Democracy and Reimagining Journalism’s Role

Journalism is central to democracy: Both citizens and the media must have access to the information that we need to make important decisions. As this chapter illustrates, however, this is a complicated idea. For example, in the aftermath of 9/11, some government officials claimed that reporters or columnists who raised questions about fighting terrorism, invading Iraq, or developing secret government programs were being unpatriotic. Yet the basic principles of democracy require citizens and the media to question our leaders and government. Isn’t this, after all, what the American Revolution was all about? (See “Examining Ethics: WikiLeaks, Secret Documents, and Good Journalism” on page 506.)

Conventional journalists will fight ferociously for the principles that underpin journalism’s basic tenets—freedom of the press, the obligation to question government, the public’s right to know, and the belief that there are two sides to every story. These are mostly worthy ideals, but they do have limitations. These tenets, for example, generally do not acknowledge any moral or ethical duty for journalists to improve the quality of daily life. Rather, conventional journalism values its news-gathering capabilities and the well-constructed news narrative, leaving the improvement of civic life to political groups, nonprofit organizations, business philanthropists, individual citizens, and practitioners of Internet activism.

Social Responsibility

Although reporters have traditionally thought of themselves first and foremost as observers and recorders, some journalists have acknowledged a social responsibility. Among them was James Agee in the 1930s. In his book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which was accompanied by the Depression-era photography of Walker Evans, Agee said that he regarded conventional journalism as dishonest, partly because the act of observing intruded on people and turned them into story characters that newspapers and magazines then exploited for profit.

Agee also worried that readers would retreat into the comfort of his writing—his narrative—instead of confronting what for many families was the horror of the Great Depression. For Agee, the question of responsibility extended not only to journalism and to himself but to the readers of his stories as well: “The reader is no less centrally involved than the authors and those of whom they tell.”46 Agee’s self-conscious analysis provides insights into journalism’s hidden agendas and the responsibility of all citizens to make public life better.

EXAMINING ETHICS

WikiLeaks, Secret Documents, and Good Journalism

Since its inception in 2006, the controversial Web site WikiLeaks has released millions of documents—from revelations of toxic dumps in Africa to the 2013 release of 1.5 million U.S. diplomatic records, many involving President Nixon’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. WikiLeaks’ main spokesperson and self-identified “editor in chief,” Julian Assange, an Australian online activist, has been called everything from a staunch free-speech advocate to a “hi-tech terrorist” (by U.S. vice president Joe Biden). Certainly, government leaders around the world have faced embarrassment from the site’s many document dumps and secrecy breaches.

In its most controversial move, in 2010 WikiLeaks offered 500,000-plus documents, called the “War Logs,” to three mainstream print outlets—the Guardian in the United Kingdom, the German magazine Der Spiegel, and the New York Times. These documents were mainly U.S. military and state department dispatches and internal memos related to the Afghan and Iraq wars—what Bill Keller, then executive editor of the New York Times, called a “huge breach of secrecy” for those running the wars. Keller described working with WikiLeaks as an adventure that “combined the cloak-and-dagger intrigue of handling a vast secret archive with the more mundane feat of sorting, searching and understanding a mountain of data.”1 Indeed, one of the first major stories the Times wrote, based on the “War Logs” project, reported on “Pakistan’s ambiguous role as an American ally.”2 Then, just a few months later, Osama bin Laden was found hiding in the middle of a Pakistani suburb.

WikiLeaks presents a number of ethical dilemmas and concerns for both journalists and citizens. News critic and journalism professor Jay Rosen has called WikiLeaks “the world’s first stateless news organization.”3 But is WikiLeaks actually engaging in journalism—and therefore entitled to First Amendment protections? Or is it merely an important “news source, news provider, content host, [or] whistle-blower,” exposing things that governments would rather keep secret, as one critic from the Nieman Journalism Lab suggests?4 And should any document or material obtained by WikiLeaks be released for public scrutiny, or should some kinds of documents and materials be withheld?

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Carl Court/AFP/Getty Images

Examining Ethics Activity

As a class or in smaller groups, consider the ethical concerns laid out above. Following the ethical template outlined on page 19 in Chapter 1, begin by researching the topic, finding as much information and analysis as possible. Read Bill Keller’s New York Times Magazine piece, “The Boy Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest” (January 30, 2011), or his longer 2011 Times report, “Open Secrets: WikiLeaks, War and American Diplomacy” (www.nytimes.com/opensecrets). See also Nikki Usher’s work for Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab and Jay Rosen’s blog, PressThink. Consider also journalism criticism and news study sites, such as the Columbia Journalism Review, the Pew Research Center, and the First Amendment Center. Watch Julian Assange’s interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes from January 2011.

Next, based on your research and informed analysis, decide whether WikiLeaks is a legitimate form of journalism and whether there should be newsroom policies that restrict the release of some kinds of documents when in partnership with a resource like WikiLeaks (such as the “War Logs” project described here). Create an outline for such policies.

Deliberative Democracy

According to advocates of public journalism, when reporters are chiefly concerned with maintaining their antagonistic relationship to politics and are less willing to improve political discourse, news and democracy suffer. The late Washington Post columnist David Broder thought that national journalists like him—through rising salaries, prestige, and formal education—have distanced themselves “from the people that [they] are writing for and have become much, much closer to people [they] are writing about.”47 Broder believed that journalists need to become activists, not for a particular party but for the political process and in the interest of reenergizing public life. For those who advocate for public journalism, this might also involve mainstream media spearheading voter registration drives or setting up pressrooms or news bureaus in public libraries or shopping malls, where people converge in large numbers.

Public journalism offers people models for how to deliberate in forums, and then it covers those deliberations. This kind of community journalism aims to reinvigorate a deliberative democracy in which citizen groups, local government, and the news media work together more actively to shape social, economic, and political agendas. In a more deliberative democracy, a large segment of the community discusses public life and social policy before advising or electing officials who represent the community’s interests.

In 1989, historian Christopher Lasch argued that “the job of the press is to encourage debate, not to supply the public with information.”48 Although he overstated his case—journalism does both and more—Lasch made a cogent point about how conventional journalism had lost its bearings. In the so-called objective era of modern journalism, mainstream news media had lost touch with its partisan roots. The early mission of journalism—to advocate opinions and encourage public debate—had been relegated to alternative magazines, the editorial pages, news blogs, and cable news channels starring allegedly elite reporters. Tellingly, Lasch connected the gradual decline in voter participation, which began in the 1920s, to more professionalized conduct on the part of journalists. With a modern “objective” press, he contended, the public increasingly began to defer to the “more professional” news media to watch over civic life on its behalf.

As the advocates of public journalism acknowledged, people had grown used to letting their representatives think and act for them. Today, more community-oriented journalism and other civic projects offer citizens an opportunity to deliberate and to influence their leaders. This may include broadening the story models and frames they use to recount experiences, paying more attention to the historical and economic contexts of these stories, doing more investigative reports that analyze both news conventions and social issues, taking more responsibility for their news narratives, participating more fully in the public life of their communities, admitting to their cultural biases and occasional mistakes, and ensuring that the verification model of reporting is not overwhelmed by the new journalism of assertion.

Arguing that for too long journalism has defined its role only in negative terms, news scholar Jay Rosen notes: “To be adversarial, critical, to ask tough questions, to expose scandal and wrongdoing . . . these are necessary tasks, even noble tasks, but they are negative tasks.” In addition, he suggests that journalism should assert itself as a positive force, not merely as a watchdog or as a neutral information conduit to readers but as “a support system for public life.”49