Where we are and whither we are tending

It is a terribly difficult time for journalism to assess itself, but all the more reason that self-assessment is necessary. As Abraham Lincoln once put it (in his ‘House Divided’ speech),we need ‘to know where we are and whither we are tending’ before we can ‘better judge what to do and how to do it’. That is precisely the biggest challenge for journalism today – to know where it is and whither it is tending so that we can better judge what to do and how to do it. To put this another way, the biggest challenge for journalism is to assess itself and to find some intellectual equilibrium.

How to do this? I think there are some prerequisite understandings if journalism is to ultimately evaluate where it is and where it is headed. I would list the following:

Journalists and analysts of journalism should recognize that the media are not all-powerful.

If national leaders think the media are all-powerful, the impression that the media are all-powerful will unfortunately become ‘common knowledge’, even though this is not so.

Journalism has had a characteristic failing (that is sometimes also a strength) to prefer the sensational, the startling, the unprecedented, the eye-popping to routine information. That’s why the sad truth is that terrible disasters for some individuals or even whole communities (Chernobyl for Chernobylans, school shootings for the people of those local communities, genocidal massacres) are excellent for journalists. There is thus an inevitable tendency to exaggerate, to hype matters that keep a story in the headlines for days or weeks if possible. That may be good for a community that does not want to be forgotten, especially after a disaster that is continuing as after a flood, earthquake, oil spill, and so on. But it may be bad for the capacity of a society as a whole to operate calmly enough to evaluate itself.

There is also a characteristic tendency in well-meaning journalism to assume that the more democratic, the more inclusive, the more a phenomenon is generated at the grassroots, the more authentic and admirable it must be. Journalists, who may be regarded by many as part of an inner circle or elite, see themselves as professional outsiders and act as snipers against the very notion of expertise. This is in bad faith and it offers bad instruction to the audience. (I have been making this case explicitly since I published a paper in 2006, ‘The Trouble with Experts – And Why Democracies Need Them’, reprinted in my book, Why Democracies Need an Unlovable Press – 2008). There is no reason that monarchies and autocracies of various brands and blends should have the benefit of expertise in guiding policy and public administration while democracies should confine decisions about governing to crowd-sourcing.

With specific reference to communication studies, where the smart, charming, and eloquent voice of Jim Carey has held an outsized influence, I have insisted that Carey’s construction of a ‘Dewey-Lippmann debate’ turned John Dewey’s very favorable review of Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion into a ‘debate’ that it never was and, worse, completely misread Lippmann’s position as one advocating that experts should take charge of governing American democracy. That is not a position Lippmann ever held and, indeed, in Public Opinion he explicitly argued against it.

Now, it may be that what Lippmann wrote in 1922 doesn’t matter very much nor does it matter very much that Carey misunderstood him. What matters, however, is that Carey’s misreading helped to legitimate media scholars’ populist inclinations – that is, their eagerness to see elites as enemies and to view experts as part of an exclusive and inherently anti-democratic cabal.

What does this have to do with arguing that realistic self-assessment is journalism’s greatest need today? The greatest challenge to journalism is to stick to its last – to report deeply, to write clearly, to hold government and other centers of power to account, to put before the public compelling information about a community, a society, and a globe so that a world of recent events can be communicated honestly, accurately, and searchingly. Journalism cannot do this if it is running around like a chicken with its head cut off.

If one looks at the most powerful journalistic feats of the past year or two, almost all of them have come from mainstream news organizations holding power to account – in the United States, this means the New York Times and the New Yorker bringing down Harvey Weinstein and scores of others through the globally reverberating movement of the #metoo campaign. The campaign arose and spread as a bold social movement, and many people can step forward to take credit for courage and ingenuity in this effort, but the silence about workplace sexual harassment and sexual abuse was broken by the dogged reporting of two conventional news organizations. At about the same time, Washington Post reporting ended Michael Flynn’s brief career as White House national security advisor; Politico brought Tom Price’s career as Secretary of Health and Human Services to a sudden halt. We are a very long way from living in a post-truth era! That people believe falsehoods is at least as old as Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 story about the emperor’s new clothes. That falsehoods circulate widely is much older still. Does the Internet offer new possibilities for lies just as it offers new opportunities for truths? Yes. Do social media complicate and confuse prior understandings about what news is and how it circulates? Yes. But we should not imagine that all prior journalistic bets are off. On the contrary, assessing where we are requires that we look closely at the instances of continuing journalistic effectiveness and the continuing expectation in both long-standing and newly founded news organizations that a search for truth guides what journalism should be about.

One of the troubles with a media-saturated world is that we are pushed to see everything as new, everything as transformative, everything as prompting or issuing from profound crisis, everything discussed in boldface type, big headlines, and multiple exclamation marks. But though we live culturally more and more online, we also live as we always did, embodied, and in one place at a time. We carry devices through which we are in touch with a wider world, but we are in touch from our own homes, neighborhoods, workplaces, worrying about our own families and friends and love lives, and whether there’s enough milk in the fridge for tomorrow’s breakfast.

Our anxieties about the future of journalism or the fate of the earth are located here, in this prosaic world, where they must compete with many concerns that have no headlines, no exclamations. There is plenty of reason for concern about a rapidly shifting context for journalism, but we should give this full consideration in relation to journalism’s impressive continuities. Look at the Spielberg film, ‘The Post’, dramatizing the Washington Post’s efforts to catch up to the New York Times in its momentous publication of the ‘Pentagon Papers’. That was 1971. Look at the most probing coverage of the Trump administration in 2017 and 2018, and I think one would have to agree that those very same two newspapers are at the top of their game in tough, probing reporting, setting an agenda for news coverage that towers over most of what other news organizations are doing. There’s a half-century and an entire technological revolution between these two moments. That’s a part of journalism’s story today that also has to be weighed in determining where we are and whither we might be tending.