What duties have journalists?

This article was written by Atticus Mullikin and was originally published on the European Journalism Center's Magazine section on December 12, 2007

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In a major world religions class in college, the teacher used the opening scenes of the secular film Jerry Maguire to introduce us to the concept of epiphany. For those who haven't seen it, the protagonist, Maguire, begins as a rich and successful sports agent, aggressively pursuing clients, all smiles and pretence and talk. After he tries to convince the son of a client that the kid's father should keep playing sports despite four concussions, he asks himself, "Who had I become? Just another shark in suit?" He breaks down in a hotel room and writes a mission statement for his company that proscribes less clients, less money, and more attention to the people his firm represents – in essence, ethical business. The epiphanic moment – and the reason our teacher showed us the clip – was when Maguire finishes his mission statement and realizes, "Suddenly, I was my father's son again."

In the five years it took for me to cobble together a degree in political science, not one professor thought to ask, "What is the polis and what should it be?" Rather, we began with Machiavelli's The Prince and Plato's Republic, both books antitheses of democratic, participatory government. To me, the message was clear. You've learned the ideal, now here's the reality; grow up. I wonder how many journalism students have had similar experiences. You go to school your father's son (or mother's daughter), learn the basics of your profession and then, after finding work and competing hard to scrape out a position, ask yourself, "Who have I become?" Just another shark in a suit?

We've come to see journalism as a function of professionals. Either by design or by happenstance, many journalists congregate around power, both in where they work and what they report on, and often think themselves a special breed. Media democratization and citizen journalism have begun to challenge that notion, with people now able to function as journalists (albeit in a limited fashion) without corporate backing. But the outcome is uncertain, and the question still lingers, "What have we become?"

The press has been called the Fourth Estate, to mean that it functions as an unofficial "fourth branch" of government. Thus the debate over the press is similar to the debate over politics. Is the press there to translate complex ideas from the power elite for the people, or is it a function of the people, the polis? More simplistically, is the press a top-heavy or bottom-heavy institution? This crystallized in the early 20th century as a debate between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey, the former representing the top-heavy argument and the latter the bottom-heavy.

Lippman posed the idea that the press served the function of manufacturing consent among the populace, who were incapable of interpreting complex ideas. He predicted that technology would enable the elite to determine public opinion. This has spooky parallels to George Orwell, who predicted technology would enable the total control of society. No doubt Orwell's Big Brother government considered its actions to be benign and ultimately for the public good, just as Machiavelli considered limited, evil acts to be necessary for a new Prince. Indeed, the influential book by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent, takes its title from Lippmann's Public Opinion to illustrate its central thesis, that most media is seen simply as a product, with few if any duties to the consumer.

In contrast to this, John Dewey was in favour of public journalism, which would remove control of public opinion from elite political and business interests. Although he agreed that individual citizens were probably incapable of understanding every complex issue, Dewey did believe that citizens were capable of participating in Democratic government, and that journalism was a primary means to do this. To Dewey, journalism should not be a system of providers and users, but all users, who collaborated to create an ever-greater society. This model is remarkably similar to media democratization.

In the end, technology has enabled both ideas. Citizens can produce journalism (of varying quality) and publish it for the world to read. At the same time, the populace is flooded with more information than it can ever process, and technology has enabled flashy graphics, galling sound effects and the ability to gather and edit media at an unprecedented rate. The 24-hour news cycle has become the rule.

The problem with the top-heavy, Lippmann model of journalism is that it does not serve the ends of democracy. That's Dewey's assessment, not mine. But I do think that just as we are in a struggle to define new media, we are in a struggle to define a new geopolitical paradigm, and the outcome of the media question will influence the outcome of the geopolitical question. Knowledge is power. In the United States, there is a struggle between conservatives and liberals, which I touched on in another article. That struggle is, respectively, between old world authoritarians and new world egalitarians, and the primary question is, as with journalism, are citizens capable of governing themselves or do they need to be controlled and guided by elites? It is a choice, really, between the democratic ideal and the Machiavellian "reality."

Thus journalism is more than just a profession. The epiphanic moment, if you like, is that good journalism is a duty. If the sum total of media is the passing down of privileged information when and how the elite see fit, then there is no point having elections or referendums or public consultations, because the entire affair has already been decided on high. In that respect, new media isn't some clever innovation. It's the realization, finally, of what always should have been. A democratic society must read, analyze, debate, communicate and report news, and it must be something undertaken by the citizenry, no matter what their profession.

You are not a journalist because you work for a big company, or because you've got a press card in you pocket, or because you rub shoulders with other journalists at champagne cocktails. You're a journalist if, in the words of Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, you "…provide people with the information they need to be free and self-governing."

Otherwise, you may be just another shark in a suit.