The amendment says that people are free to gather together without the intrusion of the state or its representatives. Once gathered, they are free to speak to one another openly and freely. They are further free to write down what they have to say and to share it beyond the immediate place of utterance.
For the people to write down what they say and share it. From this right that belongs to all citizens, Carey derives both the original meaning of press freedom, and the most urgent purpose of journalism-- to amplify, clarify and extend what the rest of us produce as a "society of conversationalists." Public conversation is not the pundits or professionals we see on talk shows. It is "ours to conduct," as Carey puts it. The press should help us out. Here emerges his different faith. For when "the press sees its role as limited to informing whomever happens to turn up at the end of the communication channel, it explicitly abandons its role as an agency for carrying on the conversation of the culture."
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?
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God, why do the religious nuts always write so much unreadable blather? Try beliefnet. :)