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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: The Manifesto Series
- Sprache: Englisch
Drawing on the collaborative expertise of three senior scholars, The Journalism Manifesto makes a powerful case for why journalism has become outdated and why it is in need of a long-overdue transformation. Focusing on the relevance of elites, norms and audiences, Zelizer, Boczkowski and Anderson reveal how these previously integral components of journalism have become outdated: Elites, the sources from which journalists draw much of their information and around whom they orient their coverage, have become dysfunctional; The relevance of norms, the cues by which journalists do newswork, has eroded so fundamentally that journalists are repeatedly entrenching themselves as negligible and out of sync; and because audiences have shattered beyond recognition, the correspondence between what journalists think of as news and what audiences care about can no longer be assumed. This authoritative manifesto argues that journalism has become decoupled from the dynamics of everyday life in contemporary society and outlines pathways for fixing this essential institution of democracy. It is a must-read for students, scholars and activists in the fields of journalism, media, policy, and political communication.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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CONTENTS
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Acknowledgments
1 Journalism in the Imagination and on the Ground
The disarray of institutions
Journalism in institutional disarray
Institutional interfaces
Conclusion
2 Elites
The crack up of the elites
Why trust declines when elites crack up
The crack up of responsibility
Indexing and the spheres of political discourse
Conclusion
3 Norms
Why norms?
What norms offer institutions
Norms of journalism
A triad of irrelevancies
Conclusion
4 Audiences
Assumed and taken for granted audiences
Known and uncertain audiences
Recoupling audiences and journalistic practices
Conclusion
5 Reform or Revolution?
The reformist path
The revolutionary path
Towards a journalism that matters
Bibliography
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Acknowledgements
Begin Reading
Bibliography
End User License Agreement
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The Manifesto Series
David Buckingham, The Media Education Manifesto
Natalie Fenton, Des Freedman, Justin Schlosberg and Lina Dencik, The Media Manifesto
Silvio Waisbord, The Communication Manifesto
Barbie Zelizer, Pablo J. Boczkowski and C. W. Anderson, The Journalism Manifesto
The Journalism Manifesto
Barbie Zelizer, Pablo J. Boczkowski and C. W. Anderson
polity
Copyright © Barbie Zelizer, Pablo J. Boczkowski and C. W. Anderson 2022
The right of Barbie Zelizer, Pablo J. Boczkowski and C.W. Anderson to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2022 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4265-9
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021938632
The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
“Listen: Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five
Acknowledgments
This book started in London, one stormy Sunday morning in late autumn of 2018, when Mary Savigar at Polity Press approached one of us with the proposal of writing a book on journalism for the new Manifesto series. A lot has happened to each of us in our personal lives, as well as to the world, between that day and when we submitted the final version of this manuscript in the spring of 2021. We alternated fascinating conversations with periods of silence. We supported each other when life got in the way of work by one of us spontaneously taking the lead when the others needed a break. We wrote and edited each other’s words to the point that we could guess each other’s thoughts and finish each other’s sentences. We started this project animated by the diversity of our viewpoints and wrapped it up with a fusion of our ideas. We ended up cherishing the manuscript, but even more our friendship.
Through it all, Mary, Stephanie Homer and Ellen MacDonald-Kramer at Polity Press graced us with outstanding support and unparalleled patience. We could not have hoped for a better editorial team. We are also grateful for the helpful feedback given by the anonymous reviewers solicited by Polity.
Last, but not least, this book would not exist without the countless conversations each of us has had with other scholars, practitioners, sources and members of the public over the past few decades. A lot of what we know and how we think about journalism is the outcome of these conversations. We hope the resulting text does some justice to how much each of you has taught us, and sparks new conversations in return.
1Journalism in the Imagination and on the Ground
For much of journalism’s study, the news and its newsmakers have been imagined as belonging to an institution perched in pristine isolation from its surroundings. Invoking widely used practices, oft-proclaimed values and publicly heralded standards has helped to produce and sustain a uniform and isolationist view of how journalism works. With journalism studies by and large helping to cheerlead it on, this view defends the sequestered institution of the press and its role in society while making the assumption, typically implicit but sometimes stated, that journalism’s worth is unquestionable. Both impulses reveal what an exercise in unreflective quarantine from the world might look like.
This manifesto seeks to put journalism back into the world where it belongs by bringing its imagination and its ground into closer quarters with each other. We argue that, if journalism is to have a future in these unsettled and unsettling times, it must stop resting on its laurels and instead reset its connections to what lies beyond its boundaries. Journalism needs to revisit its engagement with society, rethink its priorities, rekindle relevancies gone dormant and question its default settings. If it does not, its future is surely at risk.
The disarray of institutions
In all of its guises, journalism exemplifies the shaky status of the “separate but equal” myth about institutional culture that has prevailed across most western liberal democracies of late modernity and their permutations in the Global North. Encouraging thinking about institutions in certain ways and not others, the entrenchment of that myth across time and space has delivered a view of institutions as separatist endeavors that work autonomously to achieve their aims. Though early theorists of modernity had grand and expansive visions for institutions – they would help to maintain social order, promote stability, provide authoritative guidelines for behavior, coordinate activity, uphold social structure, govern and discipline the unruly – in fact, institutions have become in many ways an irritant under the surface of the collective. One source of that irritation has been their repeated proclamations of independence from each other, uttered even as growing evidence shows how interdependent all institutional settings are and will continue to be.
This has had direct ramifications on the practical dimensions of the institutional settings that have subsequently emerged. As complex social forms that mark certain activities and relationships as appropriate and imaginable while pushing alternative options from view, institutions help to consolidate the health of collectives that they aim to support. Across all of an institution’s constituent features – rules, roles, rituals, conventions and norms, among others – patterning and organization help to bind activity into a consonant whole. And yet from politics to education, the military to the market, institutions function as much in accordance with the conditions of their imagination as with the conditions on the ground. When their imaginary is activated by unnecessarily narrow positionalities, it cobbles the ensuing understanding of institutions, decouples it from everyday practices and sorely undercuts their potential.
And yet institutional imaginaries persevere, filled with often unrealistic aspirations that are multiple in number, spotless in character and misleading in impact. They include notions of identifiable and stable publics, anemic expectations in the face of challenge, a resistance to change, uniformly invoked standards of action, expertise disconnected from the communities it serves, unattainable codes of ethics and unrepresentative norms. All cater to ungrounded conditions that end up producing a state of disarray, their institutional dynamics driven by unsupported and unsustainable contours for being in the world. These attributes are fatal, for they leave efforts undone and projects abandoned midway. The recent upheavals around the world, protesting as they do the racialized, gendered and otherwise discriminatory and exclusive practices that unfortunately continue to mark social life in the twenty-first century, reflect how much challenges to the institutional order have yet to be fully grappled with. Newsrooms, too, have largely failed to come to terms with the shifts in power dynamics prompted by movements such as #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo.
We argue that much of the turmoil and confusion around journalism, an institution that inhabits this problematic landscape, stems from the adverse effects of at least four illusions about how institutions work: autonomy, centrality, cohesion and permanence. Each has been put in place by a set of thinkers – largely white, male, high status and from the West and Global North – whose predilection for certain intellectual impulses drew a picture of institutions that reflected the aspirations they held for themselves but that fared less well in attending to a host of alternative environments in which institutional settings would take hold.
Illusion of autonomy
Most academic considerations of institutions in the liberal democracies of late modernity across the West and Global North tend to presume their autonomy. Although institutions occupy shared space – where politics, the market, education and journalism are among the forces competing for public attention from fundamentally the same vantage point – they work hard to substantiate claims of independence and distinctiveness from each other. Because the combined effect of an institution’s material, moral and cultural authority keeps it separate from other institutions, aspirations of autonomy are crucial for sustaining institutional identity.
Nods to autonomy pervade much of the decision-making that occurs in institutional settings. Ethics codes, mission statements, logos and other means of positioning an institution in the world imply its autonomy. The very definition of norms, for example, as expectations of permissible and appropriate behavior, presumes that behavior unfolds within institutional boundaries, hinging desired or eschewed action on an institution’s independence.
But the narrowness of this assumption becomes clear when institutional practices unravel on the ground and institutional borders reveal themselves to be both porous and unstable. Even the liberal democracies central to the received view of institutions show how institutions move in various directions when responding to crisis. For example, news organizations in Sweden and Denmark took different tacks to gender-related violence in response to the #MeToo movement, according to Askanias and Hartley: Sweden covered it extensively, framing it as a structural and systemic problem, while Denmark peppered its scant coverage with accusations of a witch-hunt against men and an overly politically correct campaign. The different responses were also echoed in the legal and political institutions of each country. The notion of autonomy, then, might deserve rethinking along lines of the give-and-take that helps to create and sustain the illusion that institutions could be autonomous while admitting that they rarely are.
We thus might want to consider what happens when an institution’s dynamics have a domino effect on other institutions. As they are all part of a shared culture, each institutional setting is directly affected by what happens in adjacent ones.
Illusion of centrality
Notions of autonomy are tied to assumptions about the centrality of institutions in social life. Many theorists of institutional settings in western and global northern liberal democracies have regarded institutions as necessary for societies to function, becoming, in Raymond Williams’ eyes, “the normal term for any organized element of society” (1976, 169). As Everett C. Hughes argued, “participation in the life of the community becomes increasingly a matter of participating in some way in institutional activities” (1936, 182). Sociality came to be seen as depending centrally on institutions that were woven into the fabric by which societies exist.
Societies, however, come in all shapes and sizes, and many preclude a reliance on institutions and their trappings. Societies which rely heavily on activism, for instance, such as many countries in Latin America, tend to privilege non-institutional forms of political engagement over traditional modes of interaction centered on the institution, and social movements often take on the role that institutions might play elsewhere. Countries favoring modes of collective over institutional engagement might involve different sectors in society: the often-bypassed history of Black journalism in the United States, for instance, has long celebrated activism as its journalistic mantra. Black journalism blossomed, as Sarah J. Jackson argues, despite – or, perhaps, because of – a clear distaste for activist impulses in the mainstream media.
