Journalism Studies

A Critical Introduction

Andrew Calcutt, Philip Hammond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415554305
• eBook ISBN: 9781136831461
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

As the world of politics and public affairs has gradually changed beyond recognition over the past two decades, journalism too has been transformed... yet the study of news and journalism often seems stuck with ideas and debates which have lost much of their critical purchase. Journalism is at a crossroads: it needs to reaffirm core values and rediscover key activities, almost certainly in new forms, or it risks losing its distinctive character as well as its commercial basis.

Journalism Studies is a polemical textbook that rethinks the field of journalism studies for the contemporary era.

Organised around three central themes – ownership, objectivity and the public – Journalism Studies addresses the contexts in which journalism is produced, practised and disseminated. It outlines key issues and debates, reviewing established lines of critique in relation to the state of contemporary journalism, then offering alternative ways of approaching these issues, seeking to reconceptualise them in order to suggest an agenda for change and development in both journalism studies and journalism itself.

Journalism Studies is a concise and accessible introduction to contemporary journalism studies, and will be highly useful to undergraduate and postgraduate students on a range of Journalism, Media and Communications courses.

Part I
Ownership

Chapter 1
Ownership and the news industry

One of the most famous examples of mid-twentieth-century professional journalism is Tom Wicker’s account of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which first appeared in a special edition of the New York Times published on the same day that Kennedy was killed (22 November 1963).¹ Kennedy’s assassination came at the high point of the post-war boom and the peak of American influence over the rest of the world (before the USA was seen to fail in Vietnam). Wicker was prominent among a generation of journalists writing news for an industrial society – journalists whose news writing amounted to an industrial process in its own right.

Wicker’s account of the death of JFK is a fabrication. This, we hasten to add, does not mean that he made any of it up, but that he composed it; Wicker constructed his account, building a structure out of what he had observed that day in Dallas. Wicker’s structure is streamlined. He presents a stream of information lined up in order of significance, starting with the assassination of probably the most important man in the world and moving down through the hierarchy of information (and people) to encompass Jackie Kennedy’s bloodstained stocking and the bullet wounds sustained by John B. Connally Jnr. Not only because of his lesser wounds but also because he is a lesser mortal, the Governor of Texas does not appear in the body copy until the tenth paragraph (though there has been a fleeting glimpse of him on the fourth deck of an eight-decker headline).

If we were conducting a class on news reporting, we would say that the lines formed by Wicker’s structuring of this world-famous event comprise a pyramid (or triangle). But there is nothing ancient about this formulation, or Wicker’s use of it; instead, it is consistent with the modernist mode of abstracting from appearances and the order in which they first present themselves, the better to understand that which is being presented. Wicker re-presents JFK’s assassination in much the same way that a Cubist painting presents reality anew. Wicker’s representation bears the same sort of relation to raw experience as Picasso’s depiction Three Musicians (1921). In Wicker’s case, he has travelled backwards and forwards in time so as to shape the occurrence he is describing. Similarly, Picasso captured the presence of three musicians by depicting them from different angles which would not normally present themselves to the same viewer at the same time. In each instance, immediate sense impressions have been taken out of their real-time setting and organised into clearly identifiable, geometric shapes (pyramid, cube). But these formulations are not only for form’s sake. In drawing words, sentences and paragraphs together into the formal development of his story, Wicker has also replaced the line of events as they occurred in time – a flat timeline – with a sequence of information presented in descending order from primary importance to supplementary significance.

This presentation is the final movement in a three-part manoeuvre on Wicker’s part. First, as a trained observer, he will have made a mental record of events as they occurred in real time. Second, although he actually wrote it on a portable typewriter at the scene, in his mind’s eye Wicker must have stepped far enough back from the scene to extract key elements from the raw footage going on in his mind and to identify in these elements what would become the crucial components of his story. By now it is as if he has already drawn another line, dissecting the timeline of events and reaching as far back as the mental position from which to review them. Finally, he takes these crucial components and edits them into a hierarchy of descending significance (since you need to know this, you may also wish to know that which follows on from it; since you must have wanted to know that – or you wouldn’t have read this far, you may also, etc.). Having constructed the story according to this logic, Wicker has also drawn another line starting from his own, internal viewing platform, stretching not only back to the original setting in all its vivid detail but also forwards, in the direction of his readers. This last line is the one that puts them in touch with the scene, via the reporter’s reconstruction of it. In the way he wrote the story, in effect, Wicker took the flat timeline of events and drew two more lines, sharply angled against this first one, so that together they form a triangle (or pyramid structure).²

Line by line, Wicker’s story bears out the shaping process described above. The priority at the top of the story is: ‘President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot and killed by an assassin today.’ This is an abstraction from the real-time sequence. The motorcade has been wrenched out of its Dallas setting and replaced by a simple statement of the utmost importance: Kennedy is dead. The level of abstraction upon which the opening line rests is underwritten by formal identification of the dead man. Referring to him by his full name and the title of his elected office removes him temporarily from the realm of ordinary, interpersonal relations and transports him to a higher level in the public domain. As Wicker proceeds with his composition, however, he leads the reader back down towards personal detail and the passing of real time. He subsequently tells us that it was 2 p.m. when Jackie Kennedy left Parklands Hospital, walking beside the bronze coffin containing her husband’s body. We also learn what has happened to her famous coiffure: ‘she had taken off the matching pill box hat she wore earlier in the day, and her dark hair was windblown and tangled.’

In rearranging events so that his construction of them moves from the abstract to the concrete – something like an aeroplane coming down through the clouds towards the runway – Wicker offers far greater insight than could have been provided by the chronological reiteration of events. It transpires that information arranged according to a descending order of significance rises to a new level of meaning, thereby adding to its own descriptive power. Wicker’s considerable craft is formally realised in expressions which are all the more telling for being so economical (‘Mr Johnson is 55 years old; Mr Kennedy was 46’). Equally remarkable, and perhaps even more substantial, is the way that he presses vivid details (‘Mrs Kennedy […] still wore the raspberry coloured suit in which she had greeted welcoming crowds in Fort Worth and Dallas’) into service on behalf of a strict hierarchy of information in accordance with the pyramid structure. Wicker was commuting back and forth between sensory impression and causality, and the pyramid was his vehicle for making the journey.

In Wicker’s rendition of it, the pyramid construction is able to encompass abstraction from events and something of the real-time moments in which they actually turned. Far from being a barrier to meaningful information, or a shield against the intensity of being there, as Wicker constructs it the formality of the pyramid is designed to give readers more content – greater knowledge – than they might have acquired if they had been there on the day. Thus the information in Wicker’s story on the front page of the New York Times is infinitely richer than real-time, amateur film of the assassination, such as the footage currently available on YouTube, and it is more composed even than the consummate TV professional, Walter Cronkite, seen struggling to anchor CBS coverage as news of Kennedy’s death rolled out before his eyes and in his earpiece.³

Wicker’s account is a superb example of what has been described as the view from nowhere (Nagel 1986), apparently devoid of personal positioning on the reporter’s part (disingenuously so, some would say). His view is clear and farsighted, but what comes out of his viewing is, above all, constructed. In the best sense of the word, this is the manufacture of news. Of course, we recognise that in reference to news, the word ‘manufacture’ is normally used negatively. Among media academics, it is customary to put a negative construction on the story construction which Wicker exemplifies. For these critics, either the pyramid is jacked up too easily – an automatic, journalistic routine which precludes fresh observation and obstructs original insight; or else it is too much of an effort, and too big a claim – a sad case of the deluded reporter straining for godlike independence and inevitably failing to reach it. This is the case against objectivity, which we will discuss in detail in Chapter 3. Moreover, the pyramid is taken to be the structured form of writing which most clearly represents the industrial structure of news manufacture and the system of private ownership that both generates and contains it. The correlation of these three dimensions – (professional) story, (industrial) structure and (private) ownership – has led to the academic modelling of modern, industrialised news production as if private interest were its only driving force and publication merely the projection of journalists’ and publishers’ private concerns onto increasingly cynical readers, viewers and listeners.

In this chapter, we show that such a model is reductionist, i.e. it reduces a multi-level process, which entails the recurring aspiration to tell the truth, to the lowest common denominator – the bottom line. While we acknowledge that commercial turnover has usually been the precondition for professional news production, telling the story of news largely in these terms is like covering a flower show by reporting almost exclusively on the vases in which the flowers are arranged. Of course, the flowers could hardly be shown without vases to support them, but they also stand for something in their own right.

To make a case for the substantial (though never absolute) independence of news production from the blinkered self-interest associated with private ownership, we have selected some tableaux from the history of journalism, chosen because they represent significant moments in its development. Our approach to each of these encompasses something of the journalistic techniques involved, alongside the social and historical contexts from which such techniques evolved, together with recognition of the correspondence between these two paradigms (developments in technique, developments in society), utilising each to shed light on the other.

By tracking the development of journalism and the development of society, and by cross-referencing one with the other, we seek to show that journalism has been partly but by no means wholly accountable to private owners. Conversely, we aim to explain how private ownership has been essential to the development of journalism not only as its commercial basis, in which capacity it is often seen as unwelcome and unavoidable in equal measure, but also in the actual practice of journalism and the performance of its social role. In short, journalism and commercialism have flowed through history as complementary but non-identical streams.

If it seems laborious to go the same ground thrice over, it is surely better to do this than to keep revisiting the same territory any number of times, without moving the debate any further forward. To us there appears to have been something like trench warfare between professional accounts of the emergence and development of modern, commercial news production, told in terms of individual endeavour, timely innovation and journalistic autonomy, and academic studies, with their emphasis on social and industrial constraints, systematically enforced in the context of private ownership. Our aim is break this stalemate with a logical reconstruction which, though admittedly short on historical detail, nonetheless identifies and explicates the essential contradiction in journalism, namely, that it has striven for truth on behalf of the majority, while operating for the most part in conditions of minority ownership and private gain.

Furthermore, having reconstructed some of the most important elements in the previous development of news reporting and journalistic manufacture, we will be better placed to review the recent debate about objectivity and to specify the strengths and weaknesses of professional reporting in today’s context (the task to which we come in Chapters 3 and 4).

Being there

June the 16. our men having made a breach in the Castle, assaulted it, but found the Enemie desperately resolute, reviling and calling them English dogs, Parliament Rebells, Puritan rogues, and holding up some of their best apparell and linnen at their sword points, and topps of Pikes, and setting fire unto them burnt them in our sight, saying, look here you pillaging Rascals there is pillage for you, and when our Gunners shot, they cryed shoot home you rogues, Captaine Stutuile having thrown in at the breach some hand grenades, part of the house took fire, which some of them seeing, resolutely burnt their armes, goods, and lastly themselves therein, others cryed for quarter, but none being granted but to the women and children, they resolutely defended themselves, and kept our men almost two houres at the breach at push of pike […].

This quotation is from the first part of ‘A Perfect Diurnall of All the Proceedings of the English and Scotch Armies in Ireland’, published on 18 July 1642, attributed to one Master Godwin, and selected by Joad Raymond (1993: 46) as one of three examples of ‘early newsbook descriptions of battle’. In writing this report for circulation, Master Godwin was compiling a list of all that had happened in battle, or, more precisely, all he recalled as having happened, so that his comrades in arms might come to know of it. The lines quoted above are about half the number selected by Raymond in his extended extract from Godwin, but at the end of Raymond’s selection, even at twice the length of the section quoted above, neither the author nor his first sentence have yet arrived at a full stop.

Godwin’s ‘Diurnall’ was ‘perfect’ in that he wrote down just what his memory retained of the events of the day. In his writing there is no sign of formal structure or hierarchy of presentation; it is simply a chain of linked words which reflect the actions and reactions of those embroiled in battle. Godwin has not constructed his report in the same way that Wicker did, three centuries later; indeed, it is not even clear whether the occurrences Godwin describes are formed as separate events in his mind’s eye. In writing down his account, Godwin may well have been reviewing these occurrences in the same way that perhaps he first experienced them, as an uninterrupted stream. By the tenses that he has used, we know that Godwin was not writing his account as the battle raged around him: ‘our men having made a breach in the Castle, assaulted it’ (italics added). The past tense puts Godwin writing about the battle after it had occurred. But it does not put him at the same distance from the battle as we have since come to associate with news reporting. Nor can his positioning be understood as an early example of the ‘journalism of attachment’ (see Chapter 3 for further discussion of this), since the latter was a late-twentieth-century reaction against levels of detachment which in Godwin’s time (1640s) were not yet widely adopted, either in writing or in the orientation of human beings to their surroundings.

It would be wrong to say there had been no previous manifestations of any such detachment. Something like it is discernible, for example, in the self-examination of the Shakespearian soliloquy, when leading characters come down stage and out of the action in order to address the audience, and in doing this they look askance at themselves as the audience itself would do. Similarly, the delineation of separate scenes on Shakespeare’s part, distinct from the flow of medieval mystery cycles, underlines the construction of the play and indicates that Shakespeare was occupying a new kind of social position from which to construct it. But the dual spectatorship entailed in Shakespearian drama – the audience viewing characters on stage and onstage characters viewing themselves – also suggests that the Elizabethan theatre was an unusual place of uncharacteristic self-consciousness, set apart from the normal run of largely unexamined lives.

From today’s vantage point, if we look back at Godwin’s newsbooks as an early episode in the history of reporting, it comes naturally for us to say that they show the necessity of reporters being there, on the scene they are reporting. Similarly, it would be easy to suggest that, whatever its faults, the ‘journalism of attachment’ has restated the importance of this. But both statements are equally facile. Human beings have always been there, since ‘there’ is where we are, necessarily. What differentiates Godwin’s news from ours is that the reporter’s position of being one step removed, the default position from which to file copy, is hardly there for him to occupy, still less for him to deny. There can be no question of Godwin questioning the validity of detachment and opting for attachment instead, since the position hardly exists (at least, not widely) from which he could choose to adopt or reject either one of these.

The battle in which Godwin took part (he took both parts, having written on behalf of both sides in the English Civil War) was part of a war for the right to rule England. It was a war fought between representatives of opposing modes of government: theocratic autocracy versus parliamentary democracy (thou...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Ownership
• Part II Objectivity
• Part III The public
• Notes
• References
• Index