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Robert Manoff, page 3
In a lovely interview with Bill Moyers, Sister Wendy, the antic nun turned art historian, once remarked that "art deepens our awareness of the things that matter," and it strikes me that this is true of the best journalism, as well. But what are the things that matter? For the most part, they are the principles, values, norms, and structures that underlie the "relationships" to which I have been alluding. For example, the archetypal Virtues and Vices of Christendom all concern our relationship with each other, God, the self, or the universe. So do the Ten Commandments and the Qur'an. The big-ticket concepts that frame our thinking about civilization (think Justice, Truth, Freedom, Beauty, Identity…) are all ultimately relational, as well.
My NYU colleague Michael Norman once remarked that "No reporter should write a crime story, who has not thought about Justice." Restating this to place emphasis on the journalistic act, we could say that "Every story written about crime should be informed by the reporter's thinking about Justice." Or, less ambitiously, we might simply affirm that "Every story written about crime should be written by a reporter who has thought about Justice." Generalizing from this example as we begin to imagine the journalism republican subjects require, we might offer as a journalistic maxim that "Stories that report the situational truth should always be informed by a sense of the existential truth, as well."
This applies across the board. Business journalism should be written by journalists who understand the theories of the Free Market and the critiques of those theories, by people who have been deeply educated to think about such issues as Equity, Distribution, Creativity, Leadership, Competition, Cooperation, and Human Nature — and stories should be informed by their knowledge. (To be sure, journalistic genres may have to be reinvented to make this possible.) International stories must be shaped by reporters who have thought about Otherness, the role of Force in History, and Equity, as well. No one should ever become a senior news executive who has not thought about Virtue, because so many news judgments concern how to play stories about Vice. Political stories would be better if they were shaped by journalists who had grappled with the concept of The Good. Cultural stories, at least some of the time, could do worse than to illuminate the nature and experience of Beauty. Nowadays, thanks to Mssrs. bin Laden and Bush, we could use some assistance from journalists who really understand how to think about Evil, and who can help the rest of us do likewise.
Marx is an unlikely person to have had something of value to add to our discussion, but, as someone who began as a journalist, he actually did, once noting of a publication he edited in the 1840s that its purpose was "to show the world why it struggles — the nature and meaning of its own acts." Although the journalism of socialist states subsequently made a mockery of this ambition, I have never encountered a better mission statement for the profession or a more trenchant thought-agenda for the citizen.
In order to report back to the world the nature
and meaning of its own acts, we journalists must learn to demand different
answers to the questions we already pose, and we must also learn to interrogate
the world in a different ways entirely. For example, the answers to the
journalistic interrogative "Who?" now most often concern individuals
who are the subjects or objects of the acts that journalists typically
report ("President Bush said today that…," "Three
people were injured when a bus…"). Journalists, however, could
become interested in different answers to this question. For example,
taking their cue from the sociologists on university faculties, journalism
professors could encourage their students to feature social classes as
the meaningful acting subject; or they might take their cue from anthropology,
and seek to feature the agency of cultures.
When it comes to "Why?," James Carey of the Columbia Journalism faculty has argued that the classic journalistic answer to this question most frequently comes down to individual motive (often, I might add, cynically construed). Instead, and following many historians, journalism professors might encourage their students to feature underlying social or economic forces as explanatory principles. Or, following the literary theorists among their university colleagues, journalism professors might emphasize the role of discourse as a semi-autonomous force (while encouraging journalists to scrutinize their own discourses in the bargain). Or — following developmental, cognitive, or clinical psychologists on the faculty — they might provide a more adequate understanding of individual action and motive than journalists typically deploy, drawing as they do on taken-for-granted and commonsense psychological reasoning alone.
In addition to providing new answers to old questions, a journalism adequate to the demands of republican subjecthood would ask new questions of its own. For example, in addition to the five Ws and an H, it might ask, "Why Not?," since journalists who are educated to be deeply knowledgeable about the issues they cover will be aware of possibilities they could employ to potentiate the world. Perhaps "To Whose Benefit?" should always be on the agenda, with answers to be shaped by concern for the vigor of republican subjecthood and the vitality of the public sphere. Finally, as should be obvious from what I have suggested above, I would expect that journalists will be taught to ask, always, "What Does It Mean?," with existential concerns uppermost in their minds when doing so.
As a result of such interrogatories, it is true, the conventional journalistic formula will become more difficult, as WWWWWH is transformed into WWWWWHWNTWBWDIM. But who ever said doing good journalism was going to be easy?
Robert Manoff is Director of the Center for
War, Peace, and the News Media, an interdisciplinary center affiliated
with the Department of Journalism at NYU. He is the former managing editor
of Harper's and the Soho News, the senior editor of MORE,
and the editor of the Columbia Journalism Review.
