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JournalistsasAgentsofCulturalChange:FromRationalityBacktoNature

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©2007. International Journal of Applied Philosophy 21:2. ISSN 0738-098X. pp. 265–274

Journalists as Agents of Cultural Change: From Rationality Back to Nature

Robert AlbinSapir College

AbstrAct: The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which journalism—print and electronic—shapes our cultural fabric and modes of discourse. Journalists report facts and comment on them in a provocative style. They stimulate us with captivating images and colorful language, shifting our minds from a more intellectual contemplation of reality. Finally, journalists bring death into our lives through grim pictures of wars and natural disasters. I suggest that these relatively recent trends in journalism are responsible for a gradual transformation in public discourse. Emotions, rather than rational thinking, are becoming our basis for understanding current events. As a result, journalists are minimizing the distance between us, as rational creatures of culture, and nature.

The media are powerful forces of socialization, and they play an active role in the process of cultural change in the Western world. Journalism, the soul and

spirit of the media, has a major impact on many facets of cultural life. This paper is an attempt to analyze this impact—how it disrupts the traditional distinctions between important concepts in Western culture and shifts our cultural prefer-ences by refocusing our attention. In its currrent form, journalism contributes to momentous cultural change as it helps shape the way we perceive the world. Journalism has also influenced many of the concepts we use to describe and make sense of our lives. It has altered the distinctions we make between near and far, interesting and important, experience and knowledge, private and public, tem-porary and permanent, and informed and educated. The paper also discusses the role of journalism in bringing death into our lives by portraying images of war and natural disasters.

1. HeRe ANd THeRe/NeAR ANd FAR

News—as it is gathered, presented, and read or viewed—is one of the main cultural pursuits of Western cultures. In our homes, we “host” the President of the United States, the leader of the Peoples’ Republic of China, the Chair-

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man of the Palestinian Authority, famous singers and actors, and many other figures of reknown. Journalists bring us the sounds and sights of an American attack on Afghanistan, a firing squad that executes a man in China, the red landscapes of Mars, and an ice sculpture festival in Tokyo. This flood of current events creates the impression that our distinction between “near” and “far” has changed. Journalists are able to transmit geographically distant events and draw our attention to them as if they were happening right next door. The media scholar Harold Innis (1999: 47), refers to our changing criteria for “here” and “there” as “the creation of continuity in space.” “Here” has come to include everything that is presented to us as news, and “there” is a general term for all that has yet to capture our attention, or all the places and events we have yet to learn about. In Israel, for example, the recent escalation of the armed conflict between India and Pakistan and the increasing threat of nuclear war are part of our here and now, while the lives of migrant workers in the country, their anguish and struggle to be treated decently, are, for many, part of that remote territory termed “there.”

The changing criteria for “here” and “there” also suggest changing per-ceptions of boundaries between communities that are expanding. Benedict Anderson (Altheide and Snow, 1991: 53) claims that nationalism was made possible by the dissemination of printed texts since they allowed people with no prior contact or relations to view themselves as belonging to the same com-munity. He refers to the reading of the first newspapers as a “mass ceremony” since many people shared a single text. Each participant experienced the sense of belonging to a greater body of people—a community that shares the same language and cultural values. This was the embodiment of community spirit. Anderson’s explanation of the rise of nationalism can now be extended to the modern media, particularly television and radio, which have become powerful agents of cultural change (Meyrowitz, 1985: 53–4).

2. INTeReSTINg ANd ImpoRTANT

The distinction between what is important and what is interesting has also been blurred by journalists. As early as at the turn of the twentieth century, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst were the targets of fierce public criticism about their personal lives and their journalistic practices. Both publishers, particu-larly Hearst, encouraged sensational and gossipy journalism, under the pretext of satisfying the public interest, to increase the sales of their newspapers.

Journalism is a business which, like any other, is a profit-making venture, and it is partly responsible for blurring the distinction between the important and the interesting. Media scholars agree that the distinction between the two has faded, especially with regard to television and radio journalism, where every viewer has an enormous range of choice (Altheide and Snow, 1991: 28–9; Postman, 1985: 89). This situation has led, increasingly, to greater competition among channels and stations in an effort to attract viewers and listeners. Journalists, accordingly, blur the distinction as a means of surviving in the market. Although they may prefer a critical approach to the management of public affairs, their work is heavily

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influenced by market forces. Hence, journalists are often confronted with oppos-ing demands: to report and interpret events and, on the other hand, to entertain and achieve good ratings. The tension between reporting and ratings extends to the ways in which information is broadcast or delivered. One example is the deci-sion to replace professional weather forecasters on television with good-looking, professional broadcasters (often women), and to remove weather reports from the sterile studio atmosphere. There are live, on-location reports on the winter’s first snowy night in Jerusalem or a mid-summer heatwave as experienced on a yacht in the Mediterranean Sea.

The professional criteria for choosing items to broadcast are often wrong-headed. The tendency is to feature the out-of-the-ordinary, one example being the editor who instructs a novice reporter to reject the “dog bites man” item as non-news and go for the more unusual and surprising “man bites dog” story. For those who believe that journalism should serve the public interest, these criteria are deplorable; they encourage a type of journalism that prefers economic gain to piercing scrutiny and investigation of “colorless” public issues. The result is journalism that tends to choose entertainment over the dissemination of information (Dahlgren, 1995: 48–9). Another example of this tendency in Israel of preferring the provocative to the staid is the rare mention and discussion of rising unemployment rates versus the extensive coverage of celebrities’ lives (as in many places around the globe). An example of this can be found in the journalistic pursuit for intimate details about the relationship between the famous Leonardo DiCaprio and the Israeli top model Bar Refaeli.

The distinction between provocative and staid, and the related distinction between the interesting and important, are also relevant to the journalistic treat-ment of experience and knowledge. The delivery and dissemination of infor-mation is one of the main tasks of journalists. It is well described and stressed in their codes of ethics. Nevertheless, they tend to emphasize the interesting at the expense of the important, aware that what we find interesting to read or watch is what stimulates us, arouses our senses and curiosity. Newspapers and television news broadcasts that feature prominent pictures of the seriously wounded or the dead, which occasionally border on the pornographic, shift their consumers’ attention from the rational core of the story at hand to the emotional experience that surrounds it. News editors can and often do require that their reporters bring them items that are both interesting and important, or that they try to present important items from an “appealing angle.” Every beginning journalist knows that if the item does not interest consumers, does not offer them an exciting experience or move them emotionally, it will not sell. Consequently, the important but uninteresting news items will evoke the “boredom principle.” A person watching boring news will likely zap the remote control to find a channel that presents the news in a much more enticing way. Clearly, the broadcasters’ motivation to increase ratings is a good explanation for the growing emphasis on the experiential, and this view implies that the desire to increase profits lies behind the erosion of journalistic principles. But the erosion need not be total.

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When it comes to the attractiveness and popularity of their work, journalists often confuse their responsibility to the public with their responsibility to their employers. They lean toward “human interest stories,” such as the difficulties faced by the child, Elian Gonzales, before he was returned to his father in Cuba. This approach is a change in standards with respect to what is acceptable to show the public. At one time, journalists would never have considered publish-ing details about the personal lives of world leaders, such as the fact that U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was partially paralyzed with polio. Today, this kind of item has become their bread and butter. Contemporary journalists often justify their publishing ethics by claiming that personal characteristics such as these affect the performance of public figures, and their performance is certainly a matter of public interest. Economic factors, or considerations of prestige by journalists wanting to publish scoops, are important elements to consider when attempting to pinpoint the boundary between private and public. In fact, the private dimension has eroded to the point where it has almost disappeared.

3. puBlIC ANd pRIvATe

Journalists’ exposure of the “public” at the expense of the “private” reflects a change of standards about the meaning of these terms. Matters that once clearly belonged to the private domain are now accepted as permissible objects of public scrutiny. The public domain has expanded because private matters have seeped into it. If this is the case, then it is legitimate for journalists to widen their scope of reporting and deal with much more than community matters. However we may justify it, it is a fact that the public sphere now includes many components that had previously been viewed as belonging strictly to a private domain that was previously not covered by reporters.

Journalism therefore, has shifted away from knowlege and toward experience. In this way, it promotes the development of discourse with quite a different character, one that prefers imagination and intuition over deductive and analytical modes of thinking. In this discourse we find stories about private individuals. We hear about an aspiring athlete’s tragic accident that has left her hospitalized and hope-less, about the reaction of parents to the death of their child in a car accident, and about the singer who managed, against all odds, to escape his pitiful hometown and become a promising artist in the big city. This type of public discourse, which enables and even enhances personal expression, gradually expands to society as a whole. It allows us to understand cultural creatures beyond a superficial level. Public discourse has increasingly become a means to understand human beings, rather than a forum in which ideas and principles are examined and debated in order to weigh their influence on the life of the community.

4. TempoRARy ANd peRmANeNT

The familiar saying that “today’s newspaper will wrap tomorrow’s fish and chips” clearly expresses the idea that news items are valid for a very limited time only. Today’s brief newspaper article or television newscast loses all public importance

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tomorrow. Journalism is totally immersed in the present and near future. It seldom considers the past. It seems to express the spirit of technology, which focuses on future possibilities rather than on what has already been achieved. Engineers are not concerned with the history of technology, and journalists—unlike literary writers or poets—are more concerned with the present and near future than with eternity. This perspective influences the choice of topics to report, and it positions them on today’s agenda so as to differentiate this day from any other. People opening a newspaper want to know about all the changes that have occurred yesterday and today. They do not expect to find long articles that shed light on the ethics of the Greeks, the figure of the antihero in Kafka’s works, or a comparison between the morals of early Hebrew culture and those of today.

The speed with which journalists must gather the news, verify it, process it, and distribute it each day (at an even quicker pace for radio and television) forces reporters, commentators, and editors to focus on what is new, ephemeral, and exceptional. They must concentrate on what can be grasped by a sharp eye and a swift pen. The editor’s play on, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we shall die” might be, “Gather the material and write the story now, because tomorrow you will have to write another one.” This emphasis on the immediate and new over the permanent undermines any chance that society will become accustomed to delayed satisfaction: short-term assignments get quick feedback, and this, in turn, influences the norms that govern the choice of topics, their investigation, and their reporting.

All of these activities are performed under time constraints and pressure to uncover new items for immediate publication. The result, as mentioned, is a change in public discourse: what was once an attempt to uphold universal and timeless principles and truths has become a far less worthy endeavor. The shift toward the temporary is a clear predilection for the concrete—the familiar environment of everyday life.

5. INFoRmed ANd eduCATed

The products of contemporary journalism encourage us to value the informed person over the scholarly one. The latter seeks knowledge in libraries and universities by studying a particular body of knowledge to achieve a deeper understanding of current issues. Journalism has little respect for this kind of approach; instead, it advocates being well informed. Journalists have a strong socializing influence on both youngsters and adults, and they encourage them to stay up-to-date by learning a little about many new and different things.

The ideal viewers or readers, then, are wordly people. They know how to behave in different locations around world. They know what to order in a fish restaurant in Belgium; they know what is playing on Broadway or in London and how to obtain the cheapest tickets. They know the right vintage and the correct serving temperature for each kind of wine they buy, how to navigate around the world’s biggest cities, and the prices of stocks on the international exchanges. These people are familiar with newspapers around the world and know what is going on in inter-national politics. They are well informed and aware of all that is here and now.

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While journalists enrich our lives with information, they do not encourage us to probe deeply or develop sound methods to evaluate and analyze the information they present. This is partially due to their own practical training. Studying journalism clearly bears no resemblance to studying medicine, for example. Journalists are not always required to hold an academic degree or be experienced in a particular profession. They keep the public informed, but the subjects they cover do not often call for any particular area of expertise. Since journalists are in the business of disseminating everyday information, they bear no responsibilty for formulating reasoned generalizations, as scientists do.

6. CeleBRITy STATuS ANd ITS meANINg

The term “celebrity” is strongly associated with the media. A person who frequently appears on television, is heard on the radio, or is written about in the newspaper is considered a celebrity—a famous person, recognized by a large audience of media consumers. Since most media coverage concentrates on politics, the economy, na-tional security, sports, and the arts, most celebrities are connected to these fields. In the U.S., former military leaders, such as General Norman Schwarzkopf, are often called upon by the media to act as commentators, based on their expertise in matters of national security. Businesspeople such as Donald Trump or Bill Gates are often interviewed about the economic situation, and stories about their businesses (and personal lives) are the stuff of many newspapers articles. Personal stories about celebrities sometimes dominate the headlines, as was the case with prince William’s seperation form his girlfriend Kate Middleton.

Journalists are motivated to crown celebrities, it is said, because interesting topics are relatively rare, and they face daily pressure to fill columns with subjects worthy of coverage. The result may be the creation of makeshift celebrities, people whose true position in society does not warrant extensive coverage. Journalists thus demonstrate their control over a cultural resource: they designate celebrities. They are the ones who determine who gets put on the list and who, some time later, is expelled. Celebrity status itself is not a new phenomenon or unique to any one society. It also exists in traditional or highly religious societies where spiritual leaders are considered celebrities.

By creating celebrities, journalists attempt to assign meaning and spirit to people who are otherwise insignificant and unimportant in the eyes of the general public. The public prefers the provocative to the staid. The well-known Israeli journalist and cultural critic, Doron Rosenblum, once described the method for transforming an insignificant, everyday item into something of public importance:

This kind of “journalism” not only proposes that the media is the message, but that journalism itself is the most interesting and lively subject in Israeli culture today . . . and who would dare contradict this? Where would one contradict this? Like a bubble that blows itself up and can’t see what it contains, journalism assumes that anything on the exterior is barren, ruined, covered with dried weeds, until it comes along and revives it, offering meaning with its mere presence and touch. (1986: 2)

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There is a connection between these characteristic features of journalism and the desire to make money and keep the public entertained. Journalists tend to view all that is not trendy as dull—something that would lead to professional disaster. There appears to be an equilibrium between fear of boredom and fear of pain, and in both cases, the stimulus threshhold has been lowered. When sticken with a severe headache, for example, people will immediately reach for a painkiller. When boredom sets in, they will quickly change the TV channel or skip to the next headline. Journalists, well aware of these reactions, make special efforts to avoid boring their customers. This is their sole motivation for imbuing otherwise banal topics and people with overblown significance.

7. lIFe ANd deATH

The September 11, 2001, terrorist attack in New York posed a major ethical challenge for journalists. They had to decide how to cover this unprecedented and terrible disaster. Should they show the public the full tragedy and publish pictures of mutilated bodies, or should they refrain from such coverage based on professional standards? Most of the media took a clear stand and decided not to publish or broadcast these atrocities. The decision reflected our attitude toward death. Normally, to the greatest extent possible, we try to avoid thinking about death. Ages ago, death was a much more common phenomenon. Early human beings witnessed death as elephants or tigers do. They were surrounded by it. Family members died at home, surrounded by their loved ones. Others died in their fields or in their neighbors’ caves. The ominous figure with the sickle in his hand roamed freely among people in those distant eras.

Contemporary culture has built special domains for the man holding the sickle: hospitals, old-age homes, cemeteries, battlefields, prisons, and crematories. Our technological improvements were meant to deal with this very task of distancing us from the sickle’s reach. Though not fully successful, we were able to limit its range. The war we waged against the man with the sickle has shaped our attitude toward death. Those who are doomed to die are not welcome to do it in public, before our eyes. Witnessing their death repels us. They have an ethical requirement to die in privacy. We view death as a reminder of our vulnerability as mortals. Perhaps one of the most basic of all human needs is the need to control our destiny. Since this need controls our behavior, we have become cultural creatures trying to live like gods—without the presence of death.

Nevertheless, our relation with death is more complex than this. In spite of our efforts to distance ourselves from death there are many that prefer and are even attracted to death and cruelty. These can find some relief by witnessing cruel and bloody sport and fights. Violence possesses the power to transform a living creature to a dead one. Some contests and games such as boxing, eastern marshal arts, bullfights, and cockfights are extremely attractive to many as they display sheer violence and by this a proximity to death. Many others are readers and viewers of violent movies and shows. In many (some will consider that too many) of these, mutilated human bodies and corps are been shown. ‘Snuff’ and other sadistic and pornographic movies are to be taken

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into a special account in this context. This is because the latter are products shaped especially in order to stimulate the senses and at the same time to provide sadistic satisfaction. Many are being attracted to these products as they are being driven to an atmosphere of thrill, danger, and anxiety and as such to proximity to death.

Every viewer who so desires can watch the bloody results of war on any of the big media networks such as the BBC or CNN. Journalism bombards us with bloodshed and death. It is engaged, generally unconsciously, in an effort to set free the man with the sickle. Releasing him from his confined area means re-introducing him in our lives. We will encounter his work even in our bedrooms. Thus, in this context, the power that journalism has over human consciousness is not to be underestimated. Rather than respecting our cultural desire to restrain natural impulses and instincts, journalism inflames and empowers them.

However, it can be argued that this picture of journalism is much too simplified. Journalism functions in a complex reality and while it is a shaper of consciousness it is controlled and being shaped by other forces as well. All sorts of political and societal control means are involved in the process of shaping journalism’s ethics and conduct. Although American news agencies were very restrained in their choice of images of the September 11 tragedy, their coverage of the war in Iraq has been quite different. American army officials spoke with the agencies and circulated photographs of Saddam Hussein’s dead sons. Their partially mutilated faces were shown by nearly every news network in the Western world. While American media restricts itself at times from publishing images of dead Ameri-cans, it does not always treat the victims of other nations by the same standard. Nevertheless, these examples should be regarded with great care since there are exceptions to this line of media coverage where death is made visible. One of these exceptions relates to the Vietnam War where the display of body bags was a daily part of news coverage. Another was the pictures of mutilated American bodies which had been burnt and then hanged over a bridge in Iraq during the last Golf war.

Although selective display of bloodshed is a solid journalistic fact it is evident that journalists who refrain from exposing one side’s bodies still show the other party’s corpses. In the light of the latter examples journalism’s professional conduct is not to be perceived as monolithic. We are witnessing the work of many and diverse journalistic agencies over large periods of time. For example, Aljazeera does not play by the same rules as the CNN or Fox News agencies play regarding terror coverage. Furthermore, the focus of my attention is on the ways in which journalism shapes its public’s consciousness rather than what governs its conduct. One can encounter almost as many examples of journalistic exposure of death as one may wish. There is no, in any sense, shortage of journalistic exposure of death. By acting in these ways journalism, like ‘snuff’ and other cruel movies and shows, is to be regarded as one of the agents of death in our culture, and by playing this role it can be regarded as threatening our efforts in distancing ourselves from death.

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CoNCluSIoNS

Journalism plays a significant role in the cultural changes now taking place in Western society. It cultivates well informed, though less educated, people. It excites its audience with powerful sounds and images, causing us to focus our attention on news items by tantalizing us—by portraying the interesting as impor-tant. Journalism offers us, its consumers, an abundance of fascinating information from far away. By invading the private lives of important and influential people, it shifts the standards for distinguishing between the private and the public.

These shifting standards nourish a pessimistic epistemological attitude towards reality. A perceived rational attitude concerned mainly with obtaining information has given way to a more emotional one that focuses on the basic personal experi-ence. The media’s rapidity and wide distribution have lowered our expectations for profound intellectual journalism; we have become accustomed to making no intel-lectual effort to decipher the messages presented to us. People in the West must contend with an infinite torrent of images and messages that contain endless stim-uli of words, ideas, and visual images. This onslaught, which demands our near- constant attention, prevents people from focusing on the important issues; in-stead, it transforms the deep and important into the interesting, provocative, and trendy.

The examples and analyses in this paper illuminate the cultural values inherent in the current practice of journalism.. Revealing the directions that formulate and transform journalistic practices is crucial to understanding the impact of these changes on the place of journalism in our culture. We should regard journalists (particularly those working in the electronic media and for daily newspapers) as responsible for the gradual transformation in public discourse, from one guided mainly by an ethic stressing rational criticism of major public issues to one that promotes understanding of events by drawing our attention to the baser ele-ments of existence. In doing so, journalists are appealing mainly to our emotional attitudes and sensibilities rather than to our rationality, and they are therefore minimizing the distance between us (as creatures of cuture) and nature. Although journalists present useful and even vital information, they often report the facts in such an artistic narrative style that they abandon their commitment to the values of clarity and precision. The result is that when journalists try to straddle two different approaches—presenting information and telling stories—they do both with limited success.

References

Altheide, David L. and Robert P. Snow. Media Worlds in the Postjournalism Era. New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1991.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edition. London: Verso Publishers, 1992.

Dahlgren, Peter. Television and the Public Sphere: Citizenship, Democracy and the Media. London: Sage Publications, 1995.

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Innis, Harold A. The Bias of Communication. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.Meyrowitz, Joshua. No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. New

York: Oxford University Press, 1985.Postman, Neil. Amusing ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New

York: Viking Publishers, 1986.Rosenbloom, Doron “Journalism as a Secret,” Politics 9 (1986): 2–5 (Hebrew)