Abstract
Kevin Barnhurst died on 2 June 2016, just as his book, Mister Pulitzer and the Spider: Modern News from Realism to the Digital, was published. Barnhurst had scrutinized every detail of its publication, massaging the text, producing the cover art, agonizing over the title, and finally having to fight his publisher’s marketing department to keep his ‘Mister Pulitzer’ from turning into ‘Mr. Pulitzer’. Those who knew him well will understand that, to him, the difference between Mr. and Mister was not trivial. And readers of his late work, including this magisterial book, will recognize his way of seeing deep meaning in fine distinctions.
I was personally and professionally close to Kevin, and normally would not consider it appropriate for me to write a scholarly review of his book. I can hardly pretend to be objective. As one of Kevin’s coauthors – there are more than a few of us – I have an investment in this book; it is in some ways a sequel to our book The Form of News. In other ways, however, it is very distinct from that other project and expresses concerns and insights that I do not share. In this review, I will not try to minimize my personal involvement, but will also feel free to critique the work, just as I would if Kevin were still alive to take it in.
Mister Pulitzer tells a story about journalism, particularly US journalism, after the industrial revolution. The main plot line, to simplify, is the gradual conquest of realism by modernism. Industrial news was characterized by the mass production of stories that were heavy on precise people doing discrete things in specific places. These stories were short on explanations. Gradually and continuously, stories got longer and more abstract as journalists developed habits of explanation that distinguished their authoritative positioning from the subjectivities of their readers.
Barnhurst documents these changes with a battery of content studies of various kinds of news media over the past 130 years. He organizes the results of these studies according to the classic categories of news elements: Who, What, Where, When, and Why/How. The ‘who’ changed from numerous ordinary people to a few prominent people and organizations; the ‘what’ from many discrete events to a few grand movements and trends; the ‘when’ from the latest and newest to historical background and predictions of future developments; and the ‘where’ from very localized to expansive elsewheres. Each of these findings is contrary to conventional wisdom, which holds that, especially in the last 20 years, market pressures have made news items shorter, more episodic, more local, and less interpretive. In fact, in every medium, Barnhurst finds news spending more time on explanation and less on storytelling.
The book is a sustained meditation on this paradox: that the news has developed in ways that its practitioners habitually misrecognize. Or, as Barnhurst puts it, ‘beliefs about news have resisted cultural change, even as its contents and practices have transformed over more than a century. A contradiction so weird – and maybe worrisome – is worth probing …’ (p. 12). A more glib scholar – me, for instance – might have simply characterized this weird contradiction as ‘ideology’, seeing it as the way journalists imagine their actual relations of production, and left it at that. Barnhurst acknowledges this option: ‘Their beliefs misalign with their actions, and that misrecognition, shared with academics and the general public, is a central, unacknowledged aspect of news as it enters the digital twenty-first century’ (p. 19). But he does not dismiss the common sense of news professionals as a kind of false consciousness; instead, he explores it as a way of making sense out of their work and its changing conditions.
Barnhurst’s exploration of the self-consciousness of journalists is a second empirical pillar for the book’s architecture. His archive for this consists of interview material, most of it gathered during his sojourn as a Shorenstein fellow at Harvard. The voices of the journalists, who are diverse demographically but uniformly accomplished and articulate, come through clearly. There is no condescension. As a result of the respect he shows his informants, Barnhurst often accepts their descriptions of their experiences at face value; his interrogation of their self-awareness is not as consistent as one might have hoped.
This reflects Barnhurst’s ambivalence about the usefulness of modernist journalism. On one hand, he admires the commitment and hard work of his informants. On the other hand, he is attentive to what’s been lost as modernism advanced. For instance, as ordinary people dropped out of the news, their voices were replaced by those of experts, and they were represented as demographic abstractions rather than as individuals. ‘News that collapses individuals into groups is an act of power that puts people into their (subordinate) place’ (p. 49). Ordinary people lost the power to make news. They also confronted content that no longer engaged them as an audience. News became less popular as it became more authoritative and, well, more boring.
One grand historical development that journalists correctly recognize is the vanishing popularity of their product. People still love news, but they dislike and distrust journalism. News organizations blame fake news, or blame the public, but Barnhurst tends to put the blame on journalism’s modernist stance, which declared journalists ‘doctors of the public sphere’ (p. 107). Barnhurst is ambivalent about the public sphere. He came of age as a scholar in the years when journalism studies took up Habermas and Robert Putnam and civic or public journalism; at the same time, he kept his distance from ‘communitarianism’, and his identification as a queer man fostered an awareness of the ways that communities exclude while they include. If his affection for the public sphere was always qualified, his suspicion of those who declare themselves ‘doctors of the public sphere’ ran strong. His affection for journalists clashes with his criticisms of journalism.
The space between his empirical studies of content and his interviews with informants is the arena for the third piece of this book, a thoughtful and, well, wise commentary on the philosophy of news. It is in the commentaries on thinkers like Hegel and Latour that Kevin’s voice is most recognizable to me. His closing discussion, which pivots on Hannah Arendt’s distinction between ‘labor’ and ‘work’ from The Human Condition, is especially brilliant and resists easy summary.
The philosophical voice of the book underscores the fact that this is a cultural history. Barnhurst insists that the material realities of the news industry have not required modernist journalism; he is more interested in the influence of literary and philosophical thought than in the economic and technological conditions of news production. This is my chief criticism of the book, which doesn’t pay enough attention, I think, to the importance of the development of routines and beats and divisions of labor, or the mediated impact of ownership structures, in creating a necessity for a superego of the news that emphasizes its independence and social responsibilities. (In our little version of Raphael’s School of Athens, Kevin was Plato, pointing skyward.)
This book was not meant to be Barnhurst’s final word on the history of journalism. It is permeated with an awareness that he was shooting at a moving target. That the news media are undergoing momentous and turbulent change is an element of journalists’ common sense that Barnhurst honors, though he repeatedly points out the limits of this change. The passages that deal with digital news, for instance, see and foresee the assertion and reassertion of professional authority over outbursts of popular realist news. But no one was more aware that history hasn’t stopped.
Kevin has stopped, far too soon. Mister Pulitzer opens up a perspective on the coming decade of news that invites the sort of burst of studies that he was so good at designing. He has drawn our attention to the ways in which modernism orphaned the affective work of news, and he likely would be painfully but relentlessly devoted to documenting the flight of affect into the borderlands of our political culture. When you consume today’s news, can you hear him saying ‘I told you so?’