The reason for good journalism

Bloggers are citizen journalists, and most of us are not very good at journalism. “Citizen” journalists distinguishes us from professional journalists, most of whom are not very good at journalism.

I once had an argument with David Crisp, and he gave me a what-for, to which I replied that the job of the journalists was simple: Go out and find out what powerful people are doing, and report back.

But many of them don’t see it that way. Instead, they see their role as mere conveyors of facts that are put out for our general interest. Since we are mere consumers of news, our opinions are of no consequence. Powerful person A says this, and powerful person B says this in reply. They get a quote from both sides, rewrite a press release, and keep secrets from us because they are insiders, and because they have so damned much integrity.

The result? The news. Oh yeah, and Michael Jackson died.

I know they lack integrity, because powerful people like their work. Washington insiders cannot say enough praising words about the wonderful Washington press corp. That ought to be a clue that something is very wrong. Also, the fact that they devote so much time to trivia like MJ indicates that they tend to concentrate on stories that least affect power.

I have come to believe that the kind of journalism we see, of the Russert/Brokaw/Gregory variety, exists as a grand cop-out. If a journalist wants to make a lot of money, he has to get friendly with power and redefine journalism to power’s liking. The human mind cannot live with open deceit, and so self-justifies by changing the definition of the job. No longer is the job of the journalist to investigate and search for truth, but rather to simply relay to us some (but not all) goings-on among the powerful. He is of them, and not of us. He’s doing us a favor. It’s top-down, undemocratic journalism.

Atticus Mullikin is an American expatriate living and working in Maastricht, the Netherlands. He wrote a interesting piece for the European Journalism Center’s Magazine center in late 2007. In it he talks about the epiphanic moment in the movie Jerry Maguire where Tom Cruise’s character realizes that he is no more than a “shark in a suit”, and rewrites his company’s mission to be less about making lots of money and having many clients, and more about the people he represents. After he gets himself right in his own mind, he says “I am my father’s son again.”

Mullikin does not mention that Jerry Maguire loses his job as a result.

Mullikin’s epiphanic moment is to realize that “good journalism is a duty.” He talks about an early twentieth century debate between Walter Lippman and John Dewey, where Lippman argued for top-down journalism: since ordinary people are not capable of making determinations on the complicated issues of the day, they need to follow leaders. The journalist’s job is to “manufacture consent”.

Dewey thought the opposite. He agreed about the capabilities of ordinary people on complex issues, but also thought “that citizens were capable of participating in Democratic government, and that journalism was a primary means to do this.”

So good journalism is about democratic governance, and journalism as it is done in most of the American media is about top-down rule. Says Mullikin:

Knowledge is power. In the United States, there is a struggle between conservatives and liberals, which I touched on in another article. That struggle is, respectively, between old world authoritarians and new world egalitarians, and the primary question is, as with journalism, are citizens capable of governing themselves or do they need to be controlled and guided by elites? It is a choice, really, between the democratic ideal and the Machiavellian “reality.”

So in my own crude way, when I told Crisp that his job was to find out what powerful people are doing and report back to us, I was unknowingly echoing Dewey, and advocating for democratic governance. I am a new world egalitarian, and all of the back-and-forth I enjoy so much with the Budge’s and Natelson’s and Swede’s is an age old clash between my egalitarianism and their authoritarianism – the top-down world.

Mullikin’s is a remarkably insightful article. Maybe a journalist or two will stumble upon it.