The Two W's of Journalism

The Why and What of Public Affairs Reporting

Davis "Buzz" Merritt, Maxwell E. McCombs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780805847314
• eBook ISBN: 9781135704704
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In this timely volume, the authors explore public affairs journalism, a practice that lies at the core of the journalism profession. They go beyond the journalistic instruction for reporting and presenting news to reflect on why journalism works the way it does. Asking current and future journalists the critical questions, "Why do we do it?" and "What are the ways of fulfilling the goals of journalism?" their discussion stimulates the examination of contemporary practice, probing the foundations of public affairs journalism.

With its detailed examination of factors influencing current journalistic practice, The Two W's of Journalism complements and expands on the skills and techniques presented in reporting, editing, and news writing textbooks. The perspectives presented here facilitate understanding of the larger role journalism has in society. As such, the volume is an excellent supplemental text for reporting and writing courses, and for introductory courses on journalism. It will also offer valuable insights to practicing journalists.

Part I

Chapter

1

The Why

Public life is the way democracy is expressed and experienced. Most people, willingly or unwillingly, must interact with others to accomplish their personal goals, assert their individual rights and promote their private interests as well as the collective public interest.

Shared information is the key to that transaction, and how people behave in that interaction depends on how they apply their core values to the information that they acquire. Because core values vary over a wide spectrum and because information is acquired unevenly and from many sources, the process of public life is unavoidably raucous and stressful. Two individuals frequently approach the same issue with totally different value sets and totally different information. Given the high likelihood of differing value and information contexts when two or more people come together, why does public life nevertheless proceed at a more or less steady pace and not fall apart? The answer lies in the fact that in a democracy, most people share one fundamental value: a belief in democracy itself.

Beyond that starting point, however, lies only honest dispute. The basic question that democracy seeks to answer is “What shall we do?” about a given situation. The possible answers to that question are as complex and varied as the range of private values held and information acquired.

Two friends have agreed to take in a movie on Thursday night, but they know on Thursday afternoon that they have a problem. John favors action films and uses them as an escape from the rigors of his professional life. Mary prefers docudramas that broaden her knowledge of history and challenge her intellect, and she is put off by violence. They want to be together that evening, however, so they must resolve the clash of values to accomplish their shared goal without undue discomfort for either.

They need two things: information and, because they work in different offices, a place or way to discuss the matter.

Each has read reviews of the movies that they and the other favor and has looked at the newspaper advertisements for them: “Amadeus” about the life and music of Mozart and “Ninja”, about breaking up a drug cartel in Hong Kong. Other movie choices also exist. They know the cost and the times of the movies, so they have the information they need. They will meet over coffee at 3 p.m. to decide, so they have a method for discussing the matter.

They have choices to make, and each choice has consequences. Each can insist on his or her movie preference and not spend the evening together, which neither wants. One can simply give in to the other and thus spend a less-than-enjoyable evening. One can persuade the other about his or her preference and risk offense if the argument is based on poor information or is not honestly made. They can agree on a compromise choice of movies.

They can decide to do something else altogether.

This careful weighing of choices and consequences, consideration of others’ concerns and thinking about possible alternatives is called deliberation, and it is at the heart of democratic decision making. If John and Mary successfully resolve their disagreement, they also will accomplish something else. They will strengthen their relationship by creating what in the abstract is termed joint social capital and banking an experience on which they can draw in the future when the decision might be far more crucial than what movie to see. If, on the other hand, both stubbornly insist on the original choices, their relationship will be damaged and perhaps destroyed.

The way in which a potential decision is talked about sometimes becomes just as important as the decision itself because the people involved have an interest in continuing the relationship that is considerably more important than merely prevailing on a single issue. Choices on important public matters contain the same risk-and-reward factors. A community or state or nation that makes its choices through a deliberative process likewise builds civic capital, a reserve of democratic good will and success that enriches both individuals and the total society.

In one form or another and at increasing levels of complexity and consequence, that’s how democracy at its best works. With the tragic exception of the Civil War, democracy in the United States has worked that way for two and a quarter centuries. The constitutional framework has not substantially changed, and even those changes, which are embodied in 27 amendments, were made through the constitutional process itself.

This long-running, continuing experiment hardly has been straight-line or smooth, nor could it have been. In a nation whose foundation stones are pulled together from every corner of the world and every political and religious belief, the only certainty is that there will be constant clashes of values and consistently different ideas about how to answer the question, “What shall we do?” But the mortar that has held those many and varied stones together has been made up of three essential elements: shared, relevant information; a method or place for discussing the implications of that information; and shared values on which to base a decision.

Shared Relevance

As the nation has grown from a group of sparsely populated, agrarian colonies strung along the East Coast to today’s highly technological nation of 300 million, access to relevant information has become at once more efficient and less effective. Technological change, from the first telegraph message to today’s astonishing cable and Internet activity, makes an endless amount of information instantly and continuously available. This has turned out to be a very mixed blessing.

Postman’s analysis of information overload describes the problem as one of growing impotence:

In both oral and typographical cultures, information derives its importance from the possibilities of action.… But the situation created by telegraphy, and then exacerbated by later technologies, made the relationship between information and action both abstract and remote. For the first time in human history, people were faced with the problem of information glut, which means that simultaneously they were faced with the problem of diminished social and political potency…. For the first time we were sent information which answered no question we had asked, and which, in any case, did not permit the right of reply…. Thus to the reverent question posed by Morse—what hath God wrought?—a disturbing answer came back: a neighborhood of strangers and pointless quantity; a world of fragments and discontinuities.¹

For most of the nation’s history, journalists provided much of the information to fuel democratic deliberation, first in newspapers, then also in broadcast. Americans relied on them to sort out relevance from irrelevance, and as journalists made those many decisions about content, they were, purposefully or not, helping set the agenda for public discussion. Even into the 1950s, the origins of shared information were relatively few: a dozen major newspapers, two wire services, three broadcast networks and a handful of news magazines. As late as 1963, the state of information technology was such that one can see, in grainy kinescopes of the coverage of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, a network announcer holding a telephone up against a desk microphone in an effort to get the words of a reporter in Dallas instantly out to the nation.

Only 30 years later, Americans were able to be anywhere at any time, live. They watched live television from Iraq as U.S. rockets rained down on Baghdad, and they logged onto their computers to witness the birth of a baby provided in real time on a personal Web site by the proud parents. And the Internet provided a second major change. Any person with access to a computer modem—more than half of all Americans—is no longer merely a recipient of information but is also a potential information provider at many different levels, exponentially increasing the number of places from which people can receive information.

When any person on earth can theoretically reach every other person on earth with any message whatsoever—be it benign or arousing, accurate or wildly inaccurate, libelous or innocuous, profane or spiritual—the problem of providing relevance for the democratic deliberative process becomes profound.

Evidence that Postman’s “world of fragments and discontinuities” had indeed arrived and that it has large consequences for the democratic process was clearly seen in the summer of 1998 as the United States struggled with the misadventures of President Bill Clinton. The conventional reporter-source dynamic was at work full blast as journalists attempted to cover the widespread official investigations of the president. They covered the daily briefings and announcements, of course, and developed leaks from official sources on both sides. All this provided a crush of information. But a new set of players inserted themselves into the game. Private Web sites posted all sorts of material, some of it wildly speculative and even wholly falsified, which had the patina of legitimacy because it was “published”. Newspapers and broadcast networks with their own Web sites on occasion used different, and lower, standards of verification in deciding what to “publish” on those sites.

The informational clutter left the conscientious citizen totally bewildered and struggling to sort relevance from irrelevance. For many, the most comfortable response was withdrawal. Postman’s “relationship between information and action” had indeed become abstract and remote, and in public opinion surveys a majority of Americans said they didn’t want any more information about Clinton’s affair; they simply wanted the matter settled.

It is easy to understand from those months in the summer of 1998 both the problem of information glut and the challenge it presents for journalists, not only in dealing with its volume, but also in gaining the attention of people who are under constant bombardment from all sides. In “Data Smog”, Shenk offered this admonition:

Such a world necessitates a restructured value system in which sharing and summarizing existing information is more of a priority than is stumbling onto genuinely new data. New information for its own sake is no longer a goal worthy of our best reporters, our best analysts, our best minds. Journalists will need to take a more holistic approach to information as a natural resource that has to be managed more than acquired.

What we need now is not so much news but shared understanding. Who has relevant information and who needs it? We must learn to share information with one another, to manage it thoughtfully, and to transform it into universal knowledge.²

For journalists to provide shared relevance for the process of democratic decision making in a world full of potential irrelevance will require a different answer to the question, “What are journalists for?” It will involve, as Shenk suggested, a “restructured value system” in which journalists understand that the why of providing that relevance is just as important as the how and the what.

The Method

As noted earlier, the second requirement for democracy to function is a method or place for citizens to discuss the information they have acquired. Technology has also vastly expanded—and complicated—that task. Whether on talk radio or television, in Internet chat rooms, in town meetings (electronic and otherwise), through e-mail or personal Web-sites, the opportunities for exchange of views have multiplied at a breathtaking pace. The dilemma is that increased opportunities for separate conversations do not automatically mean more people are involved in “common” conversations. This fragmentation makes social consensus difficult to recognize.

If merely providing new information is no longer a sufficient role for journalists to play in public life, what is a more useful role? In his introduction to “The Power of News”, Michael Schudson issued this invitation:

Imagine a world … where governments, businesses, lobbyists, candidates, churches, and social movements deliver information directly to citizens on home computers. Journalism is momentarily abolished. Citizens tap into any information source they want on the computer networks…. The Audubon Society, the Ku Klux Klan, criminals in prison, children at summer camp, elderly people in rest homes, the urban homeless and the rural recluse send and receive messages. Each of us is our own journalist. What would happen? … People would want ways to sort through the endless information available. What is most important? What is most relevant? What is most interesting? People would want help interpreting and explaining events…. A demand would rise not only for indexers and abstracters but for interpreters, reporters, editors…....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• About the Authors
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Author Index
• Subject Index