How many journalists would say that their most basic task is to "inform" the public? Most, I think. Carey denies it: people inform themselves, he says. Yes, they need reliable news. But news should keep the conversation going among them. How many journalists believe that their profession, journalism, is the "only one mentioned in the Constitution?" Carey denies it. What is mentioned, he says, is the people's right to publish what they discover and think. Press freedom the way the press promotes it derives from that larger right.
In Carey's world the religion of the press is properly rooted in the public: "The god term of journalism--the be-all and end-all, the term without which the enterprise fails to make sense, is the public. Insofar as journalism is grounded, it is grounded in the public."
Seven: A Breakaway Church in the Press
I named my first book after a question, What Are Journalists For? because I wanted to draw attention to that question-- which held these: What are we doing all this for? For whom do we do journalism? And what do we affirm by doing it faithfully and well? What are we, the press tribe, willing to be for?
The story in the book is about the fortunes of an idea that I joined in developing for roughly ten years: 1989-99. That was public journalism, also called civic journalism. Because my role was to speak, write and agitate for it--but also to think it through--many times I tried to complete to satisfaction the same sentence: "public journalism is..." Don't all writers keep restating things in the righteous belief that one day the thing will be rightly stated?
Well, it took ten years for me to realize this: you can call it a reform movement (and it was that) but public journalism was equally a breakaway church. It parted company with mainline religion on what to believe, and what is permitted. But a breakaway church is still a church, and those who break faith do not abandon their faith.
The people I called public journalists, and wrote about, formed their own company, in a sense. They still believed in journalism as a public trust, but not in all their profession professed. They had some counter principles, which tried to improve on a newsroom faith that had begun to fail them. Some examples in this revision of creed were:
* Journalists don't get involved. (Well, they are involved, so what now?)
Article comments
1 - Docv
God, why do the religious nuts always write so much unreadable blather? Try beliefnet. :)