Nov. 17, 2005

Meet the Press

By Scott McLemee

From time to time, an academic organization will invite me to sit on a panel at one of its gatherings, where my role is to serve as a native informant from the tribe of the journalists – one charged with the task of explaining our bizarre customs, and of demonstrating the primitive means by which we approximate abstract thought. (Sometimes they then give me food.) It is a curious experience, full of potential for misstatement and hasty generalizations. For one thing, the tribe is quite heterogeneous. “Media” is a plural, or it should be anyway. And within any given medium, the “journalistic field” (as Pierre Bourdieu called it) is itself fissured and stratified. It is a point I try to communicate to the professors through a combination of grunts and hand gestures — an awkward exercise, all around.

But one question-and-answer session sticks in mind as particularly embarrassing. The audience consisted mainly of English professors. Some of them practiced media criticism and analysis of various forms. What role (the question went) did such work play in how those of us in the media understood our work?

For once, I felt no hesitation about generalizing. The short answer was simply that academic media analysis plays no part at all, at least in its theoretically articulated variants. This should not be surprising. As a guest, though, you don’t want to be rude, so I padded the answer out with polite indications that this was a matter of some regret — and that, to be fair, some kinds of media criticism do provoke a lot of attention in journalistic circles.

But that last part was a bit of a feint. The kinds of analyses produced by people in that audience have no traction. The most subtle and cogent analysis by a rhetorician of how The Times or CNN frames its stories has all the pertinence to a reporter or editor that a spectrographic analysis of jalapeno powder would to someone cooking chili.

This is not a function of journalistic anti-intellectualism, though there’s certainly enough of that to go around. No, it comes down to a knowledge gap –- one in which academic media critics are often at a serious disadvantage. I mean tacit knowledge. There are, for example, things one learns from the experience of interviewing people who are clearly lying to you (or otherwise trying to make you a pawn in whatever game they are playing) that cannot be reduced to either formal propositions or methodological rules.

It is not necessary to read the collected fulminations of Noam Chomsky to learn that editors have ideological blinkers and blindspots. You tend to figure that one out pretty quickly, and may grow impatient with its protracted demonstration. What you want, rather, is some good old-fashioned phronesis — that is, the cultivated practical wisdom required to know how to handle a situation.

One Web site quotes a scholar’s description of phronesis as “a sound practical instinct for the course of events, an almost indefinable hunch that anticipates the future by remembering the past and thus judges the present correctly.” Start showing us how to get some of that, and I guarantee that folks will stand around the newsroom, debating your endnotes.

All of this is a roundabout way of framing the virtues of Danny Schechter’s The Death of Media, as well as its limitations. It is a new title in the Melville Manifestoes series published by Melville House, an independent press mentioned here on Tuesday. Schechter, one of the first producers for CNN and a winner of two Emmys for his work on the ABC program “20/20,” has been a Neiman Fellow in Journalism at Harvard University. He is also the author of a book called The More You Watch, the Less You Know (1999), which I haven’t read — though reportedly it did upset Bill O’Reilly, which seems like recommendation enough.

Schechter, then, is someone who brings tacit knowledge aplenty to the work of commenting on the state of the media. Last year, in his documentary WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception, he did more than reconstruct how the print and electronic media alike fell into line with the administration’s justifications for war. In that, he drew in part on a piece of scholarly research that certainly does deserve the closest and most shame-faced attention by the entire journalistic profession, the study Media Coverage of Weapons of Mass Destruction, by Susan D. Moeller, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Maryland at College Park. (The full text is available here.)

But Schechter went a step further — zeroing in on moments when reporters and editors worried aloud that changes in the mass media were eroding the difference between practicing journalism and providing coverage. That distinction is not a very subtle one, but it’s largely missing from the conceptual universe of, say, cultural studies.

“Providing coverage” is rather like what Woody Allen said about life: Most of it is just showing up. The cameras record what is happening, or the reporter takes down what was said — and presto, an event is “covered.” The quantity of tacit knowledge so mobilized is not large.

By contrast, any effort to “practice journalism” involves (among other things) asking questions, following hunches, noticing the anomalous, and persisting until someone accidentally says something meaningful. There is more to it than providing stenography to power. It involves certain cognitive skills — plus a sense of professional responsibility.

In his manifesto, Schechter runs through the familiar and depressing statistics showing a decline of public confidence in the mainstream media, increasing percentages of “infotainment” to hard news, and steady downsizing of reporting staff at news organizations.

One public-opinion poll conducted for the Pew Center found that “as 70 percent of the people asked expressed dissatisfaction with the news media.” And the same figure emerged from a survey of people working in the news media: about 70 percent, as Schechter puts it, “feel the same way as their customers.” He quotes Hunter S. Thompson’s evocative characterization of the television industry as “a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.”

To all of this, Schechter offers the alternative of ... uh, Wikipedia?

Well, “citizen journalism” anyway — through which “the ideas, observations, and energy of ordinary people” will serve as “not only a way of democratizing the media but also enlivening it.” He points to “the meteoric growth of the blogosphere and the emergence of thousands of video activists,” plus the contribution of scholars to “first rate publishing projects,” including “a new online, non-commercial encyclopedia that taps the expertise of researchers and writers worldwide.”

Well, it’s probably not fair to judge the possibilities for citizen journalism by the actual state of public-access cable TV — or any given Wikipedia entry written by a follower of Lyndon LaRouche. (Besides, are either all that much worse than MSNBC?) But something is missing from Schechter’s optimistic scenario, in any case.

It is now much easier to publish and broadcast than ever before. In other words, the power to cover and event or a topic has increased. But the skills necessary to foster meaningful discussion are not programmed into the software. They have to be cultivated.

That’s where people from academe come in. The most substantial interventions in shaping mass media probably won’t come from conference papers and journal articles, but in the classroom — by giving the future citizen journalist access, not just to technology, but to cognitive tools.

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