Journalism Is Itself a Religion - Page 10

* We have to remain detached. (But how do you detach yourself from a public culture that responds to your every move?)

* Whether people join in democracy or do not is their business, not ours. (Do you really believe that an inert and atomized audience, a demoralized and disaffected citizenry, can provide "your business" with any meaningful future? Can that ever be a matter of indifference?)

* Our job is to tell the truth, not report things the way we would like them to be. (Journalism itself stands for the way things should be. Its implicit belief--call it faith--is that people can make a difference when they know what is happening in their world.)

Either you believe that--people can make a difference if they know what's going on--or you do not. If the claim turns out to be false, then journalism is false to its history and founding premise. So people in the press ought to do everything they can to support certain causes, even if they join no crusades: an informed, engaged, and active public, a society in open conversation with itself, a high quality debate, a media system with low barriers to entry, a democracy that is actively preserved, a connected politics that welcomes participation by citizens, and finally what James W. Carey called "a genuine public life and a genuine public opinion."

That was the "new" religion, among those who campaigned for public journalism, or just started doing it. They were a breakaway church in the American press, and for that they sometimes got called a cult.

Eight: Interview at the Axis of Evil

The whole public journalism episode, which is not by any stretch over, was like a religious dispute within the professional church of journalism. But it almost seems mild, compared to problems of belief that confront journalists at this time in world history. Dan Rather on being a patriot and journalist after September 11th:

What I want to do, I want to fulfill my role as a decent human member of the community and a decent and patriotic American. And therefore, I am willing to give the government, the President and the military the benefit of any doubt here in the beginning. I'm going to fulfill my role as a journalist, and that is ask the questions, when necessary ask the tough questions.

Here is a journalist, prominent in the priesthood, a visible figure in the extreme; here is Dan Rather trying to explain what attaches Dan Rather to the fate of the American people, nation and government. But his religion doesn't really go there. It has tough stuff in it about detachment, but about attachment to the republic little is said. Rather is also attempting to explain what he is for, in the end. But the language is too thin, the politics timid and confused, the belief system sounds exhausted.

Article Author: Jay Rosen

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