Advances in Foundational Mass Communication Theories

Ran Wei

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367234843
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351674157
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Providing leading-edge perspectives on the legacy theories of mass media and society, this collection advances the foundational theories of mass communications, which have sustained the field of study over the past fifty years. Many of these contributions were originally published as a Deutschmann Scholarly Essay in the Mass Communication and Society journal, and together they comprise a remarkable source of knowledge, equipped to lead mass communications theory through the emergence of new technologies, and the evolution of communications, in the 21st century.

Moreover, the contributions gathered in this volume contradict any critics who may claim the theories of the 20th century have outlived their usefulness, for these prove to guide contemporary research as forcefully as ever in the digital era. Validating the classic media theories across time and their various forms constitute the second focal section of this volume. Finally, senior media scholars offer their views on the future directions in which mass communication theories can be advanced.

Walter Lippmann’s Ghost: An Interview With Michael Schudson

Michael Schudson

An esteemed scholar conducts an enlightening examination of the enduring issues of the press as a democratic institution, the professionalization of the journalist, journalism schools, liberalism, and science. This imagined one-on-one conversation with Walter Lippmann is lightly humorous yet offers important insights on the accountability of the government by the press in days gone by and on the accountability of the press to the public in our digital age.

Michael:	Walter, what a wonderful surprise to see you here in Seattle at the International Communication Association! But I thought you died in 1974!
Walter:	You don’t believe in ghosts? Well, neither did I. And we do not get permission to travel back among civilians very often, but I had heard so much about Microsoft and Starbucks that I just had to. (Besides, over the past few decades I have learned quite a lot about Nirvana.)
Michael:	Well, it’s just wonderful that you are here. I would love to get your impressions about journalism and democracy these days, particularly in light of the program you hoped journalists would adopt back at the time you wrote Liberty and the News (1920) and then Public Opinion (1922). So let me begin with the sad fact that the population of journalists in American newspaper newsrooms declined from 67,000 in 1992 to 59,000 in 2002 to roughly 40,000 today. In such a world, is there any hope for getting the kind of news coverage a democracy requires?
Walter:	Well, as you are probably aware, a 1971 study found 39,000 journalists in newspapers then, essentially identical to what you have today. Yes, I am aware that there are about 50% more people in the country than in those days. But thanks to computers, web sites, aggregators, brilliant sources of information like Wikipedia or YouTube, stunningly good search engines like Google, and even a newspaper’s own past stories online, today’s reporters are simply a lot more efficient in researching a story than they used to be. Yes, 20,000 newsroom jobs have been lost since 2002, but how many reporters would you need to rehire to reach the same level of quality that newsrooms offered then? Surely less than 20,000. Is it less than 15,000? I think so. Is it less than 10,000? Maybe. So far as I am aware, no one has even tried to measure “the news productivity” of quality journalists—not the number of stories generated, but the amount of quality work produced.
Michael:	You seem very familiar with new technologies. I’m impressed.
Walter:	Well, of course. We do have Wi-Fi where I am.
Michael:	In Liberty and the News, you wrote that two things might help journalism to nourish democracy. First, you had high hopes that journalism schools would instill in students a professional spirit. Second, you urged an expansion of outside expertise in data-gathering and political analysis in what you nicely termed “political observatories.” How have we done in professionalization inside journalism and the development of political observatories outside?
Walter:	Let me take one at a time. First, on professionalization. You are far too young to know just how hopelessly unprofessional journalism was in 1920. There was a strong newsroom prejudice against college education. There was, in fact, a pervasive antipathy to anything that even approached the status of an idea. And what you and Katherine Fink wrote earlier this year in Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism about the “rise of contextual journalism” gets the story about right (Fink & Schudson, 2014). (Do not be surprised that I keep up with the journals. Digital communication makes this all so easy now.) Almost all of what was printed on the front page well into the 1950s and even into the early 1960s was deferential to power, deficient in energy, and just plain dull. To say that it followed the “5 W’s” in an effort at objectivity is a joke. It was 4 W’s—who, what, when, where. There was scarcely any effort to examine the “why” of the topic at hand. What Newton Minow would say of television in the 1960s we could well have said of newspapers in 1920—they were a vast wasteland. By the late sixties and the 1970s this had changed dramatically, so that half of the front-page stories became sharply and decisively analytical or interpretive, offering a context for the story that helped frame the particular breaking news event. And after Vietnam, most journalists came to believe that they were not doing their job if they did not offer context.
Michael:	But why? Is it that we have more or better journalism schools?
Walter:	Journalism schools have improved. I warned in Liberty and the News that J-Schools do no good if students are taught by “unenterprising stereotyped minds soaked in the traditions of a journalism always 10 years out of date” (p. 73). What matters is “a public recognition of the dignity” of a career in journalism (p. 73) and a training “in which the ideal of objective testimony is cardinal” (p. 74). What is key is that apprentices in journalism become “the patient and fearless men of science who have labored to see what the world really is” (p. 74). This was tougher to achieve by the 1920s than it had been earlier, simply because the world had grown so complicated. And, as I pointed out, it had grown more complicated within the governmental sphere because the center of government moved from Congress to executive agencies. “It is easier to report Congress than it is to report the departments, because the work of Congress crystallizes crudely every so often in a roll-call. But administration, although it has become more important than legislation, is hard to follow, because its results are spread over a longer period of time and its effects are felt in ways that no reporter can really measure” (p. 81).
Michael:	Okay. We’ll come back to that. But now back to your solution to the problem of the press. First, you suggested, improve journalism education. And your second key point—outside bureaus of intelligence or political observatories?
Walter:	“Theoretically,” I wrote, “Congress is competent to act as the critical eye on administration.” But that did not happen. Congressional investigations were invariably inadequate to their purposes—they were “almost always planless raids.” But two things began happening at the time I wrote. There were “more or less semi-official institutes of government research” established inside government and there was “the growth of specialized private agencies which attempt to give technical summaries of the work of various branches of government” (p. 81). Both are “expert organized reporters” (p. 81). These various organizations collectively—these political observatories—provide analysis that solid news reporters can absorb and retranslate for the public. In Public Opinion I suggested that journalism and journalists are incapable of providing reports adequate to the needs of democracy if they are operating alone, without an adequate “machinery of record” to depend upon. Political observatories are an intermediary with an ongoing and single-minded focus on analyzing and explaining complex political matters in ways accessible to journalists.
Michael:	Very well, but it is more than 90 years later now. Have political observatories succeeded?
Walter:	All I can say is that political observatories have to succeed. Journalism is not now able to and will never be able to serve democracy without them. In the long stretch of history from the democracy of ancient Athens to the 21st century, popular government has shifted from direct democracy or “assembly” government to “representative” or “republican” government to “monitory” democracy. In what became the United States, “assembly government” was largely limited to local government in New England; the town meeting model never became the template for U.S. state or federal government. At the federal government, representation was the primary governmental form, even though in the beginning the general public voted directly only for the House of Representatives, not the Senate. But in the 20th century, something unanticipated happened. The center of gravity in government moved from legislatures to the executive. This was what some thinkers have called “the rise of the administrative state.” But how does the public or its representatives keep an administrative state accountable? The short answer is: “with great difficulty.” The longer answer is that a new set of mechanisms has arisen for the purpose—so much so that we might even say, as Australian political theorist John Keane has, that we have a new form of democracy, a “monitory democracy.” “Monitory democracy” directs attention to the variety of new ways that power, particularly government power, is monitored by institutions in and out of government, arriving at what Keane (2009) called “the continuous public chastening of those who exercise power” (p. 817). The contrast to representative democracy lies particularly in the term “continuous.” Elections offer the occasional public chastening—and monitory democracy could not function without them—but monitory democracy extends the repertoire of mechanisms of oversight that operate day in and day out. Monitory democracy has emerged, interestingly, both inside and outside the government itself. I saw this beginning to happen in 1919. Outside, think tanks abound. And, much as I had hoped, universities have sprouted scores of first-rate institutes and schools of public policy that do serious research and analysis. Moreover, independent, for-profit enterprises of public opinion polling add another powerful dimension to all of this. And government began to monitor itself. The Administrative Procedures Act of 1946, as Judge Richard Posner (1996) put it, “signified the acceptance of the administrative state as a legitimate component of the federal lawmaking system, but imposed upon it procedural constraints that have made the administrative process a good deal like the judicial” (p. 954). An amendment to the Administrative Procedure Act passed in 1966 that we know as the Freedom of Information Act. In the post-Watergate era, the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 began the process that led within a few years to the appointment in every Cabinet-level agency and most other major federal agencies of its own office of inspector-general empowered to audit the department on an ongoing basis. The inspectors general [IGs], through semiannual reports on the agency each monitors, make public an assessment of waste, fraud, and abuse of the public trust. In fiscal 2008, the IGs collectively made recommendations to save more than $14 billion; conducted investigations that identified more than $4 billion, which the IGs were able to recover; and produced more than 6,000 indictments, more than 6,000 successful prosecutions, and nearly 5,000 suspensions and disbarments (Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, 200...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Extending the Deep Legacy of Our Field’s Top Scholars
• 1. Walter Lippmann’s Ghost: An Interview With Michael Schudson
• 2. Reassessing the People’s Choice: Revisiting a Classic and Excavating Lessons for Research About Media and Voting
• 3. Reading Lasswell’s Model of Communication Backward: Three Scholarly Misconceptions
• 4. Beyond the Four Theories of the Press: A New Model of National Media Systems
• 5. The First-Person Effect and Its Behavioral Consequences: A New Trend in the Twenty-Five Year History of Third-Person Effect Research
• 6. A Media Sociology for the Networked Public Sphere: The Hierarchy of Influences Model
• 7. Studying Journalists and Journalism Across Four Decades: A Sociology of Occupations Approach
• 8. New Directions in Agenda-Setting Theory and Research
• 9. The End of Framing as we Know it…and the Future of Media Effects
• 10. Yesterday’s New Cultivation, Tomorrow
• 11. A Three-Decade Retrospective on the Hostile Media Effect
• 12. Diffusion Theory in the New Media Environment: Toward an Integrated Technology Adoption Model
• 13. Defining Identification: A Theoretical Look at the Identification of Audiences With Media Characters
• 14. Mass Communication Research at the Crossroads: Definitional Issues and Theoretical Directions for Mass and Political Communication Scholarship in an Age of Online Media
• Index