The Big J

In 2004, after George W. Bush took the presidency for a second term, Jay Rosen, journalism professor at NYU, wondered if the mainstream press wasn't becoming more of a lap dog than a watchdog.

"I believe Big Journalism cannot respond as it would in previous years: with bland vows to cover the Adminstration fairly and a firm intention to make no changes whatsoever in its basic approach to politics and news. The situation is too unstable, the world is changing too rapidly, and political journalism has been pretending for too long that an old operating system will last forever. It won’t. It can’t. Particularly in the face of an innovative Bush team and its bold thesis about the fading powers of the press."

Too often in mainstream media today, the desire for “objectivity” undermines the need for historical and contextual framing of the issues, severely reducing the quality of the news. The rise of capitalism and a consumer-driven market, public disengagement from the issues, distrust for the press, political attacks on the press’s credibility and failures within the institution of journalism are responsible in varying degrees for the current dismal state of the media. However, the history of journalism is riddled with public dissatisfaction and the deleterious effects of commercialization. Nonetheless, what seems to affect news content more than any other factor is the prevailing ideology of the times.

In Herbert Altschull’s From Milton to McLuhan, periods of optimism followed the rise of America, industrialization and the end of World War II, just as pessimism trailed the Great Depression and the Vietnam War. Within the ebb and flow of optimism and pessimism, the stages of America’s development influence the stages of American journalism. After all, as Altschull points out, “David Hume held that goodness could be defined only in terms of the standards existing in particular times and places, by customs, habits and conventions. Journalism is a practice where convention is king.”

What defines American journalism today is the convention of today. Prior to 9/11 we had a press and a public preoccupied with entertainment and trivialities, caught up in consumerism and celebrities. Now, though frustration and distrust emanate from public opinion polls and news analyses, following government scandals, political manipulation and failures, Americans are no more educated or socially engaged than they were at the beginning of 2001. Society increasingly moves toward a liberal individualism where, citizens become merely individuals and communities become obsolete. Liberal individualism defines the capitalistic notion of emphasizing individual worth and need over those of the collective. As such, education becomes a training ground for future professionals and anthropology, history and philosophy become electives.

In the information age of today, bubbles of information replace history and context, dooming the public and the press to repeat mistakes of the past. As Harvard philosopher, George Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The press also has forgotten its history, its era of social responsibility, of muckraking of optimism and pessimism. As if the press had come down with a case of Alzheimers, it remembers only the basics of daily operation, like walking, talking and eating. The ideology is pragmatism, not as John Dewey or Walter Lippmann would have it, but pragmatism poorly defined as the concrete systematic process whereby truth is unearthed. The motto, Altschull writes, is: “Ideas do not exist independently in the mind; they only arrive in terms of our experiences, in facts and not thought.”

Journalism comes to resemble a trade, like welding, rather than a public service for the public good. Through the glorification of objectivity, many would argue that journalism does not predicate an ideology, but rather the lack of one. However, the denial of an ideology is an ideology. Objectivity is rationalization without the human will. Rationalization has become America’s ideology. Some of the staunchest critics of the West defined this ideology as timidity and stability, rather than human action guided by sheer will or volunteerism. Rationalization, or objectivity, in journalism means that journalists pretend they do not hold the preconceived notions, adopted from cultural norms, myths and values, they then unconsciously use to judiciously frame the stories they write. Rather, journalists should attempt to recognize their presocialized conceptions and seek new perspectives and understandings on which to contrast their own to form as accurate a portrayal of reality they possibly can. In this way, the media could begin producing content that penetrates beneath the propagandist interpretation of the truth. Coverage would then convey to Americans a reality that puts into question the liberal individualism that premises political opinions on the issues affecting minority low-income communities and the welfare of the nation in the future as a whole, because as Michael Foucault said, power “traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression.”