Alternative Journalism

Chris Atton, James F Hamilton

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781412947039, 9781412947022
• eBook ISBN: 9781446241233
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

"A provocative, inspiring and challenging intervention in both journalism and media studies.... Alternative Journalism is that rare book that services students as much as scholars. It widens the trajectory of media studies and creates different modes of reading, writing and thinking... It offers an alternative history beyond the tales of great men, great newspapers, great editors and great technologies. It adds value and content to overused and ambiguous words such as "community" and "citizenship" and captures the spark of new information environments."
- THE, (Times Higher Education)

Alternative Journalism investigates and analyses the diverse forms and genres of journalism that have arisen as challenges to mainstream news coverage. From the radical content of emancipatory media to the dizzying range of citizen journalist blogs and fanzine subcultures, this book charts the historical and cultural practices of this diverse and globalized phenomenon. This exploration goes to the heart of journalism itself, prompting a critical inquiry into the epistemology of news, the professional norms of objectivity, the elite basis of journalism and the hierarchical commerce of news production.

In investigating the challenges to media power presented by alternative journalism, Atton addresses not just the issues of politics and empowerment but also the journalism of popular culture and the everyday. The result is essential reading for students of journalism - both mainstream and alternative.

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Part 1

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1

THE HISTORICIZATION OF ALTERNATIVE JOURNALISM

Many historical accounts of journalism have been criticized for their preoccupation with great men or great technologies. Attention has been drawn to the ways in which such accounts unduly valorize individual exploits and validate the simplistic position that anyone determined (or great) enough to change the world can do so (Hardt, 1990; Hardt and Brennen, 1995). Many historical accounts of alternative journalism also suffer from the same preoccupations, which has created great gaps in understanding (Hamilton and Atton, 2001). While narrowly focused biographies of publishers, writers, journalists, publications or organizations have yielded insights into specific episodes, the resulting patchwork collection of accounts prevents a broader understanding of the general media practices and necessary conditions upon which these individual cases rely.

Accordingly, this chapter provides an historical overview of the emergence of alternative journalism. However, instead of describing a series of specific people and separate projects, it emphasizes general practices and conditions. The key insight of this overview is that alternative journalism is not an unchanging, universal type of journalism, but is an ever-changing effort to respond critically to dominant conceptions of journalism. Alternative journalism is best seen as a kind of activity instead of as a specific, definitive kind of news story, publication or mode of organization. What alternative journalism is at any given moment depends entirely on what it is responding to.

It is in this sense that this chapter is not simply a ‘history’ of events of the past disconnected from today, but instead is an effort to ‘historicize’ alternative journalism. This chapter does not present the history of alternative journalism as a neutral, complete set of facts to recount (if only it were so easy!). Rather, it seeks to understand the historicity of alternative journalism – its relational, always changing nature as a response to and a struggle against an equally changing dominant journalism within changing conditions. To adequately grasp alternative journalism in all its complexity, one must constitute and understand it not only in relation to today’s conception of the alternative as simply the opposite of the mainstream, but also in relation to its own complex development, which calls into question the viability of such a conceptual map.

We first describe the emergence of bourgeois journalism, which assisted the successful challenge to royal and ecclesiastical authority by a mercantile and later capitalist bourgeoisie. While acknowledging the contributions of many European developments, the chapter focuses on Anglo-America as a centre not only of the emergence of journalism as a mode of writing and public debate, but also of capitalism, which has proven to be such a formative force not only for journalism but for world affairs in the past 400 years. We trace the breakdown of the authority of bourgeois journalism as the accepted form of public debate, which culminates in the development of new forms of journalistic writing and new modes of journalistic organization and practice. The amalgam referred to today as alternative journalism is determined in all its variety by these contexts.

While a single chapter cannot do justice to the depth and complexity of the developments noted here, the purpose is to outline a general framework for understanding the development of alternative journalism in a way that resonates with concerns today. Expanded accounts are given in the many detailed historical studies already available.

The Absorption of the Radical-Popular

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Any account of the emergence of alternative journalism that purports to be historical in the sense outlined above must begin by noting a supreme irony, which underscores the necessity of seeing alternative journalism as constituted by its social and historical context. Although disparaged today (and often for good reason), the development of what we refer to today as the ‘dominant’ or ‘mainstream’ mode of journalism was initially a critical (dare we say ‘alternative’?) response in its day to an earlier dominant.

Raymond Williams’s influential reinterpretation of the contours of the historical development of the press in Britain helps explain this irony (Williams, 1970; Williams, 1978a; Williams, 1978b). It may seem baffling at first how a committed socialist such as Williams recognized ‘the achievement of the bourgeoisie in the creation of the modern press [… as] a major historical break-through’ of great significance for radical-democratic politics (Williams, 1979: 310–311). What explains this seeming contradiction is that, for Williams, no essential, pure types of journalism exist. Rather, journalism – like all forms of popular culture – ‘is always an uneasy mixture of two very different elements: the maintenance of an independent popular identity, often linked with political radicalism, resistance to the establishment and movements for social change; and ways of adapting, from disadvantage, to a dominant social order, finding relief and satisfaction or diversion inside it’ (Williams, 1970: 22).

Williams’s general argument is worth recalling here. In early nineteenth-century England and before the formation of a commercial journalism industry, comparatively clear class antagonisms delineated, on the one hand, independent radical newspapers as the ‘popular press’ of the day in the sense of their ‘staking a new claim, articulating a new voice, in a situation in which otherwise there would have been silence’; on the other hand, ‘established newspapers’ addressed a narrowly defined readership composed of business and political leaders (Williams, 1970: 17; see also Hollis, 1970; for the case in France, see Skuncke, 2005 and Trinkle, 2002).

This opposition began to collapse as authoritarian repression of the independent radical papers gave way to absorption and incorporation by the emerging commercial popular press. To siphon readers into this new commercial ‘popular’, the commercial press adopted long-standing popular forms of chapbooks, ballads and pamphlets as well as selected ‘radical social and political attitudes’. What enhanced the replacement of the radical-popular by the commercial-popular was the consolidation of the newspaper business into groups and chains and the securing of advertising revenue at a scale unimaginable only a short time previously, both of which gave the commercial-popular a productive capacity that moved it on to a level entirely different from the radical-popular. As a result, ‘the control of popular journalism passed into the hands of successful large-scale entrepreneurs, who alone now could reach a majority of the public quickly and attractively and cheaply, on a national scale, but who by their very ability to do this, by their control of resources, were separated from or opposed to the people whom this popular journalism served’ (Williams, 1970: 23).

The result of this extremely complex process was that ‘what had once been popular, in the political sense, was absorbed or deflected into “popular” in quite other senses’, with ‘market journalism replac[ing] the journalism of a community or movement’ (Williams, 1970: 20–21). What we call in this book ‘alternative journalism’, then, was not simply repressed or stamped out in England, although clear and sustained efforts were made to do so, as Curran (1978) has described. Today in most countries, and particularly on the Internet, we can indeed find and read ‘a press of bewildering variety’ (Williams, 1970: 24). However, at the same time, radical-popular journalism (in Williams’s terms) or alternative journalism (in our terms) has been effectively isolated from what is taken today to be the ‘popular’, not only in that it lacks the resources of the commercial-popular but also in cultural terms as now being seen largely as specialized, idiosyncratic, ‘sectarian and strange’ (Williams, 1970: 22).

The Rise of Bourgeois Journalism

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Williams’s reinterpretation serves well as a means of further organizing an understanding of the complex development of alternative journalism. Indeed, the accomplishment of this reinterpretation is the greater specificity and complexity granted to the general category of alternative journalism, and an analysis that explains it not by fixing a definition, but by viewing it as entirely determined by its relation to that against which it struggles. Williams’s provocative interpretation thus serves well as the link between developments that preceded it and those that followed. Let us first address developments prior to the point at which Williams’s account begins.

The Rise of the Bourgeoisie

The ‘established’ press that Williams refers to can be more overtly linked to its class basis by calling it ‘bourgeois journalism’. The term ‘bourgeois’ or ‘bourgeoisie’ refers generally to a property-owning class whose resources and influence come not from royal decree or royally granted monopoly but through capital generated by an expanding capitalist economy. What must be addressed first in an account of bourgeois journalism is the rise of the economic system that made this class possible. While one could characterize this new system as simply one in which the amount of goods produced and sold increased dramatically, what was more novel and important was the corresponding, fitful and often contentious reorganization of society from mercantilist to capitalist. Hawkes summarizes the decisive change as the institutionalization of a ‘system of production for exchange rather than for use’, which the increasing internationalization of finance and production helped bring about and support (Hawkes, 2001: 15).

Assisting the emergence of capitalism was increased state involvement in empire-building and colonialism. By the mid-seventeenth century and the establishment of the Protectorate headed by Cromwell, the government had already become ‘a proactive authority in commercial matters’, with a good portion of its involvement related to matters of colonization and trade beyond the confines of Europe which, as Loades argues, was where ‘the most spectacular changes took place’ (2000: 215–219). Such involvement helped lay the groundwork not only for social, political and economic changes in England, but also for the intertwinement of capitalism with colonialism and imperialism in an increasingly worldwide political and economic project that presaged today’s intensely globalized and polarized world.

The basis of bourgeois journalism in this new propertied class was significantly different from the royal-religious basis of knowledge and authority. In England and in Europe, sources of authority prior to the rise of capitalism and the bourgeoisie were rooted in combinations of divine right of rule and the word of God. As a result, what we would regard today as arbitrary – if not capricious – rulings and decrees were justified by claims of absolute authority that was seen as beyond the human ability to affect or change. While granting this, however, one should not assume that people of the day accepted such decisions and authority blindly and passively. As Hindle points out concerning early modern England, exercising rule was ‘a process in which subjects were intimately involved, one which they learned to manipulate, to criticize, and even to change’ (Hindle, 2000: 237). To give just one example, the many rebellions and riots during the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I alone suggest a far from quiescent populace (Fletcher and MacCulloch, 1997).

However, just as the emergence of capitalism and imperialism initiated growing social and economic inequalities, it also made possible the consolidation of the bourgeoisie, which was a countervailing source of power increasingly outside royal control. While royal monopolies, patronage, licensing and chartering in exchange for a share of revenues and for political support had been key ways of supporting commercial enterprises financially to ensure their political compliance, such controls were gradually superseded as independent commercial centres of finance and investment grew, diversified and internationalized. Thus, economic expansion and change in the context of empire-building helped produce and validate a new class of merchants, traders and financiers who were unbound by class rules of custom and traditional decorum and deference, and enabled through their control of capital.

Bourgeois Journalism as Cultural Form

The production of a social class with sources of power outside direct royal or ecclesiastic control relied upon and enabled the rise of what today we call ‘journalism’. Indeed, the emergence of journalism is intimately tied to the emergence of capitalism and the class it both relied on for financing and catered to as readers and buyers. Journalism at this time represented a new kind of authoritative claim to knowledge about the world that was embodied in new kinds of writing.

Journalism as a way of writing and understanding is an amalgam of a number of sources, with one being empiricism. As influentially interpreted by Francis Bacon (Lord Chancellor in the court of James I), empiricism means gathering and cataloguing evidence from which to generalize and test universal cause-and-effect relationships (Farrington, 1964). Far from a process a single person can carry out, Bacon proposed a bureaucratized project whereby a veritable army of assistants would gather data according to Bacon’s highly standardized procedures, with the goal of generating knowledge useful to the crown and to industry. Importantly, the dependability of information was directly related to how closely specific rules for gathering data were followed – much like the need for professional journalists today to follow rules such as seeking out more than one side to a story, basing conclusions on multiple sources and setting one’s personal views aside.

A second key source was the newly popular form of essays and commentary, in which claims to authority were based not on how much external evidence was gathered in support of a conclusion based on systematically gathered evidence, so much as on an individual writer’s own powers of observation, reasoning and writing skill. A third source was reportage, a longstanding practice of hiring agents to travel to distant lands and report back to their benefactors (often diplomats and other government officials) regarding events or situations that had a bearing on their interests (Schneider, 2005; see also Shapiro, 2000: 77–78, 87). In addition to diplomatic reports and private handwritten newsletters, forerunners of reportage included town criers’ announcements, broadsides, news pamphlets and manuscript newsletters (Raymond, 1996; Shapiro, 2000: 86).

A fourth source of journalism is found in the evolving standards of legal disputation, which increasingly codified rules for establishing valid evidence and legally sound claims. These rules included using details of time, place and circumstance; identifying and evaluating witnesses and their testimony; and rejecting second-hand accounts in favour of direct testimony and personal observation (Shapiro, 2000: 99–103). Such rules slowly became the standard for other purportedly ‘factual’ writing such as history, chorography, travel reporting and, of course, early journalism, which emphasized the use of credible sources, impartiality, a clear separation of the fictional from the factual, a distinction between reporting facts and speculation based on those facts, and the use of plain and unadorned prose (Shapiro, 2000: 86, 94; see also Clark, 1983: 99; Davis, 1983; and Raymond, 1996: 130–133). As Shapiro argues about the relationship between these four sources and early journalism, ‘news genres … played a role in transforming “fact” from a category limited to human actions and deeds into one that comprehended both human and natural phenomena’ (Shapiro, 2000: 4). In other words, all of these sources combined to help produce a new basis for creating and presenting a truthful and thus authoritative account of the world.

Implications of Bourgeois Journalism

Recalling the great importance Williams attributed to its emergence, the implications of the rise of bourgeois journalism for new forms of political resistance were immense. Together with other changes, bourgeois journalism helped validate plural, secular and individual routes to knowledge; solidify a challenge to the authority of divine rulers and institutionalized clergy; and challenge the monopoly of knowledge enjoyed by court and church (although such a ‘monopoly’ was never total or conclusively challenged.) As the seventeenth century merged into the eighteenth, it gradually became accepted that authoritative claims to knowledge could be gained through bourgeois journalism, by virtue of its writers’ own observation, reasoning and argument. Assessments of the power and abilities of a certain class of readers rose similarly, in that passionately argued cases and detailed descriptions of events addressed readers as capable of evaluating claims and evidence for themselves and of drawing their own conclusions. While acknowledging the often severe limitations on who was allowed to participate (a point to be addressed in more detail below), determining what was plausible if not true became a comparatively more public process of debate – what Jürgen Habermas has influentially called the European bourgeois ‘public sphere’ (Habermas, 1989; for commentary and critiques, see Calhoun, 1992).

By the mid-eighteenth century, bourgeois journalism was firmly in place as the ‘coin of the realm’ for public debate in European countries and colonies, one that was employed by all sides that sought to be deemed ‘legitimate’. And yet these sides were decidedly one-sided, with barriers of class, property, race, gender and others sifting from societies only those deemed capable or worthy of such participation. Such restrictions help explain the fit of journalism with European colonial expansion. Accounts of the emergence of journalism in a number of non-European areas suggests the degree to which it was a European invention exported to other countries as part of colonial and capitalist expansion. Whether serving a colonial occupation (as for example in India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Hawaii, Spanish colonies in the Americas and South Africa), a transnational capitalist class (such as in Japan), or an indigenous state elite (such as in Egypt), the establishment of journalism in non-European areas was intimately part of the colonial project and thus a European and capitalist effort at control rather than an indigenous effort. (Studies that address the emergence of journalism in non-Western countries include Adam, 1995; Akinfeleye, 1987; de Lange, 1998; Geracimos, 1996; González, 1993; Huffman, 1997; Kendall, 2006; Nair, 1987; Parthasarathy, 1989; Rugh, 2004; and Switzer and Adhikari, 2000.)

This class-based restriction suggests the degree to which bourgeois journalism as a means of public discourse – while indeed crucial for radical-democratic politics and radical-popular journalism in comparison with what had come before – was itself tied to a particular kind of social order, in this case the rising bourgeoisie that supported and worked within the emerging systems of capitalism and imperialism.

The Consolidation of the Commercial-Popular

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Like the paradox that today’s mainstream journalism is yesterday’s critical response to monarchical and ecclesiastical authority, Williams’s reinterpretation of how commercial-popular journalism absorbed and then replaced radical-popular journalism identifies a second paradox. On the one hand, commercial-popular journalism can indeed be said to have been more popular in that it extended more deeply into society and thus addressed the concerns and lives of a broader social stratum (although only in particular ways and not into all social strata, as will be discussed). But, on the other hand, it had become the new dominant and thus, less popular. Where bourgeois journalism had been a clear challenge to existing orders but not popular, commercial-popular journalism was more popular in that it engaged broader orders of society, but it no longer constituted a serious challenge.

Williams’s account makes clear that what transformed this erstwhile oppositional practice into a dominant one was its fit within burgeoning industrial capitalist societies, with the UK and the United States the harbingers of changes that were also afoot in other countries and regions. It was no accident that the form in which bourgeois journalism became incorporated was the commercial business and, more specifically, commercial companies in urban centres such as the so-called ‘penny presses’ in the United States which were based in New York City (Barnhurst and Nerone, 2001; Schudson, 1978) and the commercial-po...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART 1
• PART 2
• PART 3
• References
• Index