Objectivity and Autonomy in the Newsroom: a Field Approach

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Objectivity and Autonomy in the Newsroom: a Field Approach OBJECTIVITY AND AUTONOMY IN THE NEWSROOM: A FIELD APPROACH A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Jay F. Gabriel May, 2008 © Copyright 2008 by Jay F. Gabriel iii ABSTRACT Objectivity and Autonomy in the Newsroom: A Field Approach Jay F. Gabriel Doctor of Philosophy Temple University, 2008 Doctoral Advisory Committee Chair: Paul Garrett This dissertation provides a better understanding of how journalists attain their personal and occupational identities. In particular, I examine the origins and meanings of journalistic objectivity as well as the professional autonomy that is specific to journalism. Journalists understand objectivity as a worldview, value, ideal, and impossibility. A central question that remains is why the term objectivity has become highly devalued in journalistic discourse in the past 30 years, a puzzling development considered in light of evidence that “objectivity” remains important in American journalism. I use Bourdieu’s notion of field to explore anthropological ways of looking at objectivity, for instance, viewing it as a practice that distinguishes journalists from other professionals as knowledge workers. Applying notions of field to the journalistic field through anthropological methods and perspective permits the linkage of microlevel perspectives to macrolevel social phenomena. The dissertation demonstrates how qualitative research on individuals and newsroom organizations can be connected to the field of journalism in the United States. Additionally, it offers insight into why journalists continue to embrace objectivity, even as they acknowledge its deficiencies as a journalistic goal. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author wishes to thank dissertation chair Paul Garrett, committee members Jayasinhji Jhala and Carolyn Kitch and outside reader Andrew Mendelson for their guidance. v This work is dedicated to Laura Scheinfeldt. Without her patience, critical feedback and support, it would not have been written. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE ABSTRACT....................................................................................................................... iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...................................................................................................v DEDICATION................................................................................................................... vi CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................1 2. METHODS AND FIELDWORK..........................................................................33 3. OBJECTIVITY AND THE JOURNALISTIC FIELD..........................................62 4. RECURSIVITY AND INDEPENDENCE AND AUTONOMY IN THE JOURNALISTIC FIELD.....................................................................................110 5. ALTERNATIVE MODELS ................................................................................133 6. CONCLUSIONS .................................................................................................167 WORKS CITED ..............................................................................................................177 vii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Introduction: Journalism and Interpretation Back in the 1920s, at which point journalism had been moving for some time toward increased professionalization in the form of journalism schools and organizations, a notion surfaced that journalism should become more like a science. The idea of a “journalology” (e.g., Johnson 1928) never really took hold, despite the practices and goals science and journalism shared, such as an affinity for facts, a desire for methods with which to qualify and quantify facts and ways in which to interpret them. The promise of treating journalism as a science seemed obvious; such a move would create better tools for describing reality. The authority of scientists, who carefully controlled access to their disciplines, eclipsed that of journalists when it came to specific subjects, and so a less openly stated, but hoped-for effect of scientizing journalism was to make it more exclusive and thus more authoritative. As it turned out, while science and journalism possess many similarities, the audiences and purposes of each are sufficiently distinct as to have made this confluence forever unlikely. Another difference, one of the biggest of all, are the conditions under which the workers within each field produce knowledge. Deadlines are of far greater significance in journalism, which, after all, is the business of producing something called news, and so journalists have devised all sorts of ways to quickly identify, understand and assemble facts into narratives, with little particular need to conduct extended debates on the theories of such knowledge production, only the methods. Social scientists, on the 1 other hand, are taught early in their training that facts do not mean much without frameworks with which to interpret them. We would like to think that we favor the kind of theories that are explicit, that is, spelled out, articulated and as internally coherent and non-contradictory as possible. We concede, however, that most people are given to using implicit, unspoken theories (or ideologies) to interpret the world, and, in fact, many of us make our living studying these. Although the journalistic field is “undertheorized,” according even to journalist-scholars (Cline 2006), journalists certainly possess and use theories in both senses; there are explicit theories of newsgathering (such as arguments for a “participatory journalism” that seeks greater citizen involvement in the production of news) as well as more subtle, implicit frameworks within which journalists work. Does journalism mirror older (and some contemporary) models of good science? Why do journalists consider a separation of individual self from their work “good journalism”? Hoping to learn something about implicit interpretive frameworks in the field of journalism, I conducted interviews with a number of journalists and worked for a time in a newsroom. During a conversation with one of my journalist-informants, a columnist for a daily paper, I mentioned that I had been writing about ways in which journalists interpret facts. He looked up sharply. “Don’t make that mistake!” he snapped, and then continued somewhat more gently, “Columnists interpret. Journalists don’t.” This surprised me a little. In much the same way that social scientists have largely dismissed beliefs in objectivity as naïve or sophomoric, most of my informants and many journalism texts similarly have been quick to describe objectivity as an ideal impossible to achieve. Most of the journalists whom I have encountered openly concede that they hold biases, and that they deal with them in various ways when they write stories. So I 2 was taken aback to hear a veteran journalist make what I understood to be a claim that journalists do not make interpretations. What did he mean when he said that journalists do not interpret? This dissertation is about print journalists in the United States, the ways in which they interpret, and the way in which they talk about their production of the news. To make my analysis, I examine the concepts of objectivity and independence, two journalistic practices or worldviews that are grounded in the history and culture of the United States and in the institution of journalism. In particular, I have focused on journalistic discourses surrounding objectivity, a principle in American journalism that journalists have seemingly devalued in recent years. My direct ethnographic experience with journalists consists of fieldwork at an alternative weekly paper and interviews with a number of journalistic staff writers, freelancers, bloggers, editors, and teachers. The main question I am addressing is why objectivity continues to hold sway in the field; one answer that I propose is that objectivity is useful for journalists in distinguishing themselves as exceptional in a marketplace of speakers, and maintaining control over their independence from coercive forces. Why journalists and journalism? Beyond the fact that I have a personal interest in newspapers, magazines, reporting and journalism, I see the social scientific investigation of journalism as being necessary to any general understanding of the modern nation-state, globalization and a host of other things from which human beings in modern societies form consciousness of the world based on their indirect experience of the people and history that surrounds them. Human beings in a society as large the United States have little intimate interaction with individuals outside their immediate routines. Still, 3 members of a society share many aspects of identity, knowledge and social relationships, and partake in many the same discourses, creating a shared body of understanding of the world. Among the numerous discursive practices that exist, journalism is surely predominant, given its reach and the size of the audiences that news media address. For various reasons that I touch upon in this chapter, anthropology has not been terribly attentive to journalism. The omission is odd considering that a number of scholars have remarked upon the profound effects of media on social structure, social identity and individual consciousness itself (for example, Edmund Carpenter [1972] in anthropology, as well as Marshall McLuhan [1964]). The news provides
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