 |
         
|
So it comes as no surprise that Stewart, in order to demarcate his satirist's domain, should propose such a highfalutin' definition of the political journalist's task when Maddow asked him what could replace the stale he-said-she-said of red-vs-blue political journalism. The true calling of political journalists was exposing corruption.
At PressThink, Professor Rosen was particularly taken with this formulation, praising Stewart for avoiding a vacuous Can't We All Get Along? call for "a reasonable middle." He interpreted the Journalism of Virtue & Corruption expansively, covering not only Ponzi schemes and graft, but "the corruption of language, the corruption of public discourse, the corruption of our news systems and information channels, the corruption of a kind of democratic spirit, the corruption of our own sense of solidarity with our fellow citizens."
This is catnip for Rosen, the champion of civic journalism. For more than a decade now, he has been arguing that the appropriate role of the news media is to be actively involved in making the public square a more productive space in which to conduct politics. In this, he is a small-r republican, with a Roman belief in civic virtue and the citizen's forum, in a self-governing society that informs itself properly, that shines a light on corruption and purges itself in order to progress in a spirit of solidarity.
Such civic idealism finds itself in opposition to the view of politics as a contest between interest groups. At its most ambitious, such a view is leftist, seeing political struggle as the inevitable manifestation of contradictions between economic classes. So neither Stewart nor Rosen can be called left-wingers; for left-wingers what is at stake is who controls the economy, not whether citizens on either side of that control happen to be corrupt or virtuous. In such a view, the definition of the public square itself is at issue, not only the conduct of political actors within it. Indeed the very terms "virtue" and "corruption" would be produced by the political struggle rather than pre-existing as categories by which the conduct of politics could be understood.
But even a small-d democrat, who does concede the existence of the public square as a given, sees the stakes of politics as being different from the small-r republican's preservation of civic virtue. To put it crudely, what about a Journalism of Interest Groups? Whose ox is being gored? Stewart's complaint about the left-vs-right dichotomy included a second alternate view that Rosen did not mention. Besides virtue-vs-corruption, Stewart suggested that "people-with-kids-vs-not" divided more people into tribes than political ideology does. There are so many fissures in society that are a reporter's grist that do not fall along the left-vs-right dividing line--economic, psychological, sociological, demographic.
So sometimes Stewart was advocating a Journalism of Corruption and sometimes a Journalism of Interest Groups. His point was that to characterize how the population is divided as cleaving by default along left-vs-right partisan ideological lines amounted to inaccurate reporting. Why not report on all the other, non-political, ways that we fail to get along?
Taking the long view, we should remind ourselves of Professor Jarvis' observation to Koppel on Talk of the Nation: any of these discussions that rest on either/or choices are rendered moot by the Internet--where both/and is always the answer. The 24-hour cable news network was Ted Turner's invention in response to innovations such as Koppel's America Held Hostage on broadcast television. If TV news could migrate into innovative timeslots, why should it not move into every timeslot and be available round-the-clock?
It will turn out that cable news has been an interim solution to providing news on demand, a stepping stone between broadcast TV and online video. The critiques of the current state of cable news made by Stewart and Koppel still stand; their remedies may not be found on television but on the Internet instead.
You must be logged in to this website to leave a comment. Please click here to log in so you can participate in the discussion.
