Abstract
This was Kevin Barnhurst’s last book, published a few weeks after his death, at age 64 years. It is the apotheosis of three decades of work, alone and with an impressive array of colleagues, linking the history and sociology of modern news from the age of “Mister Pulitzer” to the present—the “spider” in the title is the World Wide Web. Kevin was chair of Communication in the Digital Era at the University of Leeds and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
This is an ambitions work. Barnhurst’s grand narrative comprises several elements. One is the gradual transformation of the form and rhetoric of journalism from realism to modernism, though both still exist and compete. Another is that journalists and just about everyone else is either dimly aware or wrong about fundamental changes to the news product across the period. These changes are often attributed to transformations introduced by the success of new media technologies but in fact precede them. Finally, the news media substantially shape the society they inhabit at any time, but equally they are shaped by the society at the same time. The times are the product of the news media, and the news media are the product of their times.
The arguments are supported by evidence remarkable in its breadth. The empirical backbone of the narrative comes from a series of content analyses, primarily of newspapers conducted by Barnhurst, colleagues including John Nerone and Diana Mutz, and leagues of student research assistants. Also figuring in the narrative are a wealth of interview data from journalists and media producers gathered from his times at the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center and at Harvard’s Shorenstein Barone Center, and from a lifetime of wide reading: His bibliography runs past 550 highly diverse entries from philosophy, sociology, history, media and cultural studies, research center reports, fiction, and more.
As early as the last quarter of the 19th century, news ideology began (as did much of the nation’s educated classes) to transition from realist beliefs that the world is as we see it, and that news stories are told by people about people and places we know, to modernist beliefs. Barnhurst views modernism, as it applies to the stories news people tell, as an ideology that forefronts analysis, generalization, the identification of themes and trends, and also forefronts location in the present, but also facing both the future and the past. Increasingly stories are told by professionals who place their faith (cf. Walter Lippmann) in professional classes. Modernism has never fully supplanted realism, Barnhurst argues. Indeed, the crisis in which the news media now find themselves is a product of modernism, and realist journalism may still have an important place in rescuing journalism from itself.
The notion that media professionals, critics, and audiences are flatly wrong about major portions of the evolution of news forms will be familiar to those who know his earlier work. Contra the argument that radio, then television, and now the Net forced newspaper to make news briefer, more located in the present and more local, multiple historical content analyses show the opposite. News items—not just in newspapers, but on television and on public radio—have gotten progressively longer for at least 50 years. Key to his modernism arguments, too, is the argument that news has gotten progressively less local; news is not about Main Street or located at any street—it is from all over, or, as Edward Jay Epstein noted in the 1970s, from nowhere. And news is progressively less from the mouths of news sources, and far more from the microphones and keyboards of news professionals—reporters, commentators, and anchors. For many of them, the primary sources are not newsmakers but other reporters and commentators. All of this Barnhurst has rigorously documented, and, as noted, each of these trends, contrary to conventional wisdom, precedes rather than follows introduction of disruptive new media forms and technologies. Much of the best of the commentary in the book has to do with the idea that journalism is always in crisis, but that at any particular time, including the present, the crises are not precisely how we should be framing them.
Barnhurst begins his book by noting that it likely will find an inhospitable audience among journalists, that “research on news is about as useful to journalists ‘as ornithology is to birds,’ in the words usually attributed to physicist Richard Feynman.” That notwithstanding, he ends on a hopeful note, one emphasizing that the overall weakness of the modernist project leaves an opening, as he puts it in the book’s closing sentence, for a journalism “recording real events, in the locations of everyday life, telling the stories of, by, and for the people.”
I found myself often during the 2016 presidential election campaign wishing that Kevin were around so we could talk about it. I have utterly no doubt that the failure of journalism (and of the political and economic establishment in general to understand, explain or even predict its outcome) would have surprised him. It would have pained him, no doubt, as it pains many of us.
This is a magisterial book, required reading for anyone seriously interested in the recent history or future of journalism. I would insist that any student of media sociology read it, and equally important, read deeply into its bibliography. A warning, though: It is reasonably brief (21 short chapters, 234 pages of text) but dense. Virtually every chapter has multiple insights worth consideration on their own, and it will, as important books do, generate future scholarship of note.