On the shelf life of democracy in journalism scholarship

The shelf life of ideas

The shelf life of scholarly ideas has long been relevant to intellectual inquiry, even if it has taken on different names across time. Thomas Kuhn (1964) was among the first to argue that knowledge possesses a social dimension, when he stipulated that the growth of science depends on the sentiments of the collective. In keeping with its members’ regard for a given target of inquiry, ideas develop, but they do so gradually. Changes in knowledge, said Kuhn, occur only after individuals and then collectives develop shared paradigms by appealing repeatedly to those involved in their development, naming and labeling problems and procedures in ways that can slowly generate consensus, while sidestepping the battles that ensue over competing insights and classifications. This means that the dissemination of knowledge follows routes that play to the lowest common denominator – to the known, familiar, proven and, over time, broadly predictable. New knowledge thus always builds on old knowledge – slowly, incrementally and with often agonizing timidity.

Implicit in this notion is the recognition that knowledge does not remain stable across time. At the same time as it expands by adding discretely to what has already been established, it can also wear out, grow old and diminish in relevance. The instability of knowledge, assisted by circumstances as wide-ranging as the emergence of new disciplines or the rise to prominence of public intellectuals, is akin to the shelf life of material goods. Ideas, in such a view, are subject to the same patterns of durability and ephemerality as are food, technical devices and other products.

Shelf life is popularly defined as the length of time that goods can be stored until they become unsuitable for use (American Heritage Dictionary, 2000). Like the notion of currency – that period of time during which something is valid, accepted or in force (Random House Dictionary, 2005) – shelf life refers to the point at which goods are no longer able to offer their presumed value. Characterizing the lifeline of goods that range from canned soup to batteries, shelf life suggests a point at which they become contaminated – undermined and/or neutralized by ground conditions. Usually these ground conditions are measured by time, prompting cautionary notes to potential users to make use of goods before a specified date. They are also measured by sunlight, heat and other kinds of destabilizing influences. Thus, though the source of contamination differs by the kinds of goods being addressed, in each case the expiration of shelf life has to do with the unfolding of challenging conditions on the ground that reduce or diminish the expected optimum performance of goods.

In that the use of goods is often separated in time from when they are produced, the conditions that affect shelf life are shaped in patterned ways. Four strategies are worth noting, particularly as they extend not only to material goods but to ideas as well.

First, users of both material goods and ideas develop patterned expectations regarding their shelf life. These commonsensical notions about how long shelf life is supposed to last – bread for four or five days, print cartridges for 18 months – help control for those circumstances in which shelf life might interfere with use. For academics, an idea’s shelf life is shaped by multiple internal and external deadlines, which begin with the germination of an idea and extend across its development, informal sharing with colleagues, formal presentation and publication. Where it goes beyond publication – and how long it lasts – depends on multiple factors that are akin to the stabilizing and destabilizing influences that impact material goods. The prominence of the individual proposing the idea, the institution with which he or she is affiliated, and the publication where the idea is published can all play a role in determining shelf life, as might the idea’s citation patterns or geographic spread.

Second, users often prematurely shorten the shelf life of material goods and ideas due to aspirations that the value of goods remains high till the end of their use. Marketing trends in fashion or popular culture, for instance, can kill or stifle the durability of projects even before the great majority of their users know of their value, with the brevity of faddism hyping the short-term appeal of short-lived products. Academics too frequently speak in post-isms – postmodernism, post-feminism, even post-journalism – long before the ideas that preceded them have used up their value. These strategies, developed for getting the most out of goods before they use up their anticipated shelf life, thus often unnecessarily make them more ephemeral than they need to be.

Third, material goods and ideas can be promoted in ways that extend their shelf life, often surprisingly or unintentionally so. By putting new soles on old shoes or slipcovers on worn furniture, goods are given a shelf life that lasts beyond that initially expected. Conceptual notions like freedom, fairness, love and happiness can be given a kind of moral bypass, as users embrace them as universal givens across time and space. Often, too, the shelf life of goods extends because their perceived value changes as they move into new temporal and spatial contexts. Thus, used objects newly populate antique stores as valued artifacts, worn apparel takes on new value in consignment shops that sell second-hand clothing, contemporary covers give earlier popular music inventive make-overs, or canonical knowledge draws new relevance as circumstances arise that are insufficiently explained by then-current theories. Both material goods and ideas can travel across geographic regions, building a second-stage appeal in new locations, as in the export of television shows or capitalism from the West outward. Even fads that repeat themselves, such as those affecting skirt lengths or the changing popularity of academic disciplines, impact shelf life.

Fourth, users often appraise material goods and ideas unevenly, earmarking only some of their dimensions with an early shelf life. In such cases, shelf life does not exhibit definitive ‘before’ and ‘after’ moments across all the dimensions of a device or idea, but it instead facilitates a longer life for some aspects or an unexpected re-usability for others. Car models, for instance, may last across generations of production, though aspects of the car – an unpopular color or repeated mechanical design flaw – are retired early. Though ideas and academic disciplines transform into new configurations across time, they often borrow and fast-forward aspects of their antecedents. The idea of culture, for instance, moved from being primarily an originary term in the fields of anthropology and aesthetics to also being a key frame of reference in cultural studies.

Like material goods, then, ideas are subject to patterned action on the part of people who support and challenge them. As Thomas Risse-Kappen (1994) argued, ‘ideas do not float freely’ but draw instead from a myriad of circumstances, including one’s interactions with the environment, the reactions of key people who can take action on their behalf, and the long-term regard that builds for or against an idea in the public imagination: Thus, Germany’s embrace of monetarism was critical to its widespread acceptance because it was seen as Europe’s most economically successful nation at the time (McNamara, 1998), while the idea of social democracy emerged as a way of rendering palatable the coexistence between democracy and capitalism (Berman, 2006). Ideas, said Max Weber, act like ‘switchmen [determining] the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest’ (1958[1913]: 280). Because they commonly are assumed to take on the role of hooks, weapons, road maps, flashlights, or combinations thereof (Berman, 2001; Krasner, 1993; McNamara, 1998), they are always, like material goods, dependent on strategies that shape them at any given point in time.

Shelf life and the democracy/journalism nexus

The application of shelf life – and its implicit invocation of a temporal lifeline – has particular relevance to scholarship on journalism. By definition, journalism involves news-work that is valued for its temporal dimensions (Barnhurst, 2011; Schudson, 1986). Not only are notions of newsworthiness and topicality among the earmarks rendering journalism distinct from other modes of public discourse, but journalists develop intricate routines for time-management as part of their news making. Commonly seen in popular eyes as the ‘first draft of history’, journalism is expected to turn its efforts elsewhere once historians are ready and available to account for recently occurring events. With discussions of journalism’s value, role and function wrestling continuously with the expectation that things change rapidly and that today’s news remains in constant danger of going stale, the news has thus always been associated in some form with a relatively short shelf life.

In today’s digital information environment, the abbreviated timeline against which journalism is appraised has shrunk further. This magnifies journalism’s attentiveness to shelf life. Not only do new media alter what is meant by topicality, but the involvement of citizen journalists, blogs and web cameras decentralize and speed up the process of dissemination, complicating the ability to generate consensus about what is news. Thus, journalism scholars, like journalists themselves, need to consider time’s heightened centrality in news making. As news technologies become progressively faster and enable more immediate information relay, the question of timeliness becomes only more complicated. Conducting scholarship on a phenomenon that is certain to exist in different forms at different points in time thus requires continual adjustment of journalism’s own expected shelf life and that of the various notions associated with journalism’s understanding. It is within this context that the lifeline of the nexus between journalism and democracy can be fruitfully considered.

The shelf life of ideas offers a useful prism on the historical linkage of journalism and democracy. The two have been seen as necessary props for each other since the earliest normative theories of journalism prescribed parameters that the news was expected to follow in democratic regimes. Though this linkage differs by geographic context, its appropriation in the West, and specifically the United States, has favored narrow definitions of each side of the relationship. With journalism commonly seen as the provision of information through media organizations and democracy commonly seen as a system of governance that privileges liberty, equality and well-being for all, a long host of complicating factors – new media and the internet, corporatization, public indifference, involvement of elites, among others – tend to be left out of the conversation. Instead, much of the regard for journalism in the West has been narrowly refracted through a vested interest in the political world, with journalism thought to possess the most value when it is used to enhance democracy (Zelizer, 2004). Drawing from a larger connection between journalism and politics, this connection has been more presumed than debated and challenged. Its naturalization reflects what Sheri Berman has referred to as a process of institutionalization:

… ideas become embedded in organizations, patterns of discourse, and collective identities and manage to outlast the original conditions that gave rise to them. Once institutionalized, ideas can separate from the factors that helped bring them to prominence and act as truly independent variables. (2001: 238)

Following the rationale implicit in such a process, the nexus between journalism and democracy thus persists as a largely unquestioned given in much western journalism scholarship.

How journalism became necessary for democracy

The link between journalism and democracy is not a new supposition, in that western political philosophers have argued for it since the Enlightenment. The journalism/democracy nexus they supported was consonant with a certain version of modernity to which most western thinkers subscribed. Prevalent from the late 19th century onward, their version of modernity rested on an association with rationality, certainty, consent, reasoned thought, order, objectivity, progress and universal values, all of which journalism was expected to promote in order to create the conditions needed for an optimum public life (Giddens, 1991; Thompson, 1996; Tomlinson, 1999).

Early architects of American democracy, for instance, acted upon founding father Thomas Jefferson’s oft-cited dictum that ‘information is the currency of democracy’, and they envisioned using journalism to serve the public and the polity. At the same time, many European philosophers debated journalism’s potential in burgeoning theories of democracy: John Stuart Mill saw democracy as reliant on the free exchange of ideas that journalism could make available (2008[1869]); Immanuel Kant, promoting the need for mediated interaction in democracies, defined the public reason of modernity as that which could be disseminated by ‘addressing the entire reading public’ (1985: 55); and Georg Hegel famously likened ‘reading a morning newspaper’ in the early 1800s to ‘the realist’s morning prayer’ (cited in Buck-Morss, 2009: 49). When events of the late 18th and early 19th centuries further enhanced journalism’s centrality, philosophers likened it to a fourth estate, with the press thought to exist as a guardian of democracy and defender of the public interest (Carlyle, 1974[1905]). Alexis de Tocqueville (1900) was among the first to specifically outline the effect of the press on public opinion in both France and America, with both Gabriel Tarde (1969[1901]) and Ferdinand Tönnies (1971[1923]) soon thereafter delineating an intersection of journalism, the public and polity as central to democratic functioning.

Such notions permeated 20th-century thinking in the United States. By the 1920s, journalism had become part of multiple ongoing conversations about the circumstances needed to establish and maintain democracy: American philosopher John Dewey (1954[1927]) and journalist Walter Lippmann (1914, 1925) famously debated the relevance of journalism to democracy, arguing for different roles of the press but agreeing on the centrality of its connection. Lippmann (1960[1922]: 31–32), in particular, saw the crisis of modern democracy as a crisis of journalism: ‘The problem of the press is confused,’ he noted, ‘because the critics and the apologists expect the press to … make up for all that was not foreseen in the theory of democracy.’

The linkage between journalism and democracy reached feverish heights following the two world wars, which intensified expectations of the role that democracy could play in facilitating world stability. For Americans, in particular, journalism came to be regarded as a precondition for democracy to flourish (Hallin and Mancini, 2004), largely because it could disseminate – implicitly and explicitly – the western values of free expression and civil society around the world. As the study of journalism began to be taken up by the social sciences, the insistence on wedding notions of journalism with notions of democracy became so central that US scholars asked why the academy did not ‘call journalists political actors’ (Cook, 1998: 1) and ‘whether the media govern’ (Iyengar and Reeves, 1997).

It was no surprise, then, that the intersection of democracy and journalism also figured heavily in non-academic American institutions of the time. For instance, the propagandistic activities of the Committee for Public Information, set up during the First World War in the United States, depended so heavily on its Division of News that John Dewey wondered after the war whether the ‘word “news” [was] not destined to be replaced by the word “propaganda”’ (1918: 216). By the middle of the Second World War, a free-press crusade was under way, whose American proponents sought to export the First Amendment guarantee of press freedom to the rest of the world (Blanchard, 1986). Excitement for the idea was widespread, prompting one newspaper editor to write at the time that ‘our obligation is to extend freedom of the press to the entire world … if we fail, then all fail’ (Hoyt, 1943: 9).

The legacy for connecting democracy and journalism continued during the Cold War, when the United States heightened its investment in the project of democracy-building. Simply put, journalism became widely regarded as the lifeblood of democratic theory beyond the West. Part of this was connected to the development of academic disciplines that saw democracy as the best possible outcome for world politics. American political science departments, for instance, developed curricula that delineated the mechanisms for determining, in Hans J. Morgenthau’s words (1985[1948]), the ‘nature, accumulation, distribution, exercise, and control of power on all levels of social interaction, with special emphasis on the role of the state’, where, as a choice among alternatives, democracy was uppermost and journalism was central to its workings. The rise of administrative research in the US, whose prescriptions for what was considered ‘good journalism’ were exemplified most explicitly in the Four Theories of the Press (Siebert et al., 1956), further cemented the usefulness of the democracy/journalism link, setting out how the news ‘ought’ to operate under optimum political conditions. The book – later critiqued as ideological rather than scientific, optimistic rather than realistic, and effected unilaterally by the Second World War and its aftermath (Merrill and Nerone, 2002) – offered a detailed template for how the journalism/democracy nexus might look and provided concrete markers by which it might be identified and evaluated.

Though the relevance of journalism to democracy was addressed differently in different countries – surfacing in departments of sociology in the UK, for instance, as a challenge to notions of pluralism (Morrison and Tumber, 1988) or in the Middle East through the lens of international relations (Mowlana, 1996) – its fundamental appeal as a conceptual linkage remained. Generating terms and phrases that could succinctly capture the tenor of the intersection – ‘mediated political realities’ (Nimmo and Combs, 1983), ‘media politics’ (Bennett, 1988), ‘mediacracy’ (Taylor, 1990), and ‘mediated democracy’ (McNair, 2000) were among them – the idea remained sufficiently resonant that some saw its two interlinked terms as interchangeable: James Carey (1995) famously noted that both ‘journalism’ and ‘democracy’ were names for the same act of making society intelligible. Even today lamentations over the future of newspapers are easily framed as concerns over the ‘future of democracy-sustaining journalism’ (Pickard and Torres, 2009).

Thus, since the early days of the American republic, journalism has been thought to foster the conditions necessary for democracy to thrive. It is no wonder, then, that western scholarship on journalism, itself largely driven by US thinkers, has tended to adopt the journalism/democracy nexus as a naturalized part of understanding what journalism is for.

Why democracy is not central for journalism

While one might argue that journalism has been historically necessary for democracy, the opposite assertion does not hold to the same degree. In fact, circumstances show that democracy has not been necessary for journalism, and the idea that democracy is the lifeline of journalism has not been supported on the ground.

Though here too the applicability of this assertion differs by geographic region, the West – led by the United States – has played a central role in positioning the link as a naturalized given in global understandings of journalism. As US scholarly work on journalism accompanied the export of US models of journalistic practice around the world, the aspiration that journalism would fuel the democratic polity was widely echoed, if unevenly practiced. But the opposite assertion – that democracy would fuel journalism – did not generate similar acclaim. The relevance of the journalism/democracy linkage was instead undermined by two wide-ranging but inter-related complications – one theoretical, one practical.

The theoretical shortcomings of the journalism/nexus link drew first from the certain version of modernity to which early political philosophers repaired in pushing it forward. Simply put, their version of modernity was western in geographical orientation, narrow in its applicability. The mindset they invoked was modern only from a certain geographical and cultural perspective, and it assumed conditions that were not part of the default settings elsewhere in the world. Thus, the nexus between journalism and democracy was often unreflective of circumstances beyond the West, where, as Garcia-Canclini (1995) argued nearly 20 years ago, different modes of entering and leaving modernity had become widely prevalent.

This western notion of modernity lent a sense of correctness to the possibility of democracy’s spread, leaving aside the moral and political questions that historically had underpinned notions of journalistic practice. Instead, internationalization and a growing sharing of scholarship across geographic regions meant largely making sure that ‘they’ (those from the East or the global South) practiced ‘our’ precepts (those largely from the industrialized regions of the West or North). This logic linked journalism repeatedly with democracy, though it refracted understanding of the journalisms that resulted more through the lens of the aspired project that was being imagined than through the realities that existed. The idea of journalism that resulted was more stable, more morally unambiguous, less contingent, more socially useful, less corrupt, and, most importantly, more aligned with western notions of democracy than it ever could be on the ground.

A second complication that undermined the journalism/democracy nexus was practical in nature. For, in fact, multiple aspects of the conceptual democracy/journalism nexus did not reflect conditions in practice. Historically, journalism took on many forms which were both more and less connected to democracy: journalism was more partial, biased, conflicted and unevenly related to different types of governance than models of journalism aligning it with one notion of democratic process ever assumed (Chalaby, 1996; Curran and Seaton, 1985; Schudson, 1978). For instance, Americans involved in the free-press crusade of the 1940s found a marked degree of resistance to their version of the democracy/journalism link when allies as similar as France and Great Britain favored press controls more extensive than they were willing to entertain (Britannia Waves the Rules, 1946; Perlman, 1946). Similarly, the American-mediated landscape that engaged with McCarthyism a decade later displayed the underside of journalism’s rigid adherence to balance and impartiality, when journalism failed to clearly assess and sufficiently oppose the Red Scare because of its loyalty to then-prevalent conceptions of how journalists were supposed to act in democratic regimes (Zelizer, 1993). More recently, the present period of partisan news in the United States clearly undermines the picture of rational discourse which long supported the link between democracy and journalism, suggesting instead that so-called objective journalism, so central to western notions of democracy, modernity and civil society, is an anomaly. Recent scandals in the United States and United Kingdom, ranging from WikiLeaks to the phone-hacking at the News of the World, reveal problematic aspects of journalistic practice in countries that have been heavily invested in promoting a certain traditional view of the journalism/democracy nexus.

Beyond the West, the link between journalism and democracy became even more tenuous. The debate over the New World Information and Communication Order from the 1970s to 1990s was touted as a discussion about the free flow of information, but it remained at heart a conversation about how free one’s journalists could be or what their freedom actually meant, and its assumptions – normative ideas that only one kind of journalism should prevail and it should be the kind most relevant to the democracies of the West – are now being replayed in debates over the censorship of Google searches in China (Zelizer, 2011). Certain privileged forms of journalism – the very notion of a free and independent press, the idea of a fourth estate or the public’s right to know, the embrace of neutrality or facticity – were never the practice in much of the world, even in those regions aspiring to some form of democratic polity (Jacubowicz, 2007; Waisbord, 2000). And in nearly every region of the world, journalism regularly operated, and continues to do so, in conditions in which modernity is tied to repression and a respect for order, consensus and authority rather than freedom of expression. Journalism is central in transitional states with high degrees of self-censorship, irresolution and noise, in cultures characterized by new modes of identity like hybridity and marginality, in regimes bearing odd mixes of colonialism and post-colonialism, in states of soft authoritarianism which offer little hope of developing civil society, in circumstances affected by tensions between the nation-state and pan-regionalism, in states which support information suppression, terror and the persecution of journalists, and in multiple situations of contingency with no clear beginning, end or obvious trajectory (Zelizer, 2011).

All of this says nothing of the variable technological circumstances on the ground that further underscored democracy’s irrelevance in thinking through journalism. Though multiple historic examples show how democracy only sometimes or in part motivated journalism’s operation (the radio broadcasts of US government-supported agencies during the Cold War, for instance), the contemporary new media environment complicates the journalism/democracy nexus in multiple ways. Its decentralization, wide-ranging access to both production and consumption, rapidity and accommodation of endless vantage points make certain claims to a kind of news-work that is more democratic than that exhibited in the traditional news media, but they fly in the face of broader, more long-standing assertions about journalism’s capacity to support the so-called democratic objectives of civil society, reasoned discourse, progress and universal values. In the Middle East, for instance, the internet promotes multiple, simultaneous discordant conversations which pull as much toward dissensus as toward agreement (Khamis and Sisler, 2010).

Why, then, has democracy retained its centrality in so much western academic theorizing about journalism, despite the fact that multiple sources of evidence – historical, geographical, economic, political and cultural – suggest that it is not? Why has the shelf life of democracy been given immunity from expiration? And why does this immunity in journalism scholarship continue despite the multiple conditions that have destabilized, challenged, reduced and diminished democracy’s optimum performance?

The immunity of democracy’s shelf life

Democracy has retained a long life in academic scholarship about journalism because much of the scholarly world in the West – and specifically the USA – depends directly or indirectly on the presumption of democracy and its accoutrements. Whole academic fields, communication and its long-standing study of journalism among them (Glander, 2000; Simpson, 1999), surfaced from tensions that had positioned democratic regimes on one side of the continuum and varying kinds of authoritarian polities on the other. Classes on democratic governance, on journalists’ interactions with official bureaucracy, and even on sourcing practices in the free flow of information, regularly populate curricula at all levels of academic expertise. This has lent an either/or demeanor to the sharing of academic knowledge in the West, a demeanor that over time has naturalized the polarization of attributes on both sides of the continuum. An implicit or explicit separation between the West and the rest, the center and periphery, the North and South, and the First World and Third World has metaphorically spatialized distinctions between camps for a wide range of intellectual projects, such as the field of international relations or theories of development (Downing, 1996; Escobar, 1995). Though not the only naturalized given underlying journalism (see Vos, 2012, for a discussion of journalism education and objectivity), the ties binding journalism and democracy shed a particular light on the ways in which academic inquiry and public life draw from each other in western university settings and on the ways in which they disseminate across the global environment.

Democracy’s immunity from shelf life reflects the fact that it remains a western-driven and universal standard of subjunctive action, regardless of the degree both to which it can or cannot be achieved and to which it ultimately impacts the various kinds of journalism prevalent in the world. Academic theorizing has played a critical role in keeping this mindset afloat. Democracy has no date by which it needs to be used, no deadline by which it needs to be discarded, no built-in recognition of the affairs or states of being that call for its dismantlement. Instead, notions of democracy flourish as naturalized givens in a range of academic fields that in turn impact the practical applications of the knowledge they disseminate. Journalism thus remains central to democracy’s well-being, even if the knowledge of journalism that is disseminated does not fully reflect journalistic practice.

In large part, this has to do with the flow of ideas, writ large. The stubborn durability of democracy’s invocation in journalism scholarship reflects what has been widely argued in ideational analysis – that ‘the greater the uncertainty (in the environment), the more influential is the role of ideas’ (Jacobsen, 1995: 293). Moreover, ideas themselves have attributes, ‘properties that may lend to their selection … their institutionalization and their perpetuation’ (Garret and Weingast, 1993: 178). It may be that the attributes of democracy – continuity, stability, optimism for the future, institutional centrality – are important for the academy. In this sense, invoking democracy helps it wrestle with its own practical and existential problems, echoing the oft-cited formulations of Ann Swidler (1986), who maintained that cultures or belief systems – the ideas held about the world – are like tool kits used to drive action. Even when ideas change – and they do, as they encounter challenges, conflicts and necessary compromises – they continue to play a role in shaping what ensues.

But democracy also endures as a reference term for journalism, because maintaining its centrality is consonant with existing patterns of knowledge acquisition in the West. As Arjun Appadurai (1996) has argued, western research is decidedly collective, conformist and uniform. This is the case not in the sense that people huddle together and think aloud, but that, following Thomas Kuhn (1964), new knowledge necessarily builds on that which has already been approved. Ideas can be easily and successfully disseminated when they discretely pass the familiar and expected threshold rather than overtly challenge, minimize or make irrelevant long-standing parts of the canon.

Democracy has thus settled in for the long haul of journalism scholarship because so much existing institutionalized knowledge depends on its presence. Once the idea of democracy passed the threshold as a necessary part of the intellectual frame for understanding journalism, it generated its own cheerleading squad, a squad which has proliferated over time. On the road from old to new paradigms reside multiple scholars, programs, departments, research trajectories, and careers that were invested in it as an originary idea for thinking about journalism. In part, this is commonsensical: journalism researchers have protected a commitment to no small degree to keeping scholarship as is, largely because so much of their existing work depends on what has already gone into the canon (Zelizer, 2004).

The nexus between journalism and democracy has occupied a significant part of that canon. The acts of unlearning and relearning it pose risks to those who have staked their intellectual reputations on certain kinds of knowledge. The upshot here is that by reducing, relativizing, particularizing or eliminating democracy as a given for understanding journalism, scholars would thus need to fight an uphill battle in generating a different understanding of its role and centrality.

This is problematic in the present, but it becomes more so as time moves on. For as Paul Connerton (2009) has noted more broadly of memory and modernity, settings that align their evolution with notions of progress, reason and democracy also exhibit a particular affinity with practices of forgetting. Forgetting, in this regard, becomes a useful mnemonic practice for those attempting to narrow understanding of what matters. The effects of a narrowed intellectual prism are already evident, for in retaining the centrality of democracy in thinking about journalism, the reasons for journalism’s existence have become aligned more with the political world beyond the news than with reflecting the workings of journalism itself. The rhetoric for legitimating journalism promotes a vision smaller than the world that journalism inhabits, largely because its presumed conditions of operation reside beyond journalism. Instead, its nexus with the political environment has foregrounded a set of externally imposed subjunctive aspirations which make the call about journalism’s parameters of study. Significantly, that same set of aspirations remains oblivious to journalism’s own welfare.

No wonder, then, that much journalism scholarship constantly fends off critiques about its narrow intellectual base. As Arjun Appadurai (1996) has argued, all intellectual projects have different points of origin and completion, speeds and axes of development, and links with institutional structures. This suggests that positing democracy as a necessarily progressive, reasoned and universal phenomenon, as a particular form of modernity coaxes scholars to do, is not workable because it disregards the conditions on the ground by which journalism keeps itself afloat. Such dissonance – between what exists in the head and what exists on the ground – is becoming more the case rather than less, as disparities not only between North and South but between North and North and South and South continue to grow.

Conclusion

Retiring the notion of democracy in its exclusive and exclusionary relationship with journalism thus needs to be considered. This is not only because the centrality of democracy has generated undemocratic journalism scholarship, by which those journalisms most germane to the core of democratic theory have been privileged over those which are not. It is also because the idea of democracy has created and maintained blinders about all the other variations by which some premise of a governing body might be linked with journalism. Misunderstanding, then, of both the key terms in the journalism/democracy nexus – journalism and democracy – has undermined the capacity of journalism scholars to speak reliably about the world of journalism practice. Instead, many existing discussions of journalism have become insular, static, exclusionary, marginalizing, disconnected, elitist, unrepresentative and historically and geographically myopic.

Admittedly, the centrality of the United States – in both journalism and scholarship – makes this argument more geographically specific than it might otherwise be. But the United States bears a special responsibility for the direction that conversations about journalism and democracy have taken in the West. And while the role of the United States in the global spread of knowledge deserves further analysis on its own right, there is no question that it has set the stage for thinking about both democracy and journalism across the global environment.

Though much work has been done on the ascent of new ideas to prominence and their embedding in institutional memory (Berman, 2001; Jacobsen, 1995), less is known about what it takes to remove long-standing ideas from use. Research on professional knowledge acquisition maintains that knowledge tends to have a shelf life of five or six years (Brandsma, 1998). This means that the retirement of democracy as a key term for journalism scholarship is both difficult to accomplish and overdue.

How could retiring the concept of democracy help clarify existing understandings of journalism? It might force scholars to recognize that democracies are not as clear as theories would have them be, that democracies are not as integrated with journalism as has been assumed, that space for other kinds of governing structures needs to be crafted alongside the news, and that as the power of the nation-state wavers, the real nexus between government and journalism may lie elsewhere. Recognizing these circumstances would certainly help offset the exclusive and exclusionary message that democracy has introduced into existing academic discussions of journalism. However, at the same time it might also open those same discussions to new voices on the horizons of journalistic practice, to the less shiny goods that may be more relevant to journalism than democracy ever could be.