Journalism shrinks, power expands E-Book

Ricardo Gandour

• Herausgeber: Summus Editorial
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 126

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

This book stresses the importance of professional journalism in an era when direct communication by government authorities via social media networks has escalated while newsrooms have been shrinking for decades. Mixing practical hands-on experience with academic research, in his work Brazilian journalist Ricardo Gandour brings statistical data on both phenomena and warns of the consequences for the information environment and democracies.

Leseprobe

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SINDICATO NACIONAL DOS EDITORES DE LIVROS, RJ

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Gandour, Ricardo

Journalism shrinks, power expands [recurso eletrônico] : the second death of public opinion / Ricardo Gandour ; tradução Andrew McDonnell. - 1. ed. - São Paulo : Summus, 2020.

recurso digital ; 3 MB

Tradução de: Jornalismo em retração, poder em expansão : a segunda morte da

opinião pública

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ISBN 978-65-5549-014-5 (recurso eletrônico)

1. Jornalismo. 2. Democracia - Opinião pública. 3. Redes sociais on-line - Aspectos políticos. 4. Livros eletrônicos. I. McDonnell, Andrew. II. Título.

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Journalism shrinks, power expands

THE SECOND DEATH OF PUBLIC OPINION

RICARDO GANDOUR

From the original in Portuguese language

JORNALISMO EM RETRAÇÃO, PODER EM EXPANSÃO

A segunda morte da opinião pública

Copyright © 2020 by Ricardo Gandour

All rights reserved by Summus Editorial

Executive editor: Soraia Bini Cury

Editorial assistant: Michelle Campos

English version: Andrew McDonnell (Okidokie Translation Services)

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To Alice, Antônio, Marina and Karla

Table of contents

Cover

Cataloging data

Frontispiece

Credits

Foreword – Journalism cannot wait

Introduction

1. What is happening with newspaper newsrooms?

2. The lack (or potential lack) that journalism could have

3. The second death of public opinion; fragmentation and polarization

4. Journalism and media literacy

5. Choices of a journalism business in an environment of hyper-competition

6. X-raying newsrooms

7. Politicians adopt social networks

Epilogue: Where are we headed?

Further Reading

Acknowledgments

Foreword – Journalism cannot wait

Eugênio Bucci

In a time of so much bad news for democracy and the press, it’s a joy, as well as an honor to preface this book by journalist Ricardo Gandour, which results from the brilliant Master’s dissertation he wrote at University of São Paulo’s Communication and Arts School (ECA-USP) – and passed with honors in June 2019. In fact, his research began a bit before he started his Master’s program per se. During a sabbatical semester in which he was a visiting scholar at Columbia Journalism School, in 2016, he collected testimonials through questionnaires and interviews with top editors of Brazilian newsrooms. What he deduced from them was a scenario that had not yet been observed with such clarity: Ricardo Gandour was the first to quantify, that is, to portray with numerical data, the shrinking of staffs and brutal budget cuts of a market in a full-fledged crisis.

Later on, already enrolled in ECA-USP’s Communication Sciences Graduate Program, he continued his analyses and observed something troubling: while newsrooms were losing volume, figures of the Executive Branch were gaining hypertrophied personal projection through social platforms, many times invading and usurping public-debate mediation functions until then executed by professional journalists. In summary, his dissertation showed that as the professional press shrank, the powers took advantage of the void and expanded, in a process that carried an underlying threat to democracy.

This is what was shown to the program’s examination board in June 2019. Since then, this context of shrinking journalism and the considerable swelling of politicians on social networks became dramatic. The situation worsened. Hence, although the situation that this book presents us cannot be considered relieving – on the contrary, it is a bothering piece of news –, we can accept this study as something positive, since the analysis of data presented herein, coupled with the author’s ideas, help us understand how and why this happened, in addition to showing paths that move us away from paralysis or catastrophism. This book shows us some things can be done.

One of the greatest contributions of Ricardo Gandour’s ideas is the notion of journalism that he undertakes. According to his way of seeing things, our profession is a method. More precisely, the author says, journalism is built on the conjugation of three “pillars”, which are attitude, method, and narrative. Attitude, among other foundational elements of journalism, encompasses professional independence and the practical freedom that allows a reporter to ask uncomfortable questions to the powerful. The third pillar involves the form of journalistic discourse, which, even though it does not possess rigid structures and may lean towards informative texts or opinions, as well as many other discursive possibilities, is always characterized by the pursuit of support in fact-finding – without facts, there is no journalism.

But it is the second pillar, method, that the author lends most emphasis. With reason. Method is perhaps the main structural factor in journalism. It’s by force of the method – at times developed by habit – that journalists feel and develop their unique way of working. It is essential to think of this method as something that requires an acquired skill – since talent alone does not suffice – to feel the news, to find and check primary sources, to cross reference data from different sources and, then, interpret them correctly based on objective parameters, in order to translate them into something friendly, elegant and understandable. The term “understandable” makes all the difference. Method, which at this point flows to the third pillar, narrative, ensures that the information and interpretation angles contained in the social function of journalism, set forth in a clear and concise manner, are truly useful to citizens and democracy.

That’s not all. The journalistic method likes cultivating the value of unprecedentedness. It is also the method that imposes to the narrative the diligence in techniques to attract and involve an audience’s attention. In fact, the manner how to proceed, how to behave in society, how to process information, the respect for facts (or factual truth), with emphasis on checking facts, besides the attitude and manner of expressing, all this separates the journalism professional from those who carry out other activities. When looking at this profession as a method – much more than as a “priesthood”, or as a romantic vocation –, Ricardo Gandour provides a major contribution to the abysses that challenge today’s newsrooms.

Lastly, it is also important to point out the author’s ability to work with a bibliography permeated with conceptual labyrinths and complexities somewhat foreign to journalism, as is the case with Jürgen Habermas’ writings and some of his interlocutors. Such ability was built during his research years in graduate school. Excelling well in the meaning of concepts like public sphere – an expression overly used, but rarely understood in its overlapping ramifications –, Ricardo Gandour identifies with a high degree of precision the manner how the ostensive, increasing and, at times, oppressive self-promotion of people in office via technologies enabled by social platforms cause risks to the health of democracy. As such, this research, which stands out for its exclusive findings about the journalism market – a feat that was acknowledged in a letter that the National Association of Newspapers (ANJ) sent to the author –, gains density also for its methodological diligence and good theoretical foundation, well applied and well contextualized.

When he states that democracy is in danger where the press is shrinking, Gandour is not only creating a catchphrase: he knows what he’s talking about.

In summary, this book is a piece of good news not for what it unveils, but rather the intelligence that inspires paths to overcome the empirical impasses identified. From the perspective of who believes in democracy and the press’ role, nothing is lost, but there is no time to waste. Journalism cannot wait. On behalf of this urgency, I say that this book deserves to be read and, even, studied.

Introduction

When teaching undergrads at Columbia University, Professor Michael Schudson likes to arrive early at Kent Hall, one of the campus’ century-old buildings erected in the late 19th century between Broadway and Amsterdam avenues, in New York. On that Winter morning in 2016, it was no different. Schudson, a researcher and professor whose last name is an almost-must in bibliographic references of journalism papers, was preparing for his class on Journalism and Public Life, a more than suggestive name for the classic curriculum at Columbia.

Standing next to the classroom hardwood door, Schudson anxiously awaited Richard John’s arrival, who was specially invited to speak to his students that morning. Another key reference in specialized texts about the press, Richard, that is, John, was to speak about the transformations occurring in journalism, particularly with newspapers. His narrative would cover the historical arch, from the time Gutenberg invented the manual press that revolutionized the transmission of knowledge in the 15th century, until then restricted to orality and manuscripts, by allowing information to be distributed on a greater scale.

In his lecture, John surprised the students by reproducing an article from 1845, published a year after the first telegraph line, connecting Baltimore to Washington, was inaugurated. In the text, published in New York and Magnetic Telegraph Line magazine, authors Samuel Colt and William Robinson hailed the new invention already proclaiming the imminent death of newspapers: “It is evident that the system of telegraphing news is destined to supersede, in a great degree, the publication of commercial newspapers in this and other northern cities. Who in New Orleans, for instance, would subscribe to New York newspapers, and wait eight or ten days for the receipt of commercial news brought by an Atlantic steamer, when they can be in possession of it in as many minutes by our Telegraphic Correspondence?”, prophesized the authors. Telegrams were the “e-mails” of back then, and Colt and Robinson perceived them as real threats to daily newspapers, given their agility and conciseness.1

In the 1950s, radios were projected to die in a few years following the invention of televisions, which began operating that decade in a commercial scale and becoming a part of household life.

These two examples of mediatic transformation from long ago illustrate how new channels and distribution formats impacted the dissemination of information and knowledge. But today, in particular, we are experiencing a legacy of transformations that existed for decades, and even then, the transformations, changed their characteristics over time. Throughout the entire 20th century, with the introduction of each new media, it took a while until a new channel or new platform was fully rooted as “grammar”, developing a pattern and format that allowed the market to understand its possibilities and new business model – a key requisite for any innovative channel to consolidate itself and move forward. At the same time, existing forms of media adapted to the new form, either repositioning themselves or undergoing structural adjustments.

British historian Peter Burke, Emeritus Professor at Cambridge University, detailed the phenomenon in part of his work, fundamental in understanding how we got here. According to Burke, we are living increasingly shorter cycles, with increasingly greater speeds of change. Therefore, says Burke, it is still difficult to foresee how far the current transformation will go. “It was hard to assess the consequences of the print information revolution because the change, at that time, was very slow. Today, it’s difficult to assess the consequences of the digital revolution precisely for the opposite reason, due to the speed of change,” Burke said to me in an interview in May 2016.2

Formats and channels are more than mere information supports. When the consumption relationship changes between the offer of content and society, other aspects are affected. Radio, at the beginning of the 20th century, and newspapers soon after, distributed wide-scale, became public platforms of reflection. And newspapers, also called “dailies”, established the 24-hour cycle – now broken – for hard news.

Eugenio Bucci, journalist and professor at the University of São Paulo (USP), remembers how newspapers transformed themselves in the information cycle paradigm. “In terms of newspapers – aids, by excellence, in constituting national public spaces, especially in the 19th century and early 20th century –, the pace of movements coincided with the complete cycle of one rotation of the planet around itself: 24 hours.” For Bucci, the word print went on to determine the public ritual for information consumption.

Religiously, dailies circulated, as they circulate to this day, one day after the other, marking in their way the passage of time. Regardless of whatever may have happened, they circulate. They register in their usual cadence the “last word” on their understanding of facts and ideas. Twenty-four hours later, they revoke themselves, establishing new “last words”.3

It is more than clear, and has been for some time, that digital transformations did not only affect the physical support or distribution platform. Now, little does it matter if the rhythm is 24 hours or not. Transformation occurs in the logic by which communication establishes itself. The digital revolution altered the supply-demand logic, by giving anyone a voice and a podium. With this, what role would be reserved for what we call “stable production and publishing platforms” – traditional, local newsrooms that house the professional journalism activity? Workspaces where professionals recruited, prepared, and remunerated for such meet to peruse, select, and publish news, analyses, and commentaries.

The abundance of two-way digital channels, leveraged by permanent exchange and interaction arenas that define social networks, gave any individual the possibility to edit, publish, and have a voice. There is much more information available, and that is undeniably good. And, as we will see further ahead, social networks have become tools used by politicians – candidates and in office.

This new scenario has characteristics that need to be carefully analyzed. On one hand, people today are exposed to a mixture of information, composed of news professionally generated, many times sliced into bits and pieces, and eventually mixed with rumors, gossip, and opinions from different sources. On the other hand, the group-forming mechanisms of social networks facilitate staying predominantly in contact with people who think and see things in a similar way. At the same time, the decadence of these stable production platforms – the official media responsible for the logic of supply – can weaken the establishment of what social scientists call a “common public agenda”. And, consequently, the concept of public opinion itself.

The process of defining a “common public agenda”, or, in other words, agenda-setting, was dissected by Portuguese author Carlos Traquina, who uses the term agenda-setting