Making Journalists

Diverse Models, Global Issues

Hugo de Burgh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134377541
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

At a time when the media's relation to power is at the forefront of political discussion, this book considers how journalists can affect public discourse on politics, economy and society at large.

From well-known and respected authors providing all new material, Making Journalists considers journalism education, training, practice and professionalism across a wide range of countries, including Saudi Arabia, Africa, India, USA and the UK.

The book offers insights into:

• what journalism is
• how education makes the journalist and, therefore, the news
• models of journalism taught and practised across the globe
• the ethical implications of the process.

When news reporting can lead to decisions on whether or not to got to war, everything can be affected by journalists and their mediation of the world. This text brings these present issues together in one invaluable resource for all students of journalism, politics and media studies.

Part I
JOURNALISM AND JOURNALISTS

1
WHAT IS JOURNALISM

Brian McNair

What is journalism and why should we care?

To answer the second question first: a reasonable claim can be made for journalism as the pre-eminent cultural form of our era, occupying more resources in its production and distribution, and routinely consumed by more people in most countries than any of the many other ways in which we experience the world through mass media. We love our movies and our music, of course; are addicted to our TV soaps and our game shows, perhaps; have reverence and respect for our literature and visual art. But journalism matters more than them all, if only because it is the end product of a major industry employing hundreds of thousands of people, and daily supplying hundreds of millions – billions, across the globe – with information about every conceivable aspect of the world around them. Journalism, in all its varieties, is the constant background and accompaniment to everyday life.

And in this, straightforwardly industrial sense, journalism matters more with each passing year. Journalism has existed as a recognised mode of communication – ‘the staple of news’, as Ben Jonson referred to it in 1624 – for more than four centuries, but since the early 1980s its production has expanded as print and broadcast outlets have been joined by teletext services, then, with the arrival of cable and satellite technologies, by 24-hour real-time news channels on TV and radio, and in recent years by a proliferation of mobile-telephone and online news sites. The journalistic sector of the media economy is a vast universe of information providers, a public sphere of practically (from the individual’s perspective, at least) infinite size and depth. The established brand leaders in journalism – the BBC, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the American TV networks, Reuters – have been joined in an ever more crowded multi-platform marketplace by new players like CNN, Sky News and Fox; by gossipy, often scurrilous yet enormously impactful online news sites such as the Drudge Report; by Arab language real-time broadcasters like Al Jazeera; and now, in what some have termed the blogging ‘revolution’, the thousands of journalistically inclined web logs jostling for attention in the networked, digitised media environment of the twenty-first century. The consumers of journalism have been moved from a position, not that far distant in the past, of relative information scarcity to one of surplus and excess. If it is true, as some argue, that in the early twenty-first century we inhabit a culture of information overload, a communicative Tower of Babel, then journalism is that culture’s currency.

More than all this, journalism matters because it has a uniquely privileged cultural status, placing it (and journalists) at the centre of public life and political debate ever since journalists first began to irritate kings, queens and popes in early modern Europe. In recent times, journalism has been the trigger for the Monica Lewinsky scandal which nearly brought down US President Bill Clinton, the sleaze scandals which did much to put an end to eighteen years of Conservative government in the UK, and the continuing demystification (some would say undermining) of the British monarchy in the tabloid press and elsewhere. As this chapter was being written, public debate in the United Kingdom was dominated by a bitter dispute between the Labour government and the BBC.¹ That controversy, and the suicide of a senior official to which it led, forced the setting up of an independent judicial inquiry before which even the prime minister himself was required to appear. As for the BBC, its reporters, editors and managers were subjected to an unprecedented examination of their journalistic methods and principles, from which they did not emerge unsullied. The intense political and public interest in the Hutton inquiry² illustrates that journalism is not just the most important cultural form of the twenty-first century, if measured by the billions of pounds, dollars and euros spent globally on its production and consumption; it is also the most influential and contentious, with the capacity to shape the agenda of public debate, destabilise governments and cause immense misery to individuals in all walks of life.

Journalism’s perceived importance (perceived because it is not always clear what its actual consequences on specific events and processes are) means that competing interest groups constantly struggle to define what, from their perspective, it should be, as well as what goes into it and what it says. Political actors in today’s democratic societies inhabit a world where public opinion is crucially important. Journalism is the fuel, the raw material of public opinion, and a key tool in its management by elected politicians, lobbyists, pressuregroup activists and even terrorists like Al Quaeda and ETA, for whom journalism provides the essential ‘oxygen of publicity’ which enables their causes to be noticed and (they hope) addressed. The communication techniques, tactics and strategies popularly referred to as ‘spin’ or public relations have evolved to their current state as a means of managing (or attempting to manage) journalistic coverage of events.

Journalism in transition

We should care about what journalism is, not least, because its practitioners are currently going through a period of rapid and unsettling change, driven principally by developments in communication technology, the fuller implications of which are described in John Pavlik’s chapter later in this volume. These have opened up new possibilities for newsgathering and reporting. Satellite and cable, digitalisation and the internet, CCTV and lightweight recording equipment – all have problematised long-standing notions of what journalism is, and what it is not. They have transformed the processes of news production and distribution in ways which challenge the journalist’s traditional relationship to his or her material, and his or her cultural role. They have transformed the economics of journalism, and challenged normative definitions of what the journalistic agenda should be. They have expanded the parameters of journalistic form and encouraged the emergence of hybrids. Journalism has become part of a wider culture of factuality, by which I mean our societies’ growing fascination with the real and the actual (as opposed to the imagined and the fictional). The emerging culture of factuality is seen in the explosion of reality TV, makeover shows and other media forms in which traditional boundaries between news and commentary, education and entertainment, objectivity and subjectivity, detachment and commitment, reportage and reconstruction are eroding.

These processes have been welcomed by some, condemned by others. They have made life easier for journalists in some respects, and in others more difficult. They make it timely for a consideration of what are journalism’s core values, its definitive characteristics, its unique selling propositions.

It is not just a question of what journalism is, though, but of what we think it should be, and the tensions between the two. It is a question of what journalism is becoming, when the technological, political and economic environments within which it is practised are, as they are now, in flux. And because, for all the technological wizardry now available to the industry, journalism is ultimately the product of human beings, one should also ask – who is the journalist, and what cultural role is he or she expected to perform in the twenty-first century?

This chapter proposes some answers to these questions, with occasional assistance from another branch of the culture industries. Since its origins, mainstream cinema has been fascinated with journalism and journalists, from whose working lives have been drawn a memorable set of heroes and villains. Journalists have been portrayed by the greatest stars of their era, including Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, James Stewart, Burt Lancaster, Kirk and Michael Douglas, Richard Gere, Geena Davis, Kate Winslet, Kevin Spacey, Jim Carrey and Angelina Jolie. The involvement of these stars in films centred on news media says something about the romantic allure of the journalist in our societies (something of a paradox, given the public hostility often recorded towards the profession in opinion polls). Journalists, no matter what the polls say, are glamorous and sexy in a way that accountants and bank managers are not, a fact reflected not least in the rise of journalism studies as a degree subject in higher education. But journalists are also mistrusted, despised, feared, in some cases loathed, and movies about the profession play on these ambivalences for dramatic effect.

Apart from their sheer entertainment value, therefore, these films also present a useful source for students of journalism interested in the social role of the profession. An entire book could easily be written about what the cinema tells us of the changing role of journalism in the twentieth century, and the pressures the journalist has been under from competing demands and interests. I will select here for the purposes of illustration just a few films in which journalists feature as central characters. They help us to understand, through the eyes of cinematic artists, not necessarily what journalism is but what we collectively, as a society, would like it to be, and how those expectations have changed.

What journalism is – an overview

Since the ‘invention’ of journalism sometime in the sixteenth century (Raymond, 1996) it has been required to be at least three things, often at the same time:

1. A supplier of the information required for individuals and groups to monitor their social environments; what Denis McQuail (1987) has characterised as a medium of surveillance.
2. A resource for, support to and often participant in public life and political debate – in liberal-democratic societies particularly, the discursive foundation of what Habermas (1989) famously called the public sphere.
3. A medium of education, enlightenment and entertainment – what might be grouped together as its recreational or cultural functions.

These three functions often overlap, of course, and reconciling them within texts which are at the same time (for example) politically useful and entertaining has generated professional tensions. These have structured public and political debate around the performance of journalists for as long as news media have existed. In seeking to define what journalism is, we must also consider the competing positions adopted in those debates.

Journalism as information – some distinguishing features

Journalism was born as a commodity for sale in the cultural marketplace. If not the first cultural form to exploit the technologies of text and image reproduction which drove the Enlightenment in early modern Europe (Elizabeth Eisenstein (1983) notes that religious, scientific and pornographic texts also benefited from the printing revolution), then journalism was certainly in the vanguard. Early printed pamphlets, corantos and newsheets were produced for profit. Even before print, when news was dispatched through the medium of handwritten letters as correspondence, journalists were suppliers of a commodity with, to use Marxian terminology, both use value (information about the world was needed for the pursuit of government and business, trade and war – journalism was useful) and exchange value (the price this information could command in a marketplace, when packaged and offered for sale as news). From the beginning the correspondence supplied by journalists depended on the existence of a market of paying customers who could read, or who had access to those who could read on their behalf.

For a variety of reasons, not all journalistic media have adhered to this straightforwardly commercial model, being financed, like the BBC, through taxation or other means of public support. The newspaper of the Communist Party of Great Britain, the Morning Star, was supported throughout most of its history by donations from Communist Party members and supporters, as well as subsidies from the Soviet Union. Throughout the communist world, until its collapse in the late 1980s, the party maintained journalistic media from state funds, seeing words as being, to paraphrase Lenin, ‘much more dangerous than bullets’ and thus, in the interests of political self-preservation, part of the cultural apparatus of the totalitarian state. They remain so in the decaying outposts of Marxism–Leninism, such as Cuba and North Korea. In China, where capitalism has been introduced in all but name, the Communist Party retains its monopoly on the control of journalistic media.

Local and even national newspapers in some European countries enjoy state subsidies designed to ensure healthy and diverse media in remote or underpopulated areas which might be unable to support them by sales revenue alone. These deviations from the commercial model have been exceptions to the rule, however. Journalism is principally about packaging information for sale directly to an audience willing to pay for it through a cover charge, or indirectly by selling access to that audience on to other businesses, who will pay for advertisements placed alongside journalistic material. Often, especially in print (although the UK and other countries have seen an explosion of ‘metro’ free newspapers in recent years, distributed free to commuters on their way to and from work), the two means of revenue generation are combined. A commercial company such as Independent Television News (ITN), whose bulletins are received by its UK audience on ITV and Channel 4 free of charge, depends on the size and quality of its audience to generate advertising income. Even the BBC, free of the direct commercial pressures felt by ITN and Sky News in Britain, must pay attention to its audience share if it is to maintain political and public support for its licence fee funding. Journalism here, as elsewhere, is a business, manufacturing and selling a product. As such, and like other businesses, journalism has always been required to meet the expectations of its audiences, as well as seeking to create new markets.

So what, as consumers, do we expect from journalistic commodities? What are we buying when we pay for a newspaper, or subscribe to a news service on cable or satellite, teletext, e-mail or mobile phone?

First and foremost, we are paying for useful information – for knowledge which has been extracted, processed and refined from the raw material of the world’s happenings, and within which some order has been imposed on the chaos of events. We can experience directly only what happens in our immediate physical environments. What happens at a distance may well impact on us, however, and we need (or think we need) to know about it. Journalism meets that need, at a price which reflects the costs of the inputs which have gone into its production. In agreeing to pay that price we are purchasing what we believe to be a reliable account of the real beyond our immediate experience, mediated through the professional skills of the journalist and the resources of the journalistic organisation. Journalism can be defined, in this sense, as mediated reality.

Novelists address the real, of course, as do painters, poets and scientists (natural and social) when they use their artistic or scholarly tools to investigate and then communicate something about the meaning of life and the workings of the world to their audiences. The journalist, like the novelist and the historian in their different ways, tells stories, but the former’s stories are presented to potential audiences as factual, rather than fictional, artistic, or scientific.

Journalistic stories tell us about things that actually happened, as opposed to things imagined by the novelist or the playwright, or interpretatively reconstructed from forensic analysis of relics and documents by the archaeologist or the historian. Journalism presents snapshots of the real, narratives of contemporary events rather than those of the past (although historical context is crucial to much journalism, and the uncovering of hitherto unknown historical facts can become news if it can be contextualised in terms of the present).

To have value as information, journalism has to be accepted as true, or at least an acceptable approximation of the truth. To this extent it is trusted, and acquires its privileged status over prose fiction and other discursive modes which, though they may address the real in terms which are profound and deeply affecting, cannot claim to be true in quite the same way. This despite the qualification that the reality which journalism aspires to represent is, by necessity, mediated through various processes and technologies. This mediation distinguishes the journalistic representation of reality from the reality itself, and obliges the student of journalism to consider the choices made and decisions taken in the production process. To assist here we can distinguish between three categories of the real:

• what actually happened (and what, by implication, would have happened anyway, in the absence of an observer to record it – the asteroid or comet which devastated much of Siberia in 1908 did crash to earth, despite the fact that no reporter witnessed it);
• what is perceived to have happened by those present at an event (who may or may not include journalists); and
• what is reported as having happened, or journalism.

There is no necessary correlation between these three dimensions of the real, and irrespective of the claims for objectivity made for it (see below), journalism is not and never could be reality in the first, absolute sense. It can be, at best, only a version of reality, constructed according to rules, codes and conventions which we associate with journalistic discourse.

At the most basic level of ‘constructedness’, news is a sampled version of reality. Journalists learn news values which, when applied to the unceasing flow of events, allow sifting and sorting to take place, bestowing newsworthiness on some and not others. News values are cultural, and reflect subjective assumptions about what is important to the members of a society at any given time. Commercial news media have values which reflect the need to sell journalism in a marketplace (prioritising conflict and drama, for example), whereas the statecontrolled media of the USSR operated news values designed to produce an ideologically functional journalism (the meeting of production targets was ‘news’, for example, as was any evidence, no matter how slight, of popular dissatisfaction with capitalism in Western countries).

Once bits of reality have been awarded news value and given a place on the journalistic agenda, narratives are constructed around choices about such matters as camera angle, verbal language, framing and contextualisation of events, editing of material and use of sources. Special effects will be deployed, such as graphics and computerised image manipulation. Some broadcast news bulletins even accompany their stories with soundtrack music. All these narrative devices represent subjective choices made by human beings (prescribed by technology, ethical codes, market conditions, and so on) as they strive...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTRIBUTORS
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION
• Part I: JOURNALISM AND JOURNALISTS
• Part II: JOURNALISM AND LOCATION
• Part III: JOURNALISM AND THE FUTURE