Key Readings in Journalism

Elliot King, Jane Chapman, Elliot King, Jane Chapman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415880282
• eBook ISBN: 9781135767679
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Key Readings in Journalism brings together over thirty essential writings that every student of journalism should know. Designed as a primary text for undergraduate students, each reading was carefully chosen in response to extensive surveys from educators reflecting on the needs of today's journalism classroom. Readings range from critical and historical studies of journalism, such as Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion and Michael Schudson's Discovering the News, to examples of classic reporting, such as Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward's All the President's Men. They are supplemented by additional readings to broaden the volume's scope in every dimension, including gender, race, and nationality. The volume is arranged thematically to enable students to think deeply and broadly about journalism—its development, its practice, its key individuals and institutions, its social impact, and its future—and section introductions and headnotes precede each reading to provide context and key points for discussion.

Section II Doing Journalism

Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9780203723876-9

JOURNALISM IS FIRST AND FOREMOST a social practice and a craft. People “do” journalism. The excerpts in this section explore how journalists covered the most important issues of the 20th century, such as the war in Viet Nam, the civil rights movement and the Watergate scandal. The social outcomes and impact of this journalism have been profound. These selections examine how journalists have gone about doing their jobs when what they have reported on has changed the world in which we live.

The section starts off with sociologist Herbert Gans’ landmark study of the way journalists worked in newsrooms in the 1970s. He demonstrated how organizational routines shaped news products and succinctly described the culture of journalism cultivated within media companies. This was a landmark study that offered an in-depth look into journalistic practices in major media companies.

Perhaps the most notable demonstration of how the sound practice of journalism can effect great social change is All the PRESIDENT'S Men, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward's account of their reporting on the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. This was the only time in U.S. history that a president has been forced to resign. If there is one book that every student should have read, many people in and close to professional journalism feel it is All the PRESIDENT'S Men. Bernstein and Woodward pursued the scandal, ignited by a burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office and apartment complex by people found to be associated with Richard Nixon's re-election campaign committee, by the use of old-fashioned and tenacious reporting. They knocked on doors, identified potential sources in positions high and low, and did not give up until they had the story. Each story they published in The Washington Post was confirmed by at least two sources. They also cultivated the person who became the most famous confidential source in history, who Bernstein and Woodward called Deep Throat. Though in retrospect, many scholars no longer give Bernstein and Woodward thecredit for forcing the resignation of Richard Nixon, their stories kept Watergate on the front pages of The Washington Post and prodded the U.S. Senate and the U.S. District court to pursue the scandal as well.

Along with Watergate, Viet Nam and the civil rights campaign were the big post Second World War issues that commanded the attention of reporters, contributing to what has become known as the “Golden Age” of American journalism. In the excerpt from Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff's The Race Beat, probably the definitive account of reporting on the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, the media bandwagon arrives at Little Rock, Arkansas, as the spotlight turns on de-segregation in a single community and one school. In their book, Roberts and Klibanoff argue that the mainstream media's focus on the injustices in the South played a critical role in correcting the injustice of segregation, racism and racial discrimination. As more reporters covered the civil rights movement, civil rights moved up in importance on the national political agenda, leading to its legislative successes in the 1960s.

If civil rights was the dominant political issue in the United States in the mid-to-late 1950s and early 1960s, in the mid-to-late 1960s the war in Viet Nam polarized the nation and took a central position in the political and news agenda. Many leading journalists including David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, Morley Safer, Michael Herr, Peter Arnett and Seymour Hersh established their reputations through their reporting in Viet Nam. M. Phillip Knightley's account of the reporting on Viet Nam is part of his larger work on war reporting, The First Casualty. Within the fog of war, objectivity and accurate reporting are often the first to suffer. Knightley recounts the challenges reporters faced as they reported on Viet Nam.

The practice of journalism, however, is not always benign. Who gets to be a reporter and who has authority in media organizations are of utmost importance in shaping the way news is covered and presented to the public. In The Girls in the Balcony —a book title that describes the marginalized physical location at the National Press Club in Washington D.C. where women were forced to stand, as a humiliating form of exclusion from the main action—Nan Robertson chronicles the women's fight for equality in journalism, at the New York Times in the 1970s.

The experiences of Nan Robertson and other women reporters at the Times stand in sharp contrast to those of Martha Gellhorn in World War II. As World War II approached Gellhorn funded her own trip to Europe, selling articles to pay her way. From that inauspicious start, she ultimately won recognition as one of the greatest war correspondents of the 20th century. Robertson and her colleagues were constrained by the news organization within which they found themselves, even though The New York Times was already recognized as the premier news organization of the period. In contrast, Gellhorn launched her journalistic career without accreditation from an established news organization. But her creativity and innovative presentation, which presaged similar journalism by Michael Herr and others reporting on Viet Nam, is a reminder that great journalism is not simply the product of news routines but of individuals dedicated to telling important stories.

Journalism that has impact is often not for the faint hearted. Robertson's campaign for women journalists was brave in defense of equal rights for the job (rightsthat are often taken for granted today), Woodward and Bernstein confronted ambition and treachery at the highest levels of government. Reporters covering the civil rights movement, particularly in the south, faced real physical danger as did reporters in Viet Nam. Nonetheless, the practices they followed were professional and honest—giving credibility and power to the work they produced.

Chapter 7 Deciding What's News

Herbert Gans

DOI: 10.4324/9780203723876-10

WHEN IT WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1979, Deciding What's News represented an effort to understand the organizational routines of leading media companies and how those organizational routines determined and defined the presentation of the news. It is a major work in what has become the “sociology of news,” joining works like Gaye Tuchman's Making News, and others. Gans, a distinguished sociologist at Columbia University, spent a considerable amount of time observing journalists at work at the CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Time and Newsweek magazines. He wanted to uncover the “unwritten rules” of journalism—what informs the story selection process and what are the news values underlying that process.

Gans found that without their being fully conscious of it, the work of journalists reflected the ruling ideas of American society, and the assumption that “distorted” news could somehow be replaced by “undistorted” news could not hold up in practice. He called for a “multiperspectival” approach to news, with news being presented from a variety of different frameworks. In these selections from Chapter 6, Gans explores how values in general and the value of objectivity in particular are operationalized in journalists’ daily routines.

The world of journalism has changed dramatically in the years since Deciding What's News was first published. News organizations have been downsized; the audience has been fragmented; and there are many new, albeit much smaller, competitors. When Gans wrote Deciding What's News, only the networks and the news magazines were truly national media. Now, every news blog potentially has a national and international reach. Nonetheless, in the preface to the 25th Anniversary edition, Gans argues that the processes supporting news selection and the values and assumptions that inform news judgments remain largely unchanged, at least in the major news organizations.

Objectivity, Values, and Ideology

Journalism resembles other empirical disciplines and professions in its aim to be objective: to be free from values and ideology; accordingly, journalists practice value exclusion. Of course, objectivity is itself a value, but journalists try to exclude values in the narrower sense of the term: as preference statements about nation and society.

Editorials, commentary, and at the magazines, the endings of some stories are exempted from value exclusion; the primary task in story selection, however, is, as one top editor put it, “to tell the readers this is what we think is important, and we hope they’ll feel the same way, but our aim isn't ideological.” Yet, because the importance judgments include national values as well as the enduring values, journalists do make preference statements about nation and society. Value exclusion is therefore accompanied by value inclusion, both through story selection and as opinions expressed in specific stories.

The enduring values are built into news judgment; as a result, most values and opinions enter unconsciously (in a non-Freudian sense). “Every reporter operates with certain assumptions about what constitutes normative behavior, if not the good society,” Peter Schrag has written, “and the more ‘objective’ he tries to be, the more likely those assumptions will remain concealed.”¹ Since journalists can no more operate without values than anyone else, the ones concealed in their work make it possible for them to leave their conscious personal values “at home.”

Value Exclusion

Journalists seek to exclude conscious values, and they do so in three ways: through objectivity, the disregard of implications, and the rejection of ideology (as they define it). Value exclusion, however, is not solely a goal but also a practical consideration, for it defends journalists against actual or possible criticism, and protects them against demands by powerful critics for censorship and self-censorship (see Chapter 8 [of the original publication]).

italic

Journalists justify their right to individual autonomy by the pursuit of objectivity and detachment; in a way, they strike an implied bargain, which allows them autonomy in choosing the news in exchange for leaving out their personal values. The outcome restricts the news to facts (or attributed opinions), which, journalists argue, are gathered objectively. This objectivity derives from the use of similar fact-gathering methods; like scientific method, journalistic method is validated by consensus. Equally important, the methods themselves are considered objective because journalists, being detached, do not care how the story comes out.

Most journalists fully realize that objective methods provide no guidelines for the selection either of stories or of which facts go into stories. Nevertheless, in making the selection, journalists strive to be objective, both in intent, by applying personal detachment; and in effect, by disregarding the implications of the news.² They do not choose the news on the basis of whom it will help or hurt; and when they cannot ignore implications, they try to be fair.

Objectivity so defined even enables journalists to reach evaluative conclusions and to state opinions. As long as their intent is to exclude conscious personal values, then opinions become “subjective reactions,” which follow from objectively gathered facts.³ Journalistic values are seen as reactions to the news rather than a priori judgments which determine what becomes newsworthy. Investigative reporters, who always end with explicit value judgments, often pick a topic because they smell a good story, not because they have already passed judgment on the target of their investigation. (In addition, the exposé story typically judges the exposed against their own expressed values, and these can be determined empirically by the reporter; as a result, even his or her value judgment is considered objective.⁴ ) Although journalists may not be aware of it, they are perhaps the strongest remaining bastion of logical positivism in America.

Whether journalists can be truly objective will be discussed in chapter 10 [of the original publication], but they try hard to live up to their definition of objectivity. Most train themselves, or are trained, to practice value exclusion, and many do not vote in order to preserve their political detachment. I found some exceptions: some older journalists described themselves as anti-Communist liberals worried about the dangers of American fascism, and of the Far Right generally; a few were fervent supporters of racial integration, a couple described themselves as moderate segregationists; there were some Zionists and some anti-Zionists; during the Vietnam War, a handful were hawks, and a somewhat larger number were doves; before elections, some became devotees of one or another candidate.

These journalists expressed their values freely in office discussions and, like the “house radicals” and “house conservatives” to be described later, became known for and by them. If they were unwilling or unable to keep their values out of their work, they asked to be taken off a story or were not assigned to it in the first place. Sometimes, however, editors would assign writers with known personal values to work on a story in which their values were relevant, which would ensure their bending over backwards to remain detached. When their values coincided with an organization's conscious stands, they did not need to be excluded; when their values were at odds with a stand but the story had been assigned to them because of seniority or special expertise, discordant values were “edited out” or “toned down.” This happened rarely, since experienced writers are also experienced at value exclusion.

However, journalists with conscious values were in the minority, for the news media I studied seem to attract people who keep their values to themselves. Those unable to do so seldom look for work in these media, especially when their values are discordant; and those who come with discordant values do not remain long. But equally important, the national media, and journalism generally, appear to recruit people who do not hold strong personal values in the first place. They have no prior values about the topics which become news, nor do they always develop them about topics on which they are working. Many of the reporters and writers constantly immersed in American politics did not seem particularly interested in it apart from their work. Even women journalists who felt strongly about sexual equality in their firm and profession, and who pressed male colleagues to choose more stories about women, often indicated that they did not share the values of the feminist movement. The abstention from values extended to story preferences, for when I asked people about their favorite story subjects, hoping in this manner to obtain clues to their values, almost all pointed out that they had no favorites. They were only interested in “getting the story.”

Although most of the people I studied discovered their future occupation in high school, they did not become journalists to advocate values or to reform society.⁵ Someliked to write, and a few magazine journalists are frustrated or “failed” novelists. Others wanted to be storytellers, enjoying th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: WHAT WE SHOULD KNOW
• Section I The Development of Journalism
• Section II Doing Journalism
• Section III Biography
• Section IV Classic Reporting
• Section V Journalism and Society
• Permissions
• Index