James Carey: A Critical Reader

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James Carey

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James Carey A Critical Reader Eve Stryker Munson and Catherine A. Warren, editors

University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London

Copyright 1997 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota Chapter i originally appeared in American Communication Research: The Remembered History, Everette E. Dennis and Ellen Wartella, editors; reprinted by permission of Lea Publishers. Chapter 2 originally appeared in Journal of Communication, Spring 1980, 162-78; reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press. Chapter 3 originally appeared in Information and Communications in Economics, Robert Babe, editor, 1994, 321-36; reprinted by permission of Kluwer Academic Publishers. Chapter 4 originally appeared in Journalism History i, no. i (Spring 1974): 3-5, 2,7; reprinted by permission of CSUN Foundation. Chapter 5 originally appeared in Journalism History 12, no. 2 (Summer 1985): 855-58; reprinted by permission of CSUN Foundation. Chapter 6 originally appeared in Sociological Review Monograph, no. 13, January 1969, 23-38; reprinted by permission of Blackwell Publishers. Chapter 7 originally appeared in Reading the News, Robert Karl Manoff and Michael Schudson, editors, 1986; copyright 1986 by James W. Carey. Chapter 8 reprinted with permission of the Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, from Crucible of Liberty: 200 Years of the Bill of Rights, Raymond Arsenault, editor; copyright 1991 by the Free Press. Chapter 9 originally appeared in Public Opinion and the Communication of Consent, Theodore Glasser and Charles Salmon, editors, 1995; reprinted by permission of the Guilford Press. Chapter 10 originally appeared in Journal of Communication 42, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 56-72; reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press in Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data James Carey : a critical reader / Eve Stryker Munson and Catherine A. Warren, editors, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8166-2702-9 (hardcover alk. paper). — ISBN 0-8166-2703-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) i. Carey, James W. 2. Communication and culture. I. Munson, Eve Stryker. II. Warren, Catherine A. P92.5.C37J36 1997 302.2—dc2i 97-8082 The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

Contents Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction Eve Stryker Munson and Catherine A. Warren

ix

PARTI Introduction / On the Origins of Media Studies (and Media Scholars) John Pauly

3

1 / The Chicago School and the History of Mass Communication Research

14

2 / The Roots of Modern Media Analysis: Lewis Mumford and Marshall McLuhan

34

3 / Communications and Economics

60

PART II Introduction / The Problem of Journalism History, 1996 Michael Schudson

79

4 I The Problem of Journalism History

86

5 / "Putting the World at Peril": A Conversation with James W. Carey

95

PART III Introduction / Famed Psychic's Head Explodes: James Carey on the Technology of Journalism Carolyn Marvin

119

6 / The Communications Revolution and the Professional Communicator

128

7 / The Dark Continent of American Journalism

144

v

vi / Contents

PART IV Introduction / "We'll Have That Conversation": Journalism and Democracy in the Thought of James W. Carey Jay Rosen

191

8 / "A Republic, If You Can Keep It": Liberty and Public Life in the Age of Glasnost

207

9 / The Press, Public Opinion, and Public Discourse: On the Edge of the Postmodern

228

PARTY Introduction / James Carey's Academy G.Stuart Adam

261

107 Political Correctness and Cultural Studies

270

117 Salvation by Machines: Can Technology Save Education?

292

Afterword: The Culture in Question James W. Carey

308

Bibliography of Works by James W. Carey

341

Contributors

347

Index

351

Acknowledgments

A number of people made this highly collaborative work possible. It is lovely to take a few moments to remember how this book came to be. First and foremost, we, the editors, would like to thank James Carey. Although it is quite obvious that the collection would not exist without his decades of insightful words and actions, what may be less obvious is his graciousness, his modesty, and, above all, his willingness to have us as editors. We were both graduate students at the time we proposed this collection. It was, if not breathtaking hubris, certainly close to it. We weren't rejected. He was eager to go forward. He gave us the freedom to conceptualize the trajectory of the essays, to choose the publisher we felt most comfortable with, and to suggest the essays and contributors. He sat in coffee shops, in restaurants, in motel rooms, in his office, and in his living room, talking and sometimes laughing or grimacing with us about the project. The hours and days spent both on mundane details and intellectual flight—in New York City and Illinois— meant, and means, the world to us. We are both proud and honored to have our names linked with his. We also want to extend our deepest appreciation to Clifford Christians, Director of the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois. Cliff has, from the beginning, been our mentor, our counselor, our guide, and our supporter. From providing the resources of the institute to talking over the multitude of issues involved, to sending us to New York City on more than one occasion, Cliff's intellectual, emotional, and financial support was unstinting. This book could not vii

viii / Acknowledgments

have been published without him. It is inextricably connected with both Cliff and our lives as graduate students in the institute, a richly rewarding experience for both of us. As one professor, battered by the winds of politics in another department and having found shelter at the institute, recently noted to one of us, in slight awe: "It's a classy place, isn't it?" We also want to thank the group of scholars who immediately and generously agreed—saying they were honored—to provide introductions to each section in this work: John Pauly, Michael Schudson, Carolyn Marvin, Jay Rosen, and Stuart Adam. This work, which would have been a wonderful collection, became a wonderful conversation with their contributions. Diane Tipps and Anita Specht of the institute spent considerable time helping us in a multitude of ways, from copying to typing to travel arrangements. Their expertise and hard work are most appreciated. A number of James Carey's colleagues and friends helped us through interviews, writing letters of support, and moral support: Eleanor Blum, Norm Denzin, George Gerbner, John Nerone, Ev Rogers, Kim Rotzoll, Wick Rowland, Michael Tracey, and Ellen Wartella, among others. Their efforts were appreciated. We also want to thank Nate Kohn, our fellow traveler, and Bette Carey, for her warm hospitality and great conversation. People at the University of Minnesota Press have been wonderful. First, thanks to our original editor, Janaki Bakhle, who took this project on. Our next editor, Micah Kleit, inherited the book from Janaki, adopted it without reservation, and nurtured it. With his consistent and skilled attention, as well as that of copy editor Lynn Marasco, and design and production manager Amy Unger, this book has come to be. Thank you all. Eve Munson and Cat Warren

Introduction Eve Stryker Munson and Catherine A. Warren

James Carey called us one afternoon, late in the process of compiling this volume. He had just finished reading the introductions to the several sections and was disturbed. "We'll talk about this," he said, in his typically delicate sally into a conversation, "but maybe you can look at it and do some editing." The problem was simple to state—though not so easy to solve. The scholars' introductions that open each of the five sections, he said, were too flattering. One of us slyly informed him that our introduction might correct that. But that's not really possible. We admire him. We like him. So do many others. Sociologist Norman Denzin has called Carey a "unique American treasure." Newsweek education writer Jerrold K. Footlick called him the "best-known journalism educator" in the world. Media scholar Michael Schudson terms him "wonderfully graceful and deeply engaged." A student evaluation described his class as "a spiritual experience." Carey has influenced scholars, students, and journalists for more than three decades through a variety of channels: graceful essays and reviews, of which he has written nearly a hundred; many more speeches; work on national advisory boards; and his long-standing engagement as an educator—both in and out of the classroom, directing dissertations and charting the curriculum. How does one measure the contribution of any scholar to a field? In Carey's case, it is not by research alone. Indeed, Michael Schudson, a contributor to this volume, has said his introduction to Carey was by ix

x / Introduction

way of his students. It was a fitting introduction, Schudson said, because in his view "Carey has been above all else a teacher." And for years Carey's teaching and research were carried out in addition to a full-time-plus administrative job as dean of the College of Communication at the University of Illinois, a position he left in 1992, in a move to Columbia University. Carey brought the "interpretive turn" to communications long before it became the fashion in the humanities and sociology. And he did so by interrogating and combining, in a fashion that defied communication conventions, an impressive array of philosophers, sociologists, historians, and anthropologists: John Dewey, Clifford Geertz, Raymond Williams, Thomas Kuhn, Max Weber, C. Wright Mills, Richard Rorty, Jiirgen Habermas, Harold Innis, Lewis Mumford. Carey's call for a cultural perspective in communications dates from the early 19705. It broke through the thick walls of empirical research—the so-called dominant paradigm of effects research. That fortress was quickly impoverishing what should have been a vibrant discipline. Even researchers such as Bernard Berelson, working within that paradigm, were declaring the discipline dead, its work done.1 Carey showed that mass communications has a function in society more complex than serving as a means to an end. Symbols, language, and those who create them are complex; they create rather than reflect reality. And in this regard, Carey showed that the discipline is far from exhausted, that there is a great deal left to think through. Yet despite the variety of topics Carey has addressed, almost all of his work has at its core a few closely related problematics. His work, while broad and often historical, returns time and time again to the present and the same critical themes—themes that are addressed in this collection: the strains on democracy, the drawbacks of technology, the critique of journalism, the politics of academe. He has examined the role of the media and the academy in creating and maintaining a public sphere and the ways technology helps or hinders that project. In short, Carey has spent his scholarly career considering a question that has been central to U.S. intellectual history (although not necessarily to communications theory): How does one make democracy work in a vast country that spans a continent? Political theorists going back at least to Aristotle have argued that democratic self-government depends upon face-to-face interaction among all citizens. Robert Dahl reminds us that Plato even did the

Introduction

I xi

math and concluded that a democratic republic ought comprise no more than 5,040 citizens because that was the maximum number of persons one could know sufficiently and interact with often enough to maintain the required civic dialogue. To those intent upon launching a democratic republic on this continent, it was clear from the start that the notion of a democratic conversation would have to be reworked to be meaningful in the new world. And yet the idea of face-to-face conversation was imbedded in political theory in the new world, taking material form in the drawing of county lines intended to divide the continent into sectors of a size that still would afford face-to-face interaction. With the industrialization and urbanization that transformed the map of this continent starting more than a century ago came new challenges to communication, and new tools of communication. New theoretical perspectives were required. Early in his career, Carey revived John Dewey's pivotal insight that communication is the way to create and sustain community in America. In a recently published essay, Carey declared himself as bluntly as possible: "There are no standards of evidence in politics, or anywhere else, higher than conversational ones."2 Carey has embraced this belief in the power of conversation personally as well as theoretically. The attribute that everyone—his students, his friends, his colleagues, and his critics—notes is Carey's skill as a conversationalist. This is not an interesting aside; it is central to his work. "In doing intellectual work," he notes, "the one problem is to find one's voice, to find something to say—a vocabulary, an outlet, a set of problems that one thinks are important."3 Carey's background helps explain why he sets such store by the power of conversation. His life is a testament to the way biography becomes theory and vice versa. As children and as adults, Carey notes, we tell stories about ourselves. It is a way of explaining ourselves to ourselves. We tell the story of our life in a given way until a crisis occurs and that story becomes useless and gets in the way of going on. We then cast about for another story; we reimagine the tale into a usable narrative. These stories are told at all levels: by the nation-state, by interest groups, by science, and by individuals. We all construct ourselves through conversation with what G. H. Mead called the Significant and Generalized Others. More than one scholar has criticized Carey for being essentialist. But part of that essentialism seems to be an ease he

xii / Introduction

has with extending his childhood into adulthood. Discussions about fractured postmodern identities simply irritate him, as if they were a new historical phenomenon, as if the entire history of modernity was not one of identities alternately fractured and rebuilt. Certainly Carey's upbringing contributed to his belief in the power of conversation. As a young child he was considered sickly because of an undiagnosed heart ailment, and he did not attend school until he was a teenager. Beyond an occasional hour of tutoring, his education was, he said, "kind of a mystery": My childhood consisted largely of hanging around with otherwise unemployed adults. If you're around adults all the time, functioning adults, you learn a lot. I'd make daily rounds to the church where I'd talk to the priests and sometimes accompany them when they delivered communion to the sick, visit the elderly and infirm and run their errands, hang around the local coffee shop with the retired men and read the papers and talk politics. It was a wonderful life. I wasn't educated in the technical sense so there were things I had to learn rather late. But in terms of understanding the immediacies of economics and history, of learning by direct experience how communities are put together, how people behave, what they're interested in, learning the commonsense wisdom of people, it's a tremendous way to learn.

So there is no real mystery, then, about how Carey's "education on the streets" taught him that disciplinary boundaries often are inane. From such a life came a passionate theoretical plea that communication best fulfills its function not as messages flashing across space for purposes of control—"who says what to whom to what effect"—but as rituals of fellowship and democracy. Out of his conversations grew a love of words, whether they were spoken or written and whether they were found in the pages of pulp fiction or in arcane philosophical works. His family was Irish, Catholic, and working-class; men and women alike were mill, jewelry, and railroad workers and trade union organizers as well, involved in the politics of parish and precinct. Unable to take his place in this way of life because of his health, he was forced to go to college. ("What else could I do?") The state provided a scholarship for the disabled to the University of Rhode Island, less than thirty-five miles from his home in Providence. "It was like going to China," he says. "We had to get out the map. Where's Kingston?"

Introduction I xiii

He studied business administration because that was the only curriculum that would admit him—"My family simply hoped I'd make a living outside the mills"—and when he tried to transfer to philosophy was rejected because he lacked the necessary high school credits. Carey did find a life outside the mills, and in the process he has reshaped the field of communication and become one of its leading theorists. It is his cultural approach to communication that has most influenced the direction of communication research in the United States. Indeed, Hanno Hardt, in his recent history of critical communication studies in America, calls Carey the "most prominent representative" of American cultural studies.4 In spite of his wide-ranging influence, Carey remains something of a hidden treasure. As Everett Rogers, director of the Department of Journalism and Communication at the University of New Mexico, put it: "He ought to be more widely known. I would guess that if you polled all the scholars in mass communication today, more would know Steve Chaffee than Carey, no? I like both. But personally, I think Carey has had more effect." Rogers posits that the very nature of Carey's effect on the field is also the reason he is underappreciated: the breadth of his influence obscures others' vision of him. Carey is "humanistic, literary, thoughtful—not narrowly focused." Academics tend to recognize their peers for one thing, Rogers explained: "You get typecast. They say 'Everett Rogers—diffusion of innovation.' They say 'Jim Carey—' then you have to say a lot of things. That is the mark of a true scholar."5 Contributor John Pauly has noted elsewhere that Carey is "curiously underread." That, Pauly explains, is mostly because Carey is a self-admitted essayist rather than an author of books. His work is widely scattered, sometimes in obscure venues. Carey says, with a shrug, that when someone asks him to write something, that's when he writes. This willingness to address topics at the request of others means his work has not followed a straight trajectory, the clear-cut path of research that sometimes is taken to be the hallmark of genuine scholarship. Willard D. Rowland Jr., dean of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and formerly a colleague of Carey's at Illinois, echoed Hardt's description, adding that while Carey is the leading spokesman of what Rowland called the Illinois tradition, "he also is a creature of it":

xiv / Introduction The way to understand Carey is to understand the people and institutions who had an influence on him. Carey got caught up in the Sturm und Drang of the intellectual life at Illinois. He started to wrestle with the old struggle between ideology and materialism. Much of his intellectual career can be interpreted as bouncing between those poles, ultimately tipping to the idealist side. His study of symbols, communication, meaning, history—these are vexed by materialist critiques. . . . He was always to some extent at odds with Smythe, Gerbner, Schiller, and the Gubackian tradition. But he valued it and wanted it there as a goad.6

As Rowland intimates, Carey's achievement has not been the uninterrupted ascent of an immediately heralded star. Initially he struggled to find an outlet for his work within the field of communication. None of his essays was published in Journalism Quarterly until he became president of the journal's sponsoring organization, the Association for Educators in Journalism and Mass Communication. Rowland suggests that this difficulty stemmed in part from the disdain that Carey's mentor, Jay Jensen, had for the standard scientific tradition, an attitude that tended to isolate scholars at Illinois. Similarly, as a colleague of his has noted, Carey doesn't exactly fill his essays with references to other communication scholars. Given the breadth of Carey's interests and scholarship, however, he found outlets for his work in many other venues. A glance at the list of Carey's works at the end of this volume attests to this: the previously published essays appeared in journals in sociology, political science, history, and economics. Even before his struggle to be heard by his colleagues in communication, though, Carey had to struggle to find his voice at Illinois. He recalls being a young assistant professor, coming into a program filled with luminaries such as Charles Osgood, Dallas Smythe, George Gerbner, and others: "You join a program like Illinois and everyone's got a seat staked out at the table. In some sense, every assistant professor feels the same way. But there was no chair for me. You walk into a room, and everyone sits down, and there's no chair. Where can I sit? And someone says, you can sit on my lap. But no one was quite the voice." Then Richard Hoggart, having read a piece Carey wrote on McLuhan and Innis, wrote to him in the mid-1960s and sent the first mimeographed working papers of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in England, along with a syl-

Introduction I xv labus of the current reading program. As it turned out, the readings at Birmingham were remarkably similar to those being pursued at Illinois: It was an attempt to combine not only Marx but, as importantly, also much of the classic tradition in social theory—Durkheim, Weber—with interactionists like Erving Goffman and the little that existed then of a useful literature in popular culture to fashion a different view of modern life. When one added American writers not much read in Europe, like John Dewey and Kenneth Burke, and scholars in the American studies movement—Henry Nash Smith, Leo Marx, Lewis Mumford—one sensed an opportunity to create a parallel but distinct niche within the literature. I was an assistant professor teaching around Smythe, Gerbner, Osgood, and Ross Ashby, trying to find a place at the table, and it seemed worthwhile to define yet another take on communications under the label cultural studies. I didn't like the phrase cultural science, suggested by Weber, for it seemed impossibly pretentious for such a speculative enterprise. That was very important as a marking point: to realize that other people in other places were struggling with the same problems and trying to do something roughly similar. I started using the term cultural studies largely to describe an impulse. Some people came to Illinois wanting to be a certain kind of sociologist, a certain kind of psychologist, or a certain kind of cybernetician. Cultural studies was a name for those who did not fit in the conventional boxes. We weren't doing the same thing. We disagreed a lot, but our impulses were broadly the same—qualitative social theory more open to literary analysis. As is always the case with prolific thinkers, Carey has detractors as well as admirers. Michael Tracey, who has critiqued cultural studies,7 said: There is a kind of romanticism in him that on one level is very appealing, but on another level it's silly. If you read Carey you have to pinch yourself [to believe] that this is late twentieth century America. He has an Arcadianism that is ludicrous. He has a desire to think well of other people. . . . It's almost a turning away from the real character of society, a form of false consciousness. Once you set up that we make our own meaning, you can't study institutions because you can't take into consideration how some have more power than others.8 But a careful reading of Carey's work shows this criticism to be unfounded. Many of the essays in this volume—"The Dark Continent of American Journalism" and "Communication and Economics," for instance—contain subtle and deft analyses of institutions and power,

xvi / Introduction

along with a warning of what we stand to lose if we reduce analysis of communication to nothing more than an analysis of power. Carey is unequivocally guilty of wanting to think well of other people. This is part of the power of his scholarship. He has argued that you must be careful about what theory you embrace, because we tend to become what we study. He also has argued that we create ourselves in conversation. In the extended conversation about the character of our society, Carey's voice is a persistent, consistent call for civility and mutual respect. But James Carey is, to us, foremost a teacher. He doesn't create a boundary between administrative work, teaching, research, and— indeed—living. It is what makes learning from him so easy. It really doesn't matter much whether one is sitting in a classroom, talking with him in his office across his oak desk, or walking down busy side streets of the Upper West Side of New York City, where he and his wife, Bette, now live. It is all an extended, sometimes joyous, sometimes troubled, sometimes contentious ode to life in America. Carey's classes at the University of Illinois were not magnificent, despite the awe that many students brought with them for the first few lectures. Instead, they were engaging, challenging, charming—and sometimes irritating. One cannot learn well if one is overwhelmed, but Carey is not overwhelming. He has an enormous intellectual horizon, but somehow, when he teaches, he brings it down and sets it on the table in front of you and convinces you that this immense world of ideas is within your grasp, too. There is something old-world about James Carey, a kind of courtliness, a privacy, a formality. Students would correct other students; no one called him by his first name. He was Professor Carey, or Dean Carey. Yet he would sit and talk with a student in the dean's office for an hour or more, simply shooting the intellectual breeze. Carey's formality quickly gives way to humor or outrage or joy. His emotions, like his theory, are fundamentally democratic, playing freely not only in his tone of voice but across his body as well. He rips off his glasses and lets them dangle precariously from one ear. He rolls his shoulders. He winks or rolls his eyes, adding another layer or two of meaning to his message. Taking notes at Carey's lectures means coming up with a shorthand not just for words, but for body language too. Carey's courses were heady introductions to a life of the mind. Not an austere mind, for topics would veer from the sexual life of peacocks

Introduction I xvii

to Richard Rorty to the Chicago Cubs to Stuart Hall. Carey would haul huge stacks of photocopied articles to the seminar room in Gregory Hall, looking simultaneously abashed and pleased, demurring as he passed out the bounty, often hundreds of pages, to impoverished graduate students. It was only later that we realized that the citation had been left off. We are still coming upon chapters of Feyeraband or Goffman or Sennett that are missing their provenance. But Carey does not have time to get perfectly organized: he reads voraciously, assimilating new ideas, or works at adjusting familiar ideas to new events. In 1990 one of us had received a syllabus in advance and read many of the books over the summer to prepare for her very first class in a decade. It was a false security. The first day, Carey threw out the entire syllabus. It was the year after the Berlin Wall came down, and he was thinking about it. Anything in the human sciences and history had been written against the background of the cold war, the central narrative structure of our times. That structure was now drastically changed. The syllabus was irrelevant. "We need a new vocabulary," he told the class. "It's not quite clear what we should be worrying about." At least one student was worrying about how to write about the post-cold war death of dualism and still pass the course. Carey suggested that students write about anything that interested them (presumably even peacocks were fair game). There was one stipulation, he added ominously. A student must have no intention of making the paper into a conference paper or publication—a kind of "perish the thought of publishing." That was a pet peeve of his—pragmatism in the worst sense of the term—not giving oneself the luxury of exploration; not finding one's voice before constructing one's vitae. And this brings us back again to the importance to Carey of conversation. A group of people who have something to say, who have found their voices, is essential to sustain conversation, and, indeed, democracy. The ideas presented in this volume are part of an ongoing dialogue that began before the earliest essay included here was written, nearly three decades ago, a dialogue that will continue long after this book is published. In conceptualizing how to collect some of James Carey's essays, we both felt strongly that we needed to include other voices, to offer readers a least a suggestion of the conversation that Carey has been a party to for a third of a century. We had to do this to be true to the nature of Carey's own scholarship. The scholars who comment here on Carey's work have all known

xviii / Introduction

him a long time, most for decades. John Pauly, chair of the Department of Communication at St. Louis University, was one of Carey's students. Michael Schudson, in the sociology department at the University of California, San Diego, has been a constant intellectual companion, even when he is writing, as he sometimes does, against Carey's grain. The same is true of Carolyn Marvin at the Annenberg School of Communication, who wrote of Carey that "his is the discursive art" before moving on to challenge it—a student turned affectionate critic. Professor Jay Rosen of New York University, whose projects and commitments to community journalism brought him and Carey together, and Stuart Adam, dean of the Faculty of Arts of Carleton University, longtime friend and colleague and fellow administrator, finish out this group. These five voices, along with the thirteen essays of Carey's, offer at least a suggestion of the bracing conversation that Carey offers to those who cross his intellectual path. We wanted this collection to be like Carey's classes—engaging, sometimes challenging, and possibly even irritating. As Carey himself notes: "I have a lot of intellectual companions I disagree with." (The only other collection of Carey's essays is Communication as Culture.) This collection addresses a slightly different but complementary aspect of his work, from McLuhan to political correctness to journalism's five Ws. But in particular, the love of storytelling in journalistic form has endured in Carey's work. This volume, we hope, partly addresses that love. As Rowland observed: "Jim has a fascination with and absolute delight in the journalism profession. He himself was never a journalist, but he loved the storytellers. He has respect for the professional side and an ability to live in the dualities, professional and theoretical, without a sense of contradiction. He loves those practitioners, with all their warts." But these essays diverge from journalism as often as they address it. As is always the case with Carey's work, any strict disciplinary division is impossible and undesirable. Essays flow over and into each other. It is far more intellectually honest, and indeed more accurate, to say, "We liked these essays a lot and thought you would, too." Notes 1. Bernard Berelson, "The State of Communication Research," Public Opinion Quarterly 2,3 (Spring 1959): 1-5. 2. James W. Carey, "Abolishing the Old Spirit World," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12, (March 1995): 88.

Introduction I xix 3. This and other Carey quotes come from personal conversations with the authors in New York City in December 1994. 4. Hanno Hardt, Critical Communications Studies: Communication., History, and Theory in America (New York: Routledge, 1992.), 196. 5. Personal conversation with Eve Munson, Albuquerque, N.Mex., February 9, 19956. Personal conversation with Eve Munson, Boulder, Colo., January 18, 1995. 7. David Docherty, David Morrison, and Michael Tracey, "Scholarship as Silence," Journal of Communication 43 (Summer 1993): 230-38. 8. Personal conversation with Eve Munson, Boulder, Colo., January 19, 1995.


Parti


Introduction / On the Origins of Media Studies (and Media Scholars) John Pauly

"How is society possible?" With that disarmingly simple question James Carey began his first lecture in a communication systems class I took with him over twenty years ago. The question is anything but simple, as I have learned in the years since. That question, which Carey borrowed from the philosopher Thomas Hobbes through Talcott Parsons, has vexed liberal thought since the Enlightenment. If we consider ourselves individuals, how do we understand our relation to others? If the goal of human life is freedom, what do we owe others in whose lives we are implicated? If we set our sights on the future, what do we make of the past? Hobbes thought he knew the answer, of course: the state guarantees the authority and continued existence of society. Subsequent thinkers, with equal certainty, have offered their own answers. Society is a legal arrangement guaranteed by constitutions and procedures. Society is a market in which individual interests find accommodation. Society is a covenant among true believers, guaranteed by natural law or revelation. Society is a jungle of repressed desire and sublimated instincts. Society is an artifact of technology, a by-product of the flow of information. James Carey rejects all these answers, even as he maintains a dialogue with most of them. For Carey society is possible only in and through communication. Our symbolic acts call society into existence and sustain its presence among us, making our relations amenable, investing the world with significance, offering us shared models of iden3

4 / Introduction to Part I

tity, tutoring us in common modes of interpretation. Like Susanne Langer, Carey considers humans' gradual understanding of their own symbolic practices the great achievement of twentieth-century thought, the generative idea that defines the modern sensibility. To study communication is to study how we make our way in a world of contingency, doubt, and chaos. And chaos. For Carey, chaos lurks beyond the edge of every human triumph, though his critics rarely note this recurring motif. Positioning themselves to his left, they have labeled him a defender of tradition and ritual, a champion of community, a proponent of consensus politics, a liberal. Carey has written often and eloquently on ritual, tradition, community, and public life, of course, but never naively. For him humans' frail attempts to make the world sensible shine brightly only because they stand against the utter darkness he finds everywhere. In one essay after another Carey glimpses the abyss into which public life has fallen—intergenerational conflict, military adventurism, dehumanizing technology, imperial social science, arrogant professions, brackish universities—and urges us to step back. In the face of turmoil, communication offers a momentary stay against confusion, to borrow a phrase from the poet Robert Frost that Carey himself has often invoked. If communication constitutes our mode of being in the world, then nothing matters half so much as talking well about communication. Talking well is the ethical imperative that propels Carey's work, as the three essays that follow illustrate. The disorder of our times, Carey argues, can be attributed in no small measure to our faulty understanding of our own communication practices. He said as much many years ago in his influential article "A Cultural Approach to Communication." Though that essay is now more typically cited as an early call for qualitative methods, its more ambitious claim was that our models of communication create and sanction the forms of symbolic action that they purport only to describe. When we create a model of communication, we dream the forms of social order. Thus, if we describe communication as a mode of power and manipulation (rather than a mode of being), we cripple ourselves with cynicism about the behavior of other humans. If we imagine communication as a means of information transfer, we project the marketplace onto all our social relations. If we treat communication as the antidote to individual anxiety, we render ourselves unable to act as a polity in the name of a common good. "We are paying the penalty," Carey concludes, "for the long abuse of fun-

Introduction to Part 1/5 damental communicative processes in the service of politics, trade, and therapy." In each of the essays in this section Carey opposes the approaches that have dominated American discussions of communication and the media. He frames each essay as a conversation with a tradition of thought. Over the years his essays frequently have followed this etiquette, introducing the Chicago School to effects researchers, Mumford to McLuhan, Dewey to Lippmann, and American to European thinkers (and vice versa). He tries to get beyond the printed page, so that he might engage others as fully human beings. This is the most revealing difference, perhaps, between his form of cultural studies and that widely practiced in the United States today. For Carey cultural studies grows out of our talk about the everyday worlds we inhabit, not out of a newly invented method of literary criticism. Indeed, I suspect that he finds it disconcerting, as I do, to hear cultural studies researchers talk about "interrogating" texts. That brutally clinical metaphor suggests an insensitivity that can only be sustained through abstracted relations of the printed page to the literary marketplace. Rather than strapping others' texts to the operating table in order to dissect them, Carey invites us to talk. His essays constantly move between the oral and literary traditions, in order to infuse the printed word with the charm, fluency, grace, and nuance of speech. He draws constantly on the work of others, freely acknowledging his debts. But he refuses to shackle his arguments to the apparatus of literary citation. He prefers instead to speak through the voices of others: Clifford Geertz, Raymond Williams, Jack Goody, Richard Hoggart, John Dewey, Kenneth Burke, Harold Innis, and Lewis Mumford in the early years; Stuart Hall, Richard Rorty, Robert Darnton, Pierre Bourdieu, and Mary Douglas more recently. Herein lies the pleasure of his text: in letting others hear those voices as he hears them. Not coincidentally, this is the pleasure of his teaching, too: he helps his students hear writers as speakers. Talking well is not merely a matter of civility and graciousness, though Carey has always generously and unfailingly supported others' work. Talking well constitutes a distinctive intellectual style by which Carey hopes to position his work in a conversational rather than an ideological domain, which is to say in time rather than space. He rejects spatial metaphors of difference, which attempt to array everyone


else's work (and identity) along a theoretical continuum—here the most progressive, there the most retrograde; here the right, there the left. (That this has become the preferred discursive strategy of many cultural studies scholars today must surely discourage Carey.) Any discussion worth having, Carey would argue, must be conducted in the fullness of time and the gridless ambience of conversation. In conversation we think more nimbly; we impersonate others and change voices; we accept a measure of equality that the authority of the printed page denies; we temper our criticisms with expressions of solidarity. Let me underscore that last comment. I have always marveled that no matter how tellingly Carey may criticize another's arguments, his essays never feel like an attack. He refuses to participate in the gladiatorial spectacles that professors enjoy staging at their annual conventions, in which supposed enemies are invited to beat each other into the dust in order to edify and delight their colleagues. Carey arrives with no entourage to hold his cloak. Like Richard Hoggart, he recognizes that tone modulates our relationships to one another; by maintaining a bon ton Carey chooses a strategy of resistance and defense rather than attack. What he resists are theories of communication that diminish the complex humanness of our communication practices. What he defends are the oral tradition and the moral weight it adds to humanness. By this method he constantly calls attention to what the dominant models of communication leave out. In the process, he strikes a balance between the literary and oral traditions, criticism and solidarity, cosmopolitanism and community. The essays in this section dispute three models of communication that have dominated the intellectual scene during Carey's career—effects research, technological utopianism, and economics. The first essay, "The Chicago School and the History of Mass Communication Research," offers an alternative account of the origins of American mass communication research. Carey's own career is tightly woven into this particular tale. When he began his communication studies in the 19505 at the University of Illinois, he entered a field whose borders were unraveling. As Carey notes, by that time two generations of effects researchers had produced a canonical history that explained the origins and meanings of mass communication research and the methodological innovations by which it had been accomplished. In those days research meant quantitative social science; the only dispensations granted were to fields with their own long-standing pedigrees—

Introduction to Part 1/7 history and law. This state of affairs persisted well into the late 19705, when I started attending the annual conventions of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, and it has left a mark on that organization's journal, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, that remains visible even today. In short, Carey entered a field that offered no home for someone who did his sort of work. For all its show of dominance, however, the effects tradition of mass communication research was ending. (By effects tradition, I mean those theories that use social science methods to assess the social or psychological impact of media messages.) At their moment of ideological triumph—having dismissed earlier fears of powerful media, reaffirmed the good sense of Americans and the authority of personal influence, and profitably aligned themselves with corporate and state power—effects researchers realized that they had traded methodological sophistication for conceptual insight. They had, in a sense, thoroughly bureaucratized media research as an imaginative domain. Astonishingly enough, by the early 19605 even the field's best-known researchers were publicly acknowledging that the effects tradition no longer had much to say. Bernard Berelson, at the height of a distinguished career, more or less threw up his hands. In a famous Public Opinion Quarterly forum in 1959, he wondered aloud just what mass communication research had accomplished and declared the field dead. His respondents—Wilbur Schramm, David Riesman, and Raymond Bauer—reacted with varying degrees of bemusement and surprise, but in rejoinder they mostly called for a series of modest projects, built on small, steady improvements in research methodology. Carey wanted something more: a new imaginary that would redirect and reinvigorate research on mass communication. In a sense his predicament paralleled that of C. Wright Mills in sociology. In The Sociological Imagination, Mills portrayed contemporary sociology as a field lurching between the Grand Theory of a Talcott Parsons and the Abstracted Empiricism of the new generation of methodological bureaucrats. This same intellectual distinction was articulated by Paul Lazarsfeld when he categorized mass communication research of the time as predominantly critical or administrative. Mass society theory offered serious moral and political criticism, but in a grand philosophical style not subject to empirical testing. The effects tradition, which Lazarsfeld had done so much to advance, valued empiricism but had

8 / Introduction to Part I steadily narrowed its intellectual vision to a focus on technique and method. The Chicago School of Social Thought symbolized an alternative tradition for Carey (he would find another, about the same time, in the cultural studies of Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, but that is another story). In choosing the Chicago School, Carey was declaring his affection for the older style of sociological analysis and research that structural-functional studies had begun to displace by the 19305. In John Dewey, Charles Horton Cooley, Robert Park, W. I. Thomas, Thorstein Veblen, and others he found thinkers who explored the nature of the social, using American life for their examples. Following their lead, Carey would describe the role played by communication media in building community and constructing styles of group identity. From such materials, over the next twenty years, he would create a cultural approach to mass communication research. The Chicago School's interest in the part played by communication technology in reorganizing social life led Carey to question another dominant model of mass communication: technological utopianism. In "The Roots of Modern Media Analysis: Lewis Mumford and Marshall McLuhan" Carey demonstrates how closely the technological history of mass communication parallels the effects history. Both histories debate the prospects of liberal society in an age in which communication technologies reorganize work, identity, and politics. According to the effects history, liberal politics eventually faces down the dangers posed by "mass society"—propaganda, homogenization, totalitarianism—and reaffirms the authority of personal influence and the primary group. According to the technological history, liberal politics confronts a series of inventions that have the potential for good or evil and finds that unfettered innovation produces the greatest individual freedom and happiness for the greatest number. This is the same story of progress, of course, told from two perspectives, as Carey wisely recognizes. In each version the values of liberal society—individualism, the belief in progress, the free market—are tested, purified, and redeemed. In one, the wisdom and common sense of the people buffer the alien influences of the mass media. In the other, new electronic technologies liberate citizens from the failures of the old machine technologies and reaffirm Americans' vision of a triumphant future. These complementary histories of communication technology and its effects, each mythically powerful in its own right, illustrate a larger habit of American thought, according to Carey. Especially in the con-

Introduction to Part 1/9 text of American life, communication technology has proved particularly good to think with. That phrase, good to think with, gained currency in the work of the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who used it to describe how traditional people symbolically close the distance between nature and culture by making meaning out of material objects, situations, people, events, and other creatures. Modern people deploy communication technologies—telegraph, telephone, broadcast signal, coaxial cable, computer network—for just such symbolic purposes, Carey argues. Such technologies create an idiom with which to discuss the social system. By making possible new forms of connectedness, these media simulate the feel of face-to-face communication. Using these technologies as metaphors, Americans describe the past and anticipate the future. The professional communicators who emerge to control these technologies—reporter, editor, actor, copywriter, publicist, producer, disc jockey—come to symbolize new styles of behavior and identity. The information they carry comes to pass for wisdom. McLuhan and Mumford agreed that communication technologies are good to think with, but disagreed about what we ought to think and how to use technology. Mumford occasionally speculates on how media change the way we think, but is more concerned with how media transform the way we live. McLuhan envisions electronic media liberating users from the sensory limitations of the past. Mumford discovers a darkness in the soul of each new machine. From mining technology to factory loom to automobile to atom bomb to television, each serves the pentagon of power, profit, prestige, property, and productivity. Finally, McLuhan sings the body electric, praising the more deeply collective, organic, sensual experience that electronic media allegedly inspire. Mumford mourns the way machine technology has displaced technics—the hard-won human practices of arts, language, and ritual, nurtured over centuries. Standing offstage in this debate is Harold Adams Innis, about whom Carey has written much. Like Mumford, Innis wanted to understand how technology reorganizes communication as a material practice. Occasionally Carey has quoted the poet William Carlos Williams's famous dictum "No ideas but in things" as a summary of this position. For Carey, as for Innis and Mumford, the most powerful consequences of technology are enacted through our social, political, and economic practices, rather than through direct changes in the individual psyche. (Indeed, Carey would argue, I think, that the vocabulary of psychology


dangerously depoliticizes and privatizes our discussion of technology as a shared public phenomenon.) Technology opens up markets, allows the conquest and patrol of space, transforms work routines, deracinates preexisting cultural spaces and times, coins new forms of cultural capital, and establishes monopolies of knowledge. Not surprisingly, this discussion of the social consequences of technology leads to an analysis of capitalism, and this is the topic of the third Carey essay included here, "Communications and Economics." Although Carey has written about these issues for years—mostly in his essays on Innis, the history of the telegraph, and the rhetoric of the electronic revolution—here he confronts economic thought in an unusually direct and explicit way. Carey wishes to understand communication as a material, social practice—our very ground of being in the world. To do so he must challenge the vocabulary of economics, which claims to offer the master narrative that explains our material practices. This essay, like the others, starts in a conversation now buried within the text. While he was at the University of Illinois, Carey began a deep friendship with the economist Julian Simon. The writing of each continues to bear traces of that relationship. Early in their careers, both were interested in advertising, Carey through his work with Charles Sandage, and Simon through his studies of the economics of advertising. By the early 19705 both men shared an interest in the emerging debate about population and ecology, an interest fueled by each man's religious as well as intellectual beliefs. Carey and Simon both objected to neo-Malthusian theories that foresaw economic ruin as the result of population growth. For Simon this objection took the form of a longrunning argument with Paul Erlich, author of The Population Bomb, a best-seller that predicted shortages, rising prices, famine, and war as a result of world population growth. Simon retorted that culture and politics, not nature, dictate what counts for a resource: when markets make some resources too expensive, humans simply reinvent what counts for a resource. From Simon's perspective, then, natural resources are constantly being reinvented through the exercise of human imagination. Starting from the study of communication and culture, Carey arrived at a similar conclusion, after some evolution in his views. Several years ago, while working through the ideas of Innis, Carey argued that communication technologies create monopolies of knowledge, making

Introduction to Part 7 / 1 1

the mass media the site of permanent group conflicts over whose version of reality will be displayed and honored. Borrowing the language of economics, Carey observed then that "reality is a scarce resource." Now, in this recent essay, Carey criticizes the dominance of economics in our descriptions of human affairs. The problem with the language of economics, as he sees it, is that the marketplace treats life as a zero-sum game. Yet such an analogy devastates social relations, for it foretells a society of winners and losers, constantly operating out of a sphere of private interests. For Carey democratic culture cannot operate as a zero-sum game. He makes the contrast between the vocabularies of economics and communication explicit: "Economics is the practice of allocating scarce resources. Communication is the process of producing meaning, a resource that is anything but scarce—indeed, is a superabundant, free good." Like Simon, he refuses to put resources before people. This critique of the language of economics points to one main difference between Carey and his critics on the left, who also worry about the consequences of capitalism. The left, Carey argues, too often accepts the language of economics in framing its critique. This tendency was particularly noticeable in older versions of Marxism, when critics complained that capitalism puts the economy in the service of monopoly, profit, and empire, rather than the commonweal. Despite its obvious historical truth, this critique reduces communication and culture to a shadow play of economic interests. For all its emphasis on culture, even new versions of the left critique, such as British cultural studies, tend to accept the ultimate dominance of economic concerns. To the extent that it equates communication with ideology, British cultural studies flirts with its own form of functionalism, treating culture as a response to the structural needs of capitalism. The paths of influence in such criticism prove circuitous indeed, but the destination remains unchanged. As this essay makes clear, Carey is no defender of capitalism, but he refuses to ground his critique in the language of utilitarianism. For Carey the language of economics diminishes the complexity and nuance of human culture in the same ways that the languages of effects and technology do. Metaphors of attenuation and attack run all through Carey's descriptions of the consequences of capitalism. The price system "penetrates" everyday life; markets "ingest the globe"; new technologies of communication "bleach knowledge into informa-

12 / Introduction to Part I tion"; economics "reduces" human motives to mere self-interest. Thus Carey objects to capitalism not just because it sustains the power and privilege of some groups over others (a problem that he acknowledges and condemns), but because the language of capitalism, economics, robs us of our greatest resource—our ability to understand communication as a social practice. Surely one of the droll tragedies of American intellectual history, from Carey's perspective, must be the new referent of the name Chicago School. In popular parlance the University of Chicago's renowned school of free-market Nobel laureates has largely erased the memory of the reformers, social critics, and philosophers who created the Chicago School of Social Thought. What better image of how the language of economics has conquered public discourse. Taken together, these three essays aptly illustrate Carey's position within the field of media studies. They also illustrate, I think, how intellectuals make themselves in and through their work. A collection of writings always traces the trajectory of a life. Until quite recently Carey studied, taught, and wrote at the University of Illinois, in one of the world's most prominent centers for the study of communication. If we listen carefully, these essays tell the story of how he made his intellectual home there; how he set himself apart from the social science tradition of Wilbur Schramm, one of the field's most prominent researchers and powerful administrators; how he learned what he could from the liberal intellectual histories of Fredrick Siebert and Jay Jensen; how he struggled with and against the tradition of political economy founded by Dallas Smythe and continued by Herbert Schiller and Thomas Guback. By the time he left for Columbia University, Carey had added cultural studies to the list of traditions for which Illinois is now best known. This is not how most scholars today would recount the origins of cultural studies. Others would attribute a larger role to British cultural studies, or to semiotics, hermeneutics, or postmodern literary criticism. But Carey feels no need to apologize for the Americanness of his story, nor should he. The history of culture and communication can be told in any number of places, and Carey's essays demonstrate how one might engagingly tell the tale in an American vein. After all, if a central problem of cultural studies is the social construction of meaning and identity, what better place to study that problem than in a country that incessantly and self-consciously talks about its destiny? If cultural studies hopes to understand how the mass media confer prestige and legitimate

Introduction to Part 7 / 1 3

power, what better place to study these processes than in a society that constantly uses communication technology to dream its future? By grounding cultural studies in American experience, Carey hopes to place it in the service of public life and democracy. Carey would qualify Hobbes, I think, and say that the key question for us today should be "How is democratic society possible?" His answer will not please critics who want him to declare his allegiance to one position or another. He has never been the theorist others want him to be. He is too working-class in his upbringing to join in the choruses of praise for American capitalism; too personally cautious and gradualist to be mistaken for a radical; too American in his intellectual references and too unassuming in his style to be worshipped as a prominent cultural theorist. Carey, like Raymond Williams, lives in his own border country. He refuses to declare himself either conservative or radical or liberal. His one, steadfast intellectual commitment is to democracy as a way of life. More than ten years ago, in writing an essay on the intellectual roots of the social philosopher Ivan Illich (who also has had some influence on Carey), I noted that critics faced a similar difficulty in trying to position Illich's thought. I wrote then that Illich proposes "neither a stainless steel nor a forest-green Utopia, but a democratically protected space in which a conserving culture might grow." That last phrase describes Carey's beliefs, too, I think. Culture conserves sense and meaning in a world of chaos; democracy creates a space for the work of culture, by protecting humans from state coercion, predatory capital, monopolies of professional knowledge, and imperial technology. Best of all, democracy suggests the one communication metaphor without which we cannot live: communication as conversation. In the world that James Carey envisions, the inquisitor's question Which side are you on? always gives way to an invitation: Let us talk.

1 / The Chicago School and the History of Mass Communication Research First published in 1996

Strictly speaking, there is no history of mass communication research. From the seventeenth century forward one finds scholars, scientists, lawyers, clerics, men of letters, journalists, politicians, and freelance intellectuals writing about the printing press, broadsides, penny dreadfuls, censorship, the Star Chamber, the urban public, freedom of speech and press, and a host of related topics and issues. Similarly, as the nineteenth century progressed, an increasing number of essays appeared on the telegraph, the rise of advertising, the economic power of newspapers, the growth of the national magazine, and the emergence of the "press baron." However, this motley collection of books, essays, speeches, memoirs, autobiographies, political interventions, and ideological tracts hardly constituted a history of the mass media or even the materials necessary to an understanding of such institutions. Rather, the history of mass communication research is a recent literary genre, albeit a minor one: a self-conscious creation (and now an endless recreation) that sifts, sorts, and rearranges the accumulated literary debris into a coherent narrative. The narrative that emerges serves ultimately a variety of purposes: principally to focus, justify, and legitimize a twentieth-century invention, the mass media, and to give direction and intellectual status to professional teaching and research concerning these same institutions. But it is hardly an innocent history, for it was invented with a political purpose: an attempt to cast loyalties, resolve disputes, guide public policy, confuse opposition, and legitimize institutions; in short, the history that emerged was a minor

14

The Chicago School I 15

episode in the social, political, and ideological struggles of the twentieth century. By the 19505 the history of mass communication research had achieved textual status (it was a recognizable species of writing), and certain "studies," essays, books, and intellectual figures (Paul Lazarsfeld, Wilbur Schramm) had become a part of a minor canon that was required reading on university syllabi. Once formulated, the history almost instantly achieved boilerplate status and was endlessly retailed in textbooks, essays, and research reports, and on any given academic day was providing an easy and unearned introduction to a subject matter in classrooms across the country. The history, reduced to a sketch and a caricature, went—actually, it still goes—something like this. Mass communication research began in the years surrounding World War I as a response to a widespread fear of propaganda: wartime propaganda by the major military powers, peacetime propaganda by organized interests, particularly the modern corporation and the business class. The fear of propaganda was fueled by the spread and increasing sophistication of advertising and public relations, but the indictment of these practices moved from the arena of news and public affairs across the landscape of mass-produced culture and entertainment. If the cognitive and attitudinal life of the citizen was under assault by propaganda, the moral, appreciative, and affective life of children (and the child in us all) was similarly assailed by a banal and pernicious system of cultural production emanating from massive, concentrated institutions. As the "jazz age" turned into the Great Depression, the fears of propaganda and the media were confirmed by the mass movements in politics and culture typical of that period and by a series of specific and startling events of which Orson Welles's broadcast "The War of the Worlds" stood as an archetype. In the standard history this random assortment of fears, alarms, jeremiads, political pronouncements, and a few pieces of empirical research were collapsed into the "hypodermic needle model" or a "bullet theory" or a "model of unlimited effects" of the mass media, for they converged on a common conclusion: the media collectively, but in particular the newer, illiterate media of film and radio, possessed extraordinary power to shape the beliefs and conduct of ordinary men and women. However, the standard history continues, this conclusion was supported by nothing more than speculation, conjecture, anecdotal evidence, and ideological ax grinding. None of the conclusions was theo-

16 / The Chicago School retically or empirically grounded; none was supported by systematic research. Inferential and unjustified leaps were made from patterns of ownership and control (by business elites and reactionary entrepreneurs) to the quality and import of "messages" and from the content of messages (Father Coughlin's radio addresses, for example) to effects on conduct and attitudes. In short, unjustified connections were made between the presence of a cause and the stipulation of an effect, the appearance of a stimulus and the automatic production of a response, without evidence concerning the intervening and mediating linkages between medium, message, and effect. However, the standard history continues, beginning in the late 19305 and progressively throughout the 19408, a body of research, empirically sophisticated, theoretically grounded, began to appear, largely at the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia and the Office of War Information, that decisively cut against the "hypodermic needle" model of media effects. What was discovered, almost fortuitously, it seems, was a bizarre situation in which there were causes without effects, stimuli without responses. That is, hardly anyone denied the charges that the media were a tissue of propaganda and degenerate culture, but most investigators produced evidence that the content and intentions were rarely tied to effects or consequences. What was discovered, in the standard rendition, was that individuals, the members of the audience, were protected from the deleterious possibilities inherent in the mass media by a group of predispositional or mediating factors. Some of these factors were psychological (people interpreted messages and retained meanings in the light of their own needs and desires), and some of these factors were social (people interpreted messages and assigned meanings as part of an interactive network of stable social groups to which they belonged). Both sets of factors conspired to protect individuals from everything but the most marginal effects of the mass media. Some individuals (a few) under some circumstances (rare) were directly affected by the mass media. Otherwise, media propaganda and mass culture were held at bay by an invisible shield erected by a universally resistant psyche and a universally present network of social groups. This conclusion was presented in summary form as early as 1948 in an American Scholar essay by Joseph Klapper, "Mass Media and the Engineering of Consent,"1 and fully articulated twelve years later, with all the empirical evidence assembled, as the summary judgment of The Effects of Mass Communication.2


Klapper concluded that the fears of propaganda, of manipulative elites, of media-induced extremist behavior, were misplaced and hysterical. Empirical research, he believed, had carefully documented the factors that made individuals resistant to mass persuasion. He concluded that the mass media could have an effect on their audiences only when the media moved in concert with the natural predispositions of that audience in directions ordained by the general culture rather than working against it. Given the conservative bias of the media and of social life generally, Klapper concluded that the preponderant effect was the reinforcement of the status quo. There was, therefore, little to fear from extremist behavior or antidemocratic social movements. The media were at one, if not by design and intent, at least by results and consequences, with the democratic, individualist, decentralist traditions of the country. All in all, this was a pretty rosy picture, particularly given the sharp national conflicts and deep ideological divisions present in the postwar world. With the conclusion firmly established that the media had but limited effects, the research agenda was largely a mopping-up operation: the closer and more detailed specification of the specific operation of mediating and intervening factors. Consequently, Klapper tried to turn research in another direction, toward what he called a "phenomenistic approach"3 and what others called the study of "uses and gratifications."4 In a well-known line, interest shifted from what it was that the media did to people and toward what it was people did with the media. This was then a shift in interest and attention from the source to the receiver and a relocation of the point of power in the process: the audience controlled the producers. Except for some special problems (violence and pornography are the best-known examples) and some special groups (principally children), interest in direct effects and propaganda withered away. The settled and established consensus and conclusion to the history was that the media might have special and limited effects on some topics and some groups, that they might direct attention to some problems and away from others and therefore set a social and political agenda of sorts, but the media did not constitute a social problem, did not debase the culture or promote extremism; the media were, in short, in concert with rather than opposed to the fundamentally democratic and egalitarian forces in the culture. There is, inevitably, some truth in this standard history but even more it is powerfully misleading and of late there have been attempts to recast it and recover the pertinence and sophistication of the research

18 / The Chicago School

and speculation on propaganda that was a hallmark of the i92,os.5 But what must be emphasized here is that the standard history had, or at least was subsequently endowed with, a practical political purpose. It attempted to negate or at least deflect the characteristic critiques of modern liberal, capitalistic democracies. Those critiques, whether of the left or right, identified dominative forces and totalitarian tendencies within all the Western democracies and tied these tendencies to certain features inherent in the structure, content, and ownership patterns of the mass media. These critiques are frequently lumped together as "the theory of mass society," a pastiche containing distinctively radical and distinctively conservative analyses of modern society. Daniel Bell gives the theory one kind of summary: The conception of "mass society" can be summarized as follows: The revolution in transport and communications have brought men into closer contact with each other and bound them in new ways; the division of labor has made them more interdependent; tremors in one part of the society affect all others. Despite this greater interdependence, however, individuals have grown more estranged from one another. The old primary group ties of family and local community have been shattered; ancient parochial faiths are questioned; few unifying values have taken their place. Most important, the critical standards of an educated elite no longer shape opinion or taste. As a result, mores and morals are in constant flux, relations between individuals are tangential or compartmentalized rather than organic. At the same time greater mobility, spatial and social, intensifies concern over status. Instead of a fixed or known status symbolized by dress or title, each person assumes a multiplicity of roles and constantly has to prove himself in a succession of new situations. Because of all this, the individual loses a coherent sense of self. His anxieties increase. There ensues a search for new faiths. The stage is thus set for the charismatic leader, the secular messiah, who, by bestowing upon each person the semblance of necessary grace and fullness of personality, supplies a substitute for the older unifying belief that the mass society has destroyed.6

The key event in the evolution of mass society was the development of the mass media. As Raymond and Alice Bauer put it, the population, as conceived by the theory of mass society, was "atomized" by industrialism and developed, as a result, "an insatiable appetite for narcotizing diversion, a circumstance which makes them susceptible to the machinations of the few who control the media of communication. One result of this process . . . is that the groundwork is laid for totalitarianism."7


As I said, the theory of mass society was actually a synthesis of two rather different critiques of modern life, one conservative and one radical. The two critiques shared, however, the belief that all the forces of modernity—technology, economic development, literacy, mass democracy—conspired to erode the protective standards and covering that ensured social stability and a reasonable politics and culture. They differed rather considerably concerning whose standards were being eroded and who was being disabled from exercising political leadership. The conservative critique focused on the erosion of the position and standards of traditional elites in the arts, academy, and civil service as mass participation in culture and politics was mobilized through, among other things, the mass media. The radical critique, predictably, focused on just the opposite, on the demobilization of the masses, on their exposure to manipulative control, and on the intent of domineering elites to contain any movement aimed at radical change. Synthesized into a more or less coherent position, the theory of mass society contended that the media of communication were simultaneously an agent for destroying intellectual and artistic standards and the elites that bore them and a means for exercising dominion over and control of ordinary men and women. Both elites and masses, set free from, liberated from, tradition and traditional ways of life, were promptly reabsorbed into the market and consumerism, into mass politics and mass consumption. The only winners in this game were commercial elites, and their technocratic servants in the professions, including the personnel of the mass media. The history of mass communication created, then, as its necessary double the theory of mass society and, naturally, constituted that theory in its most vulnerable form: as a straw man that would topple before the thinnest empirical evidence. The theory was patched together out of lines drawn from unlikely allies—T. S. Eliot and Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, Alexis de Tocqueville and Dwight Macdonald—and a spurious coherence imputed to the whole. Such a jerry-built structure was easy enough to topple, but the actual demolition often concealed the real intent behind the creation of both the history of mass communication research and theory of mass society, namely, the attempt to contain and neutralize those intellectuals pursuing a critical theory of modern society, among whom the Frankfurt School, exiled in America, was merely the most prominent group. My aim here, however, is not so much so much to assess the politi-

20 / The Chicago School cal intent and efficacy of the standard history of mass communications as it is to insist that even on its own terms that history is radically truncated and incomplete. This is not the place to rewrite that history in toto, but to begin the work of correction and completion, let me briefly stitch into the narrative two other traditions that are critical to understanding how thought in this field developed. It is proper to suggest, I believe, that for most of the nineteenth century there was nothing in form or content that could be considered a precursor literature to the mass communications research of this century. There were, of course, intelligent and scholarly reflections on the newspaper, telegraph, and magazine, but neither these media individually nor the mass media—a more recent coinage—were taken to be a social or intellectual problem. The agenda of intellectual life in nineteenth-century America was largely set by a species of utilitarianism that came into the culture by a particularly narrow reading of John Locke. The central problematic in utilitarianism is the question of freedom, and, therefore, the mass media (better, the press) were thought of pretty exclusively within the terms laid down by utilitarianism. The central terms were freedom and the public; the central problem the stipulation of the conditions of a free public life. What we might more generally call liberal theory emphasized that "society is grounded in a solidary public that is conceived as virtuous." Public opinion—the opinion uttered in public—was taken to be a constituent component of the liberal social order, a force in the creation and expression of a civic consciousness. When the entire public was conceived as a rational body engaged in discussion through printed media, the press was directly involved in the formation, maintenance, and expression of liberal society. The term public is the key to understanding utilitarian thought. The public is a group bound by reason and united in a conversation that seeks to place limits on state power. Faith in the public is clearest not when liberals discuss the social contract but when they identify the social foundations of the public in the process of free communication. The utilitarian argument asserts that in any free exchange of ideas among rational thinkers, truth will emerge victorious. This idea provides utilitarianism with a concrete policy: freedom of debate, preaching, speaking, writing, and, most important, freedom of publication were the means of founding order in society and reason in the individual. "Let each person be free to argue as reason guides. If all have reason and if reason is capable of discerning truth, all will ultimately come


to truth." In the liberal tradition, the conditions of freedom guaranteed the solidarity of society. "There can hardly be—or so the utilitarian thinkers suppose—a better foundation for social life than universal acceptance of truth."8 There is a second way, a more economistic way, of characterizing the liberal-utilitarian tradition, a way that places less emphasis on the public and solidarity and more on the individual and individual desire. Utilitarianism assumes that, strictly speaking, the ends of human action are random or exogenous. Rational knowledge of human values or purposes could not be gained. The best we can do is rationally judge the fitting together of ends and means. One can attain rational knowledge of the primal allocation of resources among means and toward given ends, but one can gain no rational knowledge of the selection of ends. Apples are as good as oranges; baseball is as good as poetry. All that can be determined is the rational means to satisfy subjective and irrational desire. Truth in this tradition is a property of the rational determination of means. In turn, the rationality of means depended upon freedom and the availability of information. More precisely, it was freedom that guaranteed the availability of perfect information and perfect information that guaranteed the rationality of means. In summary, then: If people are free they will have perfect information; if they have perfect information, they can be rational in choosing the most effective means to their individual ends, and if so, in a manner never quite explained, social solidarity will result. So the problem that concerned writers about the press in the Anglo-American tradition was how to secure the conditions of freedom against the forces that would undermine it. These forces were considered to be political and institutional, not psychological. Once freedom was secured against these forces, truth and social progress were guaranteed. There is, then, a coherent literature concerning mass communication, broadly conceived, that stretches back into the nineteenth century, one that was nourished by the English Enlightenment, by such venerated works as John Milton's Areopagitica and J. S. Mill's On Liberty, and by the theory of markets and individuals contained in classical economic theory. As these texts were absorbed into American culture, a literature was produced on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, on landmark legal cases, and on the philosophy of freedom; this literature was, and in many ways remains, the fundamental American outlook on the mass media.9 It is discontinuous with the modern work on commu-


nication effects for it was organized, paradigmatically, around a radically different problematic. One of the linkages between the utilitarian texts and modern ones, between the problem of freedom and the problem of effect, is found in the person of Walter Lippmann. Lippmann's Public Opinion is the originating book in the modern history of communication research. Its title may be Public Opinion, but its subject and central actor are the mass media.10 The book founded a tradition of research as it changed the central problematic in the study of the mass media. Some background will help clarify the role Lippmann played in this history. In 1914 Lippmann published Drift and Mastery, a book whose very title tells us of the mood of the year. The country, the entire Western world, is adrift: things are out of control, the Great War is about to commence. How were we to avoid drift and regain mastery; how was the course of human events to be brought back under control?11 During the war Lippmann went to work for Woodrow Wilson, provided the first draft of the Fourteen Points on which the peace settlement was to be based, and later attended the negotiations at Versailles. Like so many others, he was disappointed by the outcome of the negotiations and the subsequent failure of the League of Nations. He wrote as follows of the chaotic scene at Versailles: The pathetically limited education of officials at the conference, trained to inert and pleasant ways of life, prevented them from seeing or understanding the strange world before them. All they knew, all they cared for, all that life meant to them, seemed to be slipping away to red ruin. And so in panic they ceased to be reporters and began bombarding the chancelleries at home with gossip and frantic explanation. The clamor converged on Paris and all the winds of doctrine were sent whirling about. Every dinner table, every lobby, almost every special interview, every subordinate delegate, every expert advisor was a focus of intrigue, bluster, manufactured rumor. The hotels were choked with delegations representing, pretending to represent, hoping to represent every group of people in the world. The newspaper correspondents struggling with this illusive and allpervading chaos were squeezed between the appetites of their readers for news and the desire of the men with whom the decisions rested not to throw the negotiations into a cyclone of distortion.12

Lippmann's Public Opinion was an extended reflection of his experience at Paris and Versailles. His conclusion was a dour one. You will not get out of drift and achieve mastery by relying on the public or


newspapers. There is no such thing as informed public opinion, and therefore that opinion cannot master events. Voters are inherently incompetent to direct public affairs: "They arrive in the middle of the third act and leave before the last curtain, staying just long enough to decide who is the hero and who is the villain."13 He concludes: "The common interest in life largely eludes public opinion entirely and can be managed only by a specialized class. I set no great store on what can be done by public opinion or the action of the masses."14 The road away from drift and toward mastery was not through the public, not through public opinion, not really through the newspaper. The only hope lay in taking the weight off the public shoulders, recognizing that the average citizen had neither the capacity, nor the interest, nor the competence to direct society. Mastery would come only through a class of experts, a new order of samurai, who would mold the public mind and character: men and women dedicated to making democracy work for the masses whether the masses wanted it or not. Lippmann, in effect, took the public out of politics and politics out of public life. In a phrase of the moment, he depoliticized the public sphere. Lippmann turned the political world over to private and specialized interests, albeit interests regulated by his new samurai class. Lippmann wrote, of course, in the heyday of science, when science was taken to be the exemplar of a culture as a whole. He assumed that scientists were a transcendent class, without interests and objectives— philosopher kings of the new world: The burden of carrying on the world, of inventing, creating, executing, of attempting justice, formulating laws and moral codes, of dealing with the technic and substance, lies not upon public opinion and not upon government but on those who are reasonably concerned as agents in the affair. Where the problems arise, the ideal is a settlement by the particular interests involved. They alone know what the trouble really is.15

Note the structure of Lippmann's argument: a free system of communication will not guarantee perfect information and, therefore, there are no guarantees of truth even when the conditions of freedom are secure. Moreover, the enemies of freedom are no longer the state and the imperfections of the market but in the nature of the news and news gathering, in the psychological dispositions of the audience and in the scale and organization of modern life. Lippmann, in fact, redefined the problem of the media from one of morals, politics, and freedom to one

24 / The Chicago School of psychology and epistemology. He established the tradition of propaganda analysis and simultaneously, by framing the problem not as one of normative political theory but as one of human psychology, opened up the tradition of effects analysis that was to dominate the literature less than two decades after the publication of Public Opinion. The trick Lippmann pulled off was this: he legitimized a democratic politics of publicity and experts while confirming the psychological incompetence of people to participate in it. He tried to show how you could have "democracy without citizens" (as in the title of Robert Entman's recent book) while preserving a valuable role for the mass media.16 This was the same conclusion arrived at in the history of effects research: people could immerse themselves in a media system saturated by propaganda and mass culture, and defend themselves against this onslaught by rational psychological and social mechanisms, yet neither the "stimulus" nor the "response" would threaten the underlying conditions of democracy. But Lippmann did more than anticipate and clear the ground for effects research. He also rejected, sometimes quite explicitly, the work of John Dewey and other members of the Chicago School of Social Thought. It was Dewey, along with George Herbert Mead, Robert Park, and Charles Cooley, who reacted against the form in which utilitarianism was incarnated in the late nineteenth century—namely, social Darwinism—and in that reaction formed the most distinctive and, I believe, the most useful view of communication and the mass media in the American tradition. The work of Dewey and his colleagues is also omitted from the standard history of mass communication research, but it, along with Lippmann and liberal theory, provides the necessary linkage between the theory of the public and freedom typical of the nineteenth century and the theory of media effects typical of the twentieth. One way of catching the distinctiveness of the views of Dewey and other members of the Chicago School of Social Thought is through the commonplace observation that the liberal and utilitarian tradition never effectively crossed the Rhine and, as a result, a counterutilitarian tradition developed throughout the nineteenth century in German scholarship. Hanno Hardt's useful Social Theories of the Press: Early German and American Perspectives details the work of a group of thinkers— Karl Knies, Albert Schaffle, Karl Bucher, Ferdinand Toennies, and Max Weber—whose work was in significant ways a critique of utilitarianism


and utilitarian views of freedom and communication.17 They in turn shifted the central problematic of communication from one of freedom within the context of publics and markets to that of social integration and domination. They turned from the liberal question—What are the conditions of freedom?—to the inverse question: How it is that the social order is integrated through communication? Here a new set of concerns emerge: function, integration, legitimacy, power, and control. They invert, in short, the relation between freedom and solidarity. The group that gathered around John Dewey, originally at the University of Michigan, were all deeply influenced by and affiliated with the German scholarly traditions that descended from Hegel or later took their advanced academic work in Germany. When this German tradition settled in Ann Arbor and later resettled in Chicago and New York, it was reconstituted as a distinctively American outlook and was addressed to distinctively American concerns.18 At Ann Arbor, in the period between 1882 and 1887, Jonn Dewey was a professor of philosophy and Robert Park his student. Charles Cooley was another student in the department at the same time. George Herbert Mead was a faculty colleague, and this quartet was joined by a strange, itinerant New York journalist, Franklin Ford, about whom little is known other than what Dewey has written. Ford wandered into Ann Arbor with a plan to publish a newspaper, Thought News, that was to be the first truly scientific newspaper. Robert Park went on to a career in journalism in Minneapolis, then in Detroit. While he was in Detroit in the late i88os and the early 18905, he reconnected with Dewey and George Herbert Mead, and the group set about publishing Thought News, the first newspaper based on a scientific method of reporting. Franklin Ford had worked for a forerunner of Dun and Bradstreet, the commercial credit house that was one of the first companies to make extensive use of the telegraph in gathering credit information and intelligence. He wanted a newspaper that was as fair, accurate, objective, and honest as the credit information gathered by the company. Ford developed a plan for a national newspaper with separate editions for various regions, professions, and functions. His plan was a technologically primitive version of an integrated computer communications facility. Thought News was to be a newspaper, a professional journal, a library, and a reference service—all integrated into one flexible organization. They planned the first issue, they printed it, and, as Dewey said


later, "We pied the type." They ran out of money. But the experience had a profound effect on Dewey and he later wrote William James to the effect that it was Ford who changed his interest in philosophy and directed his attention away from metaphysics and epistemology and onto problems of politics, morals, education, and the news. In 1894 Dewey joined the faculty at the newly opened University of Chicago. Park went off to graduate school in Germany, spent ten years as the secretary and publicist for Booker T. Washington, and finally came back to Chicago in the years just after World War I. But from the 18905 forward, when Dewey and Mead came to Chicago, there was an attempt by this group to develop a different tradition of analyses of communication and the mass media. I want to offer one interpretation of that tradition, albeit a contestable one, that starts from a remark made by Carl Hovland, that in the United States communication is substituted for tradition. In the absence of a shared and inherited culture, communication had to accomplish the tasks of social integration that were elsewhere the product of tradition. This interpretation emphasizes that there was not a shared traditional culture available to people who were forming new communities and institutions, particularly on the frontier or in the western regions. In the absence of shared sentiment, the only means by which these communities could be organized and held together was through discussion, debate, negotiation, and communication. Social order was neither inherited nor unconsciously achieved but actually hammered out as diverse people assembled to create a common culture and to embody that culture in actual social institutions. This attitude looked toward the future, not the past, as the source of social cohesion: the meaning of things, the character of social relations, the structure of institutions had to be actively created rather than merely drawn out of existing stocks of knowledge and culture. Communication, at least in nineteenth-century America, was an active process of community creation and maintenance. The country was not a place for lonely individuals. Freedom was not a mere negative product of removing restraints or leaving people alone. Freedom required, first of all, the institutions—government, courts, churches, public houses—of civic and civil life. It required, as well, more subtle cultural creations: modes of conduct, styles of speaking, modes of address, instruments of social control and ostracism. It is this unromantic view of the sheer necessities of social life that

The Chicago School I 27 led to Dewey's oft-quoted statement that "society exists not only by transmission, by communication, but it may be fairly said to exist in transmission, in communication." The first site of this process of community creation was on the frontier, where strangers came together and had to negotiate a world out of diverse and conflicting cultural resources. This was a task of creating actual physical communities: town building and the institutions of local life. This occupied a full century as the nation expanded west and south. It was carried out by groups of strangers who did not necessarily share a common background, experience, or tradition. What tradition is to the rest, communication is to us: the process and resource through which we constitute ourselves and the little world we inhabit. By making a revolutionary break, we oriented to the future, not the past, to posterity, not tradition, and this made us unusually reliant on explicit processes and procedures of debate, discussion, negotiation: mutual sense-making in radically undefined situations. It is this sense of communication, the sense of community building, of communion, that gives the word one kind of weight in our culture. This creative aspect of culture has an antinomian counterpart. We ceaselessly create communities out of need, desire, and necessity but then continually try to escape from the authority of what we have created. We are forever building a city on the hill and then promptly planning to get out of town to avoid the authority and constraint of our creation. Both the creation and the escape, the organization and disorganization, involve intense episodes in sense-making, in the formation and reformation of human identity, in communication in its most fundamental sense. One recognizes here the genesis of an expressive and interpretive theory of culture. To use a contemporary phrase of Stanley Cavell, culture and communication is a process of "wording the world together." This was a particular task: common words had to be found to create and express a common world. But the stronger claim is that in the absence of a common means of communication there cannot be a common world. Theory and action are indissolubly linked in community creation. The network of communities painfully created in the nineteenth century was progressively dismantled during the turn to the twentieth as the frontier closed, the cities that now dominated the culture swelled through immigration from abroad and domestic movement from farm to city and from South to North. This was a second phase of community creation now carried out along the ecological frontier of urban

28 / The Chicago School life. New forms of racial, ethnic, religious, and class communities were created in the cities simultaneously with attempts to give institutional and cultural shape to these new urban containers. The creation of ethnic communities was the crucial event of this phase, and Thomas and Znaniecki's The Polish Peasant in Europe and America was the single most important study. Ethnic communities were not merely transplants of intact cultures from the old world to the new world. In fact, ethnic groups were formed in the diaspora. The Irish, Italians, Jews, and Poles were in significant ways creatures of the new world. Distinct people, identified with different regions, speaking different dialects or languages, were formed, partly by self-identification, partly by social imposition, into self-conscious groups, aware of or made to accept a common heritage and fate. Again, these groups created new institutions of neighborhood life—newspapers, entertainment centers, churches, hospitals, orphanages, poorhouses, friendly and burial societies—along with distinctive patterns of social interaction, ethnic and social types, new forms of language, and particular types of popular art. This second wave of community creation, which involved the simultaneous destruction and transformation of older patterns of living and settlement, was also a radical and creative cultural achievement. Recognition of this continuous and ceaseless process of community creation and re-creation gave rise to a peculiarly American version of the theory of mass society. Its European counterpart charted a transit from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft, organic to mechanical solidarity, feudalism to capitalism or, in C. Wright Mills's later phrase, from a community of publics to a society of masses. American history and experience lacked one pole of this contrast. The product of revolutionary circumstances on a "virgin continent," we were never a gemeinschaft society, never one of status or organic solidarity, without a feudal tradition; never, strictly speaking, a community of publics. Without a point of origin in traditional society we could hardly have a place of destination in a mass society. Instead, the Chicago School suggested that we go through recurring, even ceaseless cycles of social organization, disorganization, and then social reorganization, cycles when existing patterns of social interaction and relations, social institutions and forms of life, even forms of individual identity are broken down and dispersed. What follows is a moment of mass society, when social disorganization reigns, when identities and relations are in flux and change. This phase itself is never permanent, however, for the social system is reorganized


and restructured; new identities emerge; new patterns of social relations, usually quite surprising and unpredictable, are forged. The period that was formative in the intellectual life of these scholars, from the 18905 to World War I, provoked a crisis in social representation as the national system of end points in communications was extended into the small towns and hamlets that had been bypassed in the earlier extension of the railroad and telegraph. The maturing of the wire services, the growth of national magazines, the development of national retail organizations and catalog sales, rural free mail delivery, national advertising and marketing, and national political parties all had the effect of eclipsing the local, of terminating the existence of selfcontained island communities. Urbanization, industrialization, the maturing of industrial capitalism (with increasingly international connections), the closing of the frontier, the eclipse of agriculture as a predominant way of life and with it the country town as a cultural force, these were the events that set the agenda for these intellectuals. It was in this milieu of a national, urban society, a society that both invaded and transcended the local, that the nature of communication and community had to be rethought. But these problems of scale and identity were the same, though larger, as had bedeviled American life from the outset: democracy versus scale, capitalism versus republican politics, Puritanism versus antinomianism, a continental political economy versus local life. Surrounding those structural changes were a variety of cultural and social movements that were both "responses" and assertions: progressivism itself, populism, the creation of ethnic groups, nativism, the Know-Nothings, women's suffrage, temperance, the Grange. These movements expressed a restless search for new identities and for new forms of cultural and political life. Taken together, these movements offered new ways of being for a new type of society. The 18905 appear to be a moment when people actively shed their past, shed old ways of being and belonging, and created a society in motion that lacked a clear sense of where it was going or what it would be when it got there. The social psychology of this process was best laid out by Charles Cooley. The transformations created by the turn from an agricultural to an industrial society, from the rural and small to the urban and large, would not lead to a permanent change to a mass society of atomized individuals. His social psychology was a continuing argument against the frontier individualism that dominated liberal thought and the urban at-

30 / The Chicago School omization that haunted the European imagination. He recognized that even in the modern world the human personality would be formed within the context of local life, within a network of social interaction. However, a question needed to be answered: if the old small-scale, local communities of nineteenth-century America were eclipsed by the formation of large-scale cities and a national society, what would replace the local community as the agency of character formation, the site where a looking-glass self developed, where the significant other and the generalized other came together to form an I and me? Cooley invented the notion of the "primary group" to carry this indispensable burden. The primary group is, of course, a gross abstraction. Cooley was thinking of the nuclear family, the tiny circle of friends and relatives who surrounded it, the urban neighborhood. Now that the primary group in this sense has been pretty much destroyed, destroyed at the moment Paul Lazarsfeld and Elihu Katz were rediscovering it as the anchor point in their analysis of media effects,19 Cooley might seem a little quaint. But the question he leaves behind is still on the agenda. What kind of people are we to become in the postmodern world where courts, counselors, schools, child-care centers, self-help groups, and a variety of family types (single parent, blended, hinged, seriatim) assume the social role of the primary group? To understand the problems that Dewey, Cooley, and Park were attacking and the "structure of feeling," to use Raymond Williams's phrase, of the era in which they worked, we might raise parallel questions about our own time, about what is happening to us now that the fruits of the progressive era have yielded a more global or at least transnational structure of politics, commerce, and culture. What is the relation between the social disorganization of our time and the new forms of communication that have emerged since World War II? How does one represent the social totality and the period through which we are living? The global village? Spaceship Earth? The postindustrial, postmodern, poste very thing society? Who are we in this new age? World citizens? Feminists? Post-Marxists? Neoconservatives? Religious fundamentalists? What are we going to do about the new plutocrats, Donald Trump, T. Boone Pickens, Ivan Boesky? To what identity and culture are we socializing our children? The point is this: While the process of social and cultural change is ceaseless, particularly in America, where little is solid and most things


continuously melt into air, there are critical junctures at which the social capsule breaks open and the fundamental coordinates of individual identity and group life are broken up. The work of Dewey and the sociologists who followed him, the symbolic interactionists, is particularly apt and useful in these moments of rupture and less so in moments of relative stasis. The moments of rupture are times when ceaseless, impersonal competition among inchoate formations are translated into structured conflict. At these moments new forms of social drama are created, new social antagonisms defined and sharpened, new social types created, and new cultural forms of address, interaction, and relationship developed. This attempt to develop a structural ecology of urban life in relation to communication was also a means of writing a phenomenology of modern consciousness. Cooley's injunction that the solid facts of society are the imaginations people have of one another artlessly mirrors Park's romantic reminder that we have to get behind people's eyes to get to the thrill of it all. These are merely naive but expressive injunctions to create an empirical sociology of street life, of gang life, of community life, of group life on which to construct a phenomenology of the actual process of symbolic construction and reconstruction, action and interaction, in which community life was forged. The media of communication entered this social process at two critical points. First, it was the hope of Dewey, and to a lesser degree of Cooley, Park, and others, that the media of communication might recreate public life, might bring a great community of rational public discourse into existence. In this view, the public of democratic theory, eclipsed by the enormous technical expansion of social life, might be reborn in the modern mass media. While Dewey recognized the importance of the network of small-scale groups to the formation of a social fabric, he took this recognition as a prelude to transcendence. For Dewey, communication was an ethical principle. Whatever inhibited communication, whatever inhibited the sharing, widening, expansion of experience was an obstacle to be overcome. We learn from one another, from our difference as well as our similarity. The new media offered an unparalleled opportunity to widen the arena of learning, the capacity to accept but transcend the particular, to join a wider community of citizens without sacrificing our private identity as members of particular, if limited, social formations. It was this hope, the optimism

32 / The Chicago School that fueled it, and the reformist energies that it unleashed that were much opposed by Marxism and led to the split between Marxism and pragmatism, a split that opened a theoretical space through which marched the positivist, expert-oriented social science that defined the effects tradition. The split was one of the minor tragedies of modern politics. The Chicago School certainly failed in its attempt to reconstitute a democratic public life and was absurdly Utopian in hopes for the democratic potential of the mass media. Nonetheless, it kept alive a minor but enduring tradition that today has been reworked and reinvigorated.20 The second reference point for the mass media was in the more conflict-oriented sociology of Robert Park. In this scheme the media of communication became sites of competition and conflict, sites at which latent antagonisms were fashioned into explicit drama. This occurred as groups struggled to control the means of cultural production at every level of social life. In local communities groups attempted to seize newspapers and other journals to lay down definitions of group life, identity, and purpose. Within the black community there were struggles to control the forms of expressive life in the black press, to control the definitions of black culture.21 These struggles were duplicated in the national media in attempts to define the history, culture, purpose, and constituent groups that made up American life. To this end, virtually all the books that came forward from Chicago sociology—books on the gang, the Gold Coast, the Negro community in Chicago, the Polish peasant—devoted part of the analysis to the ways in which the media, as active sites of conflict and struggle, both defined and expressed these communities. What gives this view a certain distinctiveness is that it veered away from the question of communication effects and toward that of cultural struggle. At the same time, it viewed struggle not merely in class and economic terms but extended it to a full array of interests: aesthetic, moral, political, and spiritual. Such struggles were, of course, conducted on class lines but also along other fronts: racial, religious, ethnic, status, regional, and, we would have to add today, gender. This expansive view of an actual social process, an intense interest in its phenomenology, and a historical understanding of how the media of communication enter a ceaseless temporal process of change (rather than a static snapshot of having or not having an effect) is the important but forgotten episode in the standard history of mass communication research.


Notes 1. Joseph Klapper, "Mass Media and the Engineering of Consent," American Scholar 17 (Autumn 1948): 419-2.9. 2. Joseph Klapper, The Effects of Mass Communication (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1960). 3. Joseph Klapper, "Mass Communication Research: An Old Road Resurveyed," Public Opinion Quarterly 27 (Winter 1963): 515-2.7. 4. Elihu Katz and David Foulkers, "On the Use of the Mass Media as 'Escape': Clarification of a Concept," Public Opinion Quarterly 2.6 (Fall i96z): 377-88. 5. See, in particular, J. Michael Sproule, "Progressive Propaganda Critics and the Magic Bullet Myth," Critical Studies in Mass Communication, September 1989, 2.2,5-46. 6. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (New York: Collier, 1961), 21-22. 7. Raymond Bauer and Alice Bauer, "America, Mass Society, and Mass Media," Journal of Social Issues 16 (1960): 3-66. 8. The quotations are from Leon Mayhew, "In Defense of Modernity: Talcott Parsons and the Utilitarian Tradition," American Journal of Sociology 8 (6): 1273-1305. The entire paragraph is largely a paraphrase of arguments in Mayhew's splendid essay. 9. See, as one summary example, Fred S. Seibert, Theodore Peterson, and Wilbur Schramm, Four Theories of the Press (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956). 10. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan, 1922). 11. Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery (New York: Mitchell-Kennerly, 1914). 12. As quoted in Ronald Steele, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 152. 13. Clinton Rossiter and James Lare, The Essential Lippmann (New York: Random House, 1963), 108. 14. Lippmann, Public Opinion, 310. 15. Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (New York: Macmillan, 1935), 77. 16. Robert M. Entman, Democracy without Citizens (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 17. Hanno Hardt, Social Theories of the Press: Early German and American Perspectives (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1975). 18. Many of the paragraphs that follow draw from James W. Carey, "Communications and the Progressives," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 6 (September 1989): 264-82. 19. Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld, Personal Influence (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, I955)20. See, for example, Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 21. Albert L. Kreiling, "The Making of Racial Identities in the Black Press: A Cultural Analysis of Race Journalism in Chicago: 1878-1929," unpublished dissertation, University of Illinois, 1973.

2 / The Roots of Modern Media Analysis: Lewis Mumford and Marshall McLuhan First published in 1980

Scholars live by fictions. It is a belief among them that scholarship is governed by its own inner logic of development, that it proceeds by inexorable sequences of advances on the truth, compelled along by hypotheses, evidence, and confirmation. Intellectual historians often compound this view by demonstrating the inevitable path of theoretical development in the work of Marx, Weber, or Durkheim. Such historians also attempt to demonstrate how scholarly work is addressed to the members of a professional body, the general public, or the readers of a particular journal. While I do not want to dismiss such a view, I would like to emphasize the ways in which scholarship is governed less by abstract logic than it is by the demands to sustain an argument. Scholarship is principally an insinuation into an ongoing discussion, and the structure of discussion is controlling. Scholars write less for abstract audiences than for scholars with whom they are working in a cooperative and, more likely, a competitive way. To interpret a scholarly text, then, demands that one grasp the structure of the argument into which it is an entry and the identity of the combatants to which it is addressed. A text is an attempt take account of a silent auditor's prior arguments and anticipated response. For a variety of plausible reasons, the intended auditors are frequently never mentioned in the argument: their positions are not explicitly described, their names never appear in footnotes or bibliographies. If the scholarship in question is written in our own time, we can often, though not always, provide the auditor and the argument: knowing the struc34

The Roots of Modern Media Analysis I 35 ture of debate in a field, we know who a writer is implicitly arguing against. For texts that descend from the past, the problem of interpretation is particularly difficult because one cannot identify the unmentioned antagonists from the text itself. History is notoriously hard, by being decisively silent, on losers. As Quentin Skinner has demonstrated in his lively studies of Locke and Hobbes, any interpretation is likely to be faulty when one neglects to reconstruct the positions against which the argument is formulated. This failure, in turn, leads one to assimilate the text to a contemporary discussion, a move that misinterprets the text as it makes it more serviceable for current purposes. To reduce it to catchphrases, the context of argument governs the context of interpretation, and, as with much else, it takes two to argue. Any scholarly work contains, therefore, but one half of the sentences necessary to interpret it. It omits, characteristically, though not always, many of the arguments that stimulate writing in the first place and the responses, real or imagined, that control the actual presentation. All that is prelude to the purpose of this essay—to interpret some texts, to reconstruct a wider argument, and to supply an antagonist. The texts are those of Marshall McLuhan, the argument concerns the nature of electrical technology, and the antagonist is Lewis Mumford, and beyond him a certain tradition of speculation on electrical communication that Mumford represents. The relationship between McLuhan and Mumford at one level is quite straightforward and open to easy inspection. McLuhan cited Mumford in virtually all his work, certainly in all his important publications. While the argument was generally rather one-sided, in his later publications Mumford devoted considerable and often savage space to McLuhan. However, the argumentative relationship between these two important figures in contemporary scholarship is both more subtle and more ambiguous than the pattern of citation suggests. The purpose of explicating the relationship is not merely the joy to be found in puzzling through texts or influencing reputations. There is bigger game. McLuhan and Mumford debated the consequences of electrical technology, in particular electrical communication, for contemporary culture and society. Not only can they teach us something of those consequences but they also illustrate, in a variety of ways, some of the conceptual and ideological pitfalls involved in trying to think sensibly about electrical communication.

36 / The Roots of Modern Media Analysis There is now general agreement on the larger consequences of the growth of literacy and printing. "General agreement" may be too strong a phrase; there are incorrigibles. One of the important contributions of both Mumford and McLuhan has been to synthesize some of the consequences that were initiated or intensified by the characteristic forms of printing—the periodical, book, and newspaper—and the typical modes of printed expression—novel, essay, scientific report, and news story. To undress the matter and to emphasize only the "darker side" of printing, it can be argued with more or less confidence that printing centralized political power in the state and cultural power in the metropolis; intensified a spatial bias in communication favoring "remote control" and gave a differential advantage to long-distance communication over short-distance or proximate communication; transformed the word, the primordial symbol, from an event in the human world to a record for bureaucracies; demystified the symbol as a fiduciary relation among persons and transformed it into an analytic tool of thought; eroded the public sphere of discourse and led to the decline of "public man"; transformed speaking publics into passive audiences; privatized and mobilized the basic transactions of communication; led to the emergence of psychological "man" and the sciences devoted to understanding "him"; lent life a visual intensity and aesthetic preference for sight over sound; secularized knowledge and installed science as the major arbiter of truth and authority; created a tradition of the new and a bias toward the future; displaced corporate and communal forms of life in a world bifurcated between the state and the self; created a particular form of nationalism, at first parliamentary and linguistic, eventually imperial; and installed in cultural and political power the class championing most of these developments, the middle class. That sentence more than flirts with a discredited view of causality so let me quickly assert that those events did not occur simultaneously, nor did they take place in a vacuum. They are inseparably interlocked with additional technical and organizational changes and, above all, with the rise of markets and capitalism and the ideology of liberalism.1 If these conclusions are assumed rather than debated, they lead to an intractable problem that has faced all students of media: did the growth of electrical communication from the telegraph through television and the emergence of electronic communication from simple servo-mechanisms through advanced computer information utilities re-

The Roots of Modern Media Analysis I 37 verse the general developments associated with printing, or did they merely modify and intensify the major contours of modern societies? There is no easy answer to this question but around it have whirled virtually all the conceptual and ideological arguments concerning the relations of communications technology to culture. Briefly, Mumford has argued that electronics has intensified the most destructive and power-oriented tendencies of printing, whereas McLuhan has argued that electronics has produced or will produce a qualitative change in the nature of social organization and cultural life. There are not only large intellectual stakes in this argument, but social and political stakes as well, for its resolution will shape ideological discourse and social policy in the arena of communications in the decades ahead. To aid in thinking through this problem, let me reconstruct the positions of Lewis Mumford and Marshall McLuhan, particularly as they constitute addresses within a larger argument. In 1965, with the publication of Understanding Media, the work of Marshall McLuhan burst beyond the narrow limits of the scholarly community and acquired a general audience. Early review articles by Harold Rosenberg in The New Yorker, Neil Compton in Commentary, and Richard Schickel in Harper's were devoted to bringing some order and coherence out of the diffuse and erratic and contradictory arguments of that work.2 It was rather like watching someone attempt to put an elephant into pantyhose. There were three striking things about those early reviews. First, there was a presumption that McLuhan's arguments had emerged phoenixlike without intellectual parentage. Second, they noted that his arguments seemed to cast the media of communication in a new light, giving them an unprecedented importance in society that also conferred new status on the advertising and television industries. Third, independent of the complexities of that work, an unmistakable conclusion was seized upon: that electricity was the Great Reverser designed to undo the devastation of the past, dissolve the complexities of the present, and create a new world of peace and harmony. That attitude was not invented by McLuhan's analysts but coached by the book itself. "The electronic age," he argued, "if given its own unheeded leeway, will drift quite naturally into modes of cosmic humanism" and "the aspiration of our times for wholeness, empathy and depth of awareness is a natural adjunct of electric technology. There is a deep faith to be found in this new attitude—a faith that concerns the ultimate harmony of all being. Such is the faith with which

38 / The Roots of Modern Media Analysis this book has been written." It may have been a faith, but it was a peculiarly priceless one for it was pinned to the automatic, irreversible, nonpolitical operation of the new machines. To those of us who had closely followed McLuhan's essays in literary criticism, The Mechanical Bride and The Gutenberg Galaxy, the conclusions were startling, unexpected, and quite the reverse of his previous arguments. For example, in The Mechanical Bride he envisioned that "a single mechanical brain, of the sort developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by Professor Norbert Wiener, when hitched to the telepathic mechanics of Professor Joseph B. Rhine, could tyrannize over the collective consciousness of the race in ... science fiction style." And in that work and elsewhere McLuhan was sensitive to the threat of modern economies independent of the particulars of technology: "A power economy cannot tolerate power that cannot be centrally controlled. It will not tolerate the unpredictable actions and thoughts of individual men. That is plain from every gesture and intonation of current social and market research as well as from the curricula of our schools." Moreover, those who knew of his intellectual connection and indebtedness to his fellow Canadian Harold Innis were surprised to see how fundamentally he had revised Innis's position. The ideological hinge of McLuhan's arguments was recognized by some of the more acute of his earlier reviewers. Harold Rosenberg noted, for example, that "while McLuhan is an aesthete he is also an ideologue—one ready to spin out his metaphor of the 'extensions' until its webs cover the universe.... The drama of history is a crude pageant whose inner meaning is man's metamorphosis through the media."3 But at the same time this ideological image of electricity as the Great Reverser was underplayed by Rosenberg and others because within McLuhan's work was a compelling historical argument and a significant methodological and intellectual advance. From his Renaissance studies McLuhan absorbed Bacon's dictum that nature is a book to be read, although for the pioneers of modern science it was a text composed in obscure mathematical characters. McLuhan argued that social life could also be viewed as a book, a text, something composed, though written in the far more accessible characters of sound, gesture, and word. Consequently, technology did not have to be treated as a purely physical force but could also be viewed as a text. Technology was both an extension and an embodiment of mind and therefore contained and manifested meaning. It could be

The Roots of Modern Media Analysis I 39 read in an exegetical sense; its meaning could be unearthed from its material form in ways parallel to the treatment critics accorded literary texts. McLuhan's methodological advance, then, came through his attempt to break through the constraints of conventional North American social and communication theory with a new hermeneutic, a hermeneutic of technology and social life. Intellectually the advance was contained in two remarkable insights that McLuhan pressed with the outrageous daring necessary to arrest the attention of modern audiences. First, he argued that forms of communication such as writing, speech, printing, and broadcasting should not be viewed as neutral vessels carrying given and independently determined meaning. Rather, he proposed that these forms be considered technologies of the intellect, active participants in the process by which the mind is formed and in turn forms ideas. To put the matter differently, he argued that all technical forms are extensions of mind and embodiments of meaning. Technologies of communication are principally things to think with, molders of mind, shapers of thought: the medium is the message. In pressing this argument he opened a new avenue of historical scholarship and rephrased a large set of questions that had vexed scholars. The second advance McLuhan pioneered, which set certain constraints upon his critics, grew directly out of his literary studies. Students of the arts are likely to examine communication with quite a different bias than that advanced by social scientists. The question of the appeal of art is essentially a question of taste, broadly of aesthetics. McLuhan recognized, earlier than most, that the new means available for producing and reproducing art would demand and create an entirely new aesthetic. He sensed that cultural forms operate not at the level of cognition or information or even effect. The media of communication affect society principally by changing the dominant structures of taste and feeling, by altering the desired forms of experience. The new and proliferating means of recording experience meant that the monopoly enjoyed by print was to be exploded and that no one means of experiencing the world would dominate as printing had among educated classes for centuries. The new means of reproducing reality also meant that the historic barriers between the arts and other departments of life—art and science, work and leisure—would be driven down. Electronic communication would jumble experience, would creatively juxtapose ideas, forms,

40 / The Roots of Modern Media Analysis and experiences previously disseminated in different and isolated ways. In turn this would create new patterns of knowledge and awareness, a new hunger for experience, in much the same way that printing—by assembling the sacred and the profane, the new and the traditional, the exotic and the mundane, the practical and the fanciful in the same printer's workshop—led to a decisive alteration in modern taste. This erosion of barriers between the arts also meant the erosion of barriers between audiences. The division of culture into high and low, folk and popular, mass and elite, highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow—barriers and distinctions that were themselves the product of printing—would have to be discarded under the impact of new forms of communication that simply did not recognize these distinctions. The high arts were now often pirating mass and folk culture, and mass culture in turn was leaching the traditional arts. Thus, the ability to make things more widely available in graphic form, to reproduce at will sacred texts and treasured painting, to make reality itself in the drama of film and television, to record and freeze the most mundane of persons, scenes, and slices of reality that were historically convened in different and isolated ways signaled the existence of a new hunger for experience and a new means to realize it, and both of these demanded a new theory of aesthetics. But what was critical in this argument is McLuhan's realization, a realization he shared with Walter Benjamin and derived from James Joyce and the symbolists, that the new desires realized in the impractical objects of art would be demanded as well in the practical objects of everyday life. McLuhan erased the distinction between art and utility, between aesthetic action and practical form. Everyday objects—cars, clothes, and lightbulbs—were governed less by utility than by aesthetics: their meaning was to be sought in a principle of taste rather than a principle of interest and action. Specifically, communications media were to be read less in terms of their potential to transmit information or to service the practical needs of persuasion and governance and more in terms of their insinuation of a desire to realize experience aesthetically in altered form. Changes in technology, he came to conclude, offered the potential for redefining the aesthetic—that is, for altering taste and style, and through that alteration for redesigning the basic structures of social life. Technology does this at the most abstract level by offering the potential for reexperiencing time and space. Differing technologies of

The Roots of Modern Media Analysis I 41 communication have the capacity to expand or contract space, expand or contract time, changing the meaning of the fundamental coordinates of thought. This notion was obviously tied to Innis's earlier discovery of the spatial and temporal bias of media, though again McLuhan's discovery was not situated in the domain of practical action but at the level of aesthetic experience. His important argument about printing was not merely that it changed the dominant conception of space, but that it altered what we took to be an aesthetically satisfying pattern of spatial arrangement, whether this was the arrangement of a page, a city, a house, or a theory. Similarly, while printing altered our conception of time, it more importantly changed the dominantly pleasing patterns of rhythm. McLuhan was basically correct, then, in directing our consideration to the possibility that the new media of communication might be cultivating a taste for open rather than closed spaces, rimmed rather than axial patterns, historical and geologically modeled time rather than mechanical syncopation, or more generally a preference, in Mary Douglas's phrase, for group over grid. The importance of the questions McLuhan asked lay in his implicit attempt to apply hermeneutic insights to material objects, his stress on the new combinations and juxtapositions of experience created by modern technology, and his emphasis on the central place of aesthetic experience in all human action. Yet his failure to influence contemporary thought derived from weaknesses in the way he framed and presented his arguments in answering these questions, weaknesses that gradually overwhelmed his more positive achievements. In particular, he gradually slipped into technological determinism, a determinism so thorough as to remind one of the very nineteenth-century precursors McLuhan presumably was attempting to transcend. Further, his basic arguments about technology were not delivered, as he averred, as probes that opened up scholarship but as conclusions that closed it down. For example, his argument on the relation of print and nationalism, which should have opened up investigation of nationalism in many differing countries in relation to the time of the introduction of print, the class sponsoring it, the uses to which it was put, its relation to the oral tradition, and so on, has left us with a soggy conclusion rather than detailed scholarship. Similarly, his interests in a new hermeneutic and recognition of the role of aesthetics in human action were decisively compromised by two contrary and persistent tendencies of thought. His frequent focus on the direct effects of technology allowed him to be

42 / The Roots of Modern Media Analysis assimilated to a behaviorist tradition and, perhaps with greater devastation, his tendency to invoke cybernetic metaphors cast the problem up in systems theory terms. This latter tendency, a marriage of the avant-garde in art with cybernetics, ultimately forced his work back into the position of an ideology of the late bourgeois era. And that is where the critical move came. McLuhan managed to link hyperbole to metaphor, transforming the body into a metaphor for technology and assigning a characteristic quality to each of the senses: to the ear, sound and participation; to the tongue, taste and discrimination; to the eye, vision and privatization. He gave to Eliot's notion of the disassociation of sensibility a biological and technological root. And, in the critical move, he assigned to electrical communication the capacity for the reassociation of sensibility: the restoration of psychic life in a balanced sensorium, and social life in a global village. By such metaphors aesthetics, biology, and technology were converted into ideology. But McLuhan's work did not spring entirely or perhaps even largely out of literary and aesthetic sources. The debt to Innis is known and acknowledged and his citations reveal a wide and wise reading in history, biology, and social theory. But there are ideological precursors of his arguments in the work of scholars earlier in the century who argued for the capacity of electricity to act as midwife to a new society. And it is here that Mumford enters the argument. Mumford not only anticipated McLuhan's arguments but also traced an intellectual evolution in precisely the opposite direction: Mumford changed from an electrical optimist to a soured prophet of doom.4 Over seventy years ago, Mumford—as a contributor to Charles Beard's symposium Whither Mankind?—had seen the bright promise of electrical technology. The Garden Cities movement as formulated by Ebenezer Howard was "the first adequate conception of the problem." Mumford thought that "whatever the city of the future might be, we can now say with some confidence that it will not be the Leviathan of machinery." The Utopian Mumford was optimistic: with the future development of the "telephone and radio and ultimately television all the inhabitants of the planet could theoretically be linked together for instantaneous communications as closely as the inhabitants of a village." More recently, in The Highway and the City, he wrote: "All honor to Robert Louis Stevenson who back in the eighties foretold this mis-

The Roots of Modern Media Analysis I 43 carriage of technics; the word electricity now sounds the note of danger." And in his most recent major work, The Myth of the Machine, Mumford completely reversed his judgment: Their "city of the future" is one leveled down to the lowest possibility of active, autonomous, fully sentient life; just so much life as will conform to the requirements of the machine. To build any hopes for the future on such a structure would occur only to the highly trained but humanly underdimensioned "experts" who have contrived it.

This inversion of optimism and pessimism is not an unusual occurrence and should be instructive. And so I would briefly trace the roots of Mumford's ideas and his anticipation and ultimate rejection of McLuhan's position on electrical technology and communication. In the decades after the American Civil War, when the structure of American communications was laid down, electricity as fact and symbol seized hold of the native imagination. It was seen as a precursor of a new form of civilization. As technical fact, outside of history and geography, determined by the implacable march of American science, electricity promised to bring a new order out of the political and industrial disasters of the i86os and iSyos. It promised the restoration of community, the spiritualization of labor, the spread of Anglo-Saxon dominance and hegemony, the reign of universal peace, the salvation of the landscape, the rise of productivity—all those contradictory dreams that fired American, though not only American, minds. Moreover, electricity was pictured as classless, if not socialist. While lifting up communication it would erase those divisions of work, wealth, and power that assorted radicals saw as the denouement of the American dream. Electricity was a force invested with the power to transform the human landscape. One of the attractions of electricity was its seeming fit with the new organic philosophy that arose upon a discredited mechanism. While standard intellectual history usually cites the impact of Darwinism and German idealism, particularly Hegelianism, as the route of organicism into American thought, for most persons and purposes electricity cut a more gilded passageway into the imagination. Darwinism conflicted with deeply held religious notions, while idealism remained Germanic and foreign except to a limited class trained abroad. Electricity supported religious ideas, as Josiah Strong makes clear and Perry Miller

44 / The Roots of Modern Media Analysis demonstrated, and seemed not only natural but native: part of the American genius and inheritance from Franklin through Edison. Moreover, by a series of rhetorical transformations, some whimsical, some grounded in a metaphoric truth, electricity suggested the very essence of the organic process: the restoration of life and the human. It was a new, natural phenomenon ideally suited to the American landscape, mind, and society, unlike the inherited patterns of mechanical Europe. It lent itself to speed, movement, distance, and decentralism. It imitated, as many commentators noted, the very action of the brain, and its modern products were automata of the graphically human: extensions not of the wheel but of ear, eye, voice, and finally the brain itself. The idea of electricity, like that of community, crossed revolutionary lines: it symbolized what was desired and the means of attainment for groups on the left and right. Electricity became the central symbol in works as different as Edward Bellamy's influential projection of a new order in Looking Backward and standard tracts of the industrial right on the benefits of capitalist civilization. All of the claims that have been made for electricity and electrical communication, down through the computer and cable, satellite television, and the Internet, were made for the telegraph with about the same mixture of whimsy, propaganda, and truth. Cadences change, vocabulary is subtly altered, examples shift, the religious metaphors decline, but the medium has the same message. The perfection of Morse's instrument in 1844, the rapid growth of telegraph companies and the erection of "lightning lines" during the 18405 and 18505, and the first laying of the Atlantic cable in 1858 brought forth scores of paeans to the wonders of electricity. The growth of electrical communication rejuvenated Utopian social theory in America. It particularly changed the thought of a group of European and American scholars whose work revolved on the relationship of the city and countryside and who were pioneers in what has since been termed urban planning. The principal figures in this group were the Russian anarchist and geographer Peter Kropotkin, the Scot biologist Patrick Geddes, and, in America, Lewis Mumford. And their starting point was one of disappointment—disappointment in the nineteenth-century promise of industrialization and mechanical technology. In The City in History, Mumford credits Kropotkin with the first

The Roots of Modern Media Analysis I 45

systematic statement of the view that electricity might rescue humans from the blight of machine industry and restore them to communal life. Kropotkin described regional associations of industry and agriculture made possible by electricity and with this new technology a reawakening of the traditions and handicrafts of an older period and the restoration of community life. Kropotkin's faith was based on a valid perception. Electrical power, unlike steam, saved the landscape by utilizing water generation or lighter, more transportable fuel such as petroleum, which did less environmental damage than coal and "mining." Similarly, electricity promised a decentralist development by bringing work and power to the people rather than demanding that people be brought to the power and work. The telegraph similarly promised the distribution of information everywhere, simultaneously reducing the economic advantage of the city and bringing the more varied urban culture out to the countryside. No longer would people need to be physically in the city to partake of the advantages of art, commerce, and intellect that physical massing created. Finally, the small electric motor promised to lift the drudgery of work in small communities, dissipate the advantages of efficiency of the massed factory, stimulate and make more feasible handicraft production, and, as in the dream of William Morris, reclaim a more natural and older way of life. The symbol of electricity promised to many the dawning of a new age of decentralist rural production, communal life in small natural associations that would be economically viable and, with the growth or electronic communication, culturally viable as well. On a speaking tour of England, Kropotkin influenced the young Scot Patrick Geddes. Geddes, perhaps more than anyone else, popularized the notion that there were two qualitatively different periods of industrialization, corresponding to the early and late Paleolithic periods. He termed these periods the paleotechnic and neotechnic, differentiated among many dimensions but principally by their reliance on different forms of energy: steam and electricity. Geddes used this distinction to found one of the most important traditions of urban planning, merging it with the earlier Garden Cities movement founded by Ebenezer Howard. Howard had seen neotechnics as a means of escaping the traditional city. He proposed and founded two experimental communities distant from London, surrounded by green space, a new way of life

46 / The Roots of Modern Media Analysis made possible by electricity. Geddes supported this growth of decentralization and naturalism and gave it a distinctively regionalist interpretation. His great contribution was in planning or better facilitating the refurbishment of the existing city. He saw the city as a network of ritual order and communication and utilized new forms of communication and refurbished old ones to bring the city back to life. The criterion that guided his work was the notion of the city and neighborhood as social organisms. He therefore attempted to let areas regenerate themselves rather than being replaced by new and imposed designs. He believed in conservative surgery: rather than raze an entire neighborhood, he would recommend clearance of a small pocket to help circulation or provide a place for congregation while the bulk of the buildings remained intact. Anything, however minute, that carried tradition, that signified the rootedness of time and culture, was left. He was a pioneer of the social survey, the detailed designation of an area's past, the exhibit, the permanent civic exposition, the motion picture and drama—all designed to bring the past continuously to bear on the present. He fostered new departures in education, attempting to break the rule of rote learning and wed education at one level to the natural habitat and at another to the restored cloister of learning. The association between Kropotkin, Geddes, and Howard merged in Chicago in the years before and after Harold Innis studied there. Both Kropotkin and Geddes received their most enthusiastic American receptions in Chicago and felt most at home in the city. Howard most admired Chicago among American cities and based his work on that of the Chicago architect Daniel Burnham. Geddes influenced John Dewey's thinking on education and other matters. In turn, the idea of the electrical city became symbolized in Chicago architecture. Louis Sullivan built the first structures designed for the potential of electricity. Frank Lloyd Wright, Sullivan's student, conceived the skyscraper as a community within itself: its floors to be viewed as streets in the sky rather than as a collection of unintegrated functions or atomized units. In his more bucolic moments Wright saw the city, as did Howard, as superfluous in the age of electricity. As Mumford has remarked, it never appears to have entered Wright's mind "that one might need or profit by the presence of other men within an area compact enough for spontaneous encounters, durable enough for the realization of long-run plans, and attractive enough to stimulate social intercourse." Wright

The Roots of Modern Media Analysis I 47 felt that the automobile, the airplane, and electrical communication made the city unnecessary. People could work and reside in small, decentralized communities and the nation still would be integrated through high-speed, flexible transportation and communication. Wright announced clearly a theme that has continued unabated to this day: the superfluousness of geographic contiguity with the dawn of high-speed transportation and communication. It was mainly through the work of Lewis Mumford, however, that the ideas of Geddes, Howard, and Kropotkin and their attitudes toward electricity and technology entered the American scene. Mumford based his important work of 1934, Technics and Civilization, on Geddes's distinction between the paleotechnic (steam and mechanics) and neotechnic (electrical) phases of industry and communication. Mumford shared with Geddes the intellectual strategy of placing technological change at the center of the growth of civilization. In viewing the miscarriage of the machine he suggested that electricity had certain intrinsic potentials for producing a decentralized society, creating a new worker, and realizing a pastoral relation to nature. Only the cultural pseudomorph of capitalism, the housing of new forces in outmoded social forms, held back the latest advances in civilization. Throughout that work Mumford strikingly contrasted scenes of peace and order and cleanliness realized in the neotechnic world with the ugliness, exploitation, and disarray of the old world of mechanics. He recaptured in the photographic captions throughout Technics and Civilization some of the oldest dreams of the American imagination and remodeled them in terms of the potential of electricity. First the central metaphor of the electrical grid had to replace the machine and the neat rows of mechanical type: The principle of the electrical grid must be applied to our schools, libraries, art galleries, theaters, medical services; each local station though producing power in its own right must be able to draw on power, on demand, from the whole system.5

Second, decentralization: But the efficiency of small units worked by electric motors utilizing current either from local turbines or from a central power plant has given many small-scale industries a new lease on life: on a purely technical basis it can for the first time since the introduction of the steam engine compete on even terms with the larger unit.6

48 / The Roots of Modern Media Analysis Third, the creation of a new worker: The qualities the new worker's needs are alertness, responsiveness, and intelligent grasp of the separate parts: in short, he must be an all around mechanic rather than a specialized hand.7 Fourth, on nature, the landscape, and the pastoral: Electricity itself aids in this transformation. The smoke pall of paleotechnic industry begins to lift: with electricity the clear sky and clean waters of the neotechnic phase come back again: the water that runs through the immaculate discs of the turbine ... is just as pure when it emerges.8 Mumford's demon is capitalism, the fetters that emasculate neotechnics, and Technics and Civilization ends with a plea for socialism. But in condemning paleotechnic civilization he saw it, as did Marx, in a different vocabulary, as the destruction of the temple: prelude to rebuilding. While humanly speaking the paleotechnic phase was a disastrous interlude, it helped by its very disorder to intensify the search of order, and by its special forms of brutality to clarify the goals of human living. Actions and reaction were equal and in opposite directions. The central redeeming feature that all commentators on electricity from Kropotkin through Mumford and McLuhan have seen in this technology is that it is decentralizing, that it will break up the concentrations of power in the state and industry and populations in the city. In Technics and Civilization Mumford argues that "the neotechnic phase was marked . . . by the conquest of a new form of energy: electricity. . . . [It] effected revolutionary changes: these touched the location and the concentration of industries and the detailed organization of the factory."9 The decentralizing effects of electrical power were matched by the decentralizing effects of electrical communication. Mumford argues that the giantism typical of paleotechnic industry was caused by a defective system of communication that antedated the telephone and telegraph. With electrical power, factories could be placed where they were wanted, not merely where the power source dictated they be. Factories could be rearranged without regard to the centralized shafts and aisles that a central power source like steam demanded. Similarly, the new means of communication dictated that people no longer had to be in physical contact in order to transact their business. Freed from reliance

The Roots of Modern Media Analysis I 49

on face-to-face communication and a slow and erratic mail service, industry could be decentralized in the countryside. As a result, neotechnics spiritualizes labor and reduces the human robot: Here, as in neotechnical industry generally, advances in production increase the number of trained technicians in the laboratory, and decrease the number of human robots in the plant. In short, one witnesses in the chemical processes the general change that characterizes all genuinely neotechnic industry: the displacement of the proletariat.10

This is the essence of the general argument Mumford makes, on the great transition from paleotechnics to neotechnics, from steam power to electrical power, from capitalistic to postcapitalistic social forms. In describing electrical communication he saw its potential for transcending space—almost at times seeing it, as Frank Lloyd Wright did, as providing a complete substitute for social relations: With the invention of the telegraph a series of inventions began to bridge the gap in time between communication and response despite the handicaps of space: first the telegraph, the wireless telephone and finally television. As a result, communication is now on the point of returning, with the aid of mechanical devices, to that instantaneous reaction of person to person with which it began; but the possibilities of this immediate meeting, instead of being limited by space and time, will be limited only by the amount of energy available and the mechanical perfection and accessibility of the apparatus. When the radio telephone is supplemented by television communication will differ from direct intercourse only to the extent that immediate physical contact will not be possible.11

Mumford, always skeptical within his enthusiasms, always projecting the dark side of his hopes, recognized the paradox of electrical communication: that the media of reflective thought—reading, writing, and drawing—could be weakened by television and radio; that closer contact did not necessarily mean greater peace; that the new inventions would be foolishly overused; that human skills in the arts could be extirpated by easy entertainment. Nonetheless, he finally registered a reserved but positive judgment on electronic communication: Nevertheless instantaneous personal communication over long distance is one of the outstanding marks of the neotechnic phase: it is the mechanical symbol of those world wide cooperations of thought and feeling which must emerge, finally, if our whole civilization is not to sink into ruin. The new avenues of communication have the

50 / The Roots of Modern Media Analysis characteristic features and advantages of the new technics; for they imply, among other things, the use of mechanical apparatus to duplicate and further organic operations: In the long run they promise not to displace the human being but to refocus him and enlarge his capacities. .. . Perhaps the greatest social effect of radio-communication so far has been a political one: the restoration of direct contact between leader and a group. Plato defined the limits of the size of a city as the number of people who could hear the voice of a single orator: today limits do not define a city but a civilization. Wherever neotechnic instruments exist and a common language is used there are now the elements of almost as close a political entity as that which once was possible in the tiniest cities in Attica.12

I have here expunged the dark side of Mumford's prophecy to emphasize the essentially optimistic tone. To be fair it must be said, however, that he felt in the 19305 that at that moment the dangers of electronic communication seemed greater than the benefits. He guardedly but warmly embraced the resurgence of regionalism in the nineteenth century as "being a reaction against the equally exaggerated neglect of the traditions and historic monuments of a community life, fostered by the abstractedly progressive minds of the nineteenth century." It would be grossly unfair to conclude that Mumford, in his early work, was an unambiguous champion of neotechnics and of electrical communication or felt that the impact of electricity was automatic. He concluded at one point that the neotechnic refinement of the machine, without a coordinate development of higher social purposes, has only magnified the possibilities of depravity and barbarism. And yet his habit of writing of neotechnics in the past tense, his tendency to imply that only the outmoded shell of capitalism retarded the emergence of a qualitatively new electrical world where we would have the cake of power to be consumed at the table of decentralized community, led to a wide adoption of his views. To put it more strongly, Mumford's essential vision of electrical power and communication became a litany of social redemption that infused most writing, popular and intellectual, on technology and the future, including that of Marshall McLuhan. The influence of Mumford, at the level of both ideology and conceptual analysis, was not clear until the publication of Understanding Media. Even in The Mechanical Bride, however, McLuhan pointed to Mumford and his "effort to modify the social and individual efforts of technology by stressing concepts of social biology" as a road past the Marxist indictments of capitalistic civilization. Moreover, he cited Mum-

The Roots of Modern Media Analysis I 51 ford's analysis as an example of how "we may by a reasonable distribution of power and by town and country planning enjoy all the lost advantages" of countryside living without sacrificing any of the new gains of technology.13 But more importantly Mumford foreshadowed, where he did not make explicit, the central arguments—indeed, the slogans— we have come to identify with the heart of McLuhan's arguments. The first, and perhaps most important, foreshadowing is Mumford's view that neotechnics was a reassertion of the organic principle in the face of mechanization. He emphasized that the new forms of communication were extensions of biological capacity: The organic has become visible again even within the mechanical complex: some of our most characteristic mechanical instruments— the telephone, the phonograph, the motion picture—have grown out of our interest in the human voice and the human ear and out of knowledge of their physiology and anatomy.14

Mumford explicitly anticipated McLuhan's emphasis on technology as "extensions of man": The automaton is the last step in a process that began with the use of one part or another of the human body as a tool. In back of the development of tools and machines lies the attempt to modify the environment in such a way as to fortify and sustain the human organism: the effort is either to extend the powers of the otherwise unarmed organism or to manufacture outside the body a set of conditions more favorable toward manufacturing its equilibrium and ensuring its survival.15

The growth of technology was in part an attempt to build an automaton: a machine that appeared to perfect human functions, that was, in short, lifelike. The movement from naturalism to mechanism was to remove the organic symbol: to take the mechanical player from the mechanical piano. Naturalism deeply affected us, however, even in the structure of our language. It is, of course, this same view of the computer that McLuhan proposes: the mind externalized in machine; an automaton, lifelike, yet stripped of the organic symbol that McLuhan's metaphors attempt to restore. And it is this reinsertion of the natural back into the mechanical that is the stylistic hinge of McLuhan's writing. Mumford and McLuhan ascribe the same general deleterious effects to the rise of printing, particularly as it served as an agent of uniformity. Again, Mumford:

52 / The Roots of Modern Media Analysis The printing press was a powerful agent for producing uniformity in language and so by degrees in thought. Standardization, massproduction, and capitalistic enterprise came in with the printing press.16 While Mumford makes the clock the central invention of paleotechnic times, he attributes to print the effects McLuhan was to amplify and make less ambiguous: Second to the clock in order if not perhaps in importance was the printing press.. .. Printing was from the beginning a completely mechanical achievement. Not merely that: it was the type for all future instruments of reproduction for the printed sheet, even before the military uniform, was the first completely standardized product, manufactured in series, and the movable types themselves were the first example of completely standardized and interchangeable p a r t s . . . abstracted from gesture and physical presence, the printed word furthered that process of analysis and isolation which became the leading achievement of the era.17 Moreover, Mumford clearly saw that the effect of printing was to unbalance the human sensorium: Print made a greater impression than actual events, and by centering attention on the printed word, people lost that balance between the sensuous and intellectual, between image and sound, between the concrete and the abstract, which was to be achieved momentarily by the best minds of the fifteenth century. . . . To exist was to exist in print: the rest of the world became more shadowy.18 Mumford recognized clearly that the definition of media had to be extended to institutions and artifacts, much as McLuhan did in Understanding Media, and that printing was central to the perceptual and organizational form these objects took. Moreover, Mumford gave concrete examples for the effect of print, of paleotechnics generally, on the senses and on aesthetic perception: With the starvation of the senses [during the paleotechnic period] went a general starvation of the mind: mere literacy, the ability to read signs, shop notices, newspapers took the place of that general sensory and motor training that went with the handicraft and agricultural industries. . . . The eye, the ear, the touch starved and battered by the external environment took refuge in the filtered medium of print; and the sad constraint of the blind applied to all avenues of experience. The museum took the place of the concrete reality; the guidebook took the

The Roots of Modern Media Analysis I 53 place of the museum; the criticism took the place of the picture; the written description took the place of the building, the scene in nature, the adventure, the living act. This exaggerates and caricatures the paleotechnic state of mind but it does not necessarily falsify it.19

Only the qualification and the implicit ideological judgment differentiate the remark from one of McLuhan's analyses of print. McLuhan's notion of forms of communications being a "rear view mirror" and of the "content of a medium being another medium" are also anticipated by Mumford's notion of a cultural pseudomorph. Mumford borrowed the idea in turn from geology. A rock will often be leached of its original composition yet still maintain its outward form. A cultural psuedomorph occurs when "new forces, activities, institutions, instead of crystallizing independently into their own appropriate forms may creep into the structure of an existing civilization."20 Again and again Mumford comes back to the theme of communication, of the extensions of the biological organs and the feedback effect of technology. In neotechnics the human function again "takes on some of its non-specialized character: photography helps recultivate the eye, the telephone the voice, the radio the ear."21 And it was in art that the "vital organs of life which have been amputated through historic accident must be restored at least in fantasy as preliminary to their actual rebuilding in fact."22 He recognized as well the fusion of sense provided by the new technology: If photography has become popular again in our own day after its first great but somewhat sentimental outburst in the eighties, it is perhaps because like an invalid returning to health, we are finding a new delight in being, seeing, touching, feeling; because in a rural or neotechnic environment the sunlight and pure air that make it possible are present.23

What McLuhan and Mumford originally shared was the view that neotechnics restores the organic and aesthetic. As Mumford put it: "at last the quantitative and mechanical has become life sensitive."24 For Mumford, the background scene is biological while for McLuhan it is aesthetic, though neither rejects what the other affirms: McLuhan cites the biologist J. Z. Young for support; Mumford refers to the new aesthetes. Mumford notes that from biology "the investigation of the world of life opened up new possibilities for the machine itself: vital interests, ancient human wishes influence the development of new inventions. Flight, telephonic communication, the phonograph, the motion

54 / The Roots of Modern Media Analysis

picture all arose out of the more scientific study of living organisms."25 And he moves from biology to aesthetics: "This in living organisms does not stop short with machines that stimulate eye and ear. From the organic world comes an idea utterly foreign to the paleotechnic mind: the importance of shape."26 Mumford recognized that the new forms of visual reproduction even affected the perception of the self, a phenomenon McLuhan would later publicize as a widespread abandonment of jobs in a search of roles: Whereas in the paleotechnic phase one conversed with the mirror and produced the biographical portrait and the introspective biography, in the neotechnic phase one poses for the camera or still one acts for the motion picture. The change is from an introspective to a behavioristic psychology, from the fulsome sorrows of Werther to the impassive public mask of an Ernest Hemingway. Facing hunger and death in the midst of a wilderness a stranded aviator writes . . . "I must have looked good, carrying the big logs on my back in my underwear." Alone, he still thinks of himself as a public character, being watched: and to a greater or less degree everyone, from the crone in a remote hamlet to the political dictator in his carefully prepared state it is the same position. This constant sense of a public world would seem in part, at least, to be the result of the camera and the camera-eye that developed with it.27

And finally, the same linkage of the aesthetic and technological underlie both their positions. As usual, Mumford puts it most clearly: Every effective part in this whole neotechnic environment represents an effort of the collective mind to widen the province of order and control and provision. And here, finally, the perfected forms begin to hold human interest even apart from practical performances: they tend to produce that inner composure and equilibrium, that sense of balance between the inner impulse and the outer environment, which is one of the marks of a work of art. The machines, even when they are not works of art, underlie our art—that is, our organized perceptions and feelings—in the way that Nature underlies them, extending the basis upon which we operate and confirming our own impulse to order. The economic: the objective: the collective: and finally the integration of these principles in a new conception of the organic— these are the marks, already discernible, of our assimilation of the machine not merely as an instrument of practical action but as a valuable mode of life.28

The Roots of Modern Media Analysis I 55 I do not wish to overemphasize the similarities between Mumford and McLuhan. Mumford is always more complex, balanced, and moralistic in judgment. What McLuhan did was to seize upon a similar linkage of art, perception, and the machine, a set of propositions about technology and culture, and amplify them through literary sources, stripping them of the complex context in which Mumford situated them. Above all, by setting technology outside of the density, the thickness, of history and culture, he produced out of this inherited material a modern drama. He made the electrical machine an actor in an eschatological and redemptive play. The relationship between Mumford and McLuhan can be described as the inversion of a trajectory. McLuhan's earliest work was an analysis of the large cultural complexes that distinguish civilizations and an admiration for "the southern quality": the precapitalist features of southern culture that provided a decisive if not an effective critique of industrialism in terms of human and organic values. McLuhan ends in the embrace of a thorough technological determinism, a poet of postindustrial society and a prophet with one message: yield to the restorative capacity of the modern machine, throw off the cultural pseudomorph retarding progress. As McLuhan increasingly projected a "rhetoric of the electrical sublime," increasingly saw in the qualitative difference of electrical technology a road past the authentic blockages and disruptions of industrial life, Lewis Mumford turned progressively in the opposite direction. While Mumford's early work was never completely trapped in technological determinism, the decision to hang his analysis of historical change on technological stages such as paleotechnics and neotechnics, an analysis he inherited from Patrick Geddes and in turn extended, centered technology as the critical factor in human and social development. Politics and culture entered derivatively as the housing, accelerator, retarder of technical potential. The trajectory of his work was away from this initial position. By midcentury he could see no difference between the capitalist and the socialist state, as both were dedicated to an extirpation of the past, total management of the present, and a future based solely on the mechanics of power and productivity. In his later work Mumford adopted a stance almost precisely the opposite of McLuhan's. He attempted to systematically deflate the image of man as "homo faber," the toolmaker; to cut down the re-

56 / The Roots of Modern Media Analysis ceived view of technology as the central agent in human development; and to emphasize the role of art, ritual, and language as the decisive achievements in human development. He diagnosed the central alterations in human development not in terms of technological complexes but rather in terms of a struggle of, in Stephen Pepper's terms, world hypotheses: mechanism versus organicism. Human history looks increasingly like a bad idea: the domination of a lifeless, devitalized image of nature imposed upon man. By the 19608 he had abandoned the distinction between the paleotechnic and neotechnic eras. He saw then the trajectory of modern history as the recreation of the "myth of the machine" and the "pentagon of power." Whatever short-run gains and ameliorations had been introduced by electrical power and communication had been almost immediately sacrificed to a criminal and insane worldview: the vision of the universe and everything in it as a machine and, in the name of that machine, the extirpation of all human purposes, types, values, and social forms that did not fit within the limited scope of machine civilization. This in turn enthroned a pentagon of power: a community devoted to the uncritical development, without reason or control, of power (energy), political domination, productivity, profit, and publicity. This frankly dystopian vision was hard won biographically and historically. Mumford always was suspicious, to put it mildly, of the military, and one of the fatal corruptions of technical advance has been, in his view, how much of it was fueled by militarism. This is true in particular of electronic communication, which is the offspring of World War II needs for radar and servo-mechanisms to direct artillery and the cold war odyssey into space. Mumford's only son, Geddes, was killed in the Italian campaign, and this not surprisingly deepened and soured his views of military adventure and technical advance. Moreover, he recognized, more clearly than most 19305 liberals, the active interdependence of the state, the military, and scientific and technological elites. Mumford recognized in McLuhan's work a defense and legitimation, often implicit, of the very groups and agencies Mumford was attempting to excoriate. In The Pentagon of Power he turned direct attention on McLuhan and the "electronic phantasmagoria . . . he conjures up."29 He accused McLuhan of proposing an "absolute mode of control: one that will achieve total illiteracy, with no permanent record

The Roots of Modern Media Analysis I 57 except that officially committed to the computer and open only to those permitted to this facility."30 Mumford characterized McLuhan's appeal as a return to a preprimitive world where the "sole vestige of the multifarious world of concrete forms and ordered experience will be the sounds and 'tactile' images on the constantly present television screen or such abstract derivative information as can be transferred to the computer."31 McLuhan's goal was, he thought, total "cultural dissolution," a form of tribal communism, "though it is in fact the extreme antithesis of anything that can be properly called tribal or communistic. As for 'communism,' this is McLuhan's public relations euphemism for totalitarian control."32 While McLuhan never, to my knowledge, directly answered Mumford, his colleague Edmund Carpenter used a front-page review of the first volume of The Myth of the Machine in the Sunday New York Times as an occasion to devastate Mumford, particularly for being in the literal and figurative sense "an old man." A case of parricide, I take it. While Mumford's last work has many deficiencies—its attack is too broad-gauged, its moralizing finally tedious, and its gloomy prophecy encouraging of the very powerlessness it wishes to eliminate—he does offer a sounder diagnosis of the general currents of modern history. If we can forget for the moment large claims and transhistorical beatitudes, it seems reasonably clear that modern communications has aided in enlarging the scale of social organization beyond the nationstate to the regional federation of countries and bureaucracy. In doing so, electronics has furthered the spatial bias of print and increasingly centralized political and cultural power. Whatever tendency existed within electronics to cultivate a new aesthetic sense and a rejuvenated appreciation of the organic has been more than counterbalanced by the tendency of television to increase the privatization of existence and the overwhelming dependence of people on distant mechanical sources of art, information, and entertainment. For all the vaunted capacity of the computer to store, process, and make available information in densities and quantities heretofore unknown, the pervasive tendency to monopolize knowledge in the professions and the data banks continues unabated. The ability of television to involve us in depth in the lives of people around the world is more than offset by its equal tendency to imprison us within our own speechless, looking-glass world: the silent spectator as a mode of being.

58 / The Roots of Modern Media Analysis If we consider this argument between Mumford and McLuhan in terms of the larger debate over electrical technology, it seems at the moment reasonable to conclude that electrical communication has up to this time largely served to consolidate and extend the cultural hegemony and social forms that first appeared in the wake of the printing press. Notes 1. See, for instance, Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformation in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Jack Goody, ed., Literacy in Traditional Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1951); Harold Innis, Empire and Communications (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1972); and Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Knopf, 1977). 2. See, for instance, Raymond Rosenthal, ed., McLuhan: Pro and Con (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1968), and Gerald E. Stearn, ed., McLuhan: Hot and Cool (New York: Dial, 1967). 3. Stearn, McLuhan: Hot and Cool, 202. 4. For more on Mumford's vision, see Lewis Mumford in Whither Mankind: A Panorama of Modern Civilization, ed. Charles Beard (New York: Longmans, Green, 1928), 308-9; Lewis Mumford, The Highway and the City (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963); and Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1967-70). 5. Lewis Mumford, City Development (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1945), 185-86. 6. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963 [1923]), 225. 7. Ibid., 227. 8. Ibid., 255-56. 9. Ibid., 221. 10. Ibid., 229. 11. Ibid., 239-40. 12. Ibid., 241. 13. Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride (Boston: Beacon, 1951), 34, 76. 14. Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 6. 15. Ibid., 10. 16. Ibid., facing page 84. 17. Ibid., 134-35. 18. Ibid., 136. 19. Ibid., 181. 20. Ibid., 340. 21. Ibid., 279. 22. Ibid., 286. 23. Ibid., 340. 24. Ibid., 254. 25. Ibid., 250. 26. Ibid., 252.

The Roots of Modern Media Analysis I 59 27. Ibid., z43. 28. Ibid., 356. 29. Mumford, Myth of the Machine, vol. 2, 293. 30. Ibid., 2.94. 31. Ibid., 293-94. 32. Ibid., 295.

3 / Communications and Economics First published in 195*4

The heroic efforts, under way for at least four decades now, to create a rapprochement between communications and economics, to create an economics of communications (or, for the more committed, a political economy of communications), to find one frame of reference within which to contain these two social practices and disciplines, has yielded substantial results but not as yet general satisfaction. That is the paradox I want to explore in this essay. There is no mystery concerning the renewed urgency of the inquiry into the economics of communications. We live in a new phase of the political economy of the world in which both national governments and private firms recognize that trade no longer follows the flag but rather the communications system, in which knowledge, always a source of power, is bleached into information, adapted to a new technology of digital encoding and modeling, made still lighter and more transportable, for the primary end of manipulation and control. The radiant arc of a communications satellite 2.2,300 miles above the earth synchronizes time and ingests the globe into homogenized space. The computer abstracts geography into the galaxy and miniaturizes the clock of awareness to the picosecond. The conquest of time and space, the dream of the nineteenth-century romantics, explorers, and imperialists (they were sometimes the same person), has now been realized. The aggressive transformation of publics into audiences, which in the late nineteenth century created the "imaginary community of the na60

Communications and Economics I 61

tion," is now a global process as Time-Warner, with an eye on consumer markets, announces "The World Is Our Audience." Sometime in the 19705, to choose a point of arrest in a continuous social process, a stable—though not an altogether satisfactory—structure of economics, politics, and communications broke up and new forces were set loose in the world. The symptoms and symbols of the breakup were two technologies and commodities, computers and satellites, simultaneously producer goods and consumer goods, that reconfigured the map of social relations. Economic activity, political sovereignty, and cultural production changed shape and consequence within a new scalar dynamic; not the city, the nation, or even the empire but the globe became the habitus of these processes.1 Cultural fragmentation and postmodernist homogenization became two constitutive trends of a single global reality, a splitting in which social life simultaneously expanded and contracted; the stage of human activity enlarged to the globe and collapsed to the village, making the nationstate itself appear increasingly problematic. The only concepts and ideas that have emerged to contain these developments are the desiccated symbols of information and the information society. However, information and the information society are products of the theory and technology driving these developments rather than critical reflections on the practices they represent. As symbols they suggest that the new conquest of time and space is orderly, systematic, and benign. The information society is announced as fact and globalization declared a reality when both are in the planning stage. The future is colonized such that neat geometric lines run into the horizon, imploring us to lift our eyes from the chaotic present to apprehend global Utopia. Meanwhile, out on the streets, where we actually live, all is chaos. There the convergent order of the new information society dissolves into ceaseless and disorderly flows—new people and new things flowing to new places along new routes: flows of migrants, guest workers, tourists, entrepreneurs, and itinerants; new flows of capital, factories, messages, products, ideas, images, and currencies. Capitalism, though not capitalism alone, keeps the pot boiling: new things flowing from new places to new places, upsetting established patterns of geography, trade, and communications, imploding and exploding at the same time. The information society turns out to be an unstable and, in many ways, an unfriendly place in which ethnic nationalisms again occupy the cen-

62 / Communications and Economics ter of the stage. Everywhere state and nation are pitted against one another; primordia have been globalized and identity politics are practiced on a world scale. A new information class, along with the new technology, has brought us to, in the words of the former chairman of Citicorp, Walter Wriston, "a twilight of sovereignty"2 for that class has the skills to write a complex software program that produces a billion dollars of revenue and still can walk past any customs officer in the world with nothing of "value" to declare. But what are we to make of this class, one now bred in the universities, and whose sovereignty is being ended and what is the pretender to the sovereign throne? Privatization is yet another, and perhaps more useful, term by which these processes are currently understood, and that notion fits well with Walter Wriston's image of products slipping by customs agents because they are lodged in the head. However, the process of privatization is a more general and rigorous one than is commonly understood. The first and most general focus is the privatization of broadcasting in the wake of satellite communication. Once satellites were available and satellite parking spaces over Europe allocated, it was a foregone conclusion that some firms, most likely American, were going to invade the television space of European countries and siphon off mass markets. To prevent this, or, alternatively, to preserve a European "high culture" tradition, country after country has either given up state-run television or permitted the growth of private networks. Consequently, broadcasting was transformed from a phenomenon of collective public provision to more uniformly a matter of private market transactions, though given the quasi-public good character of cultural production, it was rationalized through an advertising-based distribution system. In turn, the costs of television production, even for state systems faced with reduced revenues, increasingly forced coproduction across national and linguistic boundaries. Depending on which side of the coin one examines, this looks like either the Americanization or the Canadianization of the world: Americanization if one emphasizes the dominance of the strongest exporter and coproduction partner; Canadianization if one emphasizes the deracination of production and the resulting "cultural soup" that spreads on a worldwide basis. Pastiche cultures, assembled from a cross-national production process, further displace indigenous cultural forms. In one sense, then, privatization refers to the displacement of indigenous cultures by pastiche or postmodern cultures and the elimina-

Communications and Economics I 63 tion or decline of public or state-run broadcasting. In another, perhaps stronger, sense, privatization refers to the worldwide transformation of political and cultural publics into political and cultural audiences. In multichannel environments, broadcasting connects more firmly to individual preference structures. The connection of a fragmented structure of private production to a fragmented structure of home reception results in a secondary and more problematic diremption of a public sphere, one in which the entire notion of public communication and a common culture of politics and pleasure evaporates. Balkanization, whether of groups or individuals, displaces a common arena of discourse and communication. Culture is not only privately manufactured and privately distributed but its audience is conceived as statistically concatenated individuals or members of segmented transnational groups rather than as citizens of a common polity or participants in a common tradition. How are we to contain and explicate these developments? As I said earlier, the only framework widely available is the theory of information and the information society. However, the conclusions from that framework are foreordained by, on one side, the conception of communication embodied in information theory that generates and rationalizes the technology at the heart of the problem and, on the other, by the system of neoclassical economics that generates the commodity view of information, which reduces communication to the warming metaphors of conquest and weaponry, a mere process of the transmission in space for purposes of manipulation and control. In fact, the attempt to integrate communications and economics into a consistent framework is at the heart of the problem. Communications and economics constitute contradictory frameworks. That was, I believe, the great insight of Harold Innis even as he tacked back and forth between these subjects and phenomena, borrowing from both in order that they might check off the respective biases of each.31 wish to avoid the strategy of making economics a special case of communications, though there are decent logical reasons for doing so. Nor do I wish to follow the opposite strategy, more common on the intellectual left, of making communications purely a derivative case of economics, though, again, there are good historical reasons for doing so. Rather, for reasons that are both political and moral, I want to pursue a framework of difference, a framework in which communications and economics stand in opposition, as contradictory practices. This is a rela-

64 / Communications and Economics tion, at least in theory, of countervailing power in which the phenomena of communications contain and control economics in the name of public life and discourse. The bias of communications toward the common and communal is, in turn, checked by economics wherein sufficient freedom is maintained to support a sphere of private life and action. Communication and public life, in the sense I wish to use these terms, must refer to something other than the state or public broadcasting. Similarly, economics and private life must refer to something other than commerce and monopoly capitalism. Public must refer to a domain outside both the state and the economy. Thus, as an example, if the public sphere has been dirempted by the creation of an international or global economy, the answer is not simply to internationalize the public sphere, which can only be accomplished via state power, but to re-create public life as a countervailing force at the local level. It is not a matter of thinking globally and acting locally; it is a matter of thinking locally and acting globally. I want to develop this argument by outlining the incommensurable relation between economics and communications. That is the heart of the legacy left us by Harold Innis and, as with Innis, it comes down to making a plea for time. I will make it through some well known but not always well understood propositions. Communications and economics are, in the first instance, human practices. However, they are practices that stand in a contradictory relation to one another; they are, historically though not ontologically, mutually exclusive activities. Economics is the practice of allocating scarce resources. Communication is the process of producing meaning, a resource that is anything but scarce—indeed, is a superabundant, free good. It is hard to apprehend and take full account of this contradiction because the practice of communications, like all other human practices (religion comes to mind) has itself been so transformed by the theory and practice of economics that the former (communications as a practice, meaning as a resource) can hardly be recognized given the dominance of the latter. The contradiction at the level of practice means that reflections on these practices also contradict one another. The disciplines that emerge to reflect back on the practice and aim to make the bases of the practices explicit, to codify everyday knowledge in theoretic terms, similarly stand in contradictory relation to one another. Communications

Communications and Economics I 65 and economics as disciplines, therefore, cannot be reconciled with one another; they confront one another blankly because they proceed from incommensurable premises. There is no way of integrating the propositions of each into a consistent framework or of making these disciplines simple complements wherein each borrows from the other the resources necessary for its respective completion. I go too far. In our time communications and economics can only be reconciled by an evacuation of the resources of meaning in the service of profit and power. Therefore, the only useful relation between communications and economics is a countervailing one at the level of both theory and practice. Communications and economics derive from different motivational structures and produce incommensurably alternative pictures of human action and social life. They can cancel or neutralize one another; they can check off each other's biases but otherwise they will be fiercely resistant to any form of integration. They constitute a contradictory order of things: their root meanings and consequences are opposed both in theory and in practice. This argument will be difficult to sustain in a compressed essay, and much will have to be left to the imagination of the reader. Moreover, a series of strategic retreats will have to be made at certain critical junctures. For example, because economics as practice and discipline relies upon the resources of communication—it is rather difficult to organize work or enunciate a theory without recourse to language—a strong case can be made for making economics a special case of communications, a case made with unusual force by the economist Donald McCloskey.4 However, I want to bypass the more delicate and refined parts of the argument to make a bald, but I think necessary, case for the analytical independence of communications and economics as revealed within modern history. That independence is necessary to salvage a domain of politics and culture that can resist the insidious imperialism of the economic and give us the possibility, though not the assurance, of a public life. There is only one form of economic theory and practice these days: the neoclassical form, the form that reflects and explains modern capitalism. As theory and practice, it is one of the great achievements of the human mind in action, but it exacts a terrible price in the domain of politics and culture. Let me repeat and restate what is now a very old story. Economic theory, or at least its neoclassical mainstream, though


these days the mainstream has no tributaries, has as its basic assumption that individual behavior is motivated entirely by self-regarding preferences. This assumption, which Steven Jones has called "calculating avarice,"5 has proven to be a very powerful one for organizing human activity through the institution of the market. Neoclassical economics starts from the assumption, and its institutions manifest the fact, that the desires that motivate human action are individual and subjective and therefore unknowable to an observer, unsharable via conscious acts, or purely exogenous. These subjective desires, these given and individual preferences, are expressed in human action as an attempt to maximize utility or the pleasure and happiness that the satisfaction of desire brings. Of happiness and despair we may have no measure, but we do have a theory. Mary Douglas, whom I am both quoting and paraphrasing in what follows, has argued that economic theory has its impenetrable cohesiveness—that is, its resistance to all disciplines beyond economics and to all social practices other than the economic—because of the professional intensity of its discourse and because Western thought is impregnated with the experience of the market.6 As Albert Hirschman has pointed out, the idea that greed is the dominant human motive came to be gradually accepted only after the sixteenth century, when the market itself became dominant and was expected to be a motive force that would curb the passion for power.7 The economic mode of thought and the economic as a differentiated sphere of activity enjoys, in the words of Louis Dumont, "an ideological supremacy over the political in the liberal and capitalist world thanks to its embodying a purer and more perfect form of individualism."8 In the market the focus is upon individuals exchanging privately owned goods; the individual and the rights that accrue to the individual from ownership are the given of the economic mode of thought, the rarely questioned starting point of the analysis. This is true, paradoxically enough, even with the most extreme critiques of capitalism. Those on the left, because they are no less worshipful of the market, individualism, and individual rights, continuously fall into the assumptions of the objects of their contempt. As a result, socialist economics rarely becomes more than neoclassical economics at the extreme: monopoly, the technocratic state, and the selfregarding individual. We may understand the limits or margins of economics from our own experience—after all, we do encounter in ourselves and others ac-

Communications and Economics I 67

tions and motives that are selfless and other-regarding; we need not resort to sociobiology to explain altruism. Still, economics has no room for moral feelings. Gary Becker was rewarded with the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics by imperializing three central economic assumptions—maximizing behavior, stable preferences, and equilibrium—to illuminate all types of decisions, including those in politics and family life. And, of course, he was correct, though in the way self-fulfilling prophecies are correct and not, as economists often pretend, the way natural laws are correct. The assumptions of the market have so invaded and transformed all human activity and relations that little remains outside the imaginative orbit of the market. Interest group politics (about all that is left to politics) crime and deviancy, incantations of individual rights, charity and virtue, alternative families—all are now plausibly explained by economic assumptions. At the morbid margins of the social, economists can do little more than wring their hands and lament cultural lag or insist that moral progress somehow does not keep up with material progress. Neoclassical economics presumes a society of people with preferences but is silent on the question of how society can exist at all. "In analyzing the market for private goods, classical economics jumps from individual self-interest to community interest, the interest of society, the common interest, by invoking the magic of the invisible hand. .. . Behind it lies the community engaged in its normative debate and the laws, conventions, and social values to which the narrative debate gives rise."9 It is this normative framework of the social, and the debate and the discourse that sustain and express it, that economics must either ignore or transform into an economic activity, a mere pursuit of self-regarding preferences. And that is historically exactly what has been pursued and achieved, though in two rather different ways. In this sense, economics as practice and discipline is devoted to the suppression of communication; the conceptual device through which the suppression is pursued is information. Economics has no sense of the social beyond that provided by the market. The social is a mere derivative of the self-regarding pursuit of utility by atomized selves. Because the maximizing assumption leads to neither a theory nor a practice of the social, noneconomic social theory has generally been unhappy with the claim of economics to explain the operation of modern societies. Unfortunately, the formulation of a response to economics is either in terms laid down by economics or in the

68 / Communications and Economics spaces left uncovered by economic theory. The social sciences, again in their mainstream form, simply transferred the assumptions of utility theory from the individual to the social. Utility, no longer in our heads, is relocated in our genes or the environment. Sociobiology is an example of the first strategy; behaviorism and sociological functionalism are examples of the second. Behaviorism and functionalism in turn provided the underpinning for our understanding of communication at large, but these positions, as I have attempted to suggest, are derivations of the limitations of economics rather than independent views of communications. Certain assumptions about communication eventually underwrite neoclassical theory (the theory of representation, the self-righting process in the free market of ideas) and have undergirded the belief that the quest for utility can produce a progressive social order—economically, morally, and politically progressive. The "invisible hand" works in the marketplace of both ideas and products. The utilitarian conception of human conduct and society, then, was twisted out of its originally subjective framework and resituated in the objective world of environment, biology, or social structure. It is a form of utilitarianism nonetheless: the objective utilities of natural ecology, the utilities that promote the survival of the human population or the given social order. Ayn Rand somewhere wrote that "civilization is the progress toward privacy. The savage's whole existence is public." Thus speaks an authentic voice of the economic spirit, one that rules out communications from the outset. For nothing is more primitive, in the sense of primordial savage, at the root of our humanity, and nothing more public, in the sense of common and shared, than communications. In this sense communications establishes the challenge to the self-regarding preferences that undergird economic thinking. Communication is nothing if not a collective activity; indeed, it is the process by which the real is created, maintained, celebrated, transformed, and repaired. The product of that activity—meaning—establishes a common and shared world. Words are the names of, the other side of, practices. And despite its vagrant history in this century, communication has never shed the trace of its origins in the common, communal, and community, any more than politics, despite the depredations of our time, has lost its trace of origin in the polis. Both are the names of certain forms of human practice grounded in a shared intersubjective world of common action. As

Communications and Economics I 69 the quote from Ayn Rand suggests, this century has turned against the common, the public, and the political in the name of the private, the subjective, and the economic. One aspect of our being prevents complete success in this enterprise. There can be private property, private selves, and perhaps even private thought, but there cannot be private languages, as Wittgenstein, among others, taught us. Language is the one collective and sharable phenomenon we have: not something created and then shared but only created in the act of sharing. While intellectually this century has devoted itself to finding some way by and around language to a state of pure vision and epiphany, language, the irreducible bedrock of human tools and talents, keeps reminding us of a shared and associated life. There is no removal of communication from its ancient associations with sharing, participation, association, fellowship, and the possession of a common faith. Communication is the process, in the happy words of Stanley Cavell, of wording the world together: not some mere transmission of language, an extension of messages in space, but the maintenance of a society in time; not the act of imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs. The archetypal case of communication, once saturated by the economic worldview, is the extension of messages across geography for the purpose of control. However, primordially and politically, the origin of communication is at one with the origins of ritual and religion: not the transmission of intelligent information but the construction and maintenance of an ordered, meaningful cultural world that can serve as a container for human action—a world of time rather than space. In this sense, communication can at best act as a control and check upon the economic motive, the motive of self-interest—can prevent self-interest from taking over the entire household of the social. Mary Douglas, in an essay that has shaped the views outlined here, though it is not an essay concerned with communications in a direct way, has summarized an aspect of this outlook: Humans speak, they use rhetoric and scrutinize one another's speech. Their individual conflicts surface and are overruled as they try to persuade one another to compromise or stand firm. Faced with conflict, contestants have to resort to the rhetoric of the common good to support their private claims. De Tocqueville, writing of public associations, identified the basic mechanism of the normative debate that sets the ground rules for any form of social structure, whether that of a market, the state, or the voluntary associations

70 / Communications and Economics with which he was primarily concerned. Citizens, he argued, "converse, they listen to one another and they are mutually stimulated to all sorts of undertakings." As a result, they may even "learn to surrender their own will to that of all the rest and to make their exertions subordinate to the common impulse."10

The classical tradition of sociology, for which Durkheim can serve as an exemplar, showed an intense interest in religion even though it is a highly secular tradition, skeptical about the history and claims of religion. (Here it bears a certain similarity to the religiously ironizing spirit of Harold Innis.) Because language, religion, and ritual preceded the world of practical action, it was in such forms that the search for the integrative mechanisms of the social were sought. Inspired by the complexity of anthropological studies of social reproduction, Durkheim invented notions of "collective representations" and "collective conscience" to explain how societies were held intact in the midst of conflict and strain. When he applied his analysis to modern societies, though my chronology is off here, he tried to show how capitalist societies depended for their very existence and stability on an inherited, precapitalist society—the so-called precontractual elements of contract. Gesellschaft society, the society regulated by utility and contract, could not work without the integrative mechanisms of gemeinschaft society: nonutilitarian values, beliefs, traditions, and so on. To the old slogan that money is to the West what kinship is to the rest, he added that kinship performs a continuing integrative function in advanced societies. (The fact that all such mechanisms are now, in a Foucauldian phase, seen as derivatives of the market and the power implicit in market relations is a measure of our impoverishment.) In a sense, Durkheim inverted the relations of base and superstructure: the capitalist economy thrives on the root system of traditional society. Therefore, to destroy that root system is to destroy the very possibility of a stable social order. In many ways, this is precisely what capitalism does. It is implicit in Joseph Schumpeter's mournful requiem to the creative destruction unleashed by capitalism;11 it was more directly faced by Charles Cooley's assertion that capitalism promoted lawlessness as the condition of its own rule.12 We live in a world where the imagination of the market, what Harold Innis called the penetrative powers of the price system, have transformed all social relations. And in this sense we, particularly in the United States, are testing the proposition that the market can be

Communications and Economics I 71 used as regulative mechanism for all these relations, subordinating politics, religion, culture, family, and community life to its rule. It would require far more time and space than is available to show how interest group politics and the instrumentalization of language that comes in its wake, the rights revolution, the penetration of the law into family life and the state into the community are but an extension of the market mentality. It is an attempt to transform communication into an instrument of manipulation or the pursuit of rights, that is, a weapon in the competition for scarce social goods. These activities do not extend communication but destroy it, and that was prescient truth in Harold Innis's notion that improvements in communication make communication not only more difficult but also more problematic. Economists recognize that market transactions do not include all rational transactions. Measuring the spillover to the community from individual market transactions is one approach to the nonmarket used by economists. Externalities are a powerful tool for analyzing certain problems in a market society. But externalities are fundamentally a theory of market failure, and market failure is, as Mary Douglas notes, "an elaborately backhanded way of studying the collective interest."13 The approach to communication and politics through market failure, oddly enough, was attempted by the greatest American student of communications, John Dewey, early in this century. The Public and Its Problems is an analysis of the eclipse of the public by the forces of industry and the market and a plea for the restoration of the public as a real force in the political realm.14 In that sense, it was squarely in the tradition of Jefferson and the Federalist Papers: an attempt to recreate a republican tradition of politics and social life adequate to the modern era. The public in eclipse was the face-to-face public of direct interaction. In trying to restore this public Dewey argued against individualism and pointed to a shared domain of cooperative experience and identity formation. Individualism, as I noted earlier, assumes that transactions occur between discrete individual persons, bound only by contract, and, properly speaking, such transactions concern only the individuals directly involved. Dewey argued that a public interest arises whenever there are indirect consequences of individual private transactions. Therefore, the public and a public interest came into existence whenever externalities were created. But while externalities had steadily expanded, the domain and competence of the public had steadily shrunk. The interdependencies created by industry and commerce were no-

72 / Communications and Economics where matched by the interdependencies of public life. It was Dewey's hope, forlorn as it turns out, that the new instruments of mass communication could transform the great society into a great community, bring externalities into conscious awareness, and create or restore public life on a scale matching that of industry. Dewey created an unusually abstract and regressive definition of the public, one defined by the function of dealing with externalities. Because the public interest became a mere externality of private markets, the domain of the public and the community was a pure derivative of private action. The public sphere, rather than possessing a prior and integral identity as a constraint on private life, was a mere residual to the ever widening private sphere, continuously involved in a self-defeating chase to catch up. Dewey was well intentioned enough. He was trying to counter elitist notions of democracy put forth by Walter Lippmann and a subsequent army of social scientists who reduced communication to the transmission of information from those who monopolized knowledge to those who needed to be controlled in its name.15 But Dewey's necessary response gave away the essential tension that must exist between markets and publics, between the self-regarding actions of individuals and the other-regarding actions of communities. Economists have been willing to deal with externalities. However, the goal of economics is to reduce externalities by viewing them as examples of market failure and, therefore, to cut away the community in the name of the individual and his or her self-regarding preferences. Economists are even at times willing to admit to the existence of public goods as defined by Paul Samuelson as goods that are freely available and from the enjoyment of which no one can be excluded. But what counts as a public good and a private good ultimately rests on a collective decision. As Mary Douglas puts it, public availability is conferred by the collectivity itself, but: From the point of view of a community based on market relations, public goods can only be envisaged as a residual class, a set of goods which inherently escape from market conditions, products which cannot be appropriated or costs which cannot be reclaimed. From the standpoint of such a society the fact that transactions in these goods have to be external to the market will appear as the crucial characteristic. Being without bounds or centre the market type of society is not well placed to think of collective goods except as residual to all the private good.16

Communications and Economics I 73 The entire history of modern communications is the turning of the resources not only of information but of meaning itself into a phenomenon of the market. This is true not only with those forms of meaning that are mass produced and marketed and therefore subject to the explicit controls of the price system but extends as well to all other aspects of culture and meaning down to the most ordinary transactions of daily living. This is what Harold Innis meant by the penetrative powers of the price system. In summary: the practices of communications and economics and the disciplines that rationalize them contain two opposing conceptions of the self, politics, and community life. The communications side of this divide asserts that we are not bearers of selves wholly detached from our aims and attachments; our preferences are not simply exogenous. As Michael Sandel argues, "certain of our roles are constitutive of the persons we are—as citizens of a country or members of a movement or partisans of a cause." If we are "partly defined by the communities we inhabit, then we must also be implicated in the purposes and ends characteristic of those communities. . . . The story of my life is always embedded in the story of those communities from which I derive my identity—whether family or city, tribe or nation, party or cause." In a communications view, the narratives and stories, and the purposes they embrace, which emerge out of these communities, "make a moral difference, not merely a psychological one. They situate us in the world and give our lives moral particularity."17 What are the practical differences, to paraphrase Sandel's question, between communication understood through the prism of the market and communication understood through the prism of community? What are the practical differences between a politics of rights and interests and a politics of the common good? If the party of communications is correct, our most pressing project is a moral and political one, one that cannot be contained within the theory of markets or a politics and morality derived from the market. The project is, to put it too simply, to revitalize our understanding of communications independent of economics and to revitalize, as a consequence, the political possibilities of the civic republican tradition. Economists are willing to grant a conception of community based on conventional individualist assumptions that take for granted the self-interested motivations of persons. This account conceives commu-


nity and communication "in wholly instrumental terms and evokes the image of a private society where individuals regard social arrangements as a necessary burden and cooperate only for the sake of pursuing their private ends." They may even be willing to imagine a community "where individual interests are not uniformly antagonistic but in some cases complementary and overlapping," where some may take account of the welfare of others and seek to promote it, where interests overlap the way indifferent surfaces overlap. Individuals may have motives that are self-regarding but benevolent, but in any case the social is a derivative of the individual. What economists cannot admit is a strong sense of the social, the communal, and the public, the strong view that Michael Sandel, whose words I am quoting, outlines: On this strong view, to say that the members of a society are bound by a sense of community is not simply to say that a great many of them profess communitarian sentiments and pursue communitarian aims but rather that they conceive their identity—the subject and not just the object of their feelings and aspirations—as defined to some extent by the community of which they are a part. For them, community describes not just what they have as fellow citizens but what they are, not a relationship they choose (as in a voluntary association) but an attachment they discover, not merely an attribute but a constituent of their identity.18

It was this sense of community that John Dewey rediscovered and that Harold Innis never abandoned. Innis's analysis of the relations of time and space was precisely an analysis of the difference between instrumental communities formed through markets and the extension of the market into politics and social life and constituent communities in which the right was prior to the good, identity prior to self-interest, language and meaning prior to market information. His conception of monopolies of knowledge was designed, though this would take much elaboration, to describe the consequences for politics and culture when economics overtakes the public sphere. In an Innis-like statement Dewey returns at the end of The Public and Its Problems to a conclusion, here stitched together, that remains as much of a challenge to us in the age of globalization and the information society as it was in 192.7 at the moment broadcasting entered society: The generation of democratic communities and an articulate democratic public can be solved only in the degree in which local communal life becomes a reality. Signs, symbols, language are the means by

Communications and Economics I 75 which a fraternally shared experience is ushered in and sustained. Conversation has a vital import lacking in the fixed and frozen words of written speech. Ideas which are not communicated, shared, and reborn in expression are but broken and imperfect thought. Expansion of personal understanding and judgment can be fulfilled only in the relations of personal intercourse in the local community. We lie, as Emerson said, in the lap of an immense intelligence. But that intelligence is dormant and its communications are broken until it possesses the local community as its medium.19

Notes 1. Arjun Appadurai, "Disjunction and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy," in Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, ed. Mike Featherstone (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1990), 195-310. 2. Walter B. Wriston, The Twilight of Sovereignty (New York: Scribner, 1991). 3. Harold A. Innis, Empire and Communications (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950), and Harold A. Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951). 4. Donald N. McCloskey, The Research of Economics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). 5. Steven Jones, The Economics of Conformism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984). 6. Mary Douglas, "The Normative Debate and the Origins of Culture," in Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 1991), 116-17. 7. Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977). 8. Douglas, Risk and Blame, 159-60. 9. Ibid., 117. 10. Ibid., 117-18. 11. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (Boston: Unwin Paperbacks, 1987). 12. Charles Cooley, Life and the Student Roadside Notes on Human Nature, Society and Letters (New York: Knopf, 1917). 13. Douglas, Risk and Blame, 118. 14. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: Holt, 1917). IS.Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan, 1911). 16. Douglas, Risk and Blame, 146. 17. Michael Sandel, Liberalism and Its Critics (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 6-7. 18. Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 148-50. 19. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 117-19.


Part II


Introduction / The Problem of Journalism History, 1996 Michael Schudson

"The Problem of Journalism History," published in 1974, marked a turn in the writing of journalism history. It prefaced by a few years a critical reaction to standard accounts of the American news media. In the next decade, "objectivity" as the celebrated ideal of professional journalists would be recast as nothing more than a "strategic ritual." The rise of journalism as an independent profession would be reframed in a manner unflattering to journalists; journalism's professional norms and values would be seen as the sociohistorical constructions of a commercializing culture rather than as transcendent ideals to which mortals were drawing ever closer.1 Journalistic triumphs in the Pentagon papers, Watergate, and other truth-telling episodes during the Vietnam years would even be reframed as exceptions to the rule whereby the news media marginalized and trivialized antiwar protest.2 This newly critical edge in the study of journalism in the 19705 was related to the changing climate of political criticism in and around journalism itself. This was the era when journalists chafed at their traditions, notably the ideal of objectivity, and experimented with the "new journalism," more literary, more openly subjective, and more selfreflective about the process of newswriting itself.3 The academic counterpart to this was a sharp rejection of the assumption that the history of the American press was a history of progress toward freedom. In a cold war world, the American press was easily portrayed as a bastion of liberty and conscience in contrast to the propagandistic media of the communist world. This superficial sociology of the press 79

80 / Introduction to Part II did have its critics.4 Still, it had settled pretty comfortably and complacently into conventional wisdom by the time Carey wrote his essay. In the journalism schools, it doubled as a foundation myth for journalism education. Part of Carey's achievement was to give this myth a name— "Whig history"—that stuck. The further achievement of the essay is more visible now than before: Carey criticized Whig history without trashing it and held out an alternative model. That is what gives the essay its continued currency. A characteristic feature of Jim Carey's work is his constitutional incapacity to be contemptuous of any human efforts at understanding. Carey criticized Whig history without evincing disdain for it. He did hope it would soon be succeeded. But Whiggishness, he insisted, was valuable, not wrong. It was simply used up. This generosity of spirit enabled Carey to see, in the 1985 interview, that the critical work of the 19708, turning Whig history on its head, was also useful—and also mistaken. In the wake of the transformation of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, in the wake of Tiananmen Square, it is much easier to recognize that the virtues of the American news media deserve as much attention as their defects. Whig history not only held a belief that the metastory in American journalism history is one of progress. It also took a stance of identifying with journalism and journalists, as Carey observes in "Putting the World at Peril." Journalism historians would have done well to worry, like anthropologists, about the dangers of "going native." It is not surprising that much of the best journalism history comes from people with degrees in history rather than in journalism or communication. Some of them teach in journalism or communication programs—James Baughman, George Juergens, Thomas Leonard, John Nerone, for instance—but many others do not, including the late Steven Botein, Charles Clark, Sally Griffith, Michael McGerr, Donald Ritchie, and Mark Summers.5 Carey is correct that his essay did not cause the change in the writing of journalism history. This is more evident today than it was earlier because it is more obvious that the anti-Whig history of the 19708 was only in bits and glimpses a fulfillment of Carey's vision. Carey's call for a history of consciousness, a history of reporting, is the most fervent of his pleas in these pieces, the most important, and the one most often honored in the breach. But there are now elements of a history of reporting. There is a history of reporters, to which the work of Donald

Introduction to Part II I 81

Ritchie and Mark Summers has contributed.6 There is a history of reportorial practices and forms, where the work of Thomas Leonard and, I like to think, my own work have been important.7 There is a growing critical literature on journalism as a literary practice that could and should inform historical research.8 Much of this—although the work of Michael Cornfield is a notable exception—focuses on the front-page news story. The larger "curriculum" of journalism that Carey insists we survey has secured little notice among American journalism scholars. But Carey's broadest challenge—a history of consciousness revealed through the "report"—has by no means been achieved. Historians in history departments, though rarely attending to journalism, have increasingly made valuable contributions in the adjacent field of the "history of the book." This work has been valuably coordinated through conferences and summer schools at the American Antiquarian Society. In this literature, the focus is typically on the history of readers and reading, on trying to establish an understanding of "consciousness" or "mentality" from the study of how people incorporated printed materials into their daily lives. Relatively little of this work has centered on the reading of newspapers, but Richard Brown, William Gilmore, and David Paul Nord have made notable contributions in this domain.9 But probing the psyche of another age through its popular journalistic forms—this is work scarcely begun. Even when you grasp what is clearly a part of the story, it is a matter of great difficulty to figure out just what these changing forms portend for "consciousness." I traced the history of the interview and of the summary lead in the period from 1860 to 1920, but I did not arrive at anything more than speculative suggestions about what this notable transformation may have meant in and for consciousness. It will require a historian of broad reading in the cultural and intellectual history of late Victorian America to be able to locate and articulate just where the changes in the "report" fit into other aspects of changing consciousness. Edmund Wilson made some useful suggestions in his chapters on Lincoln and Grant, but this task must be much more fully developed into an understanding of late-nineteenthcentury realism in general—of which reporting was a vital piece.10 The task of relating journalism and the consciousness represented in fiction at the end of the last century was seized in part by Shelley Fisher Fishkin in showing the literary lessons that linked the journalistic and literary careers of key writers—Theodore Dreiser, Mark Twain,

82 / Introduction to Part II Stephen Crane.11 It is developed more ambitiously by Amy Kaplan in The Social Construction of American Realism. In this study of the fiction of William Dean Howells, Edith Wharton, and Theodore Dreiser, Kaplan shows how realism serves as a response to new social tensions of the day. She agrees with other contemporary critics who insist that realism is not to be seen as a text standing outside society but as a cultural or discursive practice within it. She writes of the realist novelist's assertion of authorial voice in terms very close to what has been claimed for the reporter's assertion of authority. The realists, she argues, were not only "engaged in the construction of a new kind of public sphere" but also were "formulating a new public role for the author in the mass market." They claimed an "expertise to represent the commonplace and the ordinary, at a time when such knowledge no longer seemed available to common sense."12 Kaplan recognizes the newspaper as a literary form. She also sees the way in which the realist novelists, Howells in particular, engaged with it and distinguished their own efforts at realism from it. She does not, however, examine the newspapers themselves. It is not, of course, easy to do so. We have no "auteur theory" for the newspaper. What is the object of study? Only the news story has a conventional, individual author. But the reader may be touched by the amalgam, the ensemble, the crazy-quilt multivoiced many-layered postmodern object that the newspaper has been from its earliest days. Turnof-the-century thinkers wrote of the newspaper (and of the city and of the fair) in terms very familiar to those who characterize the postmodern aesthetic. But is the newspaper as a whole the creator of "consciousness"? Or is the "story" the carrier of the age's sense of meaning? If so, is it the realism of the "hard news" story? Or its formulaic features? Or is it the melodrama of the human interest story? We don't know. These questions have barely been addressed. The shift away from Whiggism has not been a self-conscious move toward the cultural history Carey urged. Rereading his essay now, I find it remarkably prescient, precise, just plain right about the vital importance of a cultural turn in journalism history. But the cultural turn has not quite happened yet. In this respect, Carey has been much more than a voice in the wilderness, but much less than the leader of an intellectual movement. The institutionalization of journalism history in schools of journalism and mass communication has been a mixed blessing. It has kept the

Introduction to Part II I 83

subject alive, given it a market, provided it a moral purpose, and allowed it to choose its intellectual bedfellows at will. But its practitioners have been too often isolated from the history profession at large, operating their own rather anemic organizations connected to some broad cultural trends but surprisingly innocent of others. The strength this location might provide is to keep journalism history down-toearth, connected to real live journalists who are alumni and guest speakers, and to students who intend to become journalists. Historians in history departments are not routinely connected to the world they write about in nearly so intimate a manner. Journalism history in the journalism schools has the opportunity to be not just armchair commentary but, in its own small way, a constitutive feature of journalistic practice. In 1985, before it became newly fashionable, Carey spoke of education as citizenship. In this, he anticipated the broad sociological understandings of citizenship popular of late. Citizenship is not just a political-legal status but "those social practices which enable a competent citizen to participate fully in the national culture."13 In this regard, journalism is a central institution for cultural citizenship. But what kind of citizenship is imagined in and through the news report? Do norms of objectivity or fairness keep the reader at bay just as the state keeps people at arm's length? Did the old partisan press imagine a more active citizen—but only at the cost of imposing a "coercive cultural conformity"?14 The early press is sometimes romanticized as a source of the intimate knowledge of public life that makes active citizenship possible. But this seems to me a hasty conclusion. Tocqueville himself made a hasty judgment here, attributing the large number of small newspapers in the country to the necessity of providing information about the many local seats of government. But the local newspapers at the time Tocqueville visited printed scarcely any information about their hometowns. Their aim was to make a living for a printer, to boost local commerce, or to champion a candidate or party for state or national office rather than to inform local citizens about local matters. They operated still on the eighteenth-century model that saw "news" as whatever it was that was printed in the metropole, not whatever was interesting near home. This is the political dimension of the consciousness-forming that the news participates in. It offers a direction that Carey does not fully address in the two essays that follow. Both of them, however, especially

84 / Introduction to Part II the latter, strongly suggest that direction. This, I think, is part of the challenge for journalism history in 1996—not only to truly undertake to understand journalism as culture, just as Carey hoped, but to understand it also as citizenship. This is not to revive Whiggism—not to see news as an ingredient in the evolution of true citizenship—but to analyze citizenship itself as a cultural construct, and to see news as one feature in the construction and representation of its changing formations. Notes 1. Gaye Tuchman, "Objectivity as Strategic Ritual: An Examination of Newsmen's Notions of Objectivity," American Journal of Sociology 77 (1972.): 660-79; Michael Schudson, Discovering the News (New York: Basic Books, 1978); and Daniel Schiller, Objectivity and the News (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981). 2. Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). 3. See, for instance, Ronald Weber, ed., The Reporter as Artist: A Look at the New Journalism (New York: Hastings House, 1974). 4. James Aronson, The Press and the Cold War (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970). 5. James Baughman, The Republic of Mass Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); Steven Botein, "'Meer Mechanics' and an Open Press: The Business and Political Strategies of Colonial American Printers," Perspectives in American History 9 (1975); Charles Clark, The Public Prints (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Sally F. Griffith, Home Town News: William Allen White and the Emporia Gazette (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); George Juergens, News from the White House (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Thomas Leonard, The Power of the Press (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Michael McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); John Nerone, "The Mythology of the Penny Press," in Media Voices: An Historical Perspective, ed. Jean Folkers (New York: Macmillan, 1988), 157-82; Donald Ritchie, Press Gallery (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991); Mark Summers, The Press Gang (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). David Nord, whose articles on many aspects of journalism history have been exemplary, has a master's degree in history and a doctorate in mass communication from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the communication program that has been the leader in turning out historically oriented scholars. Nord's most influential articles include "Teleology and News: The Religious Roots of American Journalism, 1630-1730," Journal of American History 77 (1990); and "A Republican Literature: A Study of Magazine Readers and Reading in Late-EighteenthCentury New York," American Quarterly 40 (1988). People in journalism and communication programs have contributed to the somewhat separate tradition of scholarship concerning the First Amendment and its history, although the most significant monument in that arena is the work of historian Leonard Levy. 6. Ritchie, Press Gallery, and Summers, The Press Gang. 7. See Leonard, Power of the Press; Michael Schudson, "The Politics of Narrative Form," Daedalus 3 (1982): 97-112; and Michael Schudson, "Question Authority: A History of the News Interview in American Journalism, 18605-19305," Media, Culture and Society 16 (1994): 565-87. Both Schudson essays are reprinted in Michael Schudson, The Power of News (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).

Introduction to Part 7 7 / 8 5 8. Barbie Zelizer, "Where Is the Author in American TV News? On the Construction and Presentation of Proximity, Authorship and Journalistic Authority," Semiotica 80 (1990): 37-48; Barbie Zelizer, Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Michael Cornfield, "The Press and Political Controversy: The Case for Narrative Analysis," Political Communication 9 (1992): 47-59; Michael Cornfield, "The Watergate Audience: Parsing the Powers of the Press," in Media, Myths, and Narratives: Television and the Press, ed. James W. Carey (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1988); and Norman Sims, Literary Journalism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 9. Richard Brown, Knowledge Is Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); William Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989); David Paul Nord, "A Republican Literature: A Study of Magazine Readers and Reading in Late-Eighteenth-Century New York," in Reading in America: Literature and Social History, ed. Cathy Davidson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); and David Paul Nord, "Working-Class Readers: Family, Community, and Reading in Late-Nineteenth-Century America," Communication Research 2 (1986). The "history of the book" has developed equally in European history, where noted practitioners include Roger Chartier in France and Robert Darnton in the United States. See, among their many works, Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987); and Robert Darnton, The Kiss ofLamourette (New York: Norton, 1990). 10. Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore (New York: Oxford University Press 1962). 11. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Prom Pact to Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). 12. Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 13. 13. Bryan S. Turner, "Postmodern Culture/Modern Citizens" in The Condition of Citizenship, ed. Bart van Steenbergen (London: Sage, 1940), 159. 14. Michael McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics, 21.

4 / The Problem of Journalism History First published in 1974

The study of journalism history remains something of an embarrassment. Can it be justified as a form of knowledge, an entry into the curriculum, an activity to which one can usefully devote one's professional life? By our behavior we answer the question affirmatively and yet a doubt remains. Each generation of journalism historians has been dissatisfied with the nature of our knowledge and the forms of our presentation. Writing in a short-lived newsletter, Cor onto, about 1950, Ted Peterson argued: In many schools and departments of journalism, history of journalism is the least rewarding course in the curriculum. The reasons are various. One is that all too often history is the orphan, or at least the grubby little cousin, who must depend on charity for its care and feeding. Young instructors teach it from sufferance; senior faculty members teach it because they have worked up a set of notes that it's a shame to waste. They drone about the dull, dead past and somnolent students cache away a store of names, dates, and places to see them through the cheerless examination season.

Peterson finally concluded that the trouble was not intrinsic to the subject matter, but in the way journalism historians had handled their material. He argued that Frank Luther Mott had laid down a solid factual foundation for the field and that we now needed "interpretive studies utilizing the factual information about the press, per se, that Mott and his predecessors have given us." Peterson in Magazines in the Twentieth Century and Edwin Emery in The Press and America have

86

The Problem of Journalism History I 87

attempted just that: building an interpretation on the raw data, I think it is fair to say, Ralph Casey's elucidation of the great interpersonal forces affecting the press as the spine of their story. Despite these achievements, and there are others that might be cited, the thought remains that our subject matter has not been domesticated, or to invert the metaphor, has been so tamed that all vitality has been drained from the enterprise. It has recently been argued that journalism history is dull and unimaginative, excessively trivial in the problems chosen for study, oppressively chronological, divorced from the major current of contemporary historiography, and needlessly preoccupied with the production of biographies of editors and publishers. As in 1950, the persistent apathy of student response to historical studies is offered as proof of the criticism. There is truth in all these charges, though I think they often mistake the fish story for the fish. For example, student response to all history, not just journalism history, has been in decline. This is because the American sense of history has always been lamentably thin and students are drawn, for reasons Tocqueville recognized, to the more abstract and generalizing social sciences. Our major response to this must be to accept a challenge: the major problem with American social thought is its scientific and ahistorical character, and our dual task remains a thoroughgoing critique of the behavioral sciences and the permeation of our studies and our students' thought with historical consciousness. Furthermore, the existing critiques of journalism history are superficial: they fail to get at a deeper set of historiographical problems. For example, we have defined our craft both too narrowly and too modestly, and, therefore, constricted the range of problems we study and the claims we make for our knowledge. We have, in general, failed to base our work on an adequate sense of historical time, and we have likewise ignored the most fruitful research of modern historians that might serve as the basis of fresh interpretations of our subject matter. I cannot here deal with all these problems. However, one paradoxical issue can be treated, namely, that the most fundamental failing in journalism history is but the reverse of our success. Our field has been dominated by one implicit paradigm of interpretation—an interpretation I will call, following Herbert Butterfield, a Whig interpretation of journalism history. This interpretation, which is absorbed in the invisible culture of graduate school, has so exclusively dominated the field

88 / The Problem of Journalism History that we do not even have, to mention the most obvious example, a thoroughgoing Marxist interpretation of press history. Herbert Butterfield used the notion of a Whig interpretation to describe the marriage of the doctrine of progress with the idea of history. The Whig interpretation of journalism history, to put it all too briefly, views journalism history as the slow, steady expansion of freedom and knowledge from the political press to the commercial press, the setbacks into sensationalism and yellow journalism, the forward thrust into muckraking and social responsibility. Sometimes written in classic terms as the expansion of individual rights, sometimes in modern terms as growth of the public's right to know, the entire story is framed by those large impersonal faces buffeting the press: industrialization, urbanization, and mass democracy. The problem with this interpretation, and the endless studies and biographies executed within its frame, is simply that it is exhausted; it has done its intellectual work. One more history written against the background of the Whig interpretation would not be wrong—just redundant. Much journalism history is now devoted to proving the indubitable. In art the solemn reproduction of the achievements of the past is called academism. And that is the term that describes much journalism history. It is not that the Whig interpretation was wrong or failed to teach us anything, but it is moribund and to pursue it further is to guarantee dead ends and the solemn reproduction of the achieved. Our historians are so set on this interpretation that they largely rewrite one another, adding a literary cupola here, a vaulted arch there, but fail to look at the evidence anew and afresh. We are suffering from what, in another context, Morris Janowitz has called "the dead hand of competence." Our studies need to be ventilated, then, by fresh perspectives and new interpretations even more than by additional data. I would like to suggest that developing the cultural history of journalism might inspire such a ventilation. In fact, I take the absence of any systematic cultural history of journalism to be the major deficiency in our teaching and research. I place an emphasis on cultural history because I think we should consider anew the objectives of our historical effort and the materials of our craft. We often think of our efforts as aimed at reconstructing the events, actions, institutions, and organizations of the past. We wish to know when a particular newspaper was founded, the progression of

The Problem of Journalism History I 89

its editors and editorial policies, when and how particular technology was innovated and diffused, when particular judicial decisions or legislative acts affecting the press were promulgated, under what circumstances and with what effect. There are innumerable such studies, which, knitted together into a general history, create that documentary record known as journalism history. This documentary record, when subject to certain rules of interpretation, forms the positive content of the discipline: an interpreted record of the events and actions of the past. This is, in general, what we choose to remember of the past. However, there is another dimension of the past, related to this documentary record, but not simply derivable from it. This dimension we call cultural, and I illustrate it with an artlessly simple example drawn from John William Ward. The documentary record of military history includes an attempt to determine, for example, how, when, and under what circumstances Caesar crossed the Rubicon. But this is not the only dimension of that event and, for many purposes, not the most important dimension either. The cultural history of that event is an attempt to reconstruct what Caesar felt in crossing the Rubicon: the particular constellation of attitudes, emotions, motives, and expectations that were experienced in that act.1 To verify that Caesar crossed the Rubicon is to say nothing of the significance of the event, a significance that derived from Caesar's defiance of a convention giving Republican law authority over the soldiers of the state. Cultural history is not concerned merely with events but with the thought within them. Cultural history is, in this sense, the study of consciousness in the past.2 As such, it derives from three assumptions: first, that consciousness has a history; second, that as Charles Cooley never tired of arguing, the solid facts of society are the imaginations we have of one another; and third, that while human actions illustrate in a general way a certain uniformity across time and space, the imaginations behind such actions illustrate a considerably wider variety. Most people make love and war, have children and die, are educated and work constrained by the physical limits of biology, nature, and technology. But for us to understand these events we must penetrate beyond mere appearance to the structure of imagination that gives them their significance. If most men march off to war, they do so in the grip of quite different imaginations: some march to recover holy lands for their god, others to protect their nations from foreign devils, others reluctantly

90 / The Problem of Journalism History and sullenly as the exploited slaves of an imperial power. The facts of warfare give none of this information directly, but the significance of military action lies in how it is imagined. The task of cultural history, then, is this recovery of past forms of imagination, of historical consciousness. The objective is not merely to recover articulate ideas or what psychologists nowadays call cognitions but rather the entire "structure of feeling": "The most difficult thing to get hold of, in studying any past period, is this felt sense of the quality of life at a particular time and place: a sense of the ways in which the particular activities combined into a way of thinking and living."3 We want to show, in short, how action made sense from the standpoint of historical actors: how did it feel to live and act in a particular period of human history? How does all this relate to journalism history? Our failure to develop the cultural history of journalism has led us to exclude from our literature any serious attention to what I believe is the central history story we have to tell, namely, the history of reporting. We have legal histories of the press, institutional histories, technical histories, even some economic history of the press. But the history of reporting remains not only unwritten but also largely unconceived. The central story in journalism has been largely banished from our remembrance of things past. Prior—both logically and chronologically—to journalism's being an institution, or business, or set of rights, or body of technology, journalism is a cultural act, a literary act. The technology of journalism existed prior to news or newspapers. Journalism is essentially a state of consciousness, a way of apprehending, of experiencing the world. The central idea in journalism is the "idea of a report" and the changing notions of what has been taken to be an adequate report of the world. Because we are a news-saturated people it may seem strange to argue that the desire to know, understand, and experience the world by getting news or reports about it is really a rather strange appetite. But it is less obtuse to suggest that there is a vast difference between what is taken to be an adequate report of the world by those who queue up before Tom Wolfe and the new journalism versus those readers wholly satisfied by the New York Times. In fact, our failure to understand journalism as a cultural form has left us virtually bereft of intelligent commentary on the "new journalism." The central and as yet unwritten history of journalism is the his-

The Problem of Journalism History I 91 tory of the idea of a report: its emergence among a certain group of people as a desirable form of rendering reality, its changing fortunes, definitions, and redefinitions over time (that is, the creation and disappearance of successive stylistic waves of reporting), and eventually, I suppose, its disappearance or radical reduction as an aspect of human consciousness. I call this a cultural history for the following reason. By culture I merely mean the organization of social experience in human consciousness manifested in symbolic action. Journalism is then a particular social form, a highly particular type of consciousness, a particular organization of social experience. This form of consciousness can only be grasped by its history and by comparing it to older forms of consciousness (mythic, religious) that it partially displaced and with other forms with which it emerged and has interacted—the scientific report, the essay, and aesthetic realism. When we grasp the history of journalism, we grasp one form of human imagination, one form—shared by writer and reader—in which reality has entered consciousness in an aesthetically satisfying way. When we study changes in journalism over time, we are grasping a significant portion of the changes that have taken place in modern consciousness since the Enlightenment. But to do this we must temporarily put aside our received views of what journalism is and examine it afresh as a cultural form, a literary act, parallel to the novel, the essay, and the scientific report. Like these other works, journalism is a creative and imaginative work, a symbolic strategy; journalism sizes up situations, names their elements, and names them in a way that contains an attitude toward them. Journalism provides what Kenneth Burke calls strategies for situations—"strategies for selecting enemies and allies, for socializing losses, for warding off evil eye, for purification, propitiation and desanctification, consolation, and vengeance, admonition and exhortation, implicit commands or instructions of one sort or another." Journalism provides audiences with models for action and feeling, with ways to size up situations, and it shares these qualities with all literary acts. Journalism is not only literary art: it is industrial art. Stylistic devices such as, for example, the inverted pyramid, the five-W (who, what, when, where, and why) lead, and associated techniques are as much a product of industrialization as tin cans. The methods, procedures, and canons of journalism were developed not only to satisfy the

92 / The Problem of Journalism History demands of the profession but also to meet the needs of industry and to turn out a mass-produced commodity. These canons are enshrined in the profession as rules of communication. They are, like the methods of the novelists, determiners of what can be written and in what way. In this sense the techniques of journalism define what is considered to be real: what can be written about and how it can be understood. From the standpoint of the audience the techniques of journalism determine what the audience can think—the range of what is taken to be real on a given day. If something happens that cannot be packaged by the industrial formula, then, in a fundamental sense, it has not happened: it cannot be brought to the attention of the audience or can be presented only in distorted fashion. When we study the history of journalism we are principally studying a way in which people in the past have grasped reality. We are searching out the intersection of journalistic style and vocabulary, created systems of meaning, and standards of reality shared by writer and audience. We are trying to root out a portion of the history of consciousness. Journalism as a cultural form is not fixed and unchanging. Journalism has changed as it has reflected and reconstituted human consciousness. Journalism not only reveals the structure of feeling of previous eras, it is the structure of feeling of past eras, or at least significant portions of it. For example, my colleague Albert Kreiling has tried to show how the history of the black press is much more than the documentary records of black papers and editors, successes and failures, or quarrels among black editors and writers. He has tried to describe the black press first and foremost as a record of black consciousness—its origins and transformation—in modern times. We do not study the black press because it passively reflects black consciousness; the press is not merely a source of data about black social history. Black consciousness is forged in, it exists in the black press: the arena where black consciousness is created and controlled by the canons of black journalism. It is not the only place, of course: one need not derogate art, pulpit, and politics to show that black journalism does not passively reflect black consciousness. To study the history of the black press or any other press is to recover the consciousness of people in the past and to relate that record to the present.

The Problem of Journalism. History I 93 There is, however, another and better explored side to the cultural history of the press. The press itself is an expression of human consciousness. Whether we think of the press as an institution, a set of legal prerogatives regarding expression, or a body of technology, it is, first of all, an expression of a certain ethos, temper, or imagination. The press embodies a structure of feeling derived from the past, and as this underlying structure of feeling changes, the press itself is altered. The press should be viewed as the embodiment of consciousness. Our histories in turn must unpack how a general consciousness becomes institutionalized in procedures for news gathering and reporting, forms of press organization, and definitions of rights and freedoms. We have made some progress here for we have realized that any understanding of the freedom and rights of journalists must take into account the changing fortunes of general legal consciousness identified by terms such as natural law, legal realism, and sociological jurisprudence. That body of literature often called "four theories of the press" has also attempted to show how general patterns of consciousness identified by political handles such as liberalism and Marxism have been institutionalized into specific patterns of press organization, news performance, and definitions of freedoms and rights. However, this work has never gone far enough, either historically or comparatively, and suffers from an overly intellectualistic cast. It has not shown how forms of consciousness shared in narrow intellectual circles have become generally shared and how they have been altered in this process of democratization. The cultural history of journalism would attempt to capture that reflexive process wherein modern consciousness has been created in the symbolic form known as the report and how in turn modern consciousness finds institutionalized expression in journalism. Our major calling is to look at journalism as a text that said something about something to someone: to grasp the forms of consciousness, the imaginations, the interpretations of reality journalism has contained. When we do this the presumed dullness and triviality of our subject matter evaporates and we are left with an important corner of the most vital human odyssey: the story of the growth and transformation of the human mind as formed and expressed by one of the most significant forms in which the mind has conceived and expressed itself during the past three hundred years—the journalistic report.

94 / The Problem of Journalism History

Notes 1. John William Ward, Red, White and Blue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 4-5. 2. To do this requires that we overcome the prejudice against consciousness as a historical fact. A useful place to begin this task is with Erich Neumann's The Origins and History of Consciousness (New York: Pantheon, 1954). 3. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 47.

5 / "Putting the World at Peril": A Conversation with James W. Carey First published in 1985

James W. Carey's influence on journalism historians can be traced in part through the pages of Journalism History, for he wrote the first article appearing in the first volume of Journalism History. That article, "The Problem of Journalism History," has been taken as the starting point by more than a dozen authors of later Journalism History articles on methods and interpretive approaches, while it has been cited as a key source by numerous additional writers in this and other journals. Tom Reilly, Journalism History's founding editor, interviewed Carey in August 1985 at the annual convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in Memphis. Q: In your 1974 Journalism History article, "The Problem of Journalism History," you were critical of the state of journalism research and writing. Has anything changed since then? jwc: I would still be critical of the literature on journalism history; I'm drawn to criticism as a moth is to light. I would not be critical in the same way, however. Much has changed since 1974. There is a much more diverse and varied body of writing in the field than there was then and in the years immediately previous to the article. I argued in 1974 that the field was dominated by one implicit paradigm of interpretation that viewed the history of the press as one steadily advancing the cause of freedom and knowledge. I called that a "Whig interpretation of journalism history," using the phrase much as Herbert Butterfield had in his elegant little book.

95

96 / "Putting the World at Peril" Today there is no longer any one point of view or fixed school of historiography or single center of training that dominates journalism history. Journalism education, at least in the historical area, has changed. Journalism historians now draw upon much more diverse sources of inspiration, pursue different methods, and conceive the subject matter in quite different ways. I take this ventilation of the field to be generally good, although I do have some reservations here and there. The "social capsule" of journalism history has broken open for reasons that have little to do with history research and writing per se. Journalism history as a field reflects many of the social forces that have been impinging on Americans generally over the past decade, forces that encourage new types of diversity. These forces have brought about changes in the categories through which people identify themselves and work their experience into knowledge. We have been going through a period of social disorganization in the sense that Chicago sociologists use that term: a loosening of the coordinates of individual identity, a breakdown in fixed habits and standards of life. This social disorganization has the effect of setting off social movements through which individuals redefine themselves and their world. In the 18908, during another period of social disorganization, John Dewey and others later grouped into the sociological school of symbolic interactionism attempted to describe how people interacted with one another in ways that led them to develop a new sense of reality. In the 18905 industrialization, the decline of the farm and agriculture, the growth of cities, mass immigration from abroad and from rural areas— what the history books generalize as industrialization, urbanization, and democratization—had the effect of rendering inadequate the social order into which people had to fit themselves. The old identity answers formed around religion, region, community, and agricultural work no longer served to describe people's experience to themselves, including their experience of themselves. As a result, a series of social movements were set in motion: populism, progressivism, nativism, temperance, and so on. Some were explicitly political, some largely cultural. But all, whether backward looking or forward looking, were attempts by people to find new ways of fitting into the social world, new ways of answering the question "Who am I?" as a political, social, economic animal. The categorical structures that emerged out of that period—Protestant, Catholic, Jew,

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atheist; working class, middle class; Irish, Italian, WASP—held for much of the twentieth century. In thinking about this it is important to understand that, to take one of the identity terms, ethnicity was invented in the 18908. There were no Italians in Italy, only in the United States. In the old country, people were from Sicily, or Genoa, or Palermo; here they were Italians. There they were from Cork or Mayo, Munster or Ulster, here they were Irish. Ethnic groups were made in the diaspora, in the immigration, not at home. In the 18905 people built new ways of belonging to society that were new structures of feeling and experience, new ways of answering the insistent question "Who are you?" A characteristic answer was "I'm working class and Irish and Catholic." Such an answer told you not only who you were but also who your children would be, what your lineage was, what your life chances were, and, among other things, how you would vote. That categorical structure held until after World War II, when a new set of changes in the economy, in housing patterns, in educational experiences came to the fore. The blue-collar economy and workforce was steadily dismantled and replaced by a pink- and white-collar workforce and an "information" rather than an industrial economy. Suburbs grew at the expense of inner cities; new patterns of social and geographic mobility emerged. Taken together, these complex changes rendered ineffective the traditional ways in which people described themselves. People remained in some sense religious and ethnic, but in altogether altered ways. Loyalties to cities, regions, political parties, institutions, even occupations attenuated. In the 19608 intellectual and social identity started to become reorganized and, as in the 18905, a new set of social movements was set in motion. Feminism emerged as a new kind of ethnicity for a new era. The complex racial landscape, once made up of Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Teutons, Franks, and Slavs, became redefined into black and white. The ethnic landscape disappeared into a racial one in which the very meaning of racial identity was transformed. Divisions of race and gender were superimposed over and significantly depressed the previously existing categorical structure of social identity. Regional differences declined except as markers of "lifestyle." Northerners, Southerners, Easterners, and Westerners continued to exist, but they largely came to signify the differences weather makes for lifestyle. Some of these changes spilled directly into historical writing, so

98 / "Putting the World at Peril" that we got women's or feminist history, black or racial history. But that direct expression masks the fact that all of us who have lived through the complex interactional process, who have attempted to figure out personal identity in relation to these complex social movements, end up seeing history, or being in history—including the history of the press—rather differently. That history had never quite assimilated labor history, religious history, the history of ethnic groups in relation to the "mainstream" press. Now all of a sudden the mainstream press had to be reexamined in relation to women, for example, and the old "paradigm" of the Whig history had very little in its conceptual tool kit to help one in doing that. As a result of these social changes, new movements of historical writing that would allow for a "new history" of a "new social structure" emerged. This history rereading, in turn, required new concepts and methods. Reading the press against, say, black/white-male/female relations is rather different than reading against a grid of labor/bourgeoisreligious/secular. Not only are new documents needed but old documents must be reread against a new background. All of a sudden the field starts to crack open, new possibilities are revealed, a new diversity is permitted and in many cases encouraged because it can answer questions that are not merely academic but insistently personal. All scholarship is, after all, autobiography. The historical reassessment from 1974 forward, which involves a lot of dubious enterprises, including the sacking and pirating of French philosophy, stems from a changed social landscape and results in a changed historical landscape—a changed landscape, but a shapeless one as well. At some point the new distinctions and concepts will settle out and down and become more or less permanent parts of our inheritance, but that may take another generation. I do not know which of the distinctions will retain their power as both social and historical categories because this remains an open set of possibilities. Are people more likely to think of themselves along the lines of gender or of race? That does not exhaust the possibilities, for we have also been rethinking the political categories of liberal, radical, and conservative. But at some point, just as notions such as working class, Catholic, Jew, doctor, and so on settle out as acceptable categorical structures, and others, such as nativist and immigrant, were discarded, we will produce a new symbolic social structure. How journalism history will then settle out—thematically, theoretically, identifi-


cationally, methodologically—is something we won't know for another decade. Q: How would you like to see the field of journalism history settle out thematically? jwc: Let me answer that with a more or less philosophical comment. I would like to see the field settle out into a conceptual vocabulary and a series of methods that constantly expand the category of "us," the people we are like, and constantly diminish the category of the "other," the people we are not like. We have to preserve the intellectual tension that comes from merger and division, that comes from pitting private identity against public identity, that maintains a complex private categorical structure but merges it into a more or less uniform public identity of the citizen. You can build intellectual and social systems that are radically reductionist and narrowing; "I'm a historian, intellectual historian, I'm a feminist, black intellectual historian," and so on until we can only meet as committees of three. Or you can attempt to preserve these categories because they answer to the question of who we are and pose significant intellectual and historical problems, but continuously expand and merge these limiting categories. Kenneth Burke said one time in conversation something like the following: When I talk to another Presbyterian, I talk about Presbyterianism; if I talk to a Catholic, I talk about Christianity; if I talk to a Jew, I talk about the Judeo-Christian tradition; if I talk to a Muslim, I talk about Western civilization; if I talk to a Buddhist, I talk about the human community. Every division is merely an opportunity for a merger. Certainly the most paradoxical fact of our time is that the civil rights and the women's movements, which at their outset aimed at depressing and eliminating the last public stigmata inhibiting and disfiguring full social participation—race and gender—have ended up inscribing race and gender more deeply into public consciousness. The first thing I hope is that we reorganize the conceptual structure of our work in such a way that we keep enlarging the sense of our identification with what other people are doing and progressively enlarge the boundaries of human life. And that we avoid becoming so narrow, so specialized in either social or intellectual terms, so tuned in to a particular and peculiar psychology, that the human community shrinks. At the level of historiography, that means that we think of our-

100 / "Putting the World at Peril" selves more and more as scholars and less and less as historians or whatever. We need to say there is a common human enterprise in which all scholars—whether they are physicists or philosophers, historians or sociologists, historians of journalism or historians of the labor force— are engaged. These enterprises always have a theoretical and a reflexive-argumentative dimension. Doing history is not so radically different from doing sociology, doing sociology is not so different from doing philosophy, doing philosophy is not so radically different from doing physics. If we get really good at this we may also realize that doing physics is not much different from doing art and that doing art is not much different from doing religion. In each of these separate activities one sees common humanity. People should feel less of a need to identify themselves as historians or journalism historians or, please God, a member of a history division. They should say, well, of course I am a member of the history division, but that exhausts only a small part of what I am. I am part of a wider scholarly and intellectual community and, still more importantly, a part of a wider community of citizens. I can answer the question in a slightly different way. A life of responsible citizenship, a life without anger and resentment, depends upon our constantly enlarging the human community with which we identify, of seeing not only that we are men and women but that every woman is a man and every man a woman; that there is no human experience so foreign or so alien that we cannot, at the least, identify with it. Raymond Williams says somewhere in one of his early books that the reason we need a common culture is that we cannot live without one. I think he has it right. At a much lower level, when I wrote the Journalism History piece I was arguing against the tendency, as pronounced now and then, to divide the world into those who do theory and those who do history. That division is inscribed into the structure of our professional societies, but it is an absurd division. These organizational divisions need not disappear, because they are useful devices through which papers get written and conventions organized. But their cognitive and emotional significance has to decline so that they do not identify what we do or who we are. They are absolutely arbitrary and absolutely debilitating for intellectual work, for they cut off argument and debate almost precisely at the point where such argument must go forward.


Q: It sounds like a sort of historical global village, or an academic global village. jwc: It is, I suppose, but I have always had difficulty with the somewhat bucolic concept of a global village. That is an old idea that can be traced back at least to Samuel Morse. But I do believe that the academic community as a whole is more important than the artificial divisions between the sciences and humanities and between the several disciplines within each. That is because I believe education is the principal mission of universities and that everything a university does is and must be an aspect of teaching. It is this larger academic community in which I want to have primary membership. So, I suppose you have found one way of putting the case. Q: Is one of the uses of history to broaden the study of journalism? jwc: My general answer is yes. One of the important tasks of historical writing is to give or restore voice to people who for whatever reason have been without a voice in the community. In some sense history has silenced them. Feminist historical writing and black historical writing have recovered the voices of the powerless. I am sure there is much more to be done on distinctive regional and class voices. At the time I wrote the piece for Journalism History relatively little was known in the United States of the kind of anonymous history that was so important in Europe. Peter Lazlett's The World We Have Lost, which I had read a few years before, is an example of such writing, of what became better known as the history of the peasant, of the voiceless, of those who did not leave written records, of those who did not lead a life of power. This has been an extremely democratizing tendency in historical scholarship that was, relatively speaking, bypassing American history and journalism history to an even larger degree. In focusing on a few powerful editors and newspapers, journalism history was leaving unstudied some of the straightforward categories of historical subjects such as the labor press. The documentary record was not to be taken seriously if it was a record of what the working class, as opposed to the middle class, felt and said; it was not to be taken seriously if it was a record of what the marginal, deviant, and rebellious said as opposed to the straight, approved, and established. There are people who remain in these unrecovered regions, and I thought, and still feel, that journalism history might recover these his-

102 / "Putting the World at Peril" torical possibilities. Such recovery would increase the variety of human experience that is there for us to consult and by representing a wider number of people make our scholarship more various. That may also require trying to do more with certain classes of people who worked within journalism but about whom we know little. We know a lot about editors of given periods but we know little about reporters. There are people within the standard role structure of journalism whose contribution or whose imprint is relatively unrecorded. Q: Given all this, how do you look at disciplines, departments, fields of study? jwc: In a way, I don't look at them, or I don't care about them, or I think they are insignificant. Disciplines divide up the world into things I and my friends do versus things done by others. We need disciplines because we need administrative units, departments, sequences, programs, associations. They help us get the daily work of distributing money and educating students done. But otherwise these structures should not be taken seriously. In fact, all important work is done in the interdisciplines. You shouldn't take disciplines seriously because you can never predict in advance where you are going to find intelligence, including intelligence on the problem that interests you at the moment. We can pretend, if you wish, that the group of people who gather under the discipline "communication research" own the study of communications, stake it out as their piece of intellectual turf. But in order to do this they must develop precise and defined notions of what communications is in ways that make it distinguishable from all other social processes; they must show how it is not politics, not economics, not anything else for that matter. In the process they mutilate the intellectual concerns that brought them to study communications in the first place. The problem with this compartmentalization is that it will not work operationally. At any given moment the people writing about communications under the disciplinary umbrella of communications may have absolutely nothing to say about the phenomena in question. Do we then close down the enterprise? "All right children, the work is over, the subject is dead, we don't have anything to say about the matter; let's pack up and go home." Of course you don't do that. If the "discipline" dries up, you have to go looking at the work


of shepherds tending different sheep in different valleys. You have to look outside the discipline for people who have something interesting to say about the phenomena in question. Why build barriers between disciplines in the first place, if you are going to have to eventually batter them down whenever the going gets rough, when the problem is intractable or the disciplinary scholarship loses its spark, verve, interest? The quest for the definition of a field is a bemusing enterprise regularly engaged in by scholars, particularly from marginal disciplines. Of course we tend to rule out so much good scholarship because it does not fit within the discipline when we actually should be including much more. If one wants to understand communications one would be well advised to read much more than the literature of communications, and if one wants to understand journalism history one better read very, very widely outside of journalism history. One must not only pay attention to what historians in general are doing but also to the best work in sociology, anthropology, and a wide range of fields. Moreover, to live within a discipline or field—journalism history, for example—is to commit oneself to a life of unbelievable dullness. One has to ask the question "Who is it that is writing, independent of discipline, the most interesting and provocative work on the questions that concern society, social life, our common humanity—work we ought to bring to bear on our own research?" It may be that other historians are doing such work. But there are no guarantees. At any given moment the historical discipline may have dried up and so it is necessary to go elsewhere—to literary criticism or law or business. Q: Can journalism historians still teach relevant lessons to students today and to practitioners in the field? jwc: Of course they can. They can teach relevant lessons to anyone and everyone. Of course, they must take up important problems if they are to do so; they must take up problems that are of more than antiquarian interest, problems that open us up to the future as well as the past, that cast light on our ability to live as free people, to function as a liberal democracy, problems that relate to the health, tradition, and outlook of our community. There is no intrinsic limitation, although we may not be smart enough, intelligent enough, to pull it off. But there is nothing in the enterprise that makes relevant lessons from journalism history impossible.

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Q: One problem today is that a lot of teachers in the field are confronted by demands for relevance and practicality in what they are teaching in the classroom. And this being a very practical-minded discipline—field, I should say—there is not much support for history in the journalism curriculum. jwc: You will never win that argument with a student or indeed anyone else as long as you divide up the curriculum into those courses that are practical and those courses that are impractical or academic. If there are two kinds of subjects, practical and impractical, history will always end up in the category of the impractical. You have to reformulate the entire argument in a way that blurs this distinction. A suggestion as to how to go about doing that was made by the late Richard Hofstadter in his book Anti-lntellectualism in America. In a chapter on businessmen and the business press he points out that the meaning of "practical" to nineteenth-century businessmen was quite different from the meaning we give to "practical" today. He suggests that businessmen then tended to believe that the world of business was the most open, changeable, unpredictable sphere in which one could operate. There was, therefore, no way of predicting in advance what it was that a businessman might find useful in working within this domain. Business was looked upon as a cultivated, civilizing, cosmopolitan activity precisely because it was not narrow, it could not be narrow in its outlook, skill, or knowledge. Was it good to know languages? Of course it was good to know languages. How could one predict when the knowledge of another language might open up an opportunity in a foreign market, or permit one to better understand the conditions of trade in a strange and irregular culture? Was it good to know history? Of course it was good to know history. If you knew what people tried in another time, you might be able to reinvent an opportunity, devise a new strategy that avoids the pitfalls of a failed one. In other words, here is a view that suggests that everything is useful because life is too open and unpredictable to be narrowed into the routines and algorithms that pass for the practical today. The only restriction on people is that they don't have time to learn everything, so choices must be made. But that dilemma suggests a sound education as the key to keeping an open and fertile mind, one not bogged down in detail and routine, as the conditions of lifetime learning. The argument your question refers to is a little different. It is still


an anti-intellectual argument, however, because it claims that all you need to be a success is a relatively narrow body of knowledge. All our experience refutes that claim and we have a responsibility not to let students get their way in these matters. If history is conceived of as something impractical, as outside a narrow band of professional knowledge, then it is hard to see how a knowledge of history fits into life as a whole. Yet I do not know how to put narrow boundaries around what it is that journalists should know. They have to know so much if we are to survive as a reasonable and humane society. Besides, I have no way of knowing what life is going to be like in the year zooo and beyond. I would suggest that under conditions where you cannot predict the future, where one cannot tell in advance what it is that is most practical, you must encourage the widest possible exposure to the best currents of thought and scholarship available. In other words, I would be tempted to resolve the practical-impractical question simply by saying everything is practical and history is among those practical things. But we have to believe it ourselves. There is another side to the question. What is practical in the eyes of those personnel directors who hire our students? What do we do about this one? We have to deal with personnel people who themselves may not have a very generous or ambitious outlook, who may in fact be rather bad businesspeople. We have to convince them of the value of history. My feeling today is that they may convince themselves before we convince them. They may return to hiring more liberally educated students because they are dissatisfied with the narrowly trained, intellectually unimaginative students that we turn out. They will blame that narrowness on us, incidentally, for we are presumably in charge of the academy. Business may turn to broadly educated students because they see the limitations a narrow education brings. Businesses operating in international markets will see it first, but the word will eventually get around to the domestic media as well. The teaching of the history of journalism is one step toward a broad, practical education. There are many ways of understanding this country. You can accomplish it through a study of its religious institutions or its political institutions or indeed virtually any of its institutions. These institutions are not identical, but the central elements, problems, dilemmas of one tend to be the same as for all the others. If matters of race, class, gender, ethnicity are central elements in making America what it is, they are central elements in making the American

106 / "Putting the World at Peril" press what it is. To study journalism history is another way of developing an adequate understanding of one's own country, a way of grasping the society and culture in which one's life and destiny are implicated. Seen and taught that way, journalism history is an immensely practical subject. I am enough of a pragmatist to believe that the distinction between the practical and the impractical, which descends to us from the distinction between the sciences and the humanities, the objective and the subjective, fact and value is simply not a useful distinction. The issue, then, is that our students' definition of what is practical differs from our definition of what is practical. But who is in charge of the funhouse? It is our responsibility as faculties to establish as intelligently as we can a pertinent, disciplined curriculum of study, and then to defend that curriculum with our students. There is another side to the problem of practicality, one bound up with the problem of what to do with youth in America. Often when I talk to the parents of students they ask me, first of all, about the job opportunities for journalism students: Is my son or daughter going to get a job? When? It all sounds so crass as opposed to our high-mindedness. But parents usually have something different in mind. They understand that becoming an American these days involves leaving home, setting up one's domicile. That is the only way you can establish identity as an adult. It cannot be done if young people stay at home and remain dependent on the largesse and goodwill of their parents. To establish that separate adulthood you have to be employed. So parents are often saying, "Look, our lives will work better and be enormously less complicated if our children at age twenty-two or twenty-three do what they are supposed to do: leave home, say goodbye to mom and dad, and establish their own home, their own identity, their own way of life." To enable that to happen we have to have an economy expansive enough that young people can enter it at an orderly rate. That is an important problem, but let us not confuse it with the problem of practicality that gets regularly hooked into it. We can give our students all the "practical education" they want but if there is no work for them, if they can't establish their own lives, then they frustrate themselves, their parents, and us. That is a problem we cannot solve as a university faculty. It is another of those responsibilities of citizenship. I think it is important that we listen to parents when they raise the question with us of just how it is that their children are to be-


come adults. And we have to respond to that. But we cannot solve that problem by adding one more course in newswriting and one less in history, which is an entirely different matter. In fact, insofar as that substitution leads to more narrowly trained students, students with less vigor and inventiveness, then we have only dampened the vitality of the economy and hurt everyone's chances for a better future. Q: What do you think of the movement to " operationalize Carey"? jwc: I always thought that an unfortunate phrase. It sounded like an attempt to pick over one's body in an immoral way. It was, however, generously intended, an attempt to bring my argument "down to earth," to attach the argument to a series of researchable problems. I think that represents a sound and generous instinct. On the other hand, I do not think much has been done to "operationalize Carey." Many of the new directions of journalism history, as I suggested earlier, do not derive from anything I said or did but rather from certain long-run changes in American society and culture, changes that brought new problems onto the agenda and, simultaneously, recast some old problems. I had nothing to do with that; it is simply part of our life and times. Work on the new journalism, on feminist or black history, did not come about because of any attempts to apply my own arguments. It just came about as part of a general attempt to create imaginative reconstructions of particular excluded groups. I also argued in that Journalism History piece for an attack on a specific problem, namely, the history of reporting. In the intervening years that problem has been attacked in bits and pieces, though no one has handled it in a large-scale or satisfactory way. We have had some very decent work on the new journalism as a different way of reporting, as an eruption of a new form of journalistic consciousness, and much interesting work has been done on the relation of journalistic accounts to the process of reality construction. There also has been considerable writing about the penny press that goes beyond the economics of that form of the newspaper and investigates the style of journalism that developed with the penny press: new ways of looking at the city and the world, new ways of conceiving just what the story is. The penny press raises the question of how reporters were located in the new commercial and industrial cities of the second third of the nineteenth century. Michael Schudson's Discovering the News is frequently quite acute about all this in recognizing that

108 / "Putting the World at Peril" the penny press arose in what he calls an "objectivization of society." People came to see society, as opposed to community, as something outside and independent of them. There is a modern division between the sphere of the "we" and the sphere of the "other." Schudson's work, Dan Schiller's work, and the work and the group of people from Iowa—Douglas Birkhead, Gary Whitby, Roxanne Zimmer, Charlotte Jones—collectively constitute an attempt to rethink the matter of the language of journalism, styles of reporting, the aesthetic and economic aspects of the words out of which a public world of meaning is constructed. Many of these concerns trace the work of all sorts of people writing the history of journalism these days. But again, these changes have been less an attempt to operationalize Carey than an attempt to deal with concrete changes in American life, in our attitudes toward the past and present of the society. All I did was to increase the pace, particularly among some students, at which this happened by providing people with justifications they could use within their own graduate departments and with their advisers. It encouraged some people to do what they always wanted to do but couldn't figure out a way to do because other people wouldn't allow them to do it. Q: You said in that essay, "We don't need another Whig history of journalism. " Do you feel the movement to operationalize Carey might have symbolized a resentment or a desire of most of the historians at that time to move away from the existing body and style of writing journalism history—that there was a latent urge, and this sort of sparked it among those who wanted to get away from the Emery approach, the Mott approach, and so on? jwc: I've answered that to a certain degree, but let me put a slightly different gloss on it. The Whig interpretation of journalism history identified the history with the institution. Ed Emery, to take an important and obvious figure, fully identifies with journalism as a human activity: with the editors, papers, struggles of the profession. I don't mean that he isn't critical; he just isn't alien. He stands to the subject of journalism in a much different posture than he would if his subject were the history of slavery. He chronicles a world that on the whole he admires and wishes to advance. He honors not only the First Amendment but also the craft and profession and takes its most noble purposes to be his


own and tries to record the uneven but steady progress and the record of achievements of the craft and institution. In my essay I recommended that we find a new vocabulary in which the concept of culture was more central, in which there was a more trenchant focus on the language of journalism as opposed to the institution, the reporter rather than the editor, and, finally, a language in which there was more critical distance, that was more open to the moral and political ambiguities of journalism. I was not proposing a new vocabulary that was both mine and correct to displace a vocabulary grounded in "Whig" concepts that were wrong. I simply argued that the Whig interpretation had done its work, it was an exhausted genre, that it has yielded whatever substantive and useful conclusions were contained within it and that it was hard to do much of flash and originality with that vocabulary. There were parts of the story of journalism that hadn't been told and couldn't be told unless a new vocabulary were available. Such a vocabulary would not only cast up new problems but also place some older problems—the problem of freedom, for example—in a new light and thereby yield new insight and understanding. Work in recent years has given us parts of a new vocabulary and has done some of the redressing of the historical record that I thought was needed. Now we face a different problem. A new generation of journalism historians does not in general have the same identification with the profession. Having come to maturity within the academy, they pretty much identify with the academic life rather than the professional community. They are therefore prone to commit an opposite error, to articulate a more or less anti-Whig interpretation of the press, an interpretation that can be similarly selfserving because it starts from the premise that the academy is somehow superior to the world of journalism. If in earlier work we had the academy pretty much looking up to and revering journalism, we now produce an often contemptuous view from the academy toward journalism. Academics can now produce a form of criticism of journalism that they would never apply to their own work within the universities. Let me give you a somewhat misdirected example from sociology. I am an admirer of Gaye Tuchman's book Making News, but much of the sociology of news gathering takes the most ordinary and mechanical aspects of journalism—beat reporting and the wire services—and


makes them somehow the representative case of all journalism; the multiform types of journalism are reduced to an essence discovered in the breaking Associated Press stories. The reverse of the analogy would occur if journalists trying to comprehend the university limited their study to courses such as Sociology I and Political Science I. We would accuse them of having identified the lowest level, the most ordinary, most mechanical part of university instruction with the institution as a whole. Just as the academy is much more than its introductory courses, journalism is more than breaking news and beat reporting. If you identify journalism with its more mechanical reporting, you have the basis for writing an anti-Whig interpretation of the press: a story of not much more than capitalist degradation. Both the Whig and anti-Whig interpretations prevent us from adequately characterizing the ambiguous role the press actually plays in American life. The Whig and anti-Whig interpretations of the press or of education are true to limited degrees but you have to bring the skills of a poet to those interpretations or they wall you into a lopsided view. The truth of poetry is its ambiguity; the truth of journalism is also its ambiguity. Q: How does someone write a history of reporting? jwc: The same way you write a history of Western civilization, of the British Crown, or the Protestant establishment, or France of Louis the Fourteenth. You do it very carefully, for it is very difficult to do. I do not think there is anything intrinsic to the history of reporting that makes it more difficult or complex than anything else we undertake. If it is difficult to do, it is because it has not been done before and we are not sure how to do it and it seems somewhat vaguer than our more established topics. At any period of time there are topics that seem to be clear. How many books have been written about the British Crown? The problem is clear to us because it has been done before and we merely need to improve on an established model. But it is a clear topic only because there are dozens of books on the topic that can guide us. The history of reporting is vague only because we do not have such books. Clarity and ambiguity are not inherent in problems and topics. The difference is merely, to twist a phrase of Thomas Kuhn, the difference between normal and abnormal science, normal and abnormal history. Quantum mechanics was vague and uncertain when people only

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knew how to do classical mechanics. So the problem is merely one of familiarity. When a new problem is undertaken you may have to attack it with unfamiliar sources and procedures, and we may have to be more generous in judging the results. We have to accord students or historians the privilege of writing essays rather than treatises when they undertake a new problem. We would expect a certain unity or integration between the treatment of Henry the Eighth and Elizabeth the First in a history of the British Crown. But if, like Elizabeth Eisenstein, you undertook a history of the printing press, you had better expect the first efforts to be a series of quite separate essays, loosely hung together on some common theme. If you undertake a history of reporting, you are likely to begin with essays on topics such as "How the writers of the penny press understood the world," "Journalists in Chicago at the turn of the century," "Revolutionary pamphleteers." There may be little in common between these essays, little that binds them together conceptually or methodologically. We have to tolerate the style of the essay and the necessary disjunctions in the material as a prerequisite to first attempts. When an established figure with impeccable credentials tries this type of essay writing, we do not much question it. Robert Darnton's widely praised The Great Cat Massacre is a series of essays on the cultural history of modern France. He suggests at the outset that he felt it necessary to start writing histories of France in a somewhat different way. He was not quite sure how to do that. As a result, he selects out a series of episodes in French life that haven't been written about before or have been treated badly and writes about them in a different way. His chapter on nursery tales in France is only marginally connected to his chapter on Rousseau and his readers; they are connected by a few concepts, a common mood and atmosphere. They are not logically or methodologically integrated. They do not have a parallel structure. Darnton's success will embolden other historians to undertake many of the same subjects and the next attempts will be better integrated, the analysis more internally consistent. The same thing will be true of the history of reporting. Work will begin as loosely connected essays and, if it is successful, end up as an integrated analysis. At that point, once the work is done, we will wonder what all the fuss was over. We just haven't had anyone attempt anything coherent about the topic up to this time; we are still at the age of essay writing. Look at another example, Daniel Czitrom's Media and the American

112 / "Putting the World at Peril" Mind. The chapters in that book don't quite connect together. There is a common imagination that stretches across them and they all represent common episodes in the history of the mass media, but they are definitely a series of essays and were accepted as such by the Wisconsin history faculty. That faculty had to apply somewhat unorthodox standards in accepting the work as a dissertation because it was abnormal rather than normal in its subject matter. Emboldened by Czitrom, someone might try a book like Journalism and the American Mind with a subtitle of Essays on the History of Reporting. Such a book could not be a unified argument. It would have to collect essays about journalists writing at different times, under different circumstances, for different media and would inevitably lack unity and parallel structure. But once that was published someone else would come to the conclusion that they could do it better by selecting different writers, at different papers and different times, and thereby pronounce a more unified picture of the history of reporting. Then the question of how do you write a history of reporting evaporates, for one only has to point to the book that has been written. The major point is this: you get essays before you get integrated volumes, and that is why innovations in scholarship occur outside the academy or from figures no longer bound by the rules of the academy and discipline. It is hard for students to take such risks, for they live under great uncertainty and strict time, and they pay dearly for failure. Q: A special issue of Journalism History might be done on that idea. Just invite essays on the history of reporting and see what turns up. In a journal it doesn't have to be connected. jwc: I know what you mean. We just finished an issue of Communication on feminism and popular culture. That is a subject no one is quite sure how to write about and there is a lot of casting about for a formula. A few years back women's history made little sense and no one knew how to answer the question "How do you write women's history?" Now that we have a number of distinguished examples of the type, the mystery has fallen away and there are books and essays, heavily cross-referenced, all over the place. It is always a discovery procedure and after the discovery it all looks perfectly normal. But it is a struggle when you take up topics that heretofore have been untreated.


Q: How do you keep up with your reading? jwc: I have no idea. I'm blessed with a great library and over the years with librarians who edit out a lot of the junk for me and call the significant work to my attention. I've also been blessed with colleagues who read widely and call things to my attention. Q: Is there one book you want graduate students to read if they are going to work with you? jwc: If I am going to serve on their committee and otherwise do business with them, I want them to read Tocqueville's Democracy in America. I realized I've gotten away from requiring it in recent years but it is the basic book. The reasons are several. It is the single best book ever written about America. Its major chapters are as insightful today as they were at the time of its publication in the 18305. The period in which it was "researched," written, and published—the Jacksonian years—is a period that very much interests me. It has generated a secondary literature that I very much admire: Riesman's The Lonely Crowd, for example. Riesman used the book at Harvard for years in his undergraduate Introduction to Social Relations course. A book of last year I much admire was Tocqueville-inspired: Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart. Democracy in America has had a circular effect: it is important in itself and it is important because of the number of major works that have been inspired by it. I respect not only the judgments contained within it but its overall view of American society and the calmness, maturity, and generosity of the judgments it registers. The fact that it was written just before and published during the opening era of the penny press gives it an additional importance because I still look to that era as a seedbed for much of what is modern in modern America. Finally, it is a book that "teaches" marvelously. So I like students who haven't read it beforehand to read it before doing business with me. Q: Do you ever watch television for relaxation? jwc: Of course. I watch television all the time because I am a Cubs fan. Cable television is the greatest thing that has happened in recent years for baseball fans. I also love the movies, and cable television has been a boon for movie watching. Beyond sports, movies, and some news I watch relatively little, but that is only because I don't have enough time.


Q: As we come to the end, can you say anything further about your attitudes toward education and scholarship? jwc: I don't have much more that is distinctive to say about that. I think all education, all scholarship is ultimately an aspect of citizenship. That may sound, these days, rather wimpy. Education is always about how to live in the world. I suppose there is some part of me that wants to say that to teach and to write is not simply or foremost a means of finding the truth or pursuing a profession. To teach and study is to occupy the ground with our fellow citizens within the life of the community. The problem of dedicating oneself to the pursuit of truth is that the truth we find today a new generation of historians and scholars will displace with a new and, I hope, better truth. It is only the best guess one can make now about what might be helpful and useful to the community. There is a continuous process of intellectual revolution. There will always be something new swimming into view. The trick is to hold on to what is useful from the past as one opens up to what is newly discovered. Q: Are you trying to prepare students for these changes? jwc: I'm trying to prepare them for the natural and inevitable displacement of what we know now by something more we know, by something different that we come to know. That is the way life is. When I emphasize citizenship in this, I am thinking of a wonderful line of John Dewey where he says something to the effect that every thinker puts a part of the world at peril. The very act of thinking means calling the world into question, loosening up established beliefs and procedures, the way we've done things up to now. In that sense to think is to engage in a perilous and disquieting undertaking. And that is why thinking is part of citizenship and not just part of technical and professional life, reserved for a small group of experts. Teachers and writers have particular ways of living in the world, but whether they do so responsibly, successfully, with political judgment, with solidarity with their fellow citizens depends on how they understand education. I never think I'm engaged in professional education, whether it is the professional education of journalists or the professional education of teachers, Ph.D.'s. I would like to think I'm engaged in civic education at both levels. We end up making a living with our education, but the end of education is to prepare one for life


in society, for public life in the widest sense, for life among our fellow men and women. Q: Can we teach students to be hopeful about this uncertainty, to look forward to putting the world at peril? jwc: The reason that I have always been drawn to John Dewey and the American pragmatists is that he and they were a group of people who lived with hope, and that hope shines through their writing. Their two greatest values were hope and solidarity. What is it that makes us hopeful? What is it that promotes solidarity with our fellows? What is it that defeats pessimism, narrowness, parochialism? This I take to be a profoundly conservative instinct. What are those values and attitudes of the past that contribute to a progressive and democratic way of life? How, in the face of difficult and intractable problems, do we continue to march in the footsteps of our ancestors and still remain open to the belief that what we know today will be displaced tomorrow? Someone is always coming up with a better idea. How do you remain ready and open to give up one notion in favor of a better one and yet not collapse into the silly state of believing that just because something is new it is inevitably better? This very possibility creates a certain optimism. Despite all our difficulties I think any look at the record leads us to be hopeful. Q: I take it you are suggesting that there is something hopeful in simply believing that good ideas are inevitably going to come along and that the trick of teaching and learning is to be open to them. jwc: I said earlier on that there is no way of predicting in advance where a good idea is going to come from. No one has a monopoly on them. You can't tell in advance whether they will come from someone in your own culture or someone outside it, someone writing today rather than someone who wrote yesterday, someone older or someone younger, someone within the academy or someone without. As we don't know in advance where good ideas will come from, the trick of education is to act in such a way as to not foreclose, limit, or restrict the movement of intelligence. A few years ago, when I had a deep personal quandary, it was a very young and much more inexperienced person who pointed the way out. Following that experience, I thought of all the barriers that inhibit the flow of intelligence across generations—in both directions. It was an ethical principle of pragmatism that anything that inhib-


ited communication was wrong because it constricted the intelligence available to the community. All of us are situated in the world differently, all of us have a different body of experience on which to draw, so often the knowledge you need to deal with a current problem is going to come from someone older or younger or different in some important way. The pressures of differentiation, specialization, the division of labor have the cumulative effect of depressing communication, of erecting boundaries and borders across which communication cannot pass. So one has to find devices to keep the conversation going and to get it to move from one unexpected quarter to another.

Part III


Introduction / Famed Psychic's Head Explodes: James Carey on the Technology of Journalism Carolyn Marvin

How communications technologies structure ways of thinking and feeling in common is a lifelong concern of James Carey's work. Along the way, he has acknowledged a debt to Harold Innis, the economic historian for whom differences in message transportability among media make all the social and cultural difference in the world. When Carey began his career as a media analyst, the staple devices for examining media in society were biographies of media figures and histories of media entities. Innis's work was different. He offered a powerful analytic framework that connected changes in the history of transportation and communications technology to dramatic changes in social structure. Carey's own distinctive development of these ideas, reflected in the following two essays, has deeply influenced the terms of media analysis by scholars in the field. To explore that thinking, we must understand a little about the Innisian concepts at its foundations. For Innis, media in which the message does not change much over time are time-binding. They are preservers of culture, and their mode is memory. Such media are exemplified in architecture, stone, and especially religious tradition mediated through oral communication, the communication of one body directly with another. The messages of time-binding media are unstable over space; they become distorted if they travel any distance. Tradition is an excellent example. The habitual customs and gestures of a community are difficult to maintain at a distance. Removed from the communities and generations of believers that have nurtured them, they are easily misinterpreted. 119

120 / Introduction to Part III In space-binding media, messages are not distorted much across distance, but cannot last long. They are extenders of culture, and their mode is power. Print and broadcast journalism are space-binding media that combine the easy transportability of paper with rapid electronic distribution by telephone, video, and computer. Contemporary journalism is time-shortened and ephemeral. Unlike media crafted from messages painstakingly sedimented across the centuries, like the Iliad or the Odyssey, contemporary media saturate the moment. They fill up every nook and cranny of public space. Wherever time-binding and space-binding technologies flourish together, powerful political states emerge, long-lasting and broadly extended across territory. The maintenance of political units as small as tribes and as large as empires depends on media. What does it feel like to live in the worlds created by different forms of media? To answer this question, Carey asks how techniques take over and reshape moral models of human society. Techniques become metaphors that predispose particular ways of thinking. They provide potent images about how we are connected to one another. What is lost when cultural elements that are deliberately cultivated and patiently reworked over time surrender to those that favor speed, novelty, and expansion as the measure of social connection? How models of the civic adjust to the built communicative environment is the foundation of Carey's interest in the practical imagination of contemporary journalists who see the world as an environment to be mastered through explanation. Repertoires of explanation are journalistic technologies as much as the telephones, printing presses, satellites, and computers on which journalists also depend. In the essays reprinted here, Carey's focus is not on the machines of journalism but on the pseudoenvironment of media explanations that furnish contemporary culture. Technology, Carey has said, is the creation and expression of human purposes embodying concrete life. How journalistic conventions structure belief for a community is a decidedly technological subject, for these conventions offer a blueprint for the architecture of relations we call society. "The Communications Revolution and the Professional Communicator" was written in the late 19605. It departs from conventional accounts of the period that depict journalism as a kind of scientific experiment in search of truth, gradually improving its tools and testing its results over time. Other accounts from this era picture journalism as a

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literary genre, a popular art possessed of a moral purpose, which is also the discovery of truth. By contrast, Carey sees journalistic technique as an arena in which competing groups lay claim to different ideas about what truth is. Through media representations, groups jockey for status around these ideas, and so create themselves. Presciently, Carey used a relatively hidden group, lesbians and gays, inhibited by social mistreatment from publicly identifying themselves, to illustrate how a previously invisible group could assemble and constitute itself through media. The subsequent rise of the gay rights movement through media representation is a textbook case of a group pitting its own self-images against those prevailing in mainstream media and exercising tangible influence over them. To discuss journalism in terms of groups instead of measuring it against a true account of the world was an unusual move. It was even subversive, since the first law of professional journalism is that its offerings ought not adopt any group's world view. Exactly how messages create or undo groups is the concern of the second Carey essay, written nearly twenty years later than the first. The title, "The Dark Continent of American Journalism," contrasts the sunny, rational ideology of professional journalism as a technique of revelation and discovery to the messy, vast, and uncharted terrain beneath reported events. Carey argues that journalism generally fails to map this terrain in its presentation of the world. Who, what, when, and where are questions for sunny rationality. How and why lurk at a deeper, less accessible level. They constitute the moral skeleton of the narrative function. Carey found them largely missing in contemporary journalism. His concerns were directed to the so-called prestige press, the term often applied to the elite national press and its imitators. But there is more to the metaphor of a dark continent. It refers not only to a terrain, but in an indirect way to the tribes that live on it. Tribal societies were long defined as groups whose social organization depends more on ritual than technology. Carey's metaphor of the dark continent suggests that reportorial techniques are a kind of ritual, both for members of the journalistic tribe and for those who observe their efforts. Like technology, ritual is a subject that has fascinated James Carey, and he has often written about it. Like technology, ritual is a cultural blueprint for maintaining communities. What communities are maintained by the rituals of respectable journalism? Not those of ordinary citizens, Carey says. High-profile journalism organizes a conversation

122 / Introduction to Part HI carried on more or less exclusively between elite journalists and opinion leaders. Its insider codes are well understood by these participants, but obfuscating to outside observers. Carey believes contemporary journalism not only fails to help most citizens understand the world they live in, but keeps them confused about it. He does not claim that journalism never informs us or enriches our understanding of the world. But he proposes that nuanced explanations of how and why are too little honored in the culture of journalism. Journalistic technique responds more to immediacy and power than to patient reflection or subtle shades of understanding. Technique has transformed the journalist's historical mission. Instead of serving up a frankly partisan, unashamedly moral point of view growing out of a life fully lived in common with other community members, the journalist must be the professional servant of facticity and objectivity. This vision fails to ground explanation in a system of propositions about what the world is and should be like. A world without an "ought," says Carey, is a world that cannot be explained. Instead, it must be ritualized. Ritualized how? Carey offers an Aristotelian catalog of types of journalistic explanations that supply motive, cause, consequence, and significance. The average journalistic portion has too much motive and too little history to provide the symbolic environment in which communities can constitute themselves deliberately and self-consciously. Take the ritual practice of yielding interpretive authority to experts. This technique visibly distances journalists from any responsibility for explaining the world, since they must not claim a particular worldview on their own authority. Such strategies for dividing journalists and readers create contempt by the journalist for the reader, Carey argues. The process works both ways, since public contempt for the press is all too familiar. Distrust now governs the political process as well, so that citizens believe their leaders act exclusively for self-aggrandizing motives. At least, this is the account offered by the respectable press. Carey charges that where media ought to provide multifaceted connections across lives in a democratic society, they have bifurcated the body politic into the used and the using. From this follows the reduction of all social complexity to black and white, right and wrong. Delicacies of nuance and complication are lost. Only crude polarities remain. These are less likely to produce reasons to understand than sides to take. So how have things come to this? Carey's portrait is intended to show that the contemporary na-

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tional press is ideologically rootless, and therefore incoherent. To say that a press must be ideological to be coherent is to strike at the heart of journalistic belief in an independent truth about the world. It implies that there is only the truth authorized by the group to which one belongs. This is the truth that makes a group and keeps it intact. Toward their group and its truth, members feel bonds of emotion and loyalty. Toward other groups these feelings will be strikingly different. The idea that emotions are more compelling than facts as a way of keeping groups together is deeply antithetical to professional journalism. The Enlightenment notion of reason assumes that group loyalties are divisive, and that emotions connected to them should be overcome. Reason is seen as the enemy of emotion. It is certainly not an instrument for every group to shape differently to its own history and experience. Still, the impulse to communicate remains deeply group-oriented and social. Since emotion may be the most attended to of all group guides about the importance of things, the impulse to communicate has strong emotional components as well. And here lies an explanation for the tenacity of the journalistic techniques Carey finds troubling. There is a strong group impulse to make even technologically engineered communities cohere. For every technique journalists invent to deny group loyalties, other techniques re-create them. If belonging to a community makes life coherent, we should not be surprised by backdoor efforts to reconstruct feelings of belonging banished by disciplinary codes of professionalism. The journalistic creation of villains and heroes, of morality plays, of fabulous dangers and exalted victories, allows us to revel in the satisfaction of subscribing, if only briefly, to a community of like-minded persons who also are indignant, hopeful, devastated, or triumphant at the prospects laid out before them. What else are personal motive explanations than a way of reshaping a complex and distant world to the mythically potent actions of a familiar cast of godlike actors? There may be weaknesses in such accounts as an explanation of the larger world. But it is very close to the community model of social interaction Carey prefers, despite his concerns for its deployment as a journalistic technique. Personal motive explanations are indifferent to the systemic, depersonalized reasons of politics, government, and economics. They render life as a saga. They tell tales of passion, envy, hope, and disappointment. They address birth and death, ordeal and trust, initiation and betrayal. Personal motive explanations follow a model of neighbor and fam-

124 / Introduction to Part HI ily talk. Family talk is multilayered. It seeks intimate details. It tracks the dramas of life, including marriage, divorce, illness, who is on our side, and whom we should avoid. Family talk is repetitive and predictable in its effort to create a world that is familiar and sturdy but punctuated with arresting and entertainingly bizarre stories of relatives and social intimates, especially when they are feuding. Its narratives are deeply affecting and provide some of the sturdiest social glue known to humans. It happens that the impulse to make a complex world manageable on the close-range, intimate model of family talk is a much discussed journalistic development. This is the so-called tabloidization of the respectable press, the blurring of traditional lines of content that used to divide the prestige press from the less respectable press and its sensational sex-and-scandal menu. A classic example was journalist Connie Chung's report of a mother's claim (and who could doubt a mother!) that her son, Representative Newt Gingrich, then Speaker of one of the big houses on the block (the House of Representatives), had once called the most prominent lady in the neighborhood, first lady Hillary Clinton, the mistress of the big white house down the street, a "bitch." This was family talk about the temperature of relations between one family in the neighborhood and another. If the neighborhood happened to be a national one, it was no less family talk for that. In its various forms—talk shows, celebrity magazines, scandal sheets—the despised tabloid press is one of the oldest and most subversive. Tabloids possess a distinctive ideological content. The high are brought low, the gloriously irrational succeeds against the most determined rationalist explanations, and the world is turned upside down in the time-honored fashion of faits-divers stories. The tabloid world embraces conservative social values at the same time it lifts up the forgotten and downtrodden. It regards the rich and famous ambivalently. It sees them as ordinary folks in disguise and as selfish miscreants. No less a press of personality and motive than the respectable press, it describes a redeemable world in which miracles happen. It is the return of the repressed, from which it constructs the world. Its stories are richly detailed. It endlessly recaps and amends its most affecting tales until they are perfectly familiar. It offers a highly moral, or at least moralistic, view of the world. Tabloids devote considerable attention to how and why, the questions that make sense of who, what, when, and where. The low regard

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in which tabloids are held by respectable journalists and media critics is therefore of some interest. Tabloid explanations address moral dimensions that are surely real, if incomplete, in the vast universe of the human condition. But it is not incompleteness alone—a quality it shares with the prestige press—that makes it anathema. Its stigmatization has more to do with its preferred subject matter. Tabloids are preoccupied with the relationship of social boundaries and taboos to the physical body. In the tabloid world, the physical body is the social body in its most elementary and unvarnished form. Of special interest is bodily transformation through the social processes of death and reproduction. Tabloid staples consist of the body distorted, confined, maimed, restored (occasionally resurrected!), or otherwise altered by a variety of agents that speak symbolically about what social boundaries do. The most charged of all social boundaries are those that touch the body. Consider gender, age, and race relations. Consider abortion. Consider war. The annihilation of social distance by technology is not the only destabilizing thing we have to worry about. Social interaction in its closest, most intimate forms also challenges the cohesion of communities. This, at least, is what the tabloids tell us. At one level, the controversy about the tabloidization of the news rehashes an older debate about mass culture. Though neither the respectable nor the tabloid press is satisfactory by the standards of many thoughtful critics, the fact remains that the press is popular. Its audience is large and faithful. It satisfies something, even if its critics believe it satisfies the wrong thing. Is this the familiar lament that the problem with democracy is that it's too democratic? How do we know what a successful press is? For many years, the British Broadcasting System seemed a paragon of dignity and rational democratic virtue compared to the vulgar, commercialized American press. Is British society less riven with strife, more coherent in its sense of itself, a more humane society because of its national media system? Are British citizens more informed about the world they live in? These claims would be difficult to defend, except in rabidly nationalist terms. Is our faith in the effect of the press misplaced? Are all groups that are connected more by technology than by tradition fractured societies that cannot be knit together by any stories at all? Do stories subject to professional news codes of objectivity and facticity fail to enchant? Or is it that the press unites us after all, but in ways that seem problematic, even horrifying?

126 / Introduction to Part III Contemporary journalism constructs mythic stories about great ordeals that test communities. Such a story was the trial of the most famous murder defendant in American history, the legendary football hero O. J. Simpson, an icon of popular culture and a shining example of African-American success in the high-stakes game of national celebrity. Simpson was accused of brutally murdering his ex-wife and a friend outside the home where his young children slept. Americans were riveted. In its early days, media commentators compared the impact of this story to the first landing on the moon and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Whether this was true matters less than that audiences received such interpretations. Giant scandals and screaming headlines are our Greek tragedies, lasting not for centuries as timebinding messages do, but echoing and reverberating throughout culture, pushing along a rising commercial wave of circulation and ratings, books, T-shirts, bumper stickers, souvenirs, and satellite stories about major and minor plot characters. Like the Greek tragedy it resembled, the O. J. Simpson trial was about gods imperiled and defiled, great wrongs done, and fears of doing more. It was a story about fairness in basic things. In matters of life and death, does racial mistrust overwhelm the judicious weighing of guilt and innocence? Is justice deformed by money? Can the police be trusted? If jurors cannot live in harmony, can the country? It was also a story about expectations. Are celebrity gods omnipotent and invincible? When life fails them, do they act out their despair more grandly than the rest of us? What has become of the American family? These are not trivial questions, and the answers to them are as elusive as questions about what economic policies will create the proper distribution of national wealth. Both kinds of questions have everything to do with the structure and feel of the communities we live in. For most Americans, O. J. Simpson was not a member of any community they lived in, but the focus of a community of aspiration and feeling anchored by media bonds. The question in these two essays is whether media bonds make communities stronger, more enriching for their members, and more honorable, or whether they are always unstable and explosive. To answer, we must decide what the proper function of media is. Is it to make us better? Should its practitioners be wise defenders of a common good? Is the job of media to right wrongs? Or to foster interesting conversations among citizens who are the only genuine agents of social change? If we believe that democracy depends on

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the press and not on ourselves, have we lost it already? Is it a triumph of civic good sense or a mark of professional failure if audiences are skeptical of stories media tell? From a different perspective, can any reasonable critic deny the existence of a wealth of serious media analysis beyond the daily papers and the nightly news for those willing to search it out? Quite aside from the moral and civic responsibilities of media professionals, does any moral or civic duty lie with audiences? If citizens care to engage the democratic dialogue, are they obliged to consult a range of information sources, and with some care? Should they expect to invest as much in their mediated relationship to the polis as they do in other relationships they expect to be rewarding? Do we bemoan technological mediatedness while expecting the automated delivery of civic judgment from the press like so much fast food? Can media ever dispense well-informedness on the technological model of water from the tap or electricity from the switch—that is, at no trouble to ourselves? James Carey might see these questions as making his point that we have come to imagine our social relations on a model of technological efficiency when they ought to reflect our irreducible humanity. He certainly argues that the press is no simple writ of truth, whatever else it is. It is a set of contentious ideas about what society is and ought to be. It is the largest national arena in which Americans encounter one another, strive for recognition and identity, and live to fight another day. In the two essays that follow, James Carey also challenges certain self-congratulatory views of the press in a democratic society. Not only does he challenge us to inquire what it feels like to live in the worlds that different media create. He challenges us to wonder what other worlds there might be.

6 / The Communications Revolution and the Professional Communicator First published in 1969

In this essay, I would like to offer a perspective or set of terms with which to characterize and analyze the contradictory tendencies within what is commonly called the "communications revolution." I also want to use this perspective to examine the development of a distinct social role, a role I have designated with the accurate but unfelicitous label "professional communicators." Finally, in a more polemical mood, I would like to comment on the dilemmas facing one group of professional communicators, namely, journalists, and the implications such dilemmas present for contemporary communications policy. As the outset candor requires that I note two weaknesses of this essay. First, it is highly suggestive in character and telescoped in argument. Second, the essay implicitly relies on American experience. The justification for such reliance, ethnocentrism aside, is provided by Gertrude Stein's wry observation that the United States is, in fact, the oldest nation since it came first into the twentieth century and has been there the longest. Miss Stein was suggesting that the absence of dominant conservative elements in American society results in an exceptionally rapid rate of social change, and certain tendencies in industrial societies are thereby revealed in this setting with an exceptional starkness. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Western countries were hit with two successive waves of revolutions, revolutions separated in time but tied in logic. The first was the industrial revolution, which reorganized the nature of work and the structural basis of class and com-

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The Communications Revolution I 129 munity. The second was the revolution in communication and popular culture, which reorganized the basis on which art, information, and culture were made available and the terms on which experience was worked into consciousness. While some commentators chose to treat these revolutions as independent events, it is obvious they stand as cause and effect, successive moments in the same process.1 The timing, interrelationship, speed, and extensiveness of these revolutions vary considerably from country to country, but both the direction of change and the major implications of these revolutions is everywhere the same. The industrial and cultural revolutions were remarkably telescoped in the United States between 1840 and i86o.2 The communications revolution presaged by the growth of the telegraph and the "penny press" in the decades before and after the Civil War decisively began in the 18905 with the birth of the national magazine, the development of the modern mass newspaper, the domination of news dissemination by the press services, and the creation of primitive electronic forms of communication.3 By the 19205 the dominant tendencies of this revolution were clear, although they continue to work themselves out even into this decade. The most explored, though still dimly understood, dimension of this revolution was the rise of national or mass media of communication—media that cut across structural divisions in society, drawing their audiences independent of race, ethnicity, occupation, region, or social class. Modern communications media allowed individuals to be linked, for the first time, directly to a national community without the mediating influence of regional and other local affiliations. Such national media laid the basis for a mass society, understood in its most technical and least ideological sense: the development of a form of social organization in which intermediate associations of community, occupation, and class do not inhibit direct linkage of the individual and primary groups to the state and other nationwide organizations through mass communication.4 The rise of national media represents a centripetal force in social organization. Such media greatly enhance the control of space by reducing signaling time (the gap between the time a message is sent and is received) in communication, by laying down direct lines of access between national centers and dispersed audiences, and by producing a remarkable potential for the centralization of power and authority.5 In the more benign and uncomfortably anthropomorphic language

130 / The Communications Revolution of Talcott Parsons, one can suggest that the revolution in national media worked to overcome the increasingly particular orientations of groups generated by the intense division of labor inherent in industrialization. Solidarity or integration in industrial societies requires the growth of communication forms specifically oriented toward emphasis on collective values and symbols of identification.6 As Joseph Gusfield has argued, a differentiated social system can be maintained only if the "conflict o f . . . groups is balanced to some extent by cohesive elements in the cultural and social system which moderates the intensity of conflicts and . . . provides loyalties to ... rules under which the social system is to operate."7 National media give public and identifiable form to symbols and values of national identity and also block out of public communication areas of potential conflict.8 A second and equally self-evident dimension of the communications revolution was the development of specialized media of communication located in ethnic, occupational, class, regional, religious, and other "special interest" segments of society. These minority media, while virtually unstudied, are in many ways more crucial forms of communication because they are building blocks upon which the social structure is built up and they serve as intermediate mechanisms linking local and partial milieus to the wider community. An example is the weekly community newspaper, which links concerns of the local community to the wider world of city, state, and nation.9 Specialized or minority media index the progressive differentiation of social structures. They mirror a process whereby groups formerly dependent upon face-to-face contact are organized into groups by providing collective symbols that transcend space, time, and culture. Finally, while such media address themselves to a narrow dimension of their audience's life, they create national communities of interest by allying themselves with national bureaucracies and selecting their audiences on a national basis. Lest I be accused of obscurity, allow me to comment briefly on the growth of homosexual magazines such as One and Mattachine Review. Such magazines turn a locally based, decentralized, tenuously connected subculture into a highly identifiable group and, above all, into an audience. Constituting a class of discredited people, homosexuals create a common culture by transcending geographic boundaries through such media. They build this common culture into an encompassing ideology, an explanation of their behavior, and an argument

The Communications Revolution I 131 stipulating their relationship to the larger society. By going public, that is, by publishing, they nationalize this culture, create a national speech community, a standardized body of symbols, and a characteristic expressive style. Such publications give voice to—indeed, create—shared feelings and common orientations; they consolidate and stabilize for the reader his identity and the reality of his group. In the pages of such publications are formulated the politics, complaints, and aspirations of the group; friends and enemies are identified along with evidence of their goodness and badness; success stories are printed, tales of heroes who have made it in "straight" society, along with atrocity tales or examples of mistreatment by the larger society. "Exemplary moral tales are provided in biographical and autobiographical form illustrating a desirable code of conduct for the stigmatized."10 Divisions of opinion within the group are expressed and managed. In One and Mattachine Review one finds rationalizations for the position of homosexuals and justifications couched in legal, moral, and historical terms; famous homosexuals in history are celebrated along with lists of their achievements; the biology, physiology, and psychology of sex are analyzed to demonstrate the Tightness of the "gay" life; legal articles pleading the case for the civil liberties of homosexuals are included.11 The relative obscurity of this example should not obliterate the central point: minority media of communication represent a centrifugal force in social organization through their capacity to organize differentiated speech communities and to confer national identity on groups and nationalize their interest; by marking off boundaries of conflict and accommodation with the values and institutions of the larger society; and by transforming groups into audiences. By this last point I merely mean that magazines, journals, and other forms of mass communication become more important than face-to-face interaction in the processing of information within the group, in the assigning of status, and in the development of collective ideologies and values. While we recognize these processes easily with magazines for defined subcultures, they must also be seen in journals and newsletters aimed at persons having suffered colostomies and ileostomies, at parents of retarded children, at scientists, lawyers, and doctors, at theosophists and other practitioners of the occult, indeed, at an infinite world of work, leisure, and politics.12 Collectively, then, the first two dimensions of the communications revolution represent centrifugal and centripetal forces in social struc-

132 / The Communications Revolution ture that create entirely new publics, transform existing groups into audiences, and nationalize sentiment and interest. The third and least explored dimension of the communications revolution was the development of a new social role, the professional communicator. We still know little of the origin of the role, the occupations that collectively constitute it, the functions that the role serves, or the norms and constraints of role occupants. Moreover, the professional communicator can only be understood against the backdrop of a general theory of communication, and this, obviously, we do not have. Despite these limitations, it is possible to suggest some features of this social role. A professional communicator is one who controls a special skill in the manipulation of symbols and who uses this skill to forge a link between distinct persons or differentiated groups. A professional communicator is a broker in symbols, one who translates the attitudes, knowledge, and concerns of one speech community into alternative but suasive and understandable terms for another community. The role operates in two directions: vertical and horizontal. Vertically, professional communicators link elites in any organization or community with general audiences; horizontally, they link two differentiated speech communities at the same level of social structure. The clearest example of a professional communicator is a language translator who stands between two different linguistic groups and converts one language into its general equivalents in another. While this is a pure manifestation of the role, many other communicators—such as reporters, editors, artists, public relations people, public information officers, specialized writers in science, medicine, and law, engineering and technical writers, speechwriters and ghostwriters—function as brokers or links between elites and masses and differentiated speech communities. Most of these roles are associated with mass media of communication, but a functionally equivalent set of occupations was developed to operate in face-to-face circumstances—for example, agitators, detail people, negotiators, salespeople, field representatives of national organizations. In each case one faces a role that mediates between two parties by use of a skill at manipulating symbols to translate the language, values, interests, ideas, and purposes from the idiom of one group into an idiom acceptable to a differentiated speech community. The distinguishing characteristic of professional communicators— as opposed to the writers, novelists, scholars, and others who produce messages—is that the messages they produce have no necessary rela-

The Communications Revolution I 133 tion to their own thoughts and perceptions. Professional communicators operate under the constraints or demands imposed on one side by the ultimate audience and, on the other hand, by the ultimate source. Their skill is not so much intellectual and critical as a skill at interpretation and communication (or obfuscation). The professional communicator takes the messages, ideas, and purposes of a source and converts them into a symbolic strategy designed to inform or persuade an ultimate audience. Thus, reporters translate government handouts and press conferences into "stories" for wider audiences; the advertising artist converts the intentions and purposes of the client into a persuasive strategy; the public relations person creates symbols that convey the "right" corporate image. It is a bit blasphemous to lump all such occupations into one role (the case of the reporter and journalist is crucial and will be treated later), but they all share in common a brokerage or linkage function and a skill or capacity at the manipulation and translation of symbols. They differ along a number of dimensions: the degree of independence of the communicator; the relative freedom of the communicator in creating a new message versus more passively transmitting a performed message; the degree to which the communicator is in the employ of or tied to the source or is in alliance with the ultimate receiver; the number of mediated positions between the communicator and the ultimate source and the ultimate audience. By failing to treat these occupations as different faces of a functionally equivalent role, we have failed to build up a theoretical apparatus for interpreting the meaning and effect of the professional communicator.13 At this moment we can at least say that a dimension of the communications revolution was the creation of a distinct occupational category, the development of programs, largely through universities, for training and providing recruits to the role, and the simultaneous growth of occupational associations and codes of professional conduct that conferred distinct role identity and the elements of an occupational ideology upon various classes of professional communicators. These three dimensions of the "communications revolution" should be encompassed by one theoretical framework, for they are tied by history as well as logic. However, the two general theoretical stances within social theory (and I am taking some decided license with sociology here)

134 / The Communications Revolution does not permit such inclusiveness. Most aggregate social theory points in one of two directions. The first ties social theory to the process of what we might call massification. This position identifies the central tendency in society to be the eclipse of local, regional, and partial groups and affiliations by the growth of national centers of power and communication. Simultaneously, it observes the erosion of individual and group differences and a massive homogenization of social life, a process that reduces the luxuriant variety of nineteenth-century life to a uniformity of style and sentiment. Consequently, this position, of which Tocqueville and J. S. Mill are the great precursors, sees all the tendencies of industrialization—communication, work, education—as directed toward the centralization and homogenization of life. Ideologically, it has been concerned with the implications of these changes for the growth of totalitarianism because of either centralized elite power or homogenous mass movements. The second general stance in sociological theory emphasizes not the massification but the progressive differentiation of social life. It emphasizes the crucial role of the division of labor in creating distinct worlds of work and community. It stresses not the sameness of social life but its overwhelming variety; not the centralization of power but its dispersal; not the threat of totalitarianism but the exceptional opportunities for individuality and freedom accompanying the decline of ascription. Following Durkheim, this position sees the division of labor creating a new form of social order that enhances freedom and individuality but also creates new modes of structural interdependence, which insures the stability of social life. In the differentiation of work communities and the corresponding separation and specialization of institutions, it discovers an upgrading in the productivity and efficiency of society. I have deliberately polarized these positions and sketched them very loosely. I do so not to understate the acuity of sociologists but to isolate again dominant tendencies in industrial societies: a tendency toward decentralization and centralization, massification and differentiation. The crucial task in social theory is to develop more adequate models that simultaneously account for these two processes that point in opposite directions and that treat the contingencies in social change resulting from the overemphasis on either of these processes. Following Parsons, I would suggest that social change involves a process of differentiation, the solution of integrative problems stem-

The Communications Revolution I 135 ming from differentiation, and the creation of value patterns that legitimize new social arrangements and give coherence to the general orientations of the total society.14 The crucial problem in the social theory of communication is to isolate the way in which communication processes mirror, index, and facilitate the processes of differentiation, integration, and legitimation (or, alternatively, frustrate them). I have suggested that a beginning can be made on this problem by closely examining the centripetal and centrifugal tendencies within mass communication and the crucial role of professional communicators in mediating and integrating the orientations of differentiated persons, groups, and institutions. The division of labor, or to use Parsons's more inclusive term, the structural differentiation of society, is, I think, the key to unlocking the dynamics of social communication, for the division of labor is central to the creation of speech communities. Speech communities develop when common facilities or channels of communication are available to support interaction. These communities are normally described as culture areas with a territorial base, for in traditional societies common cultures can develop only through face-to-face contact. However, the development of specialized means of mechanical and electronic communication (along with rapid transportation) ensures that "people who are geographically dispersed can communicate effectively."15 Culture areas, under such conditions, are no longer constrained by geographic boundaries, and they consequently overlap and lose their territorial base. As Tamotsu Shibutani reminds us, next-door neighbors may today be strangers, and we speak of people living in the nongeographic worlds of art, science, fashion, and politics.16 Modern speech communities are almost always bound together by common channels of mass communication. The division of labor has the effect of producing a bewildering variety of these communities. Such communities can be identified with the following characteristics: a body of acceptable utterances; a common terminology of motives, explanations, and accounts; a distinct if not idiosyncratic expressive style in speech, writing, and other modes of communication; a special vocabulary including an argot; and a specific social focus. In each community there are norms of conduct, values, prestige ladders, and a common outlook toward life. Shared perspectives, in other words, arise through common communication channels and "the diversity of mass societies arises from the multiplicity of channels and the ease with

136 / The Communications Revolution which one may participate in them."17 Some of these communities are organized around ethnicity and religion, some around politics and culture, many around work and leisure. It is fair to conclude, I think, that the impact of structural differentiation and the development of distinct speech communities is centrifugal, increasing the functional capacity of the social system but also creating severe problems of communication and coordination. While there can be no doubt that the division of labor, as Durkheim suggested, substitutes structural interdependence for a common moral consciousness as a basis of social solidarity—an interdependence we become aware of in times of strikes, riots, and severe unemployment— it is a very tenuous solidarity, dependent upon a series of negotiated agreements between differentiated sectors and resulting in a thinning out of the moral and evaluative center of social organization. The centrifugal pull of the division of labor is mirrored by the rise of specialized forms of communication. Indeed, these forms, as I suggested, provide an impulse to the creation of speech communities by ferreting out incipient groups in society and giving them semblance, form, rhetoric, and symbols. Yet balanced with this tendency is the development of national media—today particularly television, but also national magazines, newspapers, and, to a lesser degree, films—that cut across speech communities, drawing their audiences out of all specialized subsectors. Such media attempt to create a consensus or at least a center of value, attitude, emotion, and expressive style. Their success in doing this is highly problematic, but national media strive for this consensus. They also tend to block out of communication those values, attitudes, and groups that threaten the tenuous basis of social order. National media enact a ritual celebration of the basis of social order and provide degradation ceremonies that punish actors and orientations deviant from social norms. The decade of the 18905 and those that followed progressively witnessed not only the growth of mass or national media and the exfoliation of minority media but also the development of university departments, institutes, and training programs designed to provide a continuous supply of trained professional communicators. Simultaneously, professional associations designed to solidify and enhance these new occupations were created. Not only were new occupations innovated but existing occupations were redefined. Consequently, roles

The Communications Revolution I 137

such as artist, writer, and journalist were partially transformed into those of reporter and propagandist. Let me briefly comment on the case of journalists. Journalists were classically conceived as independent interpreters of events. They were not viewed solely or even largely as technical writers, who served as links between governmental and other institutional elites and wider audiences. Journalism was traditionally conceived as a literary genre rather than as a species of technical writing. Journalism was not characterized merely as reporting that put the words and actions of others into simpler language, but as a fluid interpretation of action and actors, an effort to create a semantic reality that invested the ordinary with significance. Journalists traditionally induced their audiences to come to terms with old realities in new ways. With the rise of "objective reporting" in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the journalist went through a process that can be fairly termed a "conversion downwards," a process whereby a role is deintellectualized and technicalized.18 Rather than independent interpreters of events, journalists became reporters, brokers in symbols who mediated between audiences and institutions, particularly but not exclusively government. In this role they lose their independence and become part of the process of news transmission. In this role they principally use not intellectual skill as critics, interpreters, and contemporary historians but technical skill at writing, a capacity to translate the specialized language and purposes of government, science, art, medicine, finance into an idiom that can be understood by broader, more amorphous, less educated audiences. Objective reporting became the fetish of American journalism in the period of rapid industrialization. Originally the development of this form of journalism was grounded in a purely commercial motive: the need of the mass newspaper to serve politically heterogeneous audiences without alienating any significant segment of the audience. The practice apparently began with the wire services. They instructed their writers and reporters that any distributed copy had to be acceptable to both Democratic and Republican subscribers, and as a result writers became skilled at constructing nonpartisan—that is, "objective"—accounts of events.19 This commercially grounded strategy of reporting was subsequently rationalized into a canon of professional competence and ideology of

138 / The Communications Revolution professional responsibility. It rested on the dubious assumption that the highest standard of professional performance occurred when the reporter presented the reader with all sides of an issue (though there were usually only two), presented all the "facts," and allowed the reader to decide what these facts meant. These conventions of objective reporting were institutionalized in journalism curricula when they were developed in universities beginning in the 18908. Whereas these schools began exclusively as training grounds for newspaper reporters, they soon broadened out to encompass the more inclusive occupations indicated by the phrase professional communicator: advertising writers, artists, other propagandists, public relations writers and advertisers, science and technical writers, television and radio broadcasters, agriculture and religion writers, and a host of equivalent occupations and specialties. The development and institutionalization of objective reporting ultimately led to the eclipse of the traditional journalist roles of advocacy and criticism. It is not that these latter features disappeared, but they were reduced to secondary aspects of the journalistic enterprise; renewed emphasis upon them is a phenomenon of this decade. It is important to recognize that the canons of objective reporting turn the journalist into a professional communicator, from an independent observer and critic to a relatively passive link in a communication chain that records the passing scene for audiences. Objective reporting severely compromised the independence of the journalist in at least two additional ways. First, as an adjunct of objective reporting there developed norms and procedures governing how reporters could utilize sources. The net effect of the press conference, the background interview, the rules governing anonymous disclosure and attribution of sources, and particularly the growing use of the public information officer within government is to routinize the reporter's function and to grant the source exceptional control over news dissemination. As a result, not only can government and other sources deliberately place messages, without alteration, before the public, but through the "leak" and other forms of anonymous disclosure they can utilize the press as an alternative channel for diplomatic and other private communication.20 The "canned" press conference in which questions are planted and to which "safe" reporters are admitted by pass further strips away the independent, critical function of the journalist.

The Communications Revolution I 139 Second, the psychology of the reporting process also chips away at reporters' independence. Because reporters mediate between the audience and sources, they are pulled in two directions: serving the interests of the source or the interests of the audience, which are rarely identical. Often, if not usually, reporters develop contempt for both parties they serve: the audience because it is so often apathetic and uninterested, the source because it is so often dishonest. Resolution of the strain in the reporting process normally supports the interests of the source rather than that of the audience. The explanation for this phenomenon is best provided by two principles derived from the social psychology of George Herbert Mead. First, reporters are dependent on their sources for information and build up over time a certain intimacy and empathy with them. Consequently, they are disposed to "take the role" of the source, to see events and problems from the standpoint of the source. Second, although reporters receive little feedback from their amorphous and disorganized audiences, they are likely to receive considerable feedback—both commendation and criticism—from sources. As a result, reporters are disposed to internalize the attitudes and expectations of the source, and indeed to turn the source into the ultimate audience.21 As a consequence of these psychic mechanisms and the procedures of objective reporting, independent journalists are reduced to brokers in the communication process and a broker allied structurally if not sympathetically with the persons and institutions they report. There is a final, more general, and more deleterious effect of the professional communicator, the norms of objective reporting, and the intense division of labor accompanying advanced industrialization. I suggested, following Durkheim, that the division of labor represents a centrifugal tendency in society that thins out the moral center of social organization. For stability, this fragmenting tendency must be counteracted by modes of communication and symbols that, in the words of Lloyd Warner, "everyone not only knows but feels," symbols that enable people in mass society to engage in "thoughtful and emotional collaboration for common ends."22 It is the absence of integrating modes and styles of communication, of emotionally charged symbols of national community and general, integrating ideas and values that underlies, in part, the instability of contemporary American society. The developments in communication I have already described have played

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their part in creating this dilemma. As Thelma McCormack has written, "The supreme test of the mass media ... is how well it provides for the integration of experience."23 Modern media of communication, through the people who own and staff them, do not provide this integration. Partly this is due to the fragmenting effects of minor media, partly to an intellectual and cultural weakness of the general society, and partly, I think, to the entire process of objective reporting, which has become, as the Commission on Freedom of the Press recognized in 1947, not an aid but a menace to understanding.24 What are lamely called the conventions of objective reporting were developed to report another culture and another society. They were designed to report a secure world of politics, culture, social relations, and international alignments about which there was a rather broad consensus concerning values, purposes, and loyalties. The conventions of reporting reflected and enhanced a settled mode of life and fleshed out with incidental information an intelligible social structure. Human interest, entertainment, trivia, and the daily events in Washington could be rendered in the straightforward "who says what to whom" manner, for they occurred within a setting of secure structures and meanings. That is, one can be content with "giving the facts" where there are generally accepted rules for interpreting the facts and an agreed set of political values and purposes. Today no accepted system of interpretation exists and political values and purposes are very much in contention. Politics, culture, classes, generations, and international alignments are not part of an intelligible mode of life, are not directed by shared values, and cannot be encased within traditional forms of understanding. Consequently, "objective reporting" does little more than convey this disorder in isolated, fragmented news stories. Even worse, the canons of objective reporting filter historically new phenomena through an outmoded linguistic machinery that grossly distorts the nature of these events. This came dramatically to light in the reporting from Vietnam. In such reporting a disorganized, fluid, nonrectilinear war was converted by journalist procedure into something straight, balanced, and moving in rectilinear ways, into a war of hills, tonnage, casualties, divisions, and hill numbers. The conventions, in other words, not only report the war, they endow it, pari passu, with an order and logic that simply mask the underlying realities. Audiences, as a result, read about and experienced the war, indeed were obsessed by it, but were unable

The Communications Revolution I 141

to personally understand it, nor were they able to see it as an event in their common national life. Despite the reassuring sense of disinterest and rigor conveyed by the term objective, it is important to recognize that all journalism, including objective reporting, is a creative and imaginative work, a symbolic strategy; journalism sizes up situations, names their elements, structure, and outstanding ingredients, and names them in a way that contains an attitude toward them. (This is a paraphrase of some lines of Kenneth Burke.) The conventions of objective reporting were developed as part of an essentially utilitarian-capitalist-scientific orientation toward events. The conventions in other words implicitly dissect experience from a point of view. It is a point of view that emphasizes, as one would expect from utilitarianism, the role of personalities or actors in the creation of events and ties the definition of news to timeliness. What it lacks, of course, are precisely those elements of news that constitute the basic information on which popular rule rests: historical background and continuity, the motives and purposes of political actors, and the impact of technology, demographic change, and other impersonal forces that contribute so much to the shape of contemporary events. Yet despite their obsolescence we continue to live with these conventions as if a silent conspiracy had been undertaken between government, the reporter, and the audience to keep the house locked up tight even though all the windows have been blown out. George Herbert Mead, writing on the aesthetic function of news, once said: "Whether this form of the enjoyed result has an aesthetic function or not depends on whether the story of the news serves to interpret to the reader his experience as the shared experience of the community of which he feels himself to be a part."25 Except in the rare instances of assassination, news no longer functions aesthetically, for it does not bring back into an integrated whole the fragmented pieces of modern experience. Consequently, not only does the modern world require new ideas, orientations, and symbols of national and international unity, it also requires new norms and procedures for the process of public communication and for the control of professional communicators. Certainly that much is needed if news is to meet the criterion and objectives established many years ago by Robert Park: "The function of news is to orient man and society in an actual world. In so far as it succeeds it tends to preserve the sanity of the individual and the permanence of society."26

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Notes 1. For a similar argument, see Asa Briggs, Mass Entertainment (Adelaide: Griffin, 1960). 2. W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 138. 3. Theodore B. Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1958). 4. On the social organization of mass societies, see William Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society (New York: Free Press, 1959). 5. The most astute student of these matters was the late Harold Innis. See Harold A. Innis, Empire and Communication (Oxford: Clarendon, 1950). 6. An excellent study of the growth of such forms of communication in Israel was provided in an exceptional and underutilized series of articles published in the 19505 by S. N. Eisenstadt. See S. N. Eisenstadt, "Comparative Study," Public Opinion Quarterly i9 (1955-56): I53-677. Joseph Gusfield, "Mass Society and Extremist Politics," American Sociological Review 37 (1962.): 32.8. 8. Warren Breed, "Mass Communication and Sociocultural Integration," Social Forces 37 (1958): 109-16. 9. For an excellent study of the community newspaper, see Morris Janowitz, The Community Press in an Urban Setting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). 10. Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 25. The entire paragraph leans heavily on this remarkable book. 11. See Howard Becker, Outsiders (New York: Free Press, 1963), 38. 12. A useful though inadequate index of this differentiation is the N. W. Ayer Directory of Newspapers and Periodicals, which lists 11,293 newspapers and 9,400 periodicals in the United States. 13. Existing models of communication are virtually mute on the matter of messages mediated through professional communicators. One exception is Bruce H. Westley and Malcolm S. MacLean Jr., "A Conceptual Model of Communications Research," journalism Quarterly 34 (1957): 31-38. What is basically needed is a series of ethnographic accounts of these occupations, done through participant observation and reported with a detailed, sensitive hand. The existing pieces of survey research on reporters, editors, technical writers, and similar occupations are almost uniformly uninformative. A glittering exception is Ian Lewis, "In the Court of Power—The Advertising Man," in The Human Shape of Work, ed. Peter Berger (New York: Macmillan, 1964). Walter Gieber of San Francisco State College has written an interesting though unpublished analysis of newsworkers entitled "The Attributes of a Reporter's Role." 14. Talcott Parsons, Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 21-23. 15. Tamotsu Shibutani, "Reference Groups as Perspectives," American Journal of Sociology 60 (1955): 566. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., 569. 18. The role of journalist never did develop effectively in the United States, it must be admitted. See Tocqueville's comments on American journalists in Democracy in America, vol. i (New York: Schocken, 1961), chapter 40. 19. This interpretation is provided by Fred Seibert. See Fred Seibert, Theodore

The Communications Revolution I 143 Peterson, and Wilbur Schramm, Four Theories of the Press (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967). 20. Muhammad Alwi Alhlan, "Anonymous Disclosure of Government Information as a Form of Political Communication," unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois, 1967. 21. See Geiber, "Attributes of a Reporter's Role," and Walter Geiber and Walter Johnson, "The City Hall 'Beat': A Study of Reporter and Source Roles," Journalism Quarterly 38 (1961): 289-97. 22. W. Lloyd Warner, American Life: Dream and Reality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 2.47, 249. 23. Thelma McCormack, "Social Theory and the Mass Media," Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 27 (1961): 488. 24. Commission on Freedom of the Press, A Free and Responsible Press (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947). 25. George Herbert Mead, "The Nature of Aesthetic Experience," in Selected Writings: George Herbert Mead, ed. Andrew Reck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), 302. 26. Robert Park, Society (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1955), 86.

7 / The Dark Continent of American Journalism First published in 1986

Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. Even Science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars' unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time is at Nought.... No retrospect will take us to the true beginning: and whether our prologue be in heaven or on earth, it is but a fraction of that all-presupposing fact with which our story set out. —George Eliot, Daniel Deronda Journalists are writers of stories and, after hours, tellers of stories as well. The stories they tell are of stories they missed, stories they got, stories they scooped, and cautionary little tales that educate the apprentice to the glories, dangers, mysteries, and desires of the craft. One such story—one that might be called "the quest for the perfect lead"— features Edwin A. Lahey, a legendary Chicago Daily News reporter. Like most stories invoking legends, it is perhaps apocryphal, but its significance is less in its truth than in the point it attempts to make. The story begins with a celebrated murder case of 1924, the Leopold-Loeb case. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were teenage graduate students at the University of Chicago when they kidnapped and killed fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks in an attempt to commit the perfect crime. They made one mistake—a pair of Leopold's eyeglasses was found at the scene of the crime. They were arrested, brought to trial, and defended by the famous barrister Clarence Darrow. He had them plead guilty but successfully argued against the death penalty.

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The Dark Continent of American Journalism I 145 Both were sentenced to life terms for the murder plus ninety-nine years for the kidnapping. Nathan Leopold was paroled in 1958 and finished his life in Puerto Rico doing volunteer medical work. Richard Loeb was killed in Stateville Penitentiary in 1936 after making a homosexual advance toward another prisoner. Eddie Lahey, who covered the story for the Daily News, began his report with this lead: "Richard Loeb, the well-known student of English, yesterday ended a sentence with a proposition." Even if the story is invented, its well-knownness tells us something of the imagination and desires of American journalists. What makes the lead so gorgeous is not only how it encapsulates most of the elements of the news story—the five Ws and the H—but also how it does so through a delightful play on words—journalistic prose brushing up against poetry, if only in the ambiguity it celebrates. The lead also illustrates a necessary condition of all good journalism: a profound collaboration between writer and audience. Lahey marks this collaboration by the assumption he makes about the knowledge his audience brings to the story: that they were constant readers who would remember Richard Loeb as an actor in a twelveyear-old drama; that they would remember who Loeb was at the time of the 192.4 crime and therefore catch the irony of the "well-known student of English"; that they could appreciate from the drills of schoolmasters the play on preposition and proposition; and, finally, that they would grasp the dual meaning of sentence. If the assumptions Lahey makes about his audience and the cleverness of his language set the lead apart, the desire it expresses and the elements contained within it make it emblematic of all journalism. All writing, all narrative art, depends upon dramatic unity, bringing together plot, character, scene, method, and purpose. The distinctive and tyrannical aspect of daily journalism is the injunction that the elements be assembled, arrayed, and accounted for in the lead, the topic sentence, or at best—here is where the inverted pyramid comes in—the first paragraph. The balance of the story merely elaborates what is announced at the outset. (The long, often interminable stories of the Wall Street Journal, and many similar feature stories, are the exception; they, as T. S. Eliot said of Swinburne, diffuse their meaning "very thinly throughout an immense verbal spate.") In Lahey's lead, the character, as is usual with American journalism, has pride of place: Richard Loeb is the subject of both the story

146 / The Dark Continent of American Journalism and the sentence. The scene, when and where, is given in the Stateville dateline (conveniently a place and a prison) and in the commonest word in any lead, yesterday. The plot, the what, is cleverly implied, though left undeveloped, by the action and reaction—"ended a sentence with a proposition." Only the how is omitted from the lead (he was killed with a razor) and awaits another sentence. And where is the why, the explanation of the act, the elucidation of the purposes, however misaligned, of the actors? Why did Richard Loeb make an advance, if indeed he did? Why did James Day, for that was his name, murder Richard Loeb, if that is what he did? No one, certainly not Eddie Lahey, knew. The why was merely an insinuation. It would be established, if at all, only by the courts. James Day was, in fact, acquitted on grounds of self-defense. Was it all an elaborate mistake, a behavioral ballet of misunderstood intentions? Lahey merely insinuates a why—he appeals to his readers' commonsense knowledge of what goes on in prisons, of what men are like in captivity. We must read the why into the story rather than out of it: Richard Loeb as a prisoner of sexual desire as well as of the prison itself. The omission of the how and the insinuation of the why is absolutely unremarkable: indeed, it is the standard practice of daily journalism. How could it be otherwise? At one level, how merely answers the question of technique: in this case, the killing was accomplished with a razor. In other cases, how tells us that interest rates were lowered by increasing the money supply, the football victory was achieved with a new formation, the political candidate won through superior precinct organization. The how is clearly of less importance than the what, and in our culture the who, and can be relegated safely to subsequent sentences and paragraphs. At another, and deeper, level, answering how requires detailing the actual sequence of acts, actors, and events that leads to a particular conclusion. How fills in a space; it tells us how an intention (the why) becomes an accomplishment (the what). How puts the reader in touch with the hard surfaces of human activity, the actual set of contingent circumstances. Loeb did this, Day did that—a blind chain of events, finally detailed for a jury, leading to a hideous outcome. When the description becomes fine-grained enough, how merges into why: a description becomes an explanation. Why answers to the question of explanation. It accounts for events, actions, and actors. It is a search for the deeper factors that lie behind

The Dark Continent of American Journalism I 147 the surfaces of the news story. "A story is worthless if it doesn't tell me why something happened," says Allan M. Siegal of the New York Times. Well, Mr. Siegal goes too far. If we threw out all the stories in the Times that failed to answer the question "Why?" there wouldn't be much newspaper left beyond the advertisements. Nonetheless, the why element attempts to make things sensible, coherent, explicable. It satisfies our desire to believe that the world, at least most of the time, is driven by something other than blind chance. How and why are the most problematic aspects of American journalism: the dark continent and the invisible landscape. Why and how are what we most want to get out of a news story and are least likely to receive or what we must in most cases supply ourselves. Both largely elude and must elude the conventions of daily journalism, as they elude, incidentally, art and science. Our interest in "what's new," "what's happening," is not merely cognitive and aesthetic. We want more than the facts pleasingly arranged. We also want to know how to feel about events and what, if anything, to do about them. If they occur by luck or blind chance, that is a kind of explanation, too. It tells us to be tragically resigned to them; indeed, luck and chance are the unannounced dummy variables of journalistic thought, as they are of common sense. We need not only to know but to understand, not only to grasp but to take an attitude toward the events and personalities that pass before us, to have an understanding or an attitude that depends upon depth in the news story. Why and how attempt to supply this depth, even if they are honored every day largely in the breach. That news stories seldom make sense in this larger context is the most frequent, punishing, and uncharitable accusation made in daily journalism. Listen to one comment, this about daily reporting from Washington, among the many that might be cited: The daily news coverage travels over surfaces of words and events, but it rarely reaches deeper to the underlying reality of how things actually happen. Its own conventions and reflexes, in large measure, prevent the news media from doing more. Until this changes too, citizens will continue to be confused by the daily slices of news from Washington. Periodically, they will continue to be shocked by occasional comprehensive revelations of what's really happening, deeper accounts which explain the events they thought they understood.

This obsessive criticism of daily journalism is true as far as it goes, though it is unforgivably self-righteous. What it overlooks is that

148 / The Dark Continent of American Journalism depth—the how and the why—are rarely in any individual story. They are properties of the whole, not the part, the coverage, not the account. To expect the dramatic unity of a three-act play in a twelve-paragraph story in a daily newspaper is to doom oneself to perpetual disappointment. But if a story can be kept alive in the news long enough, it can be fleshed out and rounded off. Journalists devote much of their energy to precisely that: keeping significant events afloat long enough so that interpretation, explanation, and thick description can be added as part of ongoing developments. Alas, management and the marketing department devote much of their energy to precisely the opposite—making each front page look like a new chapter in human history. Journalism must be examined as a corpus, not as a set of isolated stories. The corpus includes not only the multiple treatments of an event within the newspaper—breaking stories, follow-ups, news analysis, interpretation and background, critical commentary, editorials—but also the other forms of journalism that surround, correct, and complete the daily newspaper: television coverage, documentary and docudrama, the news weeklies and journals of opinion, and, finally, book-length journalism. Two decades after the Vietnam War its why is still being established in books such as Loren Baritz's Backfire. The story of busing and racial desegregation in Boston—the how and the why—cannot be found in the massive coverage that won the Boston Globe a Pulitzer Prize. The story wasn't remotely complete until the publication of J. Anthony Lucas's Common Ground, though even that remarkable book subordinated the why of the busing story to the how—to the close-grained, personified flow of events. The story behind the story was that there was no story at all. All the standard explanations— racism, bureaucratic incompetence, political manipulation, journalistic irresponsibility—ebb away under the relentless detail of Lukas's narrative. Similarly, the story of apartheid in South Africa never could be adequately described or explained in the New York Times no matter how many stories were devoted to it or how relentlessly. Anthony Lewis banged away at it in his columns. Joseph Lelyveld's Move Your Shadow deepened our understanding beyond that provided in breaking stories of this riot or that, this government action or that, but it hardly explained either the origins or the trajectory of that political system. If anything, the book made apartheid politically more ambiguous, as it deepened our moral revulsion. Journalism is, in fact, a curriculum. Its first course is the breaking

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stories of the daily press. There one gets a bare description: identification of the actors and the events, the scene against which the events are played out, and the tools available to the protagonists. Intermediate and advanced work—the fine-grained descriptions and interpretations—await the columns of analysis and interpretation, the weekly summaries and commentaries, and the book-length expositions. Each part of the curriculum depends on the other parts. It is a weakness of American journalism that the curriculum is so badly integrated and cross-referenced that each story starts anew, as if no one had ever touched the subject before. It is also a weakness of American journalism that so few of the students ever get beyond the first course. But keep things in perspective. It is similarly a weakness, say, of American social science that the curriculum is incoherent and badly cross-referenced and so few of the "students" take more than the introductory course. It is worse. Most of the students think the introductory course is the curriculum, and this naive assumption is reinforced by the pretensions of teachers and textbook writers. The weaknesses of American journalism are systemic; they are of a cloth with the weaknesses of American institutions generally, including education. Both journalism and education assume the constant student and the constant reader. American journalism assumes the figure who queues up every day for a dose of news and beyond that the commentary, analysis, and evidence that turn the "news" into knowledge. American education assumes the "constant" student who engages in lifelong learning, who, unsatisfied by the pieties and simplicities of the "introductory course," goes on to explore subjects in depth and detail and along the way acquires a mastery of theory and evidence. This is both wrong and self-serving. But, to rephrase Walter Lippmann, more journalists and scholars have been ruined by self-importance than by liquor. Many of the relations between the course and curriculum of American journalism, and many of the problems of description and explanation, are exemplified by an episode within the "big story" of recent years, the story of the American economy. Since at least 1980, we have been treated to a daily saga of runaway budget deficits, high unemployment, tax reform and reductions, roller-coaster stock market prices, corporate takeovers and consolidations, mounting trade deficits, rapidly rising military expenditures, and high, though moderating, interest rates.

150 / The Dark Continent of American Journalism An instructive episode in this larger story opened in January 1982 when William Greider of the Washington Post published a long essay in The Atlantic entitled "The Education of David Stockman." The piece was based on eighteen "off-the-record" interviews with the then director of the Office of Management and Budget taped during the first nine months of the presidency of Ronald Reagan. The essay revealed Stockman's growing doubts about the wisdom of the economic policy Reagan was pursuing. Stockman recognized early that no matter how cleverly numbers were massaged, the president's economic policy would produce massive budget deficits and the economic stimulus from tax reduction would not generate sufficient revenue to offset increased expenditures for defense. The doctrines of supply-side economics on which Reagan had conducted his successful campaign were, in Stockman's estimation, naively optimistic—or "voodoo" economics, as George Bush had called them during the heat of the Republican primaries. The supply-side tax reduction of Ronald Reagan turned out to be no different from the demand-side tax reduction of John Kennedy, except it was much more skewed toward the rich and powerful. Reagan's economic policy was a return to traditional Republican "trickle down" economics that helped the poor by first benefiting the rich. Greider's essay revealed in stark terms the considerable pulling and hauling within the administration and Congress over economic policy. It underscored the compromises and trade-offs, the caving in to special interests, the triumphs of expediency over principle that are inevitable in putting together a revenue and expenditure program. It set out the terms on which the private debate among presidential advisers was conducted and defined in "brutal terms" the genuine problems that Congress and the president would have to confront. It took us behind the calm exterior of the federal bureaucracy into a war of conflicting opinions where political choices were made amid ambiguity and uncertainty. To a certain extent, it demystified the process of budget-making by demonstrating that the experts had no magic wand or profound insights into the economy. They turned out to be pretty much like everyone else: confused about what was going on in the economy; badly divided among themselves as to remedies; not much more in control of the situation than the rankest amateurs. The piece revealed as well, at least as Greider saw it, an awesome paradox: Reagan's stunning legislative victories, which had dominated the news during the first months of his term, trapped him in the awesome fiscal crisis with which we

The Dark Continent of American Journalism I 151 still live. At least one of the roots of the paradox was in the GreiderStockman revelation that the one impregnable, off-limits part of the budget was defense. This was the biggest peacetime arms buildup in the history of the republic—one that in five years would more than double the Pentagon's annual budget. Despite the picture of conflict, indecision, and uncertainty over economic policy the Atlantic essay revealed, Reagan himself presented a confident image on television and in the newspaper: an image of fiscal control and responsibility, of a new era of stable growth, balanced budget, stock market expansion, and lowered inflation—a calm and eloquent reassurance despite privately held doubts of many of his advisers, including Stockman. For anyone familiar with bureaucracies, Greider's article rang true, particularly in contrasting the smooth and reassuring exterior of certainty and an interior space of policy-making dominated by conflict and disarray. But did the article explain anything? Hardly. It did account for Stockman's position on economic policy by showing something of the ideological commitments from which it derived. The essay, however, was primarily an answer to the question of "how," a thick description of the actual process of policy-making, an etching of the space between intention and accomplishment that eludes so much of daily journalism. Greider's publisher, E. P. Button, described the essay this way when it was reprinted in book form: "The Education of David Stockman is a narrative of political action with overtones of tragedy as the idealistic young conservative reformer discovers the complexities of the political system and watches as his moral principles are undermined by the necessities of compromise." It sounds like a soap opera; indeed, the sentence has the cadence of the introduction to the old radio soap opera Our Gal Sunday. And it is, in a way, a soap opera. While the essay is flat-footed and straightforward, it does have a strong narrative line. It opens with its one literary twist: a tour of the Stockman farm in western Michigan, situating the protagonist in his native habitat, among the conditions and people that formed him. The essay thereby sets up a contrast between the quasi-heroic protagonist who has learned solid ideological lessons in the outlands and the administration insiders who defeat him in the cloakrooms and boardrooms of Washington. The essay's revelatory power is in its consistent narrative focus—from David Stockman's point of view—and a dramatic line— from Michigan innocence to Washington defeat—that, while it is an

152 / The Dark Continent of American Journalism exaggeration, makes the entire episode coherent and the descriptive detail informing. But the story had an additional twist. Although the GreiderStockman conversations were "off the record" (not for publication in any form), certain details were put on "background" (for anonymous publication only). Washington Post reporters pursued the leads the private discussions opened up and published the results. They found White House sources to corroborate important information in the Stockman interviews so they could write independent stories. Other Washington journalists were covering and writing about these same matters. Therefore, the essential facts in the Greider essay appeared in the daily press attributed to those ubiquitous characters of Washington journalism: administration sources, senior officials, senior White House aides, key congressional aides, Defense Department advisers, and so on. The key point, in Greider's mind, was that the Atlantic essay contained nothing that was not widely known among Washington journalists, nothing that had not already appeared in the daily press. Nonetheless, the article created one of those brief storms typical of a Washington season: a squall of comment, charges, and recriminations that dissipates as quickly as it appears. Stockman was called into the president's woodshed for a licking and emerged striking his breast and intoning many mea culpas. Greider was pilloried for betraying principles of the press. He had, so it was charged, withheld information from his own paper and the public to publish it where it would get more attention. When the Atlantic article appeared, Greider was transformed from a reporter to a source: he was now a who, the subject of a story. Some reporters who called for interviews obviously had not read the piece and wanted Greider to summarize it. They showed little interest in the substance of the article—the depiction of the process of policy-making, the specific polices developed, the paradox of legislative triumph and fiscal crisis—but much interest in the specific personalities inhabiting the story. They wanted to know about motive: Why did Stockman give the interviews? Why did Greider conduct them? Why did Stockman tell Greider the things he did? Why did Greider withhold such information from his own paper? Greider tried to explain the ground rules for the interviews and the content of the article, but he found that sophisticated explanations did not hold up well in telephone interviews with reporters writing to deadline and in search of a pithy lead. Press accounts of the article by

The Dark Continent of American Journalism I 153 journalists who had read it were "brutal summaries" that sacrificed psychological nuance, character, plot, subtlety, and ambiguity—all those qualities that Greider thought made his piece distinctive and useful. As I said earlier, the perplexing thing about the controversy was that the essential information contained in the Atlantic piece had been earlier reported in the daily press, though attributed to "senior budget officials." All Greider had done was to thicken the narrative and put Stockman's name in place of the anonymous source. It was now Stockman revealing his private doubts about the administration program. But if the information was already available, why the controversy? The answer is simple: in American journalism, names make news, and explanations in the news pretty much come down to the motives of the actors in the political drama. Greider concluded that the conventions of daily journalism "serve only a very limited market—the elite audience of Washington insiders—while obscuring things for the larger audience of ordinary citizens." Insiders can read names into the anonymous sources and can ferret out motives from the interests lying behind the innocence of the text. The text may answer how and why, but in ways accessible only to those who already know the rules of Washington and the reportorial game, those who already understand the background of government policy-making: the players and interests at loose in the process, the alliances that exist between officials and reporters. Greider came to believe that his Atlantic article refuted the simple and shallow version of reality that the news created when complex episodes were carved into daily slices. He also rediscovered an old lesson of journalism, a lesson recently restated by the journalist-turned-historian Robert Darnton: journalists write not for the public but for one another, for their editors, for their sources, and for other insiders who are part of the specialized world they are reporting. It is in this context that the deeply coded text of the daily news story develops. Such stories provide a forum in which "participants in political debates can argue with each other in semipublic disguises, influencing the flow of public dialogue and the content of elite opinion without having to answer directly for their utterances." Journalists and other insiders become so adept at the deep reading of veiled messages that they forget they are unintelligible to the ordinary reader or, if they are intelligible, convey an entirely different message. Washington news is valued precisely because it is an insider's conversation, one interest group speaking to another, with reporters acting as

154 / The Dark Continent of American Journalism symbol brokers coding stories into a conversation only the sophisticated few can follow. Greider summarizes: This inside knowledge provides a continuing subtext for the news of Washington; very little of it is conveyed in intelligible terms to the uninformed. The "rules" prevent that, and so also do the conventions of the press, how a story is written, and what meets the standard definition of what is news. The insiders, both reporters and government officials, will read every news story with this subtext clearly in mind. Other readers are left to struggle with their own translation.

The Atlantic article broke through this coded text; it presented the "unvarnished private dialogue of government" that was supposed to remain private, implicit, known only to insiders capable of penetrating the bland, reassuring rhetoric of the official news story and the official handout. By making the private public, the Greider piece diminished the value of every insider's knowledge and revealed the rules of the game to a wider audience. Greider attempted, in short, to give a lesson in how to read the daily news and how to add description and explanation to accounts that regularly omit them. In doing so, his piece contradicted the reassuring image of order and progress conveyed by breaking stories. What are the lessons to be learned from the Greider-Stockman episode? First, daily journalism offers more description and explanation than one would ordinarily think, but they are not transparently available on the surface of the text. Despite the commitment of journalists to objectivity and facticity, much of what they have to report is obliquely stated, coded deeply into the text and recoverable only by "constant readers" who can decode the text and who bring to it substantial knowledge of politics, bureaucracy, and, as here, budgets. Second, the most important descriptions and explanations of journalism are lost when they are sliced into daily fragments, thin tissue cultures of reality, disconnected from a narrative framework. Third, the reader can discover such descriptions and explanations only when the separate stories are reintegrated into a more coherent framework and when the episodes of the news have a narrative structure that contains elements of drama, nuances of character, and precise chronological order. Finally, the episode demonstrates how overwhelmingly dependent American journalism is on explaining events by attributing motives, purposes, and intentions in the budget struggle and, then, in the newspaper accounts,


the motives of Stockman and Greider themselves. The origins of these habits, including the habit of relying on motives for explanations, is revealed in some commonplace history of American journalism. A Wall Street Journal radio ad of some time back said something like the following: "The business section of the daily newspaper will give you the 'who, what, when, and where,' but only the Wall Street Journal gives you the 'why and how.'" This is the hyperbole of advertising, of course, but the claim holds some truth. The Journal's feature stories are not written against a deadline, and they consume luxurious amounts of space. They allow for a certain lushness of detail and description and use a variety of literary devices, particularly personification, that give a certain illusion of explanation. At the other extreme, the staples of the Journal are the endless columns of price quotations from the financial and commodity markets, and these numbers are, in a way, the archetype of the news story. The numbers tell sophisticated readers what has happened (the market is down), how they should feel about it (that's bad), and what they should do about it (it's time to get out). The reader can extract a description and explanation from the statistics. The numbers merely signal an event; the description and explanation are within the knowledge of the reader, and this knowledge constitutes the paper's collaborative counterforce. What is unexceptional about the Journal ad is its heroic and naive realism. The ad assumes that the stories in the Journal record a transparent truth of an objective reality. Perhaps this naive realism still flourishes only among journalists. To the contrary, most scholars would argue that the stories written by journalists manifest the reality-making practices of the craft rather than some objective world. Journalists need not apologize for this. All writing, even scientific writing, is a form of storytelling aimed at imposing coherence on an otherwise chaotic flow of events. That is the point, after all, of the George Eliot quote that heads this essay. Even scientists must start with the make-believe of a beginning: the fatal pause between the tick and the tock, a moment of unfulfilled silence in which the scientist's story of the universe can begin. Journalism, then, is a fiction in the sense that all stories are fictions. They are made by journalists out of the conventions, procedures, ethos, and devices of their craft. The language of journalism is not transparent to nature or the world. Journalists speak an invented code, often, as the Greider-Stockman story indicates, a densely compacted

156 / The Dark Continent of American Journalism code, and in this sense participate in a making, a fiction. As I previously suggested, the raw data of journalism are always slipping away toward the story forms, the genres, the structures of consciousness with which the journalist tries to grasp hold of the suicide at the bridge or the bureaucrat in the policy conference. The raw materials of the making, the events, the data of journalism maintain their own unblessed existence outside the news columns. Well, one must retreat. Press conferences, pseudoevents, and media events are now so inextricably knotted into the world that the issue is as complicated as our sex lives. Nonetheless, journalism, like all fictions, is a creative and imaginative work, a symbolic strategy, a way of rendering the world reassuringly comprehensive or, failing that, of assigning events to fate, luck, and chance. Journalism, then, like everything else, often fails, but journalists do not accept, because we will not tolerate, mystery for very long, particularly if it involves politics and economics, matters of ultimate threat or reassurance. So the initially unintelligible is bashed at until it is in some kind of shape. News is not, then, some transparent glimpse at the world. News registers, on the one hand, the organizational constraints under which journalists labor: the processes by which beats are defined, stories are selected and edited, the random eruption of events are reduced to routine procedure, the editorial resources of a publisher are allocated, and "authorities" are defined and consulted. The news registers, on the other hand, the literary forms and narrative devices journalists regularly use to manage the overwhelming flow of events. These devices are partly economic and bureaucratic. They guarantee the production of a certain number of words and stories every day. They guarantee that the journalist, under the most outrageous circumstances of time and situation, can instantly turn an event into a story. These literary devices are tropisms; the journalist turns to them as a plant turns to light. Writing has to be virtually that automatic if the journalist is to produce stories on demand. They guarantee that the daily newspaper will be full of news at a cost that ensures a product salable to advertisers and readers. There is a harmonics to journalism; the stories write themselves. Yet the stories slip away toward the literary devices and dramatic conventions that are part of the culture as a whole. If, for example, one can earn a profit selling "ideological stories" in European newspapers but cannot in the United States, it tells us, at the least, that the dramatic conventions of the ideological are not sufficiently resonant with Amer-


lean culture as a whole. They do not seem to get at the truth as we understand it. The forms of American journalism are receptacles into which can be poured the disconnected data of everyday life. As Carlin Romano says, journalists present to the world not a mirror image or truth but a coherent narrative that serves particular purposes. Even that must be amended. As a rule, the newspaper presents a disconnected and often incoherent narrative—in its individual stories and in its total coverage. If the newspaper mirrors anything, it is disconnection and incoherence, though it contributes to and symbolizes the very condition it mirrors. In fact, journalism can present a coherent narrative only if it is rooted in a social and political ideology that gives a consistent focus or narrative line to events, that provides the terminology for a thick description and a ready vocabulary of explanation. The crucial events, the shaping influences, in the history of American journalism were those that stripped away this ideological context: the decline of the partisan press, the emergence of the penny papers, and the deployment of the telegraph as the nervous system of the news business. The Wall Street Journal is, in a sense, the archetype of the American newspaper: a paper for a commercial class interested in and with an economic interest in the news of the day. The American newspaper of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a producer good for a commercial class rather than a consumer good for a consumer class. It reflected the economic, political, and cultural orientations of that class. News of the day was primarily news of the rudimentary and disjointed markets of early American capitalism: of prices, transactions, shipping, the availability of goods, and events that affected prices and availabilities in markets near and far. There was political news, too, but it was political news in a restricted sense: news that could influence the conduct of commerce, not news of every conceivable happening in the society. Much of what is today called news—burglaries and fires, for example—was inserted in the paper as paid advertisements; much of what is today called advertising—the availability of goods, for example—appeared in the news columns. It is no coincidence that the most popular name for American newspapers in 1800 was The Advertiser. But the word advertising had a special meaning: not the purchase of space but the unpurchased announcement of the availability of merchandise.

158 / The Dark Continent of American Journalism The commercial and trading elites and the papers and newsletters representing their interests were central to fomenting conflict with Britain when the crown hampered their commercial activities. Following independence, the commercial press retained its interest in politics; that is, it "reported" on matters affecting the fate of merchants and traders. But this class was deeply divided over issues such as the national bank. The partisan press, aligned with different factions of the commercial class, gave venomous expression to these differences. But the thing to remember is this: because the press was organized around articulate economic interests, the news had meaning, could be interpreted through and explained by those interests. A partisan press created and utilized an ideological framework that made sense of the news. The second critical fact about the partisan press concerns the matter of time. The cycle of business is the cycle of the day: the opening and closing of trade. The press of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was not technologically equipped to report on a timely, daily basis, but it shared with business the understanding that time is the essence of trade. As a result, the natural epoch of journalism became the day: the cycle of work and trade for a business class. The technological impetus in journalism has been to coordinate the cycle of communication with the cycle of trade. While journalism lives by cycles ranging upward from the hour, its natural metier is the stories of the day, even if it recycles them over longer or shorter units of time. Journalism is a daybook that records the significant happenings of that day. Its time frame is not posterity, and journalists' flattering, self-protecting definition of their work as the "first rough draft of history" does not alter that fact. The archetype of journalism is the diary or account book. The diary records what is significant in the life of a person for that day. The business journal records all transactions for a given day. The news begins in bookkeeping. Commerce lives by, begins and ends the day with, the record of transactions on, say, the stock and commodity markets. The news begins as a record of commercial transactions and a tool of commerce. Every day there is business to be done and there are prices to be posted. In this sense, the origins of journalism, capitalism, and bookkeeping are indissoluble. In the 18305, a cheap, daily popular press—the penny press—was created in the major cities. The penny press did not destroy the commercial press. The latter has continued to this day not only in the Wall Street Journal and the Journal of Commerce, Barron's, and Business

The Dark Continent of American Journalism I 159 Week, Forbes, and Fortune but also in private newsletters and private exchanges that grew after the birth of the penny press with the enormous expansion of the middle class. The Wall Street Journal doesn't call itself "the daily diary of the American dream" for nothing. But the penny press began the displacement of the commercial-partisan press in the 18305, though it took seventy years to do so. While scholars disagree over the significance of the penny press, one can safely say three things about it. First, the penny press was a consumer good for a consumer society; it reflected all of society and politics, not just the world of commerce and commercial politics. The gradual displacement of partisanship meant that any matter, however minor, qualified for space in the paper: the details not only of trade and commerce, but the courts, the streets, the strange, the commonplace. The penny papers were filled with the odd, the exotic, and the trivial. Above all, they focused on the anonymous individuals, groups, and classes that inhabited the city. They presented a panorama of facts and persons, a "gastronomy of the eye"; in another of Baudelaire's phrases, they were a "kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness." Second, the penny press displaced not merely partisanship but an explicit ideological context in which to present, interpret, and explain the news. Such papers choked off, at least relatively, an ideological press among the working class. At its best, the penny press attempted to eliminate the wretched partisanship and factionalism into which the press had degenerated since the Revolution. It tried to constitute, through the more or less neutral support of advertising, an open forum in which to examine and represent a public rather than a merely partisan interest. Third, the penny press imposed the cycle and habit of commerce upon the life of society generally. Because in business time is money, the latest news can make the difference between success and failure, selling cheap or selling dear. Time is seldom so important in noncommercial activity. The latest news is not always the best and most useful news. Little is lost if the news of politics or urban life is a little old. Nonetheless, the cycle and habit of beginning and ending the day by reading the latest prices was imposed on social activities generally. Beginning in the 18308, the stories of society were told on a daily basis. The value of timeliness was generalized by the penny press into the cardinal value of journalism. The events of journalism happen today. The morning reading of

160 / The Dark Continent of American Journalism the New York Times is important because it establishes the salience of stories for the day. It also determines salience for the television networks, the newsmagazines, the journals of opinion issued weekly and monthly. Even the stories in books begin in the announcements in news columns: a family named Clutter was murdered in Holcomb, Kansas, yesterday. With the penny press, all forms of writing became, increasingly, a parasite of "breaking news." The telegraph cemented everything the "penny press" set in motion. It allowed newspapers to operate in "real time" for the first time. Its value was ensuring that time became irrelevant for purposes of trade. When instantaneous market reports were available everywhere at the same moment, everyone was effectively in the same place for purposes of trade. The telegraph gave a real rather than an illusory meaning to timeliness. It turned competition among newspapers away from price, even away from quality, and onto timeliness. Time became the loss leader of journalism. The telegraph also reworked the nature of written language and finally the nature of awareness itself. One old saw has it that the telegraph, by creating wire services, led to a fundamental change in news. In snapped the tradition of partisan journalism by forcing the wire services to generate "objective" news that papers of any political stripe could use. Yet the issue is deeper than that. The wire services demanded language stripped of the local, the regional and colloquial. They demanded something closer to a "scientific" language, one of strict denotation where the connotative features of utterance were under control, one of fact. If a story was to be understood in the same way from Maine to California, language had to be flattened out and standardized. The telegraph, therefore, led to the disappearance of forms of speech and styles of journalism and storytelling—the tall story, the hoax, much humor, irony, and satire—that depended on a more traditional use of language. The origins of objectivity, then, lie in the necessity of stretching language in space over the long lines of Western Union. Similarly, the telegraph eliminated correspondents who provided letters that announced events, described them in detail, and analyzed their substance. It replaced them with stringers who supplied the bare facts. As the telegraph made words expensive, a language of spare facts became the norm. Telegraph copy had to be condensed to save money. From the stringer's notes, someone at the end of the telegraphic line

The Dark Continent of American Journalism I 161 had to reconstitute the story, a process that reaches high art with the newsmagazines: the story divorced from the storyteller. If the telegraph made prose lean and unadorned and led to a journalism without the luxury of detail and analysis, it also brought an overwhelming crush of such prose to the newsroom. In the face of what was a real glut of occurrences, news judgment had to be routinized and the organization of the newsroom made factorylike. The reporter who produced the new prose displaced the editor as the archetype of the journalist. The spareness of the prose and its sheer volume allowed news, indeed forced news, to be treated like a commodity: something that could be transported, measured, reduced, and timed. News became subject to all the procedures developed for handling agricultural commodities. It was subject to "rates, contracts, franchising, discounts and thefts." Together these developments of the second third of the nineteenth century brought a new kind of journalism, a kind that is still roughly the staple of our newspapers. But, as I explained earlier, this new journalism made description and explanation radically problematic: "penny" and telegraphic journalism divorced news from an ideological context that could explain and give significance to events. It substituted the vague principle of a public interest for "class interest" as the criterion for selecting, interpreting, and explaining the news. It brought the newsroom a glut of occurrences that overwhelmed the newspaper and forced journalists to explain not just something but everything. As a result, they often could explain nothing. By elevating objectivity and facticity into cardinal principles, the penny press abandoned explanation as a primary goal. Simultaneously, it confronted readers with events they had no way of understanding. It filled the paper with human interest material that, however charming, was inexplicable. And, finally, it divorced the announcement of news from analysis of it and required readers to maintain constant vigilance to the news if they were going to understand anything. The conditions of journalistic practice and the literary forms journalists inherited together strictly limit the degree to which daily journalism can answer how and why. How something happens or how someone accomplishes something demands the journalist's close, detailed attention to the flow of facts that culminate in a happening. The dailiness and deadline of the newspaper and the television news show usually

162 / The Dark Continent of American Journalism preclude the opportunity to etch in the detail that intervenes between an intention and an accomplishment, a cause and its effect. Moreover, the journalist's typical tools, particularly the telephone interview, are inadequate to a task that demands far more varied resources. Journalists cannot subpoena witnesses; no one is required to talk to them. As a result, "how," the detail, must await agencies outside of journalism, such as the grand jury, the common trial, the blue-ribbon commission, social surveys, congressional investigating committees, or other, more leisured and wide-ranging forms of journalistic inquiry: the extended series, magazine article, or book. Explanation in daily journalism has even greater limits. Explanation demands that the journalist not only retell an event but account for it. Such accounting normally takes one of four forms: determining motives, elucidating causes, predicting consequences, or estimating significance. However, the canons of objectivity, the absence of a forum or method through which evidence can be systematically adduced, and the absence of an explicit ideological commitment on the part of journalists renders the task of explanation radically problematic, except under certain well-stipulated conditions. First, the problem of objectivity. Who, what, when, and where are relatively transparent. Why is invisible. Who, what, when, and where are empirical. Why is abstract. Who, what, when, and where refer to phenomena on the surface of the world. Why refers to something buried beneath appearances. Who, what, when, and where do not mirror the world, of course. They reflect the reality-making practices of journalists. Answering such questions depends upon conventions that are widely shared, even if they are infrequently noted. We no longer, for example, identify figures in the news by feminine nouns: poetess, Negress, Jewess, actress. The who, the identification, now obeys a different set of conventions that attempt to depress the importance of "race" and gender, conventions that journalists both use and legitimate. But for all the conventionality of who, what, when, and where, they are accessible because our culture widely shares a gradient against which to measure them. As Michael Schudson has suggested, the notion of when, of time, in journalism is not as transparent as words like recent, immediate, or breaking seem to suggest. Nonetheless, time in journalism is measured against a standard gradient of tense, of past, present, and future, that is widely shared in the culture.1 There is no accessible gradient for the measurement of causes, the


assessment of motives, the prediction of consequences, or the evaluation of significance. No one has seen a cause or a consequence; motives are ghostly happenings in the head; and significance seems to be in the eye of the beholder. Explanations do not lie within events or actions. Rather, they lie behind them or are inferences or extrapolations that go well beyond the commonsense evidence at hand. Explanation, then, cuts against the naive realism of journalism with its insistence on objective fact. The first injunction of journalists is to stay with the facts; facts provide the elements of the story. But causes, consequences, and motives are not themselves facts. Because journalists are above all else empiricists, the why must elude them. They lack a framework of theory or ideology from which to deduce evidence or infer explanations. To explain is to abandon journalism in the archetypal sense: it is to pursue soft news, "trust me" journalism. Explanatory journalism is, to use an ugly phrase, "thumbsucker journalism": stories coming from the journalist's head rather than the facts. Something is philosophically awry about all this, of course. The facts of the case are always elaborate, arbitrary cultural constructions through which who, what, when, and where are not only identified but judged, not only described but evaluated. But such constructions can be pinned down only by ordinary techniques of journalistic investigation. Not so with why. For to answer the question "Why?" one must go outside the interview-and-clip file, to the library, the computer, government documents, historical surveys. But there are no conventions to guide journalists in sifting and judging evidence from such sources and no forum in which conflicting evidence can be weighed. More than the organization of the newsroom, the nature of journalistic investigations and the professional ideology of journalism suppress a journalism of explanation. The basic definitions of news exclude definition from the outset. News focuses on the unusual, the nonroutine, the unexpected. Thus, it necessarily highlights events that interest us precisely because they have no explanation. This is part of the meaning of human interest: deviation from the accepted routine of ordinary life. News is when man bites dog. Unfortunately, no one knows what possessed the man who bit the dog; even psychiatrists are not likely to be much help. Much of journalism focuses on the bizarre, the uncanny, the inexplicable. Journalism ritualizes the bizarre; it is a counterphobia for over-


coming objects of fear. Stories of the bizarre, uncanny, horrible, and unfathomable are like roller-coasters, prizefights, stock-car races— pleasurable because we can be disturbed and frightened without being hurt and overwhelmed. Where would we be without stories of UFOs and other such phenomena, stories at once intensely pleasing and intensely disturbing? In the age of the partisan press, such stories were consigned to folklore, the oral tradition, and other underground modes of storytelling. With the penny press, they came into the open and took up residence in newspapers as the unexplained and unexplainable desiderata of our civilization. The impossible French have even given such stories a name: faitsdivers. This most easily translates as "fillers," but we might better render it idiomatically as "random, uncanny occurrences." Such stories, according to Roland Barthes, preserve at the very heart of modern society an ambiguity of the rational and irrational, of the intelligible and the unfathomable. Carlin Romano cited one such story: "Guest Drowns at Party for 100 Lifeguards."2 But think of some other newspaper samples: "Chief of Police Kills Wife"; "Psychiatrist's Son Commits Mayhem"; "Burglars Frightened away by Other Burglars"; "Thieves Sic Their Police Dog on Night Watchman." We are here in the realm of perversity, chance, accident, coincidence. "Man and Wife Collide with One Another in Auto Accident"; "Father Runs over His Child in the Driveway"; "Man Drinks Himself to Death at Party to Celebrate His Divorce." Every such story is a sign at once intelligent and indecipherable. The factors of coincidence, unpredictability, and the uncanny float some events to the surface of the news from the many that fit a type, explaining why a few murders get reported of the many committed, a few accidents detailed of the many occurring. Consider this from the Associated Press: A confirmed AIDS victim who allegedly spat on four police officers during a traffic arrest was charged Friday with assault with intent to commit murder. John Richards of Davison, Ohio, was charged with the felony warrant because "it appears the man knows he has AIDS and was trying to transmit it by spitting on the officers," said Assistant Genesee County Prosecutor John McGraw.

What is going on here? This is of course the season for stories about AIDS because of the menacing potential of the disease. But what did Mr. Richards think he was up to? And what, even more, was going

The Dark Continent of American Journalism I 165 on with the police? It is precisely the bizarre and inexplicable quality of the event that makes it a story. It gives new meaning to the phrase deadly weapon; it conjures up a time when our saliva will be registered. Or consider the following from the Chicago Sun-Times of January 7, 1986: Tale of True Love He Escapes Death, Gives Girlfriend His Heart

PATTERSON, Calif. (AP) A i5-year-old boy who learned that his girlfriend needed a heart transplant told his mother three weeks ago that he was going to die and that the young woman should have his heart. Felipe Garza Jr., who his half-brother said had seemed to be in perfect health, died Saturday after a blood vessel burst in his head. His family followed his wishes, and Felipe's heart was transplanted Sunday into Donna Ashlock. His half-brother, John Sanchez, 2,0, said Felipe told their mother, Maria, three weeks ago: "I'm going to die, and I'm going to give my heart to my girlfriend." This is the type of story that faits-divers defines; as a result, it appeared everywhere: the straight press; the weekly tabloids; television news, national and local; the newsweeklies; even many of the prestige papers. It is the generality of its distribution and the uncanniness of its content that makes it so informing an example. Naturally, as the story travels from the most to the least respectable journal, the bizarre elements become even more pronounced. But its appeal and significance are universal. Stories like those cited here appear in the daily press, where they are oddments and filler. They are main news of the tabloid weeklies. In the National Enquirer, the Star, and the Weekly World News the limits of the bizarre are pushed out one standard deviation, but the type is common to the press in general. From the tabloid weeklies: "She Became Great Granny Three Times in One Day"; "Dog Eats Boy's Nose"; "Chinese Genius Is Only Five and Ready for College"; "I Won't Be a Fat Farm Flop—700 Pound Behemoth Vows." What is filler for the

166 / The Dark Continent of American Journalism straight press is feature in the tabloids. What is filler in the evening news, often designed to give an upbeat if totally improbable ending to a half hour of mayhem and melancholy, is feature for Charles Kuralt's On the Road. As we shall see, the same instructive relation between the straight press and the weekly tabloids occurs in the realm of motives. The world of the inexplicable contrasts sharply with the foreground of daily news, the world of politics and economics. In the latter domains, we are unwilling to leave events to chance or dismiss happenings as bizarre, mysterious, or coincidental. The world of politics and economics is a world of threat in which we can lose our lives, our possessions, our freedom, our entire sense of purpose. In that world, we seek reassurance that someone or something is in control. We are intolerant of mystery in politics even when politics is mysterious, for this is the sphere of the menacing. Whenever such threat and reward systems confront us, we demand explanation, coherence, significance, and intelligibility. So once we leave the realm of faits-divers, the how and why get answered by one device or another despite the limitations of daily journalism. We start from this proposition: when matters of fundamental importance surface in the news, they cannot be treated as secular mysteries left unexplained. They must be accounted for, must be rendered sensible. The economy and the political system form the sacred center of modern society. With them, we are unwilling to sit about muttering "It's fate" or "So be it." We insist that the economy and the polity be explicable—a domain where someone is in control, or natural laws are being obeyed, or events are significant and consequential—or that despite all the bad news of the moment, the signs in the headlines auger well for the future. The importance of economics and politics in each individual's life guarantees that people will come up with explanations—ideological explanations—even if the press and the politicians are silent on these issues. As a result, explanation is an arena of struggle within journalism, a struggle to control the natural ideological forces set in motion by the appearance of disturbing and perplexing events. The press explains such events by elucidating motives, demonstrating causes, predicting consequences, or divining significance. The order of these forms of explanation is logical, not chronological. Different events are explained different ways; any given story will mix these forms of explanation to-

The Dark Continent of American Journalism I 167 gether; and the same story will be subjected at different times to different forms of explanation. But the order of explanation runs as follows: if you can find a motive, state it; if you can't find a motive or a cause, look for consequences; if you can find none of the above, read the tea leaves of the event for its significance. Motive explanations, however, dominate American journalism and create, as we shall see, all sorts of havoc. To unpack these complicated matters, I will use one extended example. In March 1985, the Department of Commerce issued its monthly report on the balance of payments of the American economy. These monthly statements had regularly shown a deteriorating American position in the international economy. The March statement was unexceptional; indeed, it was a considerable improvement over the report of the previous October. Here is the Associated Press story that opened this chapter in the trade crisis: The nation's trade deficit climbed to $11.4 billion in February, the worst showing since September, as exports fell 7.7 percent, the government reported Thursday. The deficit was n percent higher than the $10.3 billion deficit in January and was the biggest monthly imbalance since the $11.5 billion deficit in September, the Commerce Department said.

Then, after one more paragraph of description, the story offered this unattributed explanation: "The poor performance has been blamed in part on the dollar's high value, which makes U.S. goods more expensive and harder to sell overseas while whetting Americans' appetite for a flood of cheap exports." The explanation undoubtedly came from the Department of Commerce briefing but, interestingly, it did not carry the argument a step further: the high value of the dollar could have been blamed on the large federal deficit, continuing high interest rates, the need for enormous federal borrowing, and the influx of foreign currency chasing investments. The monthly stories of the trade deficit normally do not receive much attention beyond the business and financial press and usually disappear within a day or two. However, the March 1985 report showed, among other things, a further worsening of our trade balance with Japan. This story might have disappeared except that the voluntary import restrictions on Japanese automobiles were about to expire. The question on the political agenda was whether the import restrictions should be kept at the same level, raised, lowered, or eliminated alto-

168 / The Dark Continent of American Journalism gather. Action on automobile import restrictions was but a prelude, however, to overall trade policy on a number of American products— shoes, textiles, steel—that had been faring badly in international trade. The Reagan administration generally supported free trade, but it also was negotiating with the Japanese to gain greater access to Japanese markets for American manufacturers of, among other things, telecommunications products. The second matter that made the March Commerce Department report of greater than normal significance was that planning was under way for an early May "economic summit" in Bonn, West Germany, between Japan, the United States, and the other major Western countries. At that conference, trade policy was to be a principal item of discussion. The story of the balance of payments and trade policy was continuously at the "front" of the news from early March until it was pushed aside by the controversy surrounding President Reagan's visit to the Bitburg cemetery containing the graves of World War II German soldiers, including the burial sites of members of the SS. The trade story declined in prominence through an odd conjunction of circumstances: the attention to German-American relations symbolized by the cemetery visit offended President Mitterrand of France, who largely sabotaged attempts to plan future meetings on trade policy. One of the early reactions to the trade crisis was a 92-0 vote in the Senate condemning the Japanese for restrictive trade practices. A flurry of charges and countercharges allowed journalists to keep the trade story alive for a protracted period and to examine it from every conceivable angle. Many other interest groups also wished to keep the story in the headlines, and there was considerable behind-the-scenes struggle to define and explain the trade crisis. The struggle was an attempt to control public sentiment toward the Japanese and toward tariff and trade policy generally. The question facing journalists was this: why was there an increasingly negative balance of payments with Japan and other countries? The significance of the journalist's attempt to answer the questions was this: the answer arrived at would be one of the central elements in determining the course of government economic policy. The first explanation offered was based on motives. Such stories pitted wily Japanese against innocent Americans. The Japanese in their desire to dominate international markets were playing by unacceptable rules of the game. Through a variety of devices, they were securing ac-


cess to American markets and technology, engaging in unfair competitive practices, and excluding American products and producers from Japan. This explanation was advanced by leaders of declining industries, by Senators Robert Packwood and John Danforth, and by members of Congress from districts economically depressed by the flood of imports. Senator Packwood wrote in the New York Times that, to cite the headline, "Japan's Not Entitled to 'Free Lunch.'" He argued that "America can successfully compete in the Japanese market—if we can get into it. The problem is the jaded Japanese bureaucracy." The Chicago Tribune reported a speech by Lee lacocca, then the Chrysler Corporation chairman, in which he demanded that the "Japanese play fair with us." He claimed that "Americans see it as a one-way trade relationship, a wellordered plan by Japan to take as much as it can and put very little back." Joseph A. Reaves of the Chicago Tribune reported from Tokyo that "Americans see the Japanese as conniving protectionists who want to get rich exporting their goods around the world while buying only Japanese products at home." The troubles of individual industries in dealing with the Japanese were reported. James Mateja, the automotive writer of the Chicago Tribune, interviewed a representative of the automotive replacement parts industry who argued that neither low quality nor high prices kept his industry out of the Japanese market. It was restrictive trade practices: "If you have equal access to the specifications, and if you can retain business at the best price, then our prices would knock their socks off. I don't know how they accept price quotes now." A consensus position offered on Japanese motives was summarized by a Tribune business writer: "They [U.S. officials in Tokyo] say the Japanese simply aren't playing fair in the trade game. American companies trying to do business in Japan face an impenetrable wall of government-imposed barriers designed to protect Japanese firms." The "motive story" of trade was not restricted to analyzing the Japanese. Clyde Farnsworth of the New York Times reported that pressing "trade issues are reshaping the political lineup in the United States as Democrats and Republicans maneuver for advantage while trying to deal with an influx of imports from Japan and other countries." He claimed that "Democrats now smell blood on the issue" and were going after twenty-two Republican Senate seats. The Democrats were going to tie trade problems to the Republican free market economic policy that was causing an overvalued dollar.

170 / The Dark Continent of American Journalism Farnsworth's story hints at a shift in the form of explanation of the trade crisis story: from motives to causes. It was the Japanese themselves who pointed out not only the restrictive trade practices of the United States but also, more importantly, that the trade deficit was caused by the overvalued dollar, the poor quality of American goods, the taste standards of the Japanese market, and the fact that the strength of the recovery of the American economy created unprecedented demand by Americans for foreign products. The explanation, in other words, did not reside in the motives of the Japanese or in individual Americans but in collective international economic conditions: the more or less natural laws of modern economics or the unintended consequences of normal economic activity. Ronald Yates of the Chicago Tribune reported the comments of Toshiaki Fujinami, president of a small Japanese paper products company: U.S. senators were "just trying to shift the blame for the declining American economy away from the huge U.S. budget deficit and the over-valued dollar to Japan." Edwin Yoder in the Providence Journal warned against "misreading causes of the U.S. trade deficit" and claimed that "Reagan-Congress fiscal policy" and the ludicrous budget deficit of $200 billion a year "is the sword we throw ourselves on every day." He offered his own quick explanation: The budget deficits generate historically high "real" interest rates, adjusting for inflation. They suck prodigious sums of foreign capital into the United States, keeping the dollar drastically overvalued against other major currencies. The stark weighting of the terms of trade to our disfavor functions as an export tax on U.S. goods, an import subsidy to foreign goods and an incentive to U.S. employers to move plants "offshore" if they can. Those that can't move close. In this witch's brew, one partner's trade practices, even Japan's, are a piddling ingredient—the equivalent of one eye of newt.

Chicago Tribune editorials and editorial columns by Stephen Chapman pointed out that the "real" motives of Lee lacocca and others like him were less gaining access to Japanese markets than restricting foreign competition. They pointed out that Japan's trade restrictions are "just handy excuses for American ones." Chapman argued that the Japanese had not refused to buy American goods: "American exports to Japan had risen by 9 percent last year." What, then, caused the trade deficit? The strong dollar. "Foreigners, including the Japanese, are eager

The Dark Continent of American Journalism I 171 to buy a share of our booming economy. As long as foreigners invest more here than Americans invest abroad, Americans will have to import more goods than they export. That's not bad trade." Another reason: the American economy recovered faster than Japan's and Western Europe's. "Consequently, American businesses and consumers have more money to spend than their foreign counterparts. So the U.S. imports more than they do." Hobart Rowen of the Washington Post reported that a study by the Institute of International Economics showed that each country had roughly equivalent barriers to trade. The study attributed trade tension to the distorted relation between the dollar and the yen. Rowen noted that the institute's conclusion "conflicts with frequent assertions by administration officials and business executives that the imbalance in trade is a result of Tokyo's barriers to U.S. imports." As this example shows, journalists writing about causes depend upon "experts," "think tanks," and other organizations attempting to influence policy. Journalists often can handle motive explanations based upon only their own knowledge or a few well-placed sources. But with causes, journalists are largely at the mercy of others, not because the subject is necessarily more technical but because the form of the explanation is one in which social scientists specialize and therefore have an overwhelming advantage. United States and international economic conditions were not the only causes cited for the trade deficit. A slowly emerging crop of stories admitted to Japanese trade barriers but rooted those barriers not in the motives and intentions of Japanese leaders but in Japanese cultural habits. The New York Times's Nicolas Kristof suggested that the cultural barriers to trade "cannot be easily negotiated away." Even the Japanese often have difficulty breaking into the Japanese market. He cited Jon K. T. Choy, an economist at the Japanese Economic Institute in Washington, who explained that the "Japanese system doesn't simply discriminate against foreigners—it discriminates against newcomers." The Japanese "place a premium on a long-term relationship with suppliers, doing business with those who have faithfully performed their obligations in the past. This is what makes it difficult even for new Japanese companies to break into the market." Even more: Americans don't speak Japanese, whereas the Japanese speak English and understand American culture; the Japanese resist foreign goods because they consider their own superior; American products have incomprehensi-

172 / The Dark Continent of American Journalism ble instructions and are not sized and detailed to the Japanese market. (Pampers, for example, were inappropriately shaped to the Japanese bottom.) The cultural cause of the trade deficit was elaborated in other articles that examined the shopping habits of the Japanese ("The Wary Shoppers of Japan," New York Times) and Japanese attitudes toward everything foreign ("The Hideous Gaijin in Japan," Newsweek). There was something disingenuous about cultural explanations of trade deficits. Most of those reporting such explanations were advocating free trade in one way or another. However, the theory of free trade assumes the absence of cultural barriers to commerce and operates in terms of a purely rational model of economic activity where price and quality govern the terms of trade. While such stories increasingly emphasized the causes of the trade deficit, other reports continued to analyze motives. The motives in question were those of the Reagan administration. A long wrap-up story in the Chicago Tribune relied on an expert on Japan, Chalmers Johnson of the University of California. He linked the trade deficit to the fact that "U.S. foreign policy is controlled by the State Department, which, like Reagan, sees Japan more in terms of the Soviet-America rivalry than in its economic role." As long as Prime Minister Nakasone was seen as a firm ally against the Soviets, "his inability to produce real Japanese concessions on trade will be forgiven." Similarly, the economist Robert Solow, writing in the New York Times, suggested that the Reagan administration did not really favor investment, productivity, or growth. "Its goal is to shrink the Federal Government, to limit its capacity to provide services, at least civilian services, or to redistribute income to the poor or to regulate private activity." In other words, the trade crisis was a nonstory because the budget deficits driving the terms of trade derived from Reagan's intention to reshape domestic politics. These multiple explanations of the trade deficit, and the blizzard of stories reporting them, were made more complicated by two other types of stories concerning Japanese-American relations. First were stories about the personal relations of Reagan and Nakasone, a "Ron" and "Yasu" show: two embattled leaders trying to control angry forces of economic warfare at loose beneath them, sending delegations from one capital to the other to soothe relations. The other set of stories transmitted messages between the Japanese and American bureaucra-


cies: charges, recriminations, demands for concessions, threats of what was ahead if this practice or that was not abandoned. The causes of an event are intimately linked to its consequences. Therefore, every story that explains an event by elucidating causes also states, more or less directly, the consequences that flow from it. If the balance of payments problem is caused by budget deficits, and if the budget deficits are to continue for some time, then a train of consequences follows—at least until the Gramm-Rudman deficit controls kick in. But the Gramm-Rudman mechanisms have their own consequences. Causes are usually emphasized more than consequences, because consequences are in the future and thus as much a matter of prophecy as of knowledge. Even so, many stories cited the predicted consequences of the trade imbalance for employment, and even the future of United States-Japanese relations. Edwin Yoder's piece evoked a reenactment of World War II: "Only fools underrate the mischief o f . . . cultural barriers in history and the teaching of this sad history is that the United States and Japan have had difficulty understanding one another before. . . . No one is looking for a reprise of those old enmities." If all else fails, find the significance in the event. What does the trade crisis tell us about ourselves? Bill Neikirk in the Chicago Tribune told us: "Here's what's happening: They [the Japanese] sacrifice more than we do. . . . They anticipate and manage better than we do. . . . Their system of compensation promotes worker loyalty and holds down welfare payments. They have maintained higher efficiency, better management, and lower wages. . . . We have been outperformed." In short, the real significance of the trade crisis is that our economy and civilization are declining, having lost the habits of character that made us once a great nation. I have argued that "why" is the question most often left unanswered, or answered with an insinuation. Attempting to answer "why" places American journalists on soft ground, where they are subjected to and reliant on experts. When explanations do appear, they are of particular types consonant with American culture as a whole. That should not surprise us. Despite everything said about the political biases of American journalists, they are, John Chancellor says, "pretty much like everyone else in their basic beliefs." I suggested earlier that American journalism always begins from the question of "who." Although I exaggerate, you will not go far


wrong assuming that names make news. The primary subject of journalism is people—what they say and do. Moreover, the subject is usually an individual—what someone says and does. Groups, in turn, are usually personified by leaders or representatives who speak or act for them, even when we know this is pretty much a fiction. Edward Kennedy speaks for liberals, Jesse Jackson for blacks, Gloria Steinem for liberated women. Sometimes a composite or a persona speaks for a leaderless or amorphous group: "scientists say"; a suicide note from a teenager stands for all unwritten notes. Their sayings and doings are representative of a class. If journalists cannot find a representative individual, they more or less invent one, as leaders were invented or selected by the press during the 19608 for the student antiwar movements. Because news is mainly about the doings and sayings of individuals, why is usually answered by identifying the motives of those individuals. Why tells us why someone did something. This is the sense in which American culture is "individualistic": We assume that individuals are authors of their own acts, that individuals do what they do intentionally, that they say what they say because they have purposes in mind. The world is the way it is because individuals want it that way. Explanation in American journalism is a kind of longdistance mind reading in which the journalist elucidates the motives, intentions, purposes, and hidden agendas that guide individuals in their actions. This overreliance on motive explanations is a pervasive weakness of American journalism. Motive explanations are too easy. It takes time, effort, and substantial knowledge to find a cause, whereas motives are available for a phone call. And motives are profoundly misleading and simplifying. Motive explanations end up portraying a world in which people are driven by desires no more complicated than greed. Journalism is not the only forum in which motives are established. The courtroom is the great American scene in the drama of motives. To compare journalism to the courts is not farfetched. The adversary model of journalism, with the press as prosecutor and public representative, is clearly derived from the courts. The journalist is detective, the investigator, trying to establish the facts of the case and the motives of the actors. The "detective story" and the journalism story have developed in tandem since the emergence of the penny press. A New Yorker cartoon of a few years back featured two detectives staring quizzically at a corpse. One remarked to the other, "It's an old-

The Dark Continent of American Journalism I 175 fashioned crime—it has a motive." The cartoon is testimony to a demand we make of the courtroom and the press: that they present little episodes in what Max Weber called the "quest for lucidity," the demand that the world make sense. In a murder trial, for example, there will be two points of contention. First, what was the act and was it committed by the accused? But the answer to those questions depends critically on a third: what was the motive? The nature of the act cannot be determined and guilt cannot be assigned until the act is motivated, until a statement of intention is attached to it that makes it intelligible to us. In fact, to make acts intelligible is the greatest demand of a courtroom. We make acts intelligible by showing the grounds a person had for acting. These grounds are, however, not the cause of an act. If I make a person's murderous act intelligible by portraying his motive, I do not mean the motive caused the murder. After all, many people have such motives, but they do not commit murder. The motive makes intelligible but it does not cause; it is understanding action without understanding causation. Because I understand the motive behind a murderous act, I do not necessarily approve of it. It merely means that the motive is a plausible ground for the act. Acts must be placed within learned interpretive schemes so that we might judge them as being murder, suicide, manslaughter, self-defense, first degree, and so on. And those terms are not exactly unambiguous. Let us take the matter a step further. Suppose in our hypothetical crime a husband murders his wife. What interpretations might be made of his behavior? How will it be motivated? How will the action be made intelligible to us (which is also an attempt, let us remember, to make it intelligible to the accused)? We have a standard typology of motives we can bring to bear. He did it for her money—a technically rational motive in a utilitarian culture. He did it because he found her sleeping with another man—the motive of honor. He did it out of anger—it was an act of passion, of emotion. Finally, we might even imagine that he did it because this is what men always do in this society under such circumstances—it is explained by tradition. This example illustrates a number of things. First, the courtroom is simply a compacted scene of the most ordinary and important aspects of social life: it consists of interpreting experience, attaching explanations to ambiguous phenomena, using cultural resources—standard typologies of motives, for example—to explain human activity.


Similarly, American journalists explain actions by attributing motives. The motives they attribute are, in the first instance, rational, instrumental, purposeful ones. We can understand murder for money much better than murder for honor. Similarly, journalists attribute rational motives to politicians. In 1980, the New York Times explained that Jimmy Carter was opening his campaign on Labor Day in the South because of what Mr. Carter's campaign advisers "concede to be a serious effort by Ronald Reagan to win votes here." Carter had many reasons to begin in the South: tradition, his affection for his native region, the honor he wished to bring to his associates. Nonetheless, the motive selected was the one that showed it was a rational act designed solely to win the election. The explanation of conduct by rational motives is a literary and cultural convention. Just how conventional it is, is revealed when we encounter, for example, Soviet journalism, where stories were framed in terms of large collective forces—capitalism, history, imperialism— rather than individual motive. Individuals merely personify the larger forces that are in the saddle driving during the actions of individuals. But for us, individuals act. Individuals make history. Individuals have purpose and intentions. Therefore, to answer the question why in American journalism, the journalist must discover a motive or attribute one to the actor. Explanation by rational motives is the archetype of journalism as it is of the culture. But such explanations are often too arbitrary. William Greider, for example, was dismayed when journalists asked about the motives behind his Atlantic article rather than about the substance of the article itself. Similarly, the questions put to political candidates are less about what candidates are saying than why they are saying it, leading to the well-known complaint that no one writes about the issues anymore. It is simply assumed that everything candidates do is designed to win the election, and that pretty much exhausts the meaning of what is said. Indeed, it seems at times that journalists and political candidates are in a silent conspiracy to focus attention on the hidden states of mind and intentions of politicians and away from what they are concretely up to and saying. When a story breaks this mold, it is often refreshing in its candor. A December 10, 1985, New York Times story from Moscow by Serge Schmemann was striking precisely because it reported directly on what Gorbachev said about U.S.-Soviet relations without one word of speculation as to motives:

The Dark Continent of American Journalism I 177 Mikhail S. Gorbachev told 400 American business executives today that while the Geneva summit meeting had opened the way to better Soviet-American relations, trade would remain limited until Washington lifted "political obstacles." "I will be absolutely frank with you," the Soviet leader told the representatives of about 150 American companies in Moscow.. . . "So long as those obstacles exist... there will be no normal development of Soviet-U.S. trade and other economic ties on a large scale. This is regrettable but we are not going to beg the United States for anything." . . . Mr. Gorbachev held out for the carrot of "major long-term projects and numerous medium and even small business deals." But first, he said, Washington would have to lift the restrictions imposed on trade with the Soviet Union. The obstacles he listed included legislation denying most favored nation status and import-export credits to Moscow unless it permitted emigration of Jews and restrictions on high-technology exports. Mr. Gorbachev also cited what he called "the policy of boycotts, embargoes, punishments and broken trade contracts that has become habit with the U.S."

The story conveys the sense of Russian rhetoric that is, one imagines, the real substance of summit diplomacy. Motive explanations are not only arbitrary but easy. They deflect attention rather too quickly and casually away from the what and onto the why. Sometimes the motive is incorporated into the very definition of the who, as when the New York Times in a breaking story from Japan mentions that "saboteurs today knocked out key rail communications and signal systems, forcing the shutdown of 2.3 commuter trains. . . . The saboteurs [were] described by authorities as left-wing extremists." Similarly, Bernard Goetz quickly became known as the "subway vigilante," an identification that told us immediately what he did and why he did it. More to the point, journalists approach the action of politicians as drama critics approach a play, looking for a subtext in the script. The Wall Street Journal tells us that then-Representative Daniel Rostenkowski, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, had "several motives" behind his enthusiasm for tax reform: "He isn't eager to get ambushed by the White House again; tax revision can be a vehicle to reassert his committee's and his own imperatives"; the average voter supports tax simplification; and it is "an issue that can move the Democratic party closer to the political center." In short, Rostenkowski is interested in everything but tax reform.

178 / The Dark Continent of American Journalism This tendency to focus on motive explanations led Leon Sigal to complain that news stories focus on the who rather than the what and the why of disputes. As he said, journalists tend to ask who was responsible for an event rather than what was the cause. It is not that journalists substitute who for why but rather that they substitute one kind of why—a motive statement—for another kind of why—a cause statement. In continuing stories, motives are often reduced to boilerplate, a continuing thread of standard interpretation inserted in every story. Since 1969, for example, we have had a steady stream of stories about political violence in Northern Ireland. A recent one from the Associated Press was carried in the Times: BELFAST, Northern Ireland, Jan. i—Just one minute into the new year, Irish Republican Army guerrillas killed two policemen and wounded a third in an ambush that the I.R.A. said opened a renewed campaign against British security forces.

After five paragraphs describing the killings, the following boilerplate paragraph was inserted: The predominantly Roman Catholic I.R.A. is fighting to drive the British from Northern Ireland and unite the Protestant-dominated province with the overwhelming Catholic Irish Republic.

That paragraph appears in virtually every story from Northern Ireland with little or no variation. It is the explanatory paragraph, the motive paragraph, the paragraph that sets the story in context. The trouble is that it is a gross, oversimple, and unchanging explanation for complex and changing events. Not even the IRA is that simple, internally unified, or unchanging. The boilerplate acts to select stories as well as to select explanations. Stories from Ireland are selected, at one point in the transmission system or another, to fit into the one overarching boilerplate explanation available for all events in the province. Rational explanations by motives—and here the IRA is rational on an American model—commit journalists to viewing individuals, particularly political actors, as possessing far clearer and more articulate purposes than they usually do. As a result, they create a picture that renders politics far more orderly and directed than it ever is for the participants. Journalists introduce a clarity into events that rarely exists for those caught up in the muddled flow of happenings, the ambiguities

The Dark Continent of American Journalism I 179 of situations, and the crosscutting and contradictory nature of purposes and intentions. That motives obey literary and even legal conventions rather than simply mirroring what is going on can be seen in the contrasting treatment of two New York killings. In December 1985, Paul Castellano and Thomas Bilotti were gunned down on a mid-Manhattan street. Before the blood was dry on the sidewalk, the Times had identified the killer and the motive: "John Gotti, a fastidious, well-groomed fortyfive-year-old resident of Queens, is believed by law-enforcement officials to be a central figure in an internal fight for leadership of the Gambino family." The law enforcement officials were then quoted to round out the explanation: "John Gotti is a major organized crime figure in the Gambino crime family and heir apparent. . . . Gotti will emerge as the head of the other capos—that's what the struggle is all about. Bilotti was Gotti's rival and he's gone, and there may well be some more killing before it's settled." Well, we know why members of the Mafia commit murder, and they normally do not bring libel suits. That case contrasts nicely with a more mysterious one. In June 1985, a seventeen-year-old Harlem resident, Edmund Perry, a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy, a member of the freshman class at Stanford, was killed by an undercover police officer near St. Luke's Hospital on Manhattan's Upper West Side. It was an improbable killing, and the Times covered the case very circumspectly. The paper was cautious in attributing motive, was hesitant to convict anyone involved. The case did not fit the type. Racism is one nonrational motive we all understand. As a result, the episode was dramatically awry. It should have been the racism of the police officer that motivated the killing. Why should a successful black youth on his way to great things mug and attempt to rob an undercover officer as alleged? The killing did not fit an acceptable, sensible pattern of motivation, and so the Times was careful not to resolve the case for its readers. Motive explanations work only when they fit a certain ideal type of rational, purposeful action. But when they are made to fit the type, they are often too simple or radically misleading or generate an unnecessary cynicism. In anticipation of the first celebration of Martin Luther King's birthday as a national holiday, NBC reported that President Reagan was to visit a school named after the slain civil rights leader. The visit was described as "part of his attempt to improve his image

180 / The Dark Continent of American Journalism among blacks," an image, we were told, that was "on the rise." Even Ronald Reagan is more complicated than that. It is not the literal truth of the motives journalists unmask that is in question. Surely, people are driven by self-interest. But that is not the only motive that drives them; all self-interested action is knotted into and contained by other, larger, and often more honorable motives. The real problem is that the motives journalists describe and report are the motives that we live. The notion of the "hidden agenda" is now so destructively widespread in the culture because we have so unfailingly described our political leaders as possessed by undisclosed and manipulative intentions. Paradoxically, Marxism has become the ideology of late bourgeois America because our vocabulary of motives pretty much comes down to whose ox gets gored. Therefore, journalism becomes the unmasking and revealing of the "true" motives behind appearances. Power, wealth, and control become the primary objects of people's actions because we assume that everyone is driven by selfish interest. This compulsive explanation excludes the possibility that anyone can be motivated by the common good or the public interest, and so we should not be surprised if individuals are not so motivated. Greed, in the most general sense, explains everything. The one state of mind with which we feel comfortable is the rational, instrumental one. Actions that do not fit this scheme largely confuse and befuddle us. The final and most unfortunate aspect of motive explanations is the overwhelmingly technical bias they give to journalism. If people are uniformly out to better their own self-interest, and what they say and do is designed to further that end, the only sensible questions are: Are they successful? Are their means well adapted to their ends? Are they pursuing a rational course of action? We therefore ask: Will the president sign the communications bill? Who is winning the election? What do the opinion polls say? Does health care reform have a chance? Technique becomes all important because we assume that all individuals, groups, and institutions care about is winning and that the technical success of their strategies is all that is in question. All life becomes a horse race in which the press reports the progress of the contestants to the wire and announces the winners and the losers. Meanwhile, everyone forgets what the race is about and the stakes we have in the outcome. It is often said that the press reduces politics to a clash of personalities, wills, and ambitions. The only purpose of politics becomes the de-

The Dark Continent of American Journalism I 181 sire to win elections. The real meaning of objectivity is that the press takes that desire, and all such rational desires, as given and assesses everything a politician does in that light. We get, therefore, stories of success or failure, victory or defeat, cleverness or ineptness, achievement or mismanagement, defined by technical expertise, not by the content of character or nobility of purpose. Journalists pretty much keep their own counsel on rational motives. Sources are used to "objectify" what the journalist already knows. Other actions and other motives cannot be fully explained because, while they are conscious, they are not rational or believable. The old saw that men kill for money and women for love simply argues that while both men and women are motivated by conscious motives, men are motivated by reason, and women are not. Glaus von Bulow, innocent, makes sense; Jean Harris, guilty, does not. If individuals announce that they are motivated by honor, loyalty, duty, or other nonrational motives, the journalist cannot quite take them seriously, nor can we: therefore, they have to be unmasked. Actions motivated by tradition, values, and affections pretty much escape our understanding and end up as the human interest exotica that fill the space between the selfinterest stories and provide the features for the National Enquirer and Charles Kuralt. When we move to nonrational motives, we move, in fact, into the domain of causes. Nonrational motives move people as irresistible forces over which they have no control. To deal with them, journalists must call on the experts. Experts play the same role in journalism as they do in the courts. They straighten out minor technical matters such as ballistics and resolve major matters of cause and interpretation. If journalists cannot find a rational motive, they have to bring in psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists, and other experts on national character and the behavior of strange people to provide an irrational one. English rioting in Brussels, blacks rioting in Brixton, terrorists "rioting" everywhere pretty much fall outside rational assessment, so only the experts can make them comprehensible. This is particularly pronounced on television, where breaking stories on the evening news are explained by experts on Nightline or the morning news. Unfortunately, the experts do not always agree, and it usually comes down to whom the journalist chooses to trust. If the irrational is the first domain of causal explanations, the statistical is the second. Explanations by causes are particularly well

182 / The Dark Continent of American Journalism adapted to the periodic reports of government and the significant findings that turn up in scientific journals. Youth suicide is up, and the New England Journal of Medicine has an explanation based on the "rate" of depression in all age groups. Child abuse is on the rise, and a sociologist tells us of the disorganization of the American family. Mortgage rates hit a six-year low, and an economist informs us of the money supply and the Federal Reserve Board. Auto sales are down 15 percent, and an expert in consumer behavior tells us about the psychology of consumer expectations. The homeless are filling up the city, and a bureaucrat reminds us of the consequences of "deinstitutionalizing" the mentally ill. Stories of causation turn the journalist to the experts, even though the experts are not always disinterested. In fact, organizations are often created for the sole purpose of providing journalists with explanations. When a new and perplexing report comes out, someone with an explanation has to be found, and, therefore, "institutions of explanation" are available for every problem affecting the national interest. A few years back, there was a move afoot to increase the amount of what Philip Meyer called "precision journalism," the application of social science methods to the problems journalists regularly report. Precision journalism was designed to get at aggregate motives of large numbers of people so that journalists would not always be guessing at the motives of voters, or of racial groups or other subclasses of the population. It was also designed to free journalists from relying on experts by making them more self-sufficient investigators of large-scale problems for which statistics and computers provide the only answers: problems of population, migration, collective behavior, or problems of analyzing public records from the courts, the police, the assessor's office. The movement has yet to yield much, except that newspapers conduct horse race polls in elections. Otherwise, given the nature of breaking news, journalists still pretty much rely on experts for the stipulation of causes. Causal stories are often personified, of course. The growth of population, shifts in migration patterns, changes in the composition of the labor force or the mix of occupations are often exemplified in individuals and the reasons they have for migrating, changing jobs, having children, and so on. For example, the increasing rate of suicide among young males is often rendered by focusing on a particularly tragic death or a group of suicides in a community overcome by grief. But

The Dark Continent of American Journalism I 183 such suicides represent a class of acts that must be accounted for by larger historical forces than simply the motives of individuals. When a farmer in Hills, Iowa, killed three people and then committed suicide, the New York Times headlined the story "Deaths on the Iowa Prairie: Four New Victims of the Economy." The deaths were "but the latest in a series of violent outbursts across the Middle West" caused by the sagging farm economy. The reverse side of cause stories is consequence stories, and they frequently are embedded one in the other. Youth suicide, falling interest rates, and declining sales all have consequences in addition to causes. They are fateful signs with which to read the future of the community and the nation. When Chrysler and Mitsubishi signed an agreement to build a new joint production plant in Bloomington, Illinois, the newly formed company, the Diamond Star Motor Corporation, announced that the workers to be hired would be recent high school graduates. A television story on the announcement did not emphasize the motives of the company—new workers are cheaper and less given to unionization—or the cause of the policy—the problems of training older workers without automotive experience. Instead, the story emphasized the consequence: the opening of the plant would not reduce unemployment. It would merely siphon off new entrants into the job market. A decision to emphasize consequence over causes and motives is a decision to emphasize the future over the past. Consequences are predictions of what will happen rather than a recounting of what has happened. They open up the future and often unintended consequences of events. As they are as much matters of prophecy as prediction, consequence stories also throw journalists into the arms of experts, the futurologists of one kind or another who are able to divine the far horizons of human life. The final form of explanation in journalism is significance. Events that are in no way the result of intentional human acts nor the result of vast historical causes surface all the time. Their consequences are opaque and unknowable. They are, nonetheless, signs that must be read, portents of something larger, events to be prized and remembered as markers, a peculiar evidence of the state of civilization, or the dangers we face or the glories we once possessed. Any event can be read for significance. Carlin Romano calls these "symbolic events" and cites the spate of stories about President Reagan

184 / The Dark Continent of American Journalism on horseback following his surgery for cancer of the colon. Such stories show that the presidency continues, the ship of state, forgive the pun, rests on an even keel. At such a moment, only the most cynical ask why he is on horseback. People treat it for what it is—a sign full of meaning for the body politic. The murder and suicide victims in Hills, Iowa, were treated by the Times as casualties of the economy. The Iowa City Press-Citizen admitted that explanation but tried to see in the event a larger, tragic significance: There are accounts of bank transactions and economic explanations and other hypotheses as the murder and suicide story unravels. But that's not what it is really all about. It's about people—alone, desperate, and powerless with nowhere to turn.... Target prices, price supports, ceilings, sealing crops. The terminology doesn't matter. It's welfare. Farmers know it. And farmers are proud people. Nobody really wants to live that way. But for now there is no choice. . . . But if there's one thing that is clear from Monday's tragic series of murder and suicide, it is that the farm crisis is not numbers and deficits and bushels of corn. It is people and pride and tears and blood. The time has come for the state and the country to reach out to farmers who are suffering—not because they are failed businessmen and women but because they are human beings whose lives are falling apart—fast.

Significance can be found in a grain of sand—indeed, in any episode, however minor, that surfaces in a community. But as a form of explanation, significance is most manifest in stories of deaths, birthdays, anniversaries, inaugurals, coronations, weddings—in, to twist a phrase of Elihu Katz, the high holy days and the high holy events of the press. The inauguration of a president, the death of a beloved public figure, the two-hundredth anniversary of the Revolution or the Constitution, the commemoration of the onset of World War II or the invasion of Normandy—these become rituals of reflection and recollection: symbols of unity and disunity, triumph and tragedy, hope and despair. They are marked by an altered role for journalists. In writing about them, journalists abandon their pose as critics, adversaries, and detectives, and become members of the community, citizens, reverent and pietistic. In these events, they aid us in the search for meaning rather


than motives, consolation rather than causes, symbolism rather than consequences. Two events of the recent past demonstrate aspects of the search for significance. The first was the tenth anniversary of the evacuation of Saigon and the "loss" of the war in Vietnam. The war is still too close, the memory still too green, to completely abandon the question of why we lost the war. Nonetheless, the widespread and often enormously expensive coverage of the anniversary took the form of a stocktaking: Where were we ten years later? What did we learn from it? What does it reveal to us about ourselves? The second event says something about the struggle over significance rather than its mere elucidation: Reagan's visit to the cemetery at Bitburg. In one sense, this was a harmless ceremonial event amid a busy European tour. But it came to bear significance as a gesture of contrasting meaning: a gesture of final reconciliation with an old enemy now a valuable ally and, simultaneously, a gesture of forgiveness of that which could not be forgiven—the Holocaust. The struggles over whether Reagan should make the ceremonial stop and over the meaning of going or not going reveal the power of presidential gestures and the way in which the press collaborates in the quest for meaning while innocently reporting the news. Perhaps the best and most revealing recent example of a "significant" story started out as a far more ordinary event. In the late fall of 1984, a seventeen-year-old black man was shot on the South Side of Chicago. The murder perhaps would not have been reported or received any particular play except that Ben Wilson happened to be one of the best high school basketball players in the country. Destined for stardom, he already had signed a tender with the basketball program at the University of Illinois. He was about to embark on an education, an escape from the ghetto, and perhaps a life of fame and riches. The first stories concentrated on what had happened on a Friday afternoon after school: Who killed him and why did he do it? Was Wilson responsible in any way for his own death? Between the time of the stories of the murder of Ben Wilson and the stories of the trial, conviction, and sentencing of his killer, the fate of this young man gave rise to other kinds of stories. At first, Ben Wilson became the personification of the problems of growing up black, of the constant threat of gang violence, and of the

186 / The Dark Continent of American Journalism toll taken by ghetto life. Wilson became a "news peg," a tragic death to be explained by the impersonal causes of poverty, unemployment, ignorance, illiteracy, and hopelessness. Ben Wilson's death, in a way, explained his killer. Distinguished reporting of these conditions even had an effect. Gang violence was reported to be down 40 percent in the wake of Wilson's death and the coverage of it. The coverage, however, also looked for the significance of the death of this young man. The significance was found in public forgetfulness a generation after the civil rights struggle and a half generation after the War on Poverty. In an era of affluence, concern for private gratification, and lack of interest in the problems of public life, stories of the "ghetto" were not in. The Chicago Tribune used the death of Ben Wilson to forcefully remind its readers of the meaning of life in urban America. The tragedy of the stories was that it took the misfortune of Ben Wilson to bring these persistent concerns and problems back into the newspaper. I have emphasized throughout this essay that journalism is a curriculum and not merely a series of news flashes. Everything can be found in American journalism, generally understood, but it is disconnected and incoherent. It takes astute and constant readers—such as journalists themselves—to connect the disconnected, to find sense and significance in the overwhelming and overbearing glut of occurrences. American journalism is deeply embedded in American culture. Its faults and its triumphs are pretty much characteristic of the culture as a whole. The forms of storytelling it has adopted are those prized and cultivated throughout much of our literature. The explanations it offers are pretty much the same as those offered in the intellectual disciplines. As journalists move from explanations by motives to causes to consequences to significance, they roughly mirror the movement of scholars from utilitarian to causal to functional to hermeneutic explanations. Journalists, however, obsessively rely on motive explanations and thereby weaken the explanatory power of their work. Journalists, because of their professional ideology and the industrial conditions under which they work, offer thick descriptions pretty much between the lines. They explain events by insinuating, often sotto voce, motives typical of our obsessively practical culture. Otherwise, they rely on experts, not always of their own choosing, to supply them

The Dark Continent of American Journalism I 187 with causes and consequences, or they sum up the folk wisdom and commonsense significance of the community. This renders journalists active participants in making reality and not merely passive observers. It also makes them frequent victims of the forces around them rather than defenders of a public interest or a common good. As a wise man once said, journalism has taken its revenge on philosophy. As the unloved child of the craft of letters, journalism concentrates on the new, novel, transient, and ephemeral. Philosophy, the crown of the literary craft, once concentrated on the eternal, enduring, momentous, and significant. Journalism's revenge has been to impose the cycle of news on philosophy, indeed, on all the literary arts. I exaggerate, of course, but all writers and artists look for their subjects in today's headlines. Many have argued that the overriding problem of American culture is that it has no sense of time. American managers administer for the short run; American politicians look no further than the next election. Whether one looks at the susceptibility to fashion of our scholarship, the transience of our interests, the length of our memories, the planning of our institutions, or even, Reagan aside, the tenure of our presidents, everything seems to have the life span of a butterfly in spring. The daily news bulletins report this spectacle of change: victories, defeats, trends, fluctuations, battles, controversies, threats. But beneath this change, the structures of society—the distribution of income and poverty, the cleavages of class and status, race and ethnicity, the gross inequalities of hardships and life chances—remain remarkably persistent. If you look at the entire curriculum of journalism, you will find much reporting of the enduring and persistent, the solid and unyielding structures of social life. It is the part of journalism that offers genuine description and explanation, compelling force and narrative detail, and yet it is not the part of journalism we generally honor. At some lost moment in our history, journalism became identified with, defined by, breaking news, the news flash, the news bulletin. When that happened, our understanding of journalism as a democratic social practice was impossibly narrowed and our habits of reading, of attention, of interpretation were impaired. Journalists came to think of themselves as being in the news business, where their greatest achievements were defined by being first rather than best, with uncovering the unknown


rather than clarifying and interpreting the known. Scholars too often take journalists at their word and neither read nor analyze anything beyond the wire services. They are as ignorant of the curriculum of journalism as the most addled teenager. We are then doubly betrayed. To restore a sense of time to both journalism and scholarship is going to take a lot of work and a lot of luck. All of us might begin by reading more wisely. Notes 1. Michael Schudson, "Deadlines, Datelines, and History," in Reading the News, ed. Robert Karl Manoff and Michael Schudson (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 79-108. 2. Carlin Romano,"The Grisly Truth about Bare Facts," in Reading the News, 38-78.

Part IV


Introduction / "We'll Have That Conversation": Journalism and Democracy in the Thought of James W. Carey Jay Rosen Stopping me in a hallway, James Carey once offered the intriguing suggestion that journalism and democracy were really "names for the same thing." He then added—characteristically—"We'll have that conversation." A few months later we did, and so can you, by contemplating the two splendid essays that follow. Carey claims the American political tradition as one of his intellectual homes. Within that tradition, particularly its First Amendment chapter where we work these things out, democracy and the press are assumed to have a relationship of importance, but not of identity. Journalism informs democracy, journalism guards democracy, journalism serves (or, in some stories, saves) democracy. But journalism is democracy? Carey's way of approaching the subject is, in fact, so contrary to our habitual language for discussing the press, and so confounding to the American journalist's self-image, that he virtually stands conventional press theory on its head. In his view, the press does not "inform" the public. It is "the public" that ought to inform the press. The true subject matter of journalism is the conversation the public is having with itself. If this conversation does not happen or falls apart, then journalism doesn't work—for us—although it may work well for journalists seeking to further their professional status. "We have virtually no idea what we need to know until we start talking to someone," Carey writes in "A Republic, If You Can Keep It"; only in the "wake of conversation" do we discover a need for news and views. Ideally, then, 191

192 / Introduction to Part IV

the public informs the press of what might be pertinent to its discussions, and journalism as a public art begins there.1 Carey frequently calls the public the "god-term of journalism—the be-all and end-all, the term without which the entire enterprise fails to make sense."2 While journalists like to remind us that democracy is impossible without them, Carey likes to remind journalists that they are impossible without us—"us" meaning a political community organized as a discoursing public. If journalism and democracy are really "names for the same thing," the thing they both stand for is politics in the key of conversation, which is the music Carey hears in his head. Conversation permits us to be citizens in the fullest sense: people who live not just near, but among, one another, in the common space we designate with the adjective public. Journalism at its best arises from and feeds into public life, which is "our" conversation to the degree that we determine to have it. That democracy requires a healthy public debate and a free press to serve it is a familiar proposition, perhaps overly familiar, and not the one Carey wants to advance. These essays dare us to think differently. Here, journalism is seen as one mode of interaction among strangers. Unless these strangers are also in practice as citizens—unless we stand in a conversant relationship to one another—then the press may just as easily undo democracy, making us even stranger to one another than we were before the journalists went to work. A vital public life is not the consequence of a free press, Carey asserts. Rather, the prior existence of a rich public life is our only guarantee that the free press clause will work in our favor, that journalism will actually improve the body politic. A journalism "independent of the conversation of the culture, or existing in the absence of such a conversation" will soon become a "menace to public life and an effective politics," Carey concludes.

Objectivity as an Identity This is not the way of thinking reporters, and editors learn as they make their way in the field. And that's putting it mildly. Two well-worn conceptions dominate the mind of the American press. Neither is defended with much vigor or insight, and neither leaves much room for Carey's concerns. The first is the doctrine of "objectivity," which calls on the press to separate facts from values and itself from interested ac-

Introduction to Part IV I 193 tors. The second is the notion of the journalist as "watchdog" or critic of official authority. Objectivity is the closest the press comes to a working epistemology. But as Michael Schudson shows in Discovering the News, the epistemology has never really worked. Objectivity has been seen as a "myth" almost since its rise to dominance in the 19208 and 19305. Journalists assert a belief in objectivity not because they have a reliable method for separating facts from values, but out of a deep sense of pessimism that any secure "values" or truly reliable "facts" can be found. Objectivity is better understood as a set of procedures for operating in a world of almost limitless subjectivities, an attitude summed up in the "balanced" news story's implied message to readers: get both sides and decide for yourself.3 The sides we are encouraged to "get" nearly always number two. This is not because political conversation inevitably works that way. Rather, picturing the field of politics as lying between opposite poles carves out a preferred position for the press: in the middle between partisan extremes. Journalists often seek this position as a kind of safety zone, a space from which "politics" is effectively banished. Here is a passage from a 1992 report in the New York Times reviewing charges of media "bias" after the presidential campaign. ("Bias," of course, is the shadow thrown by objectivity on public dialogue about the press.) The Times reporter writes: So much energy these days is devoted to media bias that there are now groups that do nothing but monitor the press for hints of partiality. But like the report financed by M&M/Mars that advocated chocolate consumption as a way to cut cavities, the studies by these groups tend to yield results that suit the purposes of those who conducted them. Thus it is not surprising that in their surveys of the election coverage, Accuracy in Media, a monitoring group with a right-wing orientation, and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a group on the left, came to different conclusions. A.I.M. argued that most major news organizations ignored some stories damaging to Mr. Clinton while F.A.I.R. concluded that the media had devoted more attention to questions about Mr. Clinton's draft record than to those about Mr. Bush's involvement in the Irancontra scandal.4

Note how the arrangement of polar opposites dissipates the "energy" supposedly devoted to critiques of the press. Press criticism turns

194 / Introduction to PartIV out to be just another form of politics—and therefore discardable as criticism. This is how objectivity shapes the political imagination of the press. The public world appears dominated by the manipulated assertions of partisan actors, whose "facts" cannot be trusted. The press stands in the middle between these extremes, criticized from both sides because it favors neither. Beneath the apparent message of the "balanced" news report—get both sides and decide for yourself—is a subtler claim: "Trust us, the press, because everyone else wants to shade the facts their way. We as journalists have no 'way,' and that's why we're reliable."

The Adversarial Style in the Press Such a claim feeds the second image that rules the mind of the press: the notion of a "watchdog" or "adversarial" institution. Journalism is here defined as a critic of established power, which is typically represented by conniving, or, in the archetypal example of Richard Nixon, "stonewalling," government officials.5 The film and book versions of All the President's Men condense and mythologize this conception of the press as heroic antagonist to a corrupt and secretive government. As Schudson has noted, the claim that two Washington Post reporters saved the republic from Nixon and his men is largely imagined.6 Imagined, too, is the effect that Watergate supposedly had in reviving the muckraking tradition in journalism. Investigative reporting remains an exceptional and expensive practice, hardly characteristic of the press's daily operations. But none of this matters to the myth of Watergate, which has assumed, in Schudson's words, a "sustaining" power in the American press. The myth "offers journalism a charter, an inspiration, a reason for being large enough to justify the constitutional protections that journalism enjoys."7 Among the practices sustained by the mythology of Watergate is the peculiar style of aggression now common in the Washington press corps and among those lower down in the professional pyramid who aspire to elite status. The reporter-as-crap-detector, ferreting out the lies and evasions that pass for public discourse, is the identity of choice in political journalism today. Not the exhaustive fact finding of the investigative team, but the mocking incredulity of the public prosecutor, the practiced cynicism of the savvy "inside" analyst—these carry forward the message of Watergate: government is not to be trusted, and the peo-

Introduction to Part IV I 195

pie who shall do the mistrusting for us are journalists.8 Adam Gopnik, a writer for The New Yorker, offered a perceptive critique of this culture in late 1994. As he noted: "Any ordinary television viewer who has watched Presidential news conferences over the last couple of Administrations can't have failed to pick up a tone of high-minded moral indignation in the reporters' questions, which seem designed not so much to get at a particular fact or elicit a particular view as to dramatize the gulf in moral stature between the reporters and the President."9 This moral gulf—the product of press conventions as much as recent political history—can be seen as part of objectivity's regime, another way the press chooses to present itself as "free" of politics. The president is seen by journalists as the political figure par excellence. He has a party, a rhetoric, and, presumably, a program. With promises to keep, audiences to impress, reelection to win, the president is never not being "political" in the sense of seeking his own advantage. Journalists, by contrast, have no advantage of their own to seek. This frees them to be good "adversaries," all-purpose critics of the always political president. The gulf between their truth-seeking questions and the president's truth-shading answers is standing proof of journalism's independence from politics: proof of its "objectivity." Thus objectivity and the adversarial style are really features of the same environment, a self-aggrandizing professional culture that attaches the journalist to politics in order to make possible the peculiar act of detachment that identifies the press to itself. Journalists seek the isolation of the truth teller; they regard the press as the one institution without an agenda in a field of shameless self-servers. As Carey notes in "The Press, Public Opinion, and Public Discourse: On the Edge of Postmodernism," one historical reference point for this identity is the twentieth century's long battle with demagoguery and propaganda. Another is the ideology of the progressive era with its latent urge to unmask. Today, the adversarial style best typifies the journalist's withdrawal from the political community. Refusing to grant itself a political identity (or at least none we can usefully discuss), the press helps itself to an outsized role in politics as our "official" representative before a manipulative class of office holders, spinmeisters, and insiders. The contradiction—claiming a political role but no political identity—is a difficult one to sustain: hence the need for dramatic gulfs in moral stature between the press and politicians. These gulfs prove the "innocence" of


the press, even as they convict the president of shading the truth before he utters a word. The refusal to craft a self-conscious political identity, while hardly guaranteeing an "unpolitical" press, has worrisome results. For one thing, it prevents journalists from improving their contribution to public life. Gopnik notes that the culture of aggression "still has to thrive within the old institutions of the commercial press," which suppress "political thought in the interests of an ideal (or at least the appearance) of objectivity."10 Journalists are forced to lead a double life, he adds. They "relish aggression while still being prevented, by their own codes, from letting that aggression have any relation to serious political argument, let alone grown-up ideas about conduct and morality." It is a stinging indictment, backed up by a growing body of scholarly literature.11 Carey's work has a special place in that literature, primarily because it starts further back in our understanding of what journalism is (and was). His critique is thus richer when it is carried forward, amounting to a sketch of a possible politics as much as a brief for a better journalism. In "The Press, Public Opinion, and Public Discourse: On the Edge of Postmodernism," Carey argues that in our present predicament "all terms of the political equation—democracy, public opinion, public discourse, the press—are up for grabs; all such terms are historically variable even as they define each other in mutual relief." Putting everything "up for grabs" gives his work on the press an exciting feel, as if long-dead phrases (like "liberty of the press") might suddenly come to life in the next few pages. At least, it works that way for me.

Journalism as Worldmaking Carey makes two moves that most students of the press do not. The first involves his theory of communication, especially the idea that "a medium implies and constitutes a world." The second roots our understanding of democracy—and of journalism—in a particular image of the American republic. Both have important implications for the political identity and role of the press. Since everything is up for grabs, why do we need journalists? A commonsense answer would stress the importance of "information." We need the news to keep us informed, so that we can stay on top of things.12 Carey doubts that journalists are best understood as conveyers of information. In perhaps his most famous essay, "A Cultural Ap-


proach to Communication," he identifies "two alternative conceptions of communication" that have influenced American thought since the term entered our discourse in the nineteenth century.13 One he calls a "transmission view," by far the most common in our culture. Here communication is equated with the delivery of "messages" across distance. Typically, the messages are of an informational sort, and they are assumed to be important for making decisions or controlling action. At the "deepest roots of our thinking," he observes, "we picture the act of communication as the transmittal of information across space."14 With plenty of spaces to cross, Americans are inclined to believe in the social significance of such an act. Carey refers to "the regularity with which improved communication is invoked by an army of teachers, preachers, and columnists as the talisman of all our troubles."15 In contrast to the transmission metaphor stands the "ritual" view: "Here, communication is linked to terms such as 'sharing,' 'participation,' 'association,' 'fellowship,' and the 'possession of a common faith.' This definition exploits the ancient identity and common roots of the terms 'commonness,' 'communion,' community,' and 'communication.' " A ritual view directs our attention not to the movement of messages in space but to the "maintenance of society in time"; not "the act of imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs."16 Perhaps the simplest example of a ritual act of communication is a church sermon, which typically serves not to "send a message" or convey facts, but to draw the congregation together in the celebration and contemplation of a shared faith. Important for our purposes is Carey's description of the newspaper in a transmission view, as compared to what it looks like under a ritual understanding. A transmission perspective sees the newspaper as a vehicle for disseminating news and knowledge. It also leads us to ask about the "effects" of this process on audiences. We see news "as enlightening or obscuring reality, as changing or hardening attitudes, as breeding credibility or doubt." A ritual view treats newspaper reading as a different sort of act, concerned not with the conveyance of facts but with our placement in an imaginative space—one that is interesting, dramatic, satisfying to the imagination, from a ritual perspective. What is arrayed before the reader is not pure information but a portrayal of contending forces in the world. Moreover, as readers make their way through the paper, they engage in a continual shift of roles or of dramatic focus. A story on the monetary crisis salutes them as

198 / Introduction to Part IV American patriots righting those ancient enemies Germany and Japan; a story on the meeting of the women's political caucus casts them into the liberation movement as supporter or opponent; a tale of violence on the campus evokes their class antagonisms and resentments. The model here is not that of information acquisition, though such acquisition occurs, but of dramatic action in which the reader joins a world of contending forces as an observer at a play.

Carey's point (in "A Cultural Approach to Communication") is not that the transmission view of communication is "wrong," but that it cannot illuminate much of what is happening when we encounter the news. Consider a routine that millions of Americans follow: We set our clock radios so that we can wake to the news. We may be seeking a modicum of information: a few words about the weather, a traffic report, the scores of last night's games. But there is another, and perhaps deeper, purpose. While sleeping, while dreaming, we are "away," off in a private universe. By waking up to the news we return to the public world, resetting our inner horizon to a point "out there" somewhere— where the city awaits, where work is located, where the day is starting for others we know and love. The news, as we sometimes say, "gets us going," but not because it offers information without which we could not or would not "go." Waking up to the news provides daily passage into a larger, more public world, one we assume lies beyond our immediate horizon. The morning routine is an act of self-placement. Other examples are not hard to find. A feature on the president's image adviser invites us behind the scenes, where appearances are contrived for an unwitting audience from whom we are now separated by our superior knowledge of the mechanics of manipulation. A television report showing action from the Persian Gulf war puts us inside the cockpit of a fighter jet, zeroing in on an enemy target with high-tech precision. We might call this the "positioning effect." It occurs regardless of whether the journalist-as-author takes a "position" or produces a neutral, "objective" account. If positioning is part of what journalists do, then it is reasonable to ask how they should do it. That is, how do we want to be positioned? But this is only one in a class of novel questions illuminated by Carey's ritual view. As soon as journalists are no longer seen as information providers, they emerge in a variety of more interesting guises: as dramatists, model makers, timekeepers. They build public stages, people them with actors, and frame the action in a certain way. They create a certain kind of public space and issue us an

Introduction to Part IV I 199 invitation to it. Journalism can be included in what Goodman calls "ways of worldmaking."17 For each of these guises there could, in theory, be a public philosophy that tells journalists (and the rest of us) what the world looks like when it is well made, properly framed, productively paced, when we are positioned well by the press. "Objectivity" is what we have instead of such a philosophy. The two essays that follow try to address that conceptual loss.

Mapping the Political Terrain If we delve further into Carey's thinking on communication, other useful complications emerge. Take, for example, his desire to reorder "the relation of communication to reality."18 Rather than regarding language, descriptions, reports of things as "reflections" of the world out there, he directs our attention to the manner in which communication creates the world we classify as "real." He writes: "Reality is not given, not humanly existent, independent of language and toward which language stands as a pale reflection. Rather, reality is brought into existence, is produced, by communication—by, in short, the construction, apprehension, and utilization of symbolic forms."19 Carey has no wish to deny the "hardness" of reality. He is not saying that nothing is real, that all we have are our impressions. What he does say is that nothing is experienced as "real" that does not pass through an act or form of communication. The world exists independent of our minds. But it is entropic, unknowable and quite surreal unless we have maps to guide us, forms for organizing our impressions, containers into which we can pour our experience so that it takes some meaningful shape. "To put it colloquially," he writes, "there are no lines of latitude or longitude in nature, but by overlaying the globe with this particular, though not exclusively correct, symbolic organization, order is imposed on spatial organization and certain, limited human purposes served."20 Hannah Arendt made a similar observation in her classic work The Human Condition: Prior to the shrinkage of space and the abolition of distance through railroads, steamships, and airplanes, there is the infinitely greater and more effective shrinkage which comes about through the surveying capacity of the human mind, whose use of numbers, symbols, and models can condense and scale earthly physical distance down

200 / Introduction to Part IV to the size of the human body's natural sense and understanding. Before we knew how to circumscribe the sphere of human habitation in days and hours, we had brought the globe into our living rooms to be touched by our hands and swirled before our eyes.21

Like a globe, another sort of model for reality, the news as a symbolic device makes the world more graspable, reducing it to human scale—the dimensions of a front page, the duration of a newscast. In this form, the symbolic form journalism gives it, the world gets related to our "natural sense and understanding," as Arendt wrote. Carey's point is that our sense of "reality" comes into being through these acts of reduction and relation. Nothing sinister is happening. We are not being told lies. Rather, we are lying in the space created by the telling of the world's daily story. This way of thinking about the news—as producing "the world" for us—is not entirely foreign to the discourse of journalism. Consider the slogan of WINS, an all-news radio station in New York: "You give us twenty-two minutes, we'll give you the world." Or, as Time magazine used to boast in some of its televised ads: "Throughout your world, throughout your land, Time puts it all right in your hand. Read Time and understand." Carey reminds us that all symbol systems have a dual property about them. In one sense they are representations "of" the world, in another sense they can be understood as models "for." The example he offers is a blueprint for a house. On the one hand it represents the house by picturing what it looks like. "That's the house," we might say if someone asks, pointing to the blueprint. But a blueprint is also a set of instructions for making a house; we can use it to build something. Carey says we are constantly employing communication for both purposes: to represent the world, but also to create the world in habitable form. In a key distillation of his thought, he writes: "We first produce the world by symbolic work and then take up residence in the world we have produced."22 Picture a cabinet secretary in Washington, D.C., being driven to work in the morning. His day begins with a mandatory reading of the morning papers, which not only inform him "of" events but form "for" him a reality he then inhabits. If the papers happen to feature him in conflict with the president's national security adviser, then this "world of contending forces"23 becomes one in which he will reside for the day, or for much longer, depending on how the story "plays." The public meaning of his service to the president rests on "symbolic work" done

Introduction to Part IV I 201 by others—chiefly the press. The secretary must "take up residence," as Carey put it, in a frame constructed for him by journalists. But so do the rest of us whenever we take the news seriously. Here, then, is one way of understanding the press as a public actor with a political identity. Journalists suggest to us models for understanding public life even as they employ those models to represent a world beyond their own suggestions. Like all symbolic forms, political news has both an "of" and a "for" aspect. The same news columns that inform us of the personality clash within the administration form in us a view of what an "administration" is: a collection of personalities revolving around the "big" personality in politics, the president. During the time I happened to be drafting this essay, the Washington press corps was in the midst of a fascinating episode in symbolic work. It was redrawing its model of politics in order to install another man in the slot usually reserved for the president. In the aftermath of the spectacular 1994 election, in which the Republican Party won control of both houses of Congress, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was perceived to be the most important single actor in national politics—more important than President Bill Clinton, who was thought to be the "big loser" in the balloting. Almost immediately, journalists began writing the tale of Washington politics under the assumption that what Gingrich said or did, might do or had done, was now the baseline for political reality, the best way to tell the story of what American politics had become. Rituals of scrutiny ordinarily reserved for the presidency (and candidates for that office) came into effect for Congressman Gingrich, who was now cast as the story's chief protagonist. My purpose in raising this example is not to object to the selection of Gingrich as protagonist. The press certainly had its reasons, beginning with the indisputable reality that the Republicans now controlled Congress. But no argument on factual grounds can fully explain the construction of this particular "model" for grasping the political present. After all, the part of chief protagonist could plausibly be played by the "American voter," who had spoken so loudly in 1994, or by "stagnating incomes and dim prospects for the middle class," which, according to some commentators, was inducing a low-level panic in Americans despite the outward signs of a healthy economic climate in the United States. Perhaps something even vaguer was at work: something like a "collapse of political certainties in the post-cold war era." Come to think of it, why have a "chief protagonist" at all? Why arrange the

202 / Introduction to Part IV story in that particular way? What other images exist for "mapping" the terrain of the political? What sort of political "house" do we want to take up residence within? What "way of worldmaking" does the body politic need? These, in a word, are political questions. But they are also questions about communication as a human activity, a public art. They have to do with the kind of nation we wish to be; they also involve the way we make and share meaning, and our purposes in doing so. No theory of the press that is not also a theory of politics, no political philosophy that is not also a philosophy of communication can grapple successfully with the "worldmaking" dimension of journalism. That is why we read James Carey.

The Image of a Republic All communities larger than a tiny village are imagined, says Benedict Anderson. They can be distinguished "by the style in which they are imagined."24 As I have tried to suggest, the manner in which we picture the American political community is shaped by the quality (or qualities) of our journalism. But the point should not be overstressed, for journalism is itself shaped by the style in which American politics is done and described.25 Carey is continually reminding us of this: media, politics, and our language for discussing both tend to influence each other. Thus he writes in "The Press, Public Opinion, and Public Discourse: On the Edge of the Postmodern": "What we mean by democracy depends on the forms of communication by which we conduct politics. What we mean by communication depends on the central impulses and aspirations of democratic politics. What we mean by public opinion depends on both." Within this web of relationships Carey hopes to recover, for purposes of political and journalistic imagination, the image of a republic, a particular "style" in which the American nation can be vivified. A republic has a beginning, and we need to see that it can have an end. (Everything is up for grabs.) To picture America moving through time as a republic is the way of seeing Carey urges on us—as citizens, as journalists, as scholars, and as political beings. This particular republic, he tells us, was founded on a certain conception of what public life could be, codified in the First Amendment freedoms we praise so lavishly. In "A Republic, If You Can Keep It," Carey interprets them this

Introduction to Part IV I 203 way: "The [First] amendment says that people are free to gather together without the intrusion of the state or its representatives. Once gathered, they are free to speak to one another openly and freely. They are further free to write down what they have to say and to share it beyond the immediate place of utterance." From this Carey derives the true purpose of journalism, which is to amplify what the rest of us produce as a "society of conversationalists." That is how we were constituted when the republic was founded in 1789, and that is the constitution we need to recover today. "Public" conversation is not the snarling pundits or bland professionals we see on political talk shows. It is "ours to conduct," says Carey. It must exist "out there" in the country at large, in the conduct of public life at all levels of society, in the way we relate to each other as strangers. When "the press sees its role as limited to informing whomever happens to turn up at the end of the communication channel, it explicitly abandons its role as an agency for carrying on the conversation of the culture." Journalists earn their credentials as democrats not by supplying information or monitoring the state—although both may be necessary. As energetic supporters of public talk, they should be helping us "cultivate certain vital habits: the ability to follow an argument, grasp the point of view of another, expand the boundaries of understanding, decide the alternative purposes that might be pursued." Behind this view of what journalists are for is Carey's feel for the American political tradition. Not the machinations in the Oval Office in 1974 but the deliberations at Philadelphia in 1789 illuminate, for him, the true promise of journalism as a servant of the republic.26 Here, finally, is a political identity the press might claim and cultivate. Here too is the model of politics journalists should strive to assemble, the "positioning effect" we might ask them to achieve. The press ought to see itself not as our one-stop source for political knowledge, not as our official prosecutor of the high and mighty, not as thrill supplier to a pop-eyed nation, but as an experienced field guide in the landscape of public talk, a guide who knows where it is happening, what it takes, why it matters. The press should also amplify and extend, perhaps in some cases sponsor, the sort of conversation among citizens that makes us what we are and yet need to become—a republic. Carey suggests that "we value the press in the precise degree that it sus-


tains public life, that it helps keep the conversation going among us." We should "devalue the press to the degree that it seeks to inform us and turn us into silent spectators." On these grounds we might fashion a public critique of the press, a set of expectations that can guide journalism training, scholarship, and ethics.

Conclusion: Carey and the Conversational Ethic We greet in the work of James Carey a deeper, more thoroughly grounded philosophy of the press than either First Amendment law or the academic study of journalism generally has offered. I have hardly done justice to this philosophy here, slighting in particular Carey's view of the journalist as a "professional communicator," his learned treatment of the "problem of the public,"27 and his venturing into the debate over postmodernity. But these are on display in other sections of this book. The more time one spends with his writings, the more the parts fit together to make a whole, which, miraculously, has space for many others besides Carey himself. That is one thing that makes him a "public" intellectual: the room he leaves for further discussion. I discovered this in the most immediate way when I arranged for Carey to give an after-dinner talk to journalists who are struggling toward a more public approach to their craft—an approach, in fact, like the one Carey recommends.28 He delivered a highly animated version of the essay that follows, "A Republic, If You Can Keep It." For journalists, that piece has a stark undertone: you work for us, and don't forget it. So there was every chance of provoking a defensive response. But Carey overwhelmed his audience with goodwill, conversational flair, and the sheer urgency of a man gripped by ideas he must share to possess. The conference got an electric start, and the chatter of ideas lasted, as I had hoped, through several hours of drinks and conviviality. After midnight, when I bid goodnight to the remaining stragglers in the cocktail lounge, there were only two: Jim Carey and a journalist he had befriended. "We'll have that conversation," Carey's hallway promise to me, is for him the promise—in another sense the premise—of democracy as a way of life, which is the way he wants us to experience it. Journalists who have no feel for this life, no will to imagine it, are dangers to themselves and to the rest of us.


Notes 1. For a similar argument, see Christopher Lasch, "Journalism, Publicity and the Lost Art of Argument," Gannett Center Journal 4 (1990): i-n. 2. James W. Carey, "The Press and the Public Discourse," The Center Magazine, 1987,53. The literature on objectivity in journalism is large. For representative treatments see, in addition to the Schudson and the Carey essays in this book, Theodore L. Glasser, "Objectivity Precludes Responsibility," The Quill, February, 1984, 13-16; Robert A. Hackett, "Decline of a Paradigm? Bias and Objectivity in News Media Studies," Critical Studies in Mass Communication i (September 1984); D. C. Hallin, "The American News Media: A Critical Perspective," in Critical Theory and Public Life, ed. J. Forester (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press): 121-46, and The Uncensored War: The Media and Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Leonard Sigal, Reporters and Officials: The Organization and Politics of Newsmaking (Lexington, Mass.: Heath, 1973); and Gaye Tuchman, "Objectivity as Strategic Ritual: An Examination of Newsmen's Notions of Objectivity," American Journal of Sociology 79 (1972.): 110-31. 4. E. Kolbert, "Maybe the News Media Did Treat Bush a Bit Harshly," New York Times, Nov. 22,1992, 03. 5. Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of America's Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978), chapter 5. 6. Michael Schudson, The Power of News (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), chapter 7. 7. Ibid., 163. 8. On the savvy style and the journalist as insider, see Joan Didion, "Insider Baseball," in After Henry (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 47-86; Todd Gitlin, "Blips, Bites and Saavy Talk," Dissent, Winter, 1990,18-26; and Jay Rosen, "The Political Press and the Evacuation of Meaning," Tikkun, July 1993, 7-10, 94. 9. Adam Gopnik, "Read All About It," New Yorker, Dec. 12, 1994, 86. 10. Ibid. 11. See, in addition to Carey's "The Dark Continent in American Journalism" in this volume, Robert M. Entman, Democracy without Citizens: Media and the Decay of American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); T. E. Patterson, Out of Order (New York: Knopf, 1993); Jay Rosen, "Politics, Vision and the Press: Toward a Public Agenda for Journalism," in Jay Rosen and P. Taylor, The New News v. The Old News (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1992), 3-36; and L. Sabato, Feeding Frenzy: How Attack Journalism Has Transformed American Politics (New York: Free Press, 1991). 12. Schudson, Discovering the News, chapter 8. 13. James W. Carey, Communication as Culture (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), chapter i. 14. Ibid., 15. 15. Ibid., 18. 16. Ibid. 17. N. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978). Murray R. Edelman's Constructing the Political Spectacle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) also makes fine use of this perspective. 18. Carey, Communication as Culture, 25. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 26.

206 / Introduction to Part IV 21. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 2.50-51. 22. Carey, Communication as Culture, 29-30. 23. Ibid., 21. 24. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 6. 25. Schudson, The Power of News, 12-15. 26. In seeing public talk as the key to a healthy politics Carey is hardly alone. Some important recent works that take a similar perspective are James S. Fiskin, Democracy and Deliberation: New Directions for Democratic Reform (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991); David Mathews, Politics for People: Finding a Responsible Public Voice (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993); and Daniel Yankelovich, Coming to Public Judgment: Making Democracy Work in a Complex World (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991). Two texts compatible with Carey's perspective on the First Amendment are L. C. Bollinger, Images of a Free Press (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), and C. R. Sunstein, Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech (New York: Free Press, 1993). 27. The key texts here are John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: Holt, 1927), and Carey's treatment in Communication as Culture, especially chapter 3. For elaborations and applications, see J. D. Peters, "Democracy and American Mass Communication Theory: Dewey, Lippmann, Lazarsfeld," Communication n (1989): 199-220; and Jay Rosen, "Making Journalism More Public" and "Making Things More Public: On the Political Responsibility of the Media Intellectual," Critical Studies in Mass Communication n (December 1994): 362-88. 28. For a full discussion, see Rosen, "Making Things More Public," 362-88.

8 / "A Republic, If You Can Keep It": Liberty and Public Life in the Age of Glasnost First published in 1991

A story from the Constitutional Convention, probably apocryphal, sets the overall theme for this essay. Benjamin Franklin, then eighty-four, was the oldest delegate to the convention. A citizen of Philadelphia and a well-known public figure, Franklin was asked each day at the conclusion of deliberations by those gathered outside Independence Hall: "Mr. Franklin, do we have a government and if so what kind is it?" And each day Franklin answered, "We have no government as yet." On the ultimate day, as he left the convention and was asked the predictable question, he answered, or so the story goes, "We have a government; a republic, if you can keep it." If you can keep it! Franklin's remark reminds us that republican forms of government were and still are odd and aberrant occurrences in history. The natural state of humankind is domination; submission is the natural, our natural condition. Political communities founded on civic ties rather than blood relations or bureaucratic rule are rare creatures in history; they have a definite beginning, a point of origin in historical time, and, therefore, they presumably have an end. The suspicion that public liberty is aberrant in nature, that domination is our natural existence, was one obstacle Franklin and the Founding Fathers had to overcome. Their reading of history convinced them that the last republic vanished some i,800 years earlier, when Caesar crossed the Rubicon in defiance of an edict of the Roman Senate. The founders, then, were acting against history and against nature in willing a republic into existence. Writing a constitution was an attempt to lay a foundation, to create,

207

208 / "A Republic, If You Can Keep It" in the words of Bruce Smith, whose analysis I am closely following, a public space in which the two critical republican roles, citizen and patriot, might exist. Citizenship is a term of space; one is a citizen in relation to contemporaries with whom one occupies the same space. Patriot is a term of time, a relationship to one's patrimony and posterity. A patriot is a lover of place; not my country right or wrong, but a lover of what happened in this particular place and might yet happen again. The foundation of a political society, a republic, unites it in space and time. The art of political creation is to lay a foundation that will make citizens into patriots and patriots into citizens. Only when that is achieved will it be possible to prevent republican government from lurching back into domination; only then will it be possible to deliver republican government, public life, against all the vicissitudes of history, down unchangeable to posterity. The typical way in which the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are discussed these days is as legal documents: the province of lawyers, a nest of juridically derived meanings, an instrument to adjust and avoid disputes, to advance and promote interests, to protect and enhance rights. In fact, the sole meaning of the First Amendment for most people these days is "rights." We are a people who have rights. We do not constitute ourselves as a people in any other sense, except in outbreaks of militant nationalism. Behind this rights-based image of the First Amendment is a powerful organizing symbol, that of the dissident and the dissenter. This side of the First Amendment—the Emersonian side, according to Steven Shiffrin—appeals to the individualism, the rebelliousness, and the antinomian, nonconformist spirit within all of us, to a greater or lesser degree. When a legalist view of the Bill of Rights prevails, the various cases decided by the courts are arrayed under the correct clauses such that we have interminable surveys of cases that fall under the speech clause, the assembly clause, the religious clause, and we are brought up to date as to whither stand our rights. The construal of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as legal documents, an enumeration of rights, a means of settling or at least anesthetizing disputes, is a tradition and view I deeply cherish and cannot imagine living without. This view is reinvented in each period of dissent and rebellion against onerous and illegitimate demands and duties. But the powerful imperialism of the "rights tradition" has smothered all other meanings of our founding documents, even in those periods and among those people who have no

"A Republic, If You Can Keep It" I 209

quarrel with the legitimacy of authority. The assertion of rights has become a mere tropism, as automatic as a plant turning toward light. In the biological world, however, tropisms get organisms in trouble when the environment radically changes. We now often act as if the Constitution were a suicide pact, as if it had been written in Masada rather than in Philadelphia. We act as if democracy will perpetuate itself automatically if we only pay due regard to the law and rights. It is as if our ancestors had succeeded in setting up a machine that, in the words of John Dewey, "solved the problem of perpetual motion in politics." The historian Louis Hartz once cracked that "law has flourished on the corpse of philosophy in America." He meant, of course, that the law threatens to absorb the entire culture. Thus, the very meaning of speech, never mind the First Amendment, is increasingly denied, as Lee Bollinger has argued, by the notion of extremist speech, as, for example, in the famous Skokie case. But to allow the margin to define the center, the periphery to impose meaning on the core, however valuable the peripheral meanings, is to evacuate the entire culture of republicanism under the pretense of saving it. But this is not the whole story. The law is more than cases. The law is also, and in the first instance, a narrative: a set of stories about who we are and from whence we came and where we would like to go. As Mary Ann Glendon has put it, the law employs certain symbols and projects visions about a people, about, in short, what we were and are and yet might be again. In this view, the Bill of Rights is less a legal document than a political document. It is a constitution. To be redundant about it, it constitutes us as a people. A constitution is something besides the imposition of law. It is an act and foundation through which people constitute themselves as a political community. It embodies hope and aspirations. It is an injunction as to how we might live together as a people, peacefully and argumentatively but civilly and progressively. The audacious statement, so audacious we could not write it today except in nationalist tones, that opens the Constitution, "We the people," signifies a common and republican culture that cuts across and modifies all our vast and individual differences. Under this reading, merely legal rights guarantee little if in daily life the actual give and take of ideas, facts, and experiences is aborted by isolation, mutual suspicion, abuse, fear, and hatred. Or to put it in words similar to John Dewey's of fifty years ago, we have come to think of the First Amendment as a law, something external and institutional. We have to acquire

210 / "A Republic, If You Can Keep It" it, however, as something personal, as something that is but a commonplace of living. And to help us do that we should look to what in this context must seem like rather odd and out-of-the-way places, namely, the countries of Eastern Europe. The most dramatic event of recent times is the collapse of the totalitarian governments of most of Eastern Europe or, better, the emergence of a free public life in most of the states of the old Warsaw Pact. For the past year or more American journalists and intellectuals have been traveling east in order to teach these newly liberated peoples the practical arts of writing a First Amendment, managing a modern newspaper or television station, or, more elementary yet, writing and editing Western-style journalism. We regularly assume these days that we have something to export to the peoples of Eastern Europe. We are less open to the thought that we might have something to learn from them, that they might teach us something about democracy and civic culture. This curious astigmatism results from the fact that we assume that the liberation of the people of Eastern Europe resulted from something we did on their behalf and not from the internal dynamics of their own efforts. We explain these complex political changes in terms of broadcasting signals drifting over the Iron Curtain infecting a previously immune population with a desire for Western consumer goods and ideas of freedom current in America. There is something, though not much, to this notion, but it avoids the conclusion that flatters us less, namely, that the liberation of Eastern Europe resulted from what Poles, Czechs, and others did for themselves, and not primarily from what we represent or what we inadvertently did for them. How did they pull off this particular miracle? The image of totalitarianism that dominates our imagination—Orwell's 1984—allows no room for what happened. Of all the depredations visited on the citizens of Airstrip One, it is not the censorship or the wall posters or the presence of Big Brother or the ubiquitous television screen or the surveillance or the reeducation of the informer children—all of which Orwell helped become the totems of totalitarianism—that stays with one the longest. Rather, it is the silence, the absence of talk, the loss of memory, the pitiless destruction of the private and public world you cannot forget. The novel begins and ends wordlessly: Winston squirreled in an out-of-sight corner writing words in his prized notebook; Winston staring at the television screen in the Chestnut Tree Cafe. Rebellion begins with writing and ends in silence. There is cant and there is interro-

"A Republic, If You Can Keep It" I I I I gation; there are furtive, stolen glances, and there are hurried coded messages. There is simply no conversation except in the pubs and the hidden room, and very little of it there. No danger Winston faces is quite as unnerving as that of starting a conversation; nothing more demoralizing than Julia's vacant memory. We can happily ignore the coercion, social control, and domination, for we are by and large, on those terms at least, happily free of it. Not so the endless and endlessly repetitive news, the reduction of all thought to cliche, and the pervasive presence of bureaucracy: news, cliche, bureaucracy, and, finally, silence are all too familiar and much more unnerving than the technology and the terror. The destruction of mind, the deracination of character, the invasion of the private, the diremption of the public appear within but exist without the totalitarian and technological apparatus that sustains the fiction. Orwell's 19 #4 is a prophetic book and valuable in that regard for what it tells us to guard against. But it is not good prophecy. In Eastern Europe there was, in fact, enormous resistance to the powers of the state and, more importantly, the will to create a free public life despite totalitarian coercion. Eastern Europeans managed to create, however fragile it is now, whatever its prospects may be, a civic life of a distinctly republican kind, and central to that creation was the art of memory. Milan Kundera pays testimony to that art when, at the opening of his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, he says that "the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." Similarly, the workers at the shipyard in Gdansk inscribed a tombstone dedicated to their fallen comrades in Solidarity with the words of Milosz: "The poet remembers." Both examples pay testimony to the heroic acts of imaginative memory of the past forty-five years, acts that formed the basis, the foundation, of a free public life. The best known, and perhaps the most heroic, was that of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In early February 1945 Solzhenitsyn was arrested on the East Prussian front as a political criminal on the evidence of unflattering remarks he had made about Stalin and Soviet literature in letters to a friend. During the next twelve years he endured interrogations, prisons, labor camps, and exile, and he was "rehabilitated" in 1957. He had always wanted to be a writer but prior to his arrest he could never find a subject, his subject. Once he was in prison his dilemma was resolved: he had to retain and make unforgettable the experience

212 / "A Republic, If You Can Keep It" through which he was living and to transmit the meaning of that experience to posterity. But how does one write in prison? No writing paper or pens or pencils, no typewriters, or VDTs. As a result, he recovered, as have so many others, the most primitive form of writing: he wrote without setting anything down on paper, learning to compose anytime, anywhere—"on forced marches over the frigid steppe, in thundering foundries, in crowded barracks." As he put it in his autobiography, The Oak and the Calf: "As a soldier falls asleep as soon as he sits down on the ground, as a dog's own fur is the stove that keeps him warm in the cold, so I instinctively became adjusted to writing everywhere." He converted his experience into verse, stored the compositions in memory, and when he was finally released from the gulag, the words came forth as prose and poetry in a memorable series of books. The following lines from "God Keep Me from Going Mad" recall the tenacity and purpose of the effort: Yes, tight is the circle around us, tautly drawn, But my verses will burst their bonds and freely roam And I can guard, perhaps, beyond their reach, In rhythmic harmony this hard-won gift of speech. And then they can grope my body in vain— "Here I am. All yours. Look hard. Not a line . . . Our indestructible memory, by wonder divine, Is beyond the reach of your butcher's hands!"

Many similar episodes could be cited. For example, Nadezhda Mandelstam's recounting of how she and friends met to commit to memory the literature being destroyed by the OGUP, the committee in charge of counterrevolutionary struggle. She recalls in her memoirs how, when she was working in a punitive factory, she used the rhythms of mechanical looms to help her remember the lines of poems as she rushed back and forth between them, the entire scene reminiscent of the conclusion of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. The point is this: the act of creating a public sphere in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe did not begin with Western broadcasts floating across the Iron Curtain. It began in acts of recovery and the tenacious storage in memory of the experience through which people were living. It was only this that allowed people to maintain a desire for normal life or a memory of what normal life was and might yet be again. This resistance everywhere required dealing with censorship. In 1984 The Blackbook of Polish Censorship was published after having


been smuggled out of Poland in 1977. As Stanislaw Baranczak has commented about it: Everybody who read the document was genuinely struck by the extent and meticulous elaboration of the censor's guidelines and reports. The document proved that censorship had literally every kind of publication under its control, from wedding invitations, to circus posters, to obscure quarterlies dealing with Mediterranean archaeology. Here are samples of the guidelines from the censorship book: All information concerning the participation of representatives of Israel in congresses, international conferences, or performances organized by Poland should be cleared.. .. Information on direct threats to life or health caused by industry or chemical agents used in agriculture, or threats to the natural environment in Poland, should be eliminated from works on environmental protection. No information concerning Poland's export of meat to the USSR should be permitted. All criticism of Marxism should be eliminated from religious publications. . . . All material critical of the religious situation in countries of the socialist community should be eliminated. No material concerning the hippie movement in Poland may be permitted for publication if it expresses approval or tolerance. Nationwide data on increases in alcoholism should not be permitted for publication.

Among the more ingenious ways of circumventing censorship, as recounted by Baranczak, was that of Stefan Kisielewski, who wrote his most outrageous statements precisely so they would be censored, thereby making their way into classified bulletins and brought to the attention of the political elite. Perhaps the most distinguished body of literature written under censorship is the genre of prison letters. Such letters were composed under the direct control of the secret police, forced to obey rigid guidelines—no more than four pages, no foreign words or expressions, precise margins, nothing crossed out, no references to anything but family matters. Nonetheless, Vaclav Havel's Letters to Olga is one of the great political documents of our time and, as Baranczak correctly says, one of the great articulations of human freedom. While inquiring about the health of his wife and children, while commenting on his own health and state of mind, his once-a-week four-page letters added up to an entire philosophy of freedom. By devices large and small—writing between the lines; creating novels about historical events that were disguised commentaries on con-

214 / "A Republic, If You Can Keep It" temporary affairs; strengthening the arts of memory; "flying" universities; public lectures in private apartments; choosing internal migration and "writing for the desk drawers"; reviewing Nazi-era films as if they were products of state socialism; circumlocution and densely coded messages—East European writers constituted the basis of a free public life. Again, Stanislaw Baranczak: Poland, as an ironic result of decades of constant indoctrination, persecution of free speech, and official backing of obedient quasiwriters and quasi-artists .. . despite all this, or perhaps because it, the phenomenon of an independent culture ... has been able not only to survive and develop but also to secure its position successfully. The pivotal year was 1976, when the full power of the regime's monopoly of publication was recognized, and it became "necessary to go from weak and futile protests against abuses of censorship to creating a network of publishing and circulation which would remain outside the regime's control." Emboldened, given courage by an older generation of artists and writers, a number of young people were willing to take the risk of serving as underground printers, editors, distributors, and so on. For the first time in postwar history, all the links of the chain of communication fell into place: there was someone to write for the independent circuit, someone to manage the process of independent publications [and thus to form a market for them]. What began in clandestine speech spread to writing and then printing and later to yet more vulnerable media such as cinema and theater. Despite living under regimes almost as repressive as that described by Orwell, East Europeans, in country after country, managed to create a free public life. They had no help from the press; in fact, the press was their enemy. They created a life that, though it was submerged and clandestine, preserved, maintained, and developed public discourse, argument, and debate. The entire episode speaks to the importance of human memory; the sheer stupidity, incompetence, and destructiveness of censorship; the critical need for vital independent traditions of art; and, despite the bedazzling advances in technology in our time, the need for the simplest practices: to speak clearly and effectively, to write with passion and directness, and to retain culture by the unaided powers of the mind. It was not by accident that only in the later stages of the revolution did film, broadcasting, and photography become agents


of change, for these media require concentrated capital, rely upon skills not easily concealed, and are more vulnerable to state interference. With one exception: as one Czech put it, "Xerox was the best dissident for many years." East Europeans did not have a public life; they simply acted as if they had one. Jonathan Schell has written of this "as if" philosophy in his introduction to Adam Michnik's Letters from Prison. Michnik helped devise an opposition strategy that could address itself to "independent public opinion rather than totalitarian power." In explaining this approach, Schell writes: Its simple but radical guiding principle was to start doing things you think should be done and to start being what you think society should become. Do you believe in freedom and truth? Then speak freely. Do you love truth? Then tell it. Do you believe in the open society? Then act in the open. Do you believe in a decent and humane society? Then act decently and humanely.

Vaclav Havel explained a similar strategy (or it is a philosophy?) in Letters to Olga: It is I who must begin. One thing about it, however, is interesting: once I begin—that is once I try—here and now, right where I am, not excusing myself saying that things would be easier elsewhere, without grand speeches and ostentatious gestures, but all the more persistently—to live in harmony with the voice of "Being," as I understand it within myself—as soon as I begin that, I suddenly discover, to my surprise, that I am neither the only one, nor the first, nor the most important one to have set out upon that road.... Whether all is really lost or not depends entirely on whether or not I am lost.

It is time to leave the broad savanna of Eastern Europe for the village of America. It is dangerous to compare the struggle for freedom in Poland, for example, with its maintenance in an already free society, but it is equally dangerous to assume that the Polish experience has nothing to teach us. Of course, their newfound way of life is very fragile indeed, about where it was in 1914. But our way of life is very fragile, too. They had to win a free public life from a repressive state; we have to win one from the media consultants and our own ingrained habits of living. Our task may be the more difficult even if it is without comparable risks. But let me put a grace note to this, courtesy of the sociologist Richard Flacks. Flacks recounts how a member of Solidarity

216 / "A Republic, If You Can Keep It"

told him that the movement had come about because Polish workers had been able to learn from the experiences of Poland in 1956, 1967, 1971, and 1975. That is, they were able to conserve and pass on political experience. Flacks was dumbfounded, given his feeling that American students were unable to learn from earlier generations of student protesters—for example, those in Berkeley in 1964. How could it be, he wondered, that workers in Poland could learn lessons of the past when information was totally controlled by the state, and where the state systematically erased the memories of past protest? The state in our presumptively free society does none of those things, yet we are, in Joseph Featherstone's acid phrase, the "United States of Amnesia." Flack's Polish respondent replied that because the Polish people do not believe they have trustworthy mass media it never enters their mind to rely on the official media, or any public media, to transmit any useful information: "We have to create our own frameworks of communication and memory." These independent frameworks of communication and memory were assumed to exist by the framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and such frameworks were thought to be worth protecting and enhancing. The documents assume, in short, a set of personal dispositions and the existence of certain social conditions. We now are faced with the task of recreating, by deliberate and determined endeavor, the forms of political life that in our origins two hundred years ago were largely the product of a fortunate combination of persons and circumstances. We value, or so we say, the First Amendment because it contributes, in Thomas Emerson's formulation, four things to our common life. It is a method of assuring our own self-fulfillment; it is a means of attaining the truth; it is a method of securing participation of members of society in political decision making; and it is a means of maintaining a balance between stability and change. It is the third of Emerson's clauses, the clumsily expressed notion of political participation, that is critical here. If we think of the First Amendment against the background of recent East Europe experience, the interrelation among its parts becomes clearer. While the First Amendment contains four clauses—religion, speech, press, and assembly—one must think of them less as separate clauses and more as a compact way of describing a political society. In other words, the amendment is not a casual and loose consolidation of high-minded

"A Republic, If You Can Keep It" I 217 principles. It was an attempt to define the nature of public life as it existed at the time or as the founders hoped it would exist. To put it in an artlessly simple way, the amendment says that people are free to gather together without the intrusion of the state or its representatives. Once gathered, they are free to speak openly and fully. They are further free to write down what they have to say and to share it beyond the immediate place of utterance. But where does freedom of religion fit into this? Of all the freedoms of public life in the eighteenth century, freedom of religion was, perhaps, the most difficult liberty for Americans to adjust to. Compared with other forms of speech, religious heresy was the one most likely to be viewed as both a personal and a community assault. From the banishment of heretics to the hanging of witches, religious persecution often could count on popular sanction. And yet the intricate relationship of public freedoms also was evident to Americans in the colonies. The First Amendment was designed to resolve the dilemma. As such, free speech and free press were a little like bargains struck with the devil. No one could be excluded from the public realm on the basis of religion, the one basis upon which people were likely to exclude one another. In turn, that clause has allowed us to open up progressively the public realm, to make it more broadly inclusive, to reduce the barriers to entrance based on the secondary criteria of class, race, and gender. The interconnections among the clauses of the First Amendment would be clearer if some of the draft language often attributed to Madison had been adopted. The language of progressive verbs, rather than nouns, would allow us to see the interrelations among assembling, speaking, and writing. It would show more clearly the injunction in the First Amendment to create a conversational society, a society of people who speak to one another, who converse. Other words might do: a society of argument, disputation, or debate, for example. But I believe we must begin from the primacy of conversation. It implies social arrangements less hierarchical and more egalitarian than its alternatives. While people often dry up and shy away from the fierceness of argument, disputation, and debate, and while those forms of talk often bring to the surface the meanness and aggressiveness that is our second nature, conversation implies the most natural and unforced, unthreatening, and most satisfying of arrangements. Under this conception of the First Amendment, the press, whether

218 / "A Republic, If You Can Keep It" conceived of as a technology or an institution or simply as a recording device, is largely an extension and amplification, an "outering" of conversation. But the conversation is ours to conduct with one another and its amplification merely extends its reach. A press independent of the conversation of culture, or existing in the absence of such a conversation, is likely to be, in practical terms, whatever the value of the right the press represents, a menace to public life and an effective politics. The idea of the press as a mass medium, independent of, disarticulated from, the conversation of the culture, inherently contradicts the goal of creating an active remembering public. Public memory can be recorded by but cannot be transmitted through the press as an institution. The First Amendment, to repeat, constitutes us as a society of conversationalists, of people who talk to one another, who resolve disputes with one another through talk. This is the foundation of the public realm, the inner meaning of the First Amendment, and the example the people of Eastern Europe were quite inadvertently trying to teach us. The "public" is the God term of the press, the term without which the press does not make any sense. Insofar as the press is grounded, it is grounded in the public. The press justifies itself in the name of the public. It exists, or so it is said, to inform the public, to serve as the extended eyes and ears of the public. The press is the guardian of the public interest and protects the public's right to know. The canons of the press originate in and flow from the relationship of the press to the public. While the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are silent on the matter, the public is the deepest and most fundamental concept of the entire liberal tradition. Liberal society is formed around the notion of a virtuous public. For John Locke, to be a member of the public was to accept a calling. This notion of a public, a conversational public, has been pretty much evacuated in our time. Public life started to evaporate with the emergence of the public opinion industry and the apparatus of polling. Polling (the word, interestingly enough, derived from the old synonym for voting) was an attempt to simulate public opinion in order to prevent an authentic public opinion from forming. With the rise of the polling industry, intellectual work on the public went into eclipse. In political theory, the public was replaced by the interest group as the key political actor. But interest groups, by definition, operate in the private sector, behind the scenes, and their relationship to public life is essentially propagandistic and manipulative. In interest-group theory the

"A Republic, If You Can Keep It" I 219 public ceases to have a real existence. It fades into a statistical abstract: an audience whose opinions count only insofar as individuals refract the pressure of mass publicity. In short, while the word public continues in our language as an ancient memory and a pious hope, the public as a feature and factor of real politics disappears. The strongest advocate of a diminished and vanishing public was, as I argue elsewhere, Walter Lippmann. While Lippmann seemed to lament the passing of the public, he conceived of citizens primarily, if not exclusively, as the objects rather than the subjects of politics. This view turned the First Amendment primarily into a possession of the press and the interest groups with whom the press engaged in both combat and accommodation. Toward that combat citizens stood largely as spectators and ratifiers. In truth, the conversation of the culture was taken outside the public realm and into private spaces. However artlessly and awkwardly, I want to contrast the situation just described with the requirements of republican life. Republics require conversation, often cacophonous conversation, for they should be noisy places. That conversation has to be informed, of course, and the press has a role in supplying that information. But the kind of information required can be generated only by public conversation; there is simply no substitute for it. We have virtually no idea what it is we need to know until we start talking to someone. Conversation focuses our attention, it engages us, and in the wake of conversation we have need not only of the press but also of the library. From this view of the First Amendment, the task of the press is to encourage the conversation of the culture—not to preempt it or substitute for it or supply it with information as a seer from afar. Rather, the press maintains and enhances the conversation of the culture, becomes one voice in that conversation, amplifies the conversation outward, and helps it along by bringing forward the information that the conversation itself demands. President John F. Kennedy said in 1962.: Most of us are conditioned [a telling word] for many years to have a particular viewpoint: Republican or Democrat, Liberal or Conservative or Moderate. The fact of the matter is that most of the problems that we now face are technical problems, administrative problems. They require sophisticated judgments which do not lend themselves to the kinds of social movements that involve the citizenry and which stir the country. They deal with problems that are beyond the circumspection of most men.

220 / "A Republic, If You Can Keep It" Kennedy had read his Lippmann. But pretty much the same thing was said to the shipyard workers at Gdansk who formed Solidarity: These affairs are beyond you; you're not technically qualified to judge. Let us take care of these matters; you are simply interfering with the normal process of government. The important thing about public conversation is that, in an old saw of E. M. Forster's, we don't know what we think until we hear what we say. Conversation not only forms opinion, it forms memory. We remember best the things that we say, the things that we say in response to someone else with whom we are engaged. Talk is the surest guide to remembering and knowing what we think. To take in information passively guarantees that we will remember little and know less, except for a trace of the passion of the moment. And soon we have no interest in information or knowledge at all. If we insist on public conversation as the essence of democratic life, we will come, as Christopher Lasch put it, "to defend democracy, not as the most efficient form of government but as the most educational one, the one that extends the circle of debate as widely as possible and thus asks us all to articulate our views, to put them at risk, and to cultivate the virtues of clarity of thought, of eloquence and sound judgment." A press that encourages the conversation of its culture is the equivalent of an extended town meeting. However, if the press sees its role as limited to informing whoever happens to turn up at the end of the communication channel, it explicitly abandons its role as an agency for carrying on the conversation of the culture. Having embraced Lippmann's outlook, the press no longer serves to cultivate certain vital habits: the ability to follow an argument, grasp the point of view of another, expand the boundaries of understanding, decide the alternative purposes that might be pursued. A free press is a necessary condition of a free public life, but it is not the same thing as a free public life. If I am right in contending that we should value the press to the precise degree that it sustains public life, that it helps keep the conversation going among us, and that we devalue the press to the degree it seeks to inform us and turns us into silent spectators, then there are two diremptions of the central meaning of the First Amendment against which we must be on guard. The first is the tendency of the press to treat us like a client, a group with a childlike dependence and an eight-year-old mind incapable of functioning at all without our daily dose of the news. The historian John Lukacs has pointed out that one of the things that aston-


ished Europeans about America in the nineteenth century was that we regularly overestimated the intelligence of ordinary men and women. These Europeans felt America expected more from its people than they could deliver. That, of course, was a mistake, but it is infinitely preferable to its opposite, namely, the systematic underestimation of the intelligence of people. Such an underestimation is the contemporary mistake made not only by the press but by all our major institutions— education, government, and business. Second, the press endangers us when it disarms us, when it convinces us that just by sitting at home watching the news or spending an hour with the newspaper, we are actually participating in the affairs that govern our lives. At least the people of Eastern Europe never swallowed that. Sociologists Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton coined the awkward but apt phrase "narcotizing dysfunction" to describe the condition in which participation in the media becomes confused with participation in public life. Paul L. Murphy noted that the decision in the libel case New York Times v. Sullivan, and in many parallel cases, was an attempt by the Supreme Court to create a robust society of debate. We have, he concluded, secured freedom of speech for the street-corner orator. Unfortunately, the constituency of that orator is no longer on the corner, listening; it is at home watching television. However, if one looks at voting statistics and other evidence of participation in politics, or examines the knowledge people have of public affairs, or the declining attention to news on television or in print, one must conclude that the political constituency has disappeared altogether. Out there, there is no there there. The press has a great interest in the restoration of this constituency if only to assure its own financial survival. But that constituency will be found neither on the street corner nor in the audience until it has some reason to be either place. Since there is no public life, there is no longer a public conversation in which to participate, and, because there is no conversation, there is no reason to be better informed and hence no need for information. Or, to take another example: at a minimum the press has to actively lead the fight to reform the financing of political campaigns. Until the structure of campaigning changes, there is little hope of robust debate. Because we cannot control campaign financing, there is a growing movement to put term limitations on elected officials. That is, by and large, not a particularly helpful idea, but it should be under-

222 / "A Republic, If You Can Keep It" stood as a substitute for the reform of campaign financing. When we learned a few years ago that the chances of staying in Congress were infinitely better than the chances of a Soviet official's retaining his seat in the Politburo, we realized how sclerotic our politics had become. Without reform of campaign financing, there is no possibility of public debate. However, newspapers and television, particularly the latter, have no interest in campaign reform for they are the financial beneficiaries of a system that clogs the public mind, chokes the public voice, and keeps the legislature full of winningly familiar and compliant co-conspirators in the diremption of the public realm. The situation would not be so parlous if our legislatures and political parties were themselves driven by debate. Then, even if we did not get a chance to discuss the issues, we could at least have the pleasure of watching someone else do it. We could thereby form our imaginations off public argument. Debate is no longer any part of campaigning, despite the ersatz confrontations arranged every four years by the networks and the League of Women Voters. By rule the cameras on the floor of Congress can focus only on the speaker of the moment, lest the dirty little secret get out that congressional debate occurs without congressional listeners: the words are spoken only for the Congressional Record and the chance viewers back home who stumble across C-SPAN. Contrast that with the British House of Commons, also courtesy of C-SPAN, where one can actually see the benches, hear the debate, and form an opinion by selecting among carefully nuanced positions one that more or less matches one's own. That is all pretty dour as prognosis, so let's balance it with three hopeful examples—one of what an individual can do, a second of what a newspaper can do, and a third of what a public institution can do. The individual story originally appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer on February 4,1989. "An era ends for a voice in education," the Inquirer headline said, and the article went on as follows: The prose was always simple and direct. Listen to an excerpt from the Oakes Newsletter of March 1984: "High schools face enormous problems. Thousands of ill prepared students [this was 1984] are disinterested in their courses. Poor attendance. Cut classes. Students have difficulties concentrating on their studies because of struggling with problems at home such as alcoholism, abusive adults, and poverty or face hurdles such as pregnancy or drug dependence. High schools must endeavor to cope with all these problems while pushing, cajoling, and encouraging pupils to learn."

"A Republic, If You Can Keep It" I 223 Helen Oakes described her newsletter from its beginning nineteen years ago as "an independent monthly dedicated to improving public education." Every month—quarterly for the last few years— Oakes carefully researched an important educational issue and then presented her findings to the readership of her little periodical. But Oakes, 64, announced last week that her January newsletter, on the problems of new teachers and the looming teacher shortage, would be her last. With that decision, what some have described as a one-of-a-kind record of an urban school system's struggles and evolution came to an end. The circulation of the Oakes Newsletter was a mere 1,300. Her readers passed it from hand to hand. She would send copies to the Mayor, City Council, School Board members, other influential people, regardless of whether they subscribed. She only had 600 paid subscriptions at $10.00 per year, and her work was underwritten by the Alfred and Mary Gouty foundation. Over nearly two decades, there have been 156 newsletters, each four pages long, each written in the same low-key explanatory style even at the height of the school district's financial, education, and labor troubles. As she is leaving her work, one citizen of Philadelphia, Happy Fernandez, who helped found the Parents Union in 1972. during a time of escalating labor strikes, says, "The Oakes Newsletter was invaluable. I was coming from a neighborhood organization that had never looked at the issues of the whole system. A number of the newsletters helped us understand the budget dynamics that were the driving force behind the strikes. We gobbled up the stuff like the Bible and would wait for each new issue to come out." To its credit, the Inquirer, when Oakes retired, said: Most public officials know only two ways of communicating: emotional displays in public and conspiratorial whispers in private. As a result, the public's real need for discourse that is open and rational is rarely served. One of the few exceptions is Helen Oakes, who instead of adding decibel level to the traditional cacophony of the school scene, or wheeling and dealing behind the scenes, set her thoughts down on paper in a personal letter that she sends out eight times a year. This tiny story of Helen Oakes tells us more about the value of freedom of the press than a year's worth of issues of the New York Times. In fact, the main reason for defending freedom of the press for the New York Times is to ensure that we can defend and enhance that freedom in the case of people like Helen Oakes. A second example concerns a newspaper. What follows is a condensed version of what happened based on a recent essay by Jay Rosen

224 / "A Republic, If You Can Keep It" of New York University. Columbus, Georgia, a city of 175,000 in southwestern Georgia, has, like many American cities, experienced significant growth in recent years. And that growth has caused all sorts of problems. The local paper, the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, commissioned a poll of area residents to seek their opinion on what the city needed to do. They also received about eighty-five questionnaires from influential citizens. On the basis of these two sources of information, the paper published a report entitled "Columbus—Beyond 2,000" in daily installments in the spring of 1989. The report identified key issues including transportation bottlenecks, low wages, the lack of nightlife, a faltering school system, and the perceived dominance of a local elite in city politics. The editor recalled that, after the series was published, the paper sat back and waited for someone to do something—but no one did. So the editor, the late Jack Swift, decided to leap across the chasm that normally separates journalism from its community. At the newspaper's expense, he planned a town meeting to turn up the public heat on local government. Members of the newspaper staff were trained in the art of moderating public discussion by the Kettering Foundation in Ohio. A six-hour meeting in December 1988 drew three hundred people from a variety of income levels and social standings. Off the momentum of that meeting, Swift organized a barbecue at his home for seventy-five prominent citizens, again from diverse backgrounds. The result was a loosely organized citizens' movement calling itself United Beyond 2.000, after the newspaper series. It included a steering committee and a variety of task forces to address specific issues such as recreation, child care, teenagers, and race relations. As it expanded, the citizens' movement remained a concern of the newspaper, but it was not the paper's creature. United Beyond 2000 devolved into a coordinated mechanism for civic groups and their leaders, a path of entry for citizens whose civic involvement was ordinarily low, and a signal to government that public opinion was organized and active. The newspaper supported the movement with a community bulletin board featuring letters from readers and a series of articles on the region's problems, focusing particularly on the lack of a clear agenda at different levels of local and regional government. The editor did not merely deal with current problems. Employing the metaphor of tribal fire, he noted that newspapers should share history, celebrate heroes, reinforce common values, retell legends. Among the legends they retold was the story of the 1912 lynching of a black youth by a white mob in


Columbus. No one was convicted and the event passed out of local history. Swift resurrected it as "The Incident at Wynn's Hill," researched and written by a reporter whose ancestors were among the city's founders. This entire episode illustrates, as Jay Rosen insightfully argues, how journalism might, as one of its central functions, expand the definition of public time, the temporal framework within which discussion takes place and we consider our collective history. As Rosen says, "In a racially mixed Southern city, to re-install a lynching in the community's collective memory"—and to do it for a reason other than inducing collective guilt—"is a decidedly political act, an extension of 'public time' backward to include a troubled and forgotten past." The experiment by the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer raises a number of troubling issues for professional journalists and, rather unfortunately, it has been rationalized by the owner of the paper, the KnightRidder Company, as an exercise in romance and profitability. However, such issues need not detain us. The lesson of the episode is the example of a newspaper attempting, without becoming a simpleminded community booster, to reconceive its public function and to assist in the reemergence of a public conversation about the public interest. A final example from McLean County, Illinois. The county seat at Bloomington was concerned about the cohesion of the community with the arrival of a new Chrysler/Mitsubishi manufacturing plant and the many new residents who followed in its wake. How could the transformed community be brought together and equipped with a common memory and vocabulary so that the newcomers could talk to the "oldcomers" in creating an authentic civic culture? The county historical society undertook this task by first identifying six groups that collectively constituted the history of the community: Yankees, Irish, African-Americans, Anabaptists, Germans, and Upland Southerners. The society considered doing an oral history of these groups but finally rejected it as an exercise in, to use their splendid phrase, the "stripmining of memory." Instead, they created a remarkable series of events, the centerpiece of which was a living museum in which people in the community were asked to exhibit and portray the histories of their own families, to dramatize the history of McLean County by dramatizing family history, by simply talking about and displaying the artifacts that sedimented that history and brought the past of the community to life. Public life stands for a form of politics in which, in Jefferson's phrase, "we could all be participators in the government of our af-

226 / "A Republic, If You Can Keep It" fairs." Political equality in its most primitive mode probably meant simply the right to be seen and heard. When one or a few dominate the life of a people, the others, denied the opportunity to be seen and heard, despair of public joy and go in search of private pleasure. Only when citizens can speak and act with some promise that their fellows will see and hear and remember will the passions that are true and lasting grow. And, therefore, unless we can create or restore what Tocqueville called the "little republics within the frame of the larger republic," within political parties and trade unions, within local communities and workplaces, within places that can aggregate public opinion and sustain public discourse, political objects must remain indefinite and transient and political action short-lived and ineffective. The two-hundredth anniversary of the Bill of Rights coincided with the war in the Persian Gulf. Following the war academic and journalistic commentators attempted to assess the coverage of the war and the legality and efficacy of the censorship and pool arrangements of the American military. We were so busy discussing that First Amendment problem that we forget and ignored the real problem. The war in the Gulf, not in specifics but as an emanation of our foreign policy and domestic policy, should have been discussed in 1988 and again in 1990. In those political campaigns, among the silliest and most tragic in our history, there was no conversation or debate anywhere: not in the press, not among the candidates, not among the people. We had an opportunity then to discuss whether, in the wake of the end of the cold war, it might not be time to end the long period of liberal internationalism that dates back to Woodrow Wilson and the domination of the national security state that dates back, at least, to World War II. We missed the opportunity to conduct that conversation of the culture, and we may not get another one any time soon. "What a nation is, is essential. What it does can only express what it is," according to William Pfaff. What the United States does on the international stage is of some consequence. But our enduring success lies in the quality of our civilization and, in particular, of our political society. Our success in postwar years lay in the creation of a vital and energetic society, attempting, at least, to extend social justice and engage the imagination of the young. Foreign relations rightly dominated our attention during the period now ending. The true test the United States now confronts, the national challenge, is within. We must turn to the task of creating a public realm in which a free


people can assemble, speak their minds, and then write or tape or otherwise record the extended conversation so that others, out of sight, might see it. If the established press wants to aid the process, so much the better. But if, in love with profits and tied to corporate interests, the press decides to sit out public life, we shall simply have to create a space for citizens and patriots by ourselves. Like the people of Eastern Europe, we will have to constitute a free public life, whatever the odds. That was Franklin's message at the close of the Constitutional Convention: a republic, if you can keep it.

9 / The Press, Public Opinion, and Public Discourse: On the Edge of the Postmodern First published in 1995

The vast growth of the social, steadily encroaching on both public and private life, has produced the eerie phenomenon of society, which rules everybody anonymously, just as bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism. —Mary McCarthy At this late date in the history of the American republic it may be impossible to recover a useful and usable conception of public opinion and public discourse, despite notable attempts to do so. There is more than a whiff of the romantic in the verb recover, so let me explain. Phrases such as "the recovery of the public sphere," used rather often these days, do not necessarily imply that there was once, long ago, in some pristine past, an era in which the public reigned, in which our ancestors lived a free and uncoerced life of communal bliss and that we, now armed with spiritual travelers checks, can haul back to the present and reestablish. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, back there, there is no there there. The "recovery of public life" is not an attempt to recapture a period or historical moment or condition but, instead, an attempt to invigorate a conception or illusion or idea that once had the capacity to engage the imagination, motivate action, and serve an ideological purpose. Public life refers to an illusion of the possible rather than to something with a given anterior existence. To place public life in the past is merely to situate it in a context where it can be thought rather than in a landscape where it was real.

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The Press, Public Opinion, and Public Discourse I 229

The reason contemporary politics and with it the press and public opinion often seem so meaningless is that they have been severed from any imagination of a possible politics that can serve as a basis of action and motivation. Gripped by what C. Wright Mills called "crackpot realism," we have pretty much concluded that "public life" is not only an illusion and a species of the pastoral but an undesirable objective of both politics and everyday life. We may still hold to some notion of democracy as a desirable state of affairs but it is, to appropriate the title of Robert Entman's book, a democracy without citizens. This evacuation of the public realm, a contemporary feature of both theory and practice, is driven, of course, by the ruthlessly privatizing forces of capitalism that often make such a life unthinkable. However, the evacuation of the public realm is also a product of progressive thought. Most ideological positions, left and right, actively struggle against the notions of the public, public discourse, and public life. In short, whatever political allegiances obtain, they are in agreement on one point: a modern political community must be, empirically, theoretically, and normatively, a community of power, not discourse, an arena of naked and manipulative struggle between interest groups, another item in the culture of consumption and coercion. This is the way the world works and, in truth, the only way it can and ought to work. There is simply no conceivable alternative. Because modern political culture was formed as a reaction to totalitarianism, we are convinced that the only alternative to the omniscient state is an elite and managed democracy conducted as a propaganda contest in which the public is a spectator and ratifier of decisions made elsewhere. Why are we so imaginatively impoverished? A sense of conceptual loss, then, will pervade this essay, a loss of, to paraphrase some lines of Lawrence Levine, a rich, shared public culture.1 American culture was from the outset deeply divided by race, ethnicity, class, and, above all, religion. Nonetheless, it was also typified by a shared culture, less hierarchically organized, not adjectivally divided by labels such as high, mass, and popular, and not, strictly speaking, the property or province of any one group. Today our only shared culture is a commercial one, a substitute for a political culture, and what exists of politics is formed as a metaphor of commerce and an imperative of markets. While that culture, with its commitment to markets, can do many things, it cannot produce a politics, or it can produce nothing more than a politics of interests.

230 / The Press, Public Opinion, and Public Discourse The object then of this reconsideration of the press, politics, and public opinion is to move toward a shared political culture, particularly in terms of our understanding of the First Amendment and, therefore, our understanding of what have come to be thought of as the "rights" of assembly, speech, and press. To defend free speech so that people may be unfettered in forming their own opinions and choosing their own ends is a rather different matter from defending it on the grounds that a life of political discussion is inherently worthier than a life unconcerned with public affairs, worthier than a life merely selfabsorbed and self-interested. These questions have been raised anew by the spectacle of recent presidential politics.

Have We Reached a Watershed? The parenthesis enclosing the 1988 and 1992, presidential primaries and elections may turn out to be, though the wish is certainly father to the thought, a watershed period in American politics and in the history of public opinion. In the aftermath of the 1988 election there was widespread disgust with American politics and with the press itself, a disgust that muted the normal happiness of political victory and the end to yet another endless season of campaigning.2 It was a monumentally smarmy campaign, reduced to a few slogans and brutal advertisements that produced yet another record low in voter turnout. A predictable round of seminars and symposia followed, decrying the "degradation of democratic discourse" and the immiseration of the press in horse race and gossip column journalism. The theatrical and hermetically sealed quality of the campaign was caught by Joan Didion: When we talk about the process, then, we are talking increasingly, not about "the democratic process," or the general mechanism affording citizens of a state a voice in its affairs, but the reverse, a mechanism seen as so specialized that access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals, to those who manage policy and those who report on it, to those who run the polls and those who quote them, to those who ask and those who answer the questions on the Sunday shows, to the media consultants, to columnists . . . to the handful year in and year out, the narrative of public life. What strikes one most vividly about such a campaign is precisely its remoteness from the actual life of the country.3

The widespread disenchantment of the public with the spectacle of politics—with what Didion called "insider baseball," a game only for


the players, not even the fans—was evident not only in low voter turnout but also in the large, 9 percent, decline in the television audience for the political conventions. The conventions were saved only by commercial demography; as one advertising specialist put it, "the upscale target audience was there."4 Following the election there were renewed calls for the press to reconstruct its approach to politics, including an exhortation from one of the most distinguished practitioners of the craft, David Broder.5 Cries of "never again" were heard in some newsrooms around the country and a few, most notably the Charlotte Observer^ laid plans for radically altered forms of election coverage in the future. Despite that, the 1992 primary season opened pretty much as a reenactment of the worst of the lessons learned in 1988. The differences that initially obtained came largely as a result of matters outside the control of either press or politics. Tom Harkin's favorite-son status lowered the visibility of the Iowa caucus, giving a long run-up to the New Hampshire primary. With abundant time and an initial primary in a small and accessible state with a strong tradition of townmeeting governance, the campaign managed to escape the confines of television and spread out into towns and hamlets. Driven by the absence of a significant Republican contest and the unusual candor of Paul Tsongas, the primary was direct and intimate and produced an unusually high level of issue-oriented political discourse. Voter interest and turnout was up as the campaign fanned out from New Hampshire to the multiple primaries of Super Tuesday. At that point, political hope dissipated; the campaign reentered the simulated world of media: Bill Clinton's character moved to the forefront, his dalliance with Gennifer Flowers became an obsession, his Vietnam draft status an easy and never-ending story. Feeding-frenzy journalism reigned and voter interest declined such that by the New York primary, voter turnout was almost one-third less than in 1988. Everything journalists and politicians promised to avoid after 1988 were again the norm as the campaign swung into summer. But then something began to change. Partly it was a spontaneous movement among voters to reclaim the campaign for themselves, symbolized by the second, or Richmond, debate, in which the candidates directly faced voter questions. Partly it was the gravitation of the campaign into the talk-show circuit—Larry King, Arsenio Hall, Tabitha Soren, Rush Limbaugh. Partly it was the use of e-mail, partly the use of computer bulletin boards, partly the fax machine, partly the use of 800

232 / The Press, Public Opinion, and Public Discourse numbers, partly call-in radio, and partly private satellite hookups that signaled a shifting of ground. The phrase that caught on to describe this shift was "new news": new technological forms eroding historic relations of press and politics and the emergence of a new public opinion as an altered force in political campaigns.6 To many traditional journalists and some politicians, this was disaster, for it displaced a cozy and predictable game into a new, uncertain, less manageable landscape. The traditional power and influence of the press evaporated, displaced by the entertainment industry, celebrities impersonating journalists, and new, less mediated, contact between citizens and candidates. The broadcast networks, a bastard by-product of the Fairness Doctrine and a vaudeville tradition, which had, against all odds, created exceptional moments of electronic journalism, were particularly threatened by the migration of political discourse out of the newsroom and into a new electronic highway of chattering classes and masses. This is a story that, like all good stories, has a villain: Ross Perot. Perot's campaign, totally electronic, had circumvented party organization and presidential primaries. Perot even avoided a national convention as volunteers got him on the ballot in state after state. Consequently, Perot did not have to campaign in the states, ignored local newspapers, radio, and television, and in effect told the national press "I can win without you or against you." This was not a third-party candidate but a no-party candidate. Perot demonstrated that it was possible to run with one's own money and avoid restrictions on federal matching funds. He laid down new rules for presidential politics: avoid specifics, stay away from journalists, hold as few press conferences as possible, stay off the serious interview programs, cultivate electronic populism by exploiting call-in radio. Who needs Sam Donaldson if you can speak directly to a disorganized mass? All this gave rise to the worst fear of journalists formed by the experience of World War II: the new media had greased the highway of modern politics for demagogues and demagoguery. The electronic revolution had created—only the technical words were missing—mass politics and mass society. Journalists had encountered the postmodern form of politics and public opinion, and it left them little role in campaigns. If, as Joan Didion put it, campaigns raise questions that go "vertiginously to the heart of the structure" of the press and politics, what then was the future of journalism and the meaning of public opinion?7


Even if some of this seems dead wrong, we ought to begin on a note of empathy for journalists. Journalists, like the historians they in some ways resemble, have always been prey to false dawns, and to eras artificially defined as having ended. The journalist and the historian alike inhabit the same world as politicians, even if one standard deviation removed, and, like politicians, they absorb an inexhaustible supply of nirvana and Armageddon. The politician needs to believe that the events in which he or she is taking part belong to a sequence that is nearing its heroic or, when the dawn is dimmest, its craven and predestined conclusion. The language of blurred continuity, with which we understand and describe our own lives, at least most of the time, is anathema to the political leader and often the journalist and historian as well. Journalists are genetically marked—the phrase is not too strong— by the characteristic struggle and fear of this century, particularly one imprinted—the word is not too strong—by World War II and its aftermath. Journalistically the twentieth century can be defined as the struggle for democracy against propaganda, a struggle inevitably waged by an "objective" and "independent" press. That struggle culminated in the seizure of the means of communication by the demagogues of the 19305 and 19405—Hitler and Stalin—and their cold war reincarnation, the ghost that haunts American journalism, Joseph McCarthy.8 Perot's eruption into American politics recalled, if only implicitly, this episode. For those on the other side of the postwar divide, however, that struggle no longer seems apposite: the fear of demagoguery a curious hangover of a forgotten age—that simply couldn't happen again, could it? Similarly, the quest for independence or objectivity seemed to a younger generation a curious absence of passion and commitment: a deliberate sitting out of history. This historical divide, which is also a generational one, is the varying reference point of the hyperbolic division between the modern and the postmodern. If a medium implies and constitutes a world, then the world of modern journalism, a particular world of communication, democracy, and public opinion, a world built on the model of the modern newspaper and later network television, seemed to be running to the sea in red ruin. But, for the moment, the important lesson is this: all terms of the political equation—democracy, public opinion, public discourse, the press—are all up for grabs; all such terms are historically variable even as they define one another in mutual relief. Whatever

234 / The Press, Public Opinion, and Public Discourse democracy as a way of life may be, it is constituted by particular media of communication and particular institutional arrangements through which politics is conducted: speech and the agora, the colonial newspaper and pamphlet in the tavern of Philadelphia, the omnibus daily in the industrial city, the television network in an imperial nation. Similarly, a medium of communications is defined by the democratic aspirations of politics: a conversation among equals, the organ of a political ideology, a watchdog on the state, an instrument of dialogue on public issues, a device for transmitting information, the tool of interest groups. And, the meaning of public opinion gravitates between the abstract and the concrete, between public sentiment and public judgment, between references to a concrete way of life, a mode of political action, and the statistical concatenation of individuals' desires and sentiments.9 To belabor the point: What we mean by democracy depends on the forms of communication by which we conduct politics. What we mean by communication depends on the central impulses and aspirations of democratic politics. What we mean by public opinion depends on both. None of these phenomena are natural, none of the terms transcendent, all are found only within history: they exist only within language, within the particular historical conjunctures in which we define them. However, something is afoot in modern societies that seems peculiarly tied to communications, to the decline of certain media, which have defined the context of communications and democracy since the end of World War II—perhaps longer. The media have decisively changed in the past twenty years, both as technologies and as institutions. But democracy has changed also as the ends of political life have been conceived in recent years. For example, there is a widespread desire for less pro forma political representation, whether by the press or elected officials, and for more real political participation; more demand that the state act like a corporation solving problems by producing new solutions on demand rather than muddling through difficulties.10 What is changing is not some preternatural form of journalism, some transcendent form of democracy and public opinion, but rather a useful social arrangement, now in rather deep trouble, that was a modern invention. Modern journalism and modern democracy, invented around the 18905, have had a pretty long run. But there was democracy before modern journalism; there will be democracy after it, though there are difficult and dangerous transitions to be negotiated. Let me contrast, if only to jump start an argument, two ideal types of


public opinion, journalism and democracy, which, because everything needs a name, we can call journalism in a public society constituting our original understanding of the press and the First Amendment, and journalism in a national society, the modern phase, which now seems to be coming to an end. That will serve as a prelude to a brief conclusion on the dangerous and hopeful potentials of journalism, democracy, and public opinion in the years ahead.

Evolution of the Public Our basic understanding of journalism, politics, and democracy emerged in the public houses, the taverns of colonial America, though it was powerfully controlled by images of Greece and Rome and the language of republican political theory. Pubs were presided over by publicans who were often, as well, publishers. Publicans picked up information from travelers who often recorded what they had seen and heard on their journeys in log books stationed at the end of the bar and from conversations in the pub. They recorded it, printed it, in order that it might be preserved and circulated. To it they added speeches, orations, sermons, offers of goods for sale, and the political opinions of those who gathered in public places, largely merchants and traders. In other words, the content of the press was by and large the spoken word—the things being said by public men in public places. In turn, conversation and discussion, public speech, was animated by what was read in the newspapers that circulated in the same public houses. As a French diplomat described it in 1783, "They have printed the news at once; they are read avidly in the Circles, the taverns and public places. They dispute the articles; they examine from all sizes, since all the individuals without exception take part in public affairs and are [therefore] naturally talkers and questioners." Journalism, in other words, reflected speech, was largely made up of speech: the ongoing flow of conversation, not in the halls of state and legislature, but in public houses. This gives us our original understanding of the public: the public was a group, often of strangers, who gathered to discuss the news.11 Describing Philadelphia on the eve of the Revolution, Sam Bass Warner observes that gossip in the taverns provided Philadelphia's basic cells of community life... . Every ward of the city had its inns and taverns and the London Coffee House served as central communication node of the

236 / The Press, Public Opinion, and Public Discourse entire city. . . . Out of the meetings at the neighborhood tavern came much of the commonplace community development... essential to the governance of the city . . . and made it possible . . . to form effective committees of correspondence.12

Lest we be swept away by romanticism, the tragic flaw in this conception of the public should be noted, a flaw that had something to do with the decline of the public sphere—at least in concept. It was a public effectively restricted by race, class, and gender; that is, the public consisted of middle-class men who had an interest and stake in public affairs, commerce, business, or trade. Later, when public space began to fill with workers and artisans of another class, these merchants retreated into private space, into the men's clubs that are still a feature of large cities.13 However, these fatal imperfections do not diminish the historical importance of the public as it was then defined, or the power of the concept in illuminating politics. The public, in this phase, was not a fiction or an abstraction: a group of people sitting at home watching television or privately and invisibly reading a newspaper or numbers collected in a public opinion poll. The public was a specific social formation: a group of people, often strangers, gathered in public houses to talk, to read the news together, to dispute the meaning of events, to join political impulses to political actions. The public was brought into existence by the conditions of the eighteenth-century city and by the printing press itself. The public was activated into a social relation by the news and, in turn, the primary subject of the news was the public: the opinions being expressed in public by merchants, traders, citizens, and political activists of the time. The emphasis on the public as a society of strangers does not imply that those who gathered to discuss the news were in fact strangers but that the discussion occurred in an open context, in a place that was open to strangers and whose presence had to be taken into account. In our time, the public is pretty much an abstraction, a term of exhortation and reflection. "The public's right to know" is the worn and unintelligible slogan of modern journalism. That press justifies itself in the name of the public; it exists to inform the public, to serve as the extended eyes and ears of the public. The press protects the public's interest and justifies itself in its name. The power of the term public comes from the fact that while the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are silent on the matter, it is the deepest and most fundamental concept of


the entire liberal tradition. Liberal society is formed around the notion of a virtuous public. For John Locke, to be a member of the public was to accept a calling. But the historical public is of a rather more humble origin. The public is a group of strangers that gathers to discuss the news as well as a mode of discourse among them. For the public to form, urban life had to develop sufficiently for strangers to be regularly thrown into contact with one another and there had to be newspapers and pamphlets to provide a common focus of discussion and conversation. The public, then, was a society of conversationalists, or disputants if you prefer a more aggressive term, dependent upon printing. For the public to gather, however, there had to be a public space, places where strangers could gather to discuss the news and where there were expectations, however imperfectly realized, that everyone would take part in rational, critical discourse. Public space, in turn, depended on public habits, manners, and talents: the ability to welcome strangers, to avoid intimacy, to wear a public mask, to shun the personal, to clamp some control on affect, and in general to achieve some psychological distance from the self. Thus, the public was taken to be critical and rational: critical in the ordinary sense that nothing in public was to be taken for granted, that everything was subject to argument and evidence; and rational, again in the ordinary sense, in that the speaker was responsible for giving reasons for believing in any assertion—there was no intrinsic appeal to authority. Critical and rational are terms that in our day have gone transcendental, to be debated as abstract and essential qualities, present or absent in the self. However, the terms must refer to ordinary human practices: a willingness to answer questions, to be forthright, to disclose hidden motives, and to avoid dragging in notions like God or Science to save an argument when it begins to go badly. Looked at from another angle, the public was more than a group of people or a mode of discourse; it was a location, a sphere, a sector of society. The public sphere was a seat of political power. Power, then, was not exclusively located in the state or its representatives nor in the private sector—the household and company. Power was located as well in the world between the state and the private sector: in the public and in public discourse. And it was only in this sphere that power could wear the face of rationality, for it was the only sphere in which private interest might, even in principle, be transcended.14

238 / The Press, Public Opinion, and Public Discourse For our purposes, the critical factor was that the press, journalism—its freedom and utility—was not an end in itself, but was justified in terms of its ability to serve and bring into existence an actual social arrangement, a form of discourse, and a sphere of independent rational, political influence: to provide one mode in which public opinion might form and express itself. The press did not so much inform the public or educate the public or serve as a vehicle of publicity or as a watchdog on the state—the roles it would assume in a later period. Rather, it reflected and animated public conversation and argument, furnished material to be discussed, clarified, and interpreted, information in the narrow sense, but the value of the press was predicated on the existence of the public and not the reverse. Freedom of the press was an individual right, to be sure, but the right was predicated on the unspoken premise of the existence of the public. Today, we generally read the First Amendment as a loose collection of clauses: religion, assembly, speech, and press. Read against the background of public life, however, the First Amendment is not a loose collection of separate clauses, but a compact description of a desirable political society. In other words, the amendment is not a casual array of clauses or high-minded principles, and it does not deed freedom of the press as a property right to journalists or any particular group.15 On this reading, the First Amendment describes the public and the ground conditions of public debate rather than merely enumerating rights possessed by groups. It was only in the modern period that we developed the notion that the First Amendment protected rights and that the doctrine of rights could be used as a trump card to depress debate. Under my reading, the First Amendment was an attempt to define the nature of public life as it existed at the time or as the Founders hoped it would exist. To put it in an artlessly simple way, the First Amendment says that people are free to gather together, to have public spaces, free of the intrusion of the state or its representatives. Once gathered they are free to speak to one another, to carry on public discourse, freely and openly. They are further free to write down what they have to say and to share it beyond the immediate place of utterance. The religion clause, which might seem to be a rather odd inclusion, is at the heart of the interpretation. Religion was the fundamental social divide and division of the eighteenth century. In a society that still spoke a religious language in public and private, heresy was the major sin, as is clear from, for example, Milton's Areopagitica and, therefore, was the major reason for


exclusion from the public realm and excommunication from public life. The religion clause merely says that people may not be excluded from public space and discussion even on the basis of religion. Today religion is less problematic and the vexing exclusions are based on race, property, and gender. It was the religion clause, however, that established the dynamic for further dismantling the boundaries and exclusions of public life. Despite our contemporary disengagement from public life, the public remains the implicit term of the First Amendment and the "God term" of liberal society and the press alike: the term without which neither the press nor democracy makes any sense. This originalist conception of a public, a conversational public, a public of discussion and disputation independent of both the press and the state has pretty much been evacuated in our time. It has a philosophical existence and, because with us law feeds on the corpse of philosophy, it continues in the language of Supreme Court cases such as Whitney v. California, or Red Lion, for example. Public life stands for a form of politics in which, in Jefferson's phrase, "We could all be participants in the government of our affairs." Political equality, in its most primitive mode (and here I am borrowing and twisting some lines from Bruce Smith), simply meant the right to be seen and heard—to have a public life. When the life of a people is dominated by a few public figures, political celebrities, the rest of us, denied the opportunity to be seen or heard, abandon the possibility of public joy and satisfy ourselves with private pleasures. Only when we can speak and act as citizens—and have some promise that others will see, hear, and remember what we say—will an interest in public life grow and persist. Therefore, the object of our politics remains the creation and restoration of what Tocqueville called the "little republics within the frame of the larger republic." This is an imperative task if we are to aggregate an authentic public opinion and sustain political discourse. Without it all "political objects must remain indefinite" and transient and "political action short-lived" and ineffective.16

The Modern Era of Journalism The transition from the original understanding of the press and politics to journalism in the modern era was long and twisted. Throughout the nineteenth century, the public sphere split into regional and class-based warring factions organized around political parties and a partisan press.

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Journalism became an organ of such parties or, however independent, ideologically aligned with political parties. Journalism expressed and reflected a bifurcated public sphere as individuals joined in politics through party and press. Participation still occurred through party and press and through the demonstrations and street parades and street life that were expressions of both. As the franchise was extended, legal participation rose to unprecedented and unrepeated levels. Voter turnout averaged 77 percent in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Popular politics, as Michael McGerr puts it, "involved more than suffrage rights and record turnouts."17 Elections required visible support mobilized through popular journalism and political parties. Thus, the transformation to a separation between politics and the public had begun. The modern era of journalism stretches from the 18905 to the 19705. It begins with the birth of the national magazine, the development of the mass urban newspaper, the domination of news dissemination by the wire services, and the creation of early, primitive forms of electronic communication. It culminates in the network era of television when the entire nation could be assembled by three commercial networks, and on certain high holy days of politics—the Kennedy assassination, the quadrennial political conventions—the nation was so assembled.18 The nation sat down to be counted as citizens of a continental, twenty-four-hour-a-day republic. In the United States, truly national media and a national audience displaced from a local public did not emerge until the 18905 with the creation of national magazines and a national network of newspapers interconnected via the wire services. Such media were eventually supplemented by radio and by motion pictures produced in Hollywood and distributed nationally in the 192.05. The rise of national or mass media, first via print and then the airwaves, created "the great audience": a new collectivity in which we were destined to live out a major part of our lives. These media cut across the structural divisions in society, drawing their audience irrespective of race, ethnicity, occupation, region, or social class. This was the first national audience and the first mass audience and, in principle, it was open to all. Modern communications media allowed individuals to be linked, for the first time, directly to the "imaginary community of the nation"19 (at least for nations as large as the United States) without the mediating influence of regional and other local affiliations. Such national media laid the basis

The Press, Public Opinion, and Public Discourse I 241 for a mass society, understood in its most technical and least ideological sense: the development of a form of social organization in which intermediate associations of community, occupation, and class did not inhibit direct linkage of the individual and primary groups to the state and other nationwide organizations through mass communications. The rise of national media represented a centripetal force in social organization. Such media greatly enhanced the control of space by significantly reducing time (the gap between when a message is sent and when it is received as a function of distance) in communication, by laying down direct lines of access between national centers and dispersed audiences, and by producing a remarkable potential for the centralization of power and authority. The period from the 18905 onward saw the creation of a variety of social and cultural movements that were reactions against and impulses toward the formation of a national society through a national system of communication, attempts to master, tame, and direct the currents of social change. A new class structure organized around a newly dominant class—the plutocrats—a structure Henry Adams lamented and Charles Beard described, was also created. These movements— some modern, some antimodern, some even postmodern—expressed a restless search for new identities and for new forms of social and cultural life. Taken together, these movements offered new ways of being for a new type of society. These were movements organized by the new media, defined by media, commented upon by media, formed within media, or at least as a response to new conditions of social life brought about in part by new media. Our images of democracy and the press, to summarize, were formed within the structure and ideology of community life. As late as the turn of the century, democracy was seen as confined to small geographic areas and small populations. The New England town meeting was the icon of democracy, and the newspaper and journalist gave life, meaning, and dignity to the local community—to the classical form of the public. This image of the pub, the publican, and the publisher all rolled into one, presiding over the meetinghouse where the public gathered to discuss the news, representing in his person the public interest, and publishing a public newspaper that summarized and reprinted public opinion—what people were saying in public—this was the classic conception of democracy and the press, derived from ancient political life and realized in the local and decentralized life of the republic in

242 / The Press, Public Opinion, and Public Discourse its first century. This bucolic image of democracy and the press was overwhelmed by the forces of industry and geographic expansion, and, consequently, there arose a need in this century to form both a new conception of democratic action and a new conception of the press within democracy. Both were born within the most important social movement of the turn of the century, at least from the standpoint of journalism, the progressive movement, which both redefined the past and projected a new democratic future. The progressive movement contained three separable but closely connected moments. First, it was an attack upon the plutocracy, upon concentrated economic power, and upon the national social class that increasingly had a stranglehold over wealth and industry. The economic dimension of the movement, however, also included the struggle by middle-class professionals—doctors, lawyers, journalists, social workers—to become a national class, to find a place in the national occupational structure and the national system of class influence and power. The national class of progressive professionals was, in many ways, merely a less powerful imitation, the shadow movement, of the national class of plutocrats, the new titans who ran and controlled industrial America. Journalists were central to this new progressive class of professionals. They formed themselves into national groups and lobbied to professionalize their standing through higher education. They sponsored histories of their profession and a new reading of the First Amendment along with ethical codes of conduct to justify their newfound status in the new middle-class professional world. They tried to figure out new ways of reporting on and commenting about this new world—a new professional ideology, in other words—that justified their place in the new order of things. Progressivism was also a movement of political reform at the national level and, even more, an attempt to reclaim the cities from the political bosses and the urban machines. In many cases this was an attempt to uproot the political influence of ethnic working-class groups who had earlier seized city politics from local commercial and cultural elites. Progressivism was devoted to "good government" (read: honest, middle-class government) and created the chain of Better Government Associations that one still finds in major American cities. Progressivism was for merit and against patronage, for science and against tradition, for middle-class politics and against working-class privilege.


Journalists were usually allies of the movement for better government. That is, they were committed to certain middle-class ideals of honesty and uprightness. They warred against the machines if only because the machines did not need the press to govern; they did quite well with patronage and ward organization whereas reform movements were dependent upon the publicity only the press could give and thus assiduously courted and flattered the new journalists. But journalists were aligned with the reform and progressive movements by ideology and conviction, in certain beliefs about modernity and the role of the press in a movement that was at once economic, political, and cultural. Progressivism, in another guise, was a cultural movement that sought to define new styles of life, patterns of child rearing, modes of family life, taste in art, architecture, urban planning, and personal conduct. Progressive education, progressive child rearing, progressive art, progressive science, and progressive taste were as important in this movement as progressive economics and politics. Progressivism in culture became, in general, part of the outlook of the new journalists who took up residence in the new national media that formed the discourse of the nation. The three wings of progressivism were joined to one common desire: a desire to escape the merely local and contingent, an enthusiasm for everything that was distant and remote, a love of the national over the provincial. The national media of communication, particularly magazines and books but also newspaper journalists who found themselves pursuing a career that took them from city to city and paper to paper, assignment to assignment, were the arena where the progressive program was set out and the place where the struggle for its legitimation occurred. The initial impact of the progressive movement on journalism was the rise of "muckraking," which in its initial stages directed its attack against the "plutocracy" and the business class. Muckraking arose within magazines rather than newspapers, for these new national media had no affiliation with politics, let alone with a given political party. While they owed, as Michael McGerr has pointed out, something to the crusading tactics of newspapers, muckraking magazines, like sensational newspapers, did not dwell long on any topic.20 They were hitand-run artists who could expose corruption in an institution and spur the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act, but they did not have the persistence to constitute a tradition of journalism or to sustain a con-

244 / The Press, Public Opinion, and Public Discourse tinuous politics. What muckraking did do was to further a tradition of journalism that took as its task the unmasking of power: to serve as a watchdog not only of the state but of the full range of interest groups. For much of the nineteenth century political parties served as the principal means of influencing the distribution of economic resources and government privileges. When interest groups and pressure groups developed late in the century as a new vehicle for affecting governments increasingly involved in regulation of the economy, voting for party candidates in elections became less important. Muckraking gave rise to propaganda analysis: the unmasking of attempts by groups to control and manipulate the press. Both muckraking and propaganda analysis were attempts to unmask the power, privilege, and special interests that stood behind the presumed general beneficence of both private and public institutions. This was an American version of what became known in Europe as Ideologiekritik. Muckraking, however, was framed within the language of American democracy; muckrakers first of all took themselves to be representative of the people—protectors of the people's interests and not an independent intellectual class; second, their style was straightforward, descriptive, and aimed at provoking public action rather than theoretical reflection; third, while they aimed their efforts at unmasking the power of the business class, economic institutions, and business ideology, they examined concentrated power and propaganda in all its forms: labor unions as well as manufacturers' associations, universities as well as businesses. A paradigmatic figure in all this was Upton Sinclair, who in three significant volumes exposed the power and privilege, the corruption of the meatpacking industry in The Jungle, of higher education in The Goose Step, and of the press itself in The Brass Check. Muckraking demonstrated and turned into an operative principle for the press that democracy was no longer competition between political parties bearing explicit programs and ideologies but competition between interest and pressure groups who used the state political parties, the press—indeed, any apparatus available—to control the distribution of economic rewards and social privilege. By definition interest groups operate in the private sector, behind the scenes, and their relation to public life is essentially propagandistic and manipulative. When interest groups arrive on the scene, the public ceases to have a real existence. Moreover, the struggle among interest groups turns language into "public relations"; that is, an instrument in a struggle for advan-


tage rather than a vehicle of the truth. All appearances become unreliable, all language suspect, all appeals to the public interest a sham move in the struggle for private advantage. It was in this situation that the traditions of modern journalism and the particular conceptions of the media and democracy formed themselves in mutual relief. The press, in effect, broke away from politics. It established itself, at least in principle, as independent of all institutions, independent of the state, independent of political parties, independent of interest groups. It became the independent voter writ large; its only loyalty was to an abstract truth and an abstract public interest. This is the origin of objectivity in journalism, as Michael Schudson has shown.21 Objectivity was a defensive measure, an attempt to secure by quasi-scientific means a method for recording the world independent of the political and social forces that were shaping it. In this rendition, a democratic press was the representative of the people, of people no longer represented by political parties and the state itself. It was the eyes and ears of a public that could not see and hear for itself, or indeed talk to itself. It went where the public could not go, acquired information that the public could not amass on its own, tore away the veil of appearances that masked the play of power and privilege, set on a brightly lit stage what would otherwise be contained offstage, in the wings, where the real drama of social life was going on unobserved. The press seized hold of the First Amendment and exercised it in the name of a public that could no longer exercise it itself. The press became an independent profession and a collective institution: a true fourth estate that watched over the other lords of the realm in the name of those unequipped or unable to watch over it for themselves. The press no longer facilitated or animated a public conversation, for public conversation had disappeared. It informed a passive and privatized group of citizens who participated in politics through the press. What conversation remained was orchestrated by the press in the name of a superior knowledge and superior instruments of inquiry into just what was going on. But, paradoxically enough, this new role of representative of the public was contained within a sentiment that was increasingly antipopulist and antipublic. A principal architect of these sentiments was the major American journalist of this century, Walter Lippmann. Lippmann's Public Opinion is the founding book of modern American journalism. But journalism plays a modest role in Lippmann's world, a world

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ruled by interests and regulated by science in which the public faded to a spectator. It was not the task of journalism to tell the truth, for journalism had nothing to do with the truth. News was a blip on the social radar, an early-warning system that something was happening. Nothing more. Journalists primarily served as conduits relaying truth arrived at elsewhere, by the experts—scientists in their laboratories, bureaucrats in their bureaus. The truth was not a product of the conversation or debate of the public or the investigations of journalists. Journalists merely translate the arcane language of experts into a publicly accessible language for the masses. They transmit the judgments of experts, and thereby ratify decisions arrived at by that class—not by the public or public representatives. But journalists performed, in Lippmann's view, one other vital function. The chief function of news is publicity. News kept the experts honest; it kept them from confusing the public interest with the private interest by exposing them to the hot light of publicity. Lippmann had more faith in publicity than in the news or in an informed public. "The great healing effect of publicity is that by revealing man's nature, it civilizes him. If people have to declare publicly what they want and why they want it, they won't be able to be altogether ruthless. A special interest openly avowed is no terror to democracy; it is neutralized by publicity."22 The central weakness of the tradition of independent journalism, the kind of journalism espoused by Lippmann and practiced in the craft, is this: while it legitimized a democratic politics of publicity and experts, it also confirmed the psychological incompetence of people to participate in it. Again, it evolved a political system of democracy without citizens.23 While preserving a valuable role for the mass media, it evacuated the role of political parties and citizens. Political parties, weakened by independent journalism, were decimated by television, which reduced parties to devices for raising money for television advertising and turned politics toward the cult of personality without party. Citizens, denied a public arena, became either consumers of politics or escapists from it. In other words, the dissolution of the public theoretically was but a prelude to dissolving it practically. In the spot occupied in democratic theory by the public, Lippmann and others inserted interest groups and the cadres of experts in their employ. This reduced the public to a phantom and created the situation in which citizens are the objects rather


than the subjects of politics.24 It turned the First Amendment into a possession of the press and of interest groups with whom the press engaged in both combat and accommodation. Toward that combat citizens stood largely as spectators and ratifiers. In truth, the conversation of the culture was taken outside the public realm and into private spaces. It became increasingly a scientistic journalism devoted to the sanctity of the fact and objectivity, but one in which the hot light of publicity invaded every domain of privacy. We developed a journalism that was an early-warning system but one that kept the public in a constant state of agitation or boredom. It is a journalism that reports a continuing stream of expert opinion, but because there is no agreement among experts it is more like observing talk-show gossip and petty manipulation than like bearing witness to the truth. It is a journalism of fact without regard to understanding through which the public is immobilized and demobilized and merely ratifies the judgments of experts delivered from on high. It is, above all, a journalism that justifies itself in the public's name but in which the public plays no role, except as an audience; it is a receptacle to be informed by experts and an excuse for the practice of publicity. The issue could no longer be one of the First Amendment protecting public debate, for there was no longer any public debate to protect. For example, public opinion no longer refers to opinions being expressed in public and then recorded in the press. Public opinion is formed by the press and modeled by the public opinion industry and the apparatus of polling. Today, to get ahead of the story, polling (the word, interestingly enough, from the old synonym for voting) is an attempt to simulate public opinion in order to prevent an authentic public opinion from forming. With the rise of the polling industry our entire understanding of the public went into eclipse. The public was replaced by the interest group as the object of analysis and as the key political actor. In interest-group theory, the public ceases to have a real existence. It fades into a statistical artifact: an audience whose opinions count only insofar as individuals refract the pressure of mass publicity. In short, while the word public continues in our language as an ancient memory and a pious hope, the public as a feature and factor of real politics disappears. The media and democracy increasingly reduced themselves to a game in which, at its best, sources erected ever more complicated veils of appearance over events and journalists tried ever more assiduously to pierce the veil. But the mystery behind the mystery was that there

248 / The Press, Public Opinion, and Public Discourse was no mystery at all. It was a dialectic of appearance and demystification that tied the state, interest groups, and the press together in a symbiotic relationship against the fragmented remains of the public. Sometimes the press had the upper hand in the dialectical struggle; at other times, interest groups dominated and the press did little more than serve as their extension. As Robert Entman has described it, the game was played because each side had something the other needed. Interest groups and sources had newsworthy political information that had been subsidized to ease its collection and presentation, the indispensable raw material needed to construct the news. Journalists could "provide publicity slanted favorably or unfavorably." Elites sought to "exchange a minimal amount of potentially damaging information for as much positively slanted coverage" as could be obtained. Journalists sought to "extract information for stories" that would bring "acclaim or acceptance from editors and colleagues."25 Elites and journalists, in other words, mutually manipulated one another to mutually shared ends. The public stood toward this game as an increasingly bored and alienated and, above all, cynical spectator, learning to distrust appearances mounted by both elites and journalists and, most damagingly, to distrust all language, to look at language as a mere instrument of interest and obfuscation. In this context, journalism could no longer link political impulses with political action; it could produce publicity, scandal, and drama, but it could not produce politics. Today, Americans have lost interest in politics. Indeed, the title of E. J. Dionne Jr.'s book Why Americans Hate Politics expresses a more active alienation from public life than is revealed merely by the progressively lower voter turnouts that have marked the entire modern period. The absence of participation is evidenced too by active disengagement from political parties—the rise of the independent voter, and more often the independent nonvoter—and by declining political knowledge. There is active opposition to public life and an absence of public spirit in favor of a private and apolitical existence. The best evidence for this was the long-term decline in political participation as measured by voting and shadowed by knowledge of and interest in politics. Political participation declined throughout the period of national journalism with temporary blips and recoveries in certain periods such as the Depression and World War II. But the trend has been clear and no attempts to reverse it bureaucratically—extension of the franchise, easing voter registration restrictions, democratizing the


candidate selection process through primaries—has reversed it.26 The decline has been even sharper than revealed by the conventional measures of voting in presidential elections. Those measures ignore the even more precipitous declines in primary, local, and off-year congressional elections. The steepness of the decline also has been masked in recent times by the greater participation of African-Americans, particularly in the South, as practices that artificially restricted voting among racial minorities have been removed. Above all, the press lost credibility and respect; it was no longer believed. As poll after poll showed, journalists had earned the distrust of the public and were increasingly seen as a hindrance to, rather than an avenue of, politics and political reform. The watchdog press, the adversary press was exposed to greater skepticism during the period of its greatest success, namely, during the Vietnam War and the Watergate affair. While the press dismissed the rising tide of criticism during these episodes as merely reactionary politics, the problem went deeper. In the public's eyes, the press had become the adversary of all institutions, including the public itself. "My newspaper" of older usage became "the newspaper"; it had severed its contact and allegiance with the public. As the press sought greater constitutional power for itself and greater independence from the state, as it sought to remove all restrictions on its activities and its newsgathering rights, it was forced to press the legal case that it was a special institution with special rights—rights that were independent of the rights of free speech and rights that were different from, and often opposed to, the rights of ordinary men and women. In a series of court cases in the 19605, the press sought special privileges and powers and developed a view of the First Amendment that would secure them. Justice Potter Stewart developed a constitutional theory justifying an adversary and watchdog press: The primary purpose of the constitutional guarantee of a free press was . . . to create a fourth institution outside the government as an additional check on the three official branches. . . . The relevant metaphor is of the Fourth Estate. The Free Press guarantee is, in essence, a structural provision of the Constitution. Most of the other provisions in the Bill of Rights protect specific liberties or specific rights of individuals. . . . In contrast, the Free Press Clause extends protection to an institution.27

Ultimately this view creates a passive role for the public in the theater of politics. The public is an observer of the press rather than "par-

250 / The Press, Public Opinion, and Public Discourse ticipators in the government of our affairs" and the dialogue of democracy. The role of the citizen is not to participate in the formation of politics but to become a member of a veto group restraining decisions once they pass a certain boundary. The vision of active and continuous citizen involvement fails to describe not only the reality of American politics but even the end or object or desirable state of its politics. It is the media that must be protected rather than citizens' ability to participate in politics. The individual citizen was seen as remote and helpless compared to the two major protagonists—government and the media. The fourth estate view supported the press in its news-gathering cases. It focused on the activities of journalists rather than the activities of the public. In this view, journalists would serve as agents of the public in checking an inherently abusive government. To empower it to fulfill such a role, the press had to possess special rights to gather news. Thus, under the fourth-estate model a free press essentially was equated with a powerful press possessing special privileges of news gathering.28 The view of the press as the representative of the public could only be sustained if the following conditions were met: the public had to believe that the press was authentically its representative and therefore in a responsible and fiduciary relation to it; the public had to believe that the press was not in cahoots with the state, with the most powerful of interest groups, or both; and the public had to believe that the press was capable of representing the world, that is, of rendering a reasonably unbiased, true, and factual account of it. In all these senses of represent the press has been found wanting. It is time to betray this argument, however, for despite the heavy weather one can bring to bear on modern journalism, the truth is also that the press has been a bulwark of liberty in our time and no one has come up with a better arrangement. The watchdog notion of the press, a press independent of all institutions, a press that represents the public, a press that unmasks interest and privilege, a press that shines the hot glare of publicity into all the dark corners of the republic, a press that searches out expert knowledge among the welter of opinion, a press that seeks to inform the private citizen, these are ideas and roles that have served us well through some dark times. Not perfectly, not without fault, but well—and they have formed the accepted notions of democracy and the press in our time. But, as the century has progressed, the weaknesses of modern journalism have become increas-


ingly apparent and debilitating. The press, in the eyes of many, increasingly got in the way of democratic politics rather than serving as a supporting institution. As a result, modern journalism is now under assault by technology, by the distemper of the times, and by social changes the modern press has been unable to master.

Journalism Encounters the Postmodern I opened this essay with an image of dismay brought on by the campaigns of 1988 and I99Z. In that period we started to feel the force of something that had been under way for close to two decades. Sometime in the early to mid 19705, to choose an almost arbitrary time, the entire pattern of communication, the existing structure of the media, of modern journalism and the press, started to break up. The causes were technological and economic, and only later were they processed through politics and transformed to an ideology. The symptoms and symbols of the change were two technologies, satellites and computers, the consequences of which, in combination with other devices, reconfigured the map of communications and social relations. Satellite broadcasting put everyone in the same place for purposes of communication—or, inversely, eliminated distance as a cost factor in communication. Computer technology not only altered all the parameters of numerical calculation, but through miniaturization also widely diffused large-scale capacity for information processing, storage, and retrieval. While computer and satellite have enlarged the scale and scope of communications, they have also, and paradoxically, narrowed and limited it. Cable television, a product of satellite and computer, has radically expanded channel capacity, the variety of television services available, and the capacity to segment the television audience. Cable is practically as old as television, for it was the last mile of the network system relaying over the air signals to remote hamlets where topography created signal disturbance. Wedded to satellites, cable now penetrates to 60 percent of American homes, and multichannel systems fragment the audience into narrow niches based upon taste, hobbies, avocations, race, ethnicity—indeed, a potentially limitless world of work and leisure. Even politics is turned into a hobby. When cable is combined with other innovations, some actual, some still potential— the growth of superstations, direct satellite broadcasting, interactive teletext and videotext, VCRs—two consequences follow. The "great

252 / The Press, Public Opinion, and Public Discourse audience," the audience assembled by newspapers and television, is splintered and dissolved, and newspapers and network television, which reached their peak of profitability and influence in the 19708, recede as both economic and political forces. The consequences of technology are never clear until they are processed through politics. And the consequences of satellites, computers, and cable television did not emerge until, to take but two examples, they were wedded to the ideology and policies of the Reagan and Thatcher administrations in the United States and Great Britain. The general name for these policies is privatization: deregulation of broadcasting, cultivation of high tech industry, and fostering renewed competition in telecommunications. In the United States, restrictions on cable were removed, network broadcasting was hamstrung, the public interest and fairness doctrines were dismantled, the Bell System was broken up, and private competition in telecommunications was encouraged. The notion that there was a public interest in broadcasting or in the press generally was simply set aside. Private competition was deemed adequate because in the absence of a viable notion of a public, a public interest was simply inconceivable within the ideological frameworks that ruled politics. Since 1934 American broadcasting had lived under the fairness doctrine, which attempted to make a public interest articulate by requiring broadcasters to examine issues of public importance and to reflect all sides of political issues. In effect, the fairness doctrine was an attempt to create a public space within an essentially commercialized system of broadcasting. The doctrine led to the creation of first-class journalism organizations within television networks that were ruled, even more than newspapers, by heavy capital requirements and commercial imperatives toward entertainment and profit. In 1986 the Federal Communications Commission threw out the fairness doctrine and with it the entire notion of broadcasting as a public space. As Mark Fowler, the FCC chairman under Reagan, put it, "Television is just another household appliance, a toaster with a picture."29 This view is now beyond controversy; it has bipartisan support, which is to say all resistance has collapsed to the notion that communication is exclusively a private activity. The only dispute concerns which private industry will gain the largesse of government support: cable or broadcasting, Hollywood producers, or the telephone companies. Public broadcasting comes under increasing attack by those who say that it is politically biased and, even more, that it is inefficient and unneces-


sary given the imperatives of the market. As a result, proposals to either sell it off to private interests or merge it with Radio Free Europe and the USIA into a propaganda superagency are seriously entertained. In Europe public broadcasting systems are turned into private commercial enterprises or subjected to new competitive pressure from the private sector. Country after country has either given up state-run television or permitted the growth of private networks. In short, we have neither a public sphere within politics nor a public sphere within broadcasting. With the progressive weakening of public broadcasting around the world, communications is seen more uniformly as a matter of privatemarket transactions. In turn, as the costs of television increase, as state systems are faced with declining revenues, as global communications companies such as Time Warner straddle the globe, the phenomenon of coproduction takes on a new importance. News and culture are increasingly made by joint operations that cut across national and linguistic boundaries. That is, the production of culture, including most importantly the news, becomes disarticulated from existing national societies and polities. Pastiche cultures, postmodern cultures assembled by a cross-national production process, turn the world into an audience for homeless communications. These economic changes were congruent with developments on a much wider plane. In the 19705 governments all over the industrialized world were becoming more conservative. The first leap of oil prices in the middle 19705 meant that inflation was becoming the great enemy of stability, and anti-inflationary strategy dominated the thinking of all governments. This led to monetary control and the first attempts to expand high tech, telecommunications industries. Even such socialist governments as were elected—in France, Australia, and New Zealand, for example—adopted highly conservative economic policies and encouraged the further privatization of journalism and communications. That was the Zeitgeist. The movement toward privatization, which is global in scope, encompasses the deregulation of telecommunications and the constriction of public space, the elimination or decline of public or state-run broadcasting, the simultaneous fragmentation of audiences into narrower and narrower segments, and their reassembly into transnational markets for news and entertainment and the creation of pastiche cultures that originate without regard to national traditions. The connection of a fragmented structure of production to a frag-

254 / The Press, Public Opinion, and Public Discourse mented structure of home reception results in a further diremption of the public sphere: the entire notion of public communication and a common culture of politics evaporates in the "new Balkans" where groups and individuals occupy political space outside a common arena of discourse and communication. The notion of citizens of a common polity who participate in a common political tradition becomes increasingly difficult to imagine. The release of market forces in telecommunications that affected everything, including books, newspapers, and magazines, was fueled not only by purely economic considerations but by the firmly entrenched belief that there was no longer a public interest or a public sphere. All that was left were acquisitive individuals and their interests. The very starkness of this notion and its consequent inability to create a sense of community constituted not a safeguard but a threat to political freedom. These complex and interrelated changes in the world of journalism and democracy emerged in the new technology of politics in the 1992 election. Many of the most troubling phenomena—citizens councils, call-in radio, public debates with public questioners, spontaneous grassroots nominating movements—represented attempts, however dangerous, by a fragmented and dispersed public, one that had not completely lost and forgotten the image of a truly public life, to use the new technology and new media, designed purely for commercial purposes, to re-form themselves, outside the journalistic establishment, as a public and to reassert both a public interest and public participation in the sphere of national politics. This movement does not, at the moment, have much theoretical support because of the commitment of all segments of the political spectrum to an ideology of rights-based liberalism. That position begins from the claim, and here I am paraphrasing Michael Sandel, that we are separate, individual persons, each with his or her own aims, interests, and conceptions of the good, each seeking a framework of rights that will enable us to realize our capacity as free moral agents, consistent with a similar liberty for others.30 Alas, to challenge this view one must question the claim of the priority of the right over the good and the picture of freely choosing individuals it embodies and the Hobbesian state it must inevitably create. As Sandel puts it, "the priority of the self over its ends means I am never defined by my aims and attachments, but always capable of standing back to survey and assess and possibly to revise them."31 This


is what it means to be a free and independent self, capable of choice. And this is the vision of the self that finds expression in the ideal of the state as a neutral framework. In the rights-based ethic, it is precisely because we are essentially separate, independent selves that we need a neutral framework of rights that refuses to choose among competing purposes and ends. "If the self is prior to its ends, then the right must be prior to the good." But what can journalism, the First Amendment, and public opinion mean under this tyranny? Unless we are willing to entertain the possibility, again to paraphrase Sandel, that we are defined, at least in part, by communities we inhabit—indeed, that we are the animals that are forever creating and destroying communities—and that we are implicated in the purposes and ends characteristic of those communities, I see no possibility of recovering a meaningful notion of public life or of public opinion. Unless we can see the story of our lives as embedded in the story of a public community, a community of general citizenship rather than one restricted by class, race, gender, and so on, while simultaneously believing that our lives are also embedded in communities of private identity—family, city, tribe, nation, party, or cause—can journalism and public opinion, the press generally, make a moral and political difference, not merely a psychological one. Only then can journalism and public opinion situate us in the world and give our lives moral particularity. I would hope that we have learned by now, after twenty years or more of painful struggle, that the expansion of individual rights and the concomitant diminishing of common judgment is hardly the recipe for social progress it is held out to be. Its major effect is the displacement of politics from smaller forms of association to more comprehensive ones, and in these latter forms political participation is inevitably reduced even as it seems to expand. Where some kinds of liberals defend the private economy and some kinds defend the liberal state, both economic and social liberalism concentrate power in the corporate economy and the bureaucratic state and lead to the erosion of those intermediate forms of association that have at times sustained "a more vital public life."32 It is often argued these days that the needs of diversity eliminate the possibility or desirability of a politics of the common good. This is the argument for diversity made by those who are already deracinated and who wish nothing more than to deracinate others. The plea for di-

256 I The Press, Public Opinion, and Public Discourse

versity is simply a plea for sameness or a plea for those identities invented by and confirmed in the state. The sad lesson of this century is that minorities who thereby seek protection through the state will be extinguished or turned into instruments of state power without an independent cultural life. This, not some senseless nostalgia, is why we need to recover public life. Notes 1. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). 2. Jay Rosen, "Politics, Vision and the Press," The New News v. The Old News, ed. Jay Rosen and P. Taylor (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1992.). 3. Joan Didion, "Insider Baseball," in After Henry (New York: Vintage International, 1992), 49-50. 4. Ibid., 51. 5. David Broder, "Democracy and the Press," Washington Post, Jan. 3,1990, Ai5. 6. Jon Katz, "Rock, Rap and the Movies Bring You the News," Rolling Stone, March 5, 1992.. 7. Didion, "Insider Baseball," 50. 8. Edwin F. Bayley, Joe McCarthy and the Press (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981). 9. George E. Marcus and Russell L. Hanson, Reconsidering the Democratic Public (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993). 10. Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 11. Alvin Gouldner, The Dialectics of Ideology and Technology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). 12. Sam Bass Warner, Private City: Philadelphia in Three Stages of Its Growth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968). 13. Gouldner, Dialectics of Ideology and Technology, and Jiirgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). 14. Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, and The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 15. See the essay "A Republic, If You Can Keep It" in this volume and James W. Carey, "Liberty and Public Life in the Age of Glasnost," in Crucible of Liberty: 200 Years of the Bill of Rights, ed. Raymond Arsenaut (New York: Free Press, 1992). 16. Bruce Smith, Politics and Remembrance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985). 17. Michael McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 18. Daniel Dyan and Elihu Katz, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.). 19. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983). 20. McGerr, Decline of Popular Politics. 21. Michael Schudson, Discovering the News (New York: Basic Books, 1978). 22. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Free Press, 1922 [1965]).

The Press, Public Opinion, and Public Discourse I 257 23. Robert Entman, Democracy without Citizens (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 24. Benjamin Ginsburg, The Captive Public: How Mass Opinion Promotes State Power (New York: Basic Books, 1986). 25. Entman, Democracy without Citizens. 26. Congressional Quarterly, Congressional Elections Since 1789, 5th ed. (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1991); Richard M. Scammon and Alice McGillivray, American Voter 18 (Washington, D.C.: Election Research Center, 1989). 27. Potter Stewart, "Or of the Press," Hastings Law Journal ^6 (1975): 633-34. 28. Lee Bellinger, Images of a Free Press (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 29. Les Brown, Les Brown's Encyclopedia of Television, 3d ed. (Detroit: Visible Ink, 1992.). 30. Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits to Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.), and Michael Sandel, Liberalism and Its Critics (New York: New York University Press, 1984). 31. Sandel, Liberalism and Its Critics, 5. 32. Ibid.


PartV


Introduction / James Carey's Academy G. Stuart Adam

I have followed Jim Carey's work and career since 1975, when I met him for the first time at the annual convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, which was convened in Ottawa that year, and heard him talk insightfully about the theories of the Canadian economic historian Harold Adams Innis. It was a surprise and a delight for me, a Canadian, to discover an American scholar studying the work of an individual whom we regard as the father of Canadian communication studies. In due time, this American scholar would be regarded as a principal interpreter of Innis's work, and no one in Canada would think now of exploring Innis's complex theorizing without consulting Carey's interpretation of it. In many respects, the studies of Innis and that other Canadian, Marshall McLuhan, are typical of Carey's approach to learning and scholarship. In essays of considerable detail and length he has examined and dissected the ideas of several important theorists in order to prepare the way for ambitious theorizing of his own. Part of his reputation is based on these dissections, which are penetrating and eloquent; part of his reputation is based on his original contributions to cultural theory; and yet another part of it is based on his role as a pragmatist and advocate challenging ideas and concepts that in his generation have dominated the crafts of scholarship and teaching, and the university itself. The boundaries between the divisions I am suggesting for classifying his work and making statements about his reputation are by no 261

262 / Introduction to Part V means fixed. His essays on Innis and McLuhan—"Harold Adams Innis and Marshall McLuhan" (1967) and "Canadian Communication Theory: Extensions and Interpretations of Harold Innis" (1975)—exemplify what I have in mind when I refer to his analysis of important theorists. The most illuminating illustration of his utterly original approach to cultural analysis is to be found in his essay "Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph" (1983). It is one of the best examples of intellectual craftsmanship I can think of. The work on the academy with which we are concerned in this section is no less intellectual. Speaking generally, Carey's theorizing is never disconnected from the world. But its practical face is especially evident when the university is his subject. The essays in this category arise for the most part out of disagreements with his professorial colleagues and his fellow administrators over how to know, judge, and make their world. They are theoretical reflections, to be sure, but they are equally policy statements. For example, "A Cultural Approach to Communications" (1975) and "A Plea for the University Tradition" (1978) are exhortations directed at his colleagues to reconsider the ways in which they view their subjects and their work. "Political Correctness and Cultural Studies" and "Salvation by Machines: Can Technology Save Education?" are similarly exhortations to his fellow academics to measure and assess carefully influential ideas he regards as unworthy. The details of these latter two essays, the following chapters in this volume, say a great deal about Jim Carey and his ideas—and his view of the community in which he has made his home. In a sense, there are two Jim Careys. One is friendly, charming, eloquent, open, polite, agreeable, conversational, and passionate; the other is no less passionate, but more adversarial and unambiguously committed to views that are in sharp contrast to the views of those about him. The second Jim Carey—the adversarial Carey—is more evident in his formal written work, and "Political Correctness and Cultural Studies" is a good illustration of this. In it Carey argues that writers on the right, whose politics he mainly opposes, are partly correct in their various critiques of cultural studies and the university. He argues at the same time that writers on the left, whose politics he might be tempted to embrace, are mainly wrong in the way in which they practice cultural studies and influence university policies. Similarly, in "Salvation by Machines: Can Technology Save Educa-

Introduction to Part V I 263 tion?" he argues vigorously with two beliefs expressed forcefully by many of his colleagues. The first is that computer technology will so influence the structure of work in America that there should be a wholesale investment in teaching so-called computer literacy; the second is that the same technology will open up new possibilities for democratic life. To him, each belief is nonsense. His reasoning in both cases commences with the concepts of community, democracy, and culture—desirably a common culture. Carey regards any idea that diminishes the commitment to communal life and the democratic values appropriate to such living with deep suspicion. This includes, of course, ideas that subordinate the interests of ordinary people to the interests of narrowly defined groups, including university professors and computer engineers. Part of the case he makes against his colleagues in the university rests on the observation that they have turned themselves into an interest group chasing private and political opportunities at the expense of public and pedagogical duties. But more of this later. The immediate occasion for "Political Correctness and Cultural Studies" was the publication of a series of texts on the current state of education in America by critics identified with the right. The themes of those commentaries vary, but there was and continues to be a consensus of sorts among these critics that postmodern thinkers and their disciples have used the power they possess over appointments and curriculum to challenge the values and ideals on which America and, more broadly, the West have functioned. Prominent among these critics is Roger Kimball, who in the preface to his book, Tenured Radicals, says that the blame for what he calls a crisis in the humanities lies with the advocates of race and gender studies, for whom there is no horizon but a political one, and the "legions of deconstructionists, poststructuralists, and other forbiddingly named academics"1 who dwell in a variety of departments from English to media studies. Central to Kimball's case is the observation that the new breed of academics read and teach the canon of the West's greatest works of high culture, if they read it at all, as statements from the stations of power—class, race, or gender—rather than formulations of the ideal. They read it as an element in such systems of domination as patriarchy and imperialism; and they unmask, they say, structures in which there are mainly victims and victimizers. Kimball's objections to such readings are many, but most funda-

264 / Introduction to Part V mentally he says they can do nothing but blur the mind to the distinctions—between good and not so good, between ordinary and great, between virtue and evil—that matter. So he is angered by doctrines that dismiss Plato and Aristotle as dead white males rather than revere them as sources of magnificent expressions of culture, and he is contemptuous of those who might say that distinctions between Shakespeare's plays and episodes of Bugs Bunny disguise political interests. The blurring of such straightforward and fundamental distinctions and the endless preoccupation with victims and victimizers has produced a number of collateral effects on campus, including speech codes, not as devices to promote the civility required to engage in the search for truth, but as devices to achieve political equality at the expense of truth. These speech codes have exercised critics and been largely responsible for publicizing the new theorizing because they have been used to challenge the use of certain words or the expression of certain ideas and the use of certain texts on the grounds that they are sexist, racist, or not politically correct. By the time Jim Carey wrote his piece on the subject I am confident he was well briefed on the elements in the debate and ready for Kimball's critique. Furthermore, he might have accepted a good part of this critique were it not for the fact that Kimball says that cultural studies, the field Jim Carey takes to be his own, is part of the problem. Kimball writes: It must be understood that, whatever legitimate interest the academic study of popular culture may hold . . . [it] has been pursued primarily as a means of attacking the traditional academic concentration on objects of high culture. This can be seen in any number of modish academic movements, but is perhaps most completely exemplified by the movement called cultural studies.2 Not so, is Carey's response. He doesn't accept that popular culture should be set outside the sphere of serious study. (What, after all, is a democratic culture?) He believes that the ideals and values Kimball and like-minded writers proclaim are not given but made; and although he is as anxious about the future of civilization as Kimball is, there is much about Kimball's elitism that disturbs him. So Carey rejects Kimball's uncritical attachment to canonical texts, and he rejects the belief that America and the West are or ought to be synonymous. Carey does not say the right always proclaims the wrong ideals or that ideals do not matter. Rather, he says that it is a matter of

Introduction to Part V I 265 judgment on the concrete facts of cultural life to determine that such ideals as justice, truth, fairness, equal opportunity, and civic duty are actual forces in law, politics, and civil society. Furthermore, where Kimball and others might see culture as classical, European, and relatively fixed, Carey sees it as fluid, changing, and desirably democratic and inclusive. Central to the fluidity, inclusiveness, and democracy that Carey sees is American civilization, where cultural practices were established in communities that were substantially removed from the influences of European and classical high culture. As he notes, "cultural studies, as I practice it, [is] quintessentially American." So Kimball gets it wrong. He misunderstands cultural studies and culture, especially the democratic elements of culture in America. But the tenured radicals also get it wrong. If the right defends high culture and thereby defends the interests of a social class, the left rejects democratic culture and the democratic purposes of the university. The defection of the academic left in cultural studies originates in what Carey views as an unforgivable error. Many of his colleagues, some of whom no doubt engaged in cultural studies under his influence, decided along the way that the broad, rich, and community-forming meanings of culture are less worthy of study than the narrower identities of race, class, and gender. Carey says correctly that in the lexicons of the cultural left these categories have "assumed a position as the new 'base' and culture has become a mere epiphenomenal expression of these elements." The reference to "base" is to the Marxian axiom that the foundation on which the whole structure of society rests is the economy and that it in turn gives birth to a system of class and domination. In the older lexicon, culture is subordinated to ideology, and ideology camouflages and secures economic interests. In the new lexicon of cultural studies, the economy is jettisoned and attention is mostly given to race and gender and to systems of domination of a very different order. To make matters worse, the concept of culture is marginalized or, as he would say, turned into an epiphenomenon. In his brand of cultural studies, the idea is to demonstrate that culture is a primary rather than a secondary phenomenon. So the colleagues on whom he would like to depend for intellectual support in the university and for political support in the arenas where politics is appropriate have decided in their formal scholarship and in the university to work against rather than for the construction of the public and the democratic order. In his words, they have chosen to

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"work within rather than across" what he calls the "fault lines of culture"—race, class, and gender—and thereby to contribute to the fragmentation of society. Additionally, they have turned their backs on ordinary men and women by thinking of them as members of a mass rather than as members of the public or of families and communities. Finally, they have turned the university into a political battleground— their battleground—by erasing "the necessary lines between the analysis of culture, the production of culture, and the political contest over culture." Carey is saying that the study and the production of meaning, both of which take patience and time and are appropriately the business of professors, should be conducted more or less on neutral ground and more or less in light of the formative public values of the culture at large. He is saying that the political contest in its current incarnation corrupts universities. They are, after all, sites for education, not legislation. Ironically, an important consequence of this narrowing focus is to reduce the value of university education, particularly to members of minority groups whose class or ethnic positions make it essential that they break through the fault lines of the social system and culture and thereby participate more fully in society. A rich and broadening education can abet such breakthroughs. Carey has another complaint against many of his colleagues on the left. They are silent, he says, about the "major tendency of higher education, the increasing presence of corporate control over the curriculum." That is a recurrent theme in his commentaries on the university. It forms part of the argument of "Political Correctness and Cultural Studies," and it is a central theme of "Salvation by Machines." In both essays, the occasion for this reflection is the expression of a false belief—an article of national faith, he says—that the so-called crisis in education can be answered and fixed by the computer. Computer literacy, it is said, will enable increasing numbers of graduates to lead productive and useful lives; it may even provide links between citizens and the state and thereby produce a more democratic order. Carey's response to these beliefs is preemptive and dismissive. He says, for example, that the impulse to look to machines to improve things is old and recurrent, and it arises when America's competitive edge in military might or in business is threatened—by the Russians or by the Japanese. Such an impulse never reflects education's primary task to educate individuals for citizenship. More fundamentally, expression of the belief that technological development will provide an

Introduction to Part V I 267

answer to the problems of institutions of learning is a reminder that a civic education is "often held in contempt." In Carey's ideal world, a general education forms the meanings and capacities that make acts of citizenship possible. It makes liberty creative and public rather than hedonistic and private. It is about the civilized order, not the techniques of personal survival. So no one should be sanguine about the campaign to fix the university and solve economic and political crises through the expansion of computer education. The demand for such an expansion expresses the interests of business rather than democracy. Furthermore, as a footnote to such observations, skeptics should note that the proposed coalition between high tech and higher education "would further reduce the independence of the university, further confuse the values of the student, and further distort the aims of education rightly conceived: the creation of enlightened and cultivated citizens. The deeper confusions in higher education simply are not touched by the solutions of high technology." So much for technology. The broad view Carey expresses in this essay is by now familiar. Education is dominated by the same interests that dominate the economy. The aim of education in the age of the corporation is to prepare consumers and obedient workers rather than citizens: "The new plans for high tech education threaten to convert the entire society into a meritocracy and technocracy and to extirpate any residual sense of a common and collective life that extends beyond the moment or the morrow." Harsh words. I have seen Jim Carey many times since we first met—back in Ottawa at Carleton University where he is regularly invited to speak, at the Poynter Institute in Florida where we were in residence together, at the conventions of the AEJMC whenever and wherever they occur, in his home, and once in Columbia, Missouri, where together we participated in a colloquium on the future of journalism education. I remember well the frustration he expressed with a number of his fellow panelists at that colloquium, but especially with those who praised the development of race and gender studies in journalism schools and encouraged the development of courses in the new technologies of communication. It is important to stress that he was not objecting to the feminist understanding of social phenomena or the examination of racial conflicts. His inclusive beliefs predispose him to encourage such

268 / Introduction to Part V understandings because they can enrich the common culture and make it more inclusive and egalitarian. Neither was he being technophobic. He knows as well as anyone that computers are here, even desirably here, to stay. He was impatient, I now understand more clearly, with the inclination to write these matters into the curriculum as substitutes rather than add-ons. He was impatient with the lack of interest in the civic virtues and the intellectual and literary capacities that good journalists must possess and that must inform the creation of a curriculum. But in that setting he was as charming, attentive, and tolerant as he always is. The passion and the disagreements, however fundamental, were well submerged beneath his public style. So what does he really think of the university? My answer turns on the circumstantial evidence of his public manner and on the textual evidence in the essays reprinted here. The public style persuades me that he loves the university just as much as the university—his colleagues, in short—loves him. At conferences, in the audience or at the podium, his energy is always up and his eloquence is stunning. He listens, he argues, and he persuades. He is not faking it; he loves ideas and the opportunity to express them. He loves, in short, what the university provides—a safe house for the imagination and a site for conversation and friendship. At the same time, the university in America frustrates, disappoints, and even angers him. In "Political Correctness and Cultural Studies" he argues that no one would blink an eye at the phenomenon of political correctness were it not for the fact that it crystallized a belief that all was not well in the academy. He notes that political correctness "names and coalesces growing resentments against higher education and the academic establishment." Think of what he else he says: "Universities . . . are not pleasant places to be these days, filled with a lot of ill-natured arguments and uncivil habits that are destroying the possibilities of public life." "University faculties are not known for having open minds or selfless egos and they often do a lot of damage to their students." "We have tolerated academic practices that actively contribute to the ignorance of students and fail the most decent expectations of the public."

Introduction to Part V I 269 "The decadence besetting the academy is not political correctness but a genuine lack of interest in education." "The independence of the university is now pretty much gone, and where it remains it is largely a pretense." Carey believes that there is a crisis in education and that it is spiritual. The crisis, he says, is that "education has no relevance to the political order, to public life" but has, instead, become utilitarian and driven by economic factors and narrow political purposes. That in the end is what frustrates him. I would say it only frustrates him. It doesn't turn him away from the place that is the natural home for an intellectual like him. So he continues to argue for its improvement. He continues to harangue and to persuade his colleagues around the country that they should feel as passionately about the university and its purposes as he does. The creation of "a common culture with enough durability to transform today's students into tomorrow's leaders, persons who feel a sense of care and responsibility for their fellow citizens and for the noblest of our democratic traditions," he writes, "is still the essence of university life and any humane program of education even in the age of high tech." Notes 1. Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), vii. 2. Ibid., 39.

10 / Political Correctnessand Cultural Studies First published in 1992

Among the games—in the best sense of that word, the Wittgensteinian sense—at play in the field of communications is one with which I feel particularly identified, namely, cultural studies. While cultural studies embraces an astonishing variety of people and positions (no one has a registered trademark on the name), it can be simplistically divided, if only to jump-start an argument, into two broad camps: one that draws primarily upon continental sources and regularly invokes names like Derrida, Foucault, and Althusser; and one that draws primarily upon American sources and regularly invokes names like Dewey, James, and Rorty. I take myself to be part of the Dewey group not only for theoretical reasons but also because, like Dewey, I have not yet given up faith in liberal democracy, in reformist measures to make society more just and decent. I haven't given up the quest, typically if idealistically American, for an open, nonascriptive basis of community life: one in which neighbors help one another out—you know, lend the lawn mower, come to the funeral, take part in the town meeting—but do not ask one another too many questions about their private lives and pretty much ignore the color of skin, the shapes of noses and eyes, and the distribution of X and Y chromosomes. I also agree with Dewey and Rorty that we would be a lot better off if we were more rather than less democratic: less greedy, more open, less given to nostalgia, less dominated by corporations and bureaucracies, more receptive to new groups. It would even be nice to have a few more children around—and if they happen to be eight kids in a Cambodian or Vietnamese family that

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show up next door, it would be swell to remember we were all once immigrants. I now find myself in a curious position. While I take cultural studies, as I practice it, to be quintessentially American, unexceptional, and even ethnocentric, Roger Kimball, one of the most prominent conservatives leading the attack on the contemporary university, has identified cultural studies as part of the problem and one of the sources of this vexation, rather than, as I thought, part of the solution. He comments that the "one thing your literary deconstructionist, your Lacanian feminist, your post-structuralist Marxist, your New Historicist, and your devotee ... of cultural studies can agree on is that the new Western humanistic tradition is a repository of ideas that are naive, repressive, or both." Well, I do not think the Western tradition is naive or repressive, at least not intrinsically and uniquely so, and I doubt that everyone within the theoretical claques he identifies are in agreement about the Western tradition or much else. The only thing they might agree upon is that the Western tradition is an invention, something made up on the way to modernity. As a constructed and porous tradition, it is in a state of constant modification and reinvention and ought to be assessed in terms of its political uses and consequences, though not by those criteria alone. My position is curious because, while I disagree with Kimball's main line of argument, he does have a lot of smart things to say about higher education, particularly about the pretensions of contemporary "theory" and faculty and their contemptuous and condescending attitudes toward the public. I feel no need, therefore, to make a wholesale defense of the university, of tenured radicals, of the state of the humanities, as most writers on this subject apparently do. There are things wrong with universities that Mr. Kimball has yet to dream of: they often are not very pleasant places to be these days, filled with a lot of ill-natured arguments and uncivil habits that are destroying the possibilities of public life, but this has been going on for twenty-five years or more. University faculties are not known for having open minds or selfless egos, and they often do a lot of damage to their students, particularly those, generally minorities and the underclass, who might benefit from real education and a less ideological, more pragmatic, and generally more civil form of intellectual discourse. Still, I do not know what this has to do with cultural studies. Cultural studies, in fact, does not represent a homogenous point of

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view: it is not a body of propositions or methods commanding universal assent from those who practice scholarship under its banner. There are, however, a few things upon which there is general agreement. Cultural studies arose as a revolt against formalism and was antipositivist and antifoundational: a form of both interpretive and critical theory. More to the point, it rejected the views that culture was epiphenomenal or a collection of given and canonical texts or an exogenous force that determines conduct and institutions from the outside. Rather, culture, from the cultural studies view, is a process, in Stanley CavelPs happy phrase, of "wording the world together." Kimball and the rest of the attack squad find these views reprehensible, for they yearn for the time when our knowledge of the world was guaranteed and a Great Underwriter—God, Science, Method, or Objectivity—assured us that everything would turn out right and there were reliable and unambiguous standards for assigning texts and artifacts to the categories of high and mass culture. But Kimball's opposition to cultural studies is less philosophical than political: he believes such philosophical views are necessarily the stalking horse of left-wing politics.

Cultural Studies and the Left While in truth most practitioners of cultural studies are of the left, there is virtually no agreement among them as to what is left, where is left, or even who is left. Cultural studies, in fact, bears no essential or necessary politics. It does contend that the process of making meaning is never a happy or easy matter, the mere expression of an underlying consensus gentium embroidered in our genes, but always a process of struggle and conflict, at once agonistic and antagonistic. While this troubles me on many days and I often wish we were a happier family, I haven't known that many happy families and I take such conflict to be transparent to conservatives for whom combat is among the higher pleasures. Finally, while the making and contesting of meaning suffuses social space, two particularly important sites of struggle are the media of communication and the educational system—independent but deeply interrelated agencies for the production, not just the transmission, of culture, as any editor and critic ought to know from experience. There are sharp differences, of course, among practitioners of cultural studies, differences that will become relevant later over the relation between ideology and culture, over the conceptions of power and


hegemony, reason and desire, and, in particular, over the privilege accorded the experience of knowing subjects. But those differences have been effaced for the moment by the attack on political correctness. While cultural studies has become increasingly precise and pertinent in charting and explaining social conflict, in uncovering the meanings embedded in social practice, in laying out the dimensions and politics of social struggle, such studies have themselves come under forceful attack. The conservative critique of "political correctness" has identified cultural studies as part of "the problem of higher education," as one of the forces—along with feminism, ethnic studies, deconstructionism, multiculturalism—corrupting higher learning in America. Paradoxically, the necessary lines between the analysis of culture, the production of culture, and the political contest over culture have been erased. Practitioners of cultural studies have always considered that work to be part of a wider political struggle. The movement against political correctness has noted this fact and sought to make the struggle explicit. Equally paradoxical, cultural studies, which has prided itself on the close analysis of social struggle, finds itself, generally speaking, pretty much unequipped to deal with this struggle. To this point scholars in cultural studies have put up a brave front—"the political correctness scare means we (the left) have the initiative, that they (the right) are desperate"—or overindulged in paranoia—"left-wing campus thinkers have replaced the Soviet Union as easy enemies"; "political correctness is an organized conservative campaign to turn back gains made by women and minorities"—but these are sound bites inserted as a confession that the left, particularly the cultural left, lacks both an analysis and an effective counterattack. We have come face to face with an ideology, something that has stepped out of the textbooks and is directed against us., and we seem to be surprised that it speaks in tropes and hyperbole rather than flattened academic discourse. "Political correctness" is not a manufactured enemy, except in the sense that the business of ideology is the manufacture of enemies. Rather, "political correctness" is an effective political attack because it acts as a condensation symbol that names and coalesces growing resentments against higher education and the academic establishment. While much of the political correctness literature is a disinformation campaign designed to discredit higher education, it could never be politically effective and the academic left never forced into the role of a scapegoat except for one overriding fact: public resentment against

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higher education is real. Such resentment cannot be dismissed out of hand or caricatured as psychological transference from the cold war or a mere expression of racism and sexism: this is the sure route to political suicide. Until we admit that there is much more wrong with universities than is imagined by the most acerbic critic of political correctness, we will be in no position to mount a counterattack. Until we admit, at least to ourselves, that we have tolerated academic practices that actively contribute to the ignorance of students and fail the most decent expectations of the public, we will have no means to dislodge the often cynical right-wing critique of the university. The decadence besetting the academy is not political correctness but a genuine lack of interest in education. It is not that students are being ideologically indoctrinated, though some try that, but that students approach us, and we approach them, as consumers—bored and disaffected consumers, ingesting whatever is fashionable and forgettable this semester, a situation in which neither they nor we take real responsibility for their education.

The Conservative Assault on Cultural Studies Cultural studies is vulnerable to the assault from the right because of two theoretical weaknesses in its formulation: as regards, first, the idea of a common culture and, second, the role of ideology within that culture. Communications programs in particular, and universities in general, are vulnerable to the same attack because they have tolerated practices that no one can defend publicly, and that silence turns higher education into one more interest group, like the Department of Defense, with little claim on public affection or relation to the public good.

The Desertion of "A Common Culture" One of the central tenets of the conservative attack on political correctness is that cultural studies has deserted the idea of a common culture—the idea, in the words of Roger Kimball, "that despite our many differences, we hold in common an intellectual, artistic, and moral legacy, descending largely from the Greeks and the Bible, supplemented and modified over the centuries by innumerable contributions from diverse lands and people." Rather than exploding such nonsense, the cultural left has largely agreed with it: they simply put a different value on


"the Greeks and the Bible." Cultural studies at the outset was an attempt to affirm a common culture. On one side of the Atlantic, Raymond Williams argued that the reason we need a common culture is that we shall not survive without one. On the other side, American cultural studies arose in opposition to the Eurocentric notion that you could understand American democracy, institutions, and character as something that arrived on the Mayflower. In both England and the United States, cultural studies was an argument not against a common culture but against the simpleminded notion that American (or British) culture was a direct and genetic tributary of a biblical, Greek, Roman, and so on watershed. While there has not been an "American experience," there has been experience in America, and American culture has been an attempt to formulate and express that experience. Until this century—despite slavery, emancipation, the bloodiest civil war in history, women's suffrage, mass immigration, the settlement of a continent, and the rise of a distinctive and indigenous labor movement (to state but a tiny portion of the catalog)—the official documents of American culture were European, and American culture was understood backward through those documents. It was not until pragmatism, American studies, symbolic interactionism, the American literary renaissance, and so forth that a systematic attempt was made to delineate the distinctive characteristics of that experience. To allow the right to steal and deform the experience, to reify it as something passed down from the Greeks and the Bible, is both a political and a moral disaster. But it is an equal disaster to reduce that culture to race and gender (and to treat class and ethnicity as if they were vanishing moments), as if these were universals of Western culture rather than concrete manifestations of identity formed within American culture. What makes cultural studies and the left vulnerable to arguments such as those made by Kimball is the attempt to deny that there is an American culture or, worse, to see American culture as a mere derivative of something called the West or, more often, capitalism. We have learned, I trust, that capitalism is not only an economy but also a culture; in fact, it is several different and often quite incompatible cultures. Similarly, the West is hardly a uniform set of meanings, messages, institutions, or histories. The West is an artifact, an artifact useful to left and right for inverse reasons: for one the West is the history of science, philosophy, and the high European culture; for the other it is a

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history of imperialism, greed, and capital formation, of racial and gender exploitation. Neither history is particularly useful for understanding American experience or culture, though both histories play a major role in it. The conservative history erases everyone but a tiny caste; the radical history deracinates the society, paradoxically, as a means of making history multicultural. The America encountered on both sides of the political correctness argument is an imaginary America. Of course, every nation is an "imagined community" in the sense Benedict Anderson has given to that phrase. But the America imagined in the political correctness debate is disconnected from the experience of the majority of citizens, historic and contemporary. One side to the debate imagines cultural experience in Pilgrim terms as something transported from the Old World. The other side imagines it in antebellum terms: white, black, and pariah people. Such history can serve as a stick with which to beat an opponent, but, as the contemporary history of the Democratic Party alone demonstrates, it achieves its victories only at the price of an impossible narrowing of the social base.

Culture and Ideology The second vulnerability of cultural studies concerns the way in which the relationship between culture and ideology is currently formulated. One wing of sociology began as an attempt to undo the relationship of base and superstructure in classical Marxist theory, to grant a measure of autonomy and effectivity to the culture while keeping in view the complex interrelations between separable "moments" in the social formation. Over time, however, something rather important has been lost. The economy has been obliterated from theoretical view. Neither is the economic seen as thoroughly cultural from the outset, nor is culture seen as existing in moments of the economic. In fact, what has happened is that race and gender have assumed a position as the new "base" and culture has become a mere epiphenomenal expression of the primordial and determinative elements. Culture is now reduced to ideology and ideology in turn reduced to race and gender. Despite all the theoretical elaboration of the concept of ideology over the past two decades, the form of argument is now virtually identical to classical Marxism except that the forces and relations of production have disappeared. Ideology has swallowed culture, and race and gender have swallowed ideology. This anomalous development is often papered over


with the notion of hegemony, but when hegemony crosses the Atlantic it sounds pretty much like the same Ideologiekritik we have been living with since the 19305. Hegemonic analysis has worked well in some settings, such as Italy, because the political system has been, to be circular about it, hegemonic. It has worked well in other settings, such as Great Britain, because of the deftness with which Stuart Hall and others have carried through the analysis. In both cases they have stayed close to Gramsci's original formulation: ideologies achieve hegemony not by serving the interests of one class—even the white male class—and setting aside others, but by speaking to relatively enduring (Ricoeur) or quasi-transcendental (Habermas) human needs and desires. These desires are not merely economic, though they are that too, but broadly moral, aesthetic, and civic. Hegemonic politics works not by dividing and exploiting, for example, class differences, but by effacing those differences in order to constitute a civil society even if such citizenship is largely illusory. In this sense hegemonic analysis must move beyond ideology to culture and recognize that human interests cannot be exhausted by any social category and that any political movement bound by such categories must, in a complex heterogeneous society, fail. The emphasis on civic bonds and common symbols, on a shared public culture, is what turns ideology to hegemony, naked class domination to civic cooperation. Let me put this another way. In recent years cultural studies has developed the critique of ideology into a high art and the linchpin of its program. As the critique of ideology became more precise and pronounced, the absence of a left ideology became more apparent. The left has a dozen different critiques of ideology; it just does not have an ideology, in the sense of a general and embracing plan of political action. Unfortunately, the left has been so busy analyzing ideology, it forgot to develop a political program that can speak to the relatively enduring desires of a wide spectrum of citizens. As a result, to twist some lines of Todd Gitlin, the left is fighting over the English department while the right occupies the White House. Effective ideologies speak to a wide range of human concerns; they become hegemonic when they are formulated across the "natural" fault lines of a culture—in our case the fault lines of race, class, and gender. Cultural studies, of late, has chosen to work within rather than across those fault lines and, as a result, it finds itself increasingly with a constituency confined within universities, though even there it cannot


win a significant vote in anything but a demoralized faculty senate. That hardly provides a base for an assault on the citadels of power. This is what I assume Gitlin means when he questions whether emphasizing race, class, and gender will reach a big enough audience: "If white males are the problem, then I don't see anything but catastrophe ahead of us." The first step to wisdom on these matters is to recognize that there are real differences among Americans on a wide range of issues: religion, law, the schools, higher education, the arts, abortion, divorce, children, population, immigration, natural resources, crime control, a just wage—you name it. These differences are not ideologically induced in the first instance; they are neither artificial nor superficial, but grounded in frequently hard-won experience and genuine differences in values. They cannot be papered over or explained by race, class, gender, and ethnicity. Empirically, people defined by race, class, gender, and ethnicity turn up on both sides of every one of these questions, and they turn up in significant numbers. The left has attempted to deal with these differences by explaining them away, attributing them solely to one kind of prejudice or other, or setting them outside of politics by, paradoxically again, adopting the conservative rhetoric of "rights" or "keep the government off our backs" or the antidemocratic strategies of manipulating the courts and the bureaucracy and, to a lesser degree, the media. The left has tried every strategy except the ideological/hegemonic one of honestly addressing itself to these problems, of developing a program of political action that has a reasonable chance of success because it is formulated in terms congruent with American culture and experience, is addressed to our problems rather than their problems. As a result, the left has been steadily losing what little influence it has on American life and shows little likelihood of regaining it unless there is a prolonged economic crisis—a crisis in which the poor will suffer most, as usual. Moreover, any salvation offered the dispossessed will most likely come from the right because the left, or at least the cultural left, hasn't the vaguest notion of an economic program. We have to admit that there is a faint hint of absurdity in the entire political correctness argument. The society is falling down around our ears and we are arguing about status issues in higher education. Foreign observers—to steal, twist, and extend an example of Richard Rorty's—when they tick off American problems, usually point to violent cities, structural unemployment, declining productivity, failing


banks, useless schools, bought legislators, cheap handguns, middleclass contempt for the poor, gargantuan thefts of the public treasury, selfish unwillingness to be taxed, and so on. Meanwhile, we are arguing about political correctness so that a perceptive foreign journalist soon will add "whiny, defensive, self-involved universities" to the list of problems. One can respond that the right, having already seized control over economic and political institutions, is now turning its attention to their cultural counterparts. Alternatively, one can suggest that the right, having failed—or even having deliberately failed—to address the most pressing social problems, has masked that failure by attacking universities, the media, and similar agencies of culture. But those easy responses ignore the crucial fact emphasized in sociology that social struggles always and simultaneously take place along economic, political, and cultural fronts. If that is true, the worst way to deal with the attack is to meet it on its own ground by getting involved in purely diversionary issues.

The Failure of the Cultural Left The left, however, is currently unable to mount a broad counterattack; having deconstructed every ideology, it is silent on its own program. And it is silent largely because it does not have a program beyond a few pet projects and a few slogans—slogans that are increasingly unconvincing. The cultural left cannot speak to the general public not only because it is jargon besotted, not only because it is vacant of ideas, not only because it can never admit it was wrong, but because it has formulated its fundamental ideas—every disclaimer to the contrary notwithstanding—around the notion of "the masses," around contempt for ordinary men and women. What Robert Reich has called the "secession of the successful," the attenuation of any sense of a common culture or community with those left behind by the spectacular economic advances of the Reagan years, applies to more than the conservative middle class. Moreover, and finally, the left in recent years has won some tactical victories by adopting the essentially conservative language of individual rights and opposing government in general, but these victories have been at the price of its own long-run strategic interests. The only protections for the poor, weak, and disadvantaged, the only safety nets they have, are the welfare state, recently dismantled, or secondary institutions standing between the individual and the


state—family, neighborhood, parish, trade unions, voluntary associations. But only a communitarian ideology and an emphasis on collective action and rights can prevent the destruction of those institutions. There will not be a left-wing victory via a right-wing ideology. For these reasons, for its general irrelevance to the most pressing problems facing people, the debate over political correctness has pretty much run into the sand. In a short season, the debate has grown old and tired. Intellectual fashions last about a year these days and, like much else, political correctness has become an anachronism before it has been understood, has become numbingly repetitive and dominated by moral and ideological posturing before it has produced a modicum of understanding, let alone a diagnosis, of higher education. To continue the debate is to run the risk we shall bore one another to death— and boredom, particularly among intellectuals, is a greater danger to the body politic than many of the better known catastrophes about which much is written these days. But universities remain vulnerable because they have become expensive and they no longer can be depended upon to deliver on their promises.

Political Correctness in the University The critics of higher education from the right (Allan Bloom and William Bennett, Dinesh D'Souza and Charles Sykes, Roger Kimball and Page Smith) and the various left documents that purportedly respond to them (Speaking for the Humanities: The Politics of Liberal Education), along with their lesser known antagonists (Henry Louis Gates and Henry Giroux, Catherine Stimson and Stanley Fish, Gerald Graff and Barbara Herrnstein Smith), have little or nothing to do with, have even no connection to the university and the system of higher education as I know it and encounter it on a daily basis. The problems subsumed under the catchphrase "political correctness" absorb the tiniest fraction of the vital energies of the academic community and represent an even smaller portion of administrative activity or faculty conflict. The university described in the literature of political correctness is a fantasy, and the pseudodebate that results has nothing to do with higher education. It is a sign of the exhaustion of the academic community, left and right, and its irrelevance to the major tendencies in higher education". The debate is, to pirate Pierre Bourdieu's distinction, a contest between the dominated and dominant elements of the dominant class


and, like many intraclass conflicts, it is full of sound and fury signifying nothing. If we wish to be identified with neither of these class fractions, it is time to pick up our marbles and go elsewhere. Why don't we adopt George Aiken's strategy for ending the Vietnam War and just declare ourselves—whoever we are—the victors in the debate and go home? That is a happier prospect than a protracted diatribe—a status conflict in the older sense of that phrase—between the National Association of Scholars and the Teachers for a Democratic Culture. Such a contest will inevitably become a verbal joust in which we serve once again as the objects rather than the subjects of politics, spectators of someone else's political program rather than participants whose advice and knowledge are sought. When the latter group tells us in its organizing statement that "reforms in the content of the curriculum have also begun to make our classrooms more representative of our nation's diverse peoples and beliefs and to provide a more truthful account of our history and cultural heritage," those of us actually in representative classrooms don't know whether to laugh or cry. Similarly, when Roger Kimball informs us that the 19605 radicals are now taking over the university when in truth they can rarely take over a department (and if they can't take over a department they are unlikely to be able to take over a precinct, let alone the country), we must know we are on the track of the real kitsch. This is a debate that confuses garnering publicity and producing a celebrity with making political gains. I am not suggesting that the issues at the root of the political correctness debate—the role of race, class, and gender in education, curriculum reform, affirmative action, and the like—are trivial. Quite the opposite. But the debate about them as currently constructed has virtually nothing to do with what is going on in most college classrooms, is silent about what is happening to the administration of most universities, is riddled by a lot of petty silliness and ambition, and evidences a genuine lack of interest in education. Moreover, the debate is informed by a vision of a purely imaginary America, an irrelevant imaginary, of interest only to a protected academic class. Those are the reasons we should unhinge ourselves from the debate. But, even more, in the debate as currently constructed, the left is going to lose, even deserves to lose, and that loss will be a genuine catastrophe for all of us. If I am in what follows harder on the left than on the right, it is because my general sympathies are, theoretically as well as politically, with those who wish to defend, at least in principle, women's studies

282 / Political Correctness and Cultural Studies and black studies, affirmative action, and increased minority enrollments, and to attest to the genuine contributions to scholarship made by deconstructionist theory and other largely continental imports. However, I also believe that many of these programs are working badly and should be subjected to the most searching scrutiny. I admire the courage of, say, Stephen Carter, who takes the risk, in Notes of an Affirmative Action Baby, of losing leftist respectability by undertaking such an examination or Eugene Genovese's simultaneous critique and endorsement of women's studies. Similarly, the deconstructionist critique of discourse, in which the instability of signifiers always reveals the subtle play of ideology, has itself become ideologically rigid and narrowed. Indeed, the general problem is that the left early on decided that no real response was necessary to the work of Bennett, Bloom, et al. Thus, Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind and similar works remained virtually without serious discussion on our campuses. But if higher education fit the model of seriousness and rectitude with which its defenders, particularly its defenders on the left, often describe it, such books would have been subjected to the most serious, rigorous, systematic, and evenhanded debate one might imagine. Instead, the critique of higher education was largely dismissed with slogans: "the killer Bs," reactionary, journalistic. Reaganism applied to education. The political right has largely had the field to itself, and the most trenchant criticism of "the killer Bs" came from figures such as Sidney Hook and John Searle rather than from the ideological opponents of the right. The left, then, has little more to say than "We're all right, Jack." In this view, higher education needs only a little bit of ideological finetuning: less of the new criticism and more deconstruction, more money in affirmative action and minority studies, less tradition and more of the new avant-garde. The left is even silent about the major tendency of higher education, namely, the increasing presence of corporate control over the curriculum, the funding, and the basic policies of the entire institutional apparatus. And the surrender has a cause: the left has been a major though silent beneficiary of the increased presence of the corporate on the campus. Like everyone else, the left really believes that the only significant problem of higher education, beyond residual racism and sexism, is money. If we had more—particularly more to underwrite


lower teaching loads, more travel, more conferences, and less academic demand—everything would be all right. This is a recipe for failure, for, as Christopher Lasch has put it, one of the major "reasons for the rightward drift of public opinion is the widespread fear that our educational system is falling apart." Lasch was speaking of primary and secondary education, but the educational crisis is currently generalized to everything from Head Start to research universities. The right is listened to because it at least acknowledges the crisis and has some intelligent things to say about it. As I said earlier, their counterparts on the left seem to be barely aware a problem exists. (Don't they have any children? Can they afford to send them to exclusive private schools? Have they ever visited a contemporary classroom? Don't they read the papers?) Virtually every proposal for serious reform in the educational system has come from one conservative think tank or another. The right of course doesn't want to put any money into education, and George Bush was the education president the way Herbert Hoover was the prosperity president. But the stinginess has at least a justification: they argue that nothing can be done about the education problem by throwing more money at it. Serious structural reform must precede serious increases in funding. The experience of parents with schools confirms this diagnosis, for the schools have continued to deteriorate even as more money has been put into them. Much of the additional money has not gone into education, of course, but rather is an investment, and not a very good one, in heightened security. Even successful programs like Head Start have been sacrificed to the budget. Nonetheless, the conclusion seems inescapable. The left's belief that the schools are failing because they have been too resistant to cultural change simply is not believed by most parents. Whenever ordinary men and women resist this conclusion and point to the abysmal ignorance of their own children (and to the active intergenerational deskilling that is occurring), the degree to which the schools seem determined to displace parental authority rather than work with it, or the responsibility of the schools for part of the general economic problems everyone is experiencing—loss of jobs, declining productivity, the evaporation of standards of workmanship—they are quickly dismissed as racist, sexist, or reactionary, or more likely all three and a little more. In short, any serious leftist response to the crisis of the schools has to address itself to


problems experienced by most people, and unless such responses are forthcoming, public opinion will continue to move to the right. The problem of education could be safely contained within the secondary school system for a number of years. Higher education, in other words, could be safely protected because it was fulfilling its primary function for the most affluent of parents: it was buying their children a position within the occupational structure. I know this flies in the face of the general belief that upper-class parents are interested in education and working-class parents are interested in jobs. (I actually think the opposite is true: the lower their position in the social structure, the more regard people have for the general virtues of education.) However, the upper-class worship at the altar of education did not come from an elevated appreciation of disinterested learning. People do not pay inflated Harvard tuitions, to choose an example at random, because they want an educated child (though they hope that benefit might come with the bargain), and their children are not swept away with a love of learning. The largest major at Harvard, according to the latest figures I have seen, is economics—not because students fell into a swoon over the subject, but because Harvard does not have an undergraduate business school. Utilitarianism finds its natural home among the middle class. Higher education satisfactorily served the purpose of guaranteeing employment and, more, an elevated place in the status and occupational structure. While it did that, even if it failed in virtually every other way, the critique of higher education fell largely on deaf ears. Once higher education began to fail in its primary mission, the provision of middle-class employment, all bets were off and the ideological critique of the right became effective. Both the left and the right seem to believe that the raison d'etre of education is to serve as a site on which to conduct a political struggle. Parents generally, the public specifically, are not particularly enamored of this view. They may be willing to admit that all education has ideological implications, if they could follow the abstruse way in which such an argument is usually framed. But that is a long way from agreeing to the proposition that the primary, maybe even the sole, purpose of education is the conduct of ideological struggle. To such people, who I happen to believe are in the majority, the issues within the political correctness movement are pretty much beside the point. They are less worried about whether the curriculum is Eurocentric or has some other focus than about whether there is any kind of curriculum at all. The ar-


gument is not whether there should be affirmative action programs, but whether decent education is provided on a nondiscriminatory basis to all who want and can benefit from it. I do not find them opposed to women's or ethnic studies but only concerned that any kind of studies be conducted seriously and inculcate not only personal pride but also genuine intellectual and analytical skills.

What's Really Wrong The issues raised in the debate over political correctness are important if they are taken up one by one. Combined into a diagnosis they are a disastrous and incendiary melange. But whether these issues are taken individually or collectively, I remain unconvinced that the critics on the right or the increasing, though discordant, respondents from the left have seized on the fundamental problems or that they proceed from an adequate analysis of the university as an institution or even that they have much of a view of the way in which American society and American politics are put together. In fact, I don't even think they have situated the specific matters they address—the canon, political correctness, affirmative action, and so on—in the right context. So here is a brief catalog of the underlying changes in the university that provide the deep structure to its surface politics.

Good-bye, Independence The American university has never been an ivory tower, never completely independent of its surrounding society. Very few of them are architecturally walled off from their host communities. Land-grant universities were from the outset campuses without walls, dedicated to serving their states. The relationship between the university and the society has always been a tense and uneasy one—moments of accommodation alternating with assertions of autonomy. The core of university activities—teaching and the curriculum—has been the domain of the greatest academic freedom and autonomy and always the most stoutly defended against outside interference. The independence of the university is now pretty much gone, and where it remains it is largely a pretense. Perhaps the first breach came with the development of intercollegiate athletics, followed by the seizure of control of boards of trustees

286 / Political Correctness and Cultural Studies by the business community. It was this seizure that fired left-wing criticism of the university earlier in the century, as exemplified by Thorstein Veblen's The Higher Learning in America and Upton Sinclair's The Goose-Step. Despite the fact that corporate control is even stronger in universities today, it is rarely the object of sustained analysis or attack. This is partly true because the corporate community no longer attempts to exert direct control over the curriculum or the habits, manners, and speech of the faculty, but it is also true because such control is now simply accepted as the necessary price of an affluent academy and a privileged faculty. Similarly, in the years after World War II, as universities became the research arm of society, the Department of Defense, the various institutes of health, and indeed the entire federal apparatus became a daily and directive presence on the campus. During the 19605 the New Left made a run at expelling the defense establishment; that establishment, and the federal government generally, is now more firmly in control of much of higher education with rarely a word of protest. The silence comes from one point that is generally shared by left and right: both have rejected the genuinely radical and genuinely conservative principle that the university ought to be an ivory tower; they agree that the university is not and should not be an autonomous and self-governing community. As a result, the university did not get rid of the Department of Defense—it merely acquired a new set of interest groups with claims on teaching and research. Today, boards of trustees increasingly represent the claims of these new groups and have little interest in the welfare of the educational institution or the student body except as the student body represents certain interests. When you add to this mix the increasing power of accrediting agencies representing the interests of professional groups and the directive role alumni play and pay in determining what should be built and where and what should be taught and how, you must come to one inescapable conclusion: for generations now, universities have been quietly sold off, piece by piece, to the highest bidder. No one is particularly opposed to this process; the only argument concerns which ideological clique ought to be in charge. The brackish politics and the criticism of the university are played out, then, in a context in which the university has pretty much disappeared as an independent and unitary institution. The university is little more than a balance sheet that is the crossroads of the social and the site of interest-group struggles over the next generation of citizens,


workers, and knowledge: cannon fodder for one kind of extrinsic purpose or another. Intellectual culture is depreciated by being assimilated to a notion that cultural studies emerged to oppose, namely, that culture is an exogenous force acting on and directly shaping the individual. As the edges of the university become more porous and indistinct, its internal structure collapses. The only authority left is the authority of money, and that, above all else, is the thing most susceptible to outside control. The real lesson of the 19605 is that when push comes to shove, as it frequently did, the only structure left is a dialectic between the crowd and the police. The university in this sense has become a mass society with no internal structures of authority and decision making. The university senate, however composed, is exposed as a sham: it is neither a debating nor a legislative body representing the collective will and interest of the institution, but a mere crowd or ineffective assemblage of special interests who can make a mess but cannot govern an academic community because there is no academic community to govern.

Doctor, Lawyer... Despite all the talk in the political correctness debate about the core curriculum, this part of the university has been declining in significance for decades. In fact, it was pretty much abandoned by colleges of liberal arts at the major universities. Despite distribution requirements, most students seek a professional education and, indeed, some of the soundest education is now found in professional schools. This is because the faculty of professional schools must take real responsibility for undergraduate students or be thoroughly disgraced. This is hardly true in the old liberal arts, where faculty do not have and do not want a relationship with students in which they are publicly responsible for what students learn and what they become. And in my experience, this is true everywhere, even in our most elite institutions. The liberal arts have themselves become professionalized because those disciplines are driven by doctoral programs, and the curriculum increasingly reflects not the needs of students but the professional interests and research needs of faculty. Professionalization, then, has a double edge: the spread of education in the professions throughout undergraduate school, and the professionalization of the liberal arts as those disciplines increasingly reflect the professional interests and sta-


tus of the faculty. The curriculum is further professionalized, often silently, by the spread of the internship system, which in liberal arts colleges is another way students can acquire a professional education without its showing up on the university transcript. Internships, in which credit is given for work, the so-called real world experience, eat up an increasing amount of student class time. For the university it is cheap and invisible training that allows students to feel they are being prepared for an occupation, but it also turns education over to business firms, professional societies, and, increasingly, every other interest group in the society. Internships, not so incidentally, also involve the systematic exploitation of student labor and the creation of a larger, redundant supply of adult labor.

The Symptoms of a Bad Education During the 19608 the doctrine of in loco parentis was pretty much thrown out everyplace. This left the student services wing of the campus, what we used to call the dean of students' office, without much to do except paper and custodial work. Unemployment is not accepted easily anywhere and, therefore, student services had to find a new basis for its work and authority. In parallel with the culture as a whole, the new justification was the medicalization of the student body. Every student problem is now turned into an occasion for therapy and a course, frequently an academic one, analyzing the cause, symptoms, and cure not only of traditional student ailments but also of a legion of newly invented ones. Naturally, in the era of racism, sexism, homophobia, and multiculturalism, student services is having a field day. These are real problems, but because they are defined not as educational problems, like learning how to think clearly about the nature of equations or the structure of atoms, but as mental problems that must be cured by therapy and indoctrination, they lend themselves as much as or more to the curative powers of the counseling center and the student services building. Because the latter are financed through student fees (largely outside of tax and tuition money and often easier to raise), student services has had an opportunity to grow faster and more rapaciously than the academic wing of the university. This growth is further impelled and justified by the more traditional doctrine that "the major part of a student's education (and, perforce, reeducation) occurs outside the classroom," even if it is education in the self-recognition of symptoms. This


not only drains resources from instruction—from the curriculum—but also diminishes the status of instruction and creates one more large bureaucracy that increasingly operates outside of, often gets in the way of, or at the least compromises, the academic mission of the university. Student services also have been one of the sites of the principal force in the erosion of education, namely, credit inflation. Universities, of course, promote internal internships for unpaid, nonacademic work, thus rewarding students with credit for doing some of the scut work of administration. But credit inflation involves the wholesale conversion of the extracurricular into the curricular, thereby giving credit for what was once leisure, club work, or therapy. In addition, courses that were once worth, say, three hours are raised to four credit hours without a corresponding change in either the amount or the difficulty of the work involved. Student services has plenty of co-conspirators in this, because the dilution of the curriculum through inflation has certain decided advantages for faculty and students: fewer hours of less intense teaching and learning; more hours taught in the real world by outside firms, faculty, and nonfaculty; more advising turned over to nonacademic staff. The consequence is the active devaluing and dilution of the academic curriculum by everyone concerned, a devaluing that in turn has created more problems with which student services has to deal and more counseling and courses with which to deal with them. For example, we are apparently now beset with an alcohol problem on campus. Part of that problem, if it is a problem, comes from the curious notion that leisure is somehow education. But the major part of the problem results from the fact that Friday, never mind Saturday, has become a classless day pretty much everywhere, so that the drinking weekend begins on Thursday. This is an indirect and unanticipated consequence of accommodating the faculty's desire to have open stretches of time for research, but it has real consequences for undergraduate education. But the major point is this: with so much credit inflation going—and I haven't mentioned the frequent travesty of study-abroad programs—it is impossible to estimate the value and content of the old 124-hour graduation requirement, but I would estimate that it is worth about 80 hours these days. These are a few of the underlying problems and forces in higher education that escape the current debate on political correctness but that provide the real setting in which the surface political struggles are played out: the loss of autonomy, the absolute penetration of the uni-


versify by the haphazard forces of the social, the dissolution of a structure of legitimate governance and authority, the medicalization of students, the professionalization and instrumentalization of the curriculum that turn it into an ideological battleground, the inflation of credit and devaluation of academic study. These are the problems that will have to be solved before any meaningful attempt can be made to debate Western civilization, affirmative action, women's and ethnic studies, or any of the other issues, as important as they are, that critics scrape off the political surface of university life. The central issue is whether education is to be understood in instrumental or noninstrumental terms. Professional education is necessarily instrumental and, inevitably, to some degree ideological; that is, the purpose and ideology of the professions are imposed on the educational process. But only insofar as education at the core of university life is conceived as noninstrumental can education be insulated from the purposes that political and economic interests wish to project onto it. I am here following and lightly paraphrasing some lines of Ernest J. Weinrib and, as a result, using instrumental in a rather special way. Of course, all education has a purpose and end in view. But unless we can agree that education has purposes that are intrinsic to it, purposes that constitute virtues embedded in practice, then the university will be exploited by hierarchically entrenched groups, will be turned to extrinsic purposes, purposes that stand functionally outside the academy. The dismissal of education as necessarily and inevitably ideological implies not only that education is an instrument available for use by groups whose primary identity is outside the academy, but also that education can be nothing else. It denies the possibility there can be any noninstrumental understanding of any form of pedagogy. If that is true, higher education will become, as so much of it is now, solely the instrument of the powerful. Make no mistake about that: the instrumentalization of education is not a recipe for the weak inheriting the earth. Unfortunately, the point of agreement between the left and the right, between most of the current critics of the academy and, in a phrase of Henry Louis Gates's, "the rainbow coalition of feminists, deconstructionists, Althusserians, Foucauldians, people working in ethnic and gay studies" whom they criticize, is that the university is an apparatus of a political or economic interest. For all these groups all education is necessarily and desirably instrumental and ideological: education always


represents an interest rather than pursues a virtue. It all comes down to whose ox gets gored. The big losers in this great debate are the students and through them the country at large. Higher education in America reminds me of the Detroit Big Three when they dominated the automobile industry. Without competition they could engage in all sorts of inefficient practices and merely trade blame between labor and capital and their respective competitors. But the system finally started to collapse. And who lost? The workers and the rest of us. We have to pay for a failing economy. Similarly, the big losers in the current debate are the students, particularly those most disadvantaged who would benefit most from a more purposeful, more honest, more honorable, and less ideological form of education. As it stands, it is the newcomers to higher education who are the big losers. They are welcomed to higher education at the moment we so devalue a degree along with the entire educational enterprise that a goal cherished and sought for generations becomes, in personal, political, and economic terms, one more empty promise.

117 Salvation by Machines: Can Technology Save Education?

Among the articles of national faith few have stronger resonance than our belief in technology and education. Technology, freed from encrustation of the old world, purged of its bondage to old cities, old elites, and older ways, set down in the garden of America, has always promised us a general redemption: freedom from want and immiseration, freedom from weakness and corruption, freedom for a better life of peace, prosperity, and plenitude. The twin pillar of education reinforces the commitment to technology, for it guarantees not only the knowledge with which to carry the social and technological project forward but also underwrites the viability of a republican way of life; it ensures the knowledge that will make us free. Technology and education have always underwritten the quest for power, prosperity, and profit, for wealth, welfare, and beneficent progress. But they also underwrote the dream of a democratic republic: a mechanism capable of holding together, despite classical democratic theory, a large land and a large population, and rendering a people sufficiently educated that they might govern themselves. The dream of democracy has often been the equal of the dream for wealth and power, but of late the tables have turned. To go back to basics, to restore education, has been shorn of democratic pretension. The purpose of education, like that of technology, is to make us more leisured, but hardly more equitable or more community centered, hardly more democratic or public spirited. That part of the national dream is back under the night of the republic. 292

Salvation by Machines I 293

Technology is the enduring savior of American education, and virtually no other subject has been on the national agenda over the past twenty-five years. And each time technology moves to the center of attention, of consciousness, it does so in response to crisis. In the late 19505 the crisis was signaled by the launching of Sputnik and Soviet advances in weapons technology: a falling behind in space exploration that warned of a loss in military domination. A decade later there was another technological crisis, though of a rather different sort. The Vietnam War, which among other things was a massive technological failure, triggered an antitechnology movement that spawned a new humanities—special programs for special interests, destruction of the classical curriculum, abandonment of requirements and prerequisites—aimed at cultivating identity in a new class and resisting the military-industrial complex. The current technological crisis emerged around 1980 when military competition with the Soviets resurfaced at a moment of economic failure, at a moment when we began to permanently surrender markets to the Japanese and other countries of the Pacific Rim. Economic stagflation, the hostage crisis in Iran, dwindling productivity, high unemployment, and a loss of national resolve all signaled that we had to do something about education, had to develop, in the words of one commentator, a "national plan of action, a kind of space shuttle program for the knowledge systems of the future." The current technological crisis is the launching pad from which we enter the postindustrial society, the information age, a new and bedazzling world in which "we must establish a knowledge industry in which knowledge itself will be a salable commodity like food and oil. Knowledge is to become the new wealth of nations." Well, it has always been the wealth of nations. The desire is not so much for knowledge as to carry forward a project of social reconstruction, a restoration of status quo ante, in which all institutions are rebuilt in the image of one particular America. We are told rather often these days that our nation is at risk, but the only risks that interest anyone are economic and military ones. And, therefore, draconian measures are called for if we are to dominate the knowledge and military markets of the day. We must imitate the Japanese and endorse a form of statism in which a huge collaborative effort—in the words of the day, "a partnership"—integrates the federal government, the major corporations, and higher education in a crash course in military and eco-

294 / Salvation by Machines

nomic survival. Measures that at one time would have been seen as radical and statist in the extreme now have conservative benediction. As one executive of the Illinois Bell Telephone Company said, though he said it ruefully and expectantly at the same time, "It sure sounds like socialism." He just lacked the right vocabulary. The technological and educational crisis is a regional as well as a national one. Each region of the country is engaged in a bidding war to keep and attract nomadic corporations—particularly those in hightech fields—and the executives who run them. The divisive regionalism that was the major fault line of nineteenth-century politics has been reborn, and education is an enlistee, usually a willing one, in the struggle. The federal policy of resource distribution through the tax system has been a success, and the old industrial states that financed the development of the underdeveloped land of the South and Southwest are now paying twice for their charity and beginning to strike back. Our economic and military problems have many roots, but the one that is increasingly singled out is the mediocrity and recalcitrance of our schools, the lack of sufficient emphasis on science, computer science, and theory, and the failure to sufficiently integrate education with the corporate and government sectors. In this rendition of our troubles, education has but one purpose: to sustain our competitive edge against the Russians and regain it against the Japanese. The dream of an educated populace has completely faded from view and is secretly held in contempt. Beyond a few gestures at equality, gestures aimed at keeping the streets clear, education has no relevance to the political order, to public life. As Jonathan Kozol has recently demonstrated once again, education is not even any longer supposed to transmit the minimum competence of literacy necessary for political participation. Education is charged now with tasks such as restructuring the labor force and providing applied research. The age of the federal grant has come to an end; corporations are the new partners of education, but it is far from a benevolent or disinterested patronage. The quid pro quo is a new labor force—docile but ambitious—and a new entrepreneurial spirit in academic research. With minor exceptions here and there, the federal government's interest in higher education is reduced to military research. I believe we must maintain a healthy skepticism toward the current diagnosis of our ills and the remedies now suggested. Our problems are real enough and there is much that is wrong with education, but the

Salvation by Machines I 295 problems are hardly solved by hyperbole and wishful thinking. Beware of all the participants in this game of social reconstruction: computer companies in search of new markets, educational institutions in search of new sources of funds, and a federal establishment whose sense of national purpose is pretty much limited to missiles and missionaries. Our problems go deeper than this and are not amenable to an easy or shortrange solution. No one, despite the rhetoric, has an interest in the public interest. This is the age of private good, and the conspiracy between students, faculty, the state, and the corporate sector is to evacuate public life, to render it invisible and unnecessary to the precise degree it inhibits personal success and profit. In fact, it is no longer even sensible to speak of a public good; it is not a concept accessible to the contemporary imagination. All education is now education for private life or for ignorance. It is possible to address these questions on education and technology with probity and prudence, to carefully assess the possibilities that a new generation of technology offers for rebuilding the workforce, regaining our competitive position in the world economy, eliminating yet another missile gap, and curing the "pervasive mediocrity" of the schools. I am going to forswear that tactic largely because of the stridency and utopianism of the views being propagated by what I will call the protechnologists: those who believe our problem is the pace of technological development and believe reflexively that the major or sole purpose of education is to promote that development. They are all pursuing a scorched earth policy of the intellect, reducing all knowledge and achievement to a single technical equation and defining civic and public life solely in technological terms. For example, a special issue of Newsweek following the 1984 presidential election was entirely sponsored by Apple Inc. on behalf of its line of computers. The first page contained a picture of a computer. On its illuminated plasma screen was inscribed the following commercial message: Last Tuesday several million of you demonstrated the principle of democracy as it applies to politics. One person, one vote. Throughout this magazine we're going to demonstrate the principle of democracy as it applies to technology. One person, one computer.

296 / Salvation by Machines The message has a certain comic quality given the desperate straits of the home computer market and the demonstration that home computers are worth little except to the professional writer. But it is more the arrogance and anti-intellectualism that arrests one. Over three thousand years of thought about democracy reduced to the slogan "One person, one vote." The tricky issue of technological democracy or cultural democracy reduced to "one person, one computer." This is hardly a vision of life adequate to a free people. We are understandably forgiving of advertising—perhaps inured to it is a better word—and so treat the ad as so much hyperbole, on a plane with hymns to hemorrhoids, despite the fact that it speaks to our common life and not our private discomforts. However, the sentiments of the ad merely express in commercial speech the deepest current of the prevailing ideology: the rhetoric of the computational sublime, the belief that the deepest failings in our politics and our understanding of the world will be solved once the computer takes up its place in our education, imagination, and social practices. Indeed, one of the canonical texts of the computer movement, Edward Feigenbaum and Pamela McCorduck's The Fifth Generation, is a long, tedious exposition of the same faith. To wit: In short, no plausible claim to intellectuality can possibly be made in the near future without an intimate dependence upon this new instrument. Those intellectuals who persist in their indifference, not to say snobbery, will find themselves stranded in a quaint museum of the intellect, forced to live petulantly, and rather irrelevantly, on the charity of those who understand the real dimensions of the revolution and can deal with the new world it will bring about.1

It is not merely the arrogance of such an argument that is offensive; the book as a whole contains no telos, no end in view, no sense of what this technology is supposed to achieve beyond mere survival. What is this new world the computer will bring about? What is so desirable about it? What aspects of a valuable way of life will it preserve? What aspects will it extinguish? Alas, on this subject the technologists are silent, and even the claims made on behalf of high technology and computers are suspect. Let us assess those claims particularly as they bear upon the needs and outcomes of education. Forty years have passed and the age of the computer is, finally, some might say, under way. This new instrument is now making its conquest of the habits of work and imagination with


dazzling speed. The federal government, by its own estimates, will leap during this decade from 30,000 computer systems to a million. There are now about 325,000 computers in the schools and their deployment grows exponentially, encouraged by generous though self-serving policies of computer manufacturers racing to secure shares of the market. Computer camps have sprung up across the country as anxious middleclass parents try to keep their children in the competition for declining professional employment. Between five and seven million households now have computers, though the numbers change so fast any estimate is virtually useless and most of the computers serve as mere icons once the novelty of games wears away. While the diffusion of computer technology is much slower than that of many earlier technologies—telegraph, telephone, television—we have now clearly passed out of the incubation phase and into a period of saturation. Everyone will now be expected to have some minimal exposure to computers so that all are comfortable with the new technology. But to what end, particularly as regards education? Computer education is justified by the need to create a computerliterate workforce and to prepare people for the jobs of the future. It is argued that such a workforce is necessary to national defense and to improve productivity. The shortage of computer workers and knowledge workers has raised the problem of computer literacy to a national crisis. Let us leave aside for the moment the vexing fact that computer and high-tech imports from Japan are now outstripping domestic productivity. There is truth to the assertion that the economy requires more computer specialists, programmers, engineers, and systems analysts, but it presents a terribly misleading picture of the actual structure of employment opportunities. The positive effects of computer technology on employment or on the skills necessary for employment are minimal. Computerization eliminates many jobs, "deskills" or otherwise reduces the competence required in others, and leaves the majority of work absolutely unaffected. Through automation, computerization simply eliminates many industrial jobs. Jobs in computer manufacture that are not exported to cheap labor countries—and that is by far the majority—are five-dollar-perhour assembly-line jobs in toxic environments. Most of the projected 7 percent growth in high-tech employment is of this kind. The fastestgrowing segment of the employment market is in low-tech service occupations—waiters, janitors, kitchen help, hospital orderlies—and these

298 / Salvation by Machines jobs require little or no education. The computer offers little realistic hope to those abandoned by the decline of the smokestack industries. We have been creating what has been widely described as a two-tier, highly pyramidal labor force: a small cadre of engineers, professionals, managers, and bureaucrats sitting atop an increasingly deskilled and proletarianized work force. Many jobs—those of real estate sales personnel, retail clerks, supermarket checkers, bank tellers, and travel agents—are being computerized but left fundamentally unchanged. Computer education is not going to help them because there is no sensible way in which they can be said to be computer literate. They continue to do with computers the same things they did without them, and, while their work is facilitated, they become more expendable because replacements can be so easily trained: the skill is in the machine and not in the head. The supermarket checker dragging packages across sensing devices needs less manual and mental skill than the old-fashioned cash register clerk. There are a few occupations with minimal interaction with the computer and therefore some marginal change in the occupation: drafting, journalism, word processing. A few days to acquaint the worker with the machine is all that is necessary, not formal education. But even this change often eliminates all sorts of traditional crafts—think of what happens in the newspaper production plant—and worsens the work conditions of remaining occupations: the increasingly factorylike work conditions of copy editors and word processors, for example. Finally, we come to the aristocrats of the computer workforce: programmers, operators, scientists, business managers, engineers. The growth in these positions will be small—i million in the next decade compared to the 3 million that will be lost to computers. (The significant exception, though again it is not an occupation demanding formal education, is the need today for service, maintenance, and repair personnel for computers.) The true mind workers of the future will be few in numbers despite widespread fantasies of a white-coat society. There is virtually no room at the top of the labor market pyramid given the social relations of work in America, and high technology will be used to preserve existing relations of power, status, and income rather than to disturb them. We will simply go through recurring cycles in which professional labor markets are flooded with entrants. The simple truth is that there are far more people who wish to work in the knowledge professions than there are spots available, and there is no easy way


around this fact except in a few cases—law and counseling may be examples—where relatively speaking the demand for services magically rises to meet the supply of professionals. Incumbents of all the professions can be expected to continue to invent devices of closure, largely those of credentials, to protect valued and scarce positions. And the consequences of the difference between getting in and being kept out is likely to grow in a way reminiscent of professional sports, where the last player into the "big leagues" lives like a king whereas the last one kept out cannot even practice the craft, let alone earn a decent living. To summarize in the words of Douglas Noble: "The relative distribution of mind work, sophisticated, intellectually stimulating, and potent, will undoubtedly remain at or below present levels for the next few decades, if the masters of high technology continue to remake our world as they have begun to." There is, in short, hardly anything revolutionary in the effect of computerization upon employment except to make the conditions of work generally less satisfactory, and computer education hardly presents a challenge to education except in preparation of relatively small numbers of mind workers in computer science. This hardly provides a warrant for reshaping education in the image of computer literacy. If computerization will have minimal effects on education for employment, perhaps it will place new demands and offer new opportunities for that other and most important part of our education, our education for life as free men and women, our education as citizens. Here the situation is more mixed. There is no doubt that the effect of computers on government and the political process is a subject of real interest and even congressional concern. Unfortunately, the concerns are pretty much limited to two areas: government efficiency and civil liberties. Alas, while computerization and automation displace industrial workers, they do not seem to have a similar effect on the middle class, particularly in government bureaucracies. Office efficiency may increase by virtue of computerization, at least by measures of time relative to output, but white-collar employment paradoxically increases as well. Similarly, while the computer in principle endangers civil liberties via the invasion of privacy (interlinked data banks, computer matching, computer profiling), there is a strong privacy lobby in America that is likely to watch developments very closely. Efficiency and civil liberties, in short, have lobbies, interests, constituencies, and watchdogs. Democracy does not.

300 / Salvation by Machines There are fantasies, of course, that computers will empower people and make citizen participation more effective, and therefore computer literacy is seen as an important part of civic education. As the computer scientist J. C. R. Licklider has argued: The information revolution is bringing with it a key that may open the door to a new era of involvement and participation. Computer power to the people is essential to the realization of a future in which most citizens are informed about and interested and involved in the processes of government.... The political process would essentially be a giant teleconference, and a campaign would be a month-long series of communications among candidates, propagandists, commentators, political action groups and voters.

It is difficult to discern the notion of democracy embedded in this nostalgia for the future. We are being warned that we must seize computer technology before the future is wrested from us—an echo of the theme in the Apple ad I quoted earlier. But this ignores the fact that we have a computer society, as Douglas Noble has argued, without any citizen participation in its construction or ratification up to now. It has been accomplished by fiat, by the designs and interests of the few, and it is mere silliness to suggest that if we educate people in computers an impotent citizenry will suddenly be empowered. Real control of the new technology is vested outside the political process and there it will firmly remain. No matter how computer literate the population, citizen decisions in this area will be postpolitical: shall we use FORTRAN or Pascal? This is simply another example of how politics has been taken out of politics. To be a citizen in this kind of computer society one does not need either a basic or an advanced education in computer literacy. Indeed, it is questionable whether one needs or can benefit from an education at all. Jefferson's vision of a free and independent citizenry based upon education is irrelevant to a world in which all a citizen does is to ratify decisions already made by a small cadre of elites. Indeed, as I will suggest again later, engineers are among the best-educated and most talented members of the society, particularly in the area of computers, but they are also the most apolitical except on those issues that affect them as workers, as professionals. In short, if we are thinking of saving education for democracy, for a life of citizenship, computer technology will not advance that salvation one whit given the conceptions of politics and education that currently rule in technological circles. We ought by now to be disabused of the notion, implicit in much


contemporary rhetoric, that technological progress leads to political progress or that technology by itself can enhance politics. While watching the dispirited and dispiriting debates of recent years, one could not help but recall the Lincoln-Douglas debate of more than 125 years ago. Even if we allow for the circus and carnival atmosphere of those debates, one cannot help but be impressed by the large crowds, often fifteen to twenty thousand, that assembled under the hot Illinois sun or the cold and damp of a prairie rain; that came in on foot, wagon, and railroad car to unlikely places like Ottawa and Charleston and Galesburg; that listened for three hours to sustained debate on the most important questions of politics of the day—slavery, abolition, the Dred Scott decision, westward expansion; that frequently interjected their own views (from the Ottawa transcript: "A Hibernian—Give us something besides Dred Scott"). One cannot argue that the curve of democratic process and participation has been steadily upward as it has been technologically augmented. The technology of the foot, the horse, and the megaphone offered as many and probably more genuine opportunities for democratic participation than are afforded by advanced computer systems despite the illusions of empowerment contained in the keyboards, the plasma screens, and the imagined town meetings of "interactive systems." The purpose of modern technology is not to reconstruct democracy. From the outset it is designed to exercise more effective control over the population. Therefore, it should not surprise us that the current movement to save education with a new generation of technology is also a sustained attack upon democracy and democratic institutions. It is no accident that our failings are located these days in the masses of people rather than in our elites, in public education rather than private, in the overpaid and inefficient American worker, in the technophobia of the ordinary citizen, in the absence of Japanese habits among our workers, or in the scientific illiteracy of ordinary people. This analysis conveniently displaces commentary from the elites who run our institutions. For example, the much maligned American worker is blamed for declining productivity and the high cost of American products. This is the same worker who was paid the highest wages in the world from 1865 to 1975 and was able to maintain productive dominance through the proper mechanization and organization of work. In the analysis of declining productivity far less attention is paid to the effect on the economy of thirty thousand firms that are the prime

302 / Salvation by Machines contractors of the Department of Defense and therefore work in markets protected from competitive pressures, which allows such firms to make profits without worrying about the bottom line. Similarly, it may be argued that American industry is losing ground because American managers have lost their knack at productivity. They prefer financial manipulation such as leveraged buyouts and greenmail to actually managing. More time and energy go into buyouts, takeovers, golden parachutes, and other techniques of piracy and protection than go into investing in new products and processes, improving quality, training and retraining workers, and engaging in research and development. I am not then making a simple antitechnological argument. It is simply that our problems go much deeper than technology and, therefore, cannot be remedied by a technological fix. The problems of our schools, our politics, our economy are rooted in our culture, in the flawed operation of our institutions, in the patterns of our motivation, and in the ugliness of our social relations. These things cannot be fixed, though they may be temporarily patched, by automating the office, by displacing the waning capacity of traditional literacy with competence on new machines, or by investing all our scarce energies in research and development. Social reconstruction is necessary, but it will scarcely help to rebuild everything that has failed us of late and to discard like wastrels and drunkards all the values, including the democratic ones, that have given us civility, productivity, and common concern. The search for a "fifth generation" is driven not only by military competition with the Soviet Union and economic competition with the Japanese but also by a survivalist mentality. The outward gaiety of yuppie culture and the frenetic activity of a consumer culture mask the fact that our only goal at the moment is to survive. Beyond that we have nothing in view. But can a people live with no other end in view but survival? We are evacuating all our political and cultural traditions and becoming mere reaction formations to our competitors. The public is now constantly assaulted with a survivalist rhetoric. We have, it appears, but two options before us. We can become, or so it is hoped, a high-tech, high-power, highly concentrated defense state with high unemployment and a large and growing unemployed, unprotected, unemployable class. Or we can sink into a weak, agrarian, dominated, dependent economy, an imperialism in which we are the colonial outpost. The public is kept frightened and agitated by the doom and gloom predictions of what will happen unless the plans of the corporate sector


are implemented. But note what no one is saying: this crisis, our problem, might provide the basis for a more humane, stable, cooperative economic order. Where are you, Peter Kropotkin, now that we once again need you? One must be wary of the crisis mentality and agitation in its name. It is the oldest ruse of the propagandist. It not only renders the public quiescent, credulous, and accepting, it is also self-serving for those who want to deal with our problems by reconstructing society in the image of the corporation and the computer. In the words of Atari's chief scientist, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." But the remark of one of the popularizers of the computer literacy movement is more to the point: "The real measure of a revolution is not its casualty count but its effect on the survivors." The problems of the American economy and of education derive from matters of motivation and the character of American elites rather than from the direct malfunctioning of democratic institutions. We have highly trained, technically adept but malfunctioning elites: engineers, businesspeople, professors, and scientists. I don't wish to casually malign these already-maligned groups. Richard Hofstadter once suggested that nineteenth-century business publications struck a consistent theme of the equation of the march of civilization with the growth of commerce, and they did this without a trace of cynicism. One might make a similar argument about engineers and engineering as the one-time bearers of a civilization and not merely a specialty group. Both these groups showed an interest in art, politics, and cultivation with a general advance of learning that was not disconnected from but embedded in their professions and ways of life. As Hofstadter says, quoting a commercial journal, commerce was a profession "embracing and requiring more varied knowledge and general information of the . . . history, political complexion, laws, languages, and customs, of the world than is necessary in any other." Commerce, like engineering, justified itself by reference to values and attitudes of general learning and high moral purpose that originated outside its domain. To serve business or engineering was to serve God, character, and culture. Hofstadter concludes: What is essential here is that the role of the merchant was justified not solely on the ground that he is materially useful, not even on the honor and probity with which he pursues his vocation but also because he is an agent of a more general culture that lies outside business itself.

304 / Salvation by Machines But this vision has gone sour and so has the education that supports it. American business and engineering, once defended on the ground that they produced a high standard of culture, are now defended solely on the ground that they produce a high standard of living (or a high standard of defense). The same can now be said of professors and scientists. In today's survivalist culture, the standard of living is the only motivational prop left among us. Men and women may not live by bread alone, but in fact that is about all they have to live by. Under the circumstances, only two options present themselves: to live and act selfishly and hedonistically without regard for the commonweal, or to reduce the purpose of public life to occupational and personal psychoses—wealth, efficiency, power, standard of living—without any sense of what these things are good for or aimed at. The entire society is converted into a meritocracy and a technocracy, and the public is agitated and frightened of the dire consequences said to follow if we do not accept the prescriptions of the experts. The problem with our elites is that matters of duty and obligation are merely professional. The criterion for membership in this particular club is mere success in the climb, the morally neutral ability to perform. This is the major reason that American government, the American economy, American institutions generally have not been a success in recent years. Professional elites once reasonably united by a common definition of the purposes of civic life are now fragmented into competing citadels, and many have shifted their concerns away from the intellectual and moral content of civic life. The commitment to technical, specialist, meritocratic education has created a double bind: it has divorced our elites from civic purpose and cultural leadership, and it has made their interest in civic life solely one of privilege and ritual. One small example. The best-trained and in many ways intellectually most competent among our elites are the engineers. Nonetheless, a Louis Harris poll for Spectrum, the journal of the International Association of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, reported that the nuclear arms issue is far too large and complex an issue for the IAEEE membership. One respondent commented: The idea that a group of international electrical and electronics engineers could have the background, the access to pertinent data, and the familiarity with the track record of the Soviet Union and its leadership to make meaningful inputs to a serious national-security ques-

Salvation by Machines I 305 tion such as posed in your opinion solicitation is not only puerile but truly leans to the realm of agitation and political rhetoric. We have no business interfering where we have no competence. It is remarkable to hear participation in the most important political question of our time described as "interfering." But if our highest trained elites are not going to interfere—read participate—who is going to? The answer is depressingly obvious. The issue is not merely the irresponsibility of our elites—their technocratic and meritocratic nature, their divorce from public life and the commonweal in any role other than that of "experts," their overweening commitment to wealth and success—but the peculiar kind of educational crisis such elites create and represent. The mediocrity of our schools—insofar as they are mediocre—stems less from a lag in science and technology than from a lag in motivation. What we have in education, as in the society, is a motivation crisis rather than a technological crisis. The oldest lesson of capitalism is that for the system to work it must be sanctified. Capitalism carries with it no exogenous purpose; its sole motivation is endogenous—the pursuit of pleasure or utility or individual desire. In a well-known phrase, the spirit of capitalism was sanctified by the Protestant work ethic, at least historically. In a more secular age it must import a social purpose, for it contains nothing within its own resources beyond the search for wealth and personal success, or in our own time competition with the Russians and the Japanese. But such purposes will not take us very far for very long. They are simply too mean and vulgar and dispiriting to get us through anything but a crisis. They cannot supply the motivational energy to sustain the steady work any civilization must have if it is to adequately reproduce itself. What we ought to be truly concerned about these days is not our technological lag but the alarming increase in adolescent suicides and the drop in the proportion of young people going on to college, both phenomena particularly marked among the most able young males. Here motivational problems become personal disaster as well as social waste. But why after all should anyone go to college? There is no longer a civic or ennobling reason to do so, and personal ambition is the only motivation once the professions are divorced from civic enterprise. And here the schools are as much a part of the problem as are the elites who pass on their own self-serving and narrowed motivations to their

306 / Salvation by Machines children. Where in college or anywhere else in the society can one learn about or gain connection to the civic life? We have in recent years attempted to send everyone on to both secondary and higher education. This noble ambition is driven partly by the value of equality and partly by the economy. We subsidized new education for all because we believe education connects people to productive employment and the subsidy comes back through the tax system and through the heightened appetites of middle-class consumption that drive the economy forward. It is now clear that we are not going to recover the subsidy through the tax system, and the virtues of increased consumption are rather in doubt. But we do need a restoration of civic life through a system of universal public service. This service should fall on students in public and private schools alike, for both receive the subsidy, which is likely to increase through tax credits: one year of service for those who attend high school; two years for those who attend a public college; three years for those who attend a private college. The mechanics are not as important as the principle: universal, nonvoluntary public service is the return we expect on education. Such service will not only serve to keep the young off the streets and out of the employment market—an unfortunate purpose of current education—it will also get accomplished some much-needed work that cannot be financed at the moment through the market or through the tax system. It will most of all give people some connection at some time in their lives with civic purpose; it will recreate at least one role from the catalog of public roles of Greek democracy when all we have left is jury duty. Civis romanus sum. I am a Roman citizen. The phrase makes no sense in a purposeless, hedonistic world. Public service, not technology, is the end goal of education, and so we might as well link it from the outset. The restoration of civic purpose and ennobling motivation remains the great objective of education in a democracy. In our democracy, where participation is defined by declining rates of ritualistic voting, we do not at the moment need the educational apparatus. We need good technical education for a relatively small number of people. Most of our occupations do not require the educational credentials placed upon them. But we need education for a real and thorough cultural literacy and a real and thorough public purpose. Plans to save education via technology reveal a deep and pervasive nostalgia for the future: a desire to escape and outrun our problems by the simple turning of the


wheel of technological progress. But the only thing that will save education and the rest of society—if it is to be saved—is to restore to it some purpose inherent in the many meanings of democracy. Alas, at the moment democracy does not have a constituency or a technology. But let us not spit on our luck. Note 1. Edward A. Feigenbaum and Pamela McCorduck, The Fifth Generation (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1983).

Afterword / The Culture in Question James W. Carey

It is a country no one can understand. And nothing is more attractive ... than an indecipherable mystery. Mario Vargas Llosa, Death in the Andes Yet even after forty years, after fifty transatlantic crossings, after uncountable transcontinental journeys, the sense of the American mystery remains strong with me. John Keegan, Fields of Battle: The Wars for North America The essays in this volume are explorations in the culture and communications of the United States in the last third of the twentieth century. This country remains, as Vargas says of Peru and as we perhaps can say of all the Creole nations of the "new world," an indecipherable mystery. Still, in a place where ambition always seems to outrun ability, the unfulfilled aim of the work, collectively considered, is the same one that John Updike noted in speaking of novels he admires: they "give us, through the consciousness of character, a geography amplified by history, a chunk of the planet." Journalism and media are devices through which to say something about character and culture in late-twentiethcentury America for the simple reason that they are sites, among others,

308

Afterword: The Culture in Question I 309 where character is formed and expressed and the contest over culture is played out. The essays proceed from a number of underlying beliefs, some of which have drawn the attention of my collaborators. Now is the time to excavate some of those beliefs, to let a cat or two out of the bag concerning some of the subjects threaded throughout the essays: culture, ritual, technology, the postmodern, and journalism.

Culture These essays were written within the general intellectual movement of "cultural studies" but represent an increasingly strange brand of that increasingly discordant project. Let us trademark the version of cultural studies represented here, if only to provide a club with which its opponents can beat it. Let us call it "ethnocentric," meaning that the object of study is not culture in general but the cultures of particular national formations, in this case that absorbingly strange formation, American culture.1 In the introduction to her remarkable Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 19205, Ann Douglas admits that she is "by trade and calling an Americanist," and she believes, contrary to much current academic opinion, that America is a special case in the development of the West.... From the start the nation has had a tangible and unique mission concocted of unlimited natural resources, theological obsessions, a multiracial and polyglot population and unparalleled incentives and opportunities for democratization and pluralism that culminated in the early modern era in the development of the media. These media have for seventy odd years now provided much of the world, for good or bad, with its common language.2

I agree with those conclusions, particularly the last part regarding the media, but I would inflect them in a somewhat different manner. Professor Douglas's outlook is often described as American exceptionalism. From the standpoint of cultural studies, however, every nation is exceptional, a special case, in the sense that it can be understood only in relation to its particular history and geography. That is not to suggest that nations are to be understood solely in their singularity, but merely that attempts to find large-scale generalizations about society and culture have proven a failure except when conducted by compar-

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isons, implicit or explicit, with other national societies. Many nations are special cases in the development of the West (or the East, for that matter). All the nations of the Americas have had their existence shaped as outlier societies, on the margins of the West, but each has been uniquely shaped. Differences among them are never more compelling than when they seem to the outsider and casual observer to be identical. Exceptionalism, American or otherwise, then, is the common rather than unusual condition of nations. Differences in any country are only known and understood, in both intellectual work and common sense, as exceptions to some other, presumably more widespread, pattern. The United States is exceptional relative to the West and to other outlier societies of the Western margin. This is hardly a matter of national pride. What most often seem exceptional about the United States are not the characteristics Professor Douglas cites—natural resources, theology, democratization, and so on (as important as these are)—but, for example, the rather darker phenomena of crime, violence, child abuse, a congenital innocence, the particular and more often than not tragic situation of African-Americans, the political disorganization of the American working class. This is a nation in which the membrane of civilization is especially thin, despite the rarity of explicitly political violence. In fact, one of the perverse aspects of American exceptionalism is that the inordinate rates of crime and violence among us are best seen as the form civil war takes in a society of hyperindividualism where the bonds of community and group life are powerfully attenuated. As a methodological injunction, then, exceptionalism is not a blessing extended over a people but an attempt to recognize its distinctive characteristics in order to speak its distinctive language and deal with its distinctive problems. What gives rise to the exceptionally attractive in a people gives rise as well to what is exceptionally hideous or, at least, powerfully disturbing. Does anyone really understand, to take one seemingly innocuous example, why Americans start forty times as many fires per capita as do the Japanese? Why New York City alone has more fires each year than Japan, where 12.0 million people live in tightly packed wood houses with paper walls and reed-covered floors? Something more is at work than the combustibility of the environment. This uniqueness of the United States, a uniqueness both common and relative, has long been recognized. Marx, in a paragraph I never tire of citing, observed:

Afterword: The Culture in Question I 311 North Americans belong ... to a country where bourgeois society did not develop on the foundation of the feudal system, but rather developed from itself; where this society appears not as the surviving result of a centuries-old movement, but rather as the starting point of a new movement; where the state, in contrast to all earlier national formations, was from the beginning subordinate to bourgeois society, to its production and never could make the pretense of being an end-initself; where, finally, bourgeois society itself, linking up the productive forces of an old world with the enormous natural terrain of a new one, has developed hitherto unheard-of dimensions and with unheard-of freedom of movement, has far outstripped all previous work in the conquest of the forces of nature, and where, finally even the antitheses of bourgeois society itself appear only at vanishing moments.3

In the Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx similarly remarks on one of the most contested terrains of cultural studies, particularly in America, that of religion: "The feverish youthful movement of material production, which has to make a new world of its own, has left neither time nor opportunity for abolishing the old spirit world."4 Marx expected this spirit world to disappear in the United States, yet at the end of the twentieth century, fueled by millennial impulse to be sure, the spirit world still grips Americans and religion continues to shape the culture in deep and surprising ways, in ways that make it unique among the industrial democracies, as any tour through cable television channels will attest. Even our forms of disbelief are peculiarly our own. Our disbeliefs mirror and extend the very impulses they otherwise reject. The natural home of cultural studies, at least within "developed cultures," is the nation-state. It is an exercise, to use the language of Stuart Adam, in understanding how it is that given cultures know, judge, and make their world. There is no attempt here to deny the importance of transnational and diasporic sites of culture, only to suggest that such sites are understood relative to the sovereign states that produce, enable, inhibit, warp, or merely tolerate such formations. Despite the easy talk about globalization and global culture, to which I will return, that remains true today. While much commerce is hypermobile and information and capital are moved over vast distances at blinding speeds by fax and modem, far outpacing the capacity of nations to regulate corporations, such organizations still rely on legal, financial, and other services that are part of a geographically situated infrastructure and cluster in cities within nations. The continued importance of national currencies alone, as the European Union dis-

312 / Afterword: The Culture in Question covers—even though such currencies are freely converted and traded— is enough to restrain the vision of globalization. The global in fact is not out there; it is embedded in national regimes, even though such regimes now stand in differing relations to one another. Corporations, even global ones, come and go, disappearing when their power to command a market evaporates, or when they fail to control costs or keep pace with technological change. Nations, however, do not fail in the same way corporations fail. Except in special and especially important circumstances, they are not "merged" into other nations or subdivided into constituent parts.5 As Paul Krugman puts it, nations "may be happy or unhappy with their economic performance but they have no well-defined bottom line."6 Nations only go bankrupt in a metaphorical sense; their creation and destruction is attributable to something more than economic factors. Indeed, despite all the forces seeking to transcend the nation, today nations remain the sturdiest of collectivities and nationalism the most rampant ideology. The evidence for this lies in the relationship between the centers and margins of social formations. The most powerful centers are national ones and the critical margins are, simultaneously, external borders, the ambiguous geographic points at which nations meet, and internal borders, where lines are drawn between those who do and those who do not belong to the nation. Both are points at which national identity threatens to evaporate. As long as national borders, internal or external, define the critical margins in the minds of most people and nations retain the monopoly on legitimate coercion and violence, national consciousness will continue to be deeper and more powerful than class consciousness and nations more solid and enduring realities than classes or other subnational formations. Furthermore, a nation is a cultural rather than an ideological prototype; its character is the outcome of history and culture, including the history and culture of its economy, rather than of ideology.7 The principal power among men and women, like it or not, is still nationalism. As early as the late Middle Ages this began to displace religion as the strongest bond of community among large numbers of people, as Benedict Anderson has emphasized.8 Carolyn Marvin's remarkable recent work has shown how nations continue to possess a religious character and are formed, maintained, and repaired through ritual, particularly rituals of blood sacrifice and atonement.9 Nations are not merely textual communities, Anderson's useful insights notwith-

Afterword: The Culture in Question I 313 standing, but are embodied in their citizens or subjects and the sacrifices they are periodically called upon to make, in body and imagination, to the gods of the nation. All this makes cultures even more psychologically recalcitrant than individuals; generation after generation, instead of year after year, they display the same traits. However much these traits may be reshaped, adapted, and newly proportioned, they are, relatively speaking, intransigent. A central character in many cultures, the trickster, can stand as an archetype of the cultural process, for the trickster represents the persistent, recurrent, and contradictory impulses of a people. Thernadier in Les Miserables, to choose only the most accessible representative of the trickster, continually reappears, always an optical illusion it takes us a moment to recognize. While the guise is always different, the character—ambitions, motivations, moods, and desires—is always the same and serves to both mock and highlight the more serious and pretentiously resolute character types in the culture. Despite the fact that tricksters embody antisocial attitudes, despite the fact that they are often on the side of the irrational and evil, audiences are asked to identify with them. The trickster provides an example, in a way both significant and frightening, of the process by which, in Stuart Adam's words, the broad, rich community-forming meanings of culture are embedded in and implicitly opposed to the narrower identities of race, gender, and class. I am making yet another form of a Weberian argument. Weber suggested that history operates to determine the future of a nation the way a game, like craps, in which the dice become loaded, does. According to Weber, by conceiving a nation's history starting as a game in which the dice are not biased at the outset, but then become "loaded" in the direction of each past outcome, one has an analogue of the way in which culture is formed. Each time the dice come up with a given number, the probability of rolling that number again increases. Or, to shift the metaphor slightly, history is recursive, a feedback loop that alters the probability of action over time. History changes the odds and overdetermines outcomes.10

Ritual One of the consistent themes of these essays, somewhat less apparent here than in Communication as Culture, is the contrast between ritual and transmission views of communication.11 This is not the place to

314 / Afterword: The Culture in Question fully develop that contrast, but rather to underscore a number of emphases it contains. To begin from ritual is to situate the inquiry, as John Pauly points out, in a world of contingency, doubt, and chaos. Chaos is always at the edge of all of our imaginings; indeed, chaos is the object of our imaginings. The flash point of our imagination is the hidden edge of dirt and dissolution, the borders, margins, and liminal spaces where dissolution most acutely threatens to break through. Culture is the ensemble of practices through which order is imposed on chaos. These practices constitute communication in the first instance, for ritual creates the forms of social relations into which people enter as opposed to the processes occurring within those forms.12 As Pauly says, we dream the forms of social order as we enact them in the practice of communication. When Erving Goffman notes that "the world in truth is a wedding," he casually throws away a truth in the form of apothegm.13 Ritual, in its primordial sense, is the principal means, though it is more than a means, through which chaos is controlled and order imposed on the disparate and contingent impulses of human action. The most embodied form of culture is in ritual, for, as Carolyn Marvin says elsewhere, ritual constructs cosmos out of chaos, a fact no less true because it embraces both ontogeny and phylogeny. The emphasis on ritual also forces one to begin the analysis of communication not with technological forms of transmission, on which more later, but to privilege the oral formation of culture and its secondary displacement in mass-mediated forms. I use conversation as what one might call a secondary metaphor for this process for both descriptive and normative reasons. To say that communication begins in ritual is to say it begins in conversation in the sense that it is embodied. Conversation requires the actual presence of bodies. To speak is to "outer" the self in an utterance, to paraphrase a line of Marshall McLuhan. It is to enter a social relation activating and displaying all the capacities of the body. In ritual and conversation signs have intrinsic agency; they are fiduciary symbols: meanings we acquire not by examining dictionaries but by embodying and acting out the claims symbols have on us. The body contains not only speech but also memory, for the primitive form of memory is in act and gesture.14 The oral and conversational then displays the body in its full apprehensive range; it utilizes not only sound but also sight, touch, and smell, not only the aural but also the visual and gestural. It is this simultaneity of presence, embodied language, and memory that McLuhan abbreviated in the

Afterword: The Culture in Question I 315 synesthesia of the senses produced by conversation and oral communication. It is a mode of the immediately present available in all the sensory channels. All ritual begins, then, to use John Pauly's apt phrase, in the gridless ambience of conversation. Such ritual, of course, can be displaced (abbreviated, transformed, resituated) in secondary, mediated forms. However, these forms—the printing press, television, the Internet—do not so much create communities as remind us of communities elsewhere embodied in first-order ritual and conversation.15 I privilege the oral over the technologically mediated for normative as well as descriptive reasons. While I will mention some of the reasons for doing so later on, here I want to underscore the point made by John Pauly. Communication understood as a metaphor of ritual and conversation encourages, even requires, a primitive form of equality because conversation must leave room for response as a condition of its continuance. Conversation enforces a recognition of others in the fullness of their presence. In conversation we must deal with the full weight of words for they put not only our minds but also our bodies in play and at risk. Therefore, to speak conversationally is not only to invite and require a response, but to temper of necessity our criticisms and alienations, our objections and differences, with expressions, implicit and explicit, of solidarity and mutual regard. For Dewey communication was a principle of ethics, not merely a form of action, for it was the condition of human learning and, therefore, the condition of survival and prosperity. Whatever inhibits and prevents communication diminishes the vitality of culture, the reach of experience, and the capacity for growth. The most frequent criticism of this view (though criticism is too mild a word) is that it is hopelessly naive and ignores the facts of conflict and power. All I can say to that is the obvious: the emphasis on ritual, the oral tradition, and culture does not exclude issues of power and conflict; instead it attempts to locate them. All societies are riddled by antinomies and contradictions: ecological, structural, and cultural. They are riddled as well by differentials of class, status, and power that are as ineradicable as the biological programming and cultural resources on which they are based. The trick is to locate the mechanisms by which differentials of power and intractable conflict are buried, deflected, resolved, exercised, and aggregated into interests. Contests over culture are the stuff of everyday life precisely because there is fre-


quently (not always) some game that is worth the candle: something worth contesting over. And more is at stake in these conflicts than economic interests; it is a prejudice of the vanguard class that aesthetic moral and political motivations are inconsequential. Ritual, in the first instance, is a form of contest, and all social conflict takes a ritualized form. Perhaps rituals of excommunication are the most fundamental of social forms and no one is quite so excommunicated as at the end of a rope. Executions are highly ritualized acts, and it is neither in confusion nor in malice that medical examiners list the cause of death following capital punishment as homicide. Homicide describes the ultimate ritual act the state takes against one of its citizens.

Technology Technology plays an inordinately powerful and shaping role in all societies, for it is not only, as Carolyn Marvin implies, a group of purposeful instruments but also a "thing to think with": things that shape the self and the mind rather than merely serve as instruments of action. Technology is highly differentiated—that is, identifiably disengaged and objectified—in all industrial societies, but it occupies a peculiar place in the life of North Americans. Technology, for us, is more than an assortment of artifacts or practices, a means to accomplish desired ends. Technology is also the central character and actor in our social drama, an end as well as a means. In fact, technology plays the role of the trickster in American culture: at each turn of the historical cycle it appears center stage, in a different guise promising something totally new. While tricksters are usually human, in traditional societies they also can be animals or have animal companions. In our environment, sheltered as it is from the world of nature, technologies can appear as tricksters or companions of tricksters in the stories and rituals we tell ourselves about ourselves. Like the "primitive" trickster, technology is often on the side of irrationality and evil, but its victims are not to be pitied, just treated as the necessary by-products of technological change. While trickster stories are told to amuse, the audience usually identifies with the trickster and thus symbolically asserts itself over the forces of the world. While tricksters can be killed, they always come back to life. And, while they display negative qualities like stupidity and pretentiousness and duplicity, they are nonetheless able to vanquish opponents. As the trickster, technology is the "load" in the dice of American

Afterword: The Culture in Question I 317

culture, for at each turn of the historical cycle newly reincarnated technologies yield and reveal recurrent patterns of consequence and desire. There are good reasons why this is true. Western technical achievement has shaped a civilization different from any previous one, and North Americans are the most advanced in that achievement. Again, "advanced" is not said with pride but in resignation, a testimony to fate. For that technical achievement has not merely shaped the externals of the society but it "molds us in what we are not only at the heart of our animality, in the propagation and continuance of our species, but in our actions and thoughts and in our imaginings. Its pursuit has become our dominant activity and that dominance fashions both the public and private realms."16 We are a people who have no history (truly our own) from before the age of progress. Our creedal history is a technical one: a people freed from the constraints of Europe so that the machine could master a presumably vacant continent, so that the machine could make history with us as both master and servant. Wedded to a deep identification with both science and religion, technology is the center of civic life, the one unquestioned good, before which we both worship in awe and collapse in fear. Our national storytelling is, to an unusual extent, embedded in the history of technology. This attitude toward technology is not unknown in most other industrial nations, but it has particularly taken root in the United States. Technology, as a character in the American social drama, acts as a higher authority adjudicating claims of both truth and morality. Or, as I have said elsewhere, in America it is the machines that possess teleological insight. This is more than technological determinism, the belief that the machines make history; technology plays rather more the role of a superlegislator with a dominating voice in the conversation of the culture. Technology, then, ought not be conceived as a force outside culture, something lying about in the bosom of nature that we just happen to discover, but as intrinsically cultural in a number of distinct senses. First, technology is a creation of human practice and ingenuity. It embodies concrete lifeways and therefore anticipates and constructs forms of life rather than passively mirroring them. In this sense technology is a symbol of (it represents how the world works) and a symbol for (it coerces the world into behaving in terms of the representations embedded in the technology). Second, once it is constituted, technology must

318 / Afterword: The Culture in Question be propitiated. In his The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell compares the modern dilemma with that of "primitive" peoples: For the primitive hunting peoples of those remotest human millenniums when the sabertooth tiger, the mammoth and the lesser presences of the animal kingdom were the primary manifestations of what was alien—the source at once of danger and of sustenance— the great human problem was to become linked psychologically to the task of sharing the wilderness with these beings. An unconscious identification took place, and this was finally rendered conscious in the half human, half animal figures of the totem-ancestors.... Through acts of literal imitation . . . an effective annihilation of the human ego was accomplished and society achieved a cohesive organization.17

We are not spared, even in an age of advanced technology, the need to annihilate the ego, to merge into our environment. To twist some unlikely lines of Marshall McLuhan, if people in earlier ages quelled their terror by putting on animal strait]ackets, we unconsciously do the same thing vis-a-vis the machine.18 As humans ritually and psychologically got into animal skins, so we have already gone much of the distance toward assuming and propagating the behavior mechanisms of the machines that both sustain and menace us. Kenneth Burke observed during a New York electrical blackout that if it continued for long, humans would pray for electricity as others still pray for rain. And, in moments of massive technological breakdowns, such as the Challenger explosion, there is always a predictable search for human error. How can the machines, on which we have staked so much of our lives, fail us? The rituals of theory are themselves ways of propitiating technology. If human imagination operates mainly by a process of analogy, a "seeing-as" comprehension of the less intelligible by the more (the universe is a hogan, the world a wedding), the main analogy of modern thought is technology. We first build machines and then use them as models for understanding human nature and conduct, as when the brain and mind are comprehended as a computer. This is particularly true with the human body, which is no longer seen as an expression of divine purposes or the residence of the soul but as a scientific field and a Utopian fantasy. By analogy, the body has been understood as a particular kind of machine. This understanding is not merely a symbol or metaphor of the body but a symbol and metaphor for the body. The ef-


fort to harness the "human motor" has transformed our understanding of work, society, and modernity itself. As Anson Rabinbach, on whom I rely for these notions, argues in The Human Motor, the motorized view of the body gave rise to a particular scientific Utopia: the vision of society without fatigue, arrest, or wearing out. Alas, despite this understanding we continue to run into our biological limits and our bodies consistently disappoint us, and we seek, therefore, in technology an antidote to our anxiety of limits.19 To view technology as thoroughly cultural is an attempt to escape, rather than reproduce, the endless and unproductive arguments surrounding technological determinism. From a cultural viewpoint, technological artifacts are understood, at least in a provisional and hypothetical way, as homunculi: concrete embodiments of human purposes, social relations and forms of organization. Certain technologies imaginatively constitute, express, and compress into themselves the dominant features of the surrounding social world. A homunculus is a society writ small. It is also a human person writ small insofar as it serves not merely as a template for producing social relations but as a template for producing human nature as well. This is not a question of determination or causality, at least in any normal sense. There is no suggestion that the printing press or the computer, for example, determines the essential feature of society or human nature. But such technologies do not, as Raymond Williams's rewriting of the notion of determination suggests, merely set limits or create pressures.20 When technology functions as a master symbol, it operates not as an external and causal force but as a blueprint: something that makes phenomena intelligible and through that intelligibility sets the conditions for their secondary reproduction. Once adopted as fact and symbol, as a model of and instrument for, technology works its independent will not by virtue of its causality but by virtue of its intelligibility or textuality: its ability to realize an aesthetically pleasing, politically useful, socially powerful order of things. For Durkheim the totem served as a homunculus; for Marx it was the commodity. My argument is that for the modern period, technology as a gross complex (mechanics, electronics) or particular artifacts (printing press, computer) better suits the purpose of analysis. But it must be technology seen less as a physical contrivance and more as a cultural performance: more on the model of a theater that contains and


shapes our interactions than a natural force acting upon us from the outside. David Bolter catches something of that cultural performance in his notion of a defining technology: A defining technology develops links, metaphorically or otherwise, with a culture's science, philosophy, or literature; it is always available to serve as a metaphor, example, model or symbol. A defining technology resembles a magnifying glass, which collects and focuses seemingly disparate ideas in a culture into one bright, sometimes piercing ray. Technology does not call forth major cultural changes by itself, but it does bring ideas into a new focus by explaining or exemplifying them in new ways to large audiences.21

Henry Adams's image of the dynamo, a condensation symbol of a whole array of power technologies, served as a homunculus for the late nineteenth century. Power technology effected the very displacements—the removal of time, place, and vision—that laid the groundwork for the creation of commodities. But information technology, first with the telegraph's separation of transportation and communication, had already begun its displacement of power technology as the homunculus for industrial civilization at the moment Marx was writing his acid hymn to commodities. A century later, Norbert Wiener could declaim in Cybernetics that the principal problem of engineering was not the conversion of energy into power but the economy of a signal, for he recognized that power machines were no longer agents of their own, subject only to direct human intervention.22 Power machines now had to submit to the hegemony of information machines that coordinated their effects. As David Bolter says: As a calculating machine, a machine that controls machines, the computer does occupy a special place in our cultural landscape. It is the technology that more than any other defines our age. . . . For us today, the computer constantly threatens to break out of the tiny corner of human affairs (scientific measurement and business accounting) that it was built to occupy, to contribute instead to a general redefinition of certain basic relationships: the relation of science to technology, [of] knowledge to technical power, and, in the broadest sense, of mankind to the world of nature.23

None of this contradicts what I said earlier concerning nations and nationalism. Technology comes to stand for the nation in North America; it is one of the dominant ways in which the very idea of freedom, the God-term among us, is embodied in material artifacts and played

Afterword: The Culture in Question I 321 out on a dramatic stage. For us technology is, in Tocqueville's words, "the hidden source of energy, the life principle," the ultimate current running below the surface of our lives. The symbolic and geographic space of the national genius is the reach of its technology, its spacebinding technology, which shapes the contours of nationhood and its displacement into its margins. By placing culture at the center, and by identifying culture, in the first instance, with ritual and conversation, I want to underscore, on the one hand, that technology is part of culture rather than an independent force of nature and, on the other, to highlight lifeways that might offset and contain the spatial bias of technology, a bias toward the subjugation of ever further reaches of space to the control of mechanically transmitted forms of communication. To overcome the bias of space one must resituate communication as Harold Innis emphasized, in the body, in ritual and conversation and the endurance of time. Contemporary media by saturating the moment obliterate time, imprisoning it within the grid of space. The oral tradition is an exercise, to quote the title of Frank Conroy's memoir, in "stop-time": time-binding media negate time; they recreate the past in the present through the repetitive and mnemonic power of the word and the body.

The Postmodern As the millennium approaches, we confront even more insistent claims that we are going through a great social transformation, from the modern to the postmodern, from the industrial to the postindustrial, driven by the qualitatively new technology of satellites and computers: the new age of the electronic cottage and global society. There are many poets and prophets of the withering away of the state and the new technological (and mediacentric) civilization emerging from its ashes, "which blind men everywhere are trying to suppress," but few of them resemble Marx and many more Alvin Toffler. For such, the new society aborning will create a new generation, children of the eighth day, after genesis, inheritors and architects of a new future. There is just enough truth in these claims to give them a surface plausibility. We are undoubtedly in the midst of an important technological change, and the distinction between the modern and the postmodern is as good a set of terms as any other to describe it. However, the ideologies used to describe this change, for some postmodernism,

322 / Afterword: The Culture in Question for some postindustrialism, and the social process in which it is presumably embedded, postmodernization or postindustrialization, seem wide of the mark of the actual state of affairs. The essays in this volume, along with Communication as Culture, seek a different descriptive vocabulary and a different moral and political vocabulary as well. The modern era of communications begins during the decade of the 18905. A precise date is unnecessary, but that decade can serve as the approximate moment when, in the United States, space and time were enclosed, when it became possible to think of the nation as everywhere running on the same clock of awareness and existing within a homogeneous national space. The technologies that made the modern era possible were the telegraph and the railroad, which from the 18308 forward gradually laid the infrastructure for a national society. In 1883 the telegraph permitted the development of time zones so that one could determine the precise time, down to the minute and second, at any point in the nation. This not only created the knowledge of the time a call was received at the other end of a long-distance wire but also, more importantly, permitted and encouraged the detailed regulation and control of human activity within the expanded space defined by uniform time. Similarly, when the railroad linked every important town and city in the nation, a map of space was created that was also a map of probable movement. The trunk network of the railroad and telegraph was then backed and filled as smaller communities were integrated into the spatial-temporal system or allowed to wither and pass away. When the railroad and telegraph had linked every town and time, a national system of communications, regular and periodical, was possible for the first time. On the backbone of that system, a national community of politics and commerce could be constructed. No longer would people live in isolated island communities, exclusively attuned to local rhythms and customs, dimly aware of a nation beyond local borders except as news irregularly arrived or national emergencies precipitated a heightened consciousness of the nation. The creation of a fully national society was, of course, slow, uneven, and irregular. Long after 1890, many people continued isolated existences, and many communities held on even though they had been bypassed by the railroad and telegraph; the struggle of local life against the national system was a persistent feature of commerce, politics, and communications for much of this century. Nonetheless, by 1890 everyone in principle was keeping to the same clock and was accessible to

Afterword: The Culture in Question I 323 national wire services, magazines, books, and catalogs on a regular basis. However intermittently, everyone became part of the Great Audience, the imaginary community of the nation, capable of a singular focus of attention at a determined time. The perfection or completion of this national system took place only over many decades and required the invention of more flexible and "lighter" means of spatial conquest: film, radio, and television. By lumping these separate technologies together rather than assigning them distinct histories, I seek to emphasize that they were created with the same end in view: the construction and integration of a national society in which distant centers of political and cultural authority could form direct relations with individuals, circumventing the interference of local, immediate, and proximate institutions. Television completes and perfects the national system, finishes what the wire services and national magazine began. With television every home in the nation and, with only slight exaggeration, every individual within the home, could be linked to every other home and individual through a common medium, which is to say, through a centralized source of supply. The first cable systems, the last mile of the national system of communication and, as it turned out, the first mile of the new global system, linked those places inaccessible to over-the-air signals and fulfilled the social imaginary of the nineteenth century—the eclipse of time and space: one nation under a common system of communication (One Nation under Television, as J. Fred MacDonald usefully called it) sitting down to be counted together, at the "same" time and for same purpose.24 In country after country, whether driven by commercial or political imperatives, the names of television companies expressed the desire and the result: the American Broadcasting Corporation, the British Broadcasting Corporation, systems that could endow individuals with a new identity, members of the Great Audience who were also part of a Great Community, however artificial in its construction. This national system of communication held until sometime in the 19708. Again, we do not need a precise date on which to fix the beginning of the unraveling of the national system. I think of it as beginning around 1975 with the launching of satellites for Home Box Office and direct pay television and the subsequent transformation of small cable systems, which were merely adjuncts of network television, into independent competitors of the networks. The integration of cable, satellite, and computer not only permitted but also imagined new conceptions

324 / Afterword: The Culture in Question of time and space, beyond those rooted in the national system: a world of microseconds and global villages. The unraveling of the old system and the construction of the new will occupy the next few decades, at a minimum, but some of the consequences of these changes are now apparent, however dimly. Far from reversing general tendencies in the culture, these changes project traditional attitudes concerning the self and society—the individual freed from all communal bonds except those so remote and abstract as to be without force—onto a transnational and microtemporal plane. The postmodern in most of its forms is, distressing or not, quite familiar, though we are in for some surprises along the way. Those who are congenitally optimistic paper over the multiple and overlapping paradoxes in the growth of a new communication system through happy beliefs that with digitalization, all media (and even all thinking) become interchangeable or that the synergy of different technologies will lead to a magical convergence, of nations, political systems, and economies. But such abstractions merely ignore both the nature, which is to say the intention or purposes, of the new technology and the social and symbolic ecology within which they are embedded. Inevitably, a change in the communication system of this magnitude produces intense social contradiction and significant personal and collective disarray. Cultural fragmentation and postmodern homogenization are two constitutive trends of a single global reality. We are living, engineering and hardware notwithstanding, in a period of enormous disarray in all our institutions and in much of our personal life as well. We exist in a "verge," in the sense Daniel Boorstin gave that word: a moment between two different forms of social life in which technology has dislodged all human relations and nothing stable has as yet replaced them.25 Media may be converging, but only in the minor sense that computer power permits the conversion of words and images into numbers, of analog models into digital ones, providing a unified drive train for what have been heretofore separable means of communication. However, social convergence does not follow, as it is frequently implied, technical convergence. Alas, the only social convergence about these days is found in simulated electronic cottages in research laboratories; out on the streets, in cities and neighborhoods where we live, the separatist tendencies outweigh, at the moment, the convergent ones. There is a tension and contradiction, today increasingly on a global scale, between the apparent order of technology and commerce and the

Afterword: The Culture in Question I 325 apparent disorder of migration, messages, and settlements. While the growth of modern communications, technology, and commerce has made space more uniform, the same process has radically destabilized time. The industrialization of time reduces the half-life of every phenomenon, collapses and telescopes persistence into an enduring present. As the spread of the national or modern system of communication met everywhere with resistence, the postmodern or global system confronts opposition, frequently described and dismissed as cultural lag. One form of such resistance is the process of indigenization, whereby technologically imported culture is nativized in the very act of being absorbed. Arjun Appadurai has argued that as fast as forces from various metropolises are brought into new societies, they tend to become indigenized in one or another way; this is true of music and housing styles as much as it is of science and terrorism, spectacles and constitutions.26 Whether this resistance is temporary, as was resistance to the modern, or merely a rearguard action remains to be seen. However, there is evidence that the contemporary dynamic in the relations of states and peoples no longer can be understood explosively, as Harold Innis understood it, as a movement outward from metropole to hinterland, center to margin. Today there are radical disjunctions between the flow of power, culture, and status; between political, economic, and cultural flows; between the flows of currencies, messages, and migrants. None of these flows maps onto another with quite the correlation that occurred during the dominance of the national system. However, these postmodern flows have produced phenomena parallel to those that accompanied the creation of the modern system of communication in the late nineteenth century: a category crisis or cultural meltdown in which established conceptual schemes no longer make adequate sense of the self or the world; frenzied attempts to build new conceptual schemes to account for changed circumstances; an attempt to deconstruct metanarratives of the modern and build new historical understandings under the banner of postmodernism; a destruction of fixed, subjective identities and the search for new forms of self-understanding and new forms of social relations; the eruption of new social movements that attempt to reconstruct politics, economics, and social life; a reconstruction of the dimensions of space and time through the agency of new communications technology; a new migra-


tion that unsettles established social fronts of the city, nation, and globe; and, of course, the international expansion of capitalism, which keeps the whole pot boiling. We are living, in short, in the midst of a crisis of representation in a nation whose culture is like a bonfire on an ice floe, particularly prone to recurrent but intense periods in which society and social relations go opaque. If the disturbances of the world were entirely objective ones, disturbances in a common environment, we might be able to assimilate them seamlessly. However, these "objective" conditions are subjectively experienced as the displacement of identity, or in more fashionable terminology, the decentering of the subject. Throughout the culture we are confronted by category crises, failures of definitional distinction, and transgressive leaps. Borderlines between categories become increasingly permeable, and crossings between fundamental distinctions—between objective and subjective, black and white, male and female, night and day, rich and poor—are both common and problematic. To generalize, everything has been placed in doubt, is under erasure. We can no longer take the established categories of the culture for granted, whether they are seen as constructed or biological. This represents a displacement of fixed and given subjectivities and sets in motion a restless search for new identities that can act as the countersigns of new practices. In turn, the category crisis sets in motion the search for new metanarratives with which to the tell the story of our lives. In short, the twin processes of convergence and divergence jostle and compete with one another to form a new social ecology and cultural equilibrium. This is a process, experienced imaginatively, whereby the world simultaneously comes together and falls apart.27 We are living amidst a cultural meltdown, to be hyperbolic about it, a displacement and transgression of the symbolic, but it is unclear what will replace the terms with which we have navigated our sense of the world and our own nature for at least the last hundred years. Foucault describes this somewhere as the "insurrection of subjugated knowledges," but the rather romantic notion of the return of the repressed disguises rather than illuminates the real social process. Something will be invented to do the cultural work of mapping the social, but that something is at the moment not repressed but merely undiscovered. In an essay thirty years ago I suggested that one way to understand these global processes was that human diversity was disappearing, at least in a spatial sense.28 Communications, technology, and economic

Afterword: The Culture in Question I 327 modernization were reducing the variations in conduct, culture, and human institutions throughout the world. The contrasts that remained were, to use Clifford Geertz's phrase, paler and softer than those detailed in the anthropological texts. All of us were increasingly living one uniform way of life under very similar economic and political circumstances. However, I also suggested that the end of diversity was not yet at hand. As spatial diversity decreased, temporal diversity increased. As differences among people in space declined, differences among people in generational terms increased. The axis of diversity, in other words, had shifted from space to time, from differences between societies to differences between generations within societies. The sharpest evidence of this was the development of new age-segregated patterns of living and, more importantly, the generational styles of popular culture that bore discontinuous outlooks and sensibilities. In other words, we were living in a world where under the force of communications and transportation—all the imperialisms of which we were daily reminded—it was getting rather hard to find headhunters, people who climb mountains on their knees, and others who predict the weather from the entrails of a pig. The good old days of cannibalism and the ritual sacrifice of virgins were gone, perhaps forever. Moreover, the strangest tribes about those days were not on some dark continent where the people looked familiar, but up close in suburban living rooms where grandparents, parents, and children confronted one another across a cultural chasm wider than the Pacific. I was wrong, at least in a portion of that conclusion, as Clifford Geertz subsequently taught me.29 It is not that spatial differences were being erased, but that they were relocated from there to here. As he put it, the age of large undifferentiated total societies facing off against one another was, relatively speaking, gone. The old comparisons of East versus West, primitive versus modern, developed versus underdeveloped, anthropologist versus native did not work anymore. There is no longer an East here and a West there, a primitive in Malaysia and a modern in New York. The natives, if you will forgive me, are everywhere, and so are we. If someone is predicting the weather from the entrails of a pig, chances are he is living next door. If there is widow burning going on, it is likely to occur outside of town rather than halfway around the world. The most recent case of cannibalism I have encountered has not been in some dark continent elsewhere but in relatively enlightened Milwaukee.

328 / Afterword: The Culture in Question The force of this change was caught by Marshall McLuhan's suggestion that the period of explosion, when the West sailed forth to convert the natives, was over. The communication and transportation system was now running in reverse; cultures were imploding, taking up residence next to one another on the television set and in the housing subdivision. You can now sample many of the tribes of the world by taking a one-hour stroll through the neighborhoods of most cities or grazing through cable television channels. But if space has imploded so that what was once out there is now in here (next door, around the corner, in the next office, on Channel 51), so has time. The differences in generations grow more rather than less substantial, and the young adopt the culturally exotic without reference to space, time, or circumstance. Still, even with those temporal differences, national groups, not to speak of religious and ethnic ones, remain stubbornly identifiable over time. If I can shift the metaphor to an aesthetic one deployed by Geertz, we can no longer understand the world as a still life through the standing back of perspectival painting; rather, it is a collage of conflicting and randomly assorted elements in which the artist is absorbed into the art. We live amidst enormous cultural and social diversity, part of it the persisting traces of older ways of life and part of it generated on new axes of differentiation such as those of gender and sexuality. There seems to be no end to the delicacy and invidiousness with which we can describe, impute, and elaborate human difference. We can no longer count the number of tribes—old and new—that array themselves before us. I have tried to describe a displacement in which, to again borrow a formulation of Geertz, a world of integral societies in distant communication disappears into a collage of side-by-side and jumbled societies of clashing sensibilities and unavoidable conflicts. And this makes us much more sensitive to the variant structures of subjectivity, to the increasingly larger variety of ways in which people think their thoughts, live their lives, and arrange their institutions. And that brings the argument full circle, for despite the changes herein enumerated, the persistence of the underlying forces in American culture remains the most impressive phenomenon, and nothing has diluted their power to absorb new members into the community. We may be in a global village, but we have not transcended or eradicated the force of national culture and we do not appear to be on the verge of

Afterword: The Culture in Question I 329 doing so anytime soon. In the United States at least we are again in a period of social Darwinism, hyperindividualism, and fragmentation. Antistatist attitudes persist and antipublic ones have reached new intensity, which accounts for resurgent attempts to articulate new public philosophies as a means of constituting new social practices. However new this all seems, Americans appear to be learning again how to live together by experimenting with new ways of living apart.30

Journalism It is against this backdrop that one must understand the present afflictions of journalism. Like all our social practices, journalism is not immune from the eruption of the postmodern; indeed, this historical conjuncture and rupture affects journalism in two obvious ways. First, the development of what is innocently called the "information society" has destroyed or radically transformed the organizational base of journalism and created a new system for the industrial production of culture. Journalism, as a result, has ceased to be a distinct activity and has been submerged within the entertainment, telecommunications, and computer industries. The line between what is a journalism organization and division and what is entertainment or information or even a phone call or letter has been effaced. These changes have occurred with the encouragement of governments everywhere, largely as a means of maintaining global competitiveness in telecommunications. The elimination of government regulation and public service standards in broadcasting has erased the distinction between journalism, entertainment, and information, blurred the line between entertainment and news divisions of broadcasting organizations, and led many newspaper and magazine companies to desert or marginalize their core journalism activities in search of a purchase on an ill-defined but potentially profitable information industry. The formation of Time Warner, the absorption of ABC by Disney, the disappearance of journalism organizations, and the loss of autonomy of journalism divisions within newspaper and broadcasting firms are the outward signs of a radical change in the system by which journalism is created and disseminated. Second, it is no longer quite so easy to distinguish journalism from other forms of writing and imagining. The membrane separating journalism and the novel and short story, fact and fiction, has been pierced, and these forms and many others flow into one another. The distinction

330 / Afterword: The Culture in Question between fact and fiction, journalism and the novel, was itself a historical creation of the early history of printing, driven by needs of the courts in settling claims of libel. The disruption of distinctions so painfully achieved is part of a general cultural process that Clifford Geertz has called the blurring of genres, in which established forms of writing (and film and television making) lose their hard edges. To paraphrase Geertz, we have pieces of criticism pretending to be science, histories written in equations, parables passing as ethnographies, travelogues passing as theoretical treatises, polemics and ideology passing as social science, journalism passing as fiction, and fiction passing as journalism.31 Words and phrases like docudrama and infotainment, the nonfiction novel and new journalism signal a reshuffling of the imaginative cards of journalism, paralleled by disruptions in and redrawing of the established map of cultural forms. Not only is it now hard to determine precisely where journalism ends and other forms begin, but lines between forms of journalism have been similarly disrupted. Can anyone seriously pretend these days to distingush with any precision between reporting and advocacy; between news, analysis, and commentary; between opinion and fact; between the editorial and the news pages; or, frequently, between what is advertising and what is editorial? Part of the disarray in journalism is the loss of any sure footing in its imaginative forms. Similarly, the fraternity of journalism can no longer keep track of its members. Are Oprah Winfrey and Phil Donahue journalists? Is Pat Buchanan both a journalist and a politician, depending on the day? How about Joe Klein? What is the relation between Hard Copy and the evening news? When is Joan Didion writing journalism and when is she writing stories? Does it even matter anymore? Journalism can hardly be exempted from the crisis afflicting other departments of life, the confusions of identity that stretch from the most isolated individual to the most complex organizations. Journalism, like everything else, is rather in disarray these days, beset by a bafflement of purposes, a damaged self-understanding, and a confusion of mission and possibilities. But the disruption of journalism is rather more disquieting than the fact that we can no longer tell which parts of the movie are advertising and which parts are the story, for journalism is central to our politics, to the power of the state, to our capacity to form livable communities, indeed to our survivability as a democratic community. Therefore, it is rather important that we get a clear fix on the changes affecting journalism and both adapt and reinvigorate the

Afterword: The Culture in Question I 331 most ennobling traditions of the craft. Many such experiments in reclamation—most notably the movement of public journalism with which Jay Rosen is so closely identified—are under way. To ensure that these experiments sustain rather than fail us, journalism and journalists need a more usable history of their own craft than the one that has been bequeathed them, that story of the march of freedom in the world that I have earlier characterized as the Whig interpretation of journalism history. While I do not quite know how to write this more usable history, I am sure that it must be grounded in three principles. First, a usable history of journalism might be abbreviated as a plea for a "return to practice." This theme is part of a philosophical turn identified, for example, with Bernard Williams and Charles Taylor, with the reawakening of interest in John Dewey and the general revival of pragmatism.32 One might describe the "return to practice" as an attempt to dislodge questions such as What is objectivity? and focus instead on the procedures, rules, and conventions by which journalists go about their business. In short, a return to practice leads one away from abstractions such as objectivity or the people's right to know to the actual doings, to the activities whereby journalists make the world. Journalists do not live in a world of disembodied ideals; they live in a world of practices. These practices not only make the world, they make the journalist. Journalists are constituted in practice. So, the appropriate question is not only what kind of world journalists make but also what kinds of journalists are made in the process. Finally, then, we must ask not what the ideals of journalists are but what the spirit that is expressed in practice is and to what degree that spirit and practice are consistent with our needs as a democratic people. To see journalism as a form of culture is to see it as a practice of world making, of the making of meaning and significance.33 Like all practices, those of journalists are contingent; that is, they are variable over time, place, and circumstance. Nothing disables journalists more than thinking that current practice is somehow in the nature of things, that the practices nature and history determined were of the essence of journalism. Current practice is one variable expression of a continuously changing activity. Nothing disables journalism historians more than thinking that current practice is somehow the destination to which history has directed the craft in the pursuit of ideals like truth and freedom. Journalism has a history that is more than the history of institutions or technologies or economic arrangements. Journalism has

332 / Afterword: The Culture in Question a history as a variable form of comprehending and being in the world, a mode of conduct and a form of self-understanding derived from that conduct. Second, if journalism is a social practice, it should not be confused, as is done regularly in education and elsewhere, with technology or media or communication. Media are organizations or bureaucracies within which some forms of journalism are practiced. Technologies are means or instruments with which journalism is practiced. Communications is an undifferentiated social process for transferring meaning that shares some features with journalism, though not necessarily those features most important to democratic politics. But communications, media, and technology are not the same thing as journalism. Journalism can be practiced in large organizations or small ones, by independent practitioners or large teams, using the human voice or hand or printing press or television camera. How and where journalism occurs is of some importance, but to confuse journalism with media or communications is to confuse the fish story with the fish. Third, journalism as a practice is unthinkable except in the context of democracy; in fact, journalism is usefully understood as another name for democracy. The practices of journalism are not self-justifying; they are not ends in themselves. Rather, they are justified in terms of the social consequences they engender, namely, the constitution of a democratic social order. There were media in the old Soviet Union just as there was communication and even something resembling a news business. There just wasn't any journalism, because there was no democracy, which alone gives rise to the social practice of journalism. Modern despotic societies, to paraphrase some lines of Charles Taylor, go through the motions of journalism. Editorials purport to express the opinions of the writers offered for the consideration of their fellow citizens; stories in newspapers and on television claim to tell the truth about current events; mass demonstrations that purport to give vent to the indignation of large numbers of people are organized. All this takes place as if a genuine process were forming a common mind through exchange. However, the entire result is carefully controlled from the outset.34 Soviet journalism was an oxymoron because journalism requires the institutions of democratic life, either in fact or in aspiration. I say that journalism needs a more usable history, one focused on practice, than any heretofore provided it because the existing histories are largely histories of technology (the printing press or television sig-

Afterword: The Culture in Question I 333 nal) or histories of bureaucracies (the television network or newspaper) or of abstract processes (freedom, objectivity, partisanship) but not of a continuous social practice possessed of a distinctive nature, grounded in democratic aspirations, but variable across times, technology, and bureaucracies.35 Journalism is a particular form of social practice, a form of inscribing the world, first in speech, then in print, then in the modern "advanced" arts of broadcasting and electronics. What unifies the practice across time, media, and organizations is its democratic context and something more. Michael Oakeshott has argued that history is the whole of the real understood under the category of the past. Stuart Adam, in an original twist on this view, argues that journalism is whole of the real understood under the category of the present?6 Journalism, then, must be examined as the practices by which the real is made under the category of the present. And, as a historical fact, this making has occurred, even in the most proximate sense, only under conditions of democracy. As I argued in an earlier chapter, journalism begins at a verge between the oral and printed traditions, at the birth of the modern democracies. It is no accident that the Stationers Company was particularly assiduous in its licensing and censorship of song lyrics, for, at the onset of the modern world, news was carried by speech and elaborated in song. Journalism begins as an elaboration of what was being said in the oral register, generally understood as public opinion or the opinions being uttered in public. Journalism begins in speech; journalism is about a world where "public" speaking is a common, taken-for-granted practice, though a practice undertaken in the awareness of the possibilities of writing and printing. This is the spirit embedded in practice I mentioned earlier. This spirit is one of active engagement, and the practices include arguing, organizing, assembling, demonstrating, and petitioning as well as voting. Sometimes this sort of thing is simply assumed, as I tried to illustrate earlier, in my discussion of the First Amendment as a description of practice. When the Bill of Rights asserts "the right of people to peacefully assemble," one expects, not to put too fine a point on it, assemblies. It would be a very bad sign were the "people" never to exercise this right. Precisely for this reason, democracy is characterized by a series of explicit efforts to create and sustain an active citizenry, which, of course, is the practical meaning of the clauses of the First Amendment.37

334 / Afterword: The Culture in Question Journalism also arose in the context of the nation-state. As Benedict Anderson has argued, journalism and the novel emerged within the context of the nation; they were one of the forms in which the nation was embodied. In a nice phrase, he describes journalism and the novel as complex glosses on the word meanwhile. Both imputed to the nation a form of simultaneity, a shared awareness of the happenings within the boundaries of the nation. This does not mean that nations are textual communities. As I argued earlier, nations are embodied first of all in their citizens and in the active ritualized exchanges among them. Those exchanges are then given a shared but second-order reality on the larger stage of the text. But without the presence of the ritual forms, the textual community would hardly constitute a nation. The nation was mediated through the public and through what can only be called public journalism. The modern system of communications came into existence in the early 18905 and had a continuous history across a number of different types of media until, roughly, the mid 19705. One might equate the modern system of journalism with the "network era," for it runs from the formation of the Associated Press out of various regional press associations through the maturity of the television networks. The modern era is also the national era because the telos of the system was the construction of a national network that linked every household in the nation with every other. The defining characteristic of the network was an implicit equation between membership in the household, membership in the "Great Audience" of the media, and membership in the nation. The modern communication system visualized and produced the imaginary community of the nation. While such a community could be imagined for relatively small countries on the basis of the printing press alone, the temporal and spatial dimensions of a country as large as the United States, and one continuously expanding throughout the nineteenth and part of the twentieth century, required electronic communications and high-speed transportation, beginning with the railroad and telegraph, in order to put everyone in the same place for purposes of communication. The national system of communication interpellated everyone into discourse—it addressed them—on the basis of their nationality, their "Americanness," rather than their membership in subnational entities. Journalism was the driving force in the development of a national communication system. The need to integrate the nation through a uni-


form "informational culture" required news to become a commodity for systematic distribution. Journalism produced much of the traffic over the railroad and telegraph as well as the wire service and magazine. While newspapers remained local in origin, their content, which had always contained significant amounts of "distant news," became even more dependent on the correspondent and the wire service. If journalism was the driving force in the creation of a national communication system, it progressively lost ground during the twentieth century to entertainment, to the mass production of culture. The latter became, beginning with the movies and accelerating with radio and television, the control mechanism shaping and dominating the content of the national system. The extent of this change was not fully apparent until the end of the era, when, with the emergence of cable, satellites, and computers, the old but refashioned Hollywood studios came increasingly not only to own the old news business but to situate that business fully within the culture of entertainment. Earlier I outlined the dominant motifs of journalism in the modern era—its characteristic forms and outlooks—to which I here wish to add but a few grace notes. Like Michael Schudson before me, I attribute the emergence of objectivity in journalism to the struggle journalists faced in defining a place for themselves within the modern system of communication.38 With the end of partisan journalism, journalists were deprived of a point of view from which to describe the world they inhabited. That world was less and less governed by political parties, and journalists were set free of those parties in any event, so journalists, capitalizing on the growing prestige of science, positioned themselves outside the system of politics, as observers stationed on an Archimedean point above the fray of social life. Journalists attempted to insulate themselves (unsuccessfully, it turned out) from the play of interests and interest groups that increasingly dominated politics. They created a stationary point in an unstable world from which to review, report, and comment on politics. This positioning, and the quasi-scientific method that backed it, also gave them a mission: the unmasking of appearances, the penetration through the secondary qualities of social life to the primary realities, the deep truth, hidden from public view. I earlier said that journalists adopted the role of the independent voter—the voter free of all prejudicial affiliations. Actually, journalists went further; they became the independent nonvoter, independent of the very

336 / Afterword: The Culture in Question society on which they reported and commented and whose democratic forms provided them with their only justification. While journalists were positioned and given a mission by the ethic of independence, they were not automatically provided with a justification for their outlook and status. This was found in a refashioning of the history of journalism, what I called a Whig interpretation of history, aimed at showing that the craft was destined by the very nature of freedom for this resting point. The First Amendment was reinterpreted to yield the image of a fourth estate and an adversary press. The claims of journalists to the status of independent observers, and the freedom and benefits that flowed from such status, were now shown to be both in the nature of things—determined by the underlying progressive forces of history—and constitutionally sanctioned and demanded. Journalists were now not only independent of the claims of society but formed an actual estate, an institution, in Potter Stewart's conception, with a constitutionally defined role relative to other branches of society. Thus, journalists achieved remarkable freedom from the demands of membership in society and increasing status, objectively affirmed and subjectively enjoyed, among the sanctioned elite: a new media priesthood for a new media age. But the relocation of the press clause as the possession of an institution indirectly provided constitutional protection to technology. It literalized the meaning of press, taking the First Amendment away from a speaking public. This made journalism synonymous with the technology protected by the reinterpreted First Amendment. Journalism was no longer a practice identified with democracy but a right possessed by a technology. When the meaning of freedom of speech and press was further removed from political discourse and identified by the courts with art, obscenity, gesture, and behavior, the line separating journalists from the media, journalism from communication, imaginative writing from technology was further erased as the century progressed. Michael Schudson says in his commentary that journalism must be understood not only as culture but as citizenship. He subsequently modifies this to a call to analyze "citizenship itself as a cultural construct, and to see news as one feature in the construction and representation of its changing formations." I take this to be another way of saying, underscored by Jay Rosen, that journalism and politics mutually form one another, that they are symbiotic, and this lends credence to the claim that democracy and journalism are names of the same thing. As I

Afterword: The Culture in Question I 337 argued earlier, every conception of journalism and the press stitches the citizen, implicitly or explicitly, into a given role in the political formation. The modern notion of the fourth estate and the adversary press, which are names of practices and positions rather than things, stitched the citizen into a passive role as a spectator. The practices of writing and reporting the journalist thinks of as constituting "objectivity" cast the citizen in the role of student to be educated by the press rather than a participant in the process of self-government. Objectivity cultivated the naive belief that if the citizen was educated, knowledgeable, informed, somehow everything would be all right. Unfortunately, this turned journalism into something of a roman a clef: missives exchanged among insiders that could only be read if one already understood everything that was unsaid. Journalism, then, became progressively removed from the public realm, understandable only to insiders. Citizens were free to accept or reject it but they were not free to argue with it. This was a journalism in which journalists, while not citizens themselves, acted on behalf of citizens, disempowering them while leaving them with an addiction to news and an aversion to talk and political participation. Journalists, while not citizens, claimed the rights of citizens as a fiduciary. Adversary journalism, the journalism of independence and the fourth estate, had its historic work to do. Such journalism will continue and will continue to be a valued practice in any future I can imagine. However, adversary journalism can now no longer be the paradigm of the craft; as a paradigm, it has reached its end in the postmodern era. For with it, journalists have lost leadership and control over the process of public communication. Journalists are now swimming with sharks, and the noblest purposes of journalism are in doubt. In the new world of media which journalists inhabit, the public realm is declared completely unnecessary. The newspaper and the television station, with rare exceptions, become instruments of marketing, devoid of any political purpose or community-forming function. They are mere handmaidens of the individual, the device through which individuals free themselves from any social obligation or relation, or objects of consumption. But when the citizen disappears into the consumer, the journalist disappears into the propagandist or marketer, for their identities are reciprocally formed. Public journalism, of the kind advocated and shaped by Jay Rosen, in concert with many others, is an attempt to revive public life, to

338 / Afterword: The Culture in Question re-create journalism as a practice.39 It is an experiment whose end is in doubt but whose purpose is not: it is nothing less than the re-creation of a participant, speaking public, ritually formed for democratic purposes, brought to life via conversation between citizen journalists and journalist citizens. Notes 1.1 have developed this version of cultural studies rather more extensively in "Reflections on (American) Cultural Studies," in Beyond Cultural Studies, ed. Marjorie Ferguson and Peter Golding ( London: Sage, 1997). 2. Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty; Mongrel Manhattan in the 19205 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 3. 3. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations for the Critique of Political Economy (New York: Vintage, 1973), 884. 4. Karl Marx, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," in Surveys from Exile, ed. D. Fernbach (New York: Vintage, 1974), 155. 5. On the merger and division of nations, see Jane Jacobs's useful The Problem of Separatism (New York: Random House, 1980). 6. Paul Krugman, Pop Internationalism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996). 7. These lines paraphrase arguments made on many occasions by the historian John Lukacs. See, for example, John Lukacs, Confessions of an Original Sinner (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1990), 12, 194-97. 8. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983). 9. Carolyn Marvin, Capturing the Flag: The Symbolic Structure of Nationalism, unpublished manuscript, 1996. 10. Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1957), 181-85. Seymour Martin Lipset called attention to this example in American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: Norton, 1996), 2.3-2.4. 11. James W. Carey, Communication as Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989), chapter i. 12. The structure and antistructure, as Victor Turner calls it. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Antistructure (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969). 13. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1959). 14. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 15. In the age of the Internet this argument demands more elaboration than I can give it here. However, in a time of virtual communities, it is well to remember that the Internet is disembodied and that cyberspace is a cocoon, not a place where one can actually live. 16. George Grant, "In Defence of North America," Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America (Toronto: Anansi, 1969), 13-40. 17. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1949), 390. 18. Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: The Folklore of Industrial Man (Boston: Beacon, 1951), 33.

Afterword: The Culture in Question I 339 19. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990). 20. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 8 3 ff. 21. J. David Bolter, Turing's Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), n. 22. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (New York: Wiley, 1948). 23. Bolter, Turing's Man, 8-9. 24. J. Fred MacDonald, One Nation under Television: The Rise and Decline of Network TV (New York: Pantheon, 1990). 25. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Republic of Technology (New York: Harper and Row, 1978). 26. Arjun Appadurai, "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Political Economy," in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 27. See also Carey, Communication as Culture, and, more important, Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld (New York: Random House, 1995). 28. James W. Carey, "Harold Adams Innis and Marshall McLuhan," Antioch Review 2, no. 2 (1967): 5-37. 29. Clifford Geertz, "The Uses of Diversity," Michigan Quarterly Review 25 (Winter 1986): 105-23. 30. Robert Wiebe, The Segmented Society (New York: Oxford University Press, I975)31. Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 20-21. 32. Charles Taylor, Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), chapter 3. 33. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978). 34. Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, chapter 13. 35. There are many exceptions to this generalization, of course, including most prominently the work of Michael Schudson. See Michael Schudson, The Power of News (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995)- See also Thomas Leonard, News for All (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 36. Stuart Adam, Notes towards a Definition of Journalism (St. Petersburg, Fla.: Poynter Institute of Media Studies, 1993). 37. Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994). 38. Michael Schudson, Discovering the News (New York: Basic Books, 1978). 39. Jay Rosen, "Politics, Vision and the Press: Toward a Public Agenda for Journalism," in The New News v. The Old News (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1992).


Bibliography of Works by James W. Carey

"Advertising: An Institutional Approach." In The Role of Advertising, edited by Charles S. Sandage and Vernon Fryburger, 3-17. Homewood, 111.: Irwin, 1960. Review of The Powerful Consumer by George Katona. Journalism Quarterly 38 (Spring 1961): 243-44. Review of Studies in Public Communication, edited by Edward C. Uliassi. Journalism Quarterly 39 (Winter 1962.): 104-5. "Some Personality Correlates of Persuasibility." In Toward Scientific Marketing, edited by Stephen A. Greyser, 30-43. Chicago: American Marketing Association, 1964. (Reprinted in Consumer Behavior and the Behavioral Sciences, edited by Stewart Henderson Britt, 462-63. New York: Wiley, 1966.) "An Ethnic Backlash?" Commonweal 81 (16 October 1964): 91-93. "Variations in Negro/White Television Preferences." Journalism of Broadcasting 10 (Summer 1966). With Rita James Simon. "The Phantom Racist." Trans-action 4 (November 1966): 5-11. (Reprinted in Campus Power Struggle, edited by Howard S. Becker, 10-19. Chicago: Aldine, 1970.) "Harold Adams Innis and Marshall McLuhan." Antioch Review 27 (Spring 1967): 5-39. (Reprinted in many journals and anthologies, including McLuhan: Pro and Con, edited by Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1968.) "Generations and American Society." In America Now, edited by John G. Kirk, 293-305. New York: Atheneum, 1968. Review of The Committee by Walter Goodman. Commonweal 88 (17 May 1968): 275-76. "The Communications Revolution and the Professional Communicator." Sociological Review Monograph, no. 13 (January 1969): 23-38. Review of Thirty Plays Hath November by Walter Kerr. Journalism Quarterly 46 (Winter 1969): 844-45. "Marshall McLuhan." World Book Encyclopedia. 1970, 1988. Review of Dwight Macdonald on Movies by Dwight Macdonald. Journalism Quarterly 47 (Spring 1970): 181-82.

341

342 / Bibliography of Works by James W. Carey With John J. Quirk. "The Mythos of the Electronic Revolution," Parts i, 2. American Scholar 39 (Spring, Summer 1970): 219-41, 395-424. Review of Mass Media and the National Experience: Essays in Communications History, edited by Ronald T. Farrar and John D. Stevens. Journalism Quarterly 48 (Winter 1971): 774~75Review of The Movies as Medium, edited by Lewis Jacobs. Journalism Quarterly 48 (Summer 1971): 373~74The Politics of the Electronic Revolution. Urbana: Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois, 1972. "Criticism of the Press." In Education for Newspaper Journalists in the Seventies and Beyond, 257-79. Washington, D.C.: American Newspaper Publishers Association Foundation, 1973. With John J. Quirk. "The History of the Future." In Communication Technology and Social Policy, edited by George Gerbner, Larry P. Gross, and William H. Melody, 485-503. New York: Wiley, 1973. Review of On Culture and Communication by Richard Hoggart and Beyond Babel: New Directions in Communications by Brenda Maddox. Commonweal 98 (16 March 1973): 42-43. With Albert L. Kreiling. "Popular Culture and Uses and Gratifications: Notes toward an Accommodation." In The Uses of Mass Communications, edited by Jay G. Blumler and Elihu Katz, 225-48. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1974. "The Problem of Journalism History." Journalism History i (Spring 1974): 3-5, 27. "Journalism and Criticism: The Case of an Undeveloped Profession." Review of Politics 36 (April 1974): 227-49. Review of The People's Films: A Political History of U.S. Government Motion Pictures by Richard Dyer MacCann and Nonfiction Film by Richard Meran Barsam. Journalism Quarterly 51 (Summer 1974): 355-56. "Canadian Communication Theory: Extensions and Interpretations of Harold Innis." In Studies of Canadian Communications, edited by Gertrude Joch Robinson and Donald F. Theall, 27-59. Montreal: McGill University Programme in Communications, 1975. "Communication and Culture" (review of The Interpretation of Culture by Clifford Geertz). Communication Research 2 (April 1975): 173-91. "A Cultural Approach to Communication." Communication 2 (December 1975): 1-22. "But Who Will Criticize the Critics"?" Journalism Studies Review i (Summer 1976): 7-11. "Mass Communication Research and Cultural Studies: An American View." In Mass Communication and Society, edited by James Curran, Michael Gurevitch, and Janet Woollacott, 409-25. London: Edward Arnold, 1977; Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1979. Review of Film: The Democratic Art by Garth Jowett. Journal of Communication 27 (Summer 1977): 223-25. Review of Existential Journalism by John C. Merrill. Journalism Quarterly 54 (Autumn 1977): 627-29. "Concentration and Diversity in the News Media: An American View." In The Mass Media in Germany and the United States, edited by J. Herbert Altschull and Paula C. Pearce, 31-39. Bloomington: Institute for German Studies, Indiana University, 1978. "A Plea for the University Tradition." Journalism Quarterly 55 (Winter 1978): 846-55. (Reprinted in Journalism Studies Review, July 1979, and Carleton Journalism Review, Summer 1980.)

Bibliography of Works by James W. Carey I 343 "The Ambiguity of Policy Research." Journal of Communication 28 (Spring 1978): 114-19. (Reprinted in Mass Communication Review 'Yearbook, vol. i, edited by G. Cleveland Wilhoit and Harold de Bock, 706-11. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1980.) Editor, with Paul Hirsch. Special issue on "Communication and Culture: Humanistic Models in Research." Communication Research 5 (July 1978). "Social Theory and Communication Theory." Communication Research 5 (July 1978): 357-68. Foreword to Social Theories of the Press by Hanno Hardt, 9-14. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1979. "The Politics of Popular Culture: A Case Study." Journal of Communication Inquiry 4 (Winter 1979): 3-32. Review of Mass Communication and Society (Open University Course, DE 353, Milton Keynes, U.K.). Media, Culture and Society i (April 1979): 313-18. Review of Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis ofTet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington by Peter Braestrup. American Historical Review 84 (April 1979): 594-95. "Graduate Education in Mass Communication." Communication Education 2.8 (September 1979): 282-93. "Comments on the Weaver-Gray Paper." In Mass Communication Review Yearbook, vol. i, edited by G. Cleveland Wilhoit and Harold de Bock, 152-55. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1980. "International Communications: The Impact of the Mass Media." In International Communication in a Multi-Faceted World, proceedings of the Midwest Regional Conference for Senior Fulbright Scholars, 7-16. Urbana, 111.: 1980. (Reprinted in Representative American Speeches, 1980-1981, edited by Owen Peterson, 95-110. New York: Wilson, 1981.) With Clifford Christians. "The Logic of Qualitative Research." In Research Methods in Mass Communications, edited by Guido Stempel and Bruce Westley, 342-62. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980. Review of Teaching as a Conserving Activity by Neil Postman. Educational Communication and Technology 28 (Winter 1980). "The Computer as Change Agent: An Essay." Journalism Quarterly 57 (Winter 1980): 678-80. "Changing Communications Technology and the Nature of the Audience." Journal of Advertising 9 (Summer 1980): 3-9, 43. "Culture, Geography, and Communications: The Work of Harold Innis in an American Context." In Culture, Communication and Dependency, edited by William H. Meody, Liora Salter, and Paul Heyer, 73-91. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1981. "McLuhan and Mumford: The Roots of Modern Media Analysis." Journal of Communication 30 (Summer 1981): 162-78. "Mass Media: The Critical View." In Communication Yearbook j, edited by Michael Burgoon, 18-33. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1982. "Review Essay: The Discovery of Objectivity" (review of Discovering the News by Michael Schudson). American Journal of Sociology 87 (March 1982): 1182-88. "Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph." Prospects 8 (1983): 303-25. "The Origins of the Radical Discourse on Cultural Studies in the United States." Journal of Communication 33 (Summer 1983): 311-13. "High Speed Communication in an Unstable World." Chronicle of Higher Education, 27 July 1983,48.

344 / Bibliography of Works by James W. Carey "High Tech and High Ed." Illinois Issues, March 1984, 22-29. "Overcoming Resistance to Cultural Studies." In Mass Communication Review Yearbook, vol. 5, edited by Michael Gurevitch and Mark R. Levy, 2.7-40. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1985. "The Paradox of the Book." Library Trends 33 (Spring 1985): 103-13. '"Putting the World at Peril': A Conversation with James W. Carey." Journalism History 12 (Summer 1985): 38-53. "The Dark Continent of American Journalism." In Reading the News, edited by Robert Karl Manoff and Michael Schudson, 146-96. New York: Pantheon, 1986. "Journalists Just Leave: The Ethics of an Anomalous Profession." In Ethics and the Media, edited by Maile-Gene Sagen, 5-19. Iowa City: Iowa Humanities Board, 1986. "An Essay: Technology, Culture, and Democracy: Lessons from the French." Journalism Quarterly 63 (Winter 1986): 855-58. "High Technology and Higher Education." In Technological Change and the Transformation of America, edited by Steven E. Goldberg and Charles R. Strain, 183-98. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987. "Will the Center Hold?" Mass Communication Review Yearbook, vol. 6, edited by Michael Gurevitch and Mark R. Levy, 2.6-30. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1987. "Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, and the Emergence of Visual Society." Prospects ii (1987): 2.9-38. "The Press and the Public Discourse." Center Magazine 20 (March/April 1987): 4-32. Review of Politics of Letters by Richard Ohmann. Los Angeles Times, 28 June 1987, 8. "The Demagogue as Rabblesoother" (review of Reagan's America: Innocents at Home by Garry Wills). Illinois Issues, July 1987, 21-23. (Reprinted as "Reagan and the Mythology of the American Childhood." In These Times, 19 August 1987,18-19.) Editor. Media, Myths, and Narratives: Television and the Press. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1988. "Editor's Introduction: Taking Culture Seriously." In Media, Myths, and Narratives: Television and the Press. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1988. Commmunication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989. "Harold Innis (1984-1952)." In International Encyclopedia of Communications, vol. 2, edited by Erik Barnouw et al., 320-21. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. "Presidential Election 1988: The Degradation of Democratic Discourse." Illinois Issues, January 1989, 16-18. "Humanities Are Central to Doctoral Studies." ASJMC Insights, February 1989, 2-5. "Commentary: Communications and the Progressives." Critical Studies in Mass Communications 6 (September 1989): 764-82. Review of Prof Scam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education by Charles J. Sykes. Journalism Educator 44 (Autumn 1989): 48-53. "The Language of Technology: Talk, Text, and Template as Metaphors for Communication." In Communication and the Culture of Technology, edited by Martin J. Medhurst, Alberto Gonzalez, and Tarla Rai Peterson, 19-39. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1990. With Julian L. Simon. "The Churches' Responsibility to Teach the Value of Life: A Surprising Dialogue between Catholic and Jew." In Population Matters: People, Resources, Environment, and Immigration, by Julian L. Simon, 239-52. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1990.

Bibliography of Works by James W. Carey I 345 "Technology as a Totem for Culture." American Journalism 7 (Fall 1990): 242-51. "'A Republic, If You Can Keep It': Liberty and Public Life in the Age of Glasnost." In Crucible of Liberty: 200 Years of the Bill of Rights, edited by Raymond Arsenault, 108-28. New York: Free Press, 1991. Review of Media Theory: An Introduction by Fred Inglis. In Journalism Quarterly 68 (Winter 1991): 894-95. "The Academy and Its Discontents." Gannett Center Journal, Spring-Summer 1991, 163-80. "Colleges' True Ills Are Not the Trendy Ones." Newsday, 21 July 1991, 32-33"Political Correctness and Cultural Studies." Journal of Communication 42 (Spring 1992): 56-72. "Everything that Rises Must Diverge: Notes on Communications, Technology, and the Symbolic Construction of the Social." In Beyond Agendas: New Directions in Communication Research, edited by Philip Gaunt, 171-84. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1993. Review of History and Communications by Graeme Patterson and The Bias of Communications by Harold Innis. Canadian Historical Review 74 (June 1993): 269-73. "May You Live in Interesting Times." Australian Journal of Communications 20 (Summer 1993): 1-12. "Mass Media and Democracy between the Modern and the Postmodern." Journal of International Affairs 47 (Summer 1993): 1-21. "Communications and Economics." In Information and Communication in Economics, edited by Robert Babe, 321-36. Boston: Kluwer, 1994. Review of Journalism and American Education, 1914-1941, by James M. Wallace. American Journalism 20 (1994): 80-81. "The Press, Public Opinion and Public Discourse on the Edge of the Postmodern." In Public Opinion and the Communication of Consent, edited by Theodore L. Glasser and Charles T. Salmon. New York: Guilford, 1995. "Abolishing the Old Spirit World." Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12 (March 1995): 82-88. Review of The Republic of Signs by Ann Kaplan. Journal of American History, March 1995-


Contributors

G. Stuart Adam is dean of the Faculty of Arts at Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario. He received a Ph.D. in political studies from Queen's University, Kingston. His career as a journalist has included stints as a reporter and editor at the Toronto Star, a reporter and editorial writer for the Ottawa Journal, and a freelance producer at CBC-TV. He has been director of the School of Journalism at Carleton, as well as director of the Centre for Mass Media Studies in the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of Western Ontario in London. His scholarly publications include A Sourcebook of Canadian Media Law (1989) and Notes towards a Definition of Journalism (1993). James W. Carey is currently professor of journalism at Columbia University. From 1979 to 1992, Carey was dean of the College of Communications at the University of Illinois. He has published more than a hundred essays, articles, and book chapters on communications, community, journalism, technology, and related issues, as well as a collection of essays, Communications as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (1989). He has been called the best-known journalism educator in the world. In addition to editing numerous journals and collections, he has served as an officer of many academic societies and on numerous national boards of directors, including that of the Public Broadcasting System. Carolyn Marvin is associate professor of communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She is 347

348 / Contributors the author of When Old Technologies Were New (1988) and the forthcoming Capturing the Flag: The Symbolic Structure of Nationalism. Professor Marvin is interested in the dialogue between literate and oral practices, ritual as a fundamental form of group communication, and how communications technologies restructure social distances among group members. Eve Stryker Munson is an assistant professor of communications at Pennsylvania State University. Munson was a reporter, copy editor, and editor for several newspapers, including the Jackson Sun, the Wichita Eagle, and the Daily Camera, from 1972 to 1990. She is coeditor of a collection of essays, A Society to Match the Scenery: Personal Visions of the Future of the American West (1991). John J. Pauly is professor of communication and American studies and chair of the Department of Communication at Saint Louis University. He received a doctorate in communications in 1979 from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he studied with James Carey. Pauly's essays on the cultural history of journalism, the sociology of mass communication, and qualitative methods have appeared in a variety of journals, including Critical Studies in Mass Communication, Communication, Communication Research, Journalism Monographs, Communication Yearbook, and American Quarterly. From 1989 to 1993 he was editor of a scholarly quarterly published by the American Journalism Historians Association, American Journalism, which ran a symposium in 1990 on Carey's first collection of essays and published the first public bibliography of Carey's work. Jay Rosen is associate professor of journalism and mass communication at New York University and director of the Project on Public Life and the Press. He is also an associate of the Kettering Foundation, where he coordinates programs in public journalism. Michael Schudson is professor in the Departments of Communication and Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Discovering the News (1978), Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion (1984), Watergate in American Memory (1992), and The Power of News (1995).

Contributors I 349 Catherine A. Warren is assistant professor in the Department of English at North Carolina State University. Warren was a reporter during the 19805 for several newspapers, including the Casper Star-Tribune and the Hartford Courant. She is currently working on a book on institutional silence and the abuse of power in medicine.


Index

academic disciplines, 102-3 academic left: defection of, 265-66; loss of influence, 278. See also left, lack of program Adam, Stuart, xvi, 311, 313, 333 Anderson, Benedict, 202, 276, 312, 334 Apple Inc., 295-96 Arendt, Hannah, 199-200 Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, xii, 7, 261, 267 Baranczak, Stanislaw, 213, 214 Bell, Daniel, 18 Berelson, Bernard, 7 Bill of Rights, 208-9, 216, 218, 236 black history, 101, 107. See also race, class, and gender black press, 32, 92. See also media, minority Bolter, David, 320 Boorstin, Daniel, 324 breaking news, 187-88 broadcasting: deregulation of, 252-53; privatization of, 62-63; public, 252-53; satellite, 251-52 Burke, Kenneth, xii, 99, 318 Butterfield, Herbert, 87-88, 95 campaign financing, 221-22 Campbell, Joseph, 318

capitalism, 61, 305; critique of, 66 Carey, James: "Canadian Communication Theory: Extensions and Interpretations of Harold Innis," 262; childhood education, x; college education, x-xi; Communication as Culture, xvi, 313, 322; "A Cultural Approach to Communication," 4, 196-98, 262; early years at Illinois, xii-xiii; "Harold Adams Innis and Marshall McLuhan," 262; "A Plea for the University Tradition," 262; as teacher, xiv-xv; "Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph," 262 censorship, 212-13, 214 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, xii chaos, 4, 61-62 Charlotte Observer, 231 Chicago School, 5; as alternative to empiricism, 8, 24-25; Nobel laureates and,12 class. See race, class, and gender Clinton, Bill, 201, 231 clocks, 52, 322 Columbia University, viii; Bureau of Applied Social Research, 16 Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, 224-25 commerce, 303 Commission on Freedom of the Press, 140 351

352 / Index communication: as community creator and maintainer, 26-28; democracy and, 234; public life and, 64, 69; ritual view, 197-98, 313-15; spatial bias of, 36, 64; transmission view, 197-98, 313 communications: economics of, 60, 63-65, 73-74; modern era, 322-23, 334-35; revolution, 129-30, 133; technology as metaphor, 8-9; technology and social structure, 119 computers, 251; democracy and, 300-301; education and, 292-94, 297-98, 299; employment and, 297-99; growth in, 296-97; literacy, 263, 266; work structure and, 263 Constitution, U.S., 208-9, 216, 236 Constitutional Convention, 207, 227 conversation. See public conversation Cooley, Charles, 29-30, 31 cultural history: defined, 89-90; task of, 90. See also journalism history, cultural version cultural studies: American, 265, 271, 275, 309; British, 11, 275; conservative attack on, 262-64, 274-76; conversation and, 5; critique of ideology, 277; divisions in, 270, 272-73; economy and, 276; origins of, 12-13 curriculum: corporate control of, 266; professionalization of, 287-88 Czitrom, Daniel, 111-12 Darnton, Robert, 111, 153 Darwinism, 43 democracy, 196, 202. See also public Dewey, John, vii, xii, 209, 270, 315; on community, ix, 71-72, 74-75; on new media, 31-32; The Public and Its Problems, 71-72, 74-75; solidarity, 115 Didion, Joan, 230-31, 232, 330 diversity, 255-56, 326-27 Douglas, Ann, 309-10 Douglas, Mary, 41, 66, 69-70, 71, 72 Durkheim, Emile, xiii, 70, 134, 136, 319 Eastern Europe: liberation of, 210; public life in, 211, 212, 214, 215, 218, 224. See also Poland

economics: language of, 11; neoclassical, 65-68; supply-side, 150 education: as citizenship, 114; corporate control of, 285-86, 294; crisis in, 269, 283-84, 291; instrumentalism of, 290; reform of, 282-83; as site of political struggle, 284-85 effects research, 6, 7, 15, 16. See also mass communication research electricity: decentralizing effects, 48; as Great Reverser, 37, 38; promise of, 43-44, 45-46; as symbol, 44, 45; technology, 35 electronic communication, 36-37, 44, 50. See also communications Eliot, George, 144 elites, 248, 303, 304-5 Emerson, Thomas, 216 engineers, 300, 303, 304-5 Entman, Robert, 229, 248 Erlich, Paul, 10 ethnicity, 97 exceptionalism, 309-10 faits-divers stories, 124, 164-66 Federal Communications Commission, 252 First Amendment, 202-3, 208-9, 210, 216-20, 230; defined, 238; as practice, 333; press annexation of, 245, 247; religion clause, 217, 238-39; technology and, 336 Flacks, Richard, 215-16 Ford, Franklin, 25-26 "four theories of the press," 93 Franklin, Benjamin, 207, 227 Garden Cities movement, 42, 45 Gates, Henry Louis, 290 gay press, 130-31 gay rights movement, 121 Geddes, Patrick, 44, 45-46, 47, 55 Geertz, Clifford, viii, 327, 328, 333 gender. See race, class, and gender genres, blurring of, 329-30 Gerbner, George, xii, xiii Gingrich, Newt, 201 Gitlin, Todd, 277, 278 Goffman, Erving, xiii, 314 Gopnik, Adam, 195-96

Index I 353 Great Reverser. See electricity Greider, William: "The Education of David Stockman," 150-55 Guback, Thomas, 12 Hall, Stuart, 277 Hardt, Hanno, xi, 24-25 Havel, Vaclav, 213, 215 hegemony, 277 Hobbes, Thomas, 3,13 Hofstadter, Richard, 303 Hoggart, Richard, xii, 6 Howard, Ebenezer, 42, 45-46 ideology, 277-78 Illich, Ivan, 13 Innis, Harold A., viii, 10, 70; Carey's study of, 261-62; on communication and economics, 63, 64; on consequences of technology, 9; on media, 119-20; ritual and conversation, 321 interest groups, 244-45, 246, 247, 286 interpretive turn, viii Japan, U.S. trade balance with, 167-73 Jensen, Jay, 12 journalism: adversarial style, 194-96, 337; causal explanations in, 170-72, 173, 181-83; consequence stories in, 183; as culture, 331-32; as a curriculum, 186-88; as democracy, 332; explanatory, 163, 166-67; as fiction, 155-56, 329-30; how question, 146-48; modern era of, 234, 240; precision, 182; public, 331, 337-38; return to practice, 331-33, 337-38; ritual in, 121-22; significance stories in, 183-86; as social practice, 332-33; who question, 173-74, 178; why question, 146-48, 173. See also motive explanations; objectivity journalism history, 95-96, 101 journalism history, cultural version, 88-93; existing critiques of, 87; institutionalization of, 82-83; teaching of, 105-6. See also Whig history Journalism History, 95, 101 journalism Quarterly, xii journalistic report, 90-91, 93 journalistic technique, 120

journalists and World War II, 233. See also professional communicators Kennedy, John E, 219-20, 240 Kimball, Roger, 271-72, 274, 280, 281; on cultural studies, 271-72, 274, 275; Tenured Radicals, 263-65 Klapper, Joseph, 16-17 Kreiling, Albert, 92 Kropotkin, Peter, 44-46, 47, 48, 303 labor, division of, 135-36 Lahey, Edwin A., 144-46 Langer, Susanne, 4 Lasch, Christopher, 220, 283 Lazarsfeld, Paul, 7-8, 221 left, lack of program, 279-80 Leopold-Loeb murder, 144-46 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 9 Licklider, J. C. R., 300 Lippmann, Walter, 149, 219-20; Drift and Mastery, 22; Public Opinion, 22-24, 245-46; role in depoliticization of public sphere, 23-24, 72 Locke, John, 20, 218, 237 Loeb, Richard. See Leopold-Loeb murder market society, 70-71 Marvin, Carolyn, xvi, 312, 314, 316 Marx, Karl, xiii, 310-11, 319; Eighteenth Brumaire, 311 Marxism, 11, 276 mass communication research: propaganda and, 15; standard history of, 14-20; World War I and, 15. See also effects research mass society, 18-19, 129 McCarthy, Mary, 228 McCloskey, Donald, 65 McCormack, Thelma, 140 McLuhan, Marshall, 261; on aesthetics, 39-41; body as technology, 42; The Gutenberg Galaxy, 38; Harold Innis and, 42; The Mechanical Bride, 38, 50-51; and Lewis Mumford, 9, 35, 55; and primitive ritual, 318; technological determinism of, 41-42, 55; on technology, 38-39; Understanding Media, 37, 50, 52 Mead, George H., ix, 139,141

354 / Index media: bias of, 193-94; minority, 130-31; national, 136, 240-41; as site of struggle, 32; space-binding, 120; timebinding, 119. See also journalism memory, 210-12, 214, 216, 314 Merton, Robert, 221 Mill, John Stuart, 134 Mills, C. Wright, viii, 229; The Sociological Imagination, 7 motive explanations, 123-24; economic policy and, 168-69, 170, 171; irrationality and, 181-82; overreliance on, 154-55, 174, 186-87; rationality and, 176-79; technical bias of, 180 motive paragraph, 178 muckraking, 243-44 Mumford, Lewis, viii, xiii; The City in History, 44-45; contrasted with Marshall McLuhan, 9; critique of Marshall McLuhan, 35, 56-57; The Highway and the City, 42-43; and militarism, 56; The Myth of the Machine, 43, 56; The Pentagon of Power, 56-57; Techniques and Civilization, 47-50, 51-54 nation-state, 311-13 neotechnique civilization, 49, 53; defined, 45, 47; Lewis Mumford on, 54 newspapers, 82, 83 Noble, Douglas, 299, 300 Oakes Newsletter, 222-23 objectivity, 137-41, 199; conventions of, 140-41; "doctrine" of, 192-94; emergence of, 335-36; problems of, 162-63, 337 Orwell, George: 1984, 210-11 Osgood, Charles, xii, xiii paleotechnic civilization: defined, 45, 47; Lewis Mumford on, 48-49, 52-53, 54 Park, Robert, 24, 25, 26, 30, 31, 32, 141 Parsons, Talcott, 3, 7, 134-35 Pauly, John, xi, xvi, 314, 315 Pepper, Stephen, 56 Perot, Ross, 232, 233 Persian Gulf War, 198, 226 Peterson, Ted, 86-87 photography, 53 Plato, viii-ix

Poland, 212-13, 215-16. See also Eastern Europe political correctness: as effective attack, 273-74; as intraclass debate, 280-81; as sign, 268 polling, 218-19, 247 postmodern, 321-22, 324-26, 329-30 press, partisan, 157-58, 159; penny, 107-8, 158-61, 164; print, 52-53; as public representative, 250; as watchdog, 250 prison letters, 213, 215 privatization, 62-63 professional communicators, 128; creation of, 133-37; defined, 132-33, 138 progressivism, 242-43 propaganda, 15-16 protechnologists, defined, 295 public: defined by John Dewey, 72, 74-75; dissolution of, 246, 247; eighteenth century, 235-36; transformation of, 60,63 public conversation, 203-4, 217-18, 220, 238; and democracy, 191-92, 220; disappearance of, 221; as intellectual style, 5-6; need for, ix, vx, 219 public discourse, 228, 229 public houses (pubs), 235-36 public journalism, 331, 337-38 public life: as local, 239, 241-42; participation in, 221, 225-27; recovery of, 228 public opinion, 228-29, 255 Public Opinion Quarterly, 7 public service, 306-7 public sphere, 237, 254 Rabinbach, Anson, 319 race, class, and gender, 97, 99, 276, 277-78,281-82 race, class, and gender studies, 263, 265 railroad, 322 Rand, Ayn, 68-69 Reagan, Ronald, 150-51, 168, 179-80, 183-84, 185 reality, communication and, 199-200 Rogers, Everett, xi Rorty, Richard, viii, xv, 270, 278-79 Rosen, Jay, xvii, 223-24, 225, 336, 337

Index I 355 Rosenberg, Harold, 38 Rowland, Willard D. Jr., xi-xii, xvi Sandel, Michael, 74, 254-55 Schell, Jonathan, 215 Schiller, Herbert, 12 scholarship, 34-35 Schramm, Wilbur, 12 Schudson, Michael, vii, viii, xvi, 335, 336; Discovering the News, 107-8, 193,194,245 Simon, Julian, 10,11 Simpson, O. J., 126 Sinclair, Upton, 244, 286 Smith, Bruce, 239 Smythe, Dallas, xii, xiii, 12 social convergence, 324 social life, differentiation of, 134-35 social movements, 96-98 society, and communication, 3-4 Solidarity, 215-16, 220. See also Poland Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 211-12 Stein, Gertrude, 128, 228 Stewart, Potter, 249, 336 Stockman, David, 150-55 survivalist culture, 302-3, 304 symbolic action and communication, 4 symbol systems, 200-201 tabloidization, 124-25 tabloids, 124-25,165-66 technics, defined, 9 technological crisis, 293-94, 302-3 technology: as analogy, 318-19; as homunculus, 319-20; spatial bias of, 321; as trickster, 316-17

telegraph, 45,160-61, 322 television, 323; cable, 251-52. See also broadcasting Thought News, 25-26 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 83, 134, 226, 239, 321; Democracy in America, 113 Tracey, Michael, xiii trickster, 313, 316-17 Tuchman, Gaye, 109 university: corporate control of, 285-86; credit inflation, 289; and Department of Defense, 286; independence, 285-87; student services, 288-89. See also education University of Illinois, viii, xi-xiii, xiv, 6, 10,12 Updike, John, 308 utilitarianism, 20-21, 68 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 308 Veblen, Thorstein, 8, 286 Vietnam War, 249, 293 Wall Street Journal, 155 Warner, Lloyd, 139 Warner, Sam Bass, 235-36 Washington press corps, 194-95, 201 Watergate, 194-95, 249 Weber, Max, viii, xiii, 313 Whig history (of journalism), 82, 95, 98, 108, 110, 331, 336; defined, 80, 87-88 Williams, Raymond, viii, 30, 100, 275, 319 women's history, 101, 107, 112 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 46-47, 49

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