Reviews for Journalism and Democracy

The average rating for Journalism and Democracy based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-11-14 00:00:00 Teresa Gerstacker "Just the Facts: How "Objectivity" Came to Define American Journalism," by David T. Z. Mindich (New York University press, 1998). For me, a very important book. Clearly derived from a doctoral dissertation---by now I recognize the format: first explain; then go over the existing literature; then explain what you are going to say in each chapter; say it; then say it again, and on to the next chapter. Mindich argues that there are five elements to American "objectivity" (which is all our idea, no one else's). He goes through the textbooks and the literature to discover what journalists mean. He says there are five components, and examines each historically: detachment, so the facts are telling the story, not the journalist's preconceived notions; non-partisanship, "both sides" of "each story"---that the writer is not following one or another political party; the inverted pyramid, that the reader gets the most important facts at the beginning of the story (which he says was actually invented by Edwin M. Stanton, Lincoln's secretary of war. Before him, writers treated everything chronologically, so you didn't get to the important points until deep in the story); naïve empiricism: reliance on "facts" to get at the "truth" of events; and finally balance, which means undistorted reporting. He examines the development of each one historically: from the early newspapers which just gave information, not political argument; how the development of things such as the AP meant stories had to be acceptable to all sorts of newspapers; that getting the important info in first made stories blunter, more easily comprehensible, quicker; etc. Eventually he argues that the mantra of "objectivity" failed for covering race relations in the US, because white male reporters assumed that Negros who were lynched had in fact raped or assaulted white women, and the only problem was the lack of legal usages. He talks about the black journalist Ida B. Wells, who went to the scenes and reported the facts of so-called rapes and discovered that they were almost always false, that the black men had not done what they were accused of doing. The elite white press, defending "civilization," could not accept what she found, and essentially ignored it. He writes that we are currently in a "post-objective" age, because of all the sources and all the writers. This book was written a decade before the web really became ubiquitous, and his arguments still hold---even more so. Nevertheless, I disagree: the concept of "objectivity," which is impossible to achieve, will always be crucial to responsible, truly informative journalism. The problem of true balance and diversity exposed by the story of Ida B. Wells is today being addressed in a robust way, as responsible journalists try too expand their sources and their understanding of stories. He does point out that one problem of "objectivity" is that it makes journalists overly dependent on authoritative sources, government, "experts." But that is a matter good journalists fight against as much as they can. It's an unending battle, buy the concept of "objectivity" will always be close to the root.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-04-02 00:00:00 Ross Jendrzejczak Written 10 years ago, before Trump and "fake news" and when Facebook and Twitter were still in their infancy, this book made the argument that we've become a nation of individuals that have barricaded ourselves into to our respective idealogical corners. We interact only with those who agree with us, we search for news that only fits our worldview, and when we find a divergent viewpoint we either ignore it or choose from an endless stream of online information that seemingly refutes it. Rather than clarify what is true and what is not, the author argues persuasively that with the glut of information available to us today, we can now start with a belief and scour the web until we find something that validates it, no matter how spurious the information we find may be. It's not truth in the end that matters as much as a desire to find something, anything, that says we are right. Since few of us travel outside of our idealogical echo chambers, fact becomes less important than belief. If anything, America has become even more ideologically fragmented and distrustful of information from the mouths of "experts". Don't like what CNN or FOX tells you? You can find a guy holed up in a basement somewhere on the web who will tell you what you want to hear if you look hard enough. Even if you were to strip the dated references to 9/11 conspiracy theory, Swift Boat Veterans, and the 2006 election from this book, the ideas presented here are arguably even more relevant than 10 years ago. It has become a nation where truth is what "I feel" rather than what can objectively shown to be fact. The author highlights some of the ways we've gotten to this point and the consequences but whole reading this book with horror, I can only imagine what he would think of the logical extension of his ideas in 2017.