Public Discourse in America: Conversation and Community in the Twenty-First Century
Judith Rodin and Stephen P. Steinberg, Eds. (University of Pennsylvania Press)
Evaluation tools for the public:
- Identifies the key players in contemporary public discourse.
- Examines contemporary platforms for discourse (university/Academia, cyberspace etc.)
- Examines the role of discourse in American democracy
Evaluation tools for journalists:
- Provides examples of various "difficult" topics of discourse (race and reconciliation, for example) and how they have been dealt with.
- Examines development of discourse in the new century
Mediated Politics: Communication in the Future of Democracy
W. Lance Bennett and Robert M. Entman, Eds. (Cambridge University Press)
The book includes a chapter on promoting
political engagement.
Evaluation tools for the public:
- Examines how new technologies can “divide and conquer”
the public
- How infotainment challenges our political knowledge
Evaluation tools for journalists:
- Explores reporting from within a big business
- Examines public opinion, "new" media, global opinion,
democracy and terrorism
- How lobbying works in an electronic age
- Provides advice on covering politics in an electronic age
The Sound Bite Society: Television and the American Mind
Jeffrey Scheuer (Routledge)
A socio-political evaluation of the ways the medium undermines messages beyond the most basic, passive and status quo variety. Scheuer discusses the implications of television's neutralizing effect upon the body politic.
Evaluation tools for the public:
- How television delivers its message - Language, motion, symbols, etc.
- Argues that television is inherently slanted towards the right
Evaluation tools for journalists:
- In order to mitigate the effects of America's two anchoring orthodoxies - religious fundamentalism and market fundamentalism -television must become a "battleground of criticism and debate."
- Creativity and persistence will be necessary to give due attention "to causes and context; to ambiguities, contradictions and vested interests; to latent or underlying connections and distinctions; to the priority of reality over appearance; and to public over commercial values."
Who Will Tell The People: The Betrayal of American Democracy
William Greider (Simon & Schuster)
American democracy exists only in hollowed-out form, Greider posits, and he blames the systemic breakdown on distortions perpetrated by the mainstream news media, political parties and intermediary institutions including but not limited to corporate lobbies. New power relations between these forces have shut ordinary people out of the processes that affect their lives. These trends have mostly accelerated in the decade since this book was published.
Evaluation tools for the public:
- Greider quotes a community organizer noting that just as power corrupts, so does powerlessness.
- The decline in voting is just a symptom of the long-term erosion of citizen participation.
- "The formidable, ubiquitous presence of corporate political organizations persuades many citizens to retreat from the contest...The rich and complicated fabric of American life - and the infinite political imagination of its citizens - is reduced to sterile calculations of cost-benefit analysis."
Evaluation tools for journalists:
- Conflicts of interest, real and perceived, between media practitioners and powerful corporate and government figures serves to erode fair and impartial newsgathering and the public trust.
- In their quest to maintain and increase audiences, publishers and news directors are overlooking their responsibility "to speak frankly in their behalf, to educate them as citizens, to create a space for them in the political debate and draw them into it."
- News organizations are reluctant to blame themselves for the public's ignorance or inertia, even as they retreat from coverage of government, economics and other bread-and-butter issues while emphasizing celebrity and style, horse-race politics and subjects that don't threaten society's most powerful institutions.
The News About The News: American Journalism in Peril
Leonard Downie, Jr. and Robert G. Kaiser (Vintage)
The authors, both veterans of the Washington Post, examine the state of journalism past and present. While they lament a general decline in the quality of news most Americans receive, they reach for some hopeful conclusions based on Americans' renewed interest in world affairs post-September 11, 2001.
Evaluation tools for the public:
- Chronicles the shift from news as public service to news as profit center, particularly in television.
- Through interviews with news executives and presenters, describes how emphasis on celebrity and entertainment trends, news-you-can-use, health, sports, sensational video and weather have largely displaced beat and investigative reporting, coverage of the workings of government, foreign news.
- Argues that readers, listeners and viewers still want and are willing to pay for quality news - especially in times of crisis.
Evaluation tools for journalists:
- Discusses market pressures on media companies to reduce staffs and concentrate on cost-cutting methods of news gathering (increasing reliance on wire services and video pools, smaller news hole, pre-packaged segments for local TV news, talk and opinion supplanting actual reporting on national and cable television.
- Examines the tension between "news values" and "market values."
- Reviews survey results from journalists concerned about low morale and eroding standards in their newsrooms.
Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times
Robert McChesney (New Press)
A critical view of the news media, through the lens of profit = corruption. McChesney posits that the major role of news is to sell and to benefit corporate owners, and that distorting and obfuscating matters of real importance - such as key distinctions between democracy and capitalism - has always taken precedence over informing citizens.
Evaluation tools for the public:
- A historical overview that suggests there never was a "golden age" of reporting in American media. As long as news added prestige and audiences/readership to news organizations, McChesney argues, the powers that be allowed it. When reporting clashed with the interests of corporate owners, journalism lost.
- Details media reform movements such as the effort to nationalize radio in Canada in the 1930s - useful view of arguments for and against the U.S. commercial model and the British publicly-funded model.
- Offers a global view of market-driven media trends in which brand identification overtakes information key to citizen engagement and participation. With global media companies, he maintains, the news/movie/sporting event is much less important than the marketing potential around it.
Evaluation tools for journalists:
-
Examines the "hyper-commercialization" of news content and the acceleration of this trend in a climate of global media consolidation.
-
Casts a skeptical eye on professional journalism; suggests that only media operating independently of corporate ownership/influence can provide the kind of news people need to think critically and re-connect with political processes.
-
Analyzes the rise and the consolidating effects of the federal Telecommunications Act of 1996, emphasizing the role of corporate media lobbying in its passage.
Democracy and the News
Herbert Gans (Oxford University Press)
A sociologist’s view, drawing on opinion surveys of news audiences and journalists as well as scholarly writings on the news business.
Evaluation tools for the public:
- Challenges the conventional wisdom reinforced by polling – noting that pollsters seldom ask why respondents feel dissatisfied with institutions or disempowered in relation to them.
- Raises provocative questions about the roles journalists claim to play in
advancing democracy and the “public’s right to know,” the tendency of an informed citizenry to participate in politics and even the assumption that the information people get from the news media is necessary for them to act in their own best interest.
- Encourages discussions between news consumers and producers to determine what kinds of news are most relevant and useful to viewers, readers and listeners.
- Proposes new forms of democracy – fostering citizen lobbies, enabling and persuading more non-voters to participate in elections, ensuring citizen representation in the economic institutions that affect their lives.
Evaluation tools for journalists:
- Suggests that newsgathering is constrained and neutralized by a top-down perspective that ignores non-official sources, by the pressures of mass production (“News organizations are responsible for supplying an always new product to a large number of people, regularly and on time.”) and by routine simplification of complex concepts – including the roles democracy and the economy play in determining what gets reported and why.
- Proposes a re-thinking of mainstream journalistic priorities, practices and assumptions to broaden the definition of that which is newsworthy. Among his solutions: “localizing” international and national stories to offer news audiences a clearer idea of why the issues matter to them; talking informally yet habitually with readers/listeners/viewers and to counteract reliance on “official” sources; emphasizing the participatory element of public events; devoting more time and reporter training to the practice of explanatory journalism.
News Values
Jack Fuller (University of Chicago Press )
Recently retired president of Tribune Publishing and former publisher of the Chicago Tribune focuses, understandably, on newspapers and dissects the biases – favoring the immediate, the novel, the “interesting” based on audience tastes and preferences – he perceives in journalists’ approach to their craft. Fuller draws on Platonic and Socratic logic to support his arguments.
Evaluation tools for the public:
- Newspapers grow from and emphasize the communities they perceive as their key audiences.
- Explanatory or literary journalism may help readers better understand broad, complicated subjects.
Evaluation tools for journalists:
- Suggests that reporters and editors drop the pretense of neutrality in storytelling (as opposed to inquiry, which should be as neutral as possible), understanding that “busy people expect their newspapers to do much of the analytic work for them.”
- Journalists should offer “mental moorings” in an information-saturated world.
- Journalists need to help re-create public discussion, to write and edit for coherence, to resist the impulse toward cynicism.
- Technology is part of the answer, but not the complete answer, to identifying what’s important to news audiences. Interactivity is not the same as conversation.
|
