Journalism matters but journalists matter even more

Abstract

Why Journalism Still Matters is a collection of articles that reflects on the value and importance of journalism to western democratic systems. As the book's introduction indicates, these are thoughts that the author, Michael Schudson, has pondered during his long academic career covering fields such as journalism history, media sociology, political communication, and public culture. His voice is polyphonic, as he approaches today's journalism problems from different perspectives (professional, sociological and political), a fact that greatly enriches the ideas he offers us. Michael Schudson is currently Professor of Journalism at the graduate school of journalism at Columbia University, and author of a dozen monographs, among which are The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (1998), The Sociology of News (2003, 2011) and The Rise of the Right to Know (2015), already reviewed in this journal in Volume 2, Issue 1. The book is composed of 11 chapters (most of them already published as articles) and divided into four parts: 'Where Journalism Came From', 'Going Deeper into Contemporary Journalism', 'Short Takes on Journalism and Democracy' and an Afterward. Right from the introduction Schudson proposes that journalism matters more than ever today. Not all journalism is the same. He argues that the journalism that matters is professional journalism, which he defines, according to Hallin, as that in which reporters are committed more strongly to the norms of the profession than to political ideas (1). In the first part, Schudson makes a historical review of the practice of journalism that was born with the Enlightenment. Journalism is neither eternal nor consubstantial to man: it is born when certain circumstances are present, which are precisely those that make democracy possible. The need for good professional formation for journalists is argued from the starting point of a fictional interview with the 'spirit' of Walter Lippman (1889-1974), a theorist admired by the author. In this first part the author also explains how the development of journalism is linked to its process of professionalization, which began in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the emergence of full-time journalists. From 1920 onwards, began what he calls the stage of Objectivity 1.0, when the development of the press allowed it to influence political activity and, simultaneously, to develop propaganda and public relations, trying to influence newspapers. The term 'objective' begins to be used, as the ideal to be achieved by the newspapers, which reaches its maximum brilliance in the 1950s and 1960s. Then, social riots, linked to a culture of protest and mistrust of the ruling classes, gave rise to an investigative, analytical, critical, more aggressive and less conformist journalism. Journalism began to pay more attention to the context than to the facts-precisely in order to understand the facts well-giving rise to objectivity 2.0. According to Schudson we may be entering a phase of objectivity 3.0, which is chara...