Larvatus Prodeo

Of late, there’s been something of an upsurge of bad news about the news, prompted probably by the coincidence in the acceleration in the decline of newspaper business models under the pressure of the global financial crisis and the upsurge in the online mediascape. Similarly, the spectacular focus on trivia characteristic of American journalism in a momentous year has given a push to already racy debates. But, as I’ve argued for yonks, far too many of these debates are themselves stuck in the past and premised on false dichotomies.

One of those is probably the image of the informed citizen, dutifully reading “all the news that’s fit to print” which underlies so many journalistic ideologies. I had something to say about that recently, along with the related theme that the world will come to an end if people only read stuff that fits particular niches of interest to them. As I was suggesting, that ignores the work of editorial categorisation and selection which has (always) already filtered “news” through a set of presumptions (incidentally, highly gendered ones) about the ideal type of the reader.

We can see a comparable level of forgetting – a key to the distortion inherent in any sort of ideological “thinking” – in the claim that if the newspaper declines, political discourse will decline along with it. Yet it was as long ago as 1962 that the American social scientists Peter Bachratz and Morton S. Baratz pointed to the importance of “non-decisions” in the exercise of power. Now a standard analytical approach in the public policy literature, Bachratz and Baratz observed that many interests and issues are sifted off the table before they even make the agenda.

Something similar operates in the definition of what constitutes “news” and in the sphere of political reporting and commentary, “the legitimate sphere of public debate”. Jay Rosen has a great post on this process at PressThink. It’s well worth keeping in mind next time one of these tired debates that haunt too much of the debate over the media rears its head.