past mindset are not well suited to current realities. Already in July of 2016, the Washington Post queried “whether it was time to revisit journalism’s ethical responsibilities” (Gebelhoff, 2016). The following month the New York Times observed that “if you’re a working journalist and you believe that Trump is a demagogue, you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the past half-century, if not longer” (Rutenberg, 2016). More recent criticism has followed suit. The Washington Post’s Sullivan (2018) powerfully admonished reporters after the Helsinki summit of July 2018 to “get out of our ingrained habits to tell this story clearly”. In a critique of the New York Times, Gitlin (2018) queried, “Is it not time that when faced with these facts, journalists stop asking fatuous questions? Should they not adopt, as a working hypothesis going in, the assumption that [Trump’s] lies and evasions are clear hints of what drives him?” Vernon (2018b) of the Columbia Journalism Review called out journalists for failing to stand by each other, observing that “this won’t be the last time the president attacks an outlet for the act of asking a question. By now, journalists should be prepared to respond.” But despite repeated cautionary notes, US journalists by and large continue to adhere to behavior not right for the moment.

Privileging now over whenever thus feeds into Trump’s playbook, keeps the main historical parallels out of the picture, and allows unsuitable and dated journalistic beliefs, values and practices to continue unabated. This means that there is scant ability to recognize, articulate and offset authoritarianism when it surfaces. The relevance to institutions writ large should be obvious as should the inherent dangers to an engaged and informed citizenry.

Firstness under Trump

A second temporal pattern has to do with speed, by which journalists use technology for privileging first over later. The orientation to firstness above all else ensures that early indicators of a news story take precedence over whatever comes next—either with a small delay, multiple incremental delays or large temporal gaps that make it difficult to connect pieces of a story unfolding at different points in time.

Just like nowness produced a tight orientation to the here-and-now, so too does firstness. Though the repeated accommodation of what surfaces first can in fact lead to important news, it tends not to stand on its own as a news story. Often it ends up favoring trivial over important: Writer David Klion recently likened New York Times opinion pieces, for instance, to Nickelback songs, songs that are “loud, monotonous, deeply irritating, popular among the worst people, triggering to everyone with good taste, and also they are all the same song” (Klion, 2018).

Moreover, firstness does not work as news if it is all that is provided, for catering to what surfaces first usually means emphasizing the part over the whole. By focusing on what comes first, journalists often fail to understand developments in Trump’s behavior and the Trump administration, whose clarity only emerges with time. Thus, when Trump engaged in various modes of democratic backsliding, such as chipping away at the news cycle by hijacking it through Twitter, journalists were slow to label it over-the-top behavior. As the focus of Trump’s aggressions multiplied—his assault on widely shared American norms like the presidency, the media and legitimate elections; his embrace of anti-democratic ideals like intolerance, name-calling, lying, bullying, disregard for conflicts of interest, extremism and self-aggrandizement; or his refusal to engage in the ordinary connectors of media and government like press access, press pools, press conferences, press briefings, press banter and even libel laws—journalists were reticent to call them by name. By repeatedly giving such actions the benefit of the doubt, journalists effectively legitimate them while privileging what comes first.

This means that every time Trump aggresses, it becomes a story, allowing him to drive the news cycle by doing the opposite of what journalism’s imaginary would have him doing. Eighteen months into the administration, reporters wondered why it had been a year since Trump had agreed to give a full press conference (Tompkins, 2018). And though the Columbia Journalism Review pronounced the news media “newly energized by White House contradictions” after the Helsinki summit in July of 2018 (Vernon, 2018a), with one observer predicting a “new era” in Trump media relations and “uncharted territory for the coverage of a sitting president” (Pope, 2018), others wondered if journalists were now facing a renewed and more intense round of criticism and intimidation. CNN’s Oliver Darcy tweeted that though he had not seen praise for Trump’s words and actions in Helsinki, “it’s easy to see how this is likely going to play out in pro-Trump media. When all else fails, they bash the media. I imagine you’ll see RW media seize on criticism directed from journalists, and attack media as biased” (Darcy, 2018).

All of this has helped entrench normalization, which in part rides on an unmindful engagement with temporality. Though normalization takes hold incrementally—across time—its embrace in effect stops time, by halting or rendering unecessary critical engagement with the violation that is being normalized. Once an event, issue or action is recognized as part of the usual fabric of everyday life, there appears to be no further need for its discussion or clarification. Early in Trump’s administration, normalization took the form of polite alternatives, such as a style guide offered by the Washington Post on “how to cover Donald Trump fairly” (Petri, 2016). Later examples sashayed back and forth over what activity and from whom qualified as outrage: the Poynter Institute queried in July 2018 “why journalists were shouting their questions at Trump” (Tompkins, 2018), while The Hill called out CNN reporter Jim Acosta for theatrics that “mounted to the point where he is now part of the news” (McCall, 2018).

The fact that many of Trump’s outrages appear timed to distract attention from controversial changes in policy has also helped obscure the latter. Because policy changes generally require time to be understood, a temporal push for firstness plays into their lack of discussion: As journalists remain focused on what surfaces first, multiple policy changes do not get the media attention they deserve. As the repeal of climate change regulation, ICE detentions or eradication of access to federal information solidify activity in the background with not enough journalists in attendance, the role of the news to inform is being repeatedly called into question.

Much has been said of journalism’s normalization of Trump. When seen as an artifact of temporal practices—the fact that few of Trump’s violations were given attention at first sighting, making it harder to track them across repeated instances—it becomes easier to understand how easy it is for normalization to take hold.

When nowness and firstness are not enough

For those who know the journalism literature well, little of what has been offered thus far should be new. Avoiding context, relying on the scheduling of others, reactivity and neglect of the past have been for too long part of journalism’s institutional settings in the West. But the fact that such contours have temporal dimensions that build off of each other helps orient us to temporality’s role in shaping the public record. By extension, an unmindful reliance on temporal cues can undermine that same record.

While the combination of nowness and firstness helps explain what often appear to be overly simplified responses to temporality, this melding is critical for understanding journalism and other institutional settings. There is little in journalism that articulates what journalists are to do when nowness and firstness are not enough. What is to be done when the ability to report fast undercuts the ability to report fully? What happens when nowness and firstness convey a mistaken sense of the here-and-now? What if the here-and-now is a smokescreen for what will come later? When journalists embrace a mindset that is so focused on the immediate that they cannot address what is transpiring more fully, then journalism’s sense of time works against its authority. Similar drives toward temporal reductionism are likely to characterize other institutional settings.

Significantly, the Trump administration has been described as having a sense of time that gives Trump the upper hand by building directly on the temporal impulses currently emphasized by journalism’s tool box: anticipation. Anticipation—speculating what Trump might do next—has kept “journalists and audiences captive, anticipating what news might be” (Ananny, 2018: 101):

The anticipatory press faces a choice: it can align itself with Trump Time (random tweets triggered by emotional outbursts, illusions of future grandeur, and lies that rely on short and selective collective memories) or it can tame the chaos, consciously focusing on what kind of rhythms publics need (Ananny, 2018: 102).

Anticipation intensifies the embrace of nowness and firstness at the heart of journalistic temporality. Not only does it demonstrate that riding on Trump’s every move has been a strategy destined to deliver audiences but it suggests too that it has intentionally fostered for producing very bad news practice. CBS “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl remembered Trump justifying his attacks on journalists: “He said you know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all, so when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you” (quoted in Rosenberg, 2018).

Though digital forms of journalism have been widely celebrated as democratizing, journalism in the age of Trump says the opposite. As journalists continue to try and get in front of Trump’s aggressions, their activity has become fodder for his maligning abuse. And as they provide immediate and automatic coverage of the upsets that ensue, he is reinstated as the news hook regardless of what he does. The give-back to public comprehension of the issues driving Trump’s administration shrinks to close to nothing.

It is here that the notion of a reset becomes relevant. Though continually resetting expectations of journalism in accordance with evolving circumstances should be part of any model of journalistic practice, today’s troubling times highlights how critical such a resent is. Coverage of the Trump administration demonstrates that US journalism, like many adjacent institutions, is in desperate need of updating the prism that shapes practice. But that cannot happen without journalists embracing a more complicated sense of time.

On the importance of resetting

Though the temporal neglect among journalists has many ramifications, one of the most serious is the capacity to reset. Though resetting can be easily understood as a neat push-button cure to what ails a dysfunctional system, as an idea it can be seen as a decisive and energized way of accommodating change. Conjuring up activities of refurbishment, refreshment and reinvigoration, a reset can light the path to alternative ways of engaging in activity that has become routine, uninspired and mundane. In this way, resetting involves both continual acts of updating, modifying and overhauling that ensure a combination of belief systems and technologically-driven practices that better fit then-current circumstances as well as a revitalization of the energies that go into the transformation of long-held practices. Not only does resetting support the establishment and maintenance of journalistic authority, but it has direct implications for the polity writ large.

Resetting—broadly defined as setting, adjusting or fixing in a new or different way—conjures up a somewhat fundamental transformation, by which particular values, beliefs, perceptions or practices are left behind in order to address a new configuration of what matters. The gain to be had from resetting is often associated with enterprises for which some definitive change is seen as an optimal way of getting over the hump of bad or deleterious practices or conditions. Thus, one resets goals when exiting unsavory situations, like incarceration, addiction or problematic relationships.

But resetting is also relevant when trying to overcome deeply-entrenched institutional beliefs and practices. Though in institutional contexts the choice of terms for transformative activity has tended toward gradual adaptation or incremental change, sometimes circumstances call for a far broader overhaul of basic assumptions, as they drive both interpretive strategies and technologically-driven practices. Temporality is key in this regard.

For resetting requires being mindful about time, not neglecting it as evident in both nowness and firstness. Resetting requires stepping back, contemplating what needs to change, and figuring out the best way to make it happen. Resetting thus involves aspects of time other than those highlighted by journalists. Because the valorization of nowness and firstness prevents journalists from recognizing that things may have changed and from retweaking practices when things do not go as expected, it eradicates journalism’s ability to reset.

In these dark times, this is of critical concern, for a failure to reset is obscuring what Dave Karpf (2018) has called “all at once problems,” problems so big and so urgent that they require new fundamental assumptions about how things work:

The press as an institution is now facing not only a funding crisis, or a popularity crisis, or a readership crisis. It is now facing an existential crisis: the external threat of a hostile administration attempting to undermine and replace it (Karpf, 2018: 225).

Journalism’s neglect of temporality thus emblematizes a lost opportunity to recognize the potential of institutional practitioners when it is most needed. Journalistic temporality, and the muting of authority that goes with it, not only offers a cautionary note about the reliance on complex institutional settings of all kinds but it endangers public life.

What would such a reset look like? Journalism’s reset would need to accommodate the development of alternative routines like ignoring White House press briefings or delaying and censoring Trump’s tweets. It would orient investigative efforts to topics not currently being sufficiently covered—resistance activity or the pull-back on civil liberties, for instance. It would grow the newsroom by embracing existing cultural, political, social, and economic margins. Noting that the Trump administration has created a baseline by which anything journalists do cannot be trusted, Russell (2018) argued for a set of practices to animate journalism’s activist bent: It involves “telling it like it is,” “unhooking from power,” “adopting technology tools” and “banding together.” Resetting would culminate in journalists taking back the news cycle and the news agenda.

It is not incidental that each one of these practices requires a different temporality than that implied by an orientation to nowness and firstness. An alternative, more complex temporality would incorporate temporal impulses that create, prolong and thicken time: pause, hesitation, timing, delay, duration, repetition, deliberation, context, continuation, and sequencing. Such impulses raise the opportunity for journalists, like other institutional actors, to use time to their advantage. They might be able to deliberate thoughtfully on whether to boycott easy forums for securing information, to judge the outrage in Trump’s tweets, to supplant euphemism and deference for straightforward language, to seek out alternative sources, to take extra steps to protect one’s information, to keep an eye out for one’s colleagues. None of these options comes easily to the fore in journalism’s current temporal embrace.

Conclusion

One of my sons ends his mobile phone messages with a simple signature: “From the past.”

We tend toward easy temporal demarcations that introduce erroneously dichotomous thinking and deemphasize the ongoing nature of temporal engagement. Technology further blinds us in this regard.

But journalists are an emblematic group that displays the follies of embracing the simplified temporality that undergirds most current western institutional settings. Though news in the digital environment might be quicker, more instantaneous, more immediate and more live, none of these options are the same and none exits in any kind of uniform way across settings. Moreover, none of them precludes its opposite, where digital news can also be slower, more hesitant, more tentative or more delayed than we expect.

What gets lost in the neglect of temporality has enormous implications for an engaged and informed citizenry. Though news audiences approach information with their own temporal practices, a simplified and narrow invocation of time by journalists necessarily narrows the coverage of complex phenomena that audiences receive. It also undermines public understanding of the coverage that ensues, obscuring or eliminating valuable tools for understanding that necessarily involve a more complex sense of time: historical analogies, comparisons and assessments alongside predictions and speculation, to name a few.

We need to bring time back into our understanding of the complex institutional settings that comprise our public life. For as long as power-dynamics piggyback on the belief systems and practices by which institutions are sustained, time will always be at the center of what unfolds. It’s about time, then, that we recognize how complex, multi-dimensional and multi-directional temporality is and how much effort is required to mold its impact in the public interest.