Journalism and the hybrid condition: Long-form television drama at the intersections of news and narrative

Introduction

Even a cursory glance across the televisual field suggests that hybridity has become a defining feature of contemporary broadcast news, public affairs programming, and political practice (e.g. Baym, 2010; Chadwick, 2013; Jones, 2010). Yet, even as hybridity has realized ontological status, its implications remain under-explored in the field of journalism studies. This essay offers a measured corrective: one line of inquiry into a discussion that by its very nature calls for multiple points of entry. I begin with an elaboration on the concept of hybridity and the levels at which the hybridization of media are occurring. From there, I consider the implications of this multi-tiered hybridization for the practice of journalism and public affairs – in particular, the obscuring of boundaries among fictive and factual forms of storytelling. Finally, I explore three examples of fictional programs with explicit public-affairs aspirations; award-winning long-form television drama, each sitting, in different configurations, at the intersection of news and narrative. I conclude that in an age of complexifying distinctions between the factual and the fictive, hybrid long-form televisual narratives have the potential to play a valuable journalistic function, orienting audiences to critical, but often under-explored, socio-political realities.

On hybridity

At its most general level, hybridity can be defined as a blending: an integration of that which, through cultural logics and institutional practices, was previously understood to be and maintained as distinct and separate. Hybridization is a loss of distinction, a process of de-differentiation. What were once seen as essentialized categories and taxonomic structures become replaced by unstable mixtures and uncertain assemblages, taking shape momentarily in ever-shifting proportions. In a media landscape marked by an unpredictable fluidity and permeability, hybridity manifests on three mutually informing levels – what can be understood as the textual, systemic, and discursive.

On the level of text, hybridity opens questions of genre, form, and voice. Genres of drama and comedy, for example, meld into ‘dramadies’, while informational programming and entertainment television meld into ‘infotainment’. The comedy show becomes a respected site of serious news, drawing on an array of traditional media forms to offer new possibilities of engagement with politics and public affairs (Baym, 2010). The comedian interviews the President, asks tough questions, and, as Jon Stewart did with Barack Obama, calls the man ‘dude’. A more finely grained phenomenon than simply the conflation of genres, hybridity enables the interweaving of once-distinct repertories of techniques and modes of speaking (Ekström, 2011). Textual possibilities multiply as conventions of content, form, and function become subjected to recombination and reinvention. At the same time, audience expectations of how the world is to be represented, to be talked about – and who is authorized to do the talking – likewise become unfixed, decentered, and open to reimagination.

Textual hybridity is both constituent and constitutive of wider systemic hybridity. As Chadwick (2013) insightfully argues, multiple technological affordances, economic agendas, and institutional structures of media production and distribution are melding in uncertain ways (see also Jenkins, 2006). Chadwick (2013) describes an emergent ‘media system built upon interactions among older and newer media logics’ and shaped by ‘complex and ever-evolving relationships based upon adaptation, interdependence and simultaneous concentrations and diffusions of power’ (p. 4). Media institutions themselves face ongoing processes of disruption, innovation, and reconfiguration. Chadwick rightly suggests that hybridity takes us past the condition of the either–or (e.g. old or new, mainstream or alternative) and is instead a fundamentally both-and phenomenon – paradoxically, the integration of the incompatible.

Together, textual and systemic hybridity are informed by a third level of hybridization – what I call here the discursive. Drawing on Bakhtin, discourse can be understood not just as a pattern or mode of speech, but ultimately as conceptual system. Bakhtin (1981) describes discourse as the ‘verbal-ideological’ – ‘specific points of view on the world’, he explains, ‘forms for conceptualizing the world in words, specific world views, each characterized by its own objects, meanings, and values’ (pp. 291–292). Discourse, he suggests, continually establishes and reinvokes its own ‘socio-ideological cultural horizon’ – the boundaries of our conceptual, or epistemological, imagination. Foucault (1972) argues something similar in the Archaeology of Knowledge, positing that discourses are ‘themselves reflexive categories, principles of classification, normative rules, [and] institutionalized types’ that presuppose and call into being particular sets of objects, concepts, subject positions, and enunciative modalities (p. 22). Provocatively, both theorists question distinctions between literature and politics (Foucault), or fiction and non-fiction (Bakhtin), suggesting that those differentiations exist more at the level of discourse than they do of ontology.

Discursive hybridity, or what I have described elsewhere (Baym 2005, 2010) as ‘discursive integration’ is thus a matter of verbal-conceptual de-differentiation, or as Bakhtin (1981: 358) puts it, a mixture of ‘different linguistic consciousnesses’. For the journalistic field, the most significant melding may be between discourses of the ‘politico-normative’ and ‘aesthetic-expressive’ (Baym, 2010). Habermas (1983) argues that these spheres were constituent pieces of the modernist mind, shaping public discourse, institutional practice, and cultural-epistemic authority. The former, understood as the domain of journalism, politics, and public affairs, was assumed to contain questions of social organization, resource allocation, justice, and the collective good. The latter was seen as the proper space of art and affect, pleasure and play. Each offered its own modes of expression, conceptualization, and institutionalization (as Foucault suggests, institutions are the crystallization of discourse). They inhabited different locales, both figurative and literal – for US network television, for example, news was produced in New York; entertainment in Los Angeles. So too was the discourse of one considered objectively, and ontologically, distinct from the other. In an age of discursive hybridity, however, these conceptual categories have become fundamentally porous, fluid, and shifting, subject, as Corner and Pels (2003) suggest, to ‘a mutual interpenetration of formerly distinct “field logics” or “system codes”’ (p. 8).

From information to orientation

Together, these three levels of hybridization complicate traditional conceptions of journalism. Hybridity has all but shattered the high-modern paradigm – the discursive formation and its corresponding institutional arrangement that privileged centralization, rationalization, professionalization, and an epistemology grounded in the deep belief in the utility and possibility of authoritative objective observation. This paradigm, dominant through the second half of the 20th century, gave shape to long-privileged cultural assumptions about the nature of journalism and its relationship to public life (Baym, 2010; Carey, 1993; Hallin, 1992). Hybridity, however, locates us in an age of slippage and experimentation. It challenges clearly bound definitions of what journalism is, how it is to be practiced, and who is sanctioned to do the practicing. If we want to find, or define journalism, we can no longer look to institution, genre/form, or voice as markers of ‘journalism’. We must look instead, toward the work that journalism does – toward that which journalism, or what I call here the journalistic, achieves.

In part, this requires amending the high-modern conception of journalism as the provision of useful information to an inquiring citizenry. From a high-modern perspective, Kovach and Rosenstiel (2001) suggest that the primary purpose of journalism is ‘to provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self-governing’ (p. 17). That undoubtedly is an essential idea. A democratic citizenry depends on good information to thrive, but the notion also faces three conceptual challenges that complicate its usefulness in a hybrid age.

First, as the seminal work of Carey (1988) helps us to realize, it is built on the assumption of transmission. It presumes a one-way communicative flow of message content, from the sender to receiver. In that, it overlooks the fundamentally social, interactive, and communal nature of communication, a theoretical notion made explicit in the contemporary moment of social media and digital abundance. Second, the presumption that the content or the value of journalism is information is questionable. News conveys some information, but it does, and always has done, so much more – it tells stories, communicates values, gives voice, represents identities and ideals, and offers particular kinds of pleasure for particular kinds of people – all of which transcend the informational function.

Third, the assumption that the rational citizenry is the audience for news is difficult to square with contemporary realities. The concept of ‘rational citizen’ itself may be a product of the modernist imagination, a cultural ideal from a particular historical–cultural moment. Both cultural studies and some forward-thinking political science are moving instead toward an understanding of culture, identity, and affect as the foundations of political tastes, habits, patterns of decision-making, and of selective exposure to and processing of information. We are belatedly realizing that affect is a central, and perhaps foundational, level of political/public engagement (e.g. Iyengar et al., 2012; Jones, 2006; Van Zoonen, 2005).

The hybridization of broadcast news, and of media culture more broadly, necessarily asks us to recognize a concept of journalism as orientation, in addition to that of journalism as information. The journalism scholar Park (1940: 677) once suggested that more than just information, news could be understood as a form of knowledge. ‘News performs somewhat the same function for the public that perception does for the individual’, he wrote. ‘It does not so much inform as orient the public’. Carey (1988: 18), drawing on Park’s contemporary John Dewey, argued that news cannot be only the transmission of content from a sender to a receiver, but rather also and always is a form of communication – both ‘the extension of messages in space’ and ‘the maintenance of society in time; … the act of imparting information’ and ‘the representation of shared beliefs’.

Carey’s complication of the paradigm of transmission has been quite influential in communication studies. Less noticed has been his suggestion, in the same essay, that ‘newspapers do not operate as a source of effects or functions but as a dramatically satisfying, which is not to say pleasing, presentation of what the world at root is’ (Carey, 1988: 21). ‘Dramatically satisfying’ is the key phrase here, suggesting that both our efforts (and indeed our desire) to understand the world around us and the frameworks through which we do so are as much narratological, aesthetic, and affective, as they are rational and cognitive. For Carey (1988), the shift from the informational to the dramatically satisfying elevates the role of news and public affairs media in ‘the sharing of aesthetic experience, religious ideas, personal values and sentiments, and intellectual notions’ to a position of equal import as the factual reporting on ‘power, administration, decision, and control’ (p. 34).

Several decades earlier, Park (1940) similarly wrote that when understood as orientation, news could be seen as contributing ‘not only to history and to sociology, but to folklore and literature … not merely to the social sciences, but to the humanities’ (p. 681). In short, both Park and Carey direct attention toward the dramaturgic and narrative function of news, a suggestion that resonates in a both/and age of hybridity. It emphasizes the argument that the journalistic is as much the circulation of culturally evocative narratives that locate us within socio-cultural and political contexts, as it is the informing of citizens. From this perspective, the significance of the journalistic lies with its work in representing, or articulating, the socio-political world – its objects and the relationships among them, its organizing of conceptual logics, and its normative values. To put the point differently, when understood as orientation, the journalistic helps form the horizons of what Corner and Pels (2003) describe as ‘political culture’ – the realm of experience, imagination, values, and dispositions that provide the settings within which a political system operates, and that shape the character of political processes, public behavior, and civic self-identification.

Between news and narrative

A notion of journalism as orientation is, of course, hardly new. Park and Dewey were writing at the dawn of the high-modern age, and as such, their thinking was still informed by a different set of discursive sensibilities and cultural assumptions. Theirs was the heyday of realist fiction, itself a genre of hybrid truth-telling that straddled the divide between news and narrative. As Underwood (2008) argues in Journalism and the Novel, authors such as Twain, Dreiser, Crane, and Hemingway moved back and forth between the domains of journalism and literature. Their work, as would later experiments in documentary fiction and ‘new’ or ‘narrative’ journalism, obscures the borders between story and information and fact and fiction. In so doing it complicates epistemological assumptions about the nature and purpose of journalistic truth-telling.

Many of the journalists-turned-fiction-writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries found themselves frustrated by ‘the restricting formulas of conventional journalism’, which they thought impeded their efforts ‘honestly to portray the way they saw the world’. In turn, they ‘decided they needed to take up fiction-writing to convey authentically what they saw as genuine and “real” about life and the people in it’ (Underwood, 2008: 5). Most crucially, living in an era of transformation and tension, of socio-cultural instability and change that in some ways was not dissimilar to our contemporary moment, they turned to forms of hybrid writing they believed enabled them, in ways that journalism could not, to explore social and economic cleavages and the impact profound socio-cultural and political-economic transformations were exerting on the lives of average people (Underwood, 2008: 97).

Thus seeking to capture what Habermas would later refer to as the lifeworld, and its intersection with an opaque and shifting systemworld (see McCarthy, 1978), they imagined dramatic plots that were informed by real events, crafted prose steeped in vernacular language, and displayed ‘a fascination with technical and occupational details, and a high level of competence in capturing the rhythms of human speech and the patterns in the way people live’ (Underwood, 2008: 139). A half-century later, novelistically inclined journalists would adopt similar storytelling techniques in what was described as ‘new journalism’: an explicitly interpretive effort to make sense of a contingent world through narrative immersion in the lives of real people, or at least realistic characters (e.g. Frus, 1994). Both realist fiction and new, or literary, journalism implicitly problematize the connection between text and reality – the naturalistic illusion that objective journalism, and only objective journalism, could provide an accurate and reliable, if not unmediated, window to the world.

Foley (1986) argues that all realist writing, journalism included, is built around an implicit ‘mimetic contract’ between the author and reader. A matter of social convention more than ontological verifiability, the mimetic contract establishes the boundaries of agreement about which textual attributes are to be taken as markers of truth, reality, or authenticity. Foley rightly notes that because the terms of the mimetic contract are points of convention and not material essence, they shift over time. In any historical moment, different kinds of textual arrangements are taken as offering reliable representations of the real, while others are dismissed as merely realistic, or rejected outright as flights of fancy.

Of particular significance is the distinction between the concrete and the figurative, the particular and the universal, and the denotative and the connotative. Journalism, at least in its high-modern form, is primarily a discourse of the concrete, the particular, and the denotative. Fiction, however, is largely a discourse of the figurative, the universal, and the connotative. That is, the people and events that populate the journalistic discourse are denotative, while the characters and plots offered in fiction are connotative. The former specify a material, verifiable existence at a particular point in space and time – the who, what, and when, perhaps, of basic journalism. The latter speak instead to cultural motives, philosophic understandings, and human potentialities – the how, and more importantly, the why, that give meaning and order to lived experience. The former serves an informational function, and the latter points us toward a discourse of orientation.

These two discourses therefore offer not just different modes of expression, but different levels of truth-telling. For realist fiction, the characters embody actually existent social types; the plot articulates the author’s understanding of the essence of social realities. In journalism, too, as Park (1940: 681) suggested, reported events, and the people they happen to, are never meaningful in and of themselves. Rather the denotative is an indicator of something more than an individual instance. Its ‘ideal significance’ exists in the connotative – the extent to which it helps to tell us who we are, what our world is like, and what our place in that world rightfully should be. Among other realist authors, Hemingway explicitly argued that a fiction anchored in careful observation of the real could transcend the ‘kinetographic fallacy’, the assumption that a focus on the particular and its denotative position in space and time had the ability to reveal complex truths of specific human conditions. He suggested that the exercise of ‘creative imagination’ – engaging in careful character development, subjective commentary, and writing in ‘symbolic and evocative ways’ – could ‘present a picture of the world that penetrated more deeply into the texture of life than anything that journalism’s one-dimensional methods of picturing reality could attain’ (Underwood, 2008: 141).

This perspective is echoed in Proust’s distinction between ‘real lives’ – the material, embodied, and particular – and ‘true life’ – which becomes accessible only through meaningful story-telling; or in the ethnographer Fassin’s (2014: 41) opposition of the real and the true. ‘The real’, Fassin argues, ‘being that which exists or has happened and the true being that which has to be regained from deception or convention. Reality is horizontal, existing on the surface of fact. Truth is vertical, discovered in the depths of inquiry’. For Fassin, ‘the language of the “real” and the argument of “truth” serve to defend diverse and even contradictory ways to account for life and lives’ (Fassin, 2014: 43). As hybrid genres, realist fiction and narrative journalism work on both of these levels, exploring the real as a means of accessing the author’s understanding of the truth. They thus present us with the fundamental hybrid condition of the both/and – of the denotative and connotative, the particular and universal, the journalistic and the literary – of oppositional discourses coexisting and mutually informing. The literary scholar Zavarzadeh (1976: 227) once called this an enactment of a ‘yes-and-no situation’, a complex mode of reading and understanding that at once allows the reader to recognize that which is truthful and that which is artifice, without locating the entirety of the text in one category or another.

Today, one can identify a novel subset of television programming engaged in similar work. Television writers, of course, have long mined (and perhaps mimed) current events in order to craft fictional stories ‘ripped from the headlines’. The emergence of what I consider here to be a hybrid form of televisual public affairs narrative, however, has been enabled by significant transformations in the technologies, economics, and viewer habits of television. Mittell (2015) has tracked the rise of ‘complex TV’, a novel approach to long-form dramatic storytelling that blends serial and episodic logics. In contrast to the ‘movie of the week’ or the episodic procedural crime drama that draws inspiration from recent news headlines, these programs develop rich and realistic characters engaged in slowly accruing plot lines, located within complicated and highly rendered social worlds. The minority of these may be focused on matters of public affairs, but those that are so focused offer a new mode of deep civic engagement. Here we see a new role for television fiction, and a correlating disruption of broadcast news. In the high modern age, television entertainment was largely dismissed as the ‘vast wasteland’, while broadcast journalism functioned as the centrally privileged mode of truthful storytelling about the human condition. Now, however, much broadcast news has devolved into a rawly commodified form of infotainment. Some television fiction, by contrast, is expanding as a medium of serious storytelling – no longer necessarily mass entertainment, but an aesthetically, intellectually, and philosophically rich exploration of social, cultural, and political realities. Existing at points of intersection between journalism and literature, a subset of complex, or quality TV is therefore engaged, explicitly, in the journalistic labor of orientation.

To better understand this emergent mode of hybrid truth-telling, I turn to three recent public affairs dramas – Borgen, The Bridge, and The Wire – which each offer different articulations of fact and fiction. I neither argue that these three represent the total of this kind of programming nor that they are all necessarily of equal quality or critical acceptance. Rather each illustrates a different institutional setting, and a differing set of relationships between journalism and television drama. As such they offer insights into a range of possibilities in truthful televisual storytelling at the border of news and narrative.

Conclusion

In our inescapably hybrid moment, the texts, genres, institutions, and discourses of public communication are in flux. Older assumptions neither govern current practices nor audience expectations. In this landscape, journalism – understood as a particular set of institutions, practices, and textual assemblages – is subjected to disruption and a challenge to its cultural and epistemic authority. At the same time, the journalistic – understood as the labor of orientation, both social need and public good – increasingly is being realized through emergent textual possibilities, institutional arrangements, and discursive configurations.

The three programs discussed here each offer different examples of public affairs narratives, hybrid forms of journalistic truth-telling existing at the intersections of news and narrative. Enabled by the interweaving hybridizations of media text, system, and discourse, they illustrate new approaches to the televisual representation of the real and its engagement with questions of socio-cultural and political-economic significance. Grounded in different ways with journalism, they share its topical interests, observational eye, and commitment to realistic portrayal in the service of understanding, but they harness the creative potential and emotive power of fiction to do so.

A core concern for journalism studies is the extent to which an understanding of the systemworld of administrative power, law, politics, and resource allocation can be related to the everyday realities of the lifeworld. Journalism, which itself exists in an increasingly precarious relationship with the systemworld, may often fail to link one to the other. At least anecdotally, it is clear that many people do not see the relevance of news about the systemworld to and for their own lifeworlds. The kind of narrative public affairs I have considered here, however, might hold out the promise of more effectively forging those connections – not by informing, but by performing; that is, by constructing complicated, at times holistic, social worlds, populated by richly conceptualized characters who face true, if scripted, social, political, and economic challenges.

In her work on The Wire, Williams (2014) describes a ‘deeper value’ of what she calls a ‘new kind of television serial melodrama that can juxtapose dramatically different worlds over time, allowing situations to ripen, characters to change, history to unfold’ (p. 29). In so doing, she suggests, such programs encourage their audience ‘to care about those who strive and those who suffer’ and to confront ‘the larger questions of what might be an equitable and just society’ (Williams, 2014: 5). The political philosopher Nussbaum (1995: xv) likewise has suggested that well-crafted fiction has the power to inspire the literary imagination, which she defines as a ‘humanistic and multivalued conception of public rationality’ – a blend of what the Danes refer to as the dual story of emotional identification and intellectual fascination. Nussbaum argues that fictional narratives can offer compelling points of access that enable an audience to engage deeply with what otherwise might be quite difficult and perhaps impenetrable social realities.

Nussbaum suggests that ‘political-economic’ and social-scientific texts, of which journalism in its high-modern form may be constituent, are too often ‘crude in [their] powers of representation and depiction, falsely detached from the situations of fellow human beings, impoverished in the range of sentiments’ they recognize and inspire (p. 34). She advocates instead, in favor of literary texts that display a ‘commitment’ to the ‘irreducibility of quality to quantity’, a ‘sense that what happens to individuals in the world has enormous importance’, and a ‘commitment to describe the events of life not from an external perspective of detachment as the doings and movings of ants or machine parts, but from within, as invested with the complex significances with which human beings invest their own lives’ (p. 32).

Nussbaum describes here the orientating power of fiction – its invitation into unfamiliar social and material conditions and its encouragement to imagine the ways those conditions impact the lives of real people. That orienting power, in turn, is inseparable from the affective pleasure complex storytelling engenders. ‘Its moral operations’, she writes, ‘are not independent of its aesthetic excellence’ (p. 35). Rather, the affective and the aesthetic are essential means to engage audiences in critical and participatory stances. In contrast to those informational texts that speak to an audience and expect the audience to know, or at least remember, what they have been told, the kind of public affairs narrative I have described here engender a ‘different sort of readerly activity’ (Nussbaum, 1995: 4), asking the audience to imagine themselves as living in the world they see on the screen, and to realize that world and their world are often the same.

Fictional public affairs narratives cannot, and should not, replace the daily journalism that does provide valuable factual information to democratic citizens. A crisis of journalism is indeed a crisis of democracy. In an age of complexifying distinctions between the factual and the fictive, however, hybrid long-form televisual narratives have the potential to play a valuable orientating function, offering aesthetically pleasurable and critically engaging explorations of pressing, if often over-looked, socio-political situations. Particularly in our current moment, the institutions and practices of traditional journalism may be less equipped to confront the realities and implications of socio-cultural, technological, and political–economic transformation. As the institutional arrangements, textual possibilities, and conceptual frames of the journalistic multiply, however, long-form fiction increasingly is providing important points of access to consider these transformations and the challenges they engender. In turn, its significance for the public conversation deserves wider recognition and greater attention from scholars of journalism and political communication.