A movement to promote "public journalism" is gathering momentum in the United States. Variously called "civic journalism" and "conversational journalism" as well, this new concept has become an important topic of debate at academic and professional meetings over the last couple of years. Three full-length books (Anderson, Dardenne and Killenberg, 1994; Charity, 1995; and Merritt, 1995) have come out to propagate it as an evolving concept.
Because daily newspaper journalism in the United States is in deep trouble, the industry seems prepared to listen, albeit reluctantly. While the U.S. population rose 82.1 percent from 1946 to 1993, the daily newspaper circulation rose a mere 17.4 percent. While 38.2 dailies circulated per 100 people in 1946, that figure plunged to 23.3 in 1993 (and further down to 22.6 in 1994). When television became pervasive around 1955, the daily newspaper circulation stood at 56.1 million; and that figure stood at 59.8 million in 1993 -- a noticeable drop from the peak of 62.8 million reached in 1985 (Stevenson 1994b). As the size of the nuclear family has decreased over the years, one cannot surmise that pass-on readership has increased either. The industry has groped in the dark implementing supposed solutions -- readership research programs, new promotional programs, massive re-design efforts, etc. -- none of which appears to have succeeded. The nature of the problem has eluded the industry while the "efforts to mimic television have failed" (Stevenson 1994b).
Declining daily newspaper circulation has become a noticeable phenomenon in the Western world with a few exceptions. In the English-speaking countries other than the United States, the dailies circulated per 100 people in 1994 declined to 32.1 in the United Kingdom; 18.9 in Canada; 18.7 in Australia; and 15.9 in Ireland (FIEJ 1995). East-Central European countries showed the same trend in 1994: Czech Republic 31.3; Hungary 22.6; Poland 14.8; and Slovakia 15.5 (FIEJ 1995). In contrast, Japan showed steadiness at 57.5, while Singapore (35.5) and Malaysia (11.7) showed growth (FIEJ 1995) consistent with their booming economies.
Daily newspapers in the Western world have attempted to reverse this trend by following the footsteps of USA Today, which made its debut in 1982 with its contemporary design incorporating color and graphics. This has gained wide acceptance as the WEDiting -- the integration of writing, editing and design -- technique, which the Poynter Institute for Media Studies and its benefactor, the St. Petersburg Times in Florida, are promoting vigorously. Design maestro Garcia (1993) explains: "The purpose of WED is to organize the minds of all journalists so that the process of news gathering and representation is seen more artistically -- is seen by writers as involving imaginative, carefully rendered design features and by graphic journalists as incorporating the highest standards of writing." Color theorist Pegie Adam (1995) maintains that people respond positively to lots of color because "color creates relationships among various elements on the page." However, the WED concept -- an effort to mimic television? -- has so far failed to rescue the daily newspapers from their downward slide.
Pundits have opined that nothing less than a fundamental shift in the philosophy of American (Western/occidental?) journalism would stop the slide. Anderson, Dardenne and Killenberg (1994) from the professoriate at St. Louis University and the University of South Florida, in their book The Conversation of Journalism have dug the past and searched the present to advance an agenda to turn conventional journalism upside down.This essay examines that agenda critically because the authors, compared with Charity (1995) and Merritt (1995), present their case with scholarly sophistication.
In keeping with the metaphor of the "unending conversation" (Burke 1957), Anderson, Dardenne and Killenberg admit that theirs are not the final words on the matter: "Our agenda remains open, as we ask you, as readers and citizens, to discuss and debate it, to add to and subtract from it" (p. 187). They expect many of their evaluations to be controversial and to be "rejected as naive or idealistic." Nevertheless, they start with the view that "the prime role of journalism ..., and the only way by which it can survive as a viable institution in the public arena, is to take the responsibility to stimulate public dialogue on issues of common concern to a democratic public" (pp. xix-xx). Their premise is that "journalism's practical strength, which is rooted in its everyday utility, can provide a better forum for intellectual excitement, civic conversation, and public debate" (p. 13).
Their radical platform calls for a de-emphasis on the reliance on current news values and the attempt to project objectivity, a shift from the heavy reliance on the inverted pyramid format of presenting news to the much more natural narrative (storytelling) format, a change from the linear transmission of news as a commodity to a communication mode that entails interactive feedback, as well as a re-conceptualization of ethics to encompass multicultural and feminine perceptions.
On the surface, the approach of the book appears parochial because the authors deliberately confine themselves to analyzing an American phenomenon. However, the implications of their dissection can well extend to the globe considering the dissatisfaction with occidental news values that the pro-Third World voices vehemently expressed during the UNESCO-backed debate on the New World Information and Communication Order -- perhaps an unintended effect. Thus, while Stevenson (1994a) exulted about the triumph of "independent" (Western/occidental?) journalism following the collapse of communism, that exultation seems premature in the light of the clear rejection of daily newspaper journalism by increasing numbers of Americans themselves. Stevenson (1994a: 13) wrote disparagingly that in "the 'emerging democracies' of the old second and third worlds, the role of journalism is still a topic for debate." Anderson, Dardenne and Killenberg, as well as others, have made it very clear that journalism is still a topic for debate in the United States as well.
A survey of college students that Thurlow and Milo (1993) conducted in Chico, Calif., showed that the students did not read their local daily newspaper. They wrote: "But evidence from this survey shows that college students will read a community weekly that is free, have extensive event listings and calendars, and has an irreverent perspective that may be appealing to young readers ... If daily newspapers are going to recapture readers, they may have to re-invent their products to attract these young college students." One can say the same about the ethnic groups. A study of four influential U.S dailies -- the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune and the Atlanta Constitution -- that Martindale (1994) conducted showed that they failed to fulfill the 1968 Kerner CommissionÕs charge to the press to illuminate the conditions of life in poor black urban neighborhoods. She advised the newspapers "to provide a wider focus on problems that face African Americans from the full range of socioeconomic groups, not just the urban poor."
Thus Anderson, Dardenne and Killenberg's espousal of a
conversational journalism -- a pluralistic journalism -- based on the
triangular interaction of "communication, community and news" has a
foundation on research that shows the disenchantment of significant
groups of people with conventional journalistic practice. Their
five-pronged agenda to rejuvenate journalism, elaborated in the final
chapter, calls for changes on how journalism "is taught and practiced"
(p. 173):
1. Journalism must be taught as one concentration in a network of
complementary communication disciplines, not as an isolated profession
with separate skills, ground rules and structure (p. 174).
2. Journalism should be taught as the public forum and arena for
multicultural dialogue in a democracy (p. 177).
3. News organizations -- academic and professional -- should strive to
start more conversations than they stop or settle (p. 178).
4. Journalism education must more clearly delineate for students the
ethical and moral contexts of the field (p. 182).
5. News organizations must stress narrative knowing more prominently to
supplement scientific knowing (p. 186).
This agenda, which appears esoteric indeed, springs from the authors' exposition of the relationship of news, communication and community -- the three touchstones that can yield what they call conversational journalism or "people-to-people communication that ranges far beyond the printed page or newscast script." The authors claim that this formula, far from being radical, merely Òrecalls some of the strengths of an earlier, community-based, and narrative mission in which journalism fueled public talk" (p. 2).
First, the aspect of news. The authors argue that conventional news, so often devoid of hope or promise of improvement, depresses people; that public affairs reporting concentrates on colorless, humorless "official" sources; that "breaking news" stories forget to include adequate history and perspective; that journalists must expand the definition of news to include a broader range of what happens to people; that journalism "hides its own humanity behind such facades as the inverted pyramid, objectivity, truth, fact, official sources, and the cold, hard commercial transaction of a news commodity peddled to consumers" (p. 5); that journalists should approach news as a co-creative activity that depends on community participation; and that journalism can use narrative and other invitational styles and forms that can "interest and engage people in ways that recognize the publicÕs intuitive, pragmatic intelligence" (p. 6). This seems more like a recipe for "developmental journalism," a concept that arose during the NWICO debate and incurred the wrath of conservative scholars like Stevenson (1994a), who continue to eulogize the conventional news values as globally relevant (Gunaratne 1995).
Second, the aspect of communication. The authors argue that the linear transfer models of communication reflected particularly in print journalism -- that "sources" create "messages" and "transmit" them through "channels" (media) with minimum "noise" (interference) to "receivers" -- will fail our times and conditions; that journalism can no longer pretend to be a conduit of information to an uninformed public; and that it should reformulate itself as the informational commons, where "people can learn, mature, agree, and disagree -- and from which social change can grow" (p. 6). They exhort that "journalism actually must become a communication discipline" -- a redefinition that is important because: (a) its range of invitation will produce a deeper and more comprehensive accounts of social issues; (b) its inclusion and empathy will be more suited to the needs and tensions of an era of multicultural diversity; (c) its alignment with emerging and literary theories will encourage journalism's full partnership in the academic and scholarly dialogue; and (d) its ecumenical tone will ground it as a communication, and not just an information, discipline (pp. 15-16). As a communication discipline, journalism has to go beyond reporting and writing to assume "roles and responsibilities within a far broader context of communication," without which "the profession risks further erosion of its influence and place in society's conversation" (pp. 2-3).
Third, the aspect of community. The authors argue that a community exists not through agreements, but through communication; that by marking and legitimizing the conversational commons, journalism can contribute to communication links among previously disconnected people, groups and places; and that as journalists become full-fledged participants in the public dialogue, news will become a legitimated and sanctioned topic of conversation among all cultural groups, not just within an informed elite. They point out that the production of market-oriented zoned editions tend to emphasize differences rather than the commonalties of public life. More importantly, they assert: "Without a journalism that both speaks and listens within the civic dialogue, we will abandon democracy to the buffeting of social accidents" (p. 12)
These are the basic concepts that Anderson, Dardenne and Killenberg have used to develop the eight chapters of their book. Their view of journalism has some commonalties with the recent definition of Stuart Adam (1993: 11): that "journalism is an invention or a form of expression used to report and comment in the public media on the events of the here and now." Adam identifies journalism as "a fundamentally democratic art" through which "a free society engages in conversation with itself" (p. 6) -- terms that Anderson, Dardenne and Killenberg have emphasized. Adam calls journalism an invention because "it is a creation -- a product of the Imagination -- in both an individual and a cultural sense" (p. 13). However, he differs from Anderson, Dardenne and Killenberg when he asserts that "it is wrong to imagine journalism's narrative approaches as limited by the inverted pyramid and the narrative documentary" because between these two formats "a journalist may choose from many approaches" (p. 35); and he implicitly accepts the conventional news values as an essential "principle of design that mark every piece of journalism" (p. 45).
Clark's The American Conversation and the Language of Journalism (1994) also shows a semantic affinity to Anderson, Dardenne and KillenbergÕs concept of conversation. Clark says: "The language of journalism, described by Hugh Kenner as the 'plain style' is, in various senses, democratic. When used powerfully, it flows from democratic impulses, and creates a model for public discourse" (p. 12). He goes on to say: "The language of journalism has the flexibility to be more inclusive if journalists will expand their reporting strategies and let the voices of the young and the poor and the old be heard" (p. 17) -- and that certainly is one reason why Anderson, Dardenne and Killenberg are calling for a conversational journalism.
While Anderson, Dardenne and Killenberg make no reference whatsoever to the NWICO debate of the '70s and the '80s, their critique of mainstream (American/Western/ occidental?) news, particularly in Chapter 3, is very similar to that of the past voices of the old Second and Third worlds. Somavia (1979), a primary instigator of the NWICO debate, denounced occidental news as a commodity and argued that it should be a social good. He and others condemned the emphasis on the negatives that occidental news values -- impact, proximity, prominence, timeliness, currency, conflict and the bizarre, as explained in a widely used textbook (Mencher 1994) -- brought about. Traber (1993) lamented that the ordinary people most often seemed to emerge in news pages and on the television screen in relation to the news values of conflict and the bizarre. Gunaratne (1992) explained the news media's fascination with death and invasion of privacy in terms of the same occidental news values. Galtung and Vincent (1992) asserted that the conventional news values resulted in "an overabundance of highly dramatic events ... with no coverage of how structures are operating to produce these unhappy circumstances for poor people" (p. 51).
What Anderson, Dardenne and Killenberg advocate is not a total abandonment of conventional news, but supplementing it and removing it from its pedestal (p. 45) to give way to a conversational approach that "emphasizes nontraditional attributes such as perspective, context, completeness, and enduring human values" (p. 44). They argue that the conventional news values "simplify news decisions, usually resulting in simplistic news" (p. 39) that "excludes most people, just as it excludes most situations" (p. 41). They contend that "objectivity is the enduring myth of journalism" (p. 47) because "beyond the facts that can be proved or shown to be true, news is largely speculative and interpretative -- a constructed reality" (p. 51). The so-called balanced coverage of an issue "does not make a news article objective and unbiased" considering that "the news is dominated by those adamantly for or adamantly against, whereas most people fall somewhere in between" (p. 52). Their "major argument is not with objectivity in its connotation of fairness, but with objectification and nonengagement" (p. 55).
Just like the NWICO proponents, Anderson, Dardenne and Killenberg also look down upon news as a commodity -- all the news that's easy to print. They say that when advertising became the news media's primary source of income, the industry redefined news as "commodities" aimed at ever-increasing numbers of people as reflected in the sensational coverage of crime, sex and natural disasters. They trace the emergence of the inverted pyramid format and the beat system also to the news-as-commodity approach. They say: "The inverted pyramid model presumes that human stories are not webs of significance with multiple interconnected causes and effects but are instead linear sequences of acts and events in which it is possible, through diligent investigation, to know and uncover the single most important fact or set of facts" (p. 59). They exhort the media to shift from this economic approach to a journalistic model of news that takes into account the "needs" of the people. By solidifying their relationship with the people through such a conversational journalism, the news media can maintain relative independence from advertising influences as well. They go on to argue that this approach will make the U.S. press freer from various types of pressures including those from official sources.
Anderson, Dardenne and Killenberg devote the second chapter of the book to a discussion of the "conversation of journalism" as a metaphor for news. Perhaps the most scholarly though stodgy section of their treatise, the authors produce an array of evidence from scholars of diverse disciplines to back up the metaphor of conversation while also accepting the limitations of that metaphor. They posit that "a journalism dedicated to conversation defines news relationally, as a social process of negotiated meanings, rather than objectively, as transmitted product" (p. 14). They say: "Whereas the old rhetoric might have asked, 'What can we say to change those people?' now communicators are challenged to ask, 'What can we find out about them that might increase our identification with them and ultimately, perhaps, our common alignment?'" (p. 17). Conversation, they explain, is "fully interactive," "locally managed" and "mundane." Furthermore, they point out that conversation is important to journalism on several levels: public, interpersonal and institutional (p. 19).
The authors trace back the tradition of describing society as conversation to John Dewey (1927), who envisioned a society of conversationalists who encountered and responded to messages as participants, not as news consumers. They point out that Dewey's philosophy represented that of "symbolic interactionists" whose work was grounded on the teachings of Mead (1934) and his followers, who enunciated that conversation is the essence of human endeavor. Anderson, Dardenne and Killenberg propose "that news organizations promote and sustain public communication by reaching out to a public that will otherwise lose its myriad (but uncoordinated) voices to organized lobbyists, special interests, celebrities, corporations, 'spin doctors,' and the menagerie of other authorities of conventional wisdom that crowd our pages and airwaves" (p. 31).
Anderson, Dardenne and Killenberg, who ignore the NWICO discussants, rely more on the work of writers such as Gans (1979), Hartley (1982), Merrill (1977), Rosen and Taylor (1992) and van Dijk (1988). Gans called for a "bottom up" perspective of journalism; Hartley masterfully reformulated the news values that attracted media attention; Merrill called for an existential journalism that called for experimentation, diversity, creativity and pluralism; and van Dijk argued that conventional news reports discouraged people from developing knowledge and attitudes that lead to alternative frameworks.
With the benefit of previous scholarship, Anderson, Dardenne and Killenberg use another chapter to expand on ecumenical journalism, which they define as the multicultural and multidisciplinary commons. Their ecumenical journalism complements Merrill's notion of existential journalism. They focus primarily on two qualities of ecumenism -- its connotation of universal or whole-world inclusiveness and its emphasis on heightened understanding and cooperation through dialogue (p. 73). They call on journalism to adopt a multicultural approach that enables it to view the community and its people from a "bottoms up" perspective. They point out that occasional stories about diversity -- splashes of "minority" news here and there -- do not reflect ecumenism.
The ideal of muticulturalism, they say, requires treading the middle ground to create heightened sensitivity to "socially and politically disenfranchised groups," among others. They go onto say that multicultural success in journalism first requires an acknowledgment of the power of the dominant culture; then the ability to view the world through the eyes of others (pp. 83-84). Additionally, a multidisciplinary sensitivity in journalism would enable a focus on the human condition within larger cultural and ecological contexts. They surmise: "News in a broader, ecumenical definition includes relationships among people, their conditions, and their environments. News, in this sense, examines not only suffering, destruction, despair, and disintegration, but also hope, inspiration, guidance, direction, and common ground" (p. 95). Hence the inadequacy of the conventional news values.
News media can engage in ecumenical journalism, Anderson, Dardenne and Killenberg say, by featuring, for example, a story on quinceaneras -- a sort of "debutante ball" that marks the coming of age of a Hispanic young woman on her 15th birthday -- to promote multicultural awareness among Anglos in cities with Latino populations (p. 75). The (Fargo, N.D.) Forum did exactly that on a front-page spread in its Region section (Spencer 1995). As a columnist later wrote: "In the three weeks since it ran, this story has become less of a feature on a unique ceremony and more of a Rorschach test ... (Some letter) writers looked at the inkblot and didn't notice the sponsorsÕ commitment to the family for the sake of a girl, a family, a faith and a culture. They saw nothing but race, and prove themselves bigots" (Sullivan 1995). The adverse reactions of two readers who wrote to the editor implying that the girl's family had used welfare money to fund the ceremony was no surprise in a community where the general news coverage of the local media often reflects a non-ecumenical approach to journalism -- an emphasis on crime and welfare among the tiny Hispanic community of 1 percent of the population. As Anderson, Dardenne and Killenberg say: "Journalists cannot claim ecumenism by offering occasional stories about diversity" (p. 77).
How should journalism connect with the community? Anderson, Dardenne and Killenberg provide the answer in another chapter, which backs up Dewey's (1916) assertion that there is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community and communication. The authors argue that the news media "should occupy a prominent place in a community's life and conversation" and that journalism's definition of community should "include people of other cities, regions, states, and nations" (p. 101). Thereby they infuse a global flavor to their treatise. Drawing from the principles that Dewey and Robert Park (1955) set forth, the authors exhort the news media to indulge in communication, a mutual process of developing shared meaning, more than in information, a commodity. "When news constitutes a commodity, the relationship of news organization to the community remains one of power and authority of the sender over the receiver" (p. 102), they argue. One may ask the question: Aren't the people, in their perceived role as consumers, exerting their power as well by rejecting the commodity called news as currently packaged by the daily newspapers?
The authors urge the news media to develop citizens, not consumers. They say that an emphasis on community and public life, through the recreation of a journalistic town commons, can achieve this end. They ask the news media to establish lines of communication patiently through a stepladder approach starting at the bottom rung of community tolerance, and eventually advancing to acceptance, collaboration and consensus. They point out that undertaking the responsibility of maintaining lines of communication actively within a diverse community will require the media to identify problems, establish agreed-upon values, develop priorities for action, arrive at goals and objectives for governing and living and help the community realize its ambitions (pp. 104-105). They suggest that "the conversation begun through the news needs to continue after publication and broadcast in interpersonal, interactive formats" (p. 106) such as computer bulletin boards, free phone lines, hiring neighborhood writers and opening up editorial meetings to invited citizens.
Furthermore, the authors suggest that journalists should discover a community's "relevance" by meeting people and experiencing their lives by: conversing with "real" and "ordinary" people more than public officials, collaborating with community people through "my story" assignments, expanding the Rolodex to include nontraditional sources, seeking cross-cultural, cross-generational experiences, attending community-building events, and sponsoring "news dialogue" meetings in the community (pp. 109-110). The authors concede that connecting with the community "presents complications associated with boosterism and conflicts of interest" (p. 113). However, they prefer "the crusading, public-spirited journalism" of publishers like Richard Amberg of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. They also suggest that journalists should be willing to accept and act on feedback from the community, particularly from people quoted or described in stories, "both before and after publication or broadcast" (p 118). They call for a "well-publicized, accessible system of accountability" (p. 119) for journalists. In addition, they push for the narrative style of reporting because people prefer" engaging, personalized, and relevant stories" inasmuch as "news in the form of summary leads and inverted pyramids bores people" (p. 120).
Anderson, Dardenne and Killenberg, who use another chapter to discuss the listening role of journalism, say that the Clinton-Brown dialogue on the "Donahue" show during the last U.S. presidential campaign "offers almost a prototypical example of the conversation of journalism" (p. 127) illustrating what they describe as presence, context and forum issues. They approve the contemporary cultural studies approaches, which "substitute a reality that is culturally pervasive, consensually shared, and constructed symbolically by all participants" (p. 130). They push for the adoption of a transactional philosophy, which "recognizes that the world is connected in myriad ways that are not always obvious on the surface" (p. 136) -- a sort of systems approach. A transactional sensibility for journalism, they say, must imply three things for journalistic listening: that it is interpretive, not simply receptive; that it involves giving equal weight to what Elbow (1973) calls the doubting game -- the basis for most of traditional scientific discovery and much of adversary journalism -- and the believing game -- "giving the benefit of the doubt" to the other communicator; and that it entails responsibilities to fuel public dialogue. They believe that journalism as part of the discipline of communication will be more apt to examine what makes successful journalistic "interviewing."
An entire chapter, which suffers from a syndrome of repetition, extols the virtues of newstelling -- the narrative and story style of news presentation that is increasingly creeping into U.S. dailies. For instance, Scanlan (1995) argues: "The challenge of today's journalists is to go beyond bureaucracy, beyond meetings, and to write stories that reveal the 'joys and costs of being human,' as Joel Rawson, deputy executive editor of the Providence Journal Bulletin, describes it to his reporters ... Write the council story through the eyes of the Asian-American who asks for better police protection in his neighborhood" -- the very sentiments that Anderson, Dardenne and Killenberg promote in their book.
Anderson, Dardenne and Killenberg say that the dichotomy between "information" -- news presented in the inverted pyramid format -- and "entertainment" -- material presented in narrative and story format -- "has been destructive and wasteful" (p. 148). They fail to see the relevance of the distinction between "hard" and "soft" news. They say that the inverted pyramid format, coupled with the conventional news values, makes events appear as discrete happenings that occur in "fits and starts," whereas the "narrative fashions a particular reality from all the possible realities that can be created" (p. 155); moreover, the latter approach not only invites people to read or receive but also to become part of the story. They say: "Fact and event in news are certainly important, but story-based news emphasizes theme and context" (p. 153); that story-based forms of news are more likely "to be representative of a broader range of people than report forms" (p. 161); that "a news-as-story approach allows people to explore more consciously other ways of seeing" (p. 166); and that "narrative and story bring readers closer to events and people involved in them, and closer to the paper and reporters responsible for writing about them" (p. 169).
The authors' historical survey of the evolution of news into its current conventional format deserves high credit. They point out that the content of early newspapers often strongly resembled that of older story forms; that Dickens and Twain wrote engaging news narratives -- often stories that carried a strong sense of justice; that the inverted pyramid began in the 1830s when publishers realized they could make money with facts -- a development that gradually led to the separation of fact from opinion; that fact-based objective journalism took off to suit the needs of telegraph transmission after the 1840s as well as the rules of "truth, fact and objectivity" related to science (p. 151).
Pauly (1995), who commends The Conversation of Journalism, agrees that "news, as it is currently practiced, is largely irrelevant for democracy." He says that a fundamental unease exists "about the declining cultural authority of the newspaper as an institution, reporting as a profession, and news as a form of knowledge." Agreeing with the solutions posited by Anderson, Dardenne and Killenberg, Pauly suggests four reasons why a society organized around the principle of information can never be democratic. An information society, he says, (a) invests too much faith in technologies of communication rather than in the social commons; (b) imagines citizenship in overly individualistic terms by identifying personal satisfaction as a goal best achieved through technological innovation; (c) is not physically sustainable in the long run; and (d) badly misrepresents the actual social practice of democracy. He says that "journalism, conceived as a social practice rather than an industry or profession, might ... serve as one model of responsiible citizenship" (pp. xiii-xv).
One can also see a high degree of similarity between the views postulated in The Conversation of Journalism and those that Galtung and Vincent (1992) postulated in Global Glasnost on the role of the news media with specific reference to worldwide security and peace, worldwide well-being and development, ecological survival and reporting on war. Galtung and Vincent also call on the mass media, inter alia: to give a voice to all parties and recognize the media's own biases; to provide the frame of reference relating to issues and focus on the totality of concrete life situations; to de-emphasize the conventional news values and seek "non-elite" sources; to desist from talking down to their audiences; to relate development to "people" allowing them to talk and report on society by giving them some media control; and to never forget the dimension of democracy.
Conventional news media, however, may find it somewhat difficult to accept some implications of Anderson, Dardenne and Killenberg's agenda. Isn't their conversational journalism nothing but community relations -- a very important aspect of public relations? They tend to affirm this equation when they say that journalism must submit itself to the communication discipline. They further imply this equation when they decry the long-standing antagonism between some reporters and public relations specialists. They say that the journalists' propensity for doubting "sets up the very attitude by which slanted PR messages are more likely to be seen by the PR specialist as necessary to penetrate the bias of news journalists" (p. 139). They go on to say: "If journalism refuses to listen transactionally, it begins to supply its own answers or perhaps just as dangerous, begins merely to echo prepackaged answers of public relations spokespersons for companies, agencies, or candidates" (p. 137). Are the authors saying that a conversational journalism will eliminate PR practice? Or are they saying that all journalists must become PR practitioners of sorts?
Another worry may arise from the authors' suggestion to allow sources to have pre-publication access to a story in order to ensure accuracy -- again a PR-oriented solution. They do not say that all stories can practically go through this procedure. However, will not such a practice deter journalists from undertaking interpretation and investigation as watchdogs for the "fourth estate" -- a vital aspect of democracy as we know it? The concept of development journalism came under fire from the West, during the NWICO debate, because it smacked of such cooperation between sources and journalists. For the news media, this may involve making a choice between the participatory and watchdog functions of democracy.
Furthermore, if community involvement is the thrust of conversational journalism, can the news media agree on a philosophical framework to change the codes of ethics evolved during this century? The authors correctly postulate that current journalism ethics reflects "the traditionally male-orientation of journalism" -- a framework inappropriate in the context of evidence that "men and women in Western industrialized society tend to frame ethical issues differently" (p. 184) with women tending "to approach moral problems from the vantage points of listening, empathizing, caring, and creating a context of explanation in which behavior might be more meaningfully understood" (p. 185). With multiculturalism becoming an increasingly significant factor in society, should not the codes of ethics also draw from non-Western perspectives as well not forgetting the Mass Media Declaration of Unesco, the MacBride Report recommendations, and the International Principles of Professional Ethics in Journalism (Traber and Nordenstreng 1992)?
The conversational journalism espoused by Anderson, Dardenne and Killenberg has a remarkable resemblance to the right to communicate that the Unesco-backed MacBride Commission (ICSCP 1980) upheld in the following words: "Communication needs in a democratic society should be met by the extension of specific rights such as the right to be informed, the right to inform, the right to participate in public communication -- all elements of a new concept, the right to communicate" (p. 265). The Western media condemned the MacBride views during the height of the NWICO debate. Now that the chips are down, with daily newspaper circulation sliding downward, will the U.S. media accept the re-packaged version from their home-grown scholars?
Finally, is there substantial evidence to prove that a narrative journalism, compared to the inverted pyramid form that has dominated journalism for more than a century and one-half, will attract many more readers when the time they spend with a daily newspaper is a mere 15 to 20 minutes on the average? Will the readers spend much more time with a narrative-style newspaper? The spread of WEDiting has so far not resulted in a circulation rise in the United States. The decline in readership may well be a reflection not only of the availability of alternative media but also of increasing functional illiteracy (Will 1995) -- a matter that has totally escaped the authors' attention.
Anderson, Dardenne and Killenberg have indeed written a very provocative treatise on the current state of mainstream journalism. They have demonstrated that their ideas are not frivolous but rather embedded in respectable intellectual inquiry of the past and the present. Serious discussion of their treatise must now occur in newsrooms as well as journalism schools. Such a conversation may eventually produce more refined outcomes on the mission and goals of 21st century journalism. Those engaged in the conversation will no doubt help separate the grain from the chaff.
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