Openness and the
Epistemology of Journalism

Monday - Friday, June 9-20, 9.00-09.50
Course Director: Prof. Steve Fuller, University of Warwick, England

Course Description, Syllabus & Required Reading

1. The Fundamental Problem of Journalism

We begin by considering a negative historical appraisal of journalism’s impact on our moral and intellectual life. Kenneth Minogue, a retired conservative politics professor at the LSE, sums up the negative case as ‘power without responsibility’:
http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/23/feb05/journalism.htm. This piece serves as a foil against which a defence of journalism as a way of knowing will be mounted in this course.

2. Two Proto-Journalistic Social Epistemologies

Common sense and collective memory. A survey of historical claims for their philosophically foundational status as forms of knowledge. Their transformation by the mass media in the modern period: Improvement, distortion, or simply an alternative construction? How shifts in political economy (e.g. the rise of transnational multimedia empires, but also the devolution of the internet and the emergence of the ‘blogosphere’) affect the ‘incorporation’ of social knowledge.

3. The Social Construction of Public Opinion

Social technologies largely introduced by the state to organize a nation’s collective intelligence to render its administration more efficient. These track the introduction of vital statistics in the 17th and 18th centuries, quantitative social science methodologies for the prediction and control of the populace in the 19th and early 20th centuries, eventuating in the emergence of private polling agencies, starting with George Gallup in 1935. Heroic attempts by political scientists to discern the ‘psychology’ of public opinon (Harold Lasswell).

4. The Servicing of Public Opinion I -- Politicisation

The merging of political and journalistic interests in ‘informing, educating and entertaining’ the public, to quote John Reith’s founding statement of the BBC in 1927. The relation of this mission to that of ‘propaganda’, a term originally used for the propagation of the Catholic faith during the Reformation, but acquired its mass-mediated and increasingly pejorative sense after the First World War. A consideration of the ‘epidemiological’ conception of ideas underlying propaganda, which has been recently resurrected in Neo-Darwinian guise as ‘memes’.

5. The Servicing of Public Opinion II -- Commercialisation

The surveying of public opinion for marketing purposes actually predates its use for political purposes. Presented as a way of improving customer satisfaction, it was used largely to anticipate and pre-empt potential rival producers. The field of ‘public relations’, founded by Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays in the 1920s, first realized the prospect of indefinitely expanding markets by inducing demand (through ‘engineering consent’, ‘hidden persuasion’ and ‘subliminal perception’) in the name of informing consumers. By the 1960s, this leads in ‘truth in advertising’ campaigns, culminating in a growing area of ‘reputation management’.

6. Images of the Journalist I -- The Critic

Nowadays seen as an extension of the literary appraiser from art and literature to the world-at-large, the two senses of ‘critic’ arose simultaneously in the 18th century with Swift, Voltaire, and Lessing. Satire has been the preferred medium of the critic, partly to mask the potentially subversive normative standpoint informing the criticism. This genre has flourished in the modern period in repressive regimes, typically in fiction (e.g. Alexander Zinoviev in the USSR). In officially liberal regimes, critics have tended to focus on the corrupting and distorting effects of language in the public sphere: Karl Kraus, H.L. Mencken, George Orwell.

7. Images of the Journalist II -- The Muckraker

A 19th century innovation, whose descendant is the ‘investigative journalist’. Traceable to Friedrich Engels’ studies of the English urban working class, it is centred on presenting images of corruption and hypocrisy to appeal directly to the audience’s higher emotions (e.g. indignation). In the early 20th century, this image bifurcated into (a) academic domestication (Robert Park’s ethnography of Chicago’s ethnic neighbourhoods) and (b) radical politics (Lincoln Steffens’ hostility to US machine politics and enthusiasm for the Mexican and Soviet revolutions).

8. Images of the Journalist III -- The Pundit

This image, first popularised in the early 20th century by Walter Lippmann, a Harvard-trained syndicated columnist who counselled US presidents from Wilson to Nixon. Ideologically, a ‘liberal hawk’, Lippmann saw his role as representing the balance of forces influencing world affairs from an objective standpoint to people either too busy (politicians) or too ignorant (the public) to do so for themselves. Lippmann regarded the pundit as necessary in large complex democracies. One of his catchphrases, ‘manufacturing consent’, was turned against him by Noam Chomsky, who represents the more partisan conception of the pundit prevalent today.

9. Images of the Journalist IV -- The Broadcaster

The emergent image: The journalist becomes a performer in dramas s/he partly scripts – or perhaps co-produces. The case of Edward R. Murrow vs. Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1954 CBS television programme, See It Now. CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite as the most trusted authority in the United States, circa 1970. Hyperrealism and postmodern broadcasting in the 1990s: Jeremy Paxman and BBC Newsnight ‘making news happen’ and its easy parody, Armando Iannucci and Chris Morris’s The Day Today and Brass Eye.

10. Science as the Ultimate Problem for Journalism

How does one establish an independent standpoint toward the most authoritative form of knowledge? The tradition from visionary vangardism (H.G. Wells, Waldemar Kaempffert, J.G. Crowther) to demystification (Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, John Horgan’s The End of Science). How the journalist avoids writing scientists’ press releases. Is investigative science journalism possible by analogy with investigative political journalism? A failed attempt: Chris Mooney’s The Republican War on Science.

Reading:

1) Fuller S. (2005). The Intellectual, Icon Books.
2) Curry Jansen S. (1991), Censorship: The Knot that Ties Knowledge and Power, Oxford University Press.
3) Mooney C. (2005), The Republican War on Science, Basic Books.