The Journalism Manifesto

Barbie Zelizer,Pablo J. Boczkowski,C. W. Anderson

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781509542659
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Periodismo

Drawing on the collaborative expertise of three senior scholars, The Journalism Manifesto makes a powerful case for why journalism has become outdated and why it is in need of a long-overdue transformation.

Focusing on the relevance of elites, norms and audiences, Zelizer, Boczkowski and Anderson reveal how these previously integral components of journalism have become outdated: Elites, the sources from which journalists draw much of their information and around whom they orient their coverage, have become dysfunctional; The relevance of norms, the cues by which journalists do newswork, has eroded so fundamentally that journalists are repeatedly entrenching themselves as negligible and out of sync; and because audiences have shattered beyond recognition, the correspondence between what journalists think of as news and what audiences care about can no longer be assumed.

This authoritative manifesto argues that journalism has become decoupled from the dynamics of everyday life in contemporary society and outlines pathways for fixing this essential institution of democracy. It is a must-read for students, scholars and activists in the fields of journalism, media, policy, and political communication.

1
Journalism in the Imagination and on the Ground

For much of journalism’s study, the news and its newsmakers have been imagined as belonging to an institution perched in pristine isolation from its surroundings. Invoking widely used practices, oft-proclaimed values and publicly heralded standards has helped to produce and sustain a uniform and isolationist view of how journalism works. With journalism studies by and large helping to cheerlead it on, this view defends the sequestered institution of the press and its role in society while making the assumption, typically implicit but sometimes stated, that journalism’s worth is unquestionable. Both impulses reveal what an exercise in unreflective quarantine from the world might look like.

This manifesto seeks to put journalism back into the world where it belongs by bringing its imagination and its ground into closer quarters with each other. We argue that, if journalism is to have a future in these unsettled and unsettling times, it must stop resting on its laurels and instead reset its connections to what lies beyond its boundaries. Journalism needs to revisit its engagement with society, rethink its priorities, rekindle relevancies gone dormant and question its default settings. If it does not, its future is surely at risk.

The disarray of institutions

In all of its guises, journalism exemplifies the shaky status of the “separate but equal” myth about institutional culture that has prevailed across most western liberal democracies of late modernity and their permutations in the Global North. Encouraging thinking about institutions in certain ways and not others, the entrenchment of that myth across time and space has delivered a view of institutions as separatist endeavors that work autonomously to achieve their aims. Though early theorists of modernity had grand and expansive visions for institutions – they would help to maintain social order, promote stability, provide authoritative guidelines for behavior, coordinate activity, uphold social structure, govern and discipline the unruly – in fact, institutions have become in many ways an irritant under the surface of the collective. One source of that irritation has been their repeated proclamations of independence from each other, uttered even as growing evidence shows how interdependent all institutional settings are and will continue to be.

This has had direct ramifications on the practical dimensions of the institutional settings that have subsequently emerged. As complex social forms that mark certain activities and relationships as appropriate and imaginable while pushing alternative options from view, institutions help to consolidate the health of collectives that they aim to support. Across all of an institution’s constituent features – rules, roles, rituals, conventions and norms, among others – patterning and organization help to bind activity into a consonant whole. And yet from politics to education, the military to the market, institutions function as much in accordance with the conditions of their imagination as with the conditions on the ground. When their imaginary is activated by unnecessarily narrow positionalities, it cobbles the ensuing understanding of institutions, decouples it from everyday practices and sorely undercuts their potential.

And yet institutional imaginaries persevere, filled with often unrealistic aspirations that are multiple in number, spotless in character and misleading in impact. They include notions of identifiable and stable publics, anemic expectations in the face of challenge, a resistance to change, uniformly invoked standards of action, expertise disconnected from the communities it serves, unattainable codes of ethics and unrepresentative norms. All cater to ungrounded conditions that end up producing a state of disarray, their institutional dynamics driven by unsupported and unsustainable contours for being in the world. These attributes are fatal, for they leave efforts undone and projects abandoned midway. The recent upheavals around the world, protesting as they do the racialized, gendered and otherwise discriminatory and exclusive practices that unfortunately continue to mark social life in the twenty-first century, reflect how much challenges to the institutional order have yet to be fully grappled with. Newsrooms, too, have largely failed to come to terms with the shifts in power dynamics prompted by movements such as #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo.

We argue that much of the turmoil and confusion around journalism, an institution that inhabits this problematic landscape, stems from the adverse effects of at least four illusions about how institutions work: autonomy, centrality, cohesion and permanence. Each has been put in place by a set of thinkers – largely white, male, high status and from the West and Global North – whose predilection for certain intellectual impulses drew a picture of institutions that reflected the aspirations they held for themselves but that fared less well in attending to a host of alternative environments in which institutional settings would take hold.

Illusion of autonomy

Most academic considerations of institutions in the liberal democracies of late modernity across the West and Global North tend to presume their autonomy. Although institutions occupy shared space – where politics, the market, education and journalism are among the forces competing for public attention from fundamentally the same vantage point – they work hard to substantiate claims of independence and distinctiveness from each other. Because the combined effect of an institution’s material, moral and cultural authority keeps it separate from other institutions, aspirations of autonomy are crucial for sustaining institutional identity.

Nods to autonomy pervade much of the decision-making that occurs in institutional settings. Ethics codes, mission statements, logos and other means of positioning an institution in the world imply its autonomy. The very definition of norms, for example, as expectations of permissible and appropriate behavior, presumes that behavior unfolds within institutional boundaries, hinging desired or eschewed action on an institution’s independence.

But the narrowness of this assumption becomes clear when institutional practices unravel on the ground and institutional borders reveal themselves to be both porous and unstable. Even the liberal democracies central to the received view of institutions show how institutions move in various directions when responding to crisis. For example, news organizations in Sweden and Denmark took different tacks to gender-related violence in response to the #MeToo movement, according to Askanias and Hartley: Sweden covered it extensively, framing it as a structural and systemic problem, while Denmark peppered its scant coverage with accusations of a witch-hunt against men and an overly politically correct campaign. The different responses were also echoed in the legal and political institutions of each country. The notion of autonomy, then, might deserve rethinking along lines of the give-and-take that helps to create and sustain the illusion that institutions could be autonomous while admitting that they rarely are.

We thus might want to consider what happens when an institution’s dynamics have a domino effect on other institutions. As they are all part of a shared culture, each institutional setting is directly affected by what happens in adjacent ones.

Illusion of centrality

Notions of autonomy are tied to assumptions about the centrality of institutions in social life. Many theorists of institutional settings in western and global northern liberal democracies have regarded institutions as necessary for societies to function, becoming, in Raymond Williams’ eyes, “the normal term for any organized element of society” (1976, 169). As Everett C. Hughes argued, “participation in the life of the community becomes increasingly a matter of participating in some way in institutional activities” (1936, 182). Sociality came to be seen as depending centrally on institutions that were woven into the fabric by which societies exist.

Societies, however, come in all shapes and sizes, and many preclude a reliance on institutions and their trappings. Societies which rely heavily on activism, for instance, such as many countries in Latin America, tend to privilege non-institutional forms of political engagement over traditional modes of interaction centered on the institution, and social movements often take on the role that institutions might play elsewhere. Countries favoring modes of collective over institutional engagement might involve different sectors in society: the often-bypassed history of Black journalism in the United States, for instance, has long celebrated activism as its journalistic mantra. Black journalism blossomed, as Sarah J. Jackson argues, despite – or, perhaps, because of – a clear distaste for activist impulses in the mainstream media.

In the best of cases, then, institutional centrality is seen not as an end in itself as much as a means of enacting and performing the shared imagined purpose of liberal democratic institutions. Amidst expectations of transparency, engagement, efficacy and fairness, institutions use mechanisms to establish a preferred social identity and to entrench the idea that they exist to better public life. Called “face-work” by Erving Goffman, these mechanisms have been seen as central to late modern societies, where they elicit trust in abstract concepts and systems and in a desired ability to work for the common good. In this, our argument parallels the one made by Steve Reese (2021), who proposes that we think of journalism as a decentralized “hybrid” institution scattered across many sites. Our diagnosis of the crisis, however, may be more dire than Reese’s, and thus the institutional challenge we mount may be greater than his.

The centrality of institutions is also questionable today in many formerly stable liberal democracies, where government, religion, the military, science, the media, medicine and law are among those undergoing systemic challenges that regularly and repeatedly sideline their effectiveness and cultural authority. One such case is Hungary, whose government labored intensely to dismantle the Central European University in 2018, challenging its broad repute as one of the best universities in the region. Hungary’s current state of extreme polarization, found in other illiberal democracies too, pushes back on the idea that institutions can work satisfactorily for all of society. This goes a long way in sidelining expectations of centrality.

Illusion of cohesion

Ideas of autonomy and centrality are connected to beliefs about the cohesion of institutional fields. Coming from perhaps the leading western cultural sociologist of the late nineteenth century, Émile Durkheim’s famous insistence on consensus over dissensus, order over chaos, “normality” over pathology, continues to stoke many ongoing discussions of the western liberal democratic institutions of late modernity. Linked to the sociological penchant for identifiable and controllable aspects of social life, cohesion’s privileging has been central to the scholarly imaginary which gives institutions shape. As Charles Taylor established more broadly of modernity’s normative backdrop, “The basic normative principle is … that the members of society serve each other’s needs, help each other, in short behave like the rational and sociable creatures they are … The basic point of the new normative order is the mutual respect and mutual service of the individuals who make up society” (2004, 12).

Though cohesion is often taken as a trait of societies external to institutions, the aspiration for cohesion inside of an institution presupposes that all aspects of its setting stick together in some basic way. Cohesion makes it possible for institutions to thrive on routines, predictable conventions, bureaucracy, orderly arrangements and hierarchical chains of command. When an institution’s dimensions take shape in an orderly and patterned fashion, stability comes to be seen as part and parcel of institutional cohesion. Though this picture is valid at times, it does not describe the full range of behavior on the existing institutional landscape.

Rather, the received view of institutions reveals serious leakage. Democratic backsliding, for example, is now in progress in every continent of the world, unsettling democracy in locations as varied as Turkey, Poland, Zimbabwe, the United States, Russia, Cambodia and Venezuela. This suggests that, for many, cohesion and stability are a faraway dream. Additionally, many institutional settings across the Global South privilege the kind of cohesion necessary for realizing shared identity but not for accomplishing the aims consonant with the received institutional imaginary. In much of Asia and Africa, for instance, functioning for the collective becomes an integral part of identity and, when needed, resistance, with shared identity complicating and challenging the exclusive nature of settled views of sociality.

What happens to cohesion when instability, turmoil and even chaos emerge? This certainly describes much of the world today, where the uncertainty wrought by autocratic and populist governing trends, a devastating and unimaginable pandemic, a reckoning with longstanding racism and the oppression of other marginalized communities and a deepening climate emergency has shattered the illusion of cohesion. The ensuing precariousness, we argue, strikes at the heart of what institutions are even about. This uncertainty raises the question of what institutions might look like were they to be understood as settings for organizing disorder without adjacent expecta...