Abstract
Mike Ananny’s Networked Press Freedom appears at a time of great upheaval for journalism. Opinion surveys show trust in the press declining, the U.S. president constantly disparages otherwise reputable media outlets as “fake news,” and news organizations search for ways to remain financially viable amid seismic changes in the industry. Yet at the same time, there is perhaps an equally palpable sense that journalism is more important than ever. A book such as Ananny’s that interrogates how, exactly, the press can articulate its mission (and even its identity) in this atmosphere is thus sorely needed.
Ananny, associate professor of Communication and Journalism at USC Annenberg, is focused mainly on deconstructing and reframing of the notion of “freedom of the press.” From where does the press get its mandate? To do what, and for whom? To whom does “the press” even refer? Ananny argues that our understanding of what it means for the press to be “free” is inseparable from these questions. Specifically, he advocates a shift away from thinking about freedom in negative terms, or the ability of the press to be “free from” constraint in order “to pursue self-evident public interest” on behalf of citizens. Instead, he calls for a conception of press freedom that is justified because “the press’s institutional arrangements produce expansive, dynamic, diverse publics”—or what he correspondingly terms “publics’ right to hear what they need to hear to sustain themselves as publics.” Ananny more specifically articulates this dualistic conception of freedom using the recurring phrase “separations and dependencies”—or the idea that “the press earns its freedom not only by separating itself from markets, states, or audiences but also by strategically relying on others.”
The book is organized into three chapters that critically analyze the conceptual elements of press freedom using the existing journalism literature and one empirical chapter that uses a survey of the journalistic trade press to map the current “separations and dependencies” that define the networked press. Despite being two fundamentally distinct modes of analysis, the critical analysis of secondary sources acts as a complement to the primary source material because both provide evidence for the dualistic understanding of press freedom that Ananny favors.
The three more conceptual chapters address law, journalism’s professional norms, and infrastructure. In his legal account of press freedom, Ananny aligns himself with free speech scholars such as Thomas Emerson and Owen Fiss who prioritize “how systems of free speech enable the achievement of public aims.” These theorists “cal[l] for the press to be judged according to how well it ensures both individual rights to speak and also public freedoms to hear” instead of simply measuring “freedom” in terms of unfettered personal liberty to speak. Ananny grounds his analysis of journalism’s professional norms within the “new institutionalist” tradition that sees the press as “constructed relationally” through “a set of institutional relationships that continually creates its legitimacy.” He then traces this idea through the historical development of three aspects of press autonomy: “an institutionalized ideal of objectivity, organizational routines and ritualized practices, and publics bracketed as constructed audiences.” Finally, after reviewing how technological factors played a role in earlier conceptions of press freedom (especially when broadcasting was dominant), Ananny concludes that “as technologies have become more infrastructural—embedded in and inseparable from technological cultures that do not see themselves as journalistic at all—press autonomy . . . has changed shape.”
Such a characterization sets up the more empirical concluding chapter that explores how the forces that constitute this new state of affairs have been represented in the journalism trade press. It continues the dualistic theme of “separation and dependency” carried throughout the book by illustrating many ways in which journalism’s “autonomy is inseparable from its sociotechnical infrastructures.” Ananny outlines twelve dimensions of this sociotechnical infrastructure that cannot be recounted exhaustively here. As just one example to illustrate the spirit of the analysis, he details the ways in which the journalism trade press talks about metrics of reader engagement as both “corrupting . . . the reporter’s image of the public interest” and potentially helping reporters to “discover audiences’ interests and generate revenue by writing popular stories.”
Although he at one point describes several different types of publics that have been identified in previous literature, Ananny is emphatic that his objective is not to dictate what particular conception of public the networked press should pursue. His conclusion to Chapter 3, for instance, describes his account of relational press freedom as merely a “heuristic meant as a normative guide to networked forces,” not a “test to be passed.” Likewise, his exhaustive discussion of the contemporary “separations and dependencies” evidenced in the trade press in Chapter 5 is content to conclude that “a specific set of relationships among journalism’s humans and machines” will produce a “particular type of public”—leaving it to us, presumably, to decide “[i]f such arrangements result in . . . the public right to hear that individuals need to self-govern.” Although the book is thus clear about the conceptual nature of its ambitions from the start, therefore, one might perhaps wish for a slightly more direct indication either of some criteria for determining whether this “public right to hear” is being met or of which “set of relationships among journalism’s humans and machines” might in fact give us particular kinds of publics to begin with.