To focus on media professionalism in understanding the news courts the danger of seeing journalism as journalists themselves do. When journalists portray themselves as hard-working, well-informed professionals whose idealistic streak and dedication to truth are dimmed only by competitive pressures, deadlines, conservative owners, and allegiance to official rules, they bask in their integrity as professionals. This represents their own subjective experience, but at the same time it misunderstands journalism as a whole. Journalism is not the sum of the individual subjective experiences of reporters and editors but the source or structure that gives rise to themÉ.

This point requires illustration. The self-understandings of journalists do not go far enough. Take, for instance, this one: "We ran the story this way because the publisher/editor/producer has to keep his/her eye on the bottom line." The "bottom line" is one of the most elastic cultural constructs in the modern world. Not that there aren't financial constraints -- businesses do regularly fail. But accounting is more art than science. This is especially true for news institutions, which normally operate with high profit margins and a high degree of organizational "slack," so that cutting costs or watching a budget is hardly ever a sufficient, or even genuine, explanation for why news is handled the way it is.

Or consider this sort of explanation: "We did not cover X or Y better because we were under deadline pressure." For more than thirty years print journalists have been saying that they can't compete with television as a "headline service." And for thirty years they still defend shoddy work by deadline pressure. The Wall Street Journal doesn't publish on Saturday or Sunday. Why does everyone else? Deadline pressure, like economic constraint, exists, but it is socially constructed, manipulable, revisable.

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe