Journalism. Michael Schudson

but people depend on it.

      As for the rest of what journalism offers – who needs it?

      And, with today’s economically imperiled news organizations, who needs it enough or wants it enough to be willing to pay for it? If people are not willing to pay for it, could it disappear? And if it could disappear, why should any young person looking at the array of vocations in the world be foolish enough to pursue it? Is choosing a career in journalism today likely to be as ill-fated as deciding to manufacture carriages for the horse-and-buggy business a century ago?

These questions are not easy to answer. And journalists have not effectively explained the value of their work to the general public. Scholars who study journalism have not provided much help, either. They have generally been focused on or obsessed by the endless search for evidence, ideally quantified, of how a particular story (say, the Washington Post’s coverage of Watergate) or a particular journalistic cast of mind they disapprove of (for example, news that covers an election by focusing on the “horse race” among candidates rather than on the policy differences among them) influences public opinion and thereby the course of history.

      If you can convincingly identify some bit of certainty or high probability that exposure to news media has altered people’s minds and actions, that may be a noteworthy achievement. But I do not think these findings, here and there, from this study and from that, will ever tell us what we would really like to know about the power of the media because (see Chapter 5) they omit the most important, although most subtle, ways the news media make a difference in helping people come to a cognitive reckoning with a complex and changing world.

The world will survive without a lot of the journalism we have today, but the absence of some kinds of journalism would be devastating to the prospects for building a good society, notably a good democratic political system, or so I contend here. I want to champion in particular the production of original reporting that in both general and specific ways holds governments accountable when it is undertaken by reporters and, equally, photographers, documentary film-makers, bloggers, makers of podcasts, and others who operate according to the norms and practices of professional journalism. I will discuss what these norms and practices are and why we should care about them. In the past half-century, professional journalism, organized to tell true stories of contemporary affairs to, for, and sometimes with general audiences, has been particularly concerned to tell these true stories in a way that holds power accountable. In fact, this kind of journalism is now sometimes referred to as “accountability journalism.” It is an apt term. I will give special attention to what this means.

I am not a journalist myself, but in my professional life as a sociologist and historian I have spent more of my time studying journalism than any other part of society. I remain an outsider, but I am persuaded by the authentic self-understanding of professional journalists (and, yes, it is a selfpromoting position too) that journalism is not just a job but a vocation – that it has a public mission, with accuracy of reporting a chief measure of competence, truthfulness an overriding ethic, and a faithful portrait of the contemporary world as its objective. News should be compellingly presented to reach a broad audience even if it offers technical details that will mean more to insiders than outsiders. And unlike most journalism of the past up until the late 1960s, it should be, whenever possible, assertive journalism – assertive in investigating, assertive in analyzing, assertive in challenging people in seats of power.

      All of this is easier said than done. Journalism in much of the world is in a long-simmering crisis – its central institutions are floundering economically, its popular appeal is under challenge from both new and old rivals, its self-confidence stumbles. The independence of journalism from state power is under attack in the global wave of populism where “strongmen,” as they are known, vie for power or attain it and then seek to weaken or destroy any media outlets that dare criticize them. Under these circumstances, we need well-reported, compelling, and assertive journalism more than ever. This is the journalism that matters most – reported, compelling, and assertive, and I will elaborate on this model (Chapters 2 and 3).

A journalist’s job is to make news, as a carpenter’s job is to build houses. Both crafts have rules. The primary rule for journalists: put reality first. Responsible journalists learn to not produce fake news, hyped news, or corrupt news. They do not subordinate reality to ideological consistency or political advocacy. They do not curry favor with advertisers or with the publisher’s business interests, or even with the tastes of the audience. Nor should they bow to their own colleagues if the consensus in the newsroom clashes with what they see in the world around them. This – the bias of the inner circle – is especially difficult to resist. What remains true about ethical journalism is just what reporter (and novelist) John Hersey said about it in 1980: “There is one sacred rule of journalism: the writer must not invent. The legend on the license must read: NONE OF THIS WAS MADE UP.”¹

“None of this was made up” means that all of it is accurate and that, if called upon, the reporter can defend everything he or she has written as true, as accurate. This is the most boring thing we can say about a news story – “it is accurate.” But this is also quite possibly the most important thing that can be said. When Robert Pear, New York Times Washington, DC-based health care reporter, died in 2019, the Times printed a letter to the editor from Thomas S. Crane, a health care lawyer in Massachusetts, who remembered Pear’s “complete dedication to detail and fairness and his breadth of knowledge of the politics of the health care industry.” On one occasion when Pear asked him for some help on a story, Crane recalled, “We went round and round about a single sentence because of his compulsiveness for accuracy. After the third phone call that day, I finally persuaded him that the sentence was legally accurate and otherwise unassailable.”² For a reporter, “a compulsiveness for accuracy” is very high praise.

      A second rule for journalists is a good deal more complicated than it sounds: follow the story. Follow the story, don’t follow a wish, don’t hew to a line, don’t submit to a fashion, don’t go along with the crowd. Follow the story. To follow the story means that one cannot and should not anticipate where the story is going to go; one risks losing fidelity to reality if political, partisan, ideological preconceptions or loyalties block off the trail that may lead to “inconvenient truths,” facts and patterns of facts that show one’s favorite persons, parties, and causes in an unfavorable light.

      Moreover, although Rule One – do the reporting, don’t make stuff up – and Rule Two – follow the story – are both primary directives for professional journalism, they are in tension with each other. Don’t make things up but do assemble the facts into a story that is not only coherent but also emotionally compelling. And that makes for a perennial battle between tedious, “eat your spinach” journalism and the stories that grab an audience and don’t let go.

For a century now, a powerful trend in the world of newspapers, carried over also into news magazines, radio, television, and online news, has been professionalization. Newspapers emerged and continued for generations before any of them hired reporters, but from roughly the 1820s on in the United States, and a bit later in Western Europe, reporting became the central task of journalism. A French journalist, after visiting America in 1886, held that “reporting is in the process of killing journalism” – that is, in US newspapers straightforward accounts of events of the day – particularly events of the past 24 hours – dominated while in France discursive essays of political advocacy, theory, and philosophy held sway.³

But doesn’t a passion for factual reporting fly in the face of the truth that presumed “facts” are just opinions in masquerade? That everything is relative, it just depends on the standpoint you start from? Most college sophomores walk into Philosophy 1 believing that “it’s all relative.” That’s what makes them “sophomoric.” And none of them actually believes that everything is relative. If their computer malfunctions, they do not pray that it be fixed by divine intervention, nor do they normally kick