Hartley

In many ways, Hartley reminds me of James Carey. He wishes to speak about popular reality and about journalism in terms of symbol systems and in terms of culture. He wishes to think about readers rather than audiences, and views readers as participants in the sense-making process of producing culture. Hartley finds journalism to be one of the most important textual systems of modernity; however, he does distinguish between the mainstream press (prestige press) and more “base forms” such as the commercial and tabloid press. He argues that popular journalism – the commercial press—unites in a “common humanity” whereby readers are united in a “familial, informal participation”(16). This seems to be coming quite close to Carey’s assessment that news is one of the rituals that order daily life. However, Hartley is willing to get more specific with regard to journalism’s role as a modern text, even if his vision of journalism escapes the traditional boundaries and sees “trash” press as just as valid as other forms of news media. Hartley argues that journalism is a “textual system of modernity which allows it to be considered as a whole (i.e. across and beyond various binary divides) and at some time allows changes to be viewed historically (i.e. across modernity) (28). In this regard, a community of readers develops and is connected to the larger public.

What happens within mainstream journalism is a struggle over who can count as knowers in a situation where who controls knowledge is granted a certain degree of power. Hartley makes an interesting point here that may be useful for my discussion of the kind of news that online journalism “does well” – that mainstream journalism is a struggle between journalists and critical intellectuals who are engaged in a struggle that is inherently anti-democratic, relies on binaries and is unique because they rarely own the journalism they use (26). Interestingly and perhaps contrary to many Marxist theorists, Hartley does not see the control over knowledge as a class struggle about the ownership of production.

Interesting to my discussion of journalism here is that Hartley calls for a breakdown of the binaries of journalism (see notes) and argues that the distinctions between trash and the prestige press are more a product of journalists and critical intellectuals rather than actual reflections of reality. He demands an empirical inquiry into these thoughts…

There are a couple key terms here that help explain how journalism is a text that explains modernity. Hartley sees a fundamental relationship between the text, the readership, and production; all are in touch with each other through what he dubs the mediasphere—the “creation of popular readership sin the name of democractic equivalence” (13). What is interesting in particular about Hartley is that he is making a cultural claim about the function of journalism while nonetheless tying its function back to larger claims about the public sphere and participation in the social construction of reality. For Hartley, journalism is one of the forces that “creates and serves a disembodied public” that serves “politicized private sphere” – and comes up with this interesting definition of poplar reality: the “textualization of social relation… advancement of logic of democractic equivalence, and the pursuit of comfort in modernizing society. A democraticized mediasphere which not only textualized debut and decision-making but also the public in whose name all this is done (the readership) and participants in the developing dialogue; politicians to entertainers to supermodels…” (29)

In short, our popular reality is a hopeful one that is mediated through text whereby we are all brought together through the logic of democracy in a dialogic relationship. This is a hopeful approach to the function of communication and journalism in society. Additionally, Hartley talks about how one should look at journalism as a sens-making feature of modernity (34) and also as a system (rather than a mode of production) that takes into account the reader. Readers are brought into being and brought into the public through media. What’s interesting is most people presume that the production serves the public, but Hartley argues that the text creates the public. To some degree, he is agreeing with Carey’s claim that communication is democracy and communication is culture. The first feature of society is communication and out of communication we have culture. For Hartley, the text creates our culture and makes us into readers united by a textual system rather than a disembodied public. The audience is brought into being by cultural production (50). There must be a press before thre can be a public…

Hartley demands a careful approach to the study of journalism as well. Like Carey, he notes that too little time has been spent by journalism schools thinking about what journalism means. He thinks that journalism has “its own features, histories, specific relations with institutions and practice” and changes the relationship between addresser and addressee (37).

He proposes an interesting trifecta: journalism “us”; media (to) popular culture (them) but sees it as much more cultural. News becomes a discursive resource for people to use…

Hartley is also fundamentally interested in who controls knowledge, technology and information. He sees the importance of looking at how power relations construct readers and wishes to look at how oppositional logics become part of the public sphere. The universalization and opposition to discourse will come out of the text of modernity: journalism – journalistic mediation (78) helps to determine how political questions come into being.

Once more, the mediasphere receives a definition in his chapter on the media sphere: he defines the mediasphere as away that private selves arrive out of public assembly. Both the institions of social control AND audiences pressure the creation of the self (it isn’t wholly in the hands of the producer). In this regard, Hartley is giving far more importance to readers than many other scholars I have read. He is also going directly to the role of journalism within readerships and in this way is more direct than Carey about the relationship of these readers to systems of power and knowledge.

First Week

First some notes about how I plan to write about these readings. I’m taking extensive notes elsewhere, so this page is not intended to serve as a repository for my notes. Instead, I intend to reflect briefly on each piece I’ve read. I’ll talk a little about how each piece might be useful, articulate the cornerstone argument, and point out—when possible—some strengths, weaknesses, and thoughts that it has given me for future study. As I read back through these, I notice how descriptive they are. Next week, I'll try to keep them shorter and more analytical.

Zelizer-Taking Journalism Seriously

Zelizer’s book is essentially a short-cut to a broad-ranging literature review of works on journalism studies. Zelizer attempts to prove why journalism has historically been under-studied in academia; in this, she retains the cultural-humanist approach to journalism shared by Jim Carey. She seems to be articulating what I have been trying to explain when I say I want to study the cultural and sociological phenomena of journalism. Most journalists won’t get this because they view their craft as a professional enterprise where students are taught how to do a job.

Theory, according to practicioners, may not be relevant here. For theory to influence practice, journalists often won’t listen unless a scholar has been a journalist. And there may be some truth to this. Academics who study journalism often come to conclusions that fail to take into account the context and the experiences of journalists; journalists balk at attempts to theorize truth production. Making study of journalism more complicated is both the tendency to think of news only as hard news and the new sentiment that all people now have the capacity to be journalists.

She articulates these differences between scholarly views of journalism and journalists’ self-image elsewhere (Jamieson’s The Press). Journalists talk about journalism as a sixth sense, as a container, as a mirror, as a child, and as a service. Scholars talk about journalism as a profession, journalism as an institution, journalism as a text, journalism as people, and journalism as a set of practices (30-31).

Zelizer breaks down the approaches to studying journalism according to five key areas: the sociological, the historical, language, political science, and the cultural. Of these, I found the sociological overview (particularly the approaches to production studies) most helpful as it offered a wide-ranging overview and typology for understanding the variety of scholarship on news production. This typology was divided into a number of sections. 1) early sociological theory: gatekeeping, social control, and selectivity of stories; organizational studies that look at how journalists craft professional identity through their work and more specifically how this may be ritually enacted. 2) mid-period sociology, which consists of organizational theory studies framed from the perspective of social control, classic (and awesome) news ethnographies that show how structure affects production. 3) later sociology theory: much more focused on ideological interpretations of institutions of journalism (where the political economy of news comes in). The key critiques here are that these studies do not account for the non-routine and limits the definition of what counts as a news organization or what counts as “news.”

The language section contained ways to think about narrative, rhetoric, framing and other approaches to understanding news coverage that offers studies that could be potential models for future work. The importance of considering tabloids and a more expansive view of what counts as journalism (rather than simply considering hard news) was also impressed upon me. The language section also contained valuable citations on visual information. She pointed to what seem to be some interesting takes on news from a narrative and language perspective, particularly VanDijk’s News as Discourse. Here she seems most aware of the link between online and offline journalism. Good definition of discourse too: “language patterns associated with social action and the ways people interact in real situations” (125).

However, I really like her discussion of cultural studies approaches to news. She argues that cultural inquiry looks at how journalists determine what is important to themselves. This approach examines the “cultural symbol systems by which reporters make sense of their profess” – and does not assume that the routines of journalism will remain consistent.

Zelizer cites important and relevant literature that had me going through her text and underlining key sources that I hope to read either during this study or during quals reading. These texts form the backbone to contemporary journalism studies, regardless of what direction I take.

Gitlin: The whole world is watching

Gitlin’s book is really a movement study. He approaches the failure of the SDS to remain a coherent group from the perspective that the media played a crucial role in the construction and deconstruction of the group’s internal and external image. Though he claims that he does not wish to blame the media for the failings of the SDS, he writes a fascinating movement study that chronicles how the media both distorts and defines a social movement. Gitlin traces the rise and fall of the SDS through the routines of news—the demands for simplicity, the need for a “good story,” the preference for speaking to leaders, the institutional affiliations of reporters with the elite struggling to retain social control. Certainly, he does ascribe certain problems with SDS to the group’s own internal dissensus, but he argues that these problems were exacerbated by the media.

Methodologically, I’m not sure I would get away with the kind of work that he did. He claims to have read every New York Times article ever published about the SDS in the mid-sixties to 1970s period. He also went through the CBS archives at the Vandy library. But throughout the book, he employs close reading to draw out the points he wants to make about NYT coverage. He will say something like, “the media portrayed SDS leader C. Clark Kissinger as a soft-spoke radical” and cite a single article illustrating this point. Lest I were writing a history paper, I’m not sure I could get away with that.

How is Gitlin useful? For one thing, he does give an excellent summary of how Gramsci’s work can be applied to news: that the ruling classes subordinate the rulling classes through the penetration of ideology into media. However, this process goes in two directions, the dominated also participate in their own domination when they take the ideology of the dominators and adopt it into their every day life.

Gitlin is also useful for his definition of framing: “What makes the world beyond direct experience look natural is a media frame… media frames are persistent patterns of cognition, interpretation, and presentation, of selection, emphasis and exclusion, by which symbol-handlers routinely organize discourse, whether verbal or visual” (7) and for his breakdown of the categories of the way that academics have examined the news. These categories include journalist-centered approaches, intertia/sheer habit of a news organization, news as mirror of the world, story selection in outside institutions and inside institutions, and hegemony/political economy explanations of story selection. On the whole, a useful mediation on the production of the news media without actually doing a production study himself.

Carey: A critical reader and collected essays

First, Carey is absolutely amazing as a scholar. He writes in a way that is both elucidating and convincing, warm and friendly. I’d like to emulate this writing style one day. In addition, I really adore his approach to the humanistic study of communication. In his view, culture is communication. In this regard, how we discuss communication shapes and orders our culture. He is doing “cultural studies” but without the ideology that so often comes with the field; he is instead tying his work back to the human use of language, journalism, ritual and connectivity. For him, conversation is a paramount function of the press and democracy might as well be a stand-in term for communication. Where conversation happens, so does community, culture, and democracy.

Enough vague statements about Carey. The critical reader is a festschrift for Carey, so there are prominent scholars before every text talking about the piece and how great it was. First on the list: The Problems with Journalism History. Here, Carey demonstrates that the “Whig” view of history—the narrative that explains how journalism has been a bulwark of liberty through the establishment of our country in contrast to totalitarianism is overplayed. Instead, he argues for a cultural history which would explain how journalism has developed and its implications for both culture and citizenship. He defines journalism as “a state of consciousness, a way of apprehending, of experiencing the world” and notes that the “idea of a report” is what has always formed the backbone of journalism (9). More than anything in this essay, I adore his definition of culture and how journalism flows out of culture. To Carey, culture is;

“the organization of social experience in human consciousness manifested in symbolic action. Journalism is then a particular social form, a highly particular type of consciousness, a particular organization of social experience.” …. (91)

He defines journalism even further as a “form of human imagination,” which I think gets into the reality-constructing possibilities of journalism.

Carolyn Marvin (Carey’s form student) introduces the next key essay that Carey writes: The Communications Revolution and the Professional Communicator. Here introduction, however, is itself an amazing exegsis on journalism. Marvin explains how Carey sees journalism’s contemporary conventions as getting in the way of exploring how and why events or social phenomena happen. The art of dispassionate reporting and the emphasis on balance has impeded journalists from creating emotional accounts of stories that are more likely to resonate with readers. News ought to have a moral element if it is to have a ritual place in American democracy, and without emotional content within, is unable to have this content. As she writes, “Contemporary national press is ideologically rootless, and therefore incoherent.” Relevant to my inquiry about the relationship between online journalism’s hard news and tabloid journalism’s forms is an explanation of why tabloid journalism continues to stick around – and this is not really a theme picked up in Carey’s piece. Most important, though, is her explanation of why Carey finds the press important: because it unites people in conversation and becomes a common forum for the contentious battle over identity and meaning. It ought to capture public conversation rather than become the source of public conversation; and it ought to sustain democracy because it serves as a commonplace for all.

Carey’s essay on the communications revolution is brilliant as he extracts the second industrial revolution from the changes to communication. Instead of using a techonodeterminist approach, he shows how communication itself is the product of economic, cultural and technical change. The three big elements to come out of the communications revolution were the mass media, the minority media, and the professional communicators. Of these three groups, the professional communicators are almost mercenaries because they communicate on behalf of others without having a stake in what they communicate. In this regard, both PR folks and journalists are operating on the same moral level. It is from this starting point that Carey begins to critique American journalistic norms. He offers a couple of reasons that one could anticipate, but not necessarily within this broad overview. First, rules of sourcing necessarily make it so that reporters have better relationships with the sources they depend on for news and identify with sources and the dominant paradigm. Rules of sources subject reporters to routine. Third, the quest for balance makes it seem that things that have disorder (war, terrorism) really lack order—things that are confusing are no longer confusing and it makes it difficult to truly uncover the “why” of what is going on. He quotes Robert Parks to articulate the function of journalism in modern society: “The function of news is to orient man and society in an actual world. In so far as it succeeds, it tends to preserve the sanity of the individual and the permanence of society.”

In my view, this essay is completely brilliant. He explores how from a cultural and ritual perspective the approach to keep journalism away from ideology actually backfires. In this, as Marvin notes, he takes significant stabs at the current practices of American journalism.

--- “The function of news is to orient man and society in an actual world. In so far as it succeeds, it tends to preserve the sanity of the individual and the permanence of society

Carey continues to attack modern journalism in The Dark Continent of American Journalism. Here, he speaks more directly about how the constructions of journalism make it difficult to understand news stories. He explains how the quest for coherent narratives and for sourcing makes it difficult to probe the hows and whys. He gives a few reasons that cover how journalists generally make sense of stories – which are ways that I see in news all the time and are ways that I have had to write about the news:

1) determining motives

2) Elucidating Causes

3) Predicting Consequences

4) estimating significance

He goes through each way that journalists make sense of stories, noting that “names” make news” and that journalists frame stories as either successes or failures. When journalists cannot explain things, they rely on experts to explain the irrational—I think this is an interesting observation considering when journalists cite academics in our field.

In Republic if you can keep it, Carey makes an interesting observation. In as much as he sees communication as culture, he recognizes the danger of simply letting media forms overtake public conversation. Important that he notes that participation in the media should not be confused with participation in public life… that’s a crucial note here. Does participation in online blogging or the Web suggest that we are no longer civically engaged..?

In Press, Public Opinion & Public Discourse I find my match. It is in this essay that I find someone who is able to tie together the changing conceptions of the first amendment away from the individual or collective group spirit to the press while still contextualizing these developments in American democracy. Carey manages to explore the changing dimensions of the first amendment without going into technoderminist or economic determist mode, which is really important. He gives a great discussion of the original public sphere and the original function of news—taking conversation and turning itinto news… and grounding the function of the press in reflecting community life. But as journalism along with everything else, journalism became professionalized.

He is one of the few to really note the dangers of advocacy journalism, noting that the adversary press made people see the newspaper as the enemy of EVERYONE. The press grabbed for special power the public couldn’t have in those times—consider the publication of the Pentagon Papers. Carey argues for a new definition of journalism, one definied by a spirt of public community. Here, he supports the public journalism movement, but I’m not sure that he really remained the supporter he was in this essay. He has some amazing oberservations on how the press and journalists view themselves: the second that the press began to see itself as a special institution with special powers representing the collective, the public shifted to an audience. In the current philosophical conception of the press, there is NO room for an audience. I wonder if this thinking changes with the growth of citizen journalism, or if citizen journalism ceases to make an impact unless it becomes online journalism.