The Crisis of the Institutional Press

Stephen D. Reese

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509538041
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

As polarized factions in society pull apart from economic dislocation, tribalism, and fear, and as strident attacks on the press make its survival more precarious, the need for an institutionally organized forum in civic life has become increasingly important. Populist challenges amplified by a counter-institutional media system have contributed to the long-term decline in journalistic authority, exploiting a post-truth mentality that strikes at its very core. In this timely book, Stephen Reese considers these threats through a new conception of the 'hybrid institution': an idea that extends beyond the traditional newsroom, and distributes across multiple platforms, national boundaries, and social actors. What is it about the institutional press that we value, and around what normative standards could a hybrid institution emerge? Addressing these questions, Reese highlights how this is no time to be passive but rather to articulate and defend greater aspirations. The institutional press matters more than ever: a reality that must be communicated to a public that depends on it. The Crisis of the Institutional Press is an essential resource for students and scholars of journalism, media and communication.

1
The Crisis of the Institutional Press

As attacks on the press have become more strident and its survival seemingly more precarious, its importance has become more clear. Indeed, such an institutionally organized forum is needed more than ever to resist the dark side of the internet and provide a centripetal force against the scattered and increasingly polarized factions in society, pulling apart from economic dislocation, tribalism, and fear. Beyond concerns about journalism, media, and news in general, I refer specifically here to the “press,” and the institution that name signifies, or perhaps more redundantly, the “institutional press” of the title. Institutions provide a historically rooted and deeply embedded framework of practices and relationships through which social life is conducted. What happens when that framework is degraded and no longer available to mediate social action? The sports world provides an analogy. Referees enforce a common set of game rules, make judgments, and deliver the news to a player committing an infraction. Threats of violence against these messengers (which journalists essentially are) or a team’s unwillingness to accept the outcome resulting from their judgments make it impossible to have a game at all. The competition becomes a free-for-all with the most ruthless and strongest contender emerging as the seeming winner, but the game is undermined and the victory illegitimate. Indeed, one of the more chilling comments from Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign came in response to a question about whether he would respect the results of the election: “I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election,” he said, before pausing and adding, to the delight of his audience, “If I win” (Lewis, Jacobs, and Siddiqui 2016). Even as president he continues to regard any outcome unfavorable to him not as a result of voter preferences, policy consequences, or economic conditions, but as the fault of a corrupt “deep state” or antagonistic news media. We don’t seem to be playing the same institutional game any more. Is it a boxing match, with Marquis of Queensbury rules, or a street fight? And what are the consequences of abandoning all constraints in a race to the bottom? This concern goes beyond any one political or national movement. Patterns of violence around the US now suggest a climate attributable not to one specific movement or organization, such as the far-right promoting anti-Semitic attacks. The phenomenon has become broader, based on anxiety, fear, and grievance settling, with a New York Hate Crimes Task Force officer lamenting that “It’s every identity targeting every identity” (Bellafante 2018).

The importance of the press to democratic society may have seemed self-evident in years past, but that quaint period has long since passed. The transformation of the media eco-system has weakened professional boundaries, destabilized the news industry and led to what would appear to be a de-institutionalization of journalism. According to the Pew Research Center, newsroom employment has declined by 25 percent since 2008, a figure that includes print, broadcast, cable, and digital-native publishers. The drop was significantly severe for daily newspapers, where the number of newsroom employees decreased by almost 50 percent from 2008 to 2018 – from 71,000 to 38,000.¹

This vastly more diverse news eco-system exhibits growing internal tensions and contradictory signals that are difficult to sort out. For example, the popular success of the movie Spotlight, depicting the Boston Globe’s lengthy investigation of abuse within the Catholic church, and the post-2016 US election uptick in subscriptions to the New York Times and Washington Post suggest there is still an appetite for solid work by professional journalists, but a reporter from that same Washington Post recently said, “We’re losing a large part of the country,” which has given up on mainstream media, “and I don’t think they’re coming back” (Hayes 2017). Not only are they not coming back, they have instead embraced their own parallel universe media that don’t follow the same institutional norms of the traditional press, media that cater to suspicion and fear at the expense of evidence-based reporting. The power of that emotional grievance has been dramatically demonstrated in just the last few years. Calls for exclusion based on appeals to nationalist identity pack a much more powerful punch than calls for pluralism and democracy, especially when backed up by partisan media and their imperative of outrage. Identity politics distort social values into a form of fundamentalism, to the point where a group, race, ethnicity, or religion becomes itself the value. Indeed, the politics of exclusion has no real moral values other than assertion of power and the right to a privileged position.

The press does face a crisis, and the multiple layers of threat make that a justifiable claim, but what exactly constitutes the institution that is the subject of this crisis? For what failings is it appropriately to blame, and what aspects are worth defending? In some respects there has never been such an information abundance; news comes at us conveniently and in great volume, through traditional and newer channels. Alternative, niche, and partisan media have grown, with web traffic on some such sites rivaling legacy news organizations. Conservative Fox News is the most highly rated cable news channel, and online right-wing outlets, including the alt-right’s Breitbart, are among the most frequently visited news sites. Giant social media platforms push news 24-7 to anyone with a smartphone. Meanwhile, news is not just published by news organizations. Nongovernmental organizations, for example, are producing stories about human rights, the environment, and a multitude of other issues, while citizen journalism continues to proliferate. So, has the institution been rendered out of date by this information economy of abundance? A closer look shows that is not the case. The information that seems so abundant is often of low quality, and the so-called “iron core,” accountability function of journalism has been eroded, especially in those areas where commitments to serious local newsgathering have been abandoned. Even if news and information as a broader commodity is more abundant, then, a strong and robust institution dedicated to responsible newsgathering still plays a crucial role. Thus, in the wake of global concern over the health of democratic institutions, and particularly the institutional press, this is a good time to think more clearly about how an institutionalized journalism matters – as a system and accepted framework of providing reliable evidence for decision-making, a counter-weight against political power, a check on authoritarian over-reach, and a way to ensure transparency in public life.

The challenge in answering those questions, though, is to identify the scope of the institution that is evolving, how it’s evolving, and what makes journalism institutional in ways that are not obvious and as easily observed as they once were. In this book I want to think through this idea of the institution, a term that has been applied so loosely and in so many different contexts that it has lost some of its analytical value. Yes, institutions are important, as we may agree, but what are the essential aspects and character of, especially, the journalistic institution, and what are the threats that confront it? Here I would note that if the traditional model of communication research has marked the progression of media messages from senders to receivers, from producers to audiences, my focus is clearly on the production side. That distinction, however, has become much less defensible as the cycle of information anticipates and incorporates audiences into the production of news, as “prosumers.” If my emphasis lies with the institutionalized forces of media content and control, the audience certainly plays an often implicit but important role, not only as participants in the news cycle but as citizens who tolerate or reject the values of the institution and its performance (Reese 2016a; Reese and Shoemaker 2016).

We do need to take this crisis seriously, because it’s not an exaggeration to argue that the fate of democratic governance is at stake. That’s not to say that journalism has been without fault in contributing to a decline in institutional trust, meaning we have to understand those failings and better stipulate which aspects of the institution should be allowed to wither and which should be preserved, and on what basis we choose between them. In recent years, the political threat backed by the surge of populist energy has raised the visibility of journalism, for good and ill; some have been led to better appreciate the importance of the press, while others have had their distrust of the news confirmed even more strongly. Attitudes toward the press obviously track the broader polarization in society, so we need to know how to make better sense of those divisions. That’s why strong institutions are necessary to manage these fractures and channel this energy in healthier directions, supporting values of justice and inclusion. They need to be more responsive to legitimate grievances. So, we need to ask, what institutional structures will best help promote these democratic values?

As we think about the crisis of the institutional press at the professional and political levels, the economic challenge cannot be avoided. How will a robust institution be supported with the resources needed to resist attack, both legal and rhetorical, and carry out an expensive and labor-intensive task, to provide the accountability function provided at the institutional core? Without those resources – whether commercial, philanthropic, or public-state support – the institution will be increasingly susceptible to political and private capture, and its mission co-opted by forces with a different moral calculus. That’s why, as we think more clearly about the emerging institution in an online eco-system, we need to be more explicit about how press performance is defined, and about our normative expectations for journalism in whatever new forms it develops. In the desperation to find an economic lifeline for journalism, these kinds of discussion have not been made a priority. The business of news still needs to be understood within an institutional context.

The idea of crisis, as often interpreted from its Chinese character, is said to combine the idea of danger with opportunity. And that’s an important duality to keep in mind, with an optimistic aspect. The institutional press is certainly in danger, but as I consider the many threats at hand I also want to take a forward-looking view in identifying the possibilities for reform and evolution as the press changes in response to the current threats, in ways I hope will allow it to better serve its function. This chapter lays out the framework of the book, which I briefly review below, with the objective to better understand the institution of journalism, the crisis it confronts, and its value for a democratic society.

The populist threat: a counter-institution

The press is under attack from many sides, and particularly on the political front. These attacks have been perhaps the most visible, with an extreme version casting the press as the “enemy of the people.” Journalism has always played an important role as an antagonist to those in authority, leading Michael Schudson (2010) to have to explain why democracy needs an “unlovable press.” But this historical moment seems particularly worrisome, with a weakened and less self-assured traditional news media confronting a more energized and sustained attack on an international scale. As an extreme case, the Philippines has been called ground-zero of misinformation: since taking office in 2016, President Duterte has threatened to block the renewal of a license for the country’s largest broadcast network, called reporters who ask him tough questions “spies,” and warned them that “just because you’re a journalist you are not exempted from assassination.”² This brand of political populism has driven a counter-institutional antagonism toward the so-called mainstream media, which has weakened public trust in the traditional value of journalism and undermined its epistemological authority. According to a 2018 Ipsos poll, 85 percent of Americans agreed that “Freedom of the press is essential for American democracy,” but the political split is stark. While 29 percent overall agreed that “the news media is the enemy of the American people,” 48 percent of Republicans supported that view. While 26 percent agreed that “the president should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior,” 43 percent of Republicans agreed (Ipsos 2018).

In Silvio Waisbord’s (2018) analysis, populism rejects a communication commons and the possibility of truth as a common good, with popular “truths” always tied to partisan interests and pitted against elite “lies.” Therefore, populism rejects the need for truth-seeking institutions (and their experts) and prefers a self-serving truth, an affirming truth that strengthens the tribe and diminishes the “other.” Perceptions of reality may be shaped by partisan interests, but truth is not reducible to those interests. Authoritarian assertion stands in for institutional arbitration, but we need some agreed-upon means of reliably preventing tribal realities from shrinking in on themselves and of ensuring they have some connection to a consensual set of facts. The value of institutions lies in providing accepted means to seek those reliable truths. Whatever their weaknesses, their procedures can be known and steps taken for self-correction and accountability. Trump didn’t invent populism, but his style of political attack and divisive rhetoric fits the populist tradition of Us vs. Them, with the press being positioned clearly as “them.” He is one of several global leaders taking the populist path to power – from the UK to Brazil to India – and his success has emboldened those around the world to take the extreme measures they may have only secretly contemplated in the past. Even if the US has a strong tradition of press freedom and institutional safeguards, other countries are not so fortunate, and the damage to them will be even greater.

Institutions, in general, have become a more timely concern for disciplinary debates within the university, especially in view of these anti-democratic trends. But there are still different levels of alarm, with political scientists, for example, lacking consensus over the populist threat. While recognizing disturbing trends in Europe and Latin America, some conclude that US institutions are relatively robust, and that Trump’s attacks on the press are fairly benign. His political success, in this view, is regarded as an historical aberration, which will be rectified in due course by the natural workings of the political system. I would take a more alarmist view, concerned that, as with climate change, once an erosion of social structures is allowed to occur the trend may prove irreversible. This is no time to experiment with vital social institutions, even with their observable flaws, without a clear way forward to something better. In his recent research on alt-right extremists, New Yorker writer Andrew Marantz observed their basic nihilism, finding that these reactionaries with online media tools were in it to tear down, not build up: “As for what kind of society might emerge from the ashes, they had no coherent vision, and showed little interest in developing one” (2019: 23). With all the faults of political journalism, he concludes that he is a “reluctant institutionalist,” because “What if it was replaced by something incomparably worse?” (205).

According to recent surveys by the political scientists who are beginning to take this phenomenon seriously, this nihilism is not confined to a few online alt-right trolls, but is rather based on a “need ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. The Crisis of the Institutional Press
• 2. Enemies of the Institution
• 3. Defining the Institution
• 4. The Implicated Institution
• 5. The Emerging Hybrid Institution
• 6. The Sustainable Institution
• 7. Aspirations for the Institution
• Epilogue
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement