Mixed News

The Public/civic/communitarian Journalism Debate

Jay Black, Jay Black

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136685163
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume addresses some of the central issues of journalism today -- the nature and needs of the individual versus the nature and needs of the broader society; theories of communitarianism versus Enlightenment liberalism; independence versus interdependence (vs. co-dependency); negative versus positive freedoms; Constitutional mandates versus marketplace mandates; universal ethical issues versus situational and/or professional values; traditional values versus information age values; ethics of management versus ethics of worker bees; commitment and compassion versus detachment and professional "distance;" conflicts of interest versus conflicted disinterest; and "talking to" versus "talking with." All of these issues are discussed within the framework of the frenetic field of daily journalism--a field that operates at a pace and under a set of professional standards that all but preclude careful, systematic examinations of its own rituals and practices. The explorations presented here not only advance the enterprise, but also help student and professional observers to work through some of the most perplexing dilemmas to have faced the news media and public in recent times. This lively volume showcases the differing opinions of journalistic experts on this significant contemporary issue in public life. Unlike previous books and monographs which have tended toward unbridled enthusiasm about public journalism, and trade press articles which have tended toward pessimism, this book offers strong voices on several sides of this complex debate. To help inform the debate, a series of "voices"--journalistic interviews with practitioners and critics of public journalism -- is interspersed throughout the text. At the end of each essay, a series of quotes from a wide variety of sources -- "In other words..." -- augments each chapter with ideas and insights that support and contradict the points used by each chapter author.

1 Community, Public, and Journalism

James W. Carey
Columbia University

Community is one of the most difficult, complex, and ambiguous words in our language. It is a contested concept, one that represents or gathers to it contradictory, mutually exclusive images, meanings sacred and profane by turn. For many, community has a positive image—blessed community: the restoration or creation of an ideal way of life and a redemptive form of social relations. Community names a way of life where something more and other than the values of the market—"the almighty dollar," in common expression—holds sway. However, while community is for many a beacon of hope, it is for others, perhaps many more, a sign of despair, desperation, and despondency.

To some, and not only economic conservatives and libertarians, community is the nightmare word of the twentieth century. Press the word very hard and it yields images of communism, collectivism, and the oppressive power of the state—all the totalitarianisms of our time. However well intentioned and noble, the invocation of community yields a vector that runs from its utterance to Orwell's (1949) Airstrip One, a world of total surveillance, the pitiless dirernption of all forms of privacy and individuality, a world of total conformity. At the opening of 1984, Winston Smith struggles to find a space out of eyeshot and earshot of Big Brother and the omnipresent two-way television screen where "the last man in Europe" might escape the community and hold on to his dignity by making entries into that most personal thing, a written diary. All he wants is private space and a notebook, yet he finally discovers that even at such moments he is under observation from the state. At the end of the novel a transformed Winston sits mindlessly staring at the television screen in the Chestnut Tree Cafe, shorn of every defense by which the self might ward off the invasive power of the state. The Last Man in Europe, the last figure of European civilization before it was ground out in a wave of state sponsored domination, is without love, honor, reason, or conscience, the virtues that must give way to the total community. The architect of that community is O'Brien, the intellectual apparachik, who is clearminded concerning the final destination of the "quest for community."

In Orwell's world of socially sanctioned cruelty, the only recognizable life is lived in the pubs among the proletariat, a group now rendered harmless. It is only in the pub that Winston hears anything resembling conversation, the only place it is possible to talk to anyone without surveillance. Even in the upper room, the site of Winston's idyll with Julia, he is unknowingly under the gaze of the state. In Airstrip One, there is no private life, but there is no public life, either.

Community has another image in our time, equally satanic, though more benign in its typical rendition: the oppressive suffocating enclosure of the small town, Main Street, the babbitry of everything we have spent a lifetime trying to escape. This is the small town of peeping ears and peeping Toms, a world of gossip, innuendo, and ostracism for all who resist its strict mandate of conformity. Such small worlds may exist even

"We apparently want a virtual community rather than a real one ... one that simulates or imitates qualities of a common life and a common culture without the physical or emotional geography of the small town, the centralized power of the state, or the exclusive dominion of the market."

within the largest city, for they represent everything that suppresses and suffocates us, keeps us under the perpetual surveillance of our neighbors. This suffocating image of community is brought forward each time nostalgia for the world we have lost, for the world before our fall and loss of innocence, is held out as an ideal. Community is made to represent the provincial life we have been trying to exit and to which, paradoxically, we are romantically, magnetically drawn. We are, as I have put it on other occasions, a people who are forever creating new communities and then promptly trying to figure a way to get out of town. The City on the Hill that names the national aspiration also names the national nightmare.

Given these dominant images of community in the twentieth century, why does the word hang on in the language as a hope and aspiration, a national romance? Presumably none of us aspires to the world of Orwell or Sinclair Lewis (1920), but they are the inevitable endpoints, or so it seems, to which we are dragged against our will by the invocation of community. If it is the case that none of us are looking for community, what is it we do want? We apparently want a virtual community rather than a real one, something less than a community as it has been historically understood but containing remnants of community life. A virtual community is one that simulates or imitates qualities of a common life and a common culture without the physical or emotional geography of the small town, the centralized power of the state, or the exclusive dominion of the market. And, a virtual community is one based on certain virtues, the virtues identified with the long tradition of civic humanism: tolerance, fellow-feeling, reason, public engagement existing alongside genuine privacy. But is it possible to pursue this image of a virtual community and still escape the fate of Winston Smith and Babbitt? That is the minefield we have to navigate.

Defining "Community"

As Robert Fowler (1991) has deftly outlined, there are a number of concepts of community currently at work among us. We inherited from the politics of the 1960s a image of the participatory community, a life of endless democracy in which we are fully devoted to the engagements of citizenship, participating not only in politics but in economics and all the institutions of social life. Others are searching for a community of roots, something that will withstand the blinding obsolescence that infects all objects and social relations. Today, the metaphor for roots is the family, though new "families" based on race, gender, and ethnicity are represented as symbols of new rooted communities. The ideal of a religious community, formally united in sanctified and shared belief, has, if anything, gained in adherents in recent decades, although it has always played a major part in the American imagining of the very meaning of the country. In recent years, at least since we have grown accustomed to seeing "spaceship earth" photographed via satellite from "out there," a new conception of an ecological community, a global community uniting everyone in shared fate of survival on a unitary planet, has taken up residence in popular imagination. Finally, and paradoxically the most potent vision of community among us is the anti-communal image of the independent self, the community of one. The self who has absorbed all the necessary resources of living into private capital is perhaps the most viscous and illusory of the dreams of reason that animate the nation.

I do not have much truck with any of these conceptions of community, for they all pretty much are based on a Utopian vision shorn of history. The dreams of a community of one or a community of endless participation, a fully private or fully public life, must have a common ending in totalitarianism. An ecological community is too broad and devoid of solidarity to be useful, and a religious community to narrow and exclusive to do much other than damage. A virtual community models, then, a middle way, a balance point where we can avoid the tyranny of extremes toward which we are pulled as in a gravitational field in which one pole is anchored in the market and the self and the other in the state and the social. To give this image a name, if only to provide a stick with which others can beat it, let us call it the image of a republican community.

The Republican Community

If the notion of a republican community is to avoid the nightmare world for which many would find it predestined, what meanings does it have to recover? Put differently, what does the notion of a republican community attempt, however artlessly, to express?

First, "community" attempts to hold on to and express the truism that,

"The word "community" attempts to make vivid the interdependency of all life, in war and peace, and the fact that we inevitably share a common life boat and, therefore, owe one another the terrible loyalty of passengers on a fragile craft."

however disguised by the conditions of modern living, we live fully interdependent lives. The notion of the self-sufficient individual, the self that contains within his or her own person the resources necessary to a full life, is the single most pervasive image and myth of our time. The interdependency of the self is masked by virtually all the facts and images of modem life. Put differently, modern life disguises our interdependence. It cultivates quite systematically the notion that we can live by our possessions and that our possessions include our opinions, our values, our language, our capacity to deal with trauma and tragedy, our economic means, and our political existence.

To live in a community is to be aware that one's life depends on the uncoordinated decencies and actions of others; that life would constantly fail without the invisible contributions of others who with us inhabit the polity and the economy. In modern life interdependency only becomes apparent when the technology fails, the electric power goes off, the garbage workers go on strike and we are threatened by suffocation in our own filth, or, interestingly enough, in times of war, those anti-modern interludes such as World Wars I and II, when our mutual dependencies are rendered transparent by the need to consciously work toward common goals. The word "community" attempts to make vivid the interdependency of all life, in war and peace, and the fact that we inevitably share a common life boat and, therefore, owe one another the terrible loyalty of passengers on a fragile craft.

A Flawed Economic Model

In addition to this "fact" concerning our common life, the word community attempts to recover a philosophical point as well concerning the limits of individualism. Perhaps those limits can be explored indirectly through a brief but common example from economics. Classes in elementary economics almost inevitably begin by illustrating the laws of supply and demand. The teacher dutifully demonstrates how the demand curve slopes down to the left (more is demanded as the price goes down) and the supply curve upward to the right (more is supplied as the price goes up). Equilibrium between supply and demand occurs at the price where the two curves intersect. The teacher then summarizes the analysis using the two most elementary equations of the discipline: the demand equation stating that the quantity demanded of any commodity is inversely proportional to its price, and the supply equation stating that the quantity supplied of any commodity is directly proportional to its price. What is sometimes, but not always, mentioned by the teacher is that truth of these equations depends on certain assumptions that precede and support the analysis of supply and demand. The two crucial assumptions are, first of all, that, in the language of my student days, all of us are rational and, second, that tastes and preferences are given or exogenous. So stated the assumptions sound innocent enough—but what do they mean?

The assumption that all of us are rational makes a largely technical point. It states that individuals are rational in the sense that they are adept at figuring out the most efficient, economical, or costless means of getting what they want. The assumption says nothing about the rationality of ends, of what people desire; in fact, it allows that people desire the most harebrained and thoughtless sorts of things—power, prestige, emotional satisfactions of all kinds—that we rarely think of as rational. Again, the assumption merely says that once people have found an object of desire they are quite capable of calculating the most efficient, least costly way of getting what it is they want. All people can calculate to their own advantage, and so rationality means little more than observing a contest over whose ox will be gored.

The second assumption completes the groundwork of the analysis, for it tells us that not only are people's desires, the objects of their wants, beyond the scope of reason, but every person's desires are independent of every other person's. This is what it means to state that tastes and preferences are given or exogenous to the system: To analyze the conditions of supply and demand you simply have to assume there is no logic or reason to people's tastes and preferences and each individual's desire is independent of that of every other. I like poetry, you like baseball. We will both figure out how to get what we want in the most efficient manner, at the lowest cost in terms of time, effort, and dollars. But we are otherwise unrelated to one another: You may be a means to my end and I may be a means to your end, but there is otherwise no presumed membership in a community—no desires in common, no cooperation necessary, no shared rationality except that of calculation.

Economics achieves its precision, then, at a very high price, for it paints a picture of a society without community, unless one chooses to call the market a community. It assumes people have no need for community and, furthermore, they have nothing in common with which to form a community: no common needs, no common values, no common investments in the future. When Margaret Thatcher (Rankin, 1996, p. 154) remarked a few years back at the height of her reign that "we have no need for society," she was testifying to the power of elementary economics: We only have need for individuals aggressively pursuing their own selfinterest. And, if we have no need for society or, for that matter, government, we certainly have no need for that more intense and conscious form of society represented in the word community. The only necessary institution is the invisible hand of the market which, in coordinating all our disconnected needs and desires, supplies whatever community is necessary.

Insights From Social Theory

Virtually all of the major figures in the classical tradition of social theory revolted against this economic outlook. The arguments of Marx are well known. Emile Durkheim (1965) in one book, The Division of Labor in Society, pointed out that you could not have any economic activity without formal contracts. However, a contract presumes a common culture. In other words, without elementary particles of trust and mutual understanding, loyalty, and mutual regard, it would prove impossible to efficiently operate economic institutions in which individuals entered into contracts with one another. Why would I enter a contract unless I presume you will fulfill your obligations without the omnipresent enforcement of the law? In a later work, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Durkheim (1995) emphasized the necessary role that collective representations—shared beliefs and their manifestation in common symbolic forms—were to all social order. Like Durkheim, Max Weber (1974) emphasized the role religion played in providing the substratum of meanings, motivations, and mutual outlooks—the so-called Protestant ethic— on which rational economic activity was based. And even more disturbingly, he characterized a world in which instrumental reason—the kind celebrated in the economics of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Contributors
• Chapter 1 Community, Public, and Journalism
• Chapter 2 The Common Good and Universal Values
• Chapter 3 Ruminations About the Communitarian Debate
• Chapter 4 Communitarianism's Rhetorical War Against Enlightenment Liberalism
• Chapter 5 A Dangerous Drift? The Sirens' Call to Collectivism
• Chapter 6 The American Newspaper As the Public Conversational Commons
• Chapter 7 Public Journalism and the Prospects for Press Accountability
• Chapter 8 A Crisis of Conscience: Is Community Journalism the Answer?
• Chapter 9 The Ethics of Civic Journalism: Independence As the Guide
• Chapter 10 Public Journalism, Independence, and Civic Capital . . . Three Ideas in Complete Harmony
• Chapter 11 A First Amendment Perspective on Public Journalism
• Chapter 12 Communitarian and Environmental Journalism
• Chapter 13 The Problem of Compassionate Journalism
• Annotated Bibliography
• Index