Yet more thoughts on journalism and democracy

I’ve been pon­der­ing the rela­tion­ship between journ­al­ism and demo­cracy of late, and so too have the aca­demic com­menters gath­er­ing at the blog of Social Sci­ence Research Coun­cil boss, Craig Cal­houn.

Cal­houn asks the ques­tion Sam Zell has already answered — What is the future of news­pa­pers? And when social sci­ent­ists smell blood, they’re mostly rub­bing their hands at the pro­spect of a fresh cada­ver to dis­sect rather than offer­ing sym­pathy or solutions.

There’s not much in the com­ments that reg­u­lar read­ers won’t be overly famil­iar with — foundation-funded journ­al­ism any­one? But bur­ied within them is Michael Schud­son offer­ing his usual top class, ana­lyt­ical two cents:

I would name two con­sid­er­a­tions for think­ing about the future of news:

1. We should give up the notion that we have fallen away from a media-produced uni­fied pub­lic sphere in the USA. If it exis­ted, it was for a brief his­tor­ical moment. Even in the age of Web-based media and cable, we have a more uni­fied national news pic­ture today than at any time in US his­tory before the Kennedy admin­is­tra­tion. TV net­work news didn’t have its sac­red place in US homes until the early 1960s. The New York Times did not have a vis­ible pub­lic pres­ence out­side the New York-Washington cor­ridor until the 1970s. NPR and CNN did not exist until the 1970s and 1980s respect­ively. If there was a golden age of a media pub­lic sphere, it had about a 25 year run.
2. Mean­while, these same past few dec­ades have seen a remark­able growth of account­ab­il­ity insti­tu­tions both in and out of gov­ern­ment. In gov­ern­ment: grow­ing open­ness in the Con­gress and capa­city for cit­izens to mon­itor legis­lat­ive action and in the exec­ut­ive the rise of inspectors-general (1978 legis­la­tion) who have pro­duced scath­ing pub­lic cri­ti­cism of exec­ut­ive action (not­ably the hard-hitting reports of the Dept of Justice IG dur­ing the Bush years) that became the sub­ject of scores of front-page stor­ies. Journ­al­ists have a lot of high-powered research assist­ants today! The news media are part of a broad eco­logy of pub­lic inform­a­tion today rather than the lone rangers of truth-telling.

…
Could it be — here’s heresy for you — that demo­cratic life can be bet­ter off with a pro­lif­er­a­tion of cottage-industry news organ­iz­a­tions rather than the pre­ser­va­tion of hun­dreds of news factories?

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