Week 4 – Journalism as a public conversation

This post takes us back to week 4, which I had forgot!

I found Romano & Hippocrates discussion on Public Journalism strong in some areas and weak in others. I found that their chapter was helpful in describing public journalism but some of their augments in favour of it where not as convincing as they made them out to be.

In particular they raise the fact that audiences consume news in a sporadic way, often reading only what suits their world view, which is fair enough. But exactly how public journalism addresses this matter over traditional journalism is not clearly stated. Instead, they go onto argue that news involving deeper social/cultural issues need background and context worked into the articles, which is also fair enough but how does that solve their fist assertion that people read news sporadically? Surely longer articles that require more of a commitment on behalf of an already superficial audience isn’t the solution.

Another fundamental notion of public journalism that I’m yet to comprehend is this idea of subverting the news agenda set by those in power, i.e. politicians, big business etc to be set by the common person. Sure the news agenda is set by people with influence and power in society. But that’s exactly why it is news – they have power and influence over how everyone else lives their lives – that is therefore of direct interest to everybody. Having said that, we also don’t want to be dictated too – but that’s exactly why we have quotes from different institutions with different levels of interest in truth and levels of engagement with an issue to allow for different angles on the same issue. In reality, whether news organisations look to multiple sources for articles is up to them.

Also the fact that they say having an ‘open marketplace of ideas’, with a ‘mass of competing, conflicting views’ is ‘inappropriate’ (p: 168) really makes me worry about were the authors are coming from. John Stuart Mill argued centuries ago that, in theory, the only way to arrive at truth was for all views and opinions to be heard without censorship, so that everything could be in the open to be disproved or proved right.