Making the News Popular: Mobilizing U.S. News Audiences - Brossura

Nadler, Anthony M.

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0252081633 ISBN 13: 9780252081637

Casa editrice: Univ of Illinois Pr, 2016

Riassunto

The professional judgment of gatekeepers defined the American news agenda for decades. Making the News Popular examines how subsequent events brought on a post-professional period that opened the door for imagining that consumer preferences should drive news production--and unleashed both crisis and opportunity on journalistic institutions.

Anthony Nadler charts a paradigm shift, from market research's reach into the editorial suite in the 1970s through contemporary experiments in collaborative filtering and social news sites like Reddit and Digg. As Nadler shows, the transition was and is a rocky one. It also goes back much further than many experts suppose. Idealized visions of demand-driven news face obstacles with each iteration. Furthermore, the post-professional philosophy fails to recognize how organizations mobilize interest in news and public life. Nadler argues that this civic function of news organizations has been neglected in debates on the future of journalism. Only with a critical grasp of news outlets' role in stirring broad interest in democratic life, he says, might journalism's digital crisis push us toward building a more robust and democratic news media.

Wide-ranging and original, Making the News Popular offers a critical examination of an important, and still evolving, media phenomenon.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull'autore

Anthony Nadler is an assistant professor of media and communication studies at Ursinus College.

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Making the News Popular

Mobilizing U.S. News Audiences

By Anthony M. Nadler

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-252-08163-7

Contents

Acknowledgments, ix, 
Introduction: The Problem of Making News Popular, 1, 
1. A View from Somewhere: The Making and Unmaking of the Age of Professional Journalism, 27, 
2. Bringing Marketing into the Newsroom: U.S. Newspapers and the Market-Driven Journalism Movement, 53, 
3. The Cable News Wars: Another Approach to Popularizing Commercial News, 83, 
4. Popularizing News 2.0, 119, 
Conclusion: Beyond the Phantom Public, 149, 
Notes, 173, 
Index, 209, 

CHAPTER 1

A View from Somewhere

The Making and Unmaking of the Age of Professional Journalism

Now how is this network news determined? A small group of men, numbering perhaps no more than a dozen anchormen, commentators, and executive producers, settle upon the 20 minutes or so of film and commentary that's to reach the public. ... The American people would rightly not tolerate this concentration of power in Government. Is it not fair and relevant to question its concentration in the hands of a tiny, enclosed fraternity of privileged men elected by no one and enjoying a monopoly sanctioned and licensed by Government? The views of the majority of this fraternity do not — and I repeat, not — represent the views of America.

— Spiro Agnew, November 13, 1969

A week after President Richard Nixon delivered a major address declaring a need for national unity in the midst of the Vietnam War, Vice President Spiro Agnew staged an event in Des Moines, Iowa, to call for "more responsible" journalism. In Agnew's view, television news commentators' reactions to Nixon's speech had been laced with negativity, skepticism, and elite condescension directed against not only the president but, even more disturbingly, the people who had elected him. Such skewed coverage, as Agnew saw it, was quite typical of the unelected "privileged fraternity" of professional journalists despite their claims to professional objectivity. Agnew painted a portrait of the world of professional journalism, especially on the national television networks, as antidemocratic and mired in its own form of urbane provinciality. Agnew was certainly not the only critic of the dominant news institutions and their professional routines during the social and political upheavals of the late sixties. In fact, professional journalism claims to objectivity came under fire not only from a new wave of conservatives fomenting backlash against the era's social movements, but also from many leaders and participants in those left-leaning social movements. Many movement participants charged that the press largely represented established power and its values, and some saw it as stained by the biases of a workforce dominated by middle-class white men. Although it is hard not to sense in Agnew's critique a rhetorical maneuver favoring his own political agenda, many of the themes he sounded against news outlets in this speech continued to strike a chord over the following decades. Professional journalism, according to Agnew, fostered elitism, insularity, and alienation from everyday citizens and consumers, and it disguised its own biases' untenable claims to objectivity.

The following chapters will explore models for journalism that have been reacting against the professional journalism that reached its apex in the post-World War II period in the United States. This chapter explores how professional journalism came to take on a particular institutional, stylistic, and ideological form and the social, economic, and political forces that led to a crisis of that hegemonic form by the 1970s. The process of establishing journalism as a profession has been a contentious one. It has also been an object of fascination for many journalism historians, especially those who have heeded, in one way or another, James Carey's influential call for a cultural history that would approach journalism as "a highly particular type of consciousness, a particular organization of social experience" At the forefront of historical accounts of the professionalization of journalism have been questions about the origins of the ideal of journalistic "objectivity," the defining value of twentieth-century professional journalism in the United States. How did a voice claiming the status of a nonbiased observer come to dominate the news industry's organization of social experience? Objectivity was a key notion that enabled news organizations to claim an authority to tell the story of the world's goings-on from a position above the fray of politics and clashes among particular points of view. Objectivity promised to ground journalistic discourse as a way of knowing that could be distinguished from political advocacy and public relations.

Many historians have offered rich accounts of the rise of journalistic objectivity and professionalization, so this chapter proceeds differently from those that follow. My goal here is to offer what Kathy Roberts Forde calls a "synthetic history "— a weaving together of various historical accounts — of the rise of professionalism and objectivity and an overview of factors that led to a shaken confidence in professionalism by the 1970s. Journalism's professional ideals have particular histories; they are not commandments that were once handed down from the heavens or rules inscribed by founders of modern democracy. Yet even among working journalists, this historical memory can easily be lost. When journalistic standards appear eternal, they also seem immutable. Even when there is a willing attitude to reimagine how journalism should be practiced — as there is today among bloggers, entrepreneurs, and others — knowing something about the conditions in which professionalism arose can help assess contemporary alternatives to it.

Exactly how to explain the rise of objectivity has been an area of disagreement among researchers and historians. This is true even among the historians influenced by cultural and social historical approaches to understanding journalism that were inspired by fresh ideas offered by James Carey and Michael Schudson in the 1970s. Much of the disagreement regarding the origins of objectivity, I argue, has more to do with highlighting different points of emphasis rather than irreconcilable hypotheses. Nonetheless, these differences in emphasis are important. Some historians have asked how objectivity and professional norms resonated with cultural sensibilities of news audiences. Others have focused on the role journalists themselves played in transforming their craft into a profession. Still others focus on political or economic structures that can account for the shift toward professionalization. Disputes over which of these factors to prioritize matter to the extent that the genealogy of professionalism and objectivity can help reveal some of its current social functions and the kinds of alternatives it displaces. These are also disputes over historical memory. Accounts of professionalization that emphasize the role it played in supporting dominant power might be criticized as expressions of a conspiratorial mindset; more positive accounts of the origins of objectivity might be criticized for expressing the biases of liberal pluralism and neglecting power and hegemony.

The historical literature on professionalism and objectivity supports a view that acknowledges many cultural, economic, and political preconditions that have made it possible for professional journalism to take shape. However, the approach I take here highlights how media managers and owners have had a decisive influence in favoring the kind of professionalism that became dominant. For news organizations, professionalism was a strategic response to social changes. Journalists themselves had some influence over this process, to be sure, but their interests were not as well organized as those who controlled the means of production. If working journalists themselves had more power as a group to formulate their own agenda, George Seldes's alternative vision of professional journalism might have been more widely adopted. Seldes, a Newspaper Guild radical and pioneering critic of the modern press, proposed that a professional code should bar newspaper owners from any control over the editors who made decisions about content. Seldes became an object of hatred among publishers; journalists may have legitimately feared for their jobs to indicate any support for his vision. Most rank-and-file journalists seem to have accepted or acquiesced to a vision of professionalism that was preferred by their employers — one that clearly had some benefits for journalists as an occupational class, even if more tempered than what Seldes was proposing. Still, journalists' employers were not able to act without constraint. News organizations had a position of relative power, of course, but they had to respond to pressures from politicians, their advertisers, their workers, and their readers and listeners. The perspective I present here focuses on the story of how demands from these various groups took shape and how news organizations responded to them strategically through constructing a model of professional journalism. Professional journalism evolved as news organizations sought to secure the legitimacy, popularity, and profitability of their businesses while fending off threats of government intervention.

The first two sections of this chapter focus on two periods that have proved particularly important in the historiography of journalistic objectivity in the United States: the blossoming of early industrial journalism, especially the "penny press" of the 1830s and 1840s, and the years during and just following the Progressive Era, from about the 1890s to the early 1930s. During the first period, news organizations started making claims that they could separate facts clearly from opinions. The latter period represents the time in which journalism adopted its modern professional form and institutional structures such as journalism schools and professional associations emerged. The third section of the chapter outlines the solidification of professionalism during the post-World War II years when a compromise among commercial interests, the public, and journalists appeared to have been found through incorporating elements of "social responsibility" into commercial journalism. In the final section, I discuss several factors that contributed to a crisis of professionalism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a crisis that prompted the news industry to search for new models and strategies for retaining both profitability and popular legitimacy.

Early Origins of Professionalism

Despite an ample historical record at their disposal, historians of the press have encountered many problems in tracing the genealogy of professional journalism. To start, there is the difficulty of defining key terms, especially objectivity. Editors and reporters did not regularly employ the term objectivity in reference to reporting until the late 1920s. Yet news values connected to objectivity-such as accuracy, fairness, factual reporting, and emotional detachment-became part of the journalistic imagination long before that time. Did these values reflect the essence of what would later be called "objectivity"? When and why did these values become part of a journalistic creed? Were the animating norms of professionalism cultivated before modern institutional structures began to support them?

In an influential essay published in 1974, James Carey named a stubborn pattern in U.S. journalism history, what he called "the Whig interpretation of journalism history," which "views journalism history as the slow, steady expansion of freedom and knowledge from the political press to the commercial press, the setbacks into sensationalism and yellow journalism, the forward thrust into muckraking and social responsibility." Since the publication of Carey's essay, the oft-mentioned figure of Whig history became an important point of contrast for cultural and social historians, many of whom have reacted against stories about the rise of objectivity that had become cherished by the profession and journalism schools. Probably the most self-assuring and celebratory of these explanations had been that objectivity came about through a "natural history" of newspapers as they followed a teleological evolution. The natural history argument was most famously articulated by sociologist Robert Park, who suggested that the history of the newspaper needed to be approached as the history of a "surviving species," one evolving toward greater sophistication and complexity as old forms died off. Another popular account of news history suggested an affinity between journalistic progress and technological progress, linking objectivity and nonpartisan news to the influence of the telegraph.

Michael Schudson's Discovering the News (1978) offered a groundbreaking and nuanced exploration of many factors leading to the rise of journalistic objectivity that had been largely ignored by previous histories. In this book, Schudson argues that while modern objectivity did not come into full development until the 1920s, important predecessors to the values of modern objectivity took hold in the penny press that began to flourish first in New York and other eastern cities during the 1830s and 1840s. These penny papers set trends favoring fact-driven news over commentary, orienting sales toward a mass audience, initiating claims of political independence, and shifting toward greater independence from party control. This nascent form of news, Schudson claims, reflected the values of a "democratic market culture" of the Jacksonian era, one made possible by new economic and political opportunities and the urbanization patterns that were breaking apart traditional societal bonds and social structures.

While Schudson's work has been broadly admired, many have voiced a similar set of criticisms. Schudson's narrative of the penny press foregrounds a middle-class consensus rather than social conflict. David Mindich, Daniel Schiller, and Richard Kaplan all suggest that Schudson is too optimistic about the egalitarianism of Jacksonian democracy. Schiller's Objectivity and the News (1981) offers an extended argument supporting Schudson's notion that the penny press represented the beginning of what would become journalistic objectivity, but rendering a very different picture of the social relations from which it sprang. Whereas Schudson focuses on the consumer-oriented values of the rising middle class, Schiller suggests penny papers echoed a politically charged, antielite attitude that resonated with a public composed of different classes. In Schiller's account, the penny press appropriated some of the rhetorical appeal of an earlier labor press, but it incorporated this rhetoric into a worldview more palatable to the economically rising merchant class.

While Schudson and Schiller offer competing explanations for why penny papers embraced notions of fairness and impartiality, they both suggest successful penny papers mobilized popular longings and sensibilities in particular ways. In her sweeping study of nineteenth-century U.S. journalistic standards, Hazel Dicken-Garcia found, to her own surprise, that when it came to attitudes about the press's political role and partisan impartiality during the first half of the nineteenth century, "the 'inner circle' of journalists, closer to the press and its operations than were nonjournalists, simply represented more contracted views that nevertheless flowed from society's larger values" Hence, histories of this period suggest public attitudes played a major role in the rise of proto-objective news values. Public attitudes might have been more central during this period than later ones because the fledgling mass newspaper industry had not yet had a chance to coalesce around a set of organized mobilization strategies of its own. It was also an era of relatively low barriers to entry into the market. Schiller explicitly argues that the penny press artfully manipulated popular rhetoric. An alternative press form might have marshaled similar values in a different direction. As Schiller documents, the labor press of the early 1800s (exemplified by papers such as the Mechanics' Free Press and the Working Man's Advocate) showed promise as a culturally viable and popular model for news among certain classes. But this critical press could not sustain the necessary capital base. So even with the relatively open and nonconcentrated media market of the 1830s, not every form of news that could appeal to audiences proved economically viable.

The Professionalization of Journalism

It was not until the early twentieth century that all the major components of modern professional journalism came into place. During this period, an institutional foundation for professional journalism took shape. Professional associations became stronger, the first journalism schools were founded, and ethical codes for journalists were created. Values that had circulated among newspapers in haphazard ways — separating facts from opinions, claims to accuracy and fairness, a privileging of emotional detachment — came together under a new order that emphasized objectivity as a cardinal value and offered journalism a claim to specialized knowledge.

Professionalism became an aspirational ideal that many news organizations started to promise to their readers or listeners. The antics and sensationalism that had characterized the "yellow journalism," epitomized by Pulitzer's and Hearst's wildly successful New York tabloids, became less prominent. News organizations were turning away from the flamboyance and sensation that had flourished in the yellow journalism of the 1880s and 1890s. This movement was not uniform; tabloid-style journalism certainly did not disappear. On the whole, early-twentieth-century U.S. news outlets sought to win public attention and loyalty not only with attention-grabbing tactics but also with the promise of an objective rendering of what their professional editors deemed most important for audiences to know. The New York Times was a forerunner of this tendency; by the 1920s, it had established its reputation as the most influential and emulated news source in the country. Like the Times, newspapers across the country began promising to readers they could select "All the News That's Fit to Print"

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Making the News Popular by Anthony M. Nadler. Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Univ of Illinois Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2016
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0252081633
• ISBN 13: 9780252081637
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 216
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile