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Discussion Membership
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Critique of 'Journalism: Power without responsibility'Note: This is a review and critique of Journalism: Power without responsibility by Kenneth Minogue, carried in "The New Criterion" and the subject of an essay by Jay Rosen and comments in A Western Civ Course in What's Gone Wrong With the Press If Kenneth Minogue were a journalist, I'd send his piece back to rewrite. But he is not. He's a retired professor of government studies at the London School of Economics, so, instead, let's see if we can summarize his view to extract what might be useful. Minogue asserts people cannot live without journalism because, immersed in it, they think in an environment conditioned by a flow of popularized understanding. He believes, on one hand, "there is something essentially pathological about the whole activity that daily satisfies our often pointless curiosity about what is going on in the world" and, on the other, "in our educated and democratic world, a great deal of information is indespensible, and journalism is the only way we can have it." That leads Minogue to two theses:
Minogue then digresses to assert a class distinction between scholarship and news, the former championing mastery and the latter, simply transitory and ephemeral. It matters not to Minogue that, however transitory, something one ought to know to plan one's better future is still relevent understanding. Minogue claims, "A journalist is the master of the gist of things, and gist is king of the world", but journalism well done is really the practice of just-in-time understanding that relegates academics like Minogue to the bench, called to play only in time of need. [He then digresses to berate scholars, students, legislators, and everyone elsemaking one wonder if his is an article about journalism, or about the faults of members of today's society?] Minogue believes, "journalism satisfies curiosity" and this is a vice because "we are often curious about things that are none of our business." Journalism panders. It is the procurer, the dealer, the agent that makes sin possible, causing addiction. "The very availability of a rather illicit satisfaction has developed in us the very appetite itself." Is Minogue, himself, addicted or immune? [Again he digresses to suggest the richness of information leads to a loss of self.] Minogue accuses journalism of falling foul of the "culture of universities", where journalists, longer merely and agent of transmission, presume to manufacture meaning, narrative, and what Minogue called "Salvationism" -- the presumption that they hold the key to social progress. "Journalists saw themselves as 'free floating intellectuals' in a world of prejudice and superstition." Hubris reins, because the journalist applies moral abstractions according to personal taste. "[O]ur addiction to journalism is virtually inseparable from our dislike of it." and "indispensable as it is in modern democracies, journalism is an increasingly pathological influence on the way we live." Minogue then suggests journalism is an instrument of revelation; that "reality is what you find when you go behind the scenes". "The rational basis of modern journalism ... turns out to be the practice of revealing what other people want to hide from us." And, expressing its impulse toward malicious gossip, Minogue believes journalism loses contact with its mission to understand political realities. Journalism's venal instincts converge with the low passions of a burgeoning miss- or under-educated class as "entertainment" wherein both journalist and reader abdicate their responsibilities, and, in the absence of a decent attention span, no one seems to notice. He accuses journalists of retreating from opinion and of being proud of it. He sees something like the retreat of academics from scholarship to a cloak of righteousness and positions of moral relativism that take no position at all. Minogue unloads a litany of concerns -- some significant, some incidental. But couched among them he asserts, "Journalism may thus be taken as a systematic defiance of the Socratic maxim that wisdom consists in understanding one's own ignorance." It is an assertion and unsubstantiated at that. And even if it were sometimes true, journalism exercises two characteristics of undeniable value. It serves as your eyes where otherwise you would have none. And it asks questions where otherwise silence would rein. Minogue speaks to journalism's weakness, not its excellence. Quality journalism exists. And where it doesn't, it can be restored. Quality citizenry exists. And where it doesn't, it can be restored. [Macro error: Can’t call the script because the name “commentIt” hasn’t been defined.] [Macro error: Can’t call the script because the name “commentIt” hasn’t been defined.]
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