Can Journalism Be Saved?

Media and the Spheres of Democracy
By Jeffrey Scheuer

[Adapted from Ch. 8, THE BIG PICTURE: WHY DEMOCRACIES NEED JOURNALISTIC EXCELLENCE.]

A democracy is not just a formal system of government; it is an evolving social organism. Forms and levels of democratic order, primarily in terms of political accountability and political equality, are relative to the evolutionary stages of the system’s organic components: law, culture, knowledge, technology, economic production. Democracies don’t simply unfold on their own, but co-evolve along with these systemic parts.

Because of the crucial need for informed citizenship, the quality of journalism is also a co-efficient of democracy: a key determinant of its meaning and scope. And at some indeterminate point in the evolutionary process, education and journalism come to be recognized as core democratic values for informed political (as well as cultural and economic) citizenship.

In the United States, a strong vein of libertarian anti-statism has in some ways retarded that evolution; but at the same time, traditions of localism and federalism have advanced it, for example, through public education, public libraries, advocacy organizations, and nonprofit institutions in general, relatively free of both state and commercial influence, and mediating between government, the private sector, and public needs. (We have also had direct public support of the media since the early days of the Republic through postal subsidies).

To advance that evolutionary process, we need to foster an independent media sector, promoting this democratic evolution and in keeping with the American genius for nonprofit public enterprise. The question is: how do we get more nonprofit journalism, not just on the fringe, but in the mainstream of American media; in other words, how do we get a new mainstream?

Important forms of independent media are emerging spontaneously, especially on to the Internet. Such media, free of the tyranny of the market, could hasten the evolution toward a more vital and unified continuum of learning and a more robust democracy. But to get there, we need to finally explode the uncritical dualistic assumption that the market and state propaganda are the only possible sources of information. And until there are higher levels of computer-literacy and media-literacy, the Internet cannot be considered a panacea for informed citizenship. Neither is the imaginative use of private wealth a panacea; but it can usefully fund experiments and sow the seeds of change. The Kroc family’s recent $230 million gift to National Public Radio is an example.

Ultimately, it is public consciousness of what a democracy is, and what it requires and promises, that determines the pace and course of change. Paradoxically, such consciousness is both a cause and a result of education and journalism. We are evolving, slowly and uncertainly, toward a conception of democracy that embraces information and robust citizenship: citizens with multiple (political, media, computer, economic, and cultural) literacies. Journalism is integral to that mix.

Democratic journalism, like politics, must always be in a state of crisis: a state of conflict, debate, and change. It is charged with meaning and value, yet susceptible to all of the flaws, distortions, and biases endemic to human communication. Nothing (other than popular demand) assures that we have any journalism at all, much less good journalism; yet democracies are contingent on its existence and conditioned by its quality. That is a basic democratic paradox – the peculiar dependence of democracies on the quality of available information, and people’s ability to process it and act on it – and there is no simple resolution to it.

Governments cannot be trusted to have unlimited power over the information sphere; but leaving that sphere entirely to market forces is likewise inimical to political equality. It has led to monopoly concentration, the dampening or suppression of minority voices, the narrowing of the range of acceptable opinion and taste, limits on the diversity of coverage and the coverage of diversity, unequal access, isolation of smaller groups and communities from journalistic attention, and above all, the pervasive degradation of news by entertainment values.

Of course the news must be relevant to our lives as citizens, producers and consumers, and members of overlapping communities. But its aim is not to palliate or entertain us. We would do better to paraphrase John F. Kennedy:

Ask not what the news can do for you. As what you can do with the news.

Particular obstacles to excellence, commercial or otherwise, can be identified and overcome. But the quality of news is only one side of the problem: the supply side. The demand side is equally if not more elusive: improving the quality of education so that informed and engaged citizens will demand excellence in journalism, and use it once they get it. Without stimulating that demand, there is not much point worrying about the supply. The situation is indeed circular, because education and journalism interconnect with one another, and with economic resources, cultural conditions, and the gears and levers of democracy.

Hence, the quest for journalistic excellence naturally raises parallel questions about excellence in education: what is it, how do we identify and measure and maximize it? How exactly is journalism subsidiary to it? Recognizing differences of human ability, ambition, and interest, how do we improve the media and avoid the scourges of commercialism and elitism? But we are not just talking in circles. Rather, democracy itself is about interlocking circles: politics, law and money, news and entertainment, citizens and consumers, the culture and technologies that frame those systems, and the ideals that give them moral purpose. These spheres form a complex ecology; to grasp the complexity and importance of journalistic excellence within that ecology is to see the big picture.

For more information about the book visit: JScheuer.com

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