NYU's Jay Rosen: What I Think I Know About Journalism

[Hissyspit]

http://pressthink.org/2011/04/what-i-think-i-know-about-journalism

What I Think I Know About Journalism
April 26th, 2011 by Jay Rosen

Next month I will have taught journalism at New York University for 25 years, an occasion that has led me to reflect on what I have tried to profess in that time.
Or, to put it another way, what I think I know about journalism.

It comes down to these four ideas.

1. The more people who participate in the press the stronger it will be.
2. The profession of journalism went awry when it began to adopt the View from Nowhere.
3. The news system will improve when it is made more useful to people.
4. Making facts public does not a public make; information alone will not inform us.

- snip -

The profession of journalism went awry when it began to adopt the View from Nowhere.

It’s Bill Keller insisting that “torture” is the wrong word for the New York Times to use in describing torture because it involves taking sides in a dispute between the United States Government and its critics. It’s Howard Kurtz suggesting that Anderson Cooper was “taking sides” when he called the lies of the Libyan government lies. But it’s also the reporter who has to master the routine of “laundering my own views dinging someone at some think tank to say what you want to tell the reader.” And it’s that lame formula known as he said, she said journalism. It’s the way CNN “leaves it there” when two guests give utterly conflicting accounts.

MORE AT LINK

[gratuitous]

1. I tend to agree

Sometimes there are just two sides to a story. There's no way, really, to adjudicate the differing viewpoints. Think of the old story about five blind men inspecting an elephant: The one holding the tail thinks an elephant is like a rope, the one pressing on the elephant's side thinks an elephant is like a wall, the one with his arms around the elephant's leg thinks it's like a tree, and so forth. They're all correct in their way, but in a full context, they're all incorrect.

But there are times when there isn't a dispute, merely someone posturing for political advantage. The Keller example from the New York Times is quite apt: Torture is torture, and it doesn't matter what the accused torturer calls it. The Ryan budget proposal would be the end of Medicare, replacing a limited single-payer system with a program of vouchers and tax credits to buy health insurance. Politifact would like to pretend that Ryan's scheme would still be called "Medicare," so it wouldn't be the end of Medicare. No, it IS the end of Medicare, and the qualifier "as we know it" is unnecessary. If you call a dog's tail a leg, a dog still only has four legs - calling the tail a leg doesn't make it one.

Responsible journalism will land on the side of the truth, not allow itself to be buffaloed by nonsense masquerading as "another point of view."

[azul]

2. I think the news, journalism, has been changed to sell stuff, not inform

so much. The authoritative voice of the sponsors calms us to keep buying crap, and occasionally has to shock with fear to cover criminal activity. But keep the boat generally un-rocked and buying into the sales pitch.

"You Don't Understand Our Audience"

By John Hockenberry
*****
This was one in a series of lessons I learned about how television news had lost its most basic journalistic instincts in its search for the audience-driven sweet spot, the "emotional center" of the American people. Gone was the mission of using technology to veer out onto the edge of American understanding in order to introduce something fundamentally new into the national debate. The informational edge was perilous, it was unpredictable, and it required the news audience to be willing to learn something it did not already know. Stories from the edge were not typically reassuring about the future. In this sense they were like actual news, unpredictable flashes from the unknown. On the other hand, the coveted emotional center was reliable, it was predictable, and its story lines could be duplicated over and over. It reassured the audience by telling it what it already knew rather than challenging it to learn. This explains why TV news voices all use similar cadences, why all anchors seem to sound alike, why reporters in the field all use the identical tone of urgency no matter whether the story is about the devastating aftermath of an earthquake or someone's lost kitty.

www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19845/page3/