The mass media and democracy: between the modern and the postmodern. (Power of the Media in the Global System)

John Chancellor was upset. Impeccably groomed and spoken, this visual icon of virtually the entire history of television journalism could hardly contain his distress. Beneath his characteristically genial manner, his anger showed, as he lectured at Columbia University's Du Pont Forum on what went wrong in the 1992 U.S. presidential election.(1) The catalog took more than 30 minutes: The election was the worst in history, worse even than the monumentally smarmy campaign of 1988; one no longer needed to belong to a political party to run for president; talk show hosts displaced journalists; the public filled the air with silly questions on ersatz television debates and call-in radio programs; faxes, "800-numbers," computer bulletin boards, private satellite hook-ups and electronic mail had conspired with talk-show hosts Arsenio Hall and Rush Limbaugh, and interviewers Larry King and Tabitha Soren to evacuate the role of journalism from presidential politics. In sum, Chancellor asserted that network journalism had declined, and the new news of endlessly chattering masses cluttered the electronic highway with trivia.

All good stories have a villain at the center, and this one was no exception: It had Ross Perot. Perot's electronic campaign circumvented party organization, presidential primaries and a national convention, as volunteers placed him on the ballot in state after state. Perot ignored local newspapers, radio and television and, in effect, told the national press that he could win without them -- or by running against them. Perot demonstrated it was possible to run with one's own money and avoid restrictions on federal matching funds.(2) He laid down new rules for presidential politics: Avoid specifics; stay away from journalists; hold as few press conferences as possible; stay away from the serious interview programs; and cultivate electronic populism by exploiting call-in radio. Who, after all, needs Sam Donaldson? Worse yet, who needs John Chancellor?

Chancellor most of all mourned -- and who can blame him -- his own irrelevance and that of journalists like him. In his view, there was no one left to challenge the candidates, to hold their feet to the fire. The quality of campaigning was in decline because politicians had direct access to the public through media that offered neither threat nor intimidation. All this gave rise to the worst fear of the generation of journalists who had been affected by the Second World War: The new media had greased the highway of modern politics for demagogues and demagoguery. Chancellor had encountered the vampire of postmodern politics and found himself without a crucifix.

This episode serves to remind the reader that the following consideration of the mass media and democracy -- which are always intertwined -- occurs at a particularly opaque historical juncture. Something is afoot in modem societies that seems peculiarly tied to the decline of certain media that have defined the context of communications and democracy since at least the end of the Second World War. The media have changed decisively in the last 20 years, both as technologies and institutions. Yet democracy has changed also; the ends of political life have been reconceived in recent years. There is a widespread demand for less pro forma political representation, whether by the press or elected officials, and for more real participation.

Yet these changes only signal that the meanings of democracy and communication are historically variable. The meaning of democracy changes over time because forms of communication with which to conduct politics change. The meaning of communication also changes over time depending on the central impulses and aspirations of democratic politics. Neither communication nor democracy is a transcendent concept; they do not exist outside history. The meaning of these terms varies with available media and with whatever concrete notions of democracy happen to be popular at any particular time.

The journalistic side of the twentieth century can be defined as the struggle for democracy and an independent media against propaganda and subservience to the state. That struggle culminated during the first half of this century in the seizure of the means of communication by the demagogues of the 1930s and 1940s -- Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin -- and their Cold War reincarnation of the 1950s, Joseph McCarthy -- the ghost that still haunts U.S. journalism.(3)

While this struggle was imprinted upon the generation of the time, the fear of demagoguery seemed a curious hangover of a forgotten age for those in the post-McCarthy generations. Similarly, the quest for so-called objectivity seemed to a younger generation a curious absence of passion and commitment: a deliberate sitting out of history.

This historical, generational divide is what the hyperbolic phrase in the title "between the modem and the postmodern" is designed to catch. For John Chancellor was right -- if only by implication -- about one thing: A medium implies and constitutes a way of life. Whatever democracy as a way of life may be, it is constituted by particular media of communication and institutional arrangements through which politics is conducted, whether speech in the agora, the colonial newspaper and the pamphlet in the taverns of Philadelphia, the omnibus daily in the commercial city or the television network in an industrialized nation. Similarly, a medium of communication is defined by the democratic aspirations of those involved in politics: a conversation among equals, the organ of a political ideology, a watchdog on the state, an instrument of dialogue on public issues, a device for transmitting information or an arena for the struggle of interest groups. Modern journalism began around 1890 with the advent of a national system of communication and has had a pretty long run.(4) Its time now seems to be about up. Yet, there was democracy before modern journalism; and there will be democracy after it, despite difficult and dangerous transitions to be negotiated. The sections that follow contrast two historically specific forms of the relationship between journalism and democracy: journalism in a public society and journalism in a national society. The first form constitutes the original understanding of the press and the First Amendment in the United States.(5) The second form, in which the media acts more as a watchdog on the state, has been typical of the modern period that now seems to be coming to an end. These distinctions are important because it appears that the struggle today to recreate public life through new forms of communication such as cable television and talk radio are heavily inspired by images of democracy and public life from the colonial and early national periods. This article then discusses the potential for journalism and democracy in the years ahead.

This last discussion focuses primarily on U.S. experience. Nonetheless it can be instructive in a more international context for several reasons. New forms of communication rarely meet resistance in the United States: They are allowed to diffuse rapidly and penetrate deeply into the social fabric. Developments in the United States frequently foreshadow, though they never duplicate, changes that will occur in other countries. Second, the globalization of communication, and the creation of transnational audiences and markets -- which are features of the contemporary period -- have introduced similar problematic elements into the political life of all democracies, not just the United States. The press may everywhere be part of the apparatus by which the accountability of the governors to the governed is achieved. Yet, just as the meaning of democracy and communication varies historically, it varies across nations as well. Thus, ultimately, the precise terms of accountability and the role of the press in each society must be examined on a country-by-country basis.

EVOLUTION OF THE PUBLIC

The original understanding of journalism, politics and democracy in the United States emerged in the public houses and taverns of the colonial era. Pubs were presided over by publicans who were often publishers. Publicans picked up information from conversations in the pub and from travellers who often recorded what they had seen and heard on their journeys in log books stationed at the end of the bar. Publishers then recorded such conversation and gossip and printed it, in order that it might be preserved and circulated. They also printed speeches, orations, sermons, offers of goods for sale and political opinions of those who gathered in public places, largely merchants and traders. Newspapers, which were circulated in public houses, animated conversation and discussion. Consequently, journalism -- reflected speech -- was the ongoing flow of conversation, not in the halls of the legislatures, but in the public houses.

This context provides the original understanding of the public: a group of merchants, traders, citizens and political activists -- often strangers -- who gathered to discuss the news. Describing Philadelphia on the eve of the Revolutionary War, Sam Bass Warner observed that

Today in the United States, the public is an abstraction and a philosophical term. "The public's right to know" is the worn slogan of modern journalism. The press justifies itself in the name of the public: The press exists to inform it, to serve as its extended eyes and ears and to represent and protect its interest. All privileges and prerogatives of the press, such as freedom of information laws or the right to keep news sources confidential, are rationalized in the name of the public.

The eighteenth-century public, which inspired democratic theory, is of a more humble origin. It was brought into existence by the conditions of the eighteenth-century city and the printing press. It was a concrete social group who gathered in public houses to talk, read the news together, dispute the meaning of events and relate political impulses to political actions. The public was elevated into a social form by the news and, in turn, the primary subject of the news was the public. The public formed because urban life was sufficiently developed so that strangers were regularly thrown into contact with one another. Technology allowed dissemination of newspapers and pamphlets, which provided a common focus for discussion and conversation. The public, then, was a society of conversationalists -- or disputants. It was not, as it became during the modern period, a fiction or an abstraction. It was not a group of people sitting at home watching television or privately and invisibly reading newspapers. Nor was it the results of a public opinion poll.

The public space, in turn, depended on public habits, manners and talents, such as the ability to welcome strangers, to avoid intimacy, to wear a public mask and to shun the personal. As such, the public was taken to be both critical and rational. It was critical in the sense that nothing in public was taken for granted; everything was subject to argument and evidence. It was rational in the sense that the speaker was responsible for giving reasons for believing in any assertion; and there was no intrinsic appeal to authority. The public was, thus, more than a group of people or a mode of discourse: It was a seat of political power, located in the world between the state and the private sector. It was the only sphere in which power could wear the face of rationality, for it was the only sphere where private interest might be transcended.

The critical factor in the relationship between the public and journalism was that journalism was not an end in itself, but was justified in terms of its ability to serve and bring into existence an actual social arrangement, a particular form of democracy as discourse in a sphere of independent, rational, political influence. While freedom of the press was valued as an individual right, the importance of the press was predicated on the unspoken premise of the existence of the public, and not the reverse.

THE PUBLIC AND THE MEANING OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT

Today, the First Amendment is often viewed as a loose collection of clauses on the freedoms of religion, assembly, speech and the press. Typically, U.S. citizens array the separate rights contained in each clause and the legal cases that fall under them. Today, the modern slogan "freedom of the press" belongs to those who own the presses or to journalists and the organizations for which they work. When read against the background of public life, however, the First Amendment is not a casual and loose collection of separate clauses or high-minded principles. It does not deed freedom of the press as a property right to journalists or any particular group. The First Amendment is simply a compact description of public life as it existed at the time the Founding Fathers developed the U.S. Constitution, and as they hoped it would continue to exist.

The First Amendment says that people are free to gather together, to have public spaces and to speak to one another free of the intrusion of the state or its representatives. They are further free to share what they have to say beyond the immediate place of utterance. Freedom of the press, in this case, means simply the right and ability to record and preserve, to enlarge and disseminate the conversation of the culture.

The public remains the implicit term of the First Amendment. It is the God term -- the worshipped concept -- of liberal society and the press. Without the public, neither the press nor democracy makes any sense. Today, however, this original conception of a public of discussion and disputation, independent of both the press and the state, has been abandoned. Public opinion, for example, no longer refers to opinions expressed in public and then recorded in the press. Public opinion is now formed by the press and modeled by the public opinion industry, polling and interest groups.(7) With the rise of the polling industry, the previous understanding of the public went into eclipse. The public has been replaced by the interest group as the object of analysis and key political actor, and the public has ceased to have a real existence. For much of the nineteenth century, political parties served as the principal means of influencing the distribution of economic resources and government privileges. But late in the century, interest and pressure groups developed as a new vehicle for pressuring governments. Thus, voting according to the party line in elections became less important, and interest groups operated in the private sector and behind the scenes to manipulate public opinion. As a result, the public faded into a statistical artifact or an audience whose opinions counted only insofar as individuals refracted the pressure of mass publicity. In short, while the word public continued in the English language as an ancient memory and pious hope, the public as a feature and factor of real politics disappeared.

Public life stands for a form of politics in which, in Jefferson's phrase, "We could all be participants in the government of our affairs."(8) Political equality, in its most primitive mode -- to borrow and twist some lines from Bruce Smith -- simply means the right to be seen and heard, or to have a public life.(9) When the life of a people is dominated by a few public figures or political celebrities, the rest of the population, denied the opportunity to be seen or heard, takes refuge and solace in private life and private pleasures. The passions for public life only grow and persist when people can speak and act as citizens, and have some guarantee that others see, hear and remember what they say. Therefore, the object of politics remains the desire to restore what Alexis de Tocqueville called the "little republics within the frame of the larger republic," and to create a palpable public to which each citizen can belong.(10)

BETWEEN TRADITIONAL PRESS AND MODERN JOURNALISM

The transition from the original understanding of the press, the public and politics to journalism in the modem era was long and twisted. Throughout the nineteenth century, the public sphere divided into regional and class-based conflicting factions, organized around political parties and a partisan press. Journalism became an organ of such parties or ideologically aligned with political parties. Journalism began to express and reflect a bifurcated public sphere, as individuals joined politics through parties and the press.(11) Participation in the public sphere occurred more through parties, press, demonstrations and street parades, and less through public discourse. As the franchise was extended, legal participation rose to unprecedented and never-to-be repeated levels: Voter turnout averaged 77 percent in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. But popular politics, as Michael McGerr put it, "involved more than suffrage rights and record turnouts;"(12) that is, elections required visible support, mobilized through popular journalism and political parties. Thus, the transformation to a separation between politics and the public had begun.

THE MODERN ERA OF JOURNALISM

The modem era of journalism stretched from the 1890s to the 1970s. It began with the birth of national magazines, the development of mass urban newspapers, the creation of primitive forms of electronic communication and the domination of news dissemination by the wire services.

Truly national media and a national audience in the United States were eventually supplemented by motion pictures, produced in Hollywood and distributed nationwide, and by radio in the 1920s. These media created a "great audience," a new collectivity in which people were destined to live out a major part of their lives. The media cut across the structural divisions in society, drawing their audience irrespective of race, ethnicity, occupation, region or social class. This was the first national and first mass audience -- open to all. Modem communications media allowed individuals in nations as large as the United States to be linked, for the first time, directly to the "imaginary community of the nation," without the mediating influence of regional and other local affiliations.(13)

The modern period culminated in the network era of television, when the entire nation seemed to be assembled in front of the three commercial networks -- CBS, ABC and NBC -- especially on the high holy days of politics, such as those surrounding the Kennedy assassination or the quadrennial political conventions.(14) The nation sat down to be counted as citizens of a 24-hour-a-day republic.

This rise of national media represented a centripetal force in social organization. Such media greatly enhanced the ability to control vast expanses of territory by reducing signal time and laying down direct lines of access among national centers -- such as New York, Washington and Hollywood -- and dispersed audiences.(15) This produced a remarkable potential for the centralization of power and authority.

The Progressive Movement and its Impact on journalism

The period from the 1890s onward saw the creation of a variety of social and cultural movements that were reactions against and impulses toward the formation of a national society through a national system of communications. Movements and groups such as progressivism, populism, nativism, the know-nothings, women's suffrage, temperance, the Grange and ethnic or racial affiliations were all attempts to master, tame and direct the currents of social change. These movements expressed a restless search for new identities and developed new forms of social and cultural life, such as political parties, trade associations, professional groups and ethnic associations. They were organized by the new media, defined by the media, commented upon by the media and formed within the media. At a minimum, these movements were organized as a response to new conditions of social life brought about in part by the new media.

From the standpoint of journalism, the most important social movement was progressivism, which both redefined the past and projected a new democratic future. It contained economic, political and cultural elements which were closely connected. First, it was an attack on the plutocracy -- concentrated economic power and the national social class that increasingly had a strangle hold over wealth and industry. The economic dimension of the progressive movement, however, also included the struggle by the middle-class professionals -- such as doctors, lawyers, journalists and social workers -- to become a national class and find a place in the national occupational structure and the national system of class influence and power. Thus, the professionals of the progressive movement were in many ways a less powerful imitation -- a shadow movement -- of the national class of plutocrats who ran and controlled industrial America.

Journalists were among these new progressive professionals. They formed national groups and lobbied to professionalize their standing through higher education. They sponsored histories of their profession and a new reading of the First Amendment in which the speech and press clauses became their possession. In effect, journalists became a new cultural elite with codes of ethical conduct justifying their new-found status in the nascent middle class professional world. They tried to figure out new ways of reporting on and commenting about this new world -- a new professional ideology -- which justified their place in the new order of things.

Second, progressivism was a movement of political reform at the national level and an attempt by the middle class and their intellectual allies to reclaim the cities from the political bosses and the urban machines. In many cases, the movement was an attempt to uproot the political influence of working-class groups who had seized city politics from local commercial and cultural elites during the great migrations before and after the Civil War. Progressivism was devoted to so-called good government by the middle class and created the chain of Better Government Associations that one still finds in major U.S. cities.

Journalists were usually allies of this movement for better government, in that they were committed to certain traditionally middle-class ideals of honesty and uprightness. Yet they also warred against the machines because city political bosses governed through the ward and patronage system and did not need the press to manage public opinion. Reform movements, in contrast, were dependent upon the publicity that only the press could give and thus assiduously courted and flattered the new journalists. journalists were aligned with the progressive movement by both interests and ideology, although primarily through beliefs about modernity and the role of the press in the modernizing process.

Third, progressivism was a cultural movement that sought to define new styles of life, patterns of child rearing, modes of family life, taste in art and personal conduct. This cultural dimension was as important in the movement as the economic and political ones. Progressivism in culture became part of the outlook of the journalists who took up residence in the new national media, which formed the discourse of the nation.

The three wings of progressivism were joined to one common desire: to escape the merely local and contingent, to seek the distant and remote and to prefer the national over the provincial. The national media of communication -- magazines, books and newspapers -- were the arena where the progressive program was set out and the struggle for its legitimation occurred.

Muckraking

The initial impact of the progressive movement on journalism was the rise of muckraking in the first decade of the twentieth century. Initially, the muckraking journalists directed their attacks against the plutocracy and the business class in an attempt to expose corruption. Muckraking arose within magazines rather than newspapers, for the former had no affiliation with politics, let alone with a given political party. While they owed something to the crusading tactics of newspapers, muckraking magazines, like sensational newspapers, did not dwell long on any one topic, as Michael McGerr pointed out.(16) They were hit-and-run artists who exposed corruption or urged the passage of pro-consumer legislation, but they did not have the shape and persistence to constitute a tradition of journalism.(17) What muckraking did was promote a tradition of journalism that took as its task the unmasking of power. It strove to serve as watchdog, not only on the state, but also on interest groups.

Muckraking gave rise to propaganda analysis: the unmasking of attempts by both public and private interest groups to control and manipulate the press. It also demonstrated that democracy was no longer competition between political parties bearing explicit programs and ideologies. It had become a competition among interest and pressure groups that used the state, political parties and the press to control the distribution of economic rewards and social privileges. Moreover, the struggle among interest groups turned language into so-called public relations -- an instrument in a struggle for advantage rather than a vehicle of the truth.

The Fourth Estate

In the twentieth century, new traditions of journalism and particular conceptions of the relationship between media and democracy formed themselves in mutual relief. The press, in effect, broke away from politics and became the so-called Fourth Estate. It established itself, at least in principle, as independent of all institutions, including the state, political parties and interest groups. It became the independent voter writ large; its only loyalty was to an abstract truth and an abstract public interest.

This is the origin of the concept of objectivity in journalism, as Michael Schudson has shown.(18) Objectivity was a defensive measure, an attempt to secure by quasi-scientific means a method for recording the world, independent of the political and social forces that were shaping it. In this rendition, democratic media were representatives of the people because the people were no longer represented by political parties or the state. The media became the eyes and ears of a public that could not see and hear for itself -- o r indeed, talk to itself. journalists went where the public could not go, acquired information that the public could not amass on its own and tore away the veil of appearances that masked the play of power and privilege. The press seized the First Amendment and exercised it in the name of a public that could no longer exercise it on its own.

Paradoxically, this new role as representative of the public was contained within a sentiment that was increasingly antipopulist and antipublic. In a world ruled by interests and regulated by science, the public faded into a spectator. Journalism was diminished along with the public. In theory, at least, news was progressively separated from the truth. News was a blip on the social radar, an early-warning system that something was happening. The truth, however, became the exclusive domain of science. It was no longer a product of the conversation or debate of the public, or of investigations by journalists. Journalists merely translated the arcane language of experts -- scientists in their labs, bureaucrats in their offices - into a publicly accessible language for the masses. By transmitting the judgments of experts, they ratified decisions made by that class -- not those made by the public or public representatives.

Other than acting as transmitters, journalists performed one other vital function: publicity. News kept the experts honest, not by establishing the truth, but by turning on the hot light of scandal and publicity. As Walter Lippmann, who had more faith in publicity than in the news or an informed public, put it:

The great healing effect of publicity is that by revealing man's

nature, it civilizes him. If people have to declare, publicly, what

they want and why they want it, they won't be able to be altogether

ruthless. A special interest openly avowed is no terror to democracy;

it is neutralized by publicity.(19)

Disengagement from Politics

While independent journalism legitimized democratic politics of publicity and experts, it also confirmed the psychological incompetence of most people to participate in it. A political system of "democracy without citizens" evolved.(20) A valuable role for the mass media was preserved, but the role of political parties and citizens diminished. First, independent print journalism weakened political parties, and then television decimated them. It reduced them to devices for fundraising for advertising and turned politics toward the cult of personality. Citizens, denied a public arena, became either consumers of or escapists from politics. Political journalism became, in Joan Didion's apt phrase, a game of "insider baseball."(21) The conversation of the culture moved outside the public realm and into private spaces. Increasingly, journalism became devoted to the sanctity of the fact and so-called objectivity, but invaded every domain of privacy with the hot light of publicity.

A journalism developed that was an early warning system, but one that kept the public in a constant state of agitation or boredom. It became a journalism that reported a continuing stream of expert opinion, but because there was no agreement among experts, it was more like talk-show gossip and petty manipulation than bearing witness to the truth. It was a journalism of fact without regard to understanding, through which the public was immobilized, demobilized and was merely a ratifier of judgments delivered from on high. It was, above all, a journalism that justified itself in the public's name, but in which the public played no role, except as an audience: a receptacle to be informed by experts and an excuse for the practice of publicity.

The media and democracy were increasingly reduced to a game and a dialectic of appearance and demystification, which tied the state, interest groups and the press together in a symbiotic relationship against the fragmented remains of the public. The game was played because each had something the other side needed. Interest groups and sources had newsworthy political information, the indispensable raw material needed to construct the news. Journalists could provide publicity slanted favorably or unfavorably. Elites sought to exchange a minimal amount of potentially damaging information for as much positively slanted coverage as could be obtained. Journalists sought to extract information for stories that would bring acclaim or acceptance from editors and colleagues.

The public, however, watched this game as an increasingly alienated and cynical spectator: The public learned to distrust all appearances, whether mounted by elites or journalists, and to look at language as a mere instrument of interest and obfuscation. In this context, journalism could no longer link up political impulses with political action; it could produce publicity, scandal and drama, but it could not produce politics.

During the second half of the twentieth century, the average U.S. citizen was no longer interested in politics. Indeed, the title of E.J. Dionne, Jr.'s book, Why Americans Hate Politics, expresses a more active alienation from public life than is revealed by the low voter-turnouts that have marked the entire modern period.(22) The absence of participation is partially evidenced by active disengagement from political parties -- and the rise of the independent voter, or more often, the independent non-voter.

The best evidence for the public's disengagement from politics was the beginning of a long-term decline in political participation, measured by voting, especially in presidential elections. Political participation continued to fall throughout the period of journalism in a national society with temporary blips and recoveries during certain periods, such as the Great Depression and Second World War. Yet the trend line was clear, and bureaucratic attempts to reverse it were ineffective, such as extending the franchise, easing voter-registration restrictions or democratizing the candidate-selection process through primaries. The overall decline of public involvement was even sharper than revealed by the conventional measures of voting in presidential elections, because it did not include the even more precipitous declines in primary, local and off-year congressional elections.(23)

Above all -- as poll after poll showed -- the public increasingly distrusted journalists and viewed them as a hindrance to, rather than an avenue toward, politics and reform.(24) The watch-dog press -- the adversary press -- was exposed to even more skepticism during the period of its greatest success, namely during the Vietnam War and Watergate.(25) While the press dismissed the rising tide of criticism during these episodes as merely reactionary politics, the problem went deeper. In the public's eyes, the media had become the adversary of all institutions, including the public itself. As the press sought greater constitutional power, greater independence from the state and the removal of all restrictions on its activities and news-gathering rights, it pushed the legal case that it was a special institution with unique rights. These special rights were independent of the First-Amendment rights and different from -- and often opposed to -- the rights of ordinary people.

Ultimately, the public became an observer of the press rather than "participator[s] in the government of [its] affairs" and the dialogue of democracy.(26) The situation became one in which it was the media that needed to be protected, rather than the citizens' abilities to participate in politics. The individual was seen as remote and helpless compared to the two major protagonists -- the government and the media.

Despite the criticisms of modern journalism, however, the U.S. press has also been a bulwark of liberty in our time, and so far there have been no examples of a better arrangement. Many notions of the press have served U.S. citizens well through some dark times in history: the press as watchdog; the independent press; a representative of the public; the unmasker of interest and privilege; the press that shines the hot glare of publicity into all dark comers of the republic; the seeker of expert knowledge among the welter of opinion; and the private citizens' informant. These notions are not perfect or without fault, but they have worked well and formed the understanding of a democratic press in the modern era. However, as the twentieth century progressed, the weaknesses of modern journalism became increasingly apparent and debilitating, especially when it began to be assaulted by technology.

MEDIA ENTERING THE POSTMODERN ERA

This essay opened with the image of a dismayed television journalist lamenting the evaporation of the only journalism he had known, modern journalism. Actually, John Chancellor was feeling the force of something underway for close to two decades. Beginning in the early 1970s, the entire pattern of communication -- the existing structure of the media and modem journalism -- began to change.

Two technologies in particular were both the symptoms and symbols of the change: satellites and computers, the consequences of which reconfigured the map of communications and social relationships. Satellite broadcasting eliminated distance as a cost factor in communication. Computer technology not only altered all the parameters of numerical calculation, but through miniaturization widely diffused large-scale capacity for information processing, storage and retrieval. The radiant arc of a communication satellite 22,300 miles above the earth synchronized time and transformed the globe into one homogeneous space. With perfection of this technology, the conquest of time and space -- the dream of the nineteenth-century romantics -- has now in a way been realized. Moreover, the aggressive transformation of publics into audiences -- which in the late nineteenth century created the "imaginary community of the nation" -- is now a global process.(27)

While cable and satellite have enlarged the scale and scope of communications, they also -- paradoxically -- have narrowed it. Cable television has radically expanded channel capacity, the variety of services available and the capacity to segment the audience; wedded to satellites, cable was able to penetrate 60 percent of U.S. homes by the 1990s. Multichannel systems, however, have fragmented the audience into narrow niches based on taste, hobbies, avocations, race and ethnicity.(28)

The combination of cable television and video cassette recorders, direct satellite broadcasting and interactive teletext splintered the "great audience" assembled by newspapers and television. Having reached their peaks of profitability and influence in the 1970s, newspapers and network television have receded as economic and political forces. Analysts continue to search for the meaning of these changes. They have attempted to express it through metaphors such as "the global village" and "spaceship earth."

CONCLUSION

These complex and interrelated changes in the world of journalism and democracy erupted -- to John Chancellor's dismay -- in the new technology and politics of the 1992 election. What Chancellor missed, however, was the hopeful side of that election. Many of the phenomena that he found most troubling -- call-in radio, public debates with public questioners, and spontaneous grass roots nominating movements -- represented attempts by a fragmented and dispersed public, which had not completely lost and forgotten the image of a truly public life, to use the new technology and new media, designed purely for commercial purposes, to its own advantage.

The public is attempting to reform itself, outside the journalistic establishment, and to reassert both a public interest and public participation in the sphere of national politics. Rather than resisting these attempts or attempting to manage and orchestrate them, the press should assist the public's attempt to reassert a role in politics.

Today's public has inherited a journalism of the expert and the conduit, a journalism of information, fact, objectivity and publicity. This is a scientific conception of journalism: It assumes an audience to be informed and educated by the journalist and the expert. In their different ways, the methods of the journalist and the expert guarantee the truth and sanction the vocabulary of journalism as a record, a conversation and as an exercise in poetry and utopian politics.

The first thing to remember about journalism is that it derives its name from the French word jour, meaning day, and is, therefore, a daybook -- a collective and public diary that records occurrences of the day. The importance of journalism is less that it disseminates news and information, and more that it is one of the primary instruments through which the culture is preserved and recorded and, therefore, available to be reconsulted. This notion supports Thomas Jefferson's basic justification for freedom of the press: The newspaper produced -- compared to human memory or manuscript -- a virtually indestructible record of the significant events in community life. The United States must return, in other words, to this journalism of record.

Second, journalism ought to be conceived less on the model of information and more on the model of conversation. journalists are merely part of the conversation of U.S. culture; a partner with the rest of the public -- no more and no less. This is a humble role for journalism, but in fact what we need is a humble journalism. Walter Lippmann was right: journalism cannot tell the truth, because no one can tell the truth. All journalism can do is preside over and within the public conversation: to stimulate and organize it, keep it moving and leave a record so that other conversations -- history, art, science, religion -- might have something off which to feed. The public will continue to reawaken when it is addressed as a conversational partner and encouraged to join the talk rather than sit passively as a spectator before a discussion conducted by journalists and experts.

Finally, journalism ought to be perceived not as an outgrowth of science, but more as an extension of poetry, the humanities and political utopianism. What would journalism look like if it were grounded in poetry, if that metaphor were realized, rather than the metaphor of objectivity and science? it would generate, in fact, a new moral vocabulary that might dissolve some current dilemmas.

In an earlier era, science could serve as the exemplification of our culture, and the scientist could be our hero. The sciences did enormous and important work in securing the foundations of liberal democracy. It is not surprising that journalism took science as its model and tried, in however degenerate a form, to imitate it. But that age is over.

Today the most important parts of U.S. culture are in the arts and humanities and in political utopianism. The public should not shrink from this new metaphor. Social life is after all the succession of great metaphors. The metaphor that has governed the understanding of journalism in this century has run into trouble. Neither journalism nor public life will move forward until the public actually rethinks and reinterprets what journalism is: not the science or information of culture, but its poetry and conversation. There will still be plenty of room left for investigations, for the Fourth Estate as a check upon tyrannical power. But there is good news for the First Amendment, journalists and the public. The re-creation of public life, as dangerous and difficult as it will be in an age of advanced technology, will bring the United States closer to the inspiring vision of journalism that has been the objective of democratic politics since the colonial era. (1.) John Chancellor, "Seeing the Future," Keynote Speech, Alfred I. Du Pont-Columbia University Forum, 28 January 1993 (New York: Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University, 1993). (2.) Because Ross Perot did not take federal matching funds, he was exempt from the reporting and accounting requirements that bound other candidates. (3.) See Edwin F. Bayley, Joe McCarthy and the Press (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981). (4.) In this article, journalism refers to both print and broadcast journalism. (5.) The press refers to print and broadcast news media, both of which are covered, though in somewhat different ways, under the "freedom of press" clause of the First Amendment. (6.) Sam Bass Warner, Private City: Philadelphia in Three Stages of Its Growth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968) pp. 19-20; Alvin Gouldner, The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976) pp. 95-6. Lest we be swept away by romanticism, it should be noted how tragically flawed the original idea of the public was, and it was this flaw that had something to do with the decline of the public sphere. It was a public, effectively restricted by race, class and gender; that is, the public consisted of middle-class men who had an interest and stake in public affairs, commerce, business or trade. Later when public space began to fill with workers and artisans of another class, these merchants retreated into private spaces and the men's clubs that are still a feature of large cities. But these fatal imperfections do not diminish the historical importance of the public, as it was then defined, or the power of the concept to illuminate politics. (7.) Benjamin Ginsburg, The Captive Public: How Mass Opinion Promotes State Power (New York: Basic Books, 1986). (8.) Bruce Smith, Politics and Remembrance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985) p. 252. (9.) ibid., p. 259. (10.) ibid., p. 269. (11.) Participation was, strictly speaking, extralegal for the majority until the franchise was gradually extended to include all men, women and African-Americans. (12.) Michael E. McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) p. 5. (13.) Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso Books, 1983). (14.) Daniel Dyan and Elihu Katz, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). (15.) Signal time refers to the gap of time between the moment a message is sent and when it is received as a function of distance. (16.) McGerr, p. 134. (17.) An example of pro-consumer legislation is the Pure Food and Drug Act. See ibid., p. 134. (18.) Michael Schudson, Discovering the News (New York: Basic Books, 1978) chapter 4. This argument has also benefited from the unpublished work of Patrick McGarry. (19.) Clinton Rossiter and James Lane, eds., The Essential Lippmann (New York: Random House, 1963) pp. 226-7. (20.) Robert Entman, Democracy Without Citizens (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). (21.) Joan Didion, After Henry (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992) pp.47-86. (22) E.J. Dionne, Jr., Why Americans Hate Politics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991). (23.) Congressional Quarterly, "Presidential Elections Since 1789," 5th ed. (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1991); Richard M. Scammon and Alice V. McGillivray, American Voter 18 (Washington, DC: Election Research Center, 1989). (24.) D. Charles Whitney, "Americans' Experience with the News Media: A Fifty-Year Review," The Media and the People (New York: Freedom Forum Media Studies Center at Columbia University, 1985). (25.) David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Penguin Books, 1983); Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, All the President's Men (New York: Warner Books, 1976). (26.) Smith, p. 252. (27.) Anderson, p. 49. (28.) Cable systems with 150 channels are already in operation and systems of 500 channels are being tested.

Thomson Gale Document Number:A14469040