In 1990, Poland was experiencing growing pains as it shifted from a state-controlled economic system to a more open market economy. The country’s leading newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, the first noncommunist newspaper to appear in Eastern Europe since the 1940s, was also undergoing challenges. Based in Warsaw with a circulation of about 350,000 at the time, Gazeta Wyborcza had to report on and explain the new economy and the new crime wave that accompanied it. Especially troubling to the news staff and Polish citizens were gangs that robbed American and Western European tourists at railway stations, sometimes assaulting them in the process. The stolen goods would then pass to an outer circle, whose members transferred the goods to still another exterior ring of thieves. Even if the police caught the inner circle members, the loot usually disappeared.

These developments triggered heated discussions in the newsroom. A small group of young reporters, some of whom had recently worked in the United States, argued that the best way to cover the story was to describe the new crime wave and relay the facts to readers in a neutral manner. Another group, many of whom were older and more experienced, felt that the paper should take an advocacy stance and condemn the criminals through interpretive columns on the front page. The older guard won this particular debate, and more interpretive pieces appeared.40

This story illustrates the two competing models that have influenced American and European journalism since the early twentieth century. The first—the informational or modern model—emphasizes describing events and issues from a seemingly neutral point of view. The second—a more partisan or European model—stresses analyzing occurrences and advocating remedies from an acknowledged point of view. For fictionalized representations of these differences, note the contrasts between the depiction of journalists on HBO’s U.S. program The Newsroom (2012–2014) and on the Danish TV series Borgen (2010– ). In The Newsroom, discussions of remedies and viewpoints take place off camera; in Borgen, journalists talk about these issues on and off camera.

In most American newspapers today, the informational model dominates the front page, while the partisan model remains confined to the editorial pages and an occasional front-page piece. However, alternative models of news—from the serious to the satirical—have emerged to challenge modern journalistic ideals.

The Public Journalism Movement

From the late 1980s through the 1990s, a number of papers experimented with ways to involve readers more actively in the news process. These experiments surfaced primarily at midsize daily papers, including the Charlotte Observer, the Wichita Eagle, the Virginian-Pilot, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Davis “Buzz” Merritt, editor of the Wichita Eagle at the time, defined key aspects of public journalism, including moving “beyond the limited mission of ‘telling the news’ to a broader mission of helping public life go well,” and moving “from seeing people as consumers—as readers or nonreaders, as bystanders to be informed—to seeing them as a public, as potential actors in arriving at democratic solutions to public problems.”41

Public journalism is best imagined as a conversational model for news practice. Modern journalism had drawn a distinct line between reporter detachment and community involvement; public journalism—driven by citizen forums, community conversations, and even talk shows—has obscured this line.

In the 1990s—before people felt the full impact of the Internet—public journalism served as a response to the many citizens who felt alienated from participating in public life. This alienation arose, in part, from viewers who watched passively as the political process seemed to play out in the news and on TV between party operatives and media pundits. Public journalism seemed to involve both the public and journalists more centrally in civic and political life. Editors and reporters interested in addressing citizen alienation—and reporter cynicism—began devising ways to engage people as conversational partners in determining the news. In an effort to draw the public into discussions about community priorities, these journalists began sponsoring citizen forums, where readers would have a voice in shaping aspects of the news that directly affected them.

An Early Public Journalism Project

Although isolated citizen projects and reader forums are sprinkled throughout the history of journalism, the public journalism movement began in earnest in 1987 in Columbus, Georgia. The city was suffering from a depressed economy, an alienated citizenry, and an entrenched leadership. In response, a team of reporters from the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer surveyed and talked with community leaders and other citizens about the future of the city. The paper then published an eight-part series based on the findings.

When the provocative series evoked little public response, the paper’s leadership realized there was no mechanism or forum for continuing the public discussions about the issues raised in the series. Consequently, the paper created such a forum by organizing a town meeting and helped create a new civic organization to tackle issues such as racial tension and teenage antisocial behavior.

The Columbus project generated public discussion, involved more people in the news process, and eased race and class tensions by bringing various groups together in public conversations. In the newsroom, the Ledger-Enquirer tried to reposition the place of journalists in politics: “Instead of standing outside the political community and reporting on its pathologies, they took up residence within its borders.”42

Criticizing Public Journalism

By 2000, more than a hundred newspapers, many teamed with local television and public radio stations, had practiced some form of public journalism. Yet many critics remained skeptical of the experiment, raising a number of concerns, including the weakening of four journalistic hallmarks: editorial control, credibility, balance, and diverse views.43

First, some editors and reporters argued that public journalism had been co-opted by the marketing department and that those who practiced it were merely pandering to what readers wanted and taking editorial control away from newsrooms. They believed that focus group samples and consumer research—tools of marketing, not journalism—blurred the boundary between the editorial and the business functions of a paper. Some journalists also feared that by becoming more active in the community, they might be perceived as community boosters rather than as community watchdogs.

Second, critics worried that public journalism compromised the profession’s credibility, which many believe derives from detachment. They argued that public journalism turned reporters into participants rather than observers. However, as the Wichita Eagle’s editor Davis Merritt pointed out, professionals who have credibility “share some basic values about life, some common ground about common good.” Yet many journalists have insisted they “don’t share values with anyone; that [they] are value-neutral.”44 Merritt argued that as a result, modern journalism actually has little credibility with the public, which the Pew Research Center’s annual credibility surveys bear out.

Third, critics also contended that public journalism undermined balance and the both-sides-of-a-story convention by constantly seeking common ground and community consensus; therefore, it ran the risk of dulling the rough edges of democratic speech. Public journalists countered that they were trying to set aside more room for centrist positions. Such positions were often representative of many in the community but were missing in the mainstream news, which has always been more interested in the extremist views that make for a more dramatic story.

Fourth, many traditional reporters asserted that public journalism, which they considered merely a marketing tool, had not addressed the changing economic structure of the news business—especially the decline of reporting jobs and the boom in public relations work (see “Case Study: A Lost Generation of Journalists?” page 501). With more news outlets in the hands of fewer owners, both public journalists and traditional reporters needed to raise tough questions about the disappearance of competing daily papers and newsroom staff cutbacks at local monopoly newspapers. Facing little competition, in 2010 and 2011 newspapers continued to cut reporting staffs and expensive investigative projects, reduced the space for news, or converted to online-only operations. While such trends temporarily helped profits and satisfied stockholders, they limited the range of stories told and views represented in a community. In addition, the rise of PR made it much easier for companies to get stories about executive managers and corporate images into various news media, which needed new sources for story ideas with so many journalists out of work or switching careers.

“Fake” News and Satiric Journalism

For many young people, it is especially disturbing that two wealthy, established political parties—beholden to special interests and their lobbyists—control the nation’s government. After all, 98 percent of congressional incumbents get reelected each year—not always because they’ve done a good job but often because they’ve made promises and done favors for the lobbyists and interests that helped get them elected in the first place.

Why shouldn’t people, then, be cynical about politics? It is this cynicism that has drawn increasingly larger audiences to “fake” news shows like The Daily Show, The Nightly Show, and Last Week Tonight. Following in the tradition of Saturday Night Live (SNL), which began in 1975, news satires tell their audiences something that seems truthful about politicians and how they try to manipulate media and public opinion. But most important, these shows use humor to critique the news media and our political system. SNL’s sketches on GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin in 2008 drew large audiences and shaped the way younger viewers thought about the election.

The Colbert Report satirized cable news hosts, particularly Fox’s Bill O’Reilly and MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, and the bombastic opinion-assertion culture promoted by their programs. In critiquing the limits of news stories and politics, The Daily Show parodies the narrative conventions of evening news programs: the clipped eight-second sound bite that limits meaning, and the formulaic shot of the TV news “stand up,” which depicts reporters “on location,” attempting to establish credibility by revealing that they were really there.

On The Daily Show, a cast of fake reporters are digitally superimposed in front of exotic foreign locales, Washington, D.C., or other U.S. locations. In a 2004 exchange with “political correspondent” Rob Corddry, host Jon Stewart asked him for his opinion about presidential campaign tactics. “My opinion? I don’t have opinions,” Corddry answered. “I’m a reporter, Jon. My job is to spend half the time repeating what one side says, and half the time repeating the other. Little thing called objectivity; might want to look it up.”

During his reign as news court jester, Stewart, who stepped down from The Daily Show in 2015, has exposed the melodrama of TV news that nightly depicts the world in various stages of disorder while offering the stalwart, comforting presence of celebrity-anchors overseeing it all from their high-tech command centers. Even before CBS’s usually neutral and aloof Walter Cronkite signed off the evening news with “And that’s the way it is,” network news anchors tried to offer a sense of order through the reassurance of their individual personalities.

Yet even as fake anchors, satirists like Stewart and Oliver display much greater range of emotion—a range that may match our own—than we get from our detached “hard news” anchors: more amazement, irony, outrage, laughter, and skepticism. For example, during Stewart’s coverage of the 2012 presidential election, he often showed genuine irritation or even outrage—coupled with irony and humor—whenever a politician or political ad presented information that was untrue or misleading.

While fake news programs often mock the formulas that real TV news programs have long used, they also present an informative and insightful look at current events and the way “traditional” media cover them. For example, he exposes hypocrisy by juxtaposing what a politician said recently in the news with the opposite position articulated by the same politician months or years earlier. Indeed, many Americans have admitted that they watch satires such as The Daily Show not only to be entertained but also to stay current with what’s going on in the world. In fact, a prominent Pew Research Center study back in 2007 found that people who watched these satiric shows were more often “better informed” than most other news consumers, usually because these viewers tended to get their news from multiple sources and a cross section of news media.45

Although the world has changed, local TV news story formulas (except for splashy opening graphics and Doppler weather radar) have gone virtually unaltered since the 1970s, when SNL’s “Weekend Update” first started making fun of TV news. Newscasts still limit reporters’ stories to two minutes or less and promote stylish anchors, a “sports guy,” and a certified meteorologist as familiar personalities whom we invite into our homes each evening. Now that a generation of viewers has been raised on the TV satire and political cynicism of “Weekend Update,” David Letterman, Jimmy Fallon, Conan O’Brien, The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report, the slick, formulaic packaging of political ads and the canned, cautious sound bites offered in news packages are simply not as persuasive as they once were.

Journalism should break free from tired formulas—especially in TV news—and reimagine better ways to tell stories. In fictional television, storytelling has evolved over time, becoming increasingly complex. Although the Internet and 24/7 cable news have introduced new models of journalism and commentary, why has TV news remained virtually unchanged over the past forty years? Are there no new ways to report the news? Maybe audiences would value news that matches the complicated storytelling that surrounds them in everything from TV dramas to interactive video games to their own conversations. We should demand news story forms that better represent the complexity of our world.