Rosen sets himself up as saying that the press's ideology is complicated, in opposition to three different stances that say it's simple: the right that says the media is liberal, because of all the "liberals" who work in it, the left that says the media is conservative, because of all the corporate capitalists that own it, and the working journalists who say "we don't have an ideology, we just report the facts and let the chips fall where they may!"
I think this is basically a misleading set-up, though it does set up an interesting argument on Rosen's part. Why is it misleading? Because the "liberal critique" he cites is primarily nothing more than a rough framework for left/liberal criticism that tends to be much more rigorously fact-based than anything on the right. It's pretty much a big-picture liberal counter-argument to conservative critics, intended to set the parameters for understanding what's going on. After all, how many people do you know who rise to the top of their field by routinely pissing off their bosses? Rosen's characterization might be fair if the left had only this sort of broad assertion, and nothing but. However, that's just not the case. The left has plenty of empirically-driven arguments about specific examples and forms of bias, many of which do take note of variations involved.
Still, Rosen's analysis is extremely useful, so long as you keep its limitations in mind, because what he does above all is destroy the "no ideology" ideology of working journalists, and replace it with a useful--if incomplete--description of their actual working ideology. It's incomplete because it ignores the left/liberal critical framework of media ownership and control, and the institutional structures that embody the limitations and biases this entails in the daily life of working journalists. This missing aspect of institutional shaping of journalistic norms, assumptions and practices is brilliantly addressed by Jeremy Igger's slim but deep volume, Good News, Bad News: Journalism Ethics and the Public Interest, which I've discussed or alluded to on numerous occasions. Rosen's focus is more directly on internalized norms and practices, like a movie shot all in close-ups. Iggers pulls back the lens and shows us the environment in which these people live, including significant turning points in how it came to be what it is.
Rosen's work can be particularly useful, however, when what we want to focus on is how journalists are acting in or close to real-time. He gives us a lexicon for on-the-fly ideological critique that can then be embedded into a larger historical/empirical framework.
On the flip, I examine Rosen re-description of journalists' working ideology, but only after a section looking at how he prepares the way for what he has to say. Those in a hurry can simply skip the section on the prep-work... or come back and read it later.
"The quest for innocence means the desire to be manifestly agenda-less and thus 'prove' in the way you describe things that journalism is not an ideological trade. But this can get in the way of describing things! What's lost is that sense of reality Isaiah Berlin talked about..."
Rosen spends some time explaining why the Times story is a good piece of journalism--it wasn't a superficial show-up-and-get-some-quotes sort of piece, it took five months of reporting to do, involving lots of interviews with people at different levels, attending many different events, really getting to know the people involved. And that's all to the good, Rosen says, before uttering a word of complaint. But then there's this:
Now to the part that puzzles me:
It is a sprawling rebellion, but running through it is a narrative of impending tyranny. This narrative permeates Tea Party Web sites, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and YouTube videos. It is a prominent theme of their favored media outlets and commentators, and it connects the disparate issues that preoccupy many Tea Party supporters - from the concern that the community organization Acorn is stealing elections to the belief that Mr. Obama is trying to control the Internet and restrict gun ownership.
Running through it is a narrative of impending tyranny...That sounds like the Tea Party movement I have observed, so the truth of the sentence is not in doubt. But what about the truth of the narrative? David Barstow is a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter for the New York Times. He ought to know whether the United States is on the verge of losing its democracy and succumbing to an authoritarian or despotic form of government. If tyranny was pending in the U.S. that would seem to be a story. The New York Times has done a lot of reporting about the Obama Administration, but it has been silent on the collapse of basic freedoms lurking just around the corner.
Which, of course, ought to tell you something. If there really were an army of jack-booted thugs waiting in the wings, then the Times has done a lousy job of reporting on it. And if there isn't, well, it seems like a pretty big omission not to point this out, because the factual disconnect would tell you something very important about the Tea Party, and raise a whole host of the sorts of questions that reporters are supposed to be interested in, such as, "What's really going here, anyway?" In short, what's missing here is not an expression of opinion on the part of the reporter. What's missing is an entire framework of verifiable facts--something which ought to be unthinkable for a top-flight newspaper like the Times, but which is, in fact, entirely routine. And since that framework of facts is missing, an entire range of questions is missing, too, along with the facts that such questions would bring to light.
Friday, on Bill Moyers Journal there were a couple of remarkable segments (transcript here). I doubt I'll have time to discuss the segment with Eric Foner, one of America's top historians, but it was really excellent, a sharp contrast to the almost endless mindless blather one routinely hears about Abraham Lincoln. Foner comes at Lincoln as an historian who's written extensively about much more ordinary people of that time, and so he carries a perspective that much more in tune with how the blogosphere sees power today. But I want to focus on the other segment, Glenn Greenwald and Jay Rosen.
What was so good about the segment was not the content per se, which most of us are generally familiar with, but they way they were able to convey it in the tv medium, in a very distilled, but not dumbed-down manner. And I'd like to use that distilled presentation to link what they were saying to a couple of excellent books from the 1990s that can further illuminate the historical background of what we're living through and fighting against.
They began with a discussion of the Daschle affair....
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