Theodore L. Glasser

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.

Competition and Diversity among Radio Formats: Legal and Structural Issues.

The FCCs laissez‐faire approach to format allocation underscores the Commissions aversion to diversity as a goal of the First Amendment. The FCCs format policy confuses variety with diversity and thus fails to recognize that competition in the marketplace typically mitigates against the ideal of pluralistic programming.

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.

Public journalism and the search for democratic ideals

Public journalism is apparently gaining influence in newsrooms throughout the US. It seems to be a genuinely innovative effort to move journalists away from thinking about the claims of separation that have long defined the practice of journalism toward thinking about the claims of connection that might redefine and reinvigorate the role of the press in a democratic society. Public journalism presumes a democracy in decay and posits a role for the press based on what journalism can do to enrich a public discourse that has long been in decline. In this article, the authors question the role the press might play in a democratic society as purported by public journalism and its implied view of democracy. Following a review of what public journalism claims for itself, the authors identify and discuss the areas where its conception of the press and the presss commitment to self-governance appear to be most problematic. The question becomes not so much one of whether public journalism offers something desirabl...

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.

The Politics of Public Journalism

public-spirited journalists, it is said. Yes, but there is no secure place for public-spirited journalists outside a democracy that is reasonably healthy, generally inclusive, and alive in the imaginations of the people it is supposed to serve. “No more journalism for journalists!” is as close as the movement comes to any radical shift in outlook. Journalists who are “for” the media and seek only to advance its fortunes can never do the job. But neither can those who, still inspired by the ideal of a free press, adopt their profession’s current understanding of public service as the true and only way. Public journalism says there are other ways to bring a genuine public alive, even within the highly restricted environment in which most journalists labor.

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,

Play and the power of news

able, the ordinary, and the uninspired. Allen Tate understood what such a science would do to literature; good journalists knew what it would do to journalism. Science deflates the self-image of journalists as it compromises the efforts to construct democratic communities. Not finding its natural home in the humanities, journalism has tended to gravitate to the sciences: to the sciences of impact, determination and control. Were it science as imagined and practiced in Chicago, a science of space and place, a science of the local and particular, a science of the complex relations among humans struggling to create a common life within conflict and division, a science deeply democratic, pluralistic, humanistic, and imaginative in its impulses, this story might have had a happy ending: Journalism education might have become an unambiguous success as an enterprise. But the science of communication that developed and occupied journalism schools created and fed off a natural hostility between journalism and the arts of social control. Not only has this undercut the potential of journalism as an academic study and left it marooned, it has also radically compromised the possibilities of a democratic and public life in the contemporary world.

An international symposium on investigative journalism Introduction

Investigative reporting can be journalism at its most politically vigorous and methodologically rigorous. Sometimes, however, it is also journalism at its most vulnerable. The following sketches of investigative reporting in diverse political and cultural settings begin with the theme of vigor and rigor: John Tulloch’s account of British journalist Stephen Grey’s five-year effort to expose the ‘parallel universe’ of extraordinary rendition, secret prisons and torture of CIA prisoners. ‘The development of the story embodies encouraging signs about the emergence of a global investigative journalism drawing on webs of resources,’ Tulloch concludes, ‘orchestrated by a shifting cast of multi-skilled journalists, some freelance, working across print, broadcast and internet media, with relationships to branded media organizations.’ Rather than an investigation modeled on the ‘Big Bang’ or ‘Siege Warfare’, Tulloch argues, this story has been a ‘slow-burn’, building over several years, utilizing a jigsaw of different sources and collaboration as well as competition among journalists. ‘Shared moral outrage has been the basis of collaboration.’ Note too that James Aucoin’s full-length article concluding the symposium section of this issue of Journalism analyzes examples of politically vigorous investigative reporting in the form of articles from magazines on the US political Journalism

Play, pleasure and the value of newsreading

Newsreading as play‐the pleasurable but disinterested state that an individual creates and fashions when reading a newspaper‐transcends the utility or usefulness of the newspaper. In contrast to empirical studies of audience uses and gratifications, the study of newsreading as play underscores the cultural and thus symbolic dimensions of mass communication. To fully appreciate the intrinsic value of newsreading — as opposed to the extrinsic value of the newspaper — requires a fundamental shift from a transmission view of communication to a view more compatible with ethnographic description.