The Dynamics of News

Journalism in the 21st-Century Media Milieu

Richard M. Perloff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351233491
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This new and highly readable textbook by Richard M. Perloff introduces students to the complex world of contemporary news and its theoretical underpinnings, engaging with debates and ethical quandaries.

The book takes readers on a concept-guided tour of the contours, continuities, and changing features of news. It covers a huge breadth of topics including: the classic theories of what news should do, its colorful history in America and popular myths of news, the overarching forces involved in contemporary news gathering, critical economic determinants of news and social system influences, and innovative trends in the future of journalism. Drawing on scholarship in the fields of journalism studies and sociology of news, Perloff offers readers a critical, in-depth exploration of news filled with relevant examples from newspapers, newscasts, and social media.

Students of journalism, communication, sociology, politics, and related courses, as well as inquisitive scholars, will find this book's intellectual focus enriching, the writing and examples engaging, and the thoroughness of its search of the contemporary media scene invigorating. Boxes summarizing theory and key concepts help students to deepen their understanding of both what news is now and its future.

Part I

Foundations

1 Prologue

News in a Fragmented Age

A routine day in the verdant, storied city of Greensboro, North Carolina: Rufus Scales, 26, was driving his pickup truck, taking his younger brother, Devin, to a class in haircutting, doing the older brother thing, helping Devin learn the tools of the hairstyling trade. In a heartbeat, life changed, as the unmistakable shriek of a police siren pierced the air and the young men, both Black, stared at the blue light of a police car in their rear-view mirror. Two officers ambled out, pulling them over for minor violations that included expired license plates. What happened next was neither minor nor routine.

Unsure whether to leave the car, Rufus tried to keep his brother from opening the door when a Black officer shot Rufus with a Taser gun, stunning him, temporarily immobilizing him as a White officer lugged him across the road. By the time the incident ended, Rufus had a chipped tooth, a bloody upper lip that required stitches, and four traffic tickets, including assaulting a police officer. Traumatized by the encounter, which occurred back in May 2013, Devin now carries a small video camera and business card embossed with a toll-free phone number for legal assistance wherever he goes. Whenever he sees a police car, he turns away immediately. “Whenever one of them is near, I don’t feel comfortable. I don’t feel safe,” he said.

So began a banner-headlined Sunday New York Times story, written in the wake of deaths of unarmed Blacks at the hands of police, deaths that stoked national controversy about police, prejudice, and crime prevention. The Times article, featured under the memorable headline, “The Disproportionate Risks of Driving While Black,” was written in the classic style of contemporary journalism: dispassionate tone, source attributions, interviews with a variety of victims of police harassment, and comments from both sides in the controversy – police and civil rights leaders, with corroborative findings from both academic research and a Times analysis of thousands of traffic stops in Greensboro over a five-year period (LaFraniere & Lehren, 2015).

Combining powerful anecdotes with social-scientific research, reporters Sharon LaFraniere and Andrew W. Lehren came to a hard-hitting conclusion: Greensboro police officers pulled over African American drivers for traffic infractions at a rate that was disproportionate to their share of the city’s driving population. They stopped Black drivers more than twice as frequently as their White counterparts, even though they consistently found drugs and guns significantly more often when the motorist was White.

The Times story attracted considerable national attention, befitting an investigative article in the nation’s venerable elite newspaper. Intriguingly, in a sign-of-the-times development, the article recruited more than 1,000 thoughtful comments from Times readers; yet a video that younger brother Devin Scales posted on Facebook a year after the incident, which showed a White police officer cursing at him for no apparent reason while he walked down a residential street (later arresting him), recruiting not 1,000, but 10,000 likes.

More than a year later, another incident of police violence against African Americans occurred, this one in the Midwest, not the South, and it too captured national attention. It was documented not by reporters working for a mainstream media outlet, but by a young woman, in an electrifyingly tense, life-and-death situation, where her boyfriend was shot by a frightened young police officer.

The story, live-streamed on Facebook in July, 2016, began with the image of a Black woman, Diamond Reynolds, sitting in the passenger seat of a car, her anchor-woman-calm voice pleading with her boyfriend to “Stay with me,” as she narrated a series of gripping and ultimately tragic events. Viewers watch as Diamond Reynolds speaks to her boyfriend, Philando Castile, collapsed on the driver’s seat, blood oozing from a white T-shirt, a police officer aiming a gun through the car window, as Ms. Reynolds’s 4-year-old daughter sits in the back seat of the car.

“Please, officer, don’t tell me that you just did this to him,” she pleads. “You shot four bullets into him, sir. He was just getting his license and registration, sir” (Bosman, 2016). According to Diamond’s video, Castile, driving a white Oldsmobile near Minneapolis, was pulled over by police for a broken taillight, informed the officer he had a licensed gun in the car, reached to retrieve his identification, and the police officer fired the shots that killed Castile. Less than a day after the tragic incident, the video had been viewed more than 4 million times on Facebook. It was a powerful visual that related a compelling “story of race and law enforcement in America,” playing out “a life-or-death interaction” in real time between a Black woman and a Latino police officer trying mightily to do an impossibly difficult job, but tragically executing his duties with excessive force – or so her video suggested (Poniewozik, 2016). A jury later acquitted the officer, concluding he had reason to fear for his life, although the video told a different story.

And then, a year later, the scourge of racial animus never ending in America, a group of White supremacists violently tangled with protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia in August, 2017, leaving one person dead at the hands of a deranged Supremacist car driver, as the nation wondered how a group of men could be so filled with hate to protest the city’s decision to remove a Confederate statue painfully associated with the country’s racist past. This time the story was not covered by a mainstream news organization or a pained citizen, but by a courageous reporter from Vice News, an online public affairs channel. The 22-minute video, “Charlottesville: Race and Terror” (which would capture more than 6 million YouTube views), dramatically recreated the chronology of events, beginning with an electrifying frisson of verbal violence, as young Supremacists, carrying placards and torchlights, marched through the University of Virginia inexplicably, but hatefully, chanting, “Jews will not replace us. Whose streets? Our streets! White lives matter.”

The video cuts to White supremacist leader Christopher Cantwell, a bald, brawny, unapologetic tribal leader, greeting his troops, asking them where they travelled from to arrive at the rally, and moves to a one-on-one interview between Elle Reeve, a bespectacled young Vice reporter, and Cantwell. Reeve looks beyond exasperated as Cantwell delivers prejudiced epithets, but maintains her composure. The cameras roll as the Charlottesville protest unfolds, counter-protesters challenge the White supremacists, and a fight erupts. Clearly appalled by what she hears, Reeve lets her sources tell the story. Without filtering or amplifying with broader evidence, she shows, not tells, relating footage of interviews and action, climaxing with a Supremacist’s car deliberately ramming into counter-protesters and the shocked reaction, the narrative eerily ending as Cantwell, brandishing multiple guns, proudly justifies the car violence against his rivals, calling them “a bunch of stupid animals,” proclaiming his desire to build a White ethno-state, as the rapid drumming in the aural background provides a haunting conclusion to the news video.

In providing a heartrending education about the realities of race and police work in America, the media performed a service, illuminating both racial inequities and the challenges police face. Without coverage by media, broadly defined, news about the poisonous problem of racial strife, one of the oldest and most critical issues facing the nation, would go unreported, its import unknown to the public and its leaders. But the three stories – one in The Times, harnessing the detached canons of traditional journalism; the Vice story, told via an online news channel, dispassionately narrated, but with a clear political slant; and the third, a citizen’s account, viscerally situated in the moment – emotional, immediate, dramatic, with no attempt to get beyond a personal tragedy – illustrate three very different story-telling techniques, differing in form, content, news-gathering strategies, verifiability of the evidence presented, and degree to which personal perspectives richly informed the story. The stories offer a spectacularly contemporary window into the nature of journalism in a time of dizzying change (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 In a digital online age, the media describe the scourge of racial prejudice in dramatically different ways. Figure 1.1a depicts a protest against stop and frisk, the focus of a classically in-depth New York Times investigation of racial profiling in Greensboro, North Carolina. Figure 1.1b shows Diamond Reynolds, comforted by a local minister. Reynolds live-streamed on Facebook the violent, tragic story of how a Minneapolis officer, fearing for his life, fatally shot her boyfriend as he reached to retrieve his identification. Figure 1.1c depicts demonstrators wielding Confederate flags and the Nazi Party Eagle, the focus of an impassioned Vice News story on a violent Charlottesville, Virginia protest of the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. The three stories showcase the strikingly different ways that media narrate, verify, and portray stories about racial issues, underscoring the variegated, complex nature of contemporary news.

On a broader level, underscoring a focus of this book, these media accounts are a continuing, vexing testament to American journalism’s struggle to apprehend social problems, in this case the role played by race in America – a journey that has moved from sensationalized newspaper accounts of late 19th-century lynchings that blithely assumed Blacks were guilty of heinous, frequently invented crimes (Mindich, 1998; Perloff, 2000; Stabile, 2006) to 1960-style path-breaking coverage that illuminated racial segregation in the South (Roberts & Klibanoff, 2006), through the non-stop, entertainment-glazed television focus on the O.J. Simpson trial in the 1990s that treated Simpson as an archetype, a symbol, and commodity for the expansion of cable news, and, finally, to the multifaceted journalism of today, with its impassioned stories of racial injustice, sometimes marred by insufficient journalistic empathy for marginalized perspectives in minority communities, as well as ethical tensions between reporters’ traditional emphasis on detachment and a feeling on the part of communities of color that more active engagement is needed to establish trust (Robinson & Culver, 2019). Even as journalism becomes inseparable from the contemporary digital sphere, it continues to wrestle with time-honored cultural and structural issues in American society, underscoring the inseparability of news, society, power, and culture.

With these examples in mind, this chapter moves to introduce the broad contours of news, offering an overview to the book. The next section describes the overarching reasons why news is important to democratic society, ways news falls short, and the daunting political issues facing news during an era when it is in flux, maligned by political leaders and misunderstood by the public. To underline the importance of news, as well as its illustrious history, a boxed section offers a thumbnail sketch of continuities of news over the centuries that preceded the 21st.

Introducing the Issues

News plays an indispensable role in a democratic society. As the storied architect of the Bill of Rights, James Madison, emphasized, democracy cannot function properly if individuals are ill-informed about government.

“News matters,” scholars Graham Meikle and Guy Redden (2011, p. 1) observed. Focusing on a contemporary value of news – public discourse – long associated with political philosopher Jürgen Habermas (1989) and communication scholar James W. Carey (1987), they note:

It remains the main forum for discussion of issues of public importance. It offers an arena in which journalists and media firms, politicians, other high-status sources of information and audiences come together to inform, persuade, influence, endorse or reject one another in a collaborative process of making meaning from events.

News is important for other reasons. It monitors and describes the world in which we live, explains and interprets complex events, fosters empathy for those marginalized or afflicted by tragedies, and cultivates accountability of leaders to citizens by serving as an autonomous check of power, famously exemplified by newspaper exposés of the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal, and the never-ending cases of powerful men from Hollywood to Congress to blue-collar automobile plants sexually exploiting women. At its best, a Columbia University Journalism School report noted:

Journalism exposes corruption, draws attention to injustice, holds politicians and businesses accountable for their promises and duties. It informs citizens and consumers, helps organize public opinion, explains complex issues and clarifies essential disagreements.

(Gajda, 2015, p. 226)

Those are the guiding ideals, but it doesn’t always work this way. News outlets, particularly at the local level, frequently lack the resources necessary for first-rate investigative reporting, as a result of plummeting newspaper revenues (Hamilton, 2016). The glorious exposés cited above are invariably the exception, as journalists frequently prop up the powers-that-be, their stories cheerleading questionable foreign interventions and, on the local level, giving wholesale support to downtown development projects that rarely come close to fulfilling highfalutin promises (Berkowitz, 2007; Feldstein, 2007; Herman & Chomsky, 2002). Far from illuminating the public sector, news is consumed by the sexy, dramatic, and trivial aspects of politics – lascivious affairs, poll results, idle speculation about the political horse race, endless political celebrity gossip, as television reporters prioritize these stories over deeper coverage of issues that could engage the citizenry (Patterson, 1993). Too many stories, written with an eye to capturing attention on the ubiquitous Internet where so much of the public attention is focused, can take on the trappings of a much-discussed video on the online news site, Buzzfeed, famous for its listicles and cat videos gone viral (Tandoc, 2018).

In April, 2016, two BuzzFeed staffers wrapped a bunch of rubber bands around the center of a huge berry watermelon, causing it to e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Image Credits
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• PART I: Foundations
• PART II: What Makes News Tick? Concepts, Controversies, and Conclusions
• Index