THE ELEMENTS OF JOURNALISM [BILL KOVACH AND BILL ROSENSTIEL]

 News satisfy a basic human impulse – intrinsic needs – a hunger for human awareness
 Journalism provides something unique to a culture – independent, reliable, accurate and
comprehensive information that the citizens required to be free – a journalism that is
asked to provide something other than this subverts democratic culture
 Problem: If news people thought journalism was somehow different from other forms of
communication, how it was different? If they thought journalism needed to change but
that some core principles needed to endure, what were those principles?

Journalism – the purpose of journalism is to provide people with the information they need to
be free and self-governing.

1. Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth

2. Its first loyalty is to the citizens
3. Its essence is a discipline of verification
4. Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover
5. It must serve as an independent monitor of power
6. It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise
7. It must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant
8. It must keep the news comprehensive and proportional
9. Its practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience

MYTH – independence requires journalists be neutral

What is journalism for?

For Poles (people of Poland) and other in the emerging democracies – journalism is
action. Journalism was for building community; was for citizenship; was for democracy

Millions of people empowered by a free flow of information, became directly involved

in creating a new government and new rules for the political, social and economic life of
their country – is this always journalism’s purpose or is this true for one moment, in one
place?

US – it is whatever journalists said it was. Problematic – new communications

technology producing journalism is not journalism; technology created a new economic
organization of journalism.

Something to think about: The purpose of journalism is not defined by technology or

by journalists or by the techniques they employ.

The primary purpose of journalism is to provide people with the information they need to be
free and self-governing.

 Journalism is intertwined with the concept of creating community and democracy

 Societies that want to suppress freedom first suppress the press (but they do not
suppress capitalism)

Nice line: Every generation creates its own journalism. But the purpose is the same.

Problem/Threat: independent journalism may be dissolved in the solvent of commercial

communication and synergistic self-promotion. The real meaning of the first amendment – a
free press is an independent institution – is threatened even without government meddling.
Defining journalism is dangerous. To define it is to limit it. Defining journalism will make it
resistant to changing with the times, which probably will run it out of business. But the
bottomline, avoiding the definition was a commercial strategy not born out of the meaning of
the first amendment.

Awareness Instinct: Knowledge of the unknown gives people security. The more democratic
the society, the more news and information it tends to have.

Birth of journalism

 Greek – oral journalism in the Athens marketplace

 Romans – acta diurnal , daily account of Roman Senate and political and social life,
transcribed on papyrus and posted in public places
 17th century – modern journalism, conversation in coffeehouses, pubs, salon
 1609 – first newspaper from coffeehouses
 18th century – journalists/printers formulate the theory of free speech and free press
 1720 – Cato (penname) introduced the idea of truth against libel; Cato’s argument was
used by John Peter Zenger when he went on trial and he was acquitted; by then the
meaning of a free press in America began to take formal shape

A free press became the people’s first claim on their government.

Nice line: The press was to serve the governed, not the governors.

Out of a diversity of voices the people are more likely to know the truth and thus, be able to self
governed – Lee Bollinger

A Free Press in an Electronic Age

What we need in the new economy and the new communications culture is sense
making. We have a desperate need to get some stable points in an increasingly crazy
world. Journalists need the ability to look at things from multiple points of view and the
ability to get to the core of matters. – John Seeley Brown

Applying journalistic inquiry and judgment – to come to conclusions in uncertain

environments. – Paul Saffo

High-tech interaction (where the audience became pro-sumers instead of consumers, a

hybrid of consumer and producer) resembles conversation, the original journalism
occurring in public houses – the technique is different but the underlying principles are
the same – the journalist is first engaged in verification.

The journalist theory of democracy

Walter Lippmann – Democracy was flawed; people mostly know the world through
pictures they make up inside their heads and they receive these pictures mostly though
media but the pictures that they get are distorted and incomplete thus the public’s
ability to comprehend the truth even if it happened to across it was undermined by
human bias, stereotype, inattentiveness and ignorance.

John Dewey – Lippmann’s definition of democracy was fundamentally off base.

Democracy allows people to develop to their fullest potential; it was a means, not an
end.
Nice line: The solution to democracy’s problems was not to give up on it, but to try to improve
the skills of the press and the education of the public.

The Theory of Interlocking Public – journalism reflects a subtle understanding of how citizens
behave. We are all members of all the three groups (involved public, interested public and
uninterested public) depending on the issue; serving the interests of the widest community
possible, remain as strong as ever; Theory of Interlocking Public casts a shadow over the
concept of niche marketing in journalism.

Key concepts:

 A journalism that focuses on the expert elite, may be in part responsible for public
disillusionment.
 A journalism in which every story is aimed at the largest possible audience – actually
leaves most of the audience behind

Nice line: People are simply more complex than the categories and stereotypes we create for
them.

The New Challenge – three key forces causing shift away from journalism connected to citizen
building

 Nature of technology
 Globalization
 Conglomeration - The conglomeration of the news business threatens the survival of the
press as an independent institution as journalism becomes a subsidiary inside large
corporations more fundamentally grounded in other business purposes.

Nice line: There should be a nagging voice in us all asking: Is democracy going to be bought up
too?

The notion of freedom of the press is rooted in independence. Only a press free of
government censors could tell the truth. In a modern context, that freedom was expanded to
mean independence from other institutions as well (parties, advertisers, business etc.)