Journalism and the Public

David M. Ryfe

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780745671611, 9780745671604
• eBook ISBN: 9781509514441
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The public, James Carey famously wrote, is the ?god-term? of journalism, ?the term without which the entire enterprise fails to make sense.? In the last thirty years, scholars have made great progress in understanding just what this means.

In this much-needed new book, leading scholar David Ryfe takes readers on a journey through the literature that explores this most important of relationships. He discusses how and why journalism first emerged in the United States, and why journalism everywhere shares a family resemblance but is nowhere practised in precisely the same way. He goes on to explain why journalists have such difficulty talking about the business aspects of their profession, and explores the boundaries of the field?s collective imagination. Ryfe looks at the nature of change in journalism, providing sketches of its possible futures. Ultimately, he argues that the public is a keyword for journalism because it is impossible to understand the practice without it.

This rich and insightful guide will prove indispensable for anyone interested in understanding the practice of journalism.

1
Theory

When you think of the term “the public,” at least with reference to journalism, you might automatically take it to mean something like “the people,” or more narrowly, “the citizenry.” The public, you may say, is composed of citizens who live within specified geographic boundaries, and journalism produces news for this public. This definition is correct, but not complete. There have been at least four definitions of “the public,” and each of them is an important prism through which to view journalism. Looking at definitions, journalism can be seen simply as an act of producing news. Again, this is right, but partial. It misses the fact that journalism is also a culture: anyone may be able to publish news, but not everyone is a journalist, or associates with the culture of journalism. Like conceptions of “the public,” journalism has a history. It emerged in specific socioeconomic conditions and evolved differently in different places.

In the introduction to this book, I suggested that conceptions of the public and of journalism are more elastic than the conventional western narrative suggests. To see how and why this is true, it is important to get clear on these definitional issues.

Publics

In a review of the various ways in which “the public” has been defined in Western societies, Jeff Weintraub (1997) detects four alternatives. All of these definitions agree that two qualities characterize “the public”: it is shared, and it is visible. But they locate the public in different social spaces, and have people doing different things in these spaces. The two oldest senses of the term derive from Latin usage (res publica) in the Roman Empire: the public as the state (sovereignty), and the public as the polis (citizenship). In the context of the state, the public is concerned with the administrative rule of a given territory. It is the arena in which the rules that govern a territory (“public policies”) are made. The polis, in contrast, is the space in which citizens discuss those rules. In modern parlance, it is the “public sphere.” As a form of self-rule, democracy combines these two definitions into one thought: citizens as sovereign. Democracy is government, as Abraham Lincoln put it, “of the people” and “for the people,” but also “by the people.” Put more simply, democracy is a form of government in which the people have a say in the rules that govern them. When civil society began to grow in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, a third sense of the public as civic association emerged. This is a public life defined by sociability. Think of the hubbub of city life in which strangers find themselves in constant interaction with one another. We call this arena of sociability the civic sphere. Finally, as industrialism mounted across Europe and North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a fourth sense of the public as market took hold. This is a public of impersonal transactions (“it’s not personal, it’s just business”).

These various definitions track with the differentiation theory of modern society first outlined by Emile Durkheim (1893/1933). The general idea of this theory is that modern social institutions have become increasingly specialized (Parsons, 1966; Luhmann, 1982; Alexander and Colomy, 1990). Political institutions have become separate from economic organizations, which have become separate from civil associations, and so on. Along the way, each of these institutional spheres develops distinctive practices, values, identities, and rules. As they differentiate further, they also become more autonomous. Organizations that exist in one sphere come to look and act more like one another than like organizations in other institutional spheres. When seen against the backdrop of differentiation theory, Weintraub’s four definitions of “the public” merely describe the fragmentation of public life into distinct institutional spheres.

Before defining our four terms more precisely, I should make a qualification. In what follows, I cull definitions of the state, civil society, and so on from literatures that are vast and, in some cases, hundreds of years old. I do not pretend to do justice to the intricacy of these literatures—the turns they take or disagreements their participants take up. Instead, I merely wish to borrow from them enough to craft a definition that is accurate and useful for our purposes. When I refer to these texts, I will not pursue the many questions that one might ask; if you are interested you might start by consulting these texts. Here, we will focus on the task at hand: developing an accurate if incomplete sense of each institutional sphere within which we might situate journalism.

As Weintraub notes, the state is perhaps the oldest definition of “the public,” so let’s begin there. When we refer to the state, we mean primarily the apparatus of government—legislatures, legal systems, executive branches, militaries, bureaucratic departments, agencies, and bureaus—that is sovereign over a given territory (Tilly, 1992). The state may commingle with a particular religion (as in much of the Middle East), or ethnic group (which is what we mean when we say “nation-state”), but at its core the modern state is made up of governmental institutions whose purpose is to make and enforce law, or public policy, within geographic borders (Hall and Ikenberry, 1989). Both of these functions are important: making laws and policies, but then enforcing those laws and policies. This definition is simple and useful. Of course, even in its simplicity it runs several risks. For one, it risks implying that states are homogeneous, and this isn’t true. Different state institutions may and often do compete with one another. No state is entirely sovereign either. Other institutions—like the United Nations or the European Union—may have something to say about how things get done in a particular state (Haldén, 2011). To make issues even murkier, the boundaries between the state and other institutional spheres are not always clear (Eliasoph, 2013). As just one example, the American military today outsources a good part of the nation’s defense to private, for-profit contractors. Keeping these caveats in mind, it is still fair to say that the modern state, at bottom, is defined as the set of governing institutions responsible for public policymaking within a specified territory.

The modern concept of civil society refers to the set of institutions fitting between the family, the state, and the economy (Edwards, 2011). Many historical accounts of civil society place special emphasis on the sociability of urban centers, which grew in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and provided people an opportunity to meet and interact with strangers (Edwards, 2011; Seligman, 1992). Modern civic spaces are populated by voluntary associations, nonprofit groups, professional associations, churches, libraries, and more. Each of these organizational contexts is unique, but all entail a sense that people interacting within them form common bonds (beliefs and values, identities and purposes) and develop shared interests. People may enter civil society as private individuals, but as they interact with others they develop the capacity to engage one another on new, more public (shared and visible) cultural grounds.

In early modern accounts, civil society often was equated with political society (Ehrenberg, 1999). The difference between these two concepts can be confusing, so it is important to move slowly here. As we suggested above, the purpose of civil society is to develop common bonds and shared interests. But if forming collective identities and shared interests is all that a group does, we say that it remains in the sphere of civil society. It is when discussions lead people to take up collective action—that might include anything from providing aid to the poor to starting a softball team—that civic associations come to appear more like political associations., and as these collective activities come to orbit around the state, we say that civic groups begin to operate in political space, or what has come to be called “the public sphere.” Thus, political society, which for our purposes we will equate with the public sphere, is the space in civil society in which people come together to form public opinions and orient state action. Political parties, interest groups, and think tanks commonly operate in political society. But almost any civic group may find itself in the public sphere. It happens, for example, when a religious group campaigns on behalf of particular reproductive policies, or when a local parent-teacher association works on behalf of a new school bond initiative. In these instances, such groups move from the activity of forming collective bonds to that of debating and deliberating and ultimately persuading public opinion.

The market is a last institutional sphere of public life, and it is easily defined: it is the sphere of economic exchange. It may seem odd to define this sphere as public. After all, isn’t the economy the realm of private exchange and the state the arena of public policy? Yes and no. You must remember that markets were some of the first public spaces in which people interacted with strangers. They were therefore viewed as a place where people became civilized, that is, where individuals left behind purely private passions and behaved in recognizably public, self-interested ways (Hirschman, 1977). For this reason, it was quite common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to view the market as part of civil society. As markets grew in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they were seen as publics in their own right, as spaces that cultivate distinctive yet shared and visible values.

We might now ask what drives these institutional spheres to become more autonomous from one another. This question has animated a great deal of thinking among sociologists. Pierre Bourdieu’s (1985) account has been influential—especially in journalism studies—so let’s use his account. Bourdieu argues that the sorts of institutional spheres under discussion—that he calls “social fields”—separate from one another when they develop distinctive properties. These properties include values and beliefs, norms and rules, identities and practices. For example, in the context of the state, it is perfectly appropriate, perhaps even necessary, to compromise to achieve part of one’s political goals. Cutting deals is an essential practice (or property) of public policymaking. The same is not necessarily true of political society, where the purpose is to persuade others and defend one’s position rather than to make public policy. Similarly, acting in purely interested ways may be appropriate in the market but not in civil society. Within each sphere, this is to say, exist distinctive logics: sets of values and knowledge, norms and practices, identities and behaviors, that hang together more or less to form a cohesive system of relations (Thornton et al., 2012). We should not assume that these logics are homogeneous or without contradiction, or that actors necessarily agree on the system of relations a social logic produces. Instead, we should understand these logics as setting a foundation for interaction, and offering a set of definitions for what it is legitimate to do, and who it is normal to be, when acting in these respective fields. It is the fact that social fields contain logics that allow us to recognize when we are, say, in the political field rather than the economic field, or civil society rather than the state.

Bourdieu argues that the logics of fields are relational (1986a; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). He means by this that fields are organized internally by the set of oppositions and hierarchies peculiar to a given logic. He also means to say that oppositions and hierarchies create the boundaries of social fields (the idea being that you cannot tell when you are in a social field unless you can tell when you are not). It may help to think about this relational quality of social fields as akin to setting up a camping tent. If you have ever set up such a tent, you know that you start by laying out the tent on the ground. The fabric of the tent is something like the space taken up by a social field. You then place poles through holes in the tent. I take these poles to be akin to the properties of a social field. Once this is done, two people standing on opposite ends of the tent push the poles into the ground. As the poles push against one another, the tent inflates. Social fields come into being in a similar way. They do not arise due to particular properties (or poles). Rather, they inflate when properties push against one another to establish oppositions and hierarchies. Like tents, social fields come into being when properties (such as values, norms, beliefs, identities, practices, and so on) interact relationally.

Now let me take a moment to summarize what we have accomplished so far. The institutional spheres we have defined as public are social fields. Each contains preferred forms of capital (see Table 1.1), or what we may call logics. The logic of a social field includes everything from preferred identities to conventional practices to standard norms and values. Where civic associations work to build common feeling among their members, economic organizations struggle to make money. The elements of social fields work relationally, creating oppositions and hierarchies that lend social fields a sense of order.

Table 1.1 Four Institutional Spheres

Sphere	Logic	Vocabulary
The State	Administration	Public Policy, Regulation, Management, Law
Political Society	Persuasion	Public Opinion, Debate, Discussion, Deliberation
Civil Society	Association	Association, Shared Interests, Collective Identity, Social Capital
Market	Profit	Publicity, Consumption, Commodity

As Weintraub notes, the logic of each sphere is, in some basic sense, shared and visible, which makes each field a sphere of public life. Hence the common use of “public” terms in these spheres: the state is an arena of public policy, civil society a space of public life, political society the domain of public opinion, and the economy a sphere where publicity is important. Distinctive vocabularies, values, identities, and practices—what Bourdieu calls forms of capital—develop within each of t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Theory
• Chapter 2: Emergence
• Chapter 3: Outside the West
• Chapter 4: The Journalistic Imagination
• Chapter 5: Journalism and Change
• Chapter 6: Moving Forward
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement