James S. Ettema

Knowledge Gap Effects in a Health Information Campaign

The evaluation of a campaign to increase cardiovascular health knowledge indicates that within the treatment community, education was a significant predictor of knowledge before the campaign but was not a significant predictor after the campaign. Two variables related to motivation to acquire information about cardiovascular health (age and perceived threat of heart attack) were not significant predictors of knowledge before the campaign but were significant predictors afterwards. These results suggest that the infusion of information into a social system via the mass media can close as well as open knowledge gaps and that motivation to acquire information in a specific knowledge domain is a factor controlling gap effects.

Investigative journalism and the moral order

In this essay, we examine the cultural consequences of a press that seeks to be both a detached observer of fact and a “custodian of conscience.” Drawing upon interviews with distinguished investigative journalists, we examine the diverse ways that these reporters have found to work within, but never resolve, the tension between objectivity and adversarialism. We also examine the particular contribution of investigative journalists to moral order within their communities (i.e., the “objectification” of standards by which the public can make moral judgments). In conclusion, we argue that this sort of journalism may oversee the reinforcement and relegitimation of enduring or dominant moral values but that it may also preside over the definition and development as well as the debasement and dissolution of those values.

Crafting cultural resonance Imaginative power in everyday journalism

To offer mythic appeal or ritual value, news must be framed not only to make certain facts and interpretations salient but also to resonate with what writers and readers take to be real and important matters of life. Paralleling salience as an effect of selectivity in fact-gathering and emphasis in news-writing, this study argues that resonance is an effect of those same practices when accomplished with eloquence. Continuing coverage of a particular news event provides the opportunity to study the recurring narrative structures and rhetorical strategies that just seemed to work in telling the story. That story, a poignant death and its aftermath, illustrates three resources for crafting resonance - all of which point to an ultimate source of resonance in the complexities of human desire.

Press rites and race relations: A study of mass‐mediated ritual

James Careys classic call for a ritual view of communication serves as the point of departure for an examination of the concept of mass‐mediated ritual. Ironically, Careys brief sketch of a news reading ritual emphasizes privatized consumption of mythologized news content and thus yields a “transmission view” of the concept. On the other hand, symbolic anthropology, particularly Victor Turners concept of social drama, insists upon a view of ritual as a public performance in which conflictual as well as consensual social meanings may be enacted. This conceptual framework is applied to press coverage of events that have had significant consequences for race relations and mayoral politics in a major American city.

Journalism as Reason-Giving: Deliberative Democracy, Institutional Accountability, and the News Media's Mission

Offering reasons for public choice is the central act of deliberative democracy. These reasons, however, must meet a stern criterion; they must be grounded in principles that cannot be reasonably rejected by citizens seeking fair terms of cooperation. Because reasons given in actual political argument regularly fail to meet this criterion, journalism should be asked to participate not merely by presiding over an uncritical forum for reason-giving but by acting as a reasoning institution that aggressively pursues and compellingly renders reasons satisfying the criterion. Moreover, because deliberation must be regulated by procedural principles that include mutual accountability, journalism should be asked to participate by demanding the accountability of public institutions to citizens, each other, and most importantly the ideals of the polity. A case study of journalism demanding accountability to the ideals of justice—one newspapers campaign for death penalty reform—provides a constructive model of journalistic reason-giving in a situation of deep moral disagreement.

Three Phases in the Creation of Information Inequities: An Empirical Assessment of a Prototype Videotex System.

The social impact of a videotex system is assessed by examining: (1) whose needs the system was designed to serve; (2) who were the early adopters; and (3) who most used and benefited from the system.

When the Facts Don't Speak for Themselves: A Study of the Use of Irony in Daily Journalism.

A comparison of three news stories illustrates how journalists can use irony to undercut and even reverse the literal or ostensible meaning of what is being reported. As a rhetorical device aimed at establishing the conditions for competing interpretations of a text, irony enables journalists to report “the facts” accurately and impartially while at the same time letting it be known—albeit quietly—that the facts do not “speak for themselves.” But by issuing its judgment quietly and discreetly, irony renders morality a strictly private matter, which is disconcerting and arguably dysfunctional in a society where the role of the press is generally understood in terms of fostering public debate and discussion.

Good News from a Bad Neighborhood: Toward an Alternative to the Discourse of Urban Pathology

This study analyzes the language through which journalists comprehend the nature and meaning of the urban community. It employs content analysis and interviews with reporters to critique the discourse of urban pathology - that is, the conceptual system often used to think and write about economically distressed neighborhoods. Rather than suggesting that all the “bad news “from these neighborhoods merely be balanced with “good news,” this study promotes a vocabulary of community assets - a set of terms that can enhance the power of journalistic language to describe the community. Such a vocabulary, the study concludes, would make a useful contribution to the practice of civic journalism.

ETHICS AND ELOQUENCE IN JOURNALISM An approach to press accountability

Journalists’ common sense, their everyday moral intuitions, offers a practical but flawed way of knowing right from wrong. But rather than discounting or dismissing this “naïve everyday ethical knowledge,” which would rob journalism of its normative substance, we propose to rehabilitate it through a process of public justification. Grounded in aspects of Jürgen Habermass theory of communicative ethics, we offer a model of press accountability that understands ethics as a process rather than an outcome. Our being-ethical-means-being-accountable theme emphasizes the role of eloquence, understood as the competence to argue in ways that advance common or shared interests, in an open and accessible discursive test of the validity of journalisms moral norms.

Common Sense and Education of Young Journalists.

Be it law, medicine, engineering, or journalism, professionals share not only a formal knowledge of the kind associated with theories and treatises but an informal and largely tacit knowledge that often defies the rigor and reason of higher education. It is difficult to say in general terms what the relative power and influence of these two types of knowledge might be, except to observe that at times the informal or colloquial knowledge can make the difference between a minimally competent practitioner and one of distinction. We might also suppose that this second type of knowledge looms larger in the less developed professions, like journalism, where there are few treatises and even fewer theories. N o doubt educators appreciate the importance of the kind of down-to-earth wisdom professionals acquire on the job. Most professional schools, including programs in journalism and mass communication, require or at least encourage internships, apprenticeships, simulations, and other similarly ”practical” field experiences. And yet, curiously, back in the classroom this presumably invaluable knowledge gets sanitized and scientized, and students are left with little opportunity to appraise critically the meaning and value of some of the more grubby and decidedly unscientific ways professionals come to know what they know. There is, we suspect, a wide and perhaps widening gap between how journalists know what they know and what students are told about how journalists know what they know. Our case in point is probably the most basic and surely the most important question of epistemology in journalism How do journalists know news? From our review of basic news writing and reporting textsand we have tried to look at most of them knowing news is almost invariably treated in terms of what are now commonly called the attributes or values of news: prominence,