Abstract
Western democracies face a major crisis undermining the public good that is mainstream journalism. Primarily, we are bearing witness to a rejection of public discourse that nurtures democracies and connects multiple publics toward shared work on common problems such as violence in schools or opiate addiction. Functionally, this is a result of declining institutional trusting relationships that have been documented across all social and political institutions from the schools to the church as well as across the globe. 1 This essay explores this challenge to mainstream news organizations as one of a crisis of our publics, its manifesting symptoms as well as it causes, and a few of the responses to fix the situation. It is my argument that today’s journalists might distance from their synergetic relationships with institutionalized power elites and turn toward communities, helping to bridge between the poles of discourse and link together disparate conversations to enable citizens toward solutions.
The decline in media trust – less than a third of US citizens report confidence in news organizations – has been happening for decades and is merely a symptom of the much bigger problem: the worshipping of the individual at the expense of community. We are no longer in any ‘public conversation’ (Benhabib, 1996), but a giant messaging system that thrives on connective algorithms and emotions (both positive and negative) that help individuals feel (Papacharissi, 2014). Our ‘publics’ today are really niche-oriented groups susceptible to commercial and political manipulations that encourage people to assume binary interests and pick sides to protect discursive territory. Once sides have been picked, attacks to deflate and malign the other ‘side’ are the order of the day. Anything goes in this chaos of the so-called ‘post-public’ reality – from fake news to lying – so long as ‘my’ taxes are cut or they ‘stick it to the other guy’ to ease the festering resentment. Politicians, especially neoliberalists that gave birth to the Tea Party movement, rode the wave of populism that resulted in a business man as president who promised to ‘Make America Great Again’ by advancing nationalist, misogynist, racist and other policies that center the individual. The fundamental strategy of this movement seeks to undercut feelings of unity and instead nurture the feelings of disconnect and righteous anger of the individual at political, environmental, educational, and other social institutions (Asen, 2017).
Some might argue that this is the time for mainstream journalism to thrive, for the press is supposed to act as a ‘watchdog’ for democratic institutions run ‘by the people’. Much scholarship has analyzed how news content helps create order out of chaos and guides citizens into some kind of a collective meaning construction. Consider how the press shone in the wake of Hurricane Katrina (Bennett et al., 2008); as institutional authority figures failed and the press stepped up to highlight the devastation taking place in New Orleans, for example. And indeed, we have seen some news organizations flourishing such as the left-leaning Washington Post and the right-leaning Briebart, but their audiences still break down according to social identity divides. This situation was preceded by decades of declining circulations and scattered attention as mass audiences splinter; advertisers find there’s little money in chasing the individual. Furthermore, the great works being done by mainstream journalists are not being seen because of this polarization. And if they are, consumers trade out their informed citizen lens with an ideological one as they glom on to content that seems to support their own worldview and ridicule what does not.
Symptoms of distrust
The symptoms of this distrust are manifold: political polarization, fake news’ pervasiveness, newsrooms’ fiscal crises, a strong popular cultural narrative that journalists are untrustworthy, homogeneous newsrooms, and networks that privilege those already powerful. For example, popular culture casts journalists as villains. When journalists are portrayed as the heroes (think Spotlight or The Post movies), their depiction wallows in nostalgia. President Donald Trump and other anti-democratic actors have further highjacked that grand narrative as fake news bolsters people’s wariness of mainstream reporting. For their part, mainstream reporters waited too long to recognize that their traditional self-centeredness was further spiraling them down the drain into irrelevance. In the struggle to remain significant, they stick to their tried-and-true routines, which result in proliferation of information sources that cater to polemic viewpoints. All of this exists in an environment in which the president of the so-called free world orchestrates an information attack on the mainstream press with the explicit intention of eliminating it as a major underpinning of democracy. In such an atmosphere, journalists’ hierarchal and organizational norms seem outdated and limiting, but are very difficult to revise during times of crisis.
Possible ways to respond
How can we convince people it behooves them to be a part of shared public discourses for the sake of collective governing? Journalists who strive for neutrality represent a unique actor in information flows, have the networks to connect mass groups, and yet also hover above niche interests themselves. I propose a networked-based response that re-conceptualizes the journalist/news-citizen/community relationship, moving away from institutional and organizational versions of trust and toward a reconfiguring of the individual journalist–citizen association. Four concrete responses come to mind:
Reclaim the journalism narrative by telling stories that transcend nostalgic tales like Spotlight or The Post movies. What is needed now are stories of the present day, the back stories of the hard-work of newsrooms, the ethical challenges, and the current heroics for the dissemination of truths – but these need to be told on different platforms that bridge multiple publics.
Remind citizens that journalists are individuals too. Re-envision the brand as pinpricks of relationship building throughout the media landscape via individual actors who convene disparate groups into deliberation. This would also involve better synergy between offline worlds, online content, and social-media platforms where trusting relationships – in both physical and digital spaces – already thrive at the individual level.
Recognize the rejection of institutions and nuance content toward a questioning of entrenched assumptions. Enable citizens with solutions-based journalism that centers not on government but on people who can do the civic work themselves.
Develop alternative revenue streams not dependent upon on advertising – moving away from commercial interests and toward citizen-supported news such as memberships. The commercial business model represents the capitalist problematics that assume a news-you-can-use platform, privilege institutional relationships, and perpetuate content as commodity instead of a set of symbols that help people construct meaning.
Conclusion
Journalism seems a logical place to experiment with re-invigoration of common public discourses toward change. After all, despite its partisan roots, journalism in the United States by the 1940s was mandated to help provide a neutral forum for deliberation and charged with guiding communities in the resolution of wicked, shared problems. Yet, for generations, the mainstream press has acted as a political institution in sync with government and other institutions and gradually lost its connections with citizens. Now that citizens are forsaking their blind adherence to these macrostructures of society, a new kind of journalism – one more hyper connected and less institutional – is called for. Journalists need to work across multiple publics by taking up the conjoint problems of communities, discovering and explicating the shared values, and producing content around that value. The press might recognize the distrust in public institutions by questioning those structures and the systemic problems that they yield. In other words, reporters need to de-institutionalize themselves. This approach to these challenges around the individual – the individual reporter, the individual citizen – transforms journalists into co-members within a community. The #Metoo movement with its networked reporting among both amateurs and professionals – all of whom were affected by sexual harassment in the workplace – is a great example of what this can look like. The journalist can work to mitigate these discussions, reminding citizens of the common themes that connect us all, and help people break free from polarized corners to wade into a grounding information flow. Is the journalist’s role to save public democratic institutional relationships with citizens? Probably, given its role as a fourth ‘check’ on government. Primarily, though it is the press’ job to remind citizens that shared discourses must happen for the advancement of our country, localities, and ourselves.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.