Deliberating on Democracy (1 of 2)

by Tony Chavira

I want to begin this two-part series of articles with a simple question: what exactly are we attempting to do by passionately asserting our opinions on FourStory? When developers and local politicians have enough power to steamroll over the landscape of Southern California, when the government can inject money at any time and drastically shift our local redevelopment agendas, when local politicians are so obviously purchased by the economic influence of perceived “elites,” and when the percentages of jobless and homeless families in Southern California climb into record numbers, what exactly can we possibly seek to achieve by essentially throwing stones at the castle walls? How can we even presume to affect the local quality of living?

In his article “Commercialism and Professionalism in the American News Media,” Daniel Hallin details an interesting history of how people are affected by their informational media, starting with a high level of interest and involvement in news media post-World War II, through increased competition between emerging news agents in the 1970s, through deregulation and the rise of local news interests, to emerging corporate control over local and larger news entities in the 1980s. Fearful that we’ve lost “the traditional state of honest journalism,” Hallin is most threatened by something he calls “reality-based” programming; that is, the fusion of news and entertainment, which he dates back to 1968, when 60 Minutes first went on the air. Hallin writes that this sinister mix of news and entertainment was the driving force for a precipitous decline in overall journalistic standards. For our purposes, Hallin makes an interesting point regarding “new media” (also known as corporate online media and blogs). He says that they “make it possible for news-makers to communicate with the mass public without the mediation of journalists.” (p.228) Dangerous, since Hallin believes that sites like ours tend to be mistakenly described as “unmediated,” while in actuality they are carefully structured as “commercial products, each with its own logic of selection and emphasis.” (p.228)

Lord, he’s found us out.

The fact that we have an agenda to save the homeless denizens of the world automatically negates any of our efforts to bring about any actual social justice through our writing here at FourStory! Hallin is breaking us down into two forms of journalism here: the tradition of unbiased journalistic standards (which we are not a part of, thank you very much) and the guerilla, openly-biased approach of citizen journalism (which we are a part of, sort of kind of).

But what about us? We’ve got a non-profit foundation with a goal to help the homeless behind us! We’ve got staff writers and a real, no-foolin’ editor-in-chief! Hallin’s clearly missing a news organizational structure or two here:

First, we’ve got his mediated type of reporting where both the journalist and the agency referee the information before it is reported;

Second (and I know you’ve seen this one), a mediated type of reporting where the news agency provides the mediation themselves and report information directly without the involvement of a journalist at all. But is that really journalism, or just regurgitation of information?

Third, a form of reporting where the journalists themselves are the mediators without the influence of an oppressive broker agency like Fox News or MSNBC. Sounds sort of like us, more or less.

And fourth, Internet Robin Hoods with no interest in quality but lots of interest in sticking it to the man.

It’s easy to find examples for the first type of reporting, in which journalists in new agencies simply do what they are told and report the news without any intention of following through, continual correspondence, or any actual investigation. This is the kind most of us hate, and the reason why so many of us look on the life of Walter Cronkite with such reverence. This wasn’t Cronkite’s style; he got right into the mess and told it like it was. Writer Jay Rosen, in his 1991 article “Making Journalism More Public,” stated that typical journalists who work under large news agencies tend to be passive, “behave” rather than “act,” don’t construct alternative narratives or focal points, and tend to become complacent with disconnected, fragmented stories.

The second type of mediated reporting has to take into consideration the effect of the political-economic structure in which most news agencies operate and their inherent distribution of power and control. It doesn’t take a genius to see that without the journalist to provide investigative intrusion into the news process, news would be completely controlled by these power structures. In the 1999 American Journalism Review, there was an article by Kelly Heyboer about a husband and wife team of journalists from Tampa, Florida, who completed a report against a bovine hormone-producing company, Monsanto, regarding the use of cancerous hormones to increase milk production in cows. They were first told by their affiliate, FOX News, that they would not be able to broadcast their report; things escalated until the station ended their contracts early. Although they both later went onto to win awards for journalism, and the news was eventually released and investigated further, the shameless subsistence of the political-economic powers is all too apparent. Ultimately, I think this brings up a extremely critical point: news cannot exist without an opinionated slant toward social justice.

The third form of reporting is essentially Jay Rosen’s concept of “public journalism,” which the New York Times went so far as call a discredit to the journalistic profession. I’d like to think that this is sort of what we do at FourStory. In a nutshell, public journalism is simply a state where journalists, however you want to define them as a group, are the sole mediators of news.

The fourth type, despite the fact that it’s in my own best interest to automatically agree with Rosen’s statement, has the inherent flaw of allowing anyone unlimited freedom with the news. Firstly (as stated by Walter Lippmann in the classic Public Opinion), the best way to serve the public through journalism is to leave the work to the professionals, who are pretty much trained to think though critical issues and interpret them to us low-lives. From this point of view, a journalist who is independent of this process has, in effect, extricated himself from a community of fair-and-balanced journalistic standards, and therefore is not practicing true journalism. Another flaw is that journalists should not be the only intermediary between a politician and the masses (especially if the journalists are the masses) because mediation is necessary in order to understand and critique scummy political rhetoric. Though it’s just as likely that the public itself can hold the journalist responsible for their reporting. Remember when Dan Rather’s questioned Bush’s military service? Individuals investigating the information found that Rather had not thoroughly checked his references, and he was canned for it.

Most importantl, and a key point of the third news organizational structure in which we probably fall, Rosen’s ideal journalists—although not directly mediated by corporate forces—are traditionally educated in the belief that news organizations are the apex of journalistic integrity, thereby delegitimizing any other real form of independent investigation that does not conform in some way to traditional journalistic standards. If you’re not a least going to follow some of the tenets of traditional journalist integrity, you’re just not considered worthy of dealing out news and opinion.

Sure, all four types of information dealing are riddled with faults that potentially hinder the spread of information, provide bias, present lazy or sloppy information, or present fragmented stories to the public. But, ultimately, what is the point of advocating for high-quality information? Rosen defines journalism as something used “to retain, support and incite democracy and democratic debate.” Between the ability to have forums, comment, argue, troll, or link to our best friend’s website, does this not give a bit more legitimacy to the democratic quality of information and commentary on the Internet than to that of traditional journalism?

Or maybe I’m just trying to justify something.

We may (or you may) see our commentary on FourStory as “public journalism.” We have little to no real corporate structure above us (we’re a nonprofit funded by nonprofits) and we just blog as we go. But does that necessarily mean that we are trustworthy? What makes our opinions or commentary useful to deliberative democracy, and what is our actual potential to change anything when the structure for information does not typically benefit nonprofits like us?

Next week I’ll reflect on what we expect to change due to our commentary and that of other Internet Robin Hoods.

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