Public Journalism And Political Knowledge

In this text journalists, communications scholars, and political scientists assess the contemporary public journalism, looking at its origins, the arguments for and against public journalism, and the state of political knowledge.

Political journalism is often under fire. Conventional wisdom and much scholarly research suggest that journalists are cynics and political pundits. Political news is void of substance and overly focused on strategy and persons. Citizens do not learn from the news, are politically cynical, and are dissatisfied with the media. This book challenges these assumptions, which are often based on single-country studies with limited empirical observations about the relation between news production, content, and journalism's effects. Based on interviews with journalists, a systematic content analysis of political news, and panel survey data in different countries, this book tests how different systems and media-politics relations condition the contents of political news. It shows how different content creates different effects, and demonstrates that under the right circumstances citizens learn from political news, do not become cynical, and are satisfied with political journalism.

As the journalist Walter Lippmann noted nearly a century ago, democracy falters “if there is no steady supply of trustworthy and relevant news.” Today’s journalists are not providing it. Too often, reporters give equal weight to facts and biased opinion, stir up small controversies, and substitute infotainment for real news. Even when they get the facts rights, they often misjudge the context in which they belong. Information is the lifeblood of a healthy democracy. Public opinion and debate suffer when citizens are misinformed about current affairs, as is increasingly the case. Though the failures of today’s communication system cannot be blamed solely on the news media, they are part of the problem, and the best hope for something better. Patterson proposes “knowledge-based journalism” as a corrective. Unless journalists are more deeply informed about the subjects they cover, they will continue to misinterpret them and to be vulnerable to manipulation by their sources. In this book, derived from a multi-year initiative of the Carnegie Corporation and the Knight Foundation, Patterson calls for nothing less than a major overhaul of journalism practice and education. The book speaks not only to journalists but to all who are concerned about the integrity of the information on which America’s democracy depends.

"The free press cannot be free," Robert Entman asserts. "Inevitably, it is dependent." In this penetrating critique of American journalism and the political process, Entman identifies a "vicious circle of interdependence" as the key dilemma facing reporters and editors. To become sophisticated citizens, he argues, Americans need high-quality, independent political journalism; yet, to stay in business while producing such journalism, news organizations would need an audience of sophisticated citizens. As Entman shows, there is no easy way out of this dilemma, which has encouraged the decay of democratic citizenship as well as the media's continuing failure to live up to their own highest ideals. Addressing widespread despair over the degeneration of presidential campaigns, Entman argues that the media system virtually compels politicians to practice demagoguery. Entman confronts a provocative array of issues: how the media's reliance on elite groups and individuals for information inevitably slants the news, despite adherence to objectivity standards; why the media hold government accountable for its worst errors--such as scandals and foreign misadventures--only after it's too late to prevent them; how the interdependence of the media and their audience molds public opinion in ways neither group alone can control; why greater media competition does not necessarily mean better journalism; why the abolition of the FCC's Fairness Doctrine could make things worse. Entman sheds fascinating light on important news events of the past decade. He compares, for example, coverage of the failed hostage rescue in 1980, which subjected President Carter to a barrage of criticism, with coverage of the 1983 bombing that killed 241 Marines in Lebanon, an incident in which President Reagan largely escaped blame. He shows how various factors unrelated to the reality of the events themselves--the apparent popularity of Reagan and unpopularity of Carter, differences in the way the Presidents publicly framed the incidents, the potent symbols skillfully manipulated by Reagan's but not by Carter's news managers--produced two very different kinds of reportage. Entman concludes with some thoughtful suggestions for improvement. Chiefly, he proposes the creation of subsidized, party-based news outlets as a way of promoting new modes of news gathering and analysis, of spurring the established media to more innovative coverage, and of increasing political awareness and participation. Such suggestions, along with the author's probing media criticisms, make this book essential reading for anyone concerned about the state of democracy in America.

In this timely book, leading researchers consider how media inform democracy in six countries – the United States, the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. Taking as their starting point the idea that citizens need to be briefed adequately with a full and intelligent coverage of public affairs so that they can make responsible, informed choices rather than act out of ignorance and misinformation, contributors use a comparative approach to examine the way in which the shifting media landscape is affecting and informing the democratic process across the globe. In particular, they ask: Can a comparative approach provide us with new answers to the question of how media inform democracy? Has increased commercialization made media systems more similar and affected equally the character of news and public knowledge throughout the USA and Europe? Is soft news and misinformation predominantly related to an American exceptionalism, based on the market domination of its media and marginalized public broadcaster? This study combines a content analysis of press and television news with representative surveys in six nations. It makes an indispensable contribution to debates about media and democracy, and about changes in media systems. It is especially useful for media theory, comparative media, and political communication courses.

The original edition of Public Journalism and Public Life, published in 1995, was the first comprehensive argument in favor of public journalism. Designed to focus the discussion about public journalism both within and outside the profession, the book has accomplished its purpose. In the ensuing years, the debate has continued; dozens of newspapers and thousands of journalists have been experimenting with the philosophy, while others still dispute its legitimacy. This larger second edition further develops the philosophy, responds to the arguments against it, outlines how specific principles can be applied, and explains the importance of public deliberation and the role of values in public journalism. Divided into three sections, it can be used as a supplement to the first edition or as a starting point for those being newly introduced to the ideas that have been the subject of debate within the profession and among those interested and involved in civic life at all levels. Section 1 summarizes two major arguments -- why journalism and public life are inseparably bound in success or failure and why the way journalism operates in the current environment fosters failure more often than success. Section 2 looks at the evolution of the profession's culture, its impact on the author's extensive career, and how he grew to believe that substantive change is needed in journalism. Section 3 deals with the implications of public journalism philosophy -- how it requires the application of additional values to daily work, its evolution in the early years and where its current focus should be, plus various questions about the future of cyberspace.

Photo opportunities, ten-second sound bites, talking heads and celebrity anchors: so the world is explained daily to millions of Americans. The result, according to the experts, is an ignorant public, helpless targets of a one-way flow of carefully filtered and orchestrated communication. Common Knowledge shatters this pervasive myth. Reporting on a ground-breaking study, the authors reveal that our shared knowledge and evolving political beliefs are determined largely by how we actively reinterpret the images, fragments, and signals we find in the mass media. For their study, the authors analyzed coverage of 150 television and newspaper stories on five prominent issues—drugs, AIDS, South African apartheid, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and the stock market crash of October 1987. They tested audience responses of more than 1,600 people, and conducted in-depth interviews with a select sample. What emerges is a surprisingly complex picture of people actively and critically interpreting the news, making sense of even the most abstract issues in terms of their own lives, and finding political meaning in a sophisticated interplay of message, medium, and firsthand experience. At every turn, Common Knowledge refutes conventional wisdom. It shows that television is far more effective at raising the saliency of issues and promoting learning than is generally assumed; it also undermines the assumed causal connection between newspaper reading and higher levels of political knowledge. Finally, this book gives a deeply responsible and thoroughly fascinating account of how the news is conveyed to us, and how we in turn convey it to others, making meaning of at once so much and so little. For anyone who makes the news—or tries to make anything of it—Common Knowledge promises uncommon wisdom.

The new media environment has challenged the role of professional journalists as the primary source of politically relevant information. After Broadcast News puts this challenge into historical context, arguing that it is the latest of several critical moments, driven by economic, political, cultural, and technological changes, in which the relationship among citizens, political elites, and the media has been contested. Out of these past moments, distinct "media regimes" eventually emerged, each with its own seemingly natural rules and norms, and each the result of political struggle with clear winners and losers. The media regime in place for the latter half of the twentieth century has been dismantled, but a new regime has yet to emerge. Assuring this regime is a democratic one requires serious consideration of what was most beneficial and most problematic about past regimes and what is potentially most beneficial and most problematic about today's new information environment.