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As the intellectual battle to provide business models for journalism continues, so that the informed citizen can carry on being - well - informed, I thought you might like to see the latest from my favourite American sociologist Michael Schudson on journalism and democracy.
And whilst I was looking I came across this burst of Schudson wisdom from 1999:
“[T]he informed citizen” model itself is ripe for reconsideration. We have to find a place in popular rhetoric and democratic theory for the use of specialized or expert knowledge.
This is a task that merits renewed attention: the quest for a language of public life that reconciles democracy and expertise.
Civic journalism will be making a mistake if it opts for a kind of sloppy populism. Anything the experts do must be tainted. Anything that happens at the grass roots receives the benefit of a doubt.
That, I think, is the wrong impulse. I think we have to rely on expert knowledge. We just have to know - and we don’t - how and where and in what manner that expertise fits into a democratic process.
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