Carey Critical Reader

James Carey
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James Carey
A Critical Reader
Eve Stryker Munson and

Catherine A. Warren, editors
University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis
London
Copyright 1997 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
Chapter i originally appeared in American Communication Research: The Re-

membered History, Everette E. Dennis and Ellen Wartella, editors; reprinted by
permission of Lea Publishers. Chapter 2 originally appeared in Journal of Com-
munication, Spring 1980, 162-78; reprinted by permission of Oxford University
Press. Chapter 3 originally appeared in Information and Communications in
Economics, Robert Babe, editor, 1994, 321-36; reprinted by permission of Kluwer
Academic Publishers. Chapter 4 originally appeared in Journalism History i, no. i
(Spring 1974): 3-5, 2,7; reprinted by permission of CSUN Foundation. Chapter 5
originally appeared in Journalism History 12, no. 2 (Summer 1985): 855-58;
reprinted by permission of CSUN Foundation. Chapter 6 originally appeared in
Sociological Review Monograph, no. 13, January 1969, 23-38; reprinted by per-
mission of Blackwell Publishers. Chapter 7 originally appeared in Reading the
News, Robert Karl Manoff and Michael Schudson, editors, 1986; copyright 1986
by James W. Carey. Chapter 8 reprinted with permission of the Free Press, a
division of Simon & Schuster, from Crucible of Liberty: 200 Years of the Bill of
Rights, Raymond Arsenault, editor; copyright 1991 by the Free Press. Chapter 9
originally appeared in Public Opinion and the Communication of Consent,
Theodore Glasser and Charles Salmon, editors, 1995; reprinted by permission of
the Guilford Press. Chapter 10 originally appeared in Journal of Communication
42, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 56-72; reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechani-
cal, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission
of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press

in Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

James Carey : a critical reader / Eve Stryker Munson and Catherine A.
Warren, editors,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8166-2702-9 (hardcover alk. paper). — ISBN 0-8166-2703-7
(pbk. : alk. paper)
i. Carey, James W. 2. Communication and culture. I. Munson,
Eve Stryker. II. Warren, Catherine A.
P92.5.C37J36 1997
302.2—dc2i 97-8082
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction
Eve Stryker Munson and Catherine A. Warren ix
PARTI
Introduction / On the Origins of Media Studies
(and Media Scholars)
John Pauly 3
1 / The Chicago School and the History of Mass
Communication Research 14
2 / The Roots of Modern Media Analysis: Lewis Mumford
and Marshall McLuhan 34
3 / Communications and Economics 60
PART II
Introduction / The Problem of Journalism History, 1996
Michael Schudson 79
4 I The Problem of Journalism History 86
5 / "Putting the World at Peril": A Conversation with
James W. Carey 95
PART III
Introduction / Famed Psychic's Head Explodes:
James Carey on the Technology of Journalism
Carolyn Marvin 119
6 / The Communications Revolution and the Professional
Communicator 128
7 / The Dark Continent of American Journalism 144
v
vi / Contents
PART IV
Introduction / "We'll Have That Conversation": Journalism
and Democracy in the Thought of James W. Carey
Jay Rosen 191
8 / "A Republic, If You Can Keep It": Liberty and
Public Life in the Age of Glasnost 207
9 / The Press, Public Opinion, and Public Discourse:
On the Edge of the Postmodern 228
PARTY
Introduction / James Carey's Academy
G.Stuart Adam 261
107 Political Correctness and Cultural Studies 270
117 Salvation by Machines: Can Technology
Save Education? 292
Afterword: The Culture in Question

James W. Carey 308
Bibliography of Works by James W. Carey 341
Contributors 347
Index 351
Acknowledgments
A number of people made this highly collaborative work possible. It is

lovely to take a few moments to remember how this book came to be.
First and foremost, we, the editors, would like to thank James
Carey. Although it is quite obvious that the collection would not exist
without his decades of insightful words and actions, what may be less
obvious is his graciousness, his modesty, and, above all, his willingness
to have us as editors. We were both graduate students at the time we
proposed this collection. It was, if not breathtaking hubris, certainly
close to it. We weren't rejected. He was eager to go forward. He gave us
the freedom to conceptualize the trajectory of the essays, to choose the
publisher we felt most comfortable with, and to suggest the essays and
contributors. He sat in coffee shops, in restaurants, in motel rooms, in
his office, and in his living room, talking and sometimes laughing or
grimacing with us about the project. The hours and days spent both on
mundane details and intellectual flight—in New York City and Illinois—
meant, and means, the world to us. We are both proud and honored to
have our names linked with his.
We also want to extend our deepest appreciation to Clifford Chris-
tians, Director of the Institute of Communications Research at the Uni-
versity of Illinois. Cliff has, from the beginning, been our mentor, our
counselor, our guide, and our supporter. From providing the resources
of the institute to talking over the multitude of issues involved, to send-
ing us to New York City on more than one occasion, Cliff's intellectual,
emotional, and financial support was unstinting. This book could not
vii
viii / Acknowledgments
have been published without him. It is inextricably connected with

both Cliff and our lives as graduate students in the institute, a richly re-
warding experience for both of us. As one professor, battered by the
winds of politics in another department and having found shelter at the
institute, recently noted to one of us, in slight awe: "It's a classy place,
isn't it?"
We also want to thank the group of scholars who immediately and
generously agreed—saying they were honored—to provide introductions
to each section in this work: John Pauly, Michael Schudson, Carolyn
Marvin, Jay Rosen, and Stuart Adam. This work, which would have
been a wonderful collection, became a wonderful conversation with
their contributions.
Diane Tipps and Anita Specht of the institute spent considerable
time helping us in a multitude of ways, from copying to typing to travel
arrangements. Their expertise and hard work are most appreciated.
A number of James Carey's colleagues and friends helped us through
interviews, writing letters of support, and moral support: Eleanor Blum,
Norm Denzin, George Gerbner, John Nerone, Ev Rogers, Kim Rotzoll,
Wick Rowland, Michael Tracey, and Ellen Wartella, among others.
Their efforts were appreciated. We also want to thank Nate Kohn, our
fellow traveler, and Bette Carey, for her warm hospitality and great
conversation.
People at the University of Minnesota Press have been wonderful.
First, thanks to our original editor, Janaki Bakhle, who took this pro-
ject on. Our next editor, Micah Kleit, inherited the book from Janaki,
adopted it without reservation, and nurtured it. With his consistent
and skilled attention, as well as that of copy editor Lynn Marasco, and
design and production manager Amy Unger, this book has come to be.
Thank you all.
Eve Munson and Cat Warren

Introduction
Eve Stryker Munson and Catherine A. Warren
James Carey called us one afternoon, late in the process of compiling

this volume. He had just finished reading the introductions to the sev-
eral sections and was disturbed. "We'll talk about this," he said, in his
typically delicate sally into a conversation, "but maybe you can look at
it and do some editing." The problem was simple to state—though not
so easy to solve. The scholars' introductions that open each of the five
sections, he said, were too flattering.
One of us slyly informed him that our introduction might correct
that. But that's not really possible. We admire him. We like him. So
do many others. Sociologist Norman Denzin has called Carey a
"unique American treasure." Newsweek education writer Jerrold K.
Footlick called him the "best-known journalism educator" in the world.
Media scholar Michael Schudson terms him "wonderfully graceful and
deeply engaged." A student evaluation described his class as "a spiri-
tual experience."
Carey has influenced scholars, students, and journalists for more
than three decades through a variety of channels: graceful essays and re-
views, of which he has written nearly a hundred; many more speeches;
work on national advisory boards; and his long-standing engagement
as an educator—both in and out of the classroom, directing disserta-
tions and charting the curriculum.
How does one measure the contribution of any scholar to a field?
In Carey's case, it is not by research alone. Indeed, Michael Schudson,
a contributor to this volume, has said his introduction to Carey was by
ix
x / Introduction
way of his students. It was a fitting introduction, Schudson said, be-

cause in his view "Carey has been above all else a teacher." And for
years Carey's teaching and research were carried out in addition to a
full-time-plus administrative job as dean of the College of Communica-
tion at the University of Illinois, a position he left in 1992, in a move to
Columbia University.
Carey brought the "interpretive turn" to communications long be-
fore it became the fashion in the humanities and sociology. And he did
so by interrogating and combining, in a fashion that defied communi-
cation conventions, an impressive array of philosophers, sociologists,
historians, and anthropologists: John Dewey, Clifford Geertz, Ray-
mond Williams, Thomas Kuhn, Max Weber, C. Wright Mills, Richard
Rorty, Jiirgen Habermas, Harold Innis, Lewis Mumford.
Carey's call for a cultural perspective in communications dates
from the early 19705. It broke through the thick walls of empirical
research—the so-called dominant paradigm of effects research. That
fortress was quickly impoverishing what should have been a vibrant
discipline. Even researchers such as Bernard Berelson, working within
that paradigm, were declaring the discipline dead, its work done.1
Carey showed that mass communications has a function in society
more complex than serving as a means to an end. Symbols, language,
and those who create them are complex; they create rather than reflect
reality. And in this regard, Carey showed that the discipline is far from
exhausted, that there is a great deal left to think through.
Yet despite the variety of topics Carey has addressed, almost all of
his work has at its core a few closely related problematics. His work,
while broad and often historical, returns time and time again to the
present and the same critical themes—themes that are addressed in this
collection: the strains on democracy, the drawbacks of technology, the
critique of journalism, the politics of academe. He has examined the
role of the media and the academy in creating and maintaining a public
sphere and the ways technology helps or hinders that project. In short,
Carey has spent his scholarly career considering a question that has
been central to U.S. intellectual history (although not necessarily to
communications theory): How does one make democracy work in a
vast country that spans a continent?
Political theorists going back at least to Aristotle have argued that
democratic self-government depends upon face-to-face interaction
among all citizens. Robert Dahl reminds us that Plato even did the
Introduction I xi
math and concluded that a democratic republic ought comprise no

more than 5,040 citizens because that was the maximum number of
persons one could know sufficiently and interact with often enough to
maintain the required civic dialogue.
To those intent upon launching a democratic republic on this con-
tinent, it was clear from the start that the notion of a democratic con-
versation would have to be reworked to be meaningful in the new
world. And yet the idea of face-to-face conversation was imbedded in
political theory in the new world, taking material form in the drawing
of county lines intended to divide the continent into sectors of a size
that still would afford face-to-face interaction.
With the industrialization and urbanization that transformed the
map of this continent starting more than a century ago came new chal-
lenges to communication, and new tools of communication. New theo-
retical perspectives were required.
Early in his career, Carey revived John Dewey's pivotal insight that
communication is the way to create and sustain community in Amer-
ica. In a recently published essay, Carey declared himself as bluntly as
possible: "There are no standards of evidence in politics, or anywhere
else, higher than conversational ones."2 Carey has embraced this belief
in the power of conversation personally as well as theoretically. The at-
tribute that everyone—his students, his friends, his colleagues, and his
critics—notes is Carey's skill as a conversationalist. This is not an in-
teresting aside; it is central to his work. "In doing intellectual work,"
he notes, "the one problem is to find one's voice, to find something
to say—a vocabulary, an outlet, a set of problems that one thinks are
important."3
Carey's background helps explain why he sets such store by the
power of conversation. His life is a testament to the way biography be-
comes theory and vice versa. As children and as adults, Carey notes, we
tell stories about ourselves. It is a way of explaining ourselves to our-
selves. We tell the story of our life in a given way until a crisis occurs
and that story becomes useless and gets in the way of going on. We
then cast about for another story; we reimagine the tale into a usable
narrative. These stories are told at all levels: by the nation-state, by in-
terest groups, by science, and by individuals. We all construct ourselves
through conversation with what G. H. Mead called the Significant and
Generalized Others. More than one scholar has criticized Carey for
being essentialist. But part of that essentialism seems to be an ease he
xii / Introduction
has with extending his childhood into adulthood. Discussions about

fractured postmodern identities simply irritate him, as if they were a
new historical phenomenon, as if the entire history of modernity was
not one of identities alternately fractured and rebuilt.
Certainly Carey's upbringing contributed to his belief in the power
of conversation. As a young child he was considered sickly because of
an undiagnosed heart ailment, and he did not attend school until he
was a teenager. Beyond an occasional hour of tutoring, his education
was, he said, "kind of a mystery":
My childhood consisted largely of hanging around with otherwise
unemployed adults. If you're around adults all the time, functioning
adults, you learn a lot. I'd make daily rounds to the church where I'd
talk to the priests and sometimes accompany them when they deliv-
ered communion to the sick, visit the elderly and infirm and run their
errands, hang around the local coffee shop with the retired men and
read the papers and talk politics. It was a wonderful life. I wasn't
educated in the technical sense so there were things I had to learn
rather late. But in terms of understanding the immediacies of eco-
nomics and history, of learning by direct experience how communi-
ties are put together, how people behave, what they're interested in,
learning the commonsense wisdom of people, it's a tremendous way
to learn.
So there is no real mystery, then, about how Carey's "education on
the streets" taught him that disciplinary boundaries often are inane.
From such a life came a passionate theoretical plea that communica-
tion best fulfills its function not as messages flashing across space for
purposes of control—"who says what to whom to what effect"—but
as rituals of fellowship and democracy.
Out of his conversations grew a love of words, whether they were
spoken or written and whether they were found in the pages of pulp fic-
tion or in arcane philosophical works. His family was Irish, Catholic,
and working-class; men and women alike were mill, jewelry, and rail-
road workers and trade union organizers as well, involved in the poli-
tics of parish and precinct.
Unable to take his place in this way of life because of his health,
he was forced to go to college. ("What else could I do?") The state
provided a scholarship for the disabled to the University of Rhode
Island, less than thirty-five miles from his home in Providence. "It was
like going to China," he says. "We had to get out the map. Where's
Kingston?"
Introduction I xiii
He studied business administration because that was the only cur-

riculum that would admit him—"My family simply hoped I'd make a
living outside the mills"—and when he tried to transfer to philosophy
was rejected because he lacked the necessary high school credits.
Carey did find a life outside the mills, and in the process he has re-
shaped the field of communication and become one of its leading theo-
rists. It is his cultural approach to communication that has most influ-
enced the direction of communication research in the United States.
Indeed, Hanno Hardt, in his recent history of critical communication
studies in America, calls Carey the "most prominent representative" of
American cultural studies.4
In spite of his wide-ranging influence, Carey remains something of
a hidden treasure. As Everett Rogers, director of the Department of
Journalism and Communication at the University of New Mexico, put
it: "He ought to be more widely known. I would guess that if you
polled all the scholars in mass communication today, more would
know Steve Chaffee than Carey, no? I like both. But personally, I think
Carey has had more effect." Rogers posits that the very nature of
Carey's effect on the field is also the reason he is underappreciated: the
breadth of his influence obscures others' vision of him. Carey is "hu-
manistic, literary, thoughtful—not narrowly focused." Academics tend
to recognize their peers for one thing, Rogers explained: "You get type-
cast. They say 'Everett Rogers—diffusion of innovation.' They say 'Jim
Carey—' then you have to say a lot of things. That is the mark of a true
scholar."5
Contributor John Pauly has noted elsewhere that Carey is "curi-
ously underread." That, Pauly explains, is mostly because Carey is a
self-admitted essayist rather than an author of books. His work is
widely scattered, sometimes in obscure venues. Carey says, with a
shrug, that when someone asks him to write something, that's when he
writes. This willingness to address topics at the request of others
means his work has not followed a straight trajectory, the clear-cut
path of research that sometimes is taken to be the hallmark of genuine
scholarship.
Willard D. Rowland Jr., dean of the School of Journalism and
Mass Communication at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and for-
merly a colleague of Carey's at Illinois, echoed Hardt's description,
adding that while Carey is the leading spokesman of what Rowland
called the Illinois tradition, "he also is a creature of it":
xiv / Introduction
The way to understand Carey is to understand the people and insti-

tutions who had an influence on him. Carey got caught up in the
Sturm und Drang of the intellectual life at Illinois. He started to
wrestle with the old struggle between ideology and materialism.
Much of his intellectual career can be interpreted as bouncing be-
tween those poles, ultimately tipping to the idealist side. His study
of symbols, communication, meaning, history—these are vexed by
materialist critiques. . . . He was always to some extent at odds with
Smythe, Gerbner, Schiller, and the Gubackian tradition. But he val-
ued it and wanted it there as a goad.6
As Rowland intimates, Carey's achievement has not been the un-
interrupted ascent of an immediately heralded star. Initially he strug-
gled to find an outlet for his work within the field of communication.
None of his essays was published in Journalism Quarterly until he be-
came president of the journal's sponsoring organization, the Associa-
tion for Educators in Journalism and Mass Communication. Rowland
suggests that this difficulty stemmed in part from the disdain that
Carey's mentor, Jay Jensen, had for the standard scientific tradition, an
attitude that tended to isolate scholars at Illinois.
Similarly, as a colleague of his has noted, Carey doesn't exactly fill
his essays with references to other communication scholars. Given the
breadth of Carey's interests and scholarship, however, he found outlets
for his work in many other venues. A glance at the list of Carey's
works at the end of this volume attests to this: the previously published
essays appeared in journals in sociology, political science, history, and
economics.
Even before his struggle to be heard by his colleagues in communi-
cation, though, Carey had to struggle to find his voice at Illinois. He re-
calls being a young assistant professor, coming into a program filled
with luminaries such as Charles Osgood, Dallas Smythe, George Gerb-
ner, and others: "You join a program like Illinois and everyone's got a
seat staked out at the table. In some sense, every assistant professor feels
the same way. But there was no chair for me. You walk into a room,
and everyone sits down, and there's no chair. Where can I sit? And
someone says, you can sit on my lap. But no one was quite the voice."
Then Richard Hoggart, having read a piece Carey wrote on
McLuhan and Innis, wrote to him in the mid-1960s and sent the first
mimeographed working papers of the Centre for Contemporary Cul-
tural Studies at Birmingham University in England, along with a syl-
Introduction I xv
labus of the current reading program. As it turned out, the readings

at Birmingham were remarkably similar to those being pursued at
Illinois:
It was an attempt to combine not only Marx but, as importantly,
also much of the classic tradition in social theory—Durkheim,
Weber—with interactionists like Erving Goffman and the little that
existed then of a useful literature in popular culture to fashion a dif-
ferent view of modern life. When one added American writers not
much read in Europe, like John Dewey and Kenneth Burke, and
scholars in the American studies movement—Henry Nash Smith,
Leo Marx, Lewis Mumford—one sensed an opportunity to create a
parallel but distinct niche within the literature. I was an assistant
professor teaching around Smythe, Gerbner, Osgood, and Ross
Ashby, trying to find a place at the table, and it seemed worthwhile
to define yet another take on communications under the label cul-
tural studies. I didn't like the phrase cultural science, suggested by
Weber, for it seemed impossibly pretentious for such a speculative
enterprise. That was very important as a marking point: to realize
that other people in other places were struggling with the same prob-
lems and trying to do something roughly similar. I started using the
term cultural studies largely to describe an impulse. Some people
came to Illinois wanting to be a certain kind of sociologist, a certain
kind of psychologist, or a certain kind of cybernetician. Cultural
studies was a name for those who did not fit in the conventional
boxes. We weren't doing the same thing. We disagreed a lot, but our
impulses were broadly the same—qualitative social theory more
open to literary analysis.
As is always the case with prolific thinkers, Carey has detractors as
well as admirers. Michael Tracey, who has critiqued cultural studies,7 said:
There is a kind of romanticism in him that on one level is very appeal-
ing, but on another level it's silly. If you read Carey you have to pinch
yourself [to believe] that this is late twentieth century America. He
has an Arcadianism that is ludicrous. He has a desire to think well of
other people. . . . It's almost a turning away from the real character of
society, a form of false consciousness. Once you set up that we make
our own meaning, you can't study institutions because you can't take
into consideration how some have more power than others.8
But a careful reading of Carey's work shows this criticism to be un-
founded. Many of the essays in this volume—"The Dark Continent of
American Journalism" and "Communication and Economics," for in-
stance—contain subtle and deft analyses of institutions and power,
xvi / Introduction
along with a warning of what we stand to lose if we reduce analysis of

communication to nothing more than an analysis of power.
Carey is unequivocally guilty of wanting to think well of other peo-
ple. This is part of the power of his scholarship. He has argued that you
must be careful about what theory you embrace, because we tend to
become what we study. He also has argued that we create ourselves in
conversation. In the extended conversation about the character of our
society, Carey's voice is a persistent, consistent call for civility and mu-
tual respect.
But James Carey is, to us, foremost a teacher. He doesn't create
a boundary between administrative work, teaching, research, and—
indeed—living. It is what makes learning from him so easy. It really
doesn't matter much whether one is sitting in a classroom, talking with
him in his office across his oak desk, or walking down busy side streets
of the Upper West Side of New York City, where he and his wife, Bette,
now live. It is all an extended, sometimes joyous, sometimes troubled,
sometimes contentious ode to life in America.
Carey's classes at the University of Illinois were not magnificent,
despite the awe that many students brought with them for the first
few lectures. Instead, they were engaging, challenging, charming—and
sometimes irritating. One cannot learn well if one is overwhelmed, but
Carey is not overwhelming. He has an enormous intellectual horizon,
but somehow, when he teaches, he brings it down and sets it on the
table in front of you and convinces you that this immense world of
ideas is within your grasp, too.
There is something old-world about James Carey, a kind of court-
liness, a privacy, a formality. Students would correct other students; no
one called him by his first name. He was Professor Carey, or Dean
Carey. Yet he would sit and talk with a student in the dean's office for
an hour or more, simply shooting the intellectual breeze.
Carey's formality quickly gives way to humor or outrage or joy.
His emotions, like his theory, are fundamentally democratic, playing
freely not only in his tone of voice but across his body as well. He rips
off his glasses and lets them dangle precariously from one ear. He rolls
his shoulders. He winks or rolls his eyes, adding another layer or two
of meaning to his message. Taking notes at Carey's lectures means com-
ing up with a shorthand not just for words, but for body language too.
Carey's courses were heady introductions to a life of the mind. Not
an austere mind, for topics would veer from the sexual life of peacocks
Introduction I xvii
to Richard Rorty to the Chicago Cubs to Stuart Hall. Carey would

haul huge stacks of photocopied articles to the seminar room in Greg-
ory Hall, looking simultaneously abashed and pleased, demurring as he
passed out the bounty, often hundreds of pages, to impoverished grad-
uate students. It was only later that we realized that the citation had
been left off. We are still coming upon chapters of Feyeraband or Goff-
man or Sennett that are missing their provenance.
But Carey does not have time to get perfectly organized: he reads
voraciously, assimilating new ideas, or works at adjusting familiar
ideas to new events. In 1990 one of us had received a syllabus in ad-
vance and read many of the books over the summer to prepare for her
very first class in a decade. It was a false security. The first day, Carey
threw out the entire syllabus. It was the year after the Berlin Wall came
down, and he was thinking about it. Anything in the human sciences
and history had been written against the background of the cold war,
the central narrative structure of our times. That structure was now
drastically changed. The syllabus was irrelevant. "We need a new vocab-
ulary," he told the class. "It's not quite clear what we should be worry-
ing about." At least one student was worrying about how to write
about the post-cold war death of dualism and still pass the course.
Carey suggested that students write about anything that interested
them (presumably even peacocks were fair game). There was one stipu-
lation, he added ominously. A student must have no intention of mak-
ing the paper into a conference paper or publication—a kind of "perish
the thought of publishing." That was a pet peeve of his—pragmatism
in the worst sense of the term—not giving oneself the luxury of explo-
ration; not finding one's voice before constructing one's vitae.
And this brings us back again to the importance to Carey of con-
versation. A group of people who have something to say, who have
found their voices, is essential to sustain conversation, and, indeed,
democracy. The ideas presented in this volume are part of an ongoing
dialogue that began before the earliest essay included here was written,
nearly three decades ago, a dialogue that will continue long after this
book is published. In conceptualizing how to collect some of James
Carey's essays, we both felt strongly that we needed to include other
voices, to offer readers a least a suggestion of the conversation that
Carey has been a party to for a third of a century. We had to do this to
be true to the nature of Carey's own scholarship.
The scholars who comment here on Carey's work have all known
xviii / Introduction
him a long time, most for decades. John Pauly, chair of the Department
of Communication at St. Louis University, was one of Carey's students.
Michael Schudson, in the sociology department at the University of
California, San Diego, has been a constant intellectual companion, even
when he is writing, as he sometimes does, against Carey's grain. The
same is true of Carolyn Marvin at the Annenberg School of Communi-
cation, who wrote of Carey that "his is the discursive art" before mov-
ing on to challenge it—a student turned affectionate critic. Professor
Jay Rosen of New York University, whose projects and commitments
to community journalism brought him and Carey together, and Stuart
Adam, dean of the Faculty of Arts of Carleton University, longtime
friend and colleague and fellow administrator, finish out this group.
These five voices, along with the thirteen essays of Carey's, offer at
least a suggestion of the bracing conversation that Carey offers to those
who cross his intellectual path.
We wanted this collection to be like Carey's classes—engaging,
sometimes challenging, and possibly even irritating. As Carey himself
notes: "I have a lot of intellectual companions I disagree with." (The
only other collection of Carey's essays is Communication as Culture.)
This collection addresses a slightly different but complementary aspect
of his work, from McLuhan to political correctness to journalism's five
Ws. But in particular, the love of storytelling in journalistic form has
endured in Carey's work. This volume, we hope, partly addresses that
love. As Rowland observed: "Jim has a fascination with and absolute
delight in the journalism profession. He himself was never a journalist,
but he loved the storytellers. He has respect for the professional side and
an ability to live in the dualities, professional and theoretical, without a
sense of contradiction. He loves those practitioners, with all their warts."
But these essays diverge from journalism as often as they address it.
As is always the case with Carey's work, any strict disciplinary division
is impossible and undesirable. Essays flow over and into each other. It
is far more intellectually honest, and indeed more accurate, to say, "We
liked these essays a lot and thought you would, too."
Notes
1. Bernard Berelson, "The State of Communication Research," Public Opinion
Quarterly 2,3 (Spring 1959): 1-5.
2. James W. Carey, "Abolishing the Old Spirit World," Critical Studies in Mass
Communication 12, (March 1995): 88.
Introduction I xix
3. This and other Carey quotes come from personal conversations with the authors
in New York City in December 1994.
4. Hanno Hardt, Critical Communications Studies: Communication., History, and
Theory in America (New York: Routledge, 1992.), 196.
5. Personal conversation with Eve Munson, Albuquerque, N.Mex., February 9,
1995-
6. Personal conversation with Eve Munson, Boulder, Colo., January 18, 1995.
7. David Docherty, David Morrison, and Michael Tracey, "Scholarship as Silence,"
Journal of Communication 43 (Summer 1993): 230-38.
8. Personal conversation with Eve Munson, Boulder, Colo., January 19, 1995.
Parti
Introduction / On the Origins of
Media Studies (and Media Scholars)
John Pauly
"How is society possible?" With that disarmingly simple question

James Carey began his first lecture in a communication systems class I
took with him over twenty years ago. The question is anything but sim-
ple, as I have learned in the years since. That question, which Carey
borrowed from the philosopher Thomas Hobbes through Talcott Par-
sons, has vexed liberal thought since the Enlightenment. If we consider
ourselves individuals, how do we understand our relation to others? If
the goal of human life is freedom, what do we owe others in whose
lives we are implicated? If we set our sights on the future, what do we
make of the past?
Hobbes thought he knew the answer, of course: the state guaran-
tees the authority and continued existence of society. Subsequent
thinkers, with equal certainty, have offered their own answers. Society
is a legal arrangement guaranteed by constitutions and procedures. So-
ciety is a market in which individual interests find accommodation. So-
ciety is a covenant among true believers, guaranteed by natural law or
revelation. Society is a jungle of repressed desire and sublimated in-
stincts. Society is an artifact of technology, a by-product of the flow of
information.
James Carey rejects all these answers, even as he maintains a dia-
logue with most of them. For Carey society is possible only in and
through communication. Our symbolic acts call society into existence
and sustain its presence among us, making our relations amenable, in-
vesting the world with significance, offering us shared models of iden-
3
4 / Introduction to Part I
tity, tutoring us in common modes of interpretation. Like Susanne

Langer, Carey considers humans' gradual understanding of their own
symbolic practices the great achievement of twentieth-century thought,
the generative idea that defines the modern sensibility. To study com-
munication is to study how we make our way in a world of contin-
gency, doubt, and chaos.
And chaos. For Carey, chaos lurks beyond the edge of every human
triumph, though his critics rarely note this recurring motif. Positioning
themselves to his left, they have labeled him a defender of tradition and
ritual, a champion of community, a proponent of consensus politics, a
liberal. Carey has written often and eloquently on ritual, tradition,
community, and public life, of course, but never naively. For him hu-
mans' frail attempts to make the world sensible shine brightly only be-
cause they stand against the utter darkness he finds everywhere. In one
essay after another Carey glimpses the abyss into which public life has
fallen—intergenerational conflict, military adventurism, dehumanizing
technology, imperial social science, arrogant professions, brackish uni-
versities—and urges us to step back. In the face of turmoil, communi-
cation offers a momentary stay against confusion, to borrow a phrase
from the poet Robert Frost that Carey himself has often invoked.
If communication constitutes our mode of being in the world, then
nothing matters half so much as talking well about communication.
Talking well is the ethical imperative that propels Carey's work, as the
three essays that follow illustrate. The disorder of our times, Carey ar-
gues, can be attributed in no small measure to our faulty understanding
of our own communication practices. He said as much many years ago
in his influential article "A Cultural Approach to Communication."
Though that essay is now more typically cited as an early call for qual-
itative methods, its more ambitious claim was that our models of com-
munication create and sanction the forms of symbolic action that they
purport only to describe. When we create a model of communication,
we dream the forms of social order. Thus, if we describe communica-
tion as a mode of power and manipulation (rather than a mode of
being), we cripple ourselves with cynicism about the behavior of other
humans. If we imagine communication as a means of information
transfer, we project the marketplace onto all our social relations. If we
treat communication as the antidote to individual anxiety, we render
ourselves unable to act as a polity in the name of a common good. "We
are paying the penalty," Carey concludes, "for the long abuse of fun-
Introduction to Part 1/5
damental communicative processes in the service of politics, trade, and

therapy."
In each of the essays in this section Carey opposes the approaches
that have dominated American discussions of communication and the
media. He frames each essay as a conversation with a tradition of
thought. Over the years his essays frequently have followed this eti-
quette, introducing the Chicago School to effects researchers, Mum-
ford to McLuhan, Dewey to Lippmann, and American to European
thinkers (and vice versa). He tries to get beyond the printed page, so
that he might engage others as fully human beings. This is the most re-
vealing difference, perhaps, between his form of cultural studies and
that widely practiced in the United States today.
For Carey cultural studies grows out of our talk about the every-
day worlds we inhabit, not out of a newly invented method of literary
criticism. Indeed, I suspect that he finds it disconcerting, as I do, to hear
cultural studies researchers talk about "interrogating" texts. That bru-
tally clinical metaphor suggests an insensitivity that can only be sus-
tained through abstracted relations of the printed page to the literary
marketplace.
Rather than strapping others' texts to the operating table in order
to dissect them, Carey invites us to talk. His essays constantly move be-
tween the oral and literary traditions, in order to infuse the printed
word with the charm, fluency, grace, and nuance of speech. He draws
constantly on the work of others, freely acknowledging his debts. But
he refuses to shackle his arguments to the apparatus of literary citation.
He prefers instead to speak through the voices of others: Clifford
Geertz, Raymond Williams, Jack Goody, Richard Hoggart, John Dewey,
Kenneth Burke, Harold Innis, and Lewis Mumford in the early years;
Stuart Hall, Richard Rorty, Robert Darnton, Pierre Bourdieu, and
Mary Douglas more recently. Herein lies the pleasure of his text: in let-
ting others hear those voices as he hears them. Not coincidentally, this
is the pleasure of his teaching, too: he helps his students hear writers as
speakers.
Talking well is not merely a matter of civility and graciousness,
though Carey has always generously and unfailingly supported others'
work. Talking well constitutes a distinctive intellectual style by which
Carey hopes to position his work in a conversational rather than an
ideological domain, which is to say in time rather than space. He re-
jects spatial metaphors of difference, which attempt to array everyone
else's work (and identity) along a theoretical continuum—here the

most progressive, there the most retrograde; here the right, there the
left. (That this has become the preferred discursive strategy of many
cultural studies scholars today must surely discourage Carey.) Any dis-
cussion worth having, Carey would argue, must be conducted in the
fullness of time and the gridless ambience of conversation. In conversa-
tion we think more nimbly; we impersonate others and change voices;
we accept a measure of equality that the authority of the printed page
denies; we temper our criticisms with expressions of solidarity.
Let me underscore that last comment. I have always marveled that
no matter how tellingly Carey may criticize another's arguments, his
essays never feel like an attack. He refuses to participate in the gladia-
torial spectacles that professors enjoy staging at their annual conven-
tions, in which supposed enemies are invited to beat each other into the
dust in order to edify and delight their colleagues. Carey arrives with
no entourage to hold his cloak. Like Richard Hoggart, he recognizes
that tone modulates our relationships to one another; by maintaining a
bon ton Carey chooses a strategy of resistance and defense rather than
attack. What he resists are theories of communication that diminish the
complex humanness of our communication practices. What he defends
are the oral tradition and the moral weight it adds to humanness. By
this method he constantly calls attention to what the dominant models
of communication leave out. In the process, he strikes a balance be-
tween the literary and oral traditions, criticism and solidarity, cos-
mopolitanism and community.
The essays in this section dispute three models of communication
that have dominated the intellectual scene during Carey's career—ef-
fects research, technological utopianism, and economics. The first
essay, "The Chicago School and the History of Mass Communication
Research," offers an alternative account of the origins of American
mass communication research. Carey's own career is tightly woven
into this particular tale. When he began his communication studies in
the 19505 at the University of Illinois, he entered a field whose borders
were unraveling. As Carey notes, by that time two generations of ef-
fects researchers had produced a canonical history that explained the
origins and meanings of mass communication research and the
methodological innovations by which it had been accomplished. In
those days research meant quantitative social science; the only dispen-
sations granted were to fields with their own long-standing pedigrees—
history and law. This state of affairs persisted well into the late 19705,
when I started attending the annual conventions of the Association for
Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, and it has left a
mark on that organization's journal, Journalism and Mass Communi-
cation Quarterly, that remains visible even today. In short, Carey en-
tered a field that offered no home for someone who did his sort of
work.
For all its show of dominance, however, the effects tradition of
mass communication research was ending. (By effects tradition, I mean
those theories that use social science methods to assess the social or
psychological impact of media messages.) At their moment of ideolog-
ical triumph—having dismissed earlier fears of powerful media, reaf-
firmed the good sense of Americans and the authority of personal in-
fluence, and profitably aligned themselves with corporate and state
power—effects researchers realized that they had traded methodologi-
cal sophistication for conceptual insight. They had, in a sense, thor-
oughly bureaucratized media research as an imaginative domain. As-
tonishingly enough, by the early 19605 even the field's best-known
researchers were publicly acknowledging that the effects tradition no
longer had much to say. Bernard Berelson, at the height of a distin-
guished career, more or less threw up his hands. In a famous Public
Opinion Quarterly forum in 1959, he wondered aloud just what mass
communication research had accomplished and declared the field dead.
His respondents—Wilbur Schramm, David Riesman, and Raymond
Bauer—reacted with varying degrees of bemusement and surprise, but
in rejoinder they mostly called for a series of modest projects, built on
small, steady improvements in research methodology.
Carey wanted something more: a new imaginary that would redi-
rect and reinvigorate research on mass communication. In a sense his
predicament paralleled that of C. Wright Mills in sociology. In The So-
ciological Imagination, Mills portrayed contemporary sociology as a
field lurching between the Grand Theory of a Talcott Parsons and the
Abstracted Empiricism of the new generation of methodological bu-
reaucrats. This same intellectual distinction was articulated by Paul
Lazarsfeld when he categorized mass communication research of the
time as predominantly critical or administrative. Mass society theory
offered serious moral and political criticism, but in a grand philosoph-
ical style not subject to empirical testing. The effects tradition, which
Lazarsfeld had done so much to advance, valued empiricism but had
steadily narrowed its intellectual vision to a focus on technique and

method. The Chicago School of Social Thought symbolized an alterna-
tive tradition for Carey (he would find another, about the same time, in
the cultural studies of Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, but
that is another story). In choosing the Chicago School, Carey was de-
claring his affection for the older style of sociological analysis and re-
search that structural-functional studies had begun to displace by the
19305. In John Dewey, Charles Horton Cooley, Robert Park, W. I.
Thomas, Thorstein Veblen, and others he found thinkers who explored
the nature of the social, using American life for their examples.
Following their lead, Carey would describe the role played by com-
munication media in building community and constructing styles of
group identity. From such materials, over the next twenty years, he
would create a cultural approach to mass communication research.
The Chicago School's interest in the part played by communication
technology in reorganizing social life led Carey to question another
dominant model of mass communication: technological utopianism. In
"The Roots of Modern Media Analysis: Lewis Mumford and Marshall
McLuhan" Carey demonstrates how closely the technological history of
mass communication parallels the effects history. Both histories debate
the prospects of liberal society in an age in which communication tech-
nologies reorganize work, identity, and politics. According to the ef-
fects history, liberal politics eventually faces down the dangers posed by
"mass society"—propaganda, homogenization, totalitarianism—and
reaffirms the authority of personal influence and the primary group. Ac-
cording to the technological history, liberal politics confronts a series of
inventions that have the potential for good or evil and finds that un-
fettered innovation produces the greatest individual freedom and happi-
ness for the greatest number. This is the same story of progress, of course,
told from two perspectives, as Carey wisely recognizes. In each version
the values of liberal society—individualism, the belief in progress, the
free market—are tested, purified, and redeemed. In one, the wisdom
and common sense of the people buffer the alien influences of the mass
media. In the other, new electronic technologies liberate citizens from
the failures of the old machine technologies and reaffirm Americans' vi-
sion of a triumphant future.
These complementary histories of communication technology and
its effects, each mythically powerful in its own right, illustrate a larger
habit of American thought, according to Carey. Especially in the con-
text of American life, communication technology has proved particu-

larly good to think with. That phrase, good to think with, gained cur-
rency in the work of the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who used
it to describe how traditional people symbolically close the distance be-
tween nature and culture by making meaning out of material objects,
situations, people, events, and other creatures. Modern people deploy
communication technologies—telegraph, telephone, broadcast signal,
coaxial cable, computer network—for just such symbolic purposes,
Carey argues. Such technologies create an idiom with which to discuss
the social system. By making possible new forms of connectedness,
these media simulate the feel of face-to-face communication. Using
these technologies as metaphors, Americans describe the past and an-
ticipate the future. The professional communicators who emerge to
control these technologies—reporter, editor, actor, copywriter, publi-
cist, producer, disc jockey—come to symbolize new styles of behavior
and identity. The information they carry comes to pass for wisdom.
McLuhan and Mumford agreed that communication technologies
are good to think with, but disagreed about what we ought to think
and how to use technology. Mumford occasionally speculates on how
media change the way we think, but is more concerned with how
media transform the way we live. McLuhan envisions electronic media
liberating users from the sensory limitations of the past. Mumford dis-
covers a darkness in the soul of each new machine. From mining tech-
nology to factory loom to automobile to atom bomb to television, each
serves the pentagon of power, profit, prestige, property, and productiv-
ity. Finally, McLuhan sings the body electric, praising the more deeply
collective, organic, sensual experience that electronic media allegedly
inspire. Mumford mourns the way machine technology has displaced
technics—the hard-won human practices of arts, language, and ritual,
nurtured over centuries.
Standing offstage in this debate is Harold Adams Innis, about
whom Carey has written much. Like Mumford, Innis wanted to under-
stand how technology reorganizes communication as a material prac-
tice. Occasionally Carey has quoted the poet William Carlos Williams's
famous dictum "No ideas but in things" as a summary of this position.
For Carey, as for Innis and Mumford, the most powerful consequences
of technology are enacted through our social, political, and economic
practices, rather than through direct changes in the individual psyche.
(Indeed, Carey would argue, I think, that the vocabulary of psychology
dangerously depoliticizes and privatizes our discussion of technology

as a shared public phenomenon.) Technology opens up markets, allows
the conquest and patrol of space, transforms work routines, deraci-
nates preexisting cultural spaces and times, coins new forms of cultural
capital, and establishes monopolies of knowledge.
Not surprisingly, this discussion of the social consequences of tech-
nology leads to an analysis of capitalism, and this is the topic of the
third Carey essay included here, "Communications and Economics."
Although Carey has written about these issues for years—mostly in his
essays on Innis, the history of the telegraph, and the rhetoric of the
electronic revolution—here he confronts economic thought in an un-
usually direct and explicit way. Carey wishes to understand communi-
cation as a material, social practice—our very ground of being in the
world. To do so he must challenge the vocabulary of economics, which
claims to offer the master narrative that explains our material prac-
tices.
This essay, like the others, starts in a conversation now buried
within the text. While he was at the University of Illinois, Carey began
a deep friendship with the economist Julian Simon. The writing of each
continues to bear traces of that relationship. Early in their careers, both
were interested in advertising, Carey through his work with Charles
Sandage, and Simon through his studies of the economics of advertis-
ing. By the early 19705 both men shared an interest in the emerging de-
bate about population and ecology, an interest fueled by each man's re-
ligious as well as intellectual beliefs. Carey and Simon both objected to
neo-Malthusian theories that foresaw economic ruin as the result of
population growth. For Simon this objection took the form of a long-
running argument with Paul Erlich, author of The Population Bomb, a
best-seller that predicted shortages, rising prices, famine, and war as a
result of world population growth. Simon retorted that culture and
politics, not nature, dictate what counts for a resource: when markets
make some resources too expensive, humans simply reinvent what
counts for a resource. From Simon's perspective, then, natural re-
sources are constantly being reinvented through the exercise of human
imagination.
Starting from the study of communication and culture, Carey ar-
rived at a similar conclusion, after some evolution in his views. Several
years ago, while working through the ideas of Innis, Carey argued that
communication technologies create monopolies of knowledge, making
Introduction to Part 7 / 1 1
the mass media the site of permanent group conflicts over whose ver-
sion of reality will be displayed and honored. Borrowing the language
of economics, Carey observed then that "reality is a scarce resource."
Now, in this recent essay, Carey criticizes the dominance of economics
in our descriptions of human affairs. The problem with the language of
economics, as he sees it, is that the marketplace treats life as a zero-sum
game. Yet such an analogy devastates social relations, for it foretells a
society of winners and losers, constantly operating out of a sphere of
private interests. For Carey democratic culture cannot operate as a
zero-sum game. He makes the contrast between the vocabularies of
economics and communication explicit: "Economics is the practice of
allocating scarce resources. Communication is the process of produc-
ing meaning, a resource that is anything but scarce—indeed, is a super-
abundant, free good." Like Simon, he refuses to put resources before
people.
This critique of the language of economics points to one main dif-
ference between Carey and his critics on the left, who also worry about
the consequences of capitalism. The left, Carey argues, too often ac-
cepts the language of economics in framing its critique. This tendency
was particularly noticeable in older versions of Marxism, when critics
complained that capitalism puts the economy in the service of monop-
oly, profit, and empire, rather than the commonweal. Despite its obvi-
ous historical truth, this critique reduces communication and culture to
a shadow play of economic interests. For all its emphasis on culture,
even new versions of the left critique, such as British cultural studies,
tend to accept the ultimate dominance of economic concerns. To the
extent that it equates communication with ideology, British cultural
studies flirts with its own form of functionalism, treating culture as a
response to the structural needs of capitalism. The paths of influence in
such criticism prove circuitous indeed, but the destination remains un-
changed.
As this essay makes clear, Carey is no defender of capitalism, but
he refuses to ground his critique in the language of utilitarianism. For
Carey the language of economics diminishes the complexity and nu-
ance of human culture in the same ways that the languages of effects
and technology do. Metaphors of attenuation and attack run all
through Carey's descriptions of the consequences of capitalism. The
price system "penetrates" everyday life; markets "ingest the globe";
new technologies of communication "bleach knowledge into informa-
tion"; economics "reduces" human motives to mere self-interest. Thus

Carey objects to capitalism not just because it sustains the power and
privilege of some groups over others (a problem that he acknowledges
and condemns), but because the language of capitalism, economics,
robs us of our greatest resource—our ability to understand communi-
cation as a social practice. Surely one of the droll tragedies of American
intellectual history, from Carey's perspective, must be the new referent
of the name Chicago School. In popular parlance the University of
Chicago's renowned school of free-market Nobel laureates has largely
erased the memory of the reformers, social critics, and philosophers
who created the Chicago School of Social Thought. What better image
of how the language of economics has conquered public discourse.
Taken together, these three essays aptly illustrate Carey's position
within the field of media studies. They also illustrate, I think, how in-
tellectuals make themselves in and through their work. A collection of
writings always traces the trajectory of a life. Until quite recently Carey
studied, taught, and wrote at the University of Illinois, in one of the
world's most prominent centers for the study of communication. If we
listen carefully, these essays tell the story of how he made his intellec-
tual home there; how he set himself apart from the social science tradi-
tion of Wilbur Schramm, one of the field's most prominent researchers
and powerful administrators; how he learned what he could from the
liberal intellectual histories of Fredrick Siebert and Jay Jensen; how he
struggled with and against the tradition of political economy founded
by Dallas Smythe and continued by Herbert Schiller and Thomas
Guback. By the time he left for Columbia University, Carey had added
cultural studies to the list of traditions for which Illinois is now best
known.
This is not how most scholars today would recount the origins of
cultural studies. Others would attribute a larger role to British cultural
studies, or to semiotics, hermeneutics, or postmodern literary criticism.
But Carey feels no need to apologize for the Americanness of his story,
nor should he. The history of culture and communication can be told in
any number of places, and Carey's essays demonstrate how one might
engagingly tell the tale in an American vein. After all, if a central prob-
lem of cultural studies is the social construction of meaning and iden-
tity, what better place to study that problem than in a country that in-
cessantly and self-consciously talks about its destiny? If cultural studies
hopes to understand how the mass media confer prestige and legitimate
Introduction to Part 7 / 1 3
power, what better place to study these processes than in a society that
constantly uses communication technology to dream its future?
By grounding cultural studies in American experience, Carey hopes
to place it in the service of public life and democracy. Carey would
qualify Hobbes, I think, and say that the key question for us today
should be "How is democratic society possible?" His answer will not
please critics who want him to declare his allegiance to one position or
another. He has never been the theorist others want him to be. He is
too working-class in his upbringing to join in the choruses of praise for
American capitalism; too personally cautious and gradualist to be mis-
taken for a radical; too American in his intellectual references and too
unassuming in his style to be worshipped as a prominent cultural theo-
rist. Carey, like Raymond Williams, lives in his own border country. He
refuses to declare himself either conservative or radical or liberal. His
one, steadfast intellectual commitment is to democracy as a way of life.
More than ten years ago, in writing an essay on the intellectual
roots of the social philosopher Ivan Illich (who also has had some in-
fluence on Carey), I noted that critics faced a similar difficulty in trying
to position Illich's thought. I wrote then that Illich proposes "neither a
stainless steel nor a forest-green Utopia, but a democratically protected
space in which a conserving culture might grow." That last phrase de-
scribes Carey's beliefs, too, I think. Culture conserves sense and mean-
ing in a world of chaos; democracy creates a space for the work of cul-
ture, by protecting humans from state coercion, predatory capital,
monopolies of professional knowledge, and imperial technology. Best
of all, democracy suggests the one communication metaphor without
which we cannot live: communication as conversation. In the world
that James Carey envisions, the inquisitor's question Which side are
you on? always gives way to an invitation: Let us talk.
1 / The Chicago School and the History
of Mass Communication Research
First published in 1996
Strictly speaking, there is no history of mass communication research.

From the seventeenth century forward one finds scholars, scientists,
lawyers, clerics, men of letters, journalists, politicians, and freelance in-
tellectuals writing about the printing press, broadsides, penny dread-
fuls, censorship, the Star Chamber, the urban public, freedom of speech
and press, and a host of related topics and issues. Similarly, as the nine-
teenth century progressed, an increasing number of essays appeared
on the telegraph, the rise of advertising, the economic power of news-
papers, the growth of the national magazine, and the emergence of
the "press baron." However, this motley collection of books, essays,
speeches, memoirs, autobiographies, political interventions, and ideo-
logical tracts hardly constituted a history of the mass media or even the
materials necessary to an understanding of such institutions.
Rather, the history of mass communication research is a recent lit-
erary genre, albeit a minor one: a self-conscious creation (and now an
endless recreation) that sifts, sorts, and rearranges the accumulated lit-
erary debris into a coherent narrative. The narrative that emerges
serves ultimately a variety of purposes: principally to focus, justify, and
legitimize a twentieth-century invention, the mass media, and to give
direction and intellectual status to professional teaching and research
concerning these same institutions. But it is hardly an innocent history,
for it was invented with a political purpose: an attempt to cast loyal-
ties, resolve disputes, guide public policy, confuse opposition, and legit-
imize institutions; in short, the history that emerged was a minor
14
The Chicago School I 15
episode in the social, political, and ideological struggles of the twenti-

eth century.
By the 19505 the history of mass communication research had
achieved textual status (it was a recognizable species of writing), and
certain "studies," essays, books, and intellectual figures (Paul Lazarsfeld,
Wilbur Schramm) had become a part of a minor canon that was re-
quired reading on university syllabi. Once formulated, the history al-
most instantly achieved boilerplate status and was endlessly retailed in
textbooks, essays, and research reports, and on any given academic day
was providing an easy and unearned introduction to a subject matter in
classrooms across the country.
The history, reduced to a sketch and a caricature, went—actually,
it still goes—something like this. Mass communication research began
in the years surrounding World War I as a response to a widespread fear
of propaganda: wartime propaganda by the major military powers,
peacetime propaganda by organized interests, particularly the modern
corporation and the business class. The fear of propaganda was fueled
by the spread and increasing sophistication of advertising and public
relations, but the indictment of these practices moved from the arena of
news and public affairs across the landscape of mass-produced culture
and entertainment. If the cognitive and attitudinal life of the citizen
was under assault by propaganda, the moral, appreciative, and affec-
tive life of children (and the child in us all) was similarly assailed by a
banal and pernicious system of cultural production emanating from
massive, concentrated institutions. As the "jazz age" turned into the
Great Depression, the fears of propaganda and the media were con-
firmed by the mass movements in politics and culture typical of that pe-
riod and by a series of specific and startling events of which Orson
Welles's broadcast "The War of the Worlds" stood as an archetype. In
the standard history this random assortment of fears, alarms, jeremiads,
political pronouncements, and a few pieces of empirical research were
collapsed into the "hypodermic needle model" or a "bullet theory" or a
"model of unlimited effects" of the mass media, for they converged on
a common conclusion: the media collectively, but in particular the
newer, illiterate media of film and radio, possessed extraordinary
power to shape the beliefs and conduct of ordinary men and women.
However, the standard history continues, this conclusion was sup-
ported by nothing more than speculation, conjecture, anecdotal evi-
dence, and ideological ax grinding. None of the conclusions was theo-
16 / The Chicago School
retically or empirically grounded; none was supported by systematic

research. Inferential and unjustified leaps were made from patterns of
ownership and control (by business elites and reactionary entrepre-
neurs) to the quality and import of "messages" and from the content of
messages (Father Coughlin's radio addresses, for example) to effects on
conduct and attitudes. In short, unjustified connections were made be-
tween the presence of a cause and the stipulation of an effect, the ap-
pearance of a stimulus and the automatic production of a response,
without evidence concerning the intervening and mediating linkages
between medium, message, and effect.
However, the standard history continues, beginning in the late
19305 and progressively throughout the 19408, a body of research, em-
pirically sophisticated, theoretically grounded, began to appear, largely
at the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia and the Office of
War Information, that decisively cut against the "hypodermic needle"
model of media effects. What was discovered, almost fortuitously, it
seems, was a bizarre situation in which there were causes without ef-
fects, stimuli without responses. That is, hardly anyone denied the
charges that the media were a tissue of propaganda and degenerate cul-
ture, but most investigators produced evidence that the content and in-
tentions were rarely tied to effects or consequences. What was discov-
ered, in the standard rendition, was that individuals, the members of
the audience, were protected from the deleterious possibilities inherent
in the mass media by a group of predispositional or mediating factors.
Some of these factors were psychological (people interpreted messages
and retained meanings in the light of their own needs and desires), and
some of these factors were social (people interpreted messages and as-
signed meanings as part of an interactive network of stable social
groups to which they belonged). Both sets of factors conspired to pro-
tect individuals from everything but the most marginal effects of the
mass media. Some individuals (a few) under some circumstances (rare)
were directly affected by the mass media. Otherwise, media propa-
ganda and mass culture were held at bay by an invisible shield erected
by a universally resistant psyche and a universally present network of
social groups. This conclusion was presented in summary form as early
as 1948 in an American Scholar essay by Joseph Klapper, "Mass Media
and the Engineering of Consent,"1 and fully articulated twelve years
later, with all the empirical evidence assembled, as the summary judg-
ment of The Effects of Mass Communication.2
Klapper concluded that the fears of propaganda, of manipulative

elites, of media-induced extremist behavior, were misplaced and hysteri-
cal. Empirical research, he believed, had carefully documented the factors
that made individuals resistant to mass persuasion. He concluded that the
mass media could have an effect on their audiences only when the media
moved in concert with the natural predispositions of that audience in
directions ordained by the general culture rather than working against
it. Given the conservative bias of the media and of social life generally,
Klapper concluded that the preponderant effect was the reinforcement
of the status quo. There was, therefore, little to fear from extremist be-
havior or antidemocratic social movements. The media were at one, if
not by design and intent, at least by results and consequences, with the
democratic, individualist, decentralist traditions of the country. All in
all, this was a pretty rosy picture, particularly given the sharp national
conflicts and deep ideological divisions present in the postwar world.
With the conclusion firmly established that the media had but lim-
ited effects, the research agenda was largely a mopping-up operation:
the closer and more detailed specification of the specific operation of
mediating and intervening factors. Consequently, Klapper tried to turn
research in another direction, toward what he called a "phenomenistic
approach"3 and what others called the study of "uses and gratifica-
tions."4 In a well-known line, interest shifted from what it was that the
media did to people and toward what it was people did with the media.
This was then a shift in interest and attention from the source to the re-
ceiver and a relocation of the point of power in the process: the audi-
ence controlled the producers. Except for some special problems (vio-
lence and pornography are the best-known examples) and some special
groups (principally children), interest in direct effects and propaganda
withered away. The settled and established consensus and conclusion
to the history was that the media might have special and limited effects
on some topics and some groups, that they might direct attention to
some problems and away from others and therefore set a social and po-
litical agenda of sorts, but the media did not constitute a social prob-
lem, did not debase the culture or promote extremism; the media were,
in short, in concert with rather than opposed to the fundamentally de-
mocratic and egalitarian forces in the culture.
There is, inevitably, some truth in this standard history but even
more it is powerfully misleading and of late there have been attempts to
recast it and recover the pertinence and sophistication of the research
and speculation on propaganda that was a hallmark of the i92,os.5 But

what must be emphasized here is that the standard history had, or at
least was subsequently endowed with, a practical political purpose. It
attempted to negate or at least deflect the characteristic critiques of
modern liberal, capitalistic democracies. Those critiques, whether of
the left or right, identified dominative forces and totalitarian tendencies
within all the Western democracies and tied these tendencies to certain
features inherent in the structure, content, and ownership patterns of
the mass media. These critiques are frequently lumped together as "the
theory of mass society," a pastiche containing distinctively radical and
distinctively conservative analyses of modern society. Daniel Bell gives
the theory one kind of summary:
The conception of "mass society" can be summarized as follows:
The revolution in transport and communications have brought men
into closer contact with each other and bound them in new ways; the
division of labor has made them more interdependent; tremors in
one part of the society affect all others. Despite this greater inter-
dependence, however, individuals have grown more estranged from
one another. The old primary group ties of family and local commu-
nity have been shattered; ancient parochial faiths are questioned; few
unifying values have taken their place. Most important, the critical
standards of an educated elite no longer shape opinion or taste. As a
result, mores and morals are in constant flux, relations between indi-
viduals are tangential or compartmentalized rather than organic. At
the same time greater mobility, spatial and social, intensifies concern
over status. Instead of a fixed or known status symbolized by dress
or title, each person assumes a multiplicity of roles and constantly
has to prove himself in a succession of new situations. Because of
all this, the individual loses a coherent sense of self. His anxieties in-
crease. There ensues a search for new faiths. The stage is thus set for
the charismatic leader, the secular messiah, who, by bestowing upon
each person the semblance of necessary grace and fullness of person-
ality, supplies a substitute for the older unifying belief that the mass
society has destroyed.6
The key event in the evolution of mass society was the development
of the mass media. As Raymond and Alice Bauer put it, the population,
as conceived by the theory of mass society, was "atomized" by industri-
alism and developed, as a result, "an insatiable appetite for narcotizing
diversion, a circumstance which makes them susceptible to the machi-
nations of the few who control the media of communication. One result
of this process . . . is that the groundwork is laid for totalitarianism."7
As I said, the theory of mass society was actually a synthesis of two

rather different critiques of modern life, one conservative and one rad-
ical. The two critiques shared, however, the belief that all the forces of
modernity—technology, economic development, literacy, mass democ-
racy—conspired to erode the protective standards and covering that en-
sured social stability and a reasonable politics and culture. They differed
rather considerably concerning whose standards were being eroded and
who was being disabled from exercising political leadership. The con-
servative critique focused on the erosion of the position and standards
of traditional elites in the arts, academy, and civil service as mass par-
ticipation in culture and politics was mobilized through, among other
things, the mass media. The radical critique, predictably, focused on
just the opposite, on the demobilization of the masses, on their expo-
sure to manipulative control, and on the intent of domineering elites to
contain any movement aimed at radical change.
Synthesized into a more or less coherent position, the theory of
mass society contended that the media of communication were simul-
taneously an agent for destroying intellectual and artistic standards
and the elites that bore them and a means for exercising dominion over
and control of ordinary men and women. Both elites and masses, set
free from, liberated from, tradition and traditional ways of life, were
promptly reabsorbed into the market and consumerism, into mass pol-
itics and mass consumption. The only winners in this game were com-
mercial elites, and their technocratic servants in the professions, in-
cluding the personnel of the mass media.
The history of mass communication created, then, as its necessary
double the theory of mass society and, naturally, constituted that the-
ory in its most vulnerable form: as a straw man that would topple be-
fore the thinnest empirical evidence. The theory was patched together
out of lines drawn from unlikely allies—T. S. Eliot and Karl Marx,
Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, Alexis de Tocqueville and Dwight
Macdonald—and a spurious coherence imputed to the whole. Such a
jerry-built structure was easy enough to topple, but the actual demo-
lition often concealed the real intent behind the creation of both the
history of mass communication research and theory of mass society,
namely, the attempt to contain and neutralize those intellectuals pursu-
ing a critical theory of modern society, among whom the Frankfurt
School, exiled in America, was merely the most prominent group.
My aim here, however, is not so much so much to assess the politi-
cal intent and efficacy of the standard history of mass communications

as it is to insist that even on its own terms that history is radically trun-
cated and incomplete. This is not the place to rewrite that history in
toto, but to begin the work of correction and completion, let me briefly
stitch into the narrative two other traditions that are critical to under-
standing how thought in this field developed.
It is proper to suggest, I believe, that for most of the nineteenth
century there was nothing in form or content that could be considered
a precursor literature to the mass communications research of this cen-
tury. There were, of course, intelligent and scholarly reflections on the
newspaper, telegraph, and magazine, but neither these media individu-
ally nor the mass media—a more recent coinage—were taken to be a
social or intellectual problem. The agenda of intellectual life in nine-
teenth-century America was largely set by a species of utilitarianism
that came into the culture by a particularly narrow reading of John
Locke. The central problematic in utilitarianism is the question of free-
dom, and, therefore, the mass media (better, the press) were thought of
pretty exclusively within the terms laid down by utilitarianism. The
central terms were freedom and the public; the central problem the
stipulation of the conditions of a free public life. What we might more
generally call liberal theory emphasized that "society is grounded in a
solidary public that is conceived as virtuous." Public opinion—the opin-
ion uttered in public—was taken to be a constituent component of the
liberal social order, a force in the creation and expression of a civic con-
sciousness. When the entire public was conceived as a rational body en-
gaged in discussion through printed media, the press was directly in-
volved in the formation, maintenance, and expression of liberal society.
The term public is the key to understanding utilitarian thought. The
public is a group bound by reason and united in a conversation that
seeks to place limits on state power. Faith in the public is clearest not
when liberals discuss the social contract but when they identify the so-
cial foundations of the public in the process of free communication.
The utilitarian argument asserts that in any free exchange of ideas
among rational thinkers, truth will emerge victorious. This idea pro-
vides utilitarianism with a concrete policy: freedom of debate, preach-
ing, speaking, writing, and, most important, freedom of publication
were the means of founding order in society and reason in the individ-
ual. "Let each person be free to argue as reason guides. If all have rea-
son and if reason is capable of discerning truth, all will ultimately come
to truth." In the liberal tradition, the conditions of freedom guaranteed

the solidarity of society. "There can hardly be—or so the utilitarian
thinkers suppose—a better foundation for social life than universal ac-
ceptance of truth."8
There is a second way, a more economistic way, of characterizing
the liberal-utilitarian tradition, a way that places less emphasis on the
public and solidarity and more on the individual and individual desire.
Utilitarianism assumes that, strictly speaking, the ends of human action
are random or exogenous. Rational knowledge of human values or
purposes could not be gained. The best we can do is rationally judge
the fitting together of ends and means. One can attain rational knowl-
edge of the primal allocation of resources among means and toward
given ends, but one can gain no rational knowledge of the selection of
ends. Apples are as good as oranges; baseball is as good as poetry. All
that can be determined is the rational means to satisfy subjective and ir-
rational desire. Truth in this tradition is a property of the rational de-
termination of means. In turn, the rationality of means depended upon
freedom and the availability of information. More precisely, it was
freedom that guaranteed the availability of perfect information and
perfect information that guaranteed the rationality of means. In sum-
mary, then: If people are free they will have perfect information; if they
have perfect information, they can be rational in choosing the most ef-
fective means to their individual ends, and if so, in a manner never
quite explained, social solidarity will result. So the problem that con-
cerned writers about the press in the Anglo-American tradition was
how to secure the conditions of freedom against the forces that would
undermine it. These forces were considered to be political and institu-
tional, not psychological. Once freedom was secured against these
forces, truth and social progress were guaranteed.
There is, then, a coherent literature concerning mass communica-
tion, broadly conceived, that stretches back into the nineteenth century,
one that was nourished by the English Enlightenment, by such vener-
ated works as John Milton's Areopagitica and J. S. Mill's On Liberty,
and by the theory of markets and individuals contained in classical eco-
nomic theory. As these texts were absorbed into American culture, a lit-
erature was produced on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, on
landmark legal cases, and on the philosophy of freedom; this literature
was, and in many ways remains, the fundamental American outlook on
the mass media.9 It is discontinuous with the modern work on commu-
nication effects for it was organized, paradigmatically, around a radi-

cally different problematic. One of the linkages between the utilitarian
texts and modern ones, between the problem of freedom and the prob-
lem of effect, is found in the person of Walter Lippmann. Lippmann's
Public Opinion is the originating book in the modern history of com-
munication research. Its title may be Public Opinion, but its subject
and central actor are the mass media.10 The book founded a tradition
of research as it changed the central problematic in the study of the
mass media.
Some background will help clarify the role Lippmann played in
this history. In 1914 Lippmann published Drift and Mastery, a book
whose very title tells us of the mood of the year. The country, the entire
Western world, is adrift: things are out of control, the Great War is
about to commence. How were we to avoid drift and regain mastery;
how was the course of human events to be brought back under con-
trol?11 During the war Lippmann went to work for Woodrow Wilson,
provided the first draft of the Fourteen Points on which the peace set-
tlement was to be based, and later attended the negotiations at Ver-
sailles. Like so many others, he was disappointed by the outcome of the
negotiations and the subsequent failure of the League of Nations. He
wrote as follows of the chaotic scene at Versailles:
The pathetically limited education of officials at the conference,
trained to inert and pleasant ways of life, prevented them from see-
ing or understanding the strange world before them. All they knew,
all they cared for, all that life meant to them, seemed to be slipping
away to red ruin. And so in panic they ceased to be reporters and
began bombarding the chancelleries at home with gossip and frantic
explanation. The clamor converged on Paris and all the winds of
doctrine were sent whirling about. Every dinner table, every lobby,
almost every special interview, every subordinate delegate, every ex-
pert advisor was a focus of intrigue, bluster, manufactured rumor.
The hotels were choked with delegations representing, pretending to
represent, hoping to represent every group of people in the world.
The newspaper correspondents struggling with this illusive and all-
pervading chaos were squeezed between the appetites of their read-
ers for news and the desire of the men with whom the decisions
rested not to throw the negotiations into a cyclone of distortion.12
Lippmann's Public Opinion was an extended reflection of his ex-
perience at Paris and Versailles. His conclusion was a dour one. You
will not get out of drift and achieve mastery by relying on the public or
newspapers. There is no such thing as informed public opinion, and

therefore that opinion cannot master events. Voters are inherently in-
competent to direct public affairs: "They arrive in the middle of the
third act and leave before the last curtain, staying just long enough to
decide who is the hero and who is the villain."13 He concludes: "The
common interest in life largely eludes public opinion entirely and can
be managed only by a specialized class. I set no great store on what can
be done by public opinion or the action of the masses."14 The road
away from drift and toward mastery was not through the public, not
through public opinion, not really through the newspaper. The only
hope lay in taking the weight off the public shoulders, recognizing that
the average citizen had neither the capacity, nor the interest, nor the
competence to direct society. Mastery would come only through a class
of experts, a new order of samurai, who would mold the public mind
and character: men and women dedicated to making democracy work
for the masses whether the masses wanted it or not.
Lippmann, in effect, took the public out of politics and politics out
of public life. In a phrase of the moment, he depoliticized the public
sphere. Lippmann turned the political world over to private and spe-
cialized interests, albeit interests regulated by his new samurai class.
Lippmann wrote, of course, in the heyday of science, when science was
taken to be the exemplar of a culture as a whole. He assumed that sci-
entists were a transcendent class, without interests and objectives—
philosopher kings of the new world:
The burden of carrying on the world, of inventing, creating, execut-
ing, of attempting justice, formulating laws and moral codes, of
dealing with the technic and substance, lies not upon public opinion
and not upon government but on those who are reasonably con-
cerned as agents in the affair. Where the problems arise, the ideal is
a settlement by the particular interests involved. They alone know
what the trouble really is.15
Note the structure of Lippmann's argument: a free system of com-
munication will not guarantee perfect information and, therefore, there
are no guarantees of truth even when the conditions of freedom are se-
cure. Moreover, the enemies of freedom are no longer the state and the
imperfections of the market but in the nature of the news and news
gathering, in the psychological dispositions of the audience and in the
scale and organization of modern life. Lippmann, in fact, redefined the
problem of the media from one of morals, politics, and freedom to one
of psychology and epistemology. He established the tradition of propa-

ganda analysis and simultaneously, by framing the problem not as one
of normative political theory but as one of human psychology, opened
up the tradition of effects analysis that was to dominate the literature
less than two decades after the publication of Public Opinion.
The trick Lippmann pulled off was this: he legitimized a democra-
tic politics of publicity and experts while confirming the psychological
incompetence of people to participate in it. He tried to show how you
could have "democracy without citizens" (as in the title of Robert Ent-
man's recent book) while preserving a valuable role for the mass media.16
This was the same conclusion arrived at in the history of effects re-
search: people could immerse themselves in a media system saturated
by propaganda and mass culture, and defend themselves against this
onslaught by rational psychological and social mechanisms, yet neither
the "stimulus" nor the "response" would threaten the underlying con-
ditions of democracy.
But Lippmann did more than anticipate and clear the ground for
effects research. He also rejected, sometimes quite explicitly, the work
of John Dewey and other members of the Chicago School of Social
Thought. It was Dewey, along with George Herbert Mead, Robert
Park, and Charles Cooley, who reacted against the form in which utili-
tarianism was incarnated in the late nineteenth century—namely, social
Darwinism—and in that reaction formed the most distinctive and, I
believe, the most useful view of communication and the mass media
in the American tradition. The work of Dewey and his colleagues is
also omitted from the standard history of mass communication re-
search, but it, along with Lippmann and liberal theory, provides the
necessary linkage between the theory of the public and freedom typical
of the nineteenth century and the theory of media effects typical of the
twentieth.
One way of catching the distinctiveness of the views of Dewey and
other members of the Chicago School of Social Thought is through the
commonplace observation that the liberal and utilitarian tradition never
effectively crossed the Rhine and, as a result, a counterutilitarian tradi-
tion developed throughout the nineteenth century in German scholar-
ship. Hanno Hardt's useful Social Theories of the Press: Early German
and American Perspectives details the work of a group of thinkers—
Karl Knies, Albert Schaffle, Karl Bucher, Ferdinand Toennies, and Max
Weber—whose work was in significant ways a critique of utilitarianism
and utilitarian views of freedom and communication.17 They in turn

shifted the central problematic of communication from one of freedom
within the context of publics and markets to that of social integration
and domination. They turned from the liberal question—What are the
conditions of freedom?—to the inverse question: How it is that the so-
cial order is integrated through communication? Here a new set of con-
cerns emerge: function, integration, legitimacy, power, and control.
They invert, in short, the relation between freedom and solidarity.
The group that gathered around John Dewey, originally at the Uni-
versity of Michigan, were all deeply influenced by and affiliated with
the German scholarly traditions that descended from Hegel or later
took their advanced academic work in Germany. When this German
tradition settled in Ann Arbor and later resettled in Chicago and New
York, it was reconstituted as a distinctively American outlook and was
addressed to distinctively American concerns.18
At Ann Arbor, in the period between 1882 and 1887, Jonn Dewey
was a professor of philosophy and Robert Park his student. Charles
Cooley was another student in the department at the same time. George
Herbert Mead was a faculty colleague, and this quartet was joined by a
strange, itinerant New York journalist, Franklin Ford, about whom lit-
tle is known other than what Dewey has written. Ford wandered into
Ann Arbor with a plan to publish a newspaper, Thought News, that was
to be the first truly scientific newspaper. Robert Park went on to a ca-
reer in journalism in Minneapolis, then in Detroit. While he was in De-
troit in the late i88os and the early 18905, he reconnected with Dewey
and George Herbert Mead, and the group set about publishing Thought
News, the first newspaper based on a scientific method of reporting.
Franklin Ford had worked for a forerunner of Dun and Bradstreet,
the commercial credit house that was one of the first companies to
make extensive use of the telegraph in gathering credit information and
intelligence. He wanted a newspaper that was as fair, accurate, objec-
tive, and honest as the credit information gathered by the company.
Ford developed a plan for a national newspaper with separate editions
for various regions, professions, and functions. His plan was a tech-
nologically primitive version of an integrated computer communica-
tions facility. Thought News was to be a newspaper, a professional
journal, a library, and a reference service—all integrated into one flexi-
ble organization.
They planned the first issue, they printed it, and, as Dewey said
later, "We pied the type." They ran out of money. But the experience
had a profound effect on Dewey and he later wrote William James to
the effect that it was Ford who changed his interest in philosophy and
directed his attention away from metaphysics and epistemology and
onto problems of politics, morals, education, and the news.
In 1894 Dewey joined the faculty at the newly opened University
of Chicago. Park went off to graduate school in Germany, spent ten
years as the secretary and publicist for Booker T. Washington, and fi-
nally came back to Chicago in the years just after World War I. But
from the 18905 forward, when Dewey and Mead came to Chicago,
there was an attempt by this group to develop a different tradition of
analyses of communication and the mass media.
I want to offer one interpretation of that tradition, albeit a con-
testable one, that starts from a remark made by Carl Hovland, that in
the United States communication is substituted for tradition. In the ab-
sence of a shared and inherited culture, communication had to accom-
plish the tasks of social integration that were elsewhere the product of
tradition. This interpretation emphasizes that there was not a shared
traditional culture available to people who were forming new commu-
nities and institutions, particularly on the frontier or in the western re-
gions. In the absence of shared sentiment, the only means by which
these communities could be organized and held together was through
discussion, debate, negotiation, and communication. Social order was
neither inherited nor unconsciously achieved but actually hammered
out as diverse people assembled to create a common culture and to em-
body that culture in actual social institutions. This attitude looked to-
ward the future, not the past, as the source of social cohesion: the
meaning of things, the character of social relations, the structure of in-
stitutions had to be actively created rather than merely drawn out of
existing stocks of knowledge and culture. Communication, at least in
nineteenth-century America, was an active process of community cre-
ation and maintenance. The country was not a place for lonely individ-
uals. Freedom was not a mere negative product of removing restraints
or leaving people alone. Freedom required, first of all, the institu-
tions—government, courts, churches, public houses—of civic and civil
life. It required, as well, more subtle cultural creations: modes of con-
duct, styles of speaking, modes of address, instruments of social con-
trol and ostracism.
It is this unromantic view of the sheer necessities of social life that
led to Dewey's oft-quoted statement that "society exists not only by

transmission, by communication, but it may be fairly said to exist in
transmission, in communication."
The first site of this process of community creation was on the
frontier, where strangers came together and had to negotiate a world
out of diverse and conflicting cultural resources. This was a task of cre-
ating actual physical communities: town building and the institutions
of local life. This occupied a full century as the nation expanded west
and south. It was carried out by groups of strangers who did not neces-
sarily share a common background, experience, or tradition. What tra-
dition is to the rest, communication is to us: the process and resource
through which we constitute ourselves and the little world we inhabit.
By making a revolutionary break, we oriented to the future, not the
past, to posterity, not tradition, and this made us unusually reliant on
explicit processes and procedures of debate, discussion, negotiation:
mutual sense-making in radically undefined situations. It is this sense of
communication, the sense of community building, of communion, that
gives the word one kind of weight in our culture. This creative aspect of
culture has an antinomian counterpart. We ceaselessly create commu-
nities out of need, desire, and necessity but then continually try to es-
cape from the authority of what we have created. We are forever build-
ing a city on the hill and then promptly planning to get out of town to
avoid the authority and constraint of our creation. Both the creation
and the escape, the organization and disorganization, involve intense
episodes in sense-making, in the formation and reformation of human
identity, in communication in its most fundamental sense.
One recognizes here the genesis of an expressive and interpretive
theory of culture. To use a contemporary phrase of Stanley Cavell, cul-
ture and communication is a process of "wording the world together."
This was a particular task: common words had to be found to create and
express a common world. But the stronger claim is that in the absence of
a common means of communication there cannot be a common world.
Theory and action are indissolubly linked in community creation.
The network of communities painfully created in the nineteenth
century was progressively dismantled during the turn to the twentieth
as the frontier closed, the cities that now dominated the culture swelled
through immigration from abroad and domestic movement from farm
to city and from South to North. This was a second phase of com-
munity creation now carried out along the ecological frontier of urban
life. New forms of racial, ethnic, religious, and class communities were
created in the cities simultaneously with attempts to give institutional
and cultural shape to these new urban containers. The creation of
ethnic communities was the crucial event of this phase, and Thomas and
Znaniecki's The Polish Peasant in Europe and America was the single
most important study. Ethnic communities were not merely transplants
of intact cultures from the old world to the new world. In fact, ethnic
groups were formed in the diaspora. The Irish, Italians, Jews, and Poles
were in significant ways creatures of the new world. Distinct people,
identified with different regions, speaking different dialects or lan-
guages, were formed, partly by self-identification, partly by social im-
position, into self-conscious groups, aware of or made to accept a com-
mon heritage and fate. Again, these groups created new institutions of
neighborhood life—newspapers, entertainment centers, churches, hos-
pitals, orphanages, poorhouses, friendly and burial societies—along
with distinctive patterns of social interaction, ethnic and social types,
new forms of language, and particular types of popular art.
This second wave of community creation, which involved the si-
multaneous destruction and transformation of older patterns of living
and settlement, was also a radical and creative cultural achievement.
Recognition of this continuous and ceaseless process of community
creation and re-creation gave rise to a peculiarly American version of
the theory of mass society. Its European counterpart charted a transit
from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft, organic to mechanical solidarity,
feudalism to capitalism or, in C. Wright Mills's later phrase, from a
community of publics to a society of masses. American history and ex-
perience lacked one pole of this contrast. The product of revolutionary
circumstances on a "virgin continent," we were never a gemeinschaft
society, never one of status or organic solidarity, without a feudal tra-
dition; never, strictly speaking, a community of publics. Without a
point of origin in traditional society we could hardly have a place of des-
tination in a mass society. Instead, the Chicago School suggested that
we go through recurring, even ceaseless cycles of social organization,
disorganization, and then social reorganization, cycles when existing
patterns of social interaction and relations, social institutions and forms
of life, even forms of individual identity are broken down and dispersed.
What follows is a moment of mass society, when social disorganization
reigns, when identities and relations are in flux and change. This phase
itself is never permanent, however, for the social system is reorganized
and restructured; new identities emerge; new patterns of social rela-

tions, usually quite surprising and unpredictable, are forged.
The period that was formative in the intellectual life of these schol-
ars, from the 18905 to World War I, provoked a crisis in social repre-
sentation as the national system of end points in communications was
extended into the small towns and hamlets that had been bypassed in
the earlier extension of the railroad and telegraph. The maturing of the
wire services, the growth of national magazines, the development of
national retail organizations and catalog sales, rural free mail delivery,
national advertising and marketing, and national political parties all
had the effect of eclipsing the local, of terminating the existence of self-
contained island communities. Urbanization, industrialization, the ma-
turing of industrial capitalism (with increasingly international con-
nections), the closing of the frontier, the eclipse of agriculture as a
predominant way of life and with it the country town as a cultural
force, these were the events that set the agenda for these intellectuals. It
was in this milieu of a national, urban society, a society that both in-
vaded and transcended the local, that the nature of communication and
community had to be rethought. But these problems of scale and iden-
tity were the same, though larger, as had bedeviled American life from
the outset: democracy versus scale, capitalism versus republican poli-
tics, Puritanism versus antinomianism, a continental political economy
versus local life.
Surrounding those structural changes were a variety of cultural
and social movements that were both "responses" and assertions: pro-
gressivism itself, populism, the creation of ethnic groups, nativism, the
Know-Nothings, women's suffrage, temperance, the Grange. These
movements expressed a restless search for new identities and for new
forms of cultural and political life. Taken together, these movements of-
fered new ways of being for a new type of society. The 18905 appear to
be a moment when people actively shed their past, shed old ways of
being and belonging, and created a society in motion that lacked a clear
sense of where it was going or what it would be when it got there.
The social psychology of this process was best laid out by Charles
Cooley. The transformations created by the turn from an agricultural
to an industrial society, from the rural and small to the urban and large,
would not lead to a permanent change to a mass society of atomized in-
dividuals. His social psychology was a continuing argument against the
frontier individualism that dominated liberal thought and the urban at-
omization that haunted the European imagination. He recognized that

even in the modern world the human personality would be formed
within the context of local life, within a network of social interaction.
However, a question needed to be answered: if the old small-scale, local
communities of nineteenth-century America were eclipsed by the for-
mation of large-scale cities and a national society, what would replace
the local community as the agency of character formation, the site
where a looking-glass self developed, where the significant other and
the generalized other came together to form an I and me? Cooley in-
vented the notion of the "primary group" to carry this indispensable
burden. The primary group is, of course, a gross abstraction. Cooley
was thinking of the nuclear family, the tiny circle of friends and rela-
tives who surrounded it, the urban neighborhood.
Now that the primary group in this sense has been pretty much de-
stroyed, destroyed at the moment Paul Lazarsfeld and Elihu Katz were
rediscovering it as the anchor point in their analysis of media effects,19
Cooley might seem a little quaint. But the question he leaves behind is
still on the agenda. What kind of people are we to become in the post-
modern world where courts, counselors, schools, child-care centers,
self-help groups, and a variety of family types (single parent, blended,
hinged, seriatim) assume the social role of the primary group?
To understand the problems that Dewey, Cooley, and Park were at-
tacking and the "structure of feeling," to use Raymond Williams's
phrase, of the era in which they worked, we might raise parallel ques-
tions about our own time, about what is happening to us now that the
fruits of the progressive era have yielded a more global or at least
transnational structure of politics, commerce, and culture. What is the
relation between the social disorganization of our time and the new
forms of communication that have emerged since World War II? How
does one represent the social totality and the period through which
we are living? The global village? Spaceship Earth? The postindustrial,
postmodern, poste very thing society? Who are we in this new age?
World citizens? Feminists? Post-Marxists? Neoconservatives? Religious
fundamentalists? What are we going to do about the new plutocrats,
Donald Trump, T. Boone Pickens, Ivan Boesky? To what identity and
culture are we socializing our children?
The point is this: While the process of social and cultural change is
ceaseless, particularly in America, where little is solid and most things
continuously melt into air, there are critical junctures at which the so-
cial capsule breaks open and the fundamental coordinates of individual
identity and group life are broken up. The work of Dewey and the so-
ciologists who followed him, the symbolic interactionists, is particu-
larly apt and useful in these moments of rupture and less so in moments
of relative stasis. The moments of rupture are times when ceaseless, im-
personal competition among inchoate formations are translated into
structured conflict. At these moments new forms of social drama are
created, new social antagonisms defined and sharpened, new social
types created, and new cultural forms of address, interaction, and rela-
tionship developed.
This attempt to develop a structural ecology of urban life in rela-
tion to communication was also a means of writing a phenomenology
of modern consciousness. Cooley's injunction that the solid facts of so-
ciety are the imaginations people have of one another artlessly mirrors
Park's romantic reminder that we have to get behind people's eyes to
get to the thrill of it all. These are merely naive but expressive injunc-
tions to create an empirical sociology of street life, of gang life, of com-
munity life, of group life on which to construct a phenomenology of
the actual process of symbolic construction and reconstruction, action
and interaction, in which community life was forged.
The media of communication entered this social process at two
critical points. First, it was the hope of Dewey, and to a lesser degree of
Cooley, Park, and others, that the media of communication might
recreate public life, might bring a great community of rational public
discourse into existence. In this view, the public of democratic theory,
eclipsed by the enormous technical expansion of social life, might be
reborn in the modern mass media. While Dewey recognized the impor-
tance of the network of small-scale groups to the formation of a social
fabric, he took this recognition as a prelude to transcendence. For
Dewey, communication was an ethical principle. Whatever inhibited
communication, whatever inhibited the sharing, widening, expansion
of experience was an obstacle to be overcome. We learn from one an-
other, from our difference as well as our similarity. The new media of-
fered an unparalleled opportunity to widen the arena of learning, the
capacity to accept but transcend the particular, to join a wider commu-
nity of citizens without sacrificing our private identity as members of
particular, if limited, social formations. It was this hope, the optimism
that fueled it, and the reformist energies that it unleashed that were
much opposed by Marxism and led to the split between Marxism and
pragmatism, a split that opened a theoretical space through which
marched the positivist, expert-oriented social science that defined the
effects tradition. The split was one of the minor tragedies of modern
politics. The Chicago School certainly failed in its attempt to recon-
stitute a democratic public life and was absurdly Utopian in hopes for
the democratic potential of the mass media. Nonetheless, it kept alive
a minor but enduring tradition that today has been reworked and
reinvigorated.20
The second reference point for the mass media was in the more
conflict-oriented sociology of Robert Park. In this scheme the media of
communication became sites of competition and conflict, sites at which
latent antagonisms were fashioned into explicit drama. This occurred
as groups struggled to control the means of cultural production at
every level of social life. In local communities groups attempted to seize
newspapers and other journals to lay down definitions of group life,
identity, and purpose. Within the black community there were strug-
gles to control the forms of expressive life in the black press, to control
the definitions of black culture.21 These struggles were duplicated in the
national media in attempts to define the history, culture, purpose, and
constituent groups that made up American life. To this end, virtually all
the books that came forward from Chicago sociology—books on the
gang, the Gold Coast, the Negro community in Chicago, the Polish
peasant—devoted part of the analysis to the ways in which the media,
as active sites of conflict and struggle, both defined and expressed these
communities. What gives this view a certain distinctiveness is that it
veered away from the question of communication effects and toward
that of cultural struggle. At the same time, it viewed struggle not merely
in class and economic terms but extended it to a full array of interests:
aesthetic, moral, political, and spiritual. Such struggles were, of course,
conducted on class lines but also along other fronts: racial, religious,
ethnic, status, regional, and, we would have to add today, gender. This
expansive view of an actual social process, an intense interest in its phe-
nomenology, and a historical understanding of how the media of com-
munication enter a ceaseless temporal process of change (rather than a
static snapshot of having or not having an effect) is the important but
forgotten episode in the standard history of mass communication
research.
Notes
1. Joseph Klapper, "Mass Media and the Engineering of Consent," American
Scholar 17 (Autumn 1948): 419-2.9.
2. Joseph Klapper, The Effects of Mass Communication (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press,
1960).
3. Joseph Klapper, "Mass Communication Research: An Old Road Resurveyed,"
Public Opinion Quarterly 27 (Winter 1963): 515-2.7.
4. Elihu Katz and David Foulkers, "On the Use of the Mass Media as 'Escape':
Clarification of a Concept," Public Opinion Quarterly 2.6 (Fall i96z): 377-88.
5. See, in particular, J. Michael Sproule, "Progressive Propaganda Critics and the
Magic Bullet Myth," Critical Studies in Mass Communication, September 1989, 2.2,5-46.
6. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (New York: Collier, 1961), 21-22.
7. Raymond Bauer and Alice Bauer, "America, Mass Society, and Mass Media,"
Journal of Social Issues 16 (1960): 3-66.
8. The quotations are from Leon Mayhew, "In Defense of Modernity: Talcott Par-
sons and the Utilitarian Tradition," American Journal of Sociology 8 (6): 1273-1305.
The entire paragraph is largely a paraphrase of arguments in Mayhew's splendid essay.
9. See, as one summary example, Fred S. Seibert, Theodore Peterson, and Wilbur
Schramm, Four Theories of the Press (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956).
10. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan, 1922).
11. Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery (New York: Mitchell-Kennerly, 1914).
12. As quoted in Ronald Steele, Walter Lippmann and the American Century
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 152.
13. Clinton Rossiter and James Lare, The Essential Lippmann (New York: Random
House, 1963), 108.
14. Lippmann, Public Opinion, 310.
15. Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (New York: Macmillan, 1935), 77.
16. Robert M. Entman, Democracy without Citizens (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1989).
17. Hanno Hardt, Social Theories of the Press: Early German and American Per-
spectives (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1975).
18. Many of the paragraphs that follow draw from James W. Carey, "Communica-
tions and the Progressives," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 6 (September
1989): 264-82.
19. Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld, Personal Influence (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press,
I955)-
20. See, for example, Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984).
21. Albert L. Kreiling, "The Making of Racial Identities in the Black Press: A Cul-
tural Analysis of Race Journalism in Chicago: 1878-1929," unpublished dissertation,
University of Illinois, 1973.
2 / The Roots of Modern Media Analysis:
Lewis Mumford and Marshall McLuhan
Scholars live by fictions. It is a belief among them that scholarship is

governed by its own inner logic of development, that it proceeds by
inexorable sequences of advances on the truth, compelled along by
hypotheses, evidence, and confirmation. Intellectual historians often
compound this view by demonstrating the inevitable path of theoreti-
cal development in the work of Marx, Weber, or Durkheim. Such his-
torians also attempt to demonstrate how scholarly work is addressed
to the members of a professional body, the general public, or the read-
ers of a particular journal. While I do not want to dismiss such a view,
I would like to emphasize the ways in which scholarship is governed
less by abstract logic than it is by the demands to sustain an argument.
Scholarship is principally an insinuation into an ongoing discussion,
and the structure of discussion is controlling.
Scholars write less for abstract audiences than for scholars with
whom they are working in a cooperative and, more likely, a competi-
tive way. To interpret a scholarly text, then, demands that one grasp
the structure of the argument into which it is an entry and the identity
of the combatants to which it is addressed. A text is an attempt take ac-
count of a silent auditor's prior arguments and anticipated response.
For a variety of plausible reasons, the intended auditors are frequently
never mentioned in the argument: their positions are not explicitly de-
scribed, their names never appear in footnotes or bibliographies. If the
scholarship in question is written in our own time, we can often, though
not always, provide the auditor and the argument: knowing the struc-
34
The Roots of Modern Media Analysis I 35
ture of debate in a field, we know who a writer is implicitly arguing

against.
For texts that descend from the past, the problem of interpretation
is particularly difficult because one cannot identify the unmentioned
antagonists from the text itself. History is notoriously hard, by being
decisively silent, on losers. As Quentin Skinner has demonstrated in his
lively studies of Locke and Hobbes, any interpretation is likely to be
faulty when one neglects to reconstruct the positions against which the
argument is formulated. This failure, in turn, leads one to assimilate the
text to a contemporary discussion, a move that misinterprets the text as
it makes it more serviceable for current purposes. To reduce it to catch-
phrases, the context of argument governs the context of interpretation,
and, as with much else, it takes two to argue. Any scholarly work con-
tains, therefore, but one half of the sentences necessary to interpret it. It
omits, characteristically, though not always, many of the arguments
that stimulate writing in the first place and the responses, real or imag-
ined, that control the actual presentation.
All that is prelude to the purpose of this essay—to interpret some
texts, to reconstruct a wider argument, and to supply an antagonist.
The texts are those of Marshall McLuhan, the argument concerns the
nature of electrical technology, and the antagonist is Lewis Mumford,
and beyond him a certain tradition of speculation on electrical commu-
nication that Mumford represents.
The relationship between McLuhan and Mumford at one level
is quite straightforward and open to easy inspection. McLuhan cited
Mumford in virtually all his work, certainly in all his important publi-
cations. While the argument was generally rather one-sided, in his later
publications Mumford devoted considerable and often savage space
to McLuhan. However, the argumentative relationship between these
two important figures in contemporary scholarship is both more sub-
tle and more ambiguous than the pattern of citation suggests. The pur-
pose of explicating the relationship is not merely the joy to be found
in puzzling through texts or influencing reputations. There is bigger
game. McLuhan and Mumford debated the consequences of electrical
technology, in particular electrical communication, for contemporary
culture and society. Not only can they teach us something of those con-
sequences but they also illustrate, in a variety of ways, some of the con-
ceptual and ideological pitfalls involved in trying to think sensibly about
electrical communication.
36 / The Roots of Modern Media Analysis
There is now general agreement on the larger consequences of the

growth of literacy and printing. "General agreement" may be too strong
a phrase; there are incorrigibles. One of the important contributions of
both Mumford and McLuhan has been to synthesize some of the con-
sequences that were initiated or intensified by the characteristic forms
of printing—the periodical, book, and newspaper—and the typical
modes of printed expression—novel, essay, scientific report, and news
story. To undress the matter and to emphasize only the "darker side" of
printing, it can be argued with more or less confidence that printing
centralized political power in the state and cultural power in the me-
tropolis; intensified a spatial bias in communication favoring "remote
control" and gave a differential advantage to long-distance communi-
cation over short-distance or proximate communication; transformed
the word, the primordial symbol, from an event in the human world to
a record for bureaucracies; demystified the symbol as a fiduciary rela-
tion among persons and transformed it into an analytic tool of thought;
eroded the public sphere of discourse and led to the decline of "public
man"; transformed speaking publics into passive audiences; privatized
and mobilized the basic transactions of communication; led to the
emergence of psychological "man" and the sciences devoted to under-
standing "him"; lent life a visual intensity and aesthetic preference for
sight over sound; secularized knowledge and installed science as the
major arbiter of truth and authority; created a tradition of the new and
a bias toward the future; displaced corporate and communal forms of
life in a world bifurcated between the state and the self; created a par-
ticular form of nationalism, at first parliamentary and linguistic, even-
tually imperial; and installed in cultural and political power the class
championing most of these developments, the middle class. That sen-
tence more than flirts with a discredited view of causality so let me
quickly assert that those events did not occur simultaneously, nor did
they take place in a vacuum. They are inseparably interlocked with ad-
ditional technical and organizational changes and, above all, with the
rise of markets and capitalism and the ideology of liberalism.1
If these conclusions are assumed rather than debated, they lead to
an intractable problem that has faced all students of media: did the
growth of electrical communication from the telegraph through tele-
vision and the emergence of electronic communication from simple
servo-mechanisms through advanced computer information utilities re-
verse the general developments associated with printing, or did they

merely modify and intensify the major contours of modern societies?
There is no easy answer to this question but around it have whirled
virtually all the conceptual and ideological arguments concerning the
relations of communications technology to culture. Briefly, Mumford
has argued that electronics has intensified the most destructive and
power-oriented tendencies of printing, whereas McLuhan has argued
that electronics has produced or will produce a qualitative change in
the nature of social organization and cultural life. There are not only
large intellectual stakes in this argument, but social and political stakes
as well, for its resolution will shape ideological discourse and social
policy in the arena of communications in the decades ahead. To aid in
thinking through this problem, let me reconstruct the positions of
Lewis Mumford and Marshall McLuhan, particularly as they consti-
tute addresses within a larger argument.
In 1965, with the publication of Understanding Media, the work
of Marshall McLuhan burst beyond the narrow limits of the scholarly
community and acquired a general audience. Early review articles by
Harold Rosenberg in The New Yorker, Neil Compton in Commentary,
and Richard Schickel in Harper's were devoted to bringing some order
and coherence out of the diffuse and erratic and contradictory argu-
ments of that work.2 It was rather like watching someone attempt to
put an elephant into pantyhose. There were three striking things about
those early reviews. First, there was a presumption that McLuhan's ar-
guments had emerged phoenixlike without intellectual parentage. Sec-
ond, they noted that his arguments seemed to cast the media of com-
munication in a new light, giving them an unprecedented importance in
society that also conferred new status on the advertising and television
industries. Third, independent of the complexities of that work, an un-
mistakable conclusion was seized upon: that electricity was the Great
Reverser designed to undo the devastation of the past, dissolve the
complexities of the present, and create a new world of peace and har-
mony. That attitude was not invented by McLuhan's analysts but
coached by the book itself. "The electronic age," he argued, "if given
its own unheeded leeway, will drift quite naturally into modes of cos-
mic humanism" and "the aspiration of our times for wholeness, empa-
thy and depth of awareness is a natural adjunct of electric technology.
There is a deep faith to be found in this new attitude—a faith that con-
cerns the ultimate harmony of all being. Such is the faith with which
this book has been written." It may have been a faith, but it was a pe-
culiarly priceless one for it was pinned to the automatic, irreversible,
nonpolitical operation of the new machines.
To those of us who had closely followed McLuhan's essays in liter-
ary criticism, The Mechanical Bride and The Gutenberg Galaxy, the
conclusions were startling, unexpected, and quite the reverse of his pre-
vious arguments. For example, in The Mechanical Bride he envisioned
that "a single mechanical brain, of the sort developed at the Massachu-
setts Institute of Technology by Professor Norbert Wiener, when
hitched to the telepathic mechanics of Professor Joseph B. Rhine, could
tyrannize over the collective consciousness of the race in ... science fic-
tion style." And in that work and elsewhere McLuhan was sensitive to
the threat of modern economies independent of the particulars of tech-
nology: "A power economy cannot tolerate power that cannot be cen-
trally controlled. It will not tolerate the unpredictable actions and
thoughts of individual men. That is plain from every gesture and into-
nation of current social and market research as well as from the curric-
ula of our schools." Moreover, those who knew of his intellectual con-
nection and indebtedness to his fellow Canadian Harold Innis were
surprised to see how fundamentally he had revised Innis's position.
The ideological hinge of McLuhan's arguments was recognized by
some of the more acute of his earlier reviewers. Harold Rosenberg
noted, for example, that "while McLuhan is an aesthete he is also an
ideologue—one ready to spin out his metaphor of the 'extensions' until
its webs cover the universe.... The drama of history is a crude pageant
whose inner meaning is man's metamorphosis through the media."3
But at the same time this ideological image of electricity as the Great
Reverser was underplayed by Rosenberg and others because within
McLuhan's work was a compelling historical argument and a signifi-
cant methodological and intellectual advance.
From his Renaissance studies McLuhan absorbed Bacon's dictum
that nature is a book to be read, although for the pioneers of modern
science it was a text composed in obscure mathematical characters.
McLuhan argued that social life could also be viewed as a book, a text,
something composed, though written in the far more accessible char-
acters of sound, gesture, and word. Consequently, technology did not
have to be treated as a purely physical force but could also be viewed
as a text. Technology was both an extension and an embodiment of
mind and therefore contained and manifested meaning. It could be
read in an exegetical sense; its meaning could be unearthed from its

material form in ways parallel to the treatment critics accorded literary
texts. McLuhan's methodological advance, then, came through his at-
tempt to break through the constraints of conventional North Ameri-
can social and communication theory with a new hermeneutic, a her-
meneutic of technology and social life.
Intellectually the advance was contained in two remarkable in-
sights that McLuhan pressed with the outrageous daring necessary to
arrest the attention of modern audiences.
First, he argued that forms of communication such as writing,
speech, printing, and broadcasting should not be viewed as neutral ves-
sels carrying given and independently determined meaning. Rather, he
proposed that these forms be considered technologies of the intellect,
active participants in the process by which the mind is formed and in
turn forms ideas. To put the matter differently, he argued that all tech-
nical forms are extensions of mind and embodiments of meaning. Tech-
nologies of communication are principally things to think with, mold-
ers of mind, shapers of thought: the medium is the message. In pressing
this argument he opened a new avenue of historical scholarship and
rephrased a large set of questions that had vexed scholars.
The second advance McLuhan pioneered, which set certain con-
straints upon his critics, grew directly out of his literary studies. Stu-
dents of the arts are likely to examine communication with quite a
different bias than that advanced by social scientists. The question of
the appeal of art is essentially a question of taste, broadly of aesthetics.
McLuhan recognized, earlier than most, that the new means available
for producing and reproducing art would demand and create an en-
tirely new aesthetic. He sensed that cultural forms operate not at the
level of cognition or information or even effect. The media of commu-
nication affect society principally by changing the dominant structures
of taste and feeling, by altering the desired forms of experience. The
new and proliferating means of recording experience meant that the
monopoly enjoyed by print was to be exploded and that no one means
of experiencing the world would dominate as printing had among edu-
cated classes for centuries.
The new means of reproducing reality also meant that the historic
barriers between the arts and other departments of life—art and sci-
ence, work and leisure—would be driven down. Electronic communica-
tion would jumble experience, would creatively juxtapose ideas, forms,
and experiences previously disseminated in different and isolated ways.

In turn this would create new patterns of knowledge and awareness, a
new hunger for experience, in much the same way that printing—by as-
sembling the sacred and the profane, the new and the traditional, the
exotic and the mundane, the practical and the fanciful in the same
printer's workshop—led to a decisive alteration in modern taste.
This erosion of barriers between the arts also meant the erosion of
barriers between audiences. The division of culture into high and low,
folk and popular, mass and elite, highbrow, lowbrow, and middle-
brow—barriers and distinctions that were themselves the product of
printing—would have to be discarded under the impact of new forms
of communication that simply did not recognize these distinctions. The
high arts were now often pirating mass and folk culture, and mass cul-
ture in turn was leaching the traditional arts. Thus, the ability to make
things more widely available in graphic form, to reproduce at will sa-
cred texts and treasured painting, to make reality itself in the drama of
film and television, to record and freeze the most mundane of persons,
scenes, and slices of reality that were historically convened in different
and isolated ways signaled the existence of a new hunger for experience
and a new means to realize it, and both of these demanded a new the-
ory of aesthetics.
But what was critical in this argument is McLuhan's realization, a
realization he shared with Walter Benjamin and derived from James
Joyce and the symbolists, that the new desires realized in the impracti-
cal objects of art would be demanded as well in the practical objects of
everyday life. McLuhan erased the distinction between art and utility,
between aesthetic action and practical form. Everyday objects—cars,
clothes, and lightbulbs—were governed less by utility than by aesthet-
ics: their meaning was to be sought in a principle of taste rather than a
principle of interest and action. Specifically, communications media
were to be read less in terms of their potential to transmit information
or to service the practical needs of persuasion and governance and
more in terms of their insinuation of a desire to realize experience aes-
thetically in altered form.
Changes in technology, he came to conclude, offered the potential
for redefining the aesthetic—that is, for altering taste and style, and
through that alteration for redesigning the basic structures of social
life. Technology does this at the most abstract level by offering the
potential for reexperiencing time and space. Differing technologies of
communication have the capacity to expand or contract space, expand

or contract time, changing the meaning of the fundamental coordinates
of thought. This notion was obviously tied to Innis's earlier discovery
of the spatial and temporal bias of media, though again McLuhan's dis-
covery was not situated in the domain of practical action but at the
level of aesthetic experience. His important argument about printing
was not merely that it changed the dominant conception of space, but
that it altered what we took to be an aesthetically satisfying pattern of
spatial arrangement, whether this was the arrangement of a page, a
city, a house, or a theory. Similarly, while printing altered our concep-
tion of time, it more importantly changed the dominantly pleasing pat-
terns of rhythm. McLuhan was basically correct, then, in directing our
consideration to the possibility that the new media of communication
might be cultivating a taste for open rather than closed spaces, rimmed
rather than axial patterns, historical and geologically modeled time
rather than mechanical syncopation, or more generally a preference, in
Mary Douglas's phrase, for group over grid.
The importance of the questions McLuhan asked lay in his implicit
attempt to apply hermeneutic insights to material objects, his stress on
the new combinations and juxtapositions of experience created by
modern technology, and his emphasis on the central place of aesthetic
experience in all human action. Yet his failure to influence contempo-
rary thought derived from weaknesses in the way he framed and pre-
sented his arguments in answering these questions, weaknesses that
gradually overwhelmed his more positive achievements. In particular,
he gradually slipped into technological determinism, a determinism so
thorough as to remind one of the very nineteenth-century precursors
McLuhan presumably was attempting to transcend. Further, his basic
arguments about technology were not delivered, as he averred, as probes
that opened up scholarship but as conclusions that closed it down.
For example, his argument on the relation of print and nationalism,
which should have opened up investigation of nationalism in many dif-
fering countries in relation to the time of the introduction of print, the
class sponsoring it, the uses to which it was put, its relation to the oral
tradition, and so on, has left us with a soggy conclusion rather than
detailed scholarship. Similarly, his interests in a new hermeneutic and
recognition of the role of aesthetics in human action were decisively
compromised by two contrary and persistent tendencies of thought.
His frequent focus on the direct effects of technology allowed him to be
assimilated to a behaviorist tradition and, perhaps with greater devas-

tation, his tendency to invoke cybernetic metaphors cast the problem
up in systems theory terms. This latter tendency, a marriage of the
avant-garde in art with cybernetics, ultimately forced his work back
into the position of an ideology of the late bourgeois era.
And that is where the critical move came. McLuhan managed to
link hyperbole to metaphor, transforming the body into a metaphor for
technology and assigning a characteristic quality to each of the senses:
to the ear, sound and participation; to the tongue, taste and discrimi-
nation; to the eye, vision and privatization. He gave to Eliot's notion
of the disassociation of sensibility a biological and technological root.
And, in the critical move, he assigned to electrical communication the
capacity for the reassociation of sensibility: the restoration of psychic
life in a balanced sensorium, and social life in a global village. By such
metaphors aesthetics, biology, and technology were converted into
ideology.
But McLuhan's work did not spring entirely or perhaps even largely
out of literary and aesthetic sources. The debt to Innis is known and
acknowledged and his citations reveal a wide and wise reading in his-
tory, biology, and social theory. But there are ideological precursors of
his arguments in the work of scholars earlier in the century who argued
for the capacity of electricity to act as midwife to a new society. And it
is here that Mumford enters the argument. Mumford not only antici-
pated McLuhan's arguments but also traced an intellectual evolution in
precisely the opposite direction: Mumford changed from an electrical
optimist to a soured prophet of doom.4
Over seventy years ago, Mumford—as a contributor to Charles
Beard's symposium Whither Mankind?—had seen the bright promise
of electrical technology. The Garden Cities movement as formulated by
Ebenezer Howard was "the first adequate conception of the problem."
Mumford thought that "whatever the city of the future might be, we
can now say with some confidence that it will not be the Leviathan of
machinery."
The Utopian Mumford was optimistic: with the future develop-
ment of the "telephone and radio and ultimately television all the in-
habitants of the planet could theoretically be linked together for in-
stantaneous communications as closely as the inhabitants of a village."
More recently, in The Highway and the City, he wrote: "All honor
to Robert Louis Stevenson who back in the eighties foretold this mis-
carriage of technics; the word electricity now sounds the note of dan-
ger." And in his most recent major work, The Myth of the Machine,
Mumford completely reversed his judgment:
Their "city of the future" is one leveled down to the lowest possibil-
ity of active, autonomous, fully sentient life; just so much life as will
conform to the requirements of the machine. To build any hopes for
the future on such a structure would occur only to the highly trained
but humanly underdimensioned "experts" who have contrived it.
This inversion of optimism and pessimism is not an unusual occur-
rence and should be instructive. And so I would briefly trace the roots
of Mumford's ideas and his anticipation and ultimate rejection of
McLuhan's position on electrical technology and communication.
In the decades after the American Civil War, when the structure of
American communications was laid down, electricity as fact and sym-
bol seized hold of the native imagination. It was seen as a precursor of
a new form of civilization.
As technical fact, outside of history and geography, determined by
the implacable march of American science, electricity promised to
bring a new order out of the political and industrial disasters of the
i86os and iSyos. It promised the restoration of community, the spiri-
tualization of labor, the spread of Anglo-Saxon dominance and hege-
mony, the reign of universal peace, the salvation of the landscape, the
rise of productivity—all those contradictory dreams that fired Ameri-
can, though not only American, minds.
Moreover, electricity was pictured as classless, if not socialist.
While lifting up communication it would erase those divisions of work,
wealth, and power that assorted radicals saw as the denouement of the
American dream. Electricity was a force invested with the power to
transform the human landscape.
One of the attractions of electricity was its seeming fit with the new
organic philosophy that arose upon a discredited mechanism. While
standard intellectual history usually cites the impact of Darwinism and
German idealism, particularly Hegelianism, as the route of organicism
into American thought, for most persons and purposes electricity cut a
more gilded passageway into the imagination. Darwinism conflicted
with deeply held religious notions, while idealism remained Germanic
and foreign except to a limited class trained abroad. Electricity sup-
ported religious ideas, as Josiah Strong makes clear and Perry Miller
demonstrated, and seemed not only natural but native: part of the
American genius and inheritance from Franklin through Edison. More-
over, by a series of rhetorical transformations, some whimsical, some
grounded in a metaphoric truth, electricity suggested the very essence
of the organic process: the restoration of life and the human.
It was a new, natural phenomenon ideally suited to the American
landscape, mind, and society, unlike the inherited patterns of me-
chanical Europe. It lent itself to speed, movement, distance, and de-
centralism. It imitated, as many commentators noted, the very action
of the brain, and its modern products were automata of the graphi-
cally human: extensions not of the wheel but of ear, eye, voice, and fi-
nally the brain itself.
The idea of electricity, like that of community, crossed revolution-
ary lines: it symbolized what was desired and the means of attainment
for groups on the left and right. Electricity became the central symbol
in works as different as Edward Bellamy's influential projection of a
new order in Looking Backward and standard tracts of the industrial
right on the benefits of capitalist civilization.
All of the claims that have been made for electricity and electrical
communication, down through the computer and cable, satellite tele-
vision, and the Internet, were made for the telegraph with about the
same mixture of whimsy, propaganda, and truth. Cadences change, vo-
cabulary is subtly altered, examples shift, the religious metaphors de-
cline, but the medium has the same message. The perfection of Morse's
instrument in 1844, the rapid growth of telegraph companies and the
erection of "lightning lines" during the 18405 and 18505, and the first
laying of the Atlantic cable in 1858 brought forth scores of paeans to
the wonders of electricity.
The growth of electrical communication rejuvenated Utopian so-
cial theory in America. It particularly changed the thought of a group
of European and American scholars whose work revolved on the rela-
tionship of the city and countryside and who were pioneers in what has
since been termed urban planning. The principal figures in this group
were the Russian anarchist and geographer Peter Kropotkin, the Scot
biologist Patrick Geddes, and, in America, Lewis Mumford. And their
starting point was one of disappointment—disappointment in the nine-
teenth-century promise of industrialization and mechanical technology.
In The City in History, Mumford credits Kropotkin with the first
systematic statement of the view that electricity might rescue humans

from the blight of machine industry and restore them to communal life.
Kropotkin described regional associations of industry and agriculture
made possible by electricity and with this new technology a reawaken-
ing of the traditions and handicrafts of an older period and the restora-
tion of community life.
Kropotkin's faith was based on a valid perception. Electrical power,
unlike steam, saved the landscape by utilizing water generation or
lighter, more transportable fuel such as petroleum, which did less envi-
ronmental damage than coal and "mining." Similarly, electricity prom-
ised a decentralist development by bringing work and power to the
people rather than demanding that people be brought to the power and
work. The telegraph similarly promised the distribution of information
everywhere, simultaneously reducing the economic advantage of the
city and bringing the more varied urban culture out to the countryside.
No longer would people need to be physically in the city to partake of
the advantages of art, commerce, and intellect that physical massing
created. Finally, the small electric motor promised to lift the drudgery
of work in small communities, dissipate the advantages of efficiency of
the massed factory, stimulate and make more feasible handicraft pro-
duction, and, as in the dream of William Morris, reclaim a more nat-
ural and older way of life. The symbol of electricity promised to many
the dawning of a new age of decentralist rural production, communal
life in small natural associations that would be economically viable and,
with the growth or electronic communication, culturally viable as well.
On a speaking tour of England, Kropotkin influenced the young
Scot Patrick Geddes. Geddes, perhaps more than anyone else, popular-
ized the notion that there were two qualitatively different periods of in-
dustrialization, corresponding to the early and late Paleolithic periods.
He termed these periods the paleotechnic and neotechnic, differentiated
among many dimensions but principally by their reliance on different
forms of energy: steam and electricity. Geddes used this distinction to
found one of the most important traditions of urban planning, merg-
ing it with the earlier Garden Cities movement founded by Ebenezer
Howard.
Howard had seen neotechnics as a means of escaping the tradi-
tional city. He proposed and founded two experimental communities
distant from London, surrounded by green space, a new way of life
made possible by electricity. Geddes supported this growth of de-

centralization and naturalism and gave it a distinctively regionalist in-
terpretation. His great contribution was in planning or better facilitat-
ing the refurbishment of the existing city. He saw the city as a network
of ritual order and communication and utilized new forms of commu-
nication and refurbished old ones to bring the city back to life. The
criterion that guided his work was the notion of the city and neigh-
borhood as social organisms. He therefore attempted to let areas re-
generate themselves rather than being replaced by new and imposed
designs. He believed in conservative surgery: rather than raze an entire
neighborhood, he would recommend clearance of a small pocket to
help circulation or provide a place for congregation while the bulk of
the buildings remained intact. Anything, however minute, that carried
tradition, that signified the rootedness of time and culture, was left. He
was a pioneer of the social survey, the detailed designation of an area's
past, the exhibit, the permanent civic exposition, the motion picture
and drama—all designed to bring the past continuously to bear on the
present. He fostered new departures in education, attempting to break
the rule of rote learning and wed education at one level to the natural
habitat and at another to the restored cloister of learning.
The association between Kropotkin, Geddes, and Howard merged
in Chicago in the years before and after Harold Innis studied there.
Both Kropotkin and Geddes received their most enthusiastic American
receptions in Chicago and felt most at home in the city. Howard most
admired Chicago among American cities and based his work on that of
the Chicago architect Daniel Burnham. Geddes influenced John Dewey's
thinking on education and other matters. In turn, the idea of the elec-
trical city became symbolized in Chicago architecture. Louis Sullivan
built the first structures designed for the potential of electricity. Frank
Lloyd Wright, Sullivan's student, conceived the skyscraper as a com-
munity within itself: its floors to be viewed as streets in the sky rather
than as a collection of unintegrated functions or atomized units.
In his more bucolic moments Wright saw the city, as did Howard,
as superfluous in the age of electricity. As Mumford has remarked, it
never appears to have entered Wright's mind "that one might need or
profit by the presence of other men within an area compact enough for
spontaneous encounters, durable enough for the realization of long-run
plans, and attractive enough to stimulate social intercourse." Wright
felt that the automobile, the airplane, and electrical communication

made the city unnecessary. People could work and reside in small, de-
centralized communities and the nation still would be integrated through
high-speed, flexible transportation and communication. Wright an-
nounced clearly a theme that has continued unabated to this day: the
superfluousness of geographic contiguity with the dawn of high-speed
transportation and communication.
It was mainly through the work of Lewis Mumford, however, that
the ideas of Geddes, Howard, and Kropotkin and their attitudes to-
ward electricity and technology entered the American scene. Mumford
based his important work of 1934, Technics and Civilization, on Ged-
des's distinction between the paleotechnic (steam and mechanics) and
neotechnic (electrical) phases of industry and communication. Mum-
ford shared with Geddes the intellectual strategy of placing technologi-
cal change at the center of the growth of civilization. In viewing the
miscarriage of the machine he suggested that electricity had certain in-
trinsic potentials for producing a decentralized society, creating a new
worker, and realizing a pastoral relation to nature. Only the cultural
pseudomorph of capitalism, the housing of new forces in outmoded so-
cial forms, held back the latest advances in civilization. Throughout
that work Mumford strikingly contrasted scenes of peace and order
and cleanliness realized in the neotechnic world with the ugliness, ex-
ploitation, and disarray of the old world of mechanics. He recaptured
in the photographic captions throughout Technics and Civilization
some of the oldest dreams of the American imagination and remodeled
them in terms of the potential of electricity.
First the central metaphor of the electrical grid had to replace the
machine and the neat rows of mechanical type:
The principle of the electrical grid must be applied to our schools,
libraries, art galleries, theaters, medical services; each local station
though producing power in its own right must be able to draw on
power, on demand, from the whole system.5
Second, decentralization:
But the efficiency of small units worked by electric motors utilizing
current either from local turbines or from a central power plant has
given many small-scale industries a new lease on life: on a purely
technical basis it can for the first time since the introduction of the
steam engine compete on even terms with the larger unit.6
Third, the creation of a new worker:

The qualities the new worker's needs are alertness, responsiveness,
and intelligent grasp of the separate parts: in short, he must be an all
around mechanic rather than a specialized hand.7
Fourth, on nature, the landscape, and the pastoral:
Electricity itself aids in this transformation. The smoke pall of paleo-
technic industry begins to lift: with electricity the clear sky and clean
waters of the neotechnic phase come back again: the water that runs
through the immaculate discs of the turbine ... is just as pure when
it emerges.8
Mumford's demon is capitalism, the fetters that emasculate neo-
technics, and Technics and Civilization ends with a plea for socialism.
But in condemning paleotechnic civilization he saw it, as did Marx, in
a different vocabulary, as the destruction of the temple: prelude to
rebuilding.
While humanly speaking the paleotechnic phase was a disastrous
interlude, it helped by its very disorder to intensify the search of order,
and by its special forms of brutality to clarify the goals of human living.
Actions and reaction were equal and in opposite directions.
The central redeeming feature that all commentators on electricity
from Kropotkin through Mumford and McLuhan have seen in this
technology is that it is decentralizing, that it will break up the concen-
trations of power in the state and industry and populations in the city.
In Technics and Civilization Mumford argues that "the neotechnic
phase was marked . . . by the conquest of a new form of energy: elec-
tricity. . . . [It] effected revolutionary changes: these touched the loca-
tion and the concentration of industries and the detailed organization
of the factory."9
The decentralizing effects of electrical power were matched by the
decentralizing effects of electrical communication. Mumford argues
that the giantism typical of paleotechnic industry was caused by a de-
fective system of communication that antedated the telephone and tele-
graph. With electrical power, factories could be placed where they were
wanted, not merely where the power source dictated they be. Factories
could be rearranged without regard to the centralized shafts and aisles
that a central power source like steam demanded. Similarly, the new
means of communication dictated that people no longer had to be in
physical contact in order to transact their business. Freed from reliance
on face-to-face communication and a slow and erratic mail service, in-

dustry could be decentralized in the countryside. As a result, neotech-
nics spiritualizes labor and reduces the human robot:
Here, as in neotechnical industry generally, advances in production
increase the number of trained technicians in the laboratory, and
decrease the number of human robots in the plant. In short, one
witnesses in the chemical processes the general change that charac-
terizes all genuinely neotechnic industry: the displacement of the
proletariat.10
This is the essence of the general argument Mumford makes, on
the great transition from paleotechnics to neotechnics, from steam
power to electrical power, from capitalistic to postcapitalistic social
forms. In describing electrical communication he saw its potential for
transcending space—almost at times seeing it, as Frank Lloyd Wright
did, as providing a complete substitute for social relations:
With the invention of the telegraph a series of inventions began to
bridge the gap in time between communication and response despite
the handicaps of space: first the telegraph, the wireless telephone and
finally television. As a result, communication is now on the point of
returning, with the aid of mechanical devices, to that instantaneous
reaction of person to person with which it began; but the possibili-
ties of this immediate meeting, instead of being limited by space and
time, will be limited only by the amount of energy available and the
mechanical perfection and accessibility of the apparatus. When the
radio telephone is supplemented by television communication will
differ from direct intercourse only to the extent that immediate phys-
ical contact will not be possible.11
Mumford, always skeptical within his enthusiasms, always pro-
jecting the dark side of his hopes, recognized the paradox of electrical
communication: that the media of reflective thought—reading, writing,
and drawing—could be weakened by television and radio; that closer
contact did not necessarily mean greater peace; that the new inventions
would be foolishly overused; that human skills in the arts could be ex-
tirpated by easy entertainment. Nonetheless, he finally registered a re-
served but positive judgment on electronic communication:
Nevertheless instantaneous personal communication over long dis-
tance is one of the outstanding marks of the neotechnic phase: it is
the mechanical symbol of those world wide cooperations of thought
and feeling which must emerge, finally, if our whole civilization is
not to sink into ruin. The new avenues of communication have the
characteristic features and advantages of the new technics; for they

imply, among other things, the use of mechanical apparatus to dupli-
cate and further organic operations: In the long run they promise not
to displace the human being but to refocus him and enlarge his capac-
ities. .. . Perhaps the greatest social effect of radio-communication so
far has been a political one: the restoration of direct contact between
leader and a group. Plato defined the limits of the size of a city as the
number of people who could hear the voice of a single orator: today
limits do not define a city but a civilization. Wherever neotechnic in-
struments exist and a common language is used there are now the
elements of almost as close a political entity as that which once was
possible in the tiniest cities in Attica.12
I have here expunged the dark side of Mumford's prophecy to em-
phasize the essentially optimistic tone. To be fair it must be said, how-
ever, that he felt in the 19305 that at that moment the dangers of elec-
tronic communication seemed greater than the benefits. He guardedly
but warmly embraced the resurgence of regionalism in the nineteenth
century as "being a reaction against the equally exaggerated neglect of
the traditions and historic monuments of a community life, fostered by
the abstractedly progressive minds of the nineteenth century."
It would be grossly unfair to conclude that Mumford, in his early
work, was an unambiguous champion of neotechnics and of electrical
communication or felt that the impact of electricity was automatic. He
concluded at one point that the neotechnic refinement of the machine,
without a coordinate development of higher social purposes, has only
magnified the possibilities of depravity and barbarism. And yet his
habit of writing of neotechnics in the past tense, his tendency to imply
that only the outmoded shell of capitalism retarded the emergence of a
qualitatively new electrical world where we would have the cake of
power to be consumed at the table of decentralized community, led to a
wide adoption of his views. To put it more strongly, Mumford's essen-
tial vision of electrical power and communication became a litany of
social redemption that infused most writing, popular and intellectual,
on technology and the future, including that of Marshall McLuhan.
The influence of Mumford, at the level of both ideology and con-
ceptual analysis, was not clear until the publication of Understanding
Media. Even in The Mechanical Bride, however, McLuhan pointed to
Mumford and his "effort to modify the social and individual efforts of
technology by stressing concepts of social biology" as a road past the
Marxist indictments of capitalistic civilization. Moreover, he cited Mum-
ford's analysis as an example of how "we may by a reasonable distrib-

ution of power and by town and country planning enjoy all the lost ad-
vantages" of countryside living without sacrificing any of the new gains
of technology.13 But more importantly Mumford foreshadowed, where
he did not make explicit, the central arguments—indeed, the slogans—
we have come to identify with the heart of McLuhan's arguments.
The first, and perhaps most important, foreshadowing is Mum-
ford's view that neotechnics was a reassertion of the organic principle
in the face of mechanization. He emphasized that the new forms of
communication were extensions of biological capacity:
The organic has become visible again even within the mechanical
complex: some of our most characteristic mechanical instruments—
the telephone, the phonograph, the motion picture—have grown out
of our interest in the human voice and the human ear and out of
knowledge of their physiology and anatomy.14
Mumford explicitly anticipated McLuhan's emphasis on technol-
ogy as "extensions of man":
The automaton is the last step in a process that began with the use of
one part or another of the human body as a tool. In back of the de-
velopment of tools and machines lies the attempt to modify the envi-
ronment in such a way as to fortify and sustain the human organism:
the effort is either to extend the powers of the otherwise unarmed
organism or to manufacture outside the body a set of conditions
more favorable toward manufacturing its equilibrium and ensuring
its survival.15
The growth of technology was in part an attempt to build an
automaton: a machine that appeared to perfect human functions, that
was, in short, lifelike. The movement from naturalism to mechanism
was to remove the organic symbol: to take the mechanical player from
the mechanical piano. Naturalism deeply affected us, however, even in
the structure of our language. It is, of course, this same view of the com-
puter that McLuhan proposes: the mind externalized in machine; an
automaton, lifelike, yet stripped of the organic symbol that McLuhan's
metaphors attempt to restore. And it is this reinsertion of the nat-
ural back into the mechanical that is the stylistic hinge of McLuhan's
writing.
Mumford and McLuhan ascribe the same general deleterious ef-
fects to the rise of printing, particularly as it served as an agent of uni-
formity. Again, Mumford:
The printing press was a powerful agent for producing uniformity

in language and so by degrees in thought. Standardization, mass-
production, and capitalistic enterprise came in with the printing
press.16
While Mumford makes the clock the central invention of paleotechnic
times, he attributes to print the effects McLuhan was to amplify and
make less ambiguous:
Second to the clock in order if not perhaps in importance was the
printing press.. .. Printing was from the beginning a completely me-
chanical achievement. Not merely that: it was the type for all future
instruments of reproduction for the printed sheet, even before the mil-
itary uniform, was the first completely standardized product, manu-
factured in series, and the movable types themselves were the first
example of completely standardized and interchangeable p a r t s . . .
abstracted from gesture and physical presence, the printed word fur-
thered that process of analysis and isolation which became the lead-
ing achievement of the era.17
Moreover, Mumford clearly saw that the effect of printing was to
unbalance the human sensorium:
Print made a greater impression than actual events, and by centering
attention on the printed word, people lost that balance between the
sensuous and intellectual, between image and sound, between the
concrete and the abstract, which was to be achieved momentarily by
the best minds of the fifteenth century. . . . To exist was to exist in
print: the rest of the world became more shadowy.18
Mumford recognized clearly that the definition of media had to be
extended to institutions and artifacts, much as McLuhan did in Under-
standing Media, and that printing was central to the perceptual and or-
ganizational form these objects took. Moreover, Mumford gave con-
crete examples for the effect of print, of paleotechnics generally, on the
senses and on aesthetic perception:
With the starvation of the senses [during the paleotechnic period]
went a general starvation of the mind: mere literacy, the ability to
read signs, shop notices, newspapers took the place of that general
sensory and motor training that went with the handicraft and agri-
cultural industries. . . .
The eye, the ear, the touch starved and battered by the external
environment took refuge in the filtered medium of print; and the sad
constraint of the blind applied to all avenues of experience. The mu-
seum took the place of the concrete reality; the guidebook took the
place of the museum; the criticism took the place of the picture; the
written description took the place of the building, the scene in na-
ture, the adventure, the living act. This exaggerates and caricatures
the paleotechnic state of mind but it does not necessarily falsify it.19
Only the qualification and the implicit ideological judgment differ-
entiate the remark from one of McLuhan's analyses of print.
McLuhan's notion of forms of communications being a "rear view
mirror" and of the "content of a medium being another medium" are
also anticipated by Mumford's notion of a cultural pseudomorph. Mum-
ford borrowed the idea in turn from geology. A rock will often be leached
of its original composition yet still maintain its outward form. A cul-
tural psuedomorph occurs when "new forces, activities, institutions, in-
stead of crystallizing independently into their own appropriate forms
may creep into the structure of an existing civilization."20
Again and again Mumford comes back to the theme of communi-
cation, of the extensions of the biological organs and the feedback ef-
fect of technology. In neotechnics the human function again "takes on
some of its non-specialized character: photography helps recultivate
the eye, the telephone the voice, the radio the ear."21 And it was in art
that the "vital organs of life which have been amputated through his-
toric accident must be restored at least in fantasy as preliminary to
their actual rebuilding in fact."22 He recognized as well the fusion of
sense provided by the new technology:
If photography has become popular again in our own day after its
first great but somewhat sentimental outburst in the eighties, it is
perhaps because like an invalid returning to health, we are finding a
new delight in being, seeing, touching, feeling; because in a rural or
neotechnic environment the sunlight and pure air that make it possi-
ble are present.23
What McLuhan and Mumford originally shared was the view that
neotechnics restores the organic and aesthetic. As Mumford put it: "at
last the quantitative and mechanical has become life sensitive."24 For
Mumford, the background scene is biological while for McLuhan it is
aesthetic, though neither rejects what the other affirms: McLuhan cites
the biologist J. Z. Young for support; Mumford refers to the new aes-
thetes. Mumford notes that from biology "the investigation of the
world of life opened up new possibilities for the machine itself: vital in-
terests, ancient human wishes influence the development of new inven-
tions. Flight, telephonic communication, the phonograph, the motion
picture all arose out of the more scientific study of living organisms."25
And he moves from biology to aesthetics: "This in living organisms
does not stop short with machines that stimulate eye and ear. From the
organic world comes an idea utterly foreign to the paleotechnic mind:
the importance of shape."26
Mumford recognized that the new forms of visual reproduction
even affected the perception of the self, a phenomenon McLuhan
would later publicize as a widespread abandonment of jobs in a search
of roles:
Whereas in the paleotechnic phase one conversed with the mirror
and produced the biographical portrait and the introspective biogra-
phy, in the neotechnic phase one poses for the camera or still one
acts for the motion picture. The change is from an introspective to a
behavioristic psychology, from the fulsome sorrows of Werther to
the impassive public mask of an Ernest Hemingway. Facing hunger
and death in the midst of a wilderness a stranded aviator writes . . .
"I must have looked good, carrying the big logs on my back in my
underwear." Alone, he still thinks of himself as a public character,
being watched: and to a greater or less degree everyone, from the
crone in a remote hamlet to the political dictator in his carefully pre-
pared state it is the same position. This constant sense of a public
world would seem in part, at least, to be the result of the camera and
the camera-eye that developed with it.27
And finally, the same linkage of the aesthetic and technological un-
derlie both their positions. As usual, Mumford puts it most clearly:
Every effective part in this whole neotechnic environment represents
an effort of the collective mind to widen the province of order and
control and provision. And here, finally, the perfected forms begin to
hold human interest even apart from practical performances: they
tend to produce that inner composure and equilibrium, that sense of
balance between the inner impulse and the outer environment, which
is one of the marks of a work of art. The machines, even when they
are not works of art, underlie our art—that is, our organized percep-
tions and feelings—in the way that Nature underlies them, extending
the basis upon which we operate and confirming our own impulse
to order. The economic: the objective: the collective: and finally the
integration of these principles in a new conception of the organic—
these are the marks, already discernible, of our assimilation of the
machine not merely as an instrument of practical action but as a
valuable mode of life.28
I do not wish to overemphasize the similarities between Mumford

and McLuhan. Mumford is always more complex, balanced, and
moralistic in judgment. What McLuhan did was to seize upon a similar
linkage of art, perception, and the machine, a set of propositions about
technology and culture, and amplify them through literary sources,
stripping them of the complex context in which Mumford situated
them. Above all, by setting technology outside of the density, the thick-
ness, of history and culture, he produced out of this inherited material
a modern drama. He made the electrical machine an actor in an escha-
tological and redemptive play.
The relationship between Mumford and McLuhan can be described
as the inversion of a trajectory. McLuhan's earliest work was an analy-
sis of the large cultural complexes that distinguish civilizations and an
admiration for "the southern quality": the precapitalist features of
southern culture that provided a decisive if not an effective critique of
industrialism in terms of human and organic values. McLuhan ends in
the embrace of a thorough technological determinism, a poet of post-
industrial society and a prophet with one message: yield to the restora-
tive capacity of the modern machine, throw off the cultural pseudo-
morph retarding progress. As McLuhan increasingly projected a
"rhetoric of the electrical sublime," increasingly saw in the qualitative
difference of electrical technology a road past the authentic blockages
and disruptions of industrial life, Lewis Mumford turned progressively
in the opposite direction. While Mumford's early work was never com-
pletely trapped in technological determinism, the decision to hang his
analysis of historical change on technological stages such as paleo-
technics and neotechnics, an analysis he inherited from Patrick Geddes
and in turn extended, centered technology as the critical factor in
human and social development. Politics and culture entered deriva-
tively as the housing, accelerator, retarder of technical potential. The tra-
jectory of his work was away from this initial position. By midcentury
he could see no difference between the capitalist and the socialist state,
as both were dedicated to an extirpation of the past, total management
of the present, and a future based solely on the mechanics of power and
productivity.
In his later work Mumford adopted a stance almost precisely the
opposite of McLuhan's. He attempted to systematically deflate the
image of man as "homo faber," the toolmaker; to cut down the re-
ceived view of technology as the central agent in human development;

and to emphasize the role of art, ritual, and language as the decisive
achievements in human development. He diagnosed the central alter-
ations in human development not in terms of technological complexes
but rather in terms of a struggle of, in Stephen Pepper's terms, world
hypotheses: mechanism versus organicism. Human history looks in-
creasingly like a bad idea: the domination of a lifeless, devitalized image
of nature imposed upon man.
By the 19608 he had abandoned the distinction between the paleo-
technic and neotechnic eras. He saw then the trajectory of modern
history as the recreation of the "myth of the machine" and the "penta-
gon of power." Whatever short-run gains and ameliorations had been
introduced by electrical power and communication had been almost
immediately sacrificed to a criminal and insane worldview: the vision
of the universe and everything in it as a machine and, in the name of
that machine, the extirpation of all human purposes, types, values, and
social forms that did not fit within the limited scope of machine civi-
lization. This in turn enthroned a pentagon of power: a community de-
voted to the uncritical development, without reason or control, of power
(energy), political domination, productivity, profit, and publicity.
This frankly dystopian vision was hard won biographically and
historically. Mumford always was suspicious, to put it mildly, of the
military, and one of the fatal corruptions of technical advance has been,
in his view, how much of it was fueled by militarism. This is true in par-
ticular of electronic communication, which is the offspring of World
War II needs for radar and servo-mechanisms to direct artillery and
the cold war odyssey into space. Mumford's only son, Geddes, was
killed in the Italian campaign, and this not surprisingly deepened and
soured his views of military adventure and technical advance. More-
over, he recognized, more clearly than most 19305 liberals, the active
interdependence of the state, the military, and scientific and technolog-
ical elites.
Mumford recognized in McLuhan's work a defense and legitima-
tion, often implicit, of the very groups and agencies Mumford was at-
tempting to excoriate. In The Pentagon of Power he turned direct
attention on McLuhan and the "electronic phantasmagoria . . . he con-
jures up."29 He accused McLuhan of proposing an "absolute mode of
control: one that will achieve total illiteracy, with no permanent record
except that officially committed to the computer and open only to

those permitted to this facility."30 Mumford characterized McLuhan's
appeal as a return to a preprimitive world where the "sole vestige of the
multifarious world of concrete forms and ordered experience will be
the sounds and 'tactile' images on the constantly present television
screen or such abstract derivative information as can be transferred to
the computer."31 McLuhan's goal was, he thought, total "cultural dis-
solution," a form of tribal communism, "though it is in fact the ex-
treme antithesis of anything that can be properly called tribal or com-
munistic. As for 'communism,' this is McLuhan's public relations
euphemism for totalitarian control."32
While McLuhan never, to my knowledge, directly answered Mum-
ford, his colleague Edmund Carpenter used a front-page review of the
first volume of The Myth of the Machine in the Sunday New York
Times as an occasion to devastate Mumford, particularly for being in
the literal and figurative sense "an old man." A case of parricide, I take it.
While Mumford's last work has many deficiencies—its attack is
too broad-gauged, its moralizing finally tedious, and its gloomy proph-
ecy encouraging of the very powerlessness it wishes to eliminate—he
does offer a sounder diagnosis of the general currents of modern his-
tory. If we can forget for the moment large claims and transhistorical
beatitudes, it seems reasonably clear that modern communications has
aided in enlarging the scale of social organization beyond the nation-
state to the regional federation of countries and bureaucracy. In doing
so, electronics has furthered the spatial bias of print and increasingly
centralized political and cultural power. Whatever tendency existed
within electronics to cultivate a new aesthetic sense and a rejuvenated
appreciation of the organic has been more than counterbalanced by the
tendency of television to increase the privatization of existence and the
overwhelming dependence of people on distant mechanical sources of
art, information, and entertainment. For all the vaunted capacity of the
computer to store, process, and make available information in densities
and quantities heretofore unknown, the pervasive tendency to monop-
olize knowledge in the professions and the data banks continues un-
abated. The ability of television to involve us in depth in the lives of
people around the world is more than offset by its equal tendency to
imprison us within our own speechless, looking-glass world: the silent
spectator as a mode of being.
If we consider this argument between Mumford and McLuhan in

terms of the larger debate over electrical technology, it seems at the mo-
ment reasonable to conclude that electrical communication has up to
this time largely served to consolidate and extend the cultural hege-
mony and social forms that first appeared in the wake of the printing
press.
Notes
1. See, for instance, Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change:
Communications and Cultural Transformation in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols. (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Jack Goody, ed., Literacy in Traditional
Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); Harold Innis, The Bias of
Communication (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1951); Harold Innis, Empire and
Communications (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1972); and Richard Sennett, The
Fall of Public Man (New York: Knopf, 1977).
2. See, for instance, Raymond Rosenthal, ed., McLuhan: Pro and Con (New York:
Funk and Wagnalls, 1968), and Gerald E. Stearn, ed., McLuhan: Hot and Cool (New
York: Dial, 1967).
3. Stearn, McLuhan: Hot and Cool, 202.
4. For more on Mumford's vision, see Lewis Mumford in Whither Mankind: A
Panorama of Modern Civilization, ed. Charles Beard (New York: Longmans, Green,
1928), 308-9; Lewis Mumford, The Highway and the City (New York: Harcourt, Brace
and World, 1963); and Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, 2 vols. (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1967-70).
5. Lewis Mumford, City Development (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1945),
185-86.
6. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace and
World, 1963 [1923]), 225.
7. Ibid., 227.
8. Ibid., 255-56.
9. Ibid., 221.
10. Ibid., 229.
11. Ibid., 239-40.
12. Ibid., 241.
13. Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride (Boston: Beacon, 1951), 34, 76.
14. Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 6.
15. Ibid., 10.
16. Ibid., facing page 84.
17. Ibid., 134-35.
18. Ibid., 136.
19. Ibid., 181.
20. Ibid., 340.
21. Ibid., 279.
22. Ibid., 286.
23. Ibid., 340.
24. Ibid., 254.
25. Ibid., 250.
26. Ibid., 252.
27. Ibid., z43.

28. Ibid., 356.
29. Mumford, Myth of the Machine, vol. 2, 293.
30. Ibid., 2.94.
31. Ibid., 293-94.
32. Ibid., 295.
3 / Communications and Economics
First published in 195*4
The heroic efforts, under way for at least four decades now, to create a
rapprochement between communications and economics, to create an
economics of communications (or, for the more committed, a political
economy of communications), to find one frame of reference within
which to contain these two social practices and disciplines, has yielded
substantial results but not as yet general satisfaction. That is the para-
dox I want to explore in this essay.
There is no mystery concerning the renewed urgency of the inquiry
into the economics of communications. We live in a new phase of the
political economy of the world in which both national governments
and private firms recognize that trade no longer follows the flag but
rather the communications system, in which knowledge, always a
source of power, is bleached into information, adapted to a new tech-
nology of digital encoding and modeling, made still lighter and more
transportable, for the primary end of manipulation and control. The
radiant arc of a communications satellite 2.2,300 miles above the earth
synchronizes time and ingests the globe into homogenized space. The
computer abstracts geography into the galaxy and miniaturizes the
clock of awareness to the picosecond. The conquest of time and space,
the dream of the nineteenth-century romantics, explorers, and imperi-
alists (they were sometimes the same person), has now been realized.
The aggressive transformation of publics into audiences, which in the
late nineteenth century created the "imaginary community of the na-
60
Communications and Economics I 61
tion," is now a global process as Time-Warner, with an eye on con-

sumer markets, announces "The World Is Our Audience."
Sometime in the 19705, to choose a point of arrest in a continuous
social process, a stable—though not an altogether satisfactory—struc-
ture of economics, politics, and communications broke up and new
forces were set loose in the world. The symptoms and symbols of the
breakup were two technologies and commodities, computers and satel-
lites, simultaneously producer goods and consumer goods, that re-
configured the map of social relations. Economic activity, political sov-
ereignty, and cultural production changed shape and consequence
within a new scalar dynamic; not the city, the nation, or even the em-
pire but the globe became the habitus of these processes.1 Cultural frag-
mentation and postmodernist homogenization became two constitu-
tive trends of a single global reality, a splitting in which social life
simultaneously expanded and contracted; the stage of human activity
enlarged to the globe and collapsed to the village, making the nation-
state itself appear increasingly problematic.
The only concepts and ideas that have emerged to contain these de-
velopments are the desiccated symbols of information and the informa-
tion society. However, information and the information society are
products of the theory and technology driving these developments
rather than critical reflections on the practices they represent. As sym-
bols they suggest that the new conquest of time and space is orderly,
systematic, and benign. The information society is announced as fact
and globalization declared a reality when both are in the planning
stage. The future is colonized such that neat geometric lines run into
the horizon, imploring us to lift our eyes from the chaotic present to
apprehend global Utopia.
Meanwhile, out on the streets, where we actually live, all is chaos.
There the convergent order of the new information society dissolves
into ceaseless and disorderly flows—new people and new things flow-
ing to new places along new routes: flows of migrants, guest workers,
tourists, entrepreneurs, and itinerants; new flows of capital, factories,
messages, products, ideas, images, and currencies. Capitalism, though
not capitalism alone, keeps the pot boiling: new things flowing from
new places to new places, upsetting established patterns of geography,
trade, and communications, imploding and exploding at the same time.
The information society turns out to be an unstable and, in many ways,
an unfriendly place in which ethnic nationalisms again occupy the cen-
ter of the stage. Everywhere state and nation are pitted against one an-
other; primordia have been globalized and identity politics are prac-
ticed on a world scale. A new information class, along with the new
technology, has brought us to, in the words of the former chairman of
Citicorp, Walter Wriston, "a twilight of sovereignty"2 for that class has
the skills to write a complex software program that produces a billion
dollars of revenue and still can walk past any customs officer in the
world with nothing of "value" to declare. But what are we to make of
this class, one now bred in the universities, and whose sovereignty is
being ended and what is the pretender to the sovereign throne?
Privatization is yet another, and perhaps more useful, term by
which these processes are currently understood, and that notion fits
well with Walter Wriston's image of products slipping by customs
agents because they are lodged in the head. However, the process of
privatization is a more general and rigorous one than is commonly un-
derstood. The first and most general focus is the privatization of broad-
casting in the wake of satellite communication. Once satellites were
available and satellite parking spaces over Europe allocated, it was a
foregone conclusion that some firms, most likely American, were going
to invade the television space of European countries and siphon off
mass markets. To prevent this, or, alternatively, to preserve a European
"high culture" tradition, country after country has either given up
state-run television or permitted the growth of private networks.
Consequently, broadcasting was transformed from a phenomenon
of collective public provision to more uniformly a matter of private
market transactions, though given the quasi-public good character of
cultural production, it was rationalized through an advertising-based
distribution system. In turn, the costs of television production, even
for state systems faced with reduced revenues, increasingly forced co-
production across national and linguistic boundaries. Depending on
which side of the coin one examines, this looks like either the Ameri-
canization or the Canadianization of the world: Americanization if one
emphasizes the dominance of the strongest exporter and coproduction
partner; Canadianization if one emphasizes the deracination of pro-
duction and the resulting "cultural soup" that spreads on a worldwide
basis. Pastiche cultures, assembled from a cross-national production
process, further displace indigenous cultural forms.
In one sense, then, privatization refers to the displacement of in-
digenous cultures by pastiche or postmodern cultures and the elimina-
tion or decline of public or state-run broadcasting. In another, perhaps

stronger, sense, privatization refers to the worldwide transformation of
political and cultural publics into political and cultural audiences. In
multichannel environments, broadcasting connects more firmly to indi-
vidual preference structures. The connection of a fragmented structure
of private production to a fragmented structure of home reception re-
sults in a secondary and more problematic diremption of a public
sphere, one in which the entire notion of public communication and a
common culture of politics and pleasure evaporates. Balkanization,
whether of groups or individuals, displaces a common arena of discourse
and communication. Culture is not only privately manufactured and
privately distributed but its audience is conceived as statistically con-
catenated individuals or members of segmented transnational groups
rather than as citizens of a common polity or participants in a common
tradition.
How are we to contain and explicate these developments? As I said
earlier, the only framework widely available is the theory of informa-
tion and the information society. However, the conclusions from that
framework are foreordained by, on one side, the conception of com-
munication embodied in information theory that generates and ratio-
nalizes the technology at the heart of the problem and, on the other, by
the system of neoclassical economics that generates the commodity
view of information, which reduces communication to the warming
metaphors of conquest and weaponry, a mere process of the transmis-
sion in space for purposes of manipulation and control.
In fact, the attempt to integrate communications and economics
into a consistent framework is at the heart of the problem. Communica-
tions and economics constitute contradictory frameworks. That was, I
believe, the great insight of Harold Innis even as he tacked back and
forth between these subjects and phenomena, borrowing from both in
order that they might check off the respective biases of each.31 wish to
avoid the strategy of making economics a special case of communica-
tions, though there are decent logical reasons for doing so. Nor do I
wish to follow the opposite strategy, more common on the intellectual
left, of making communications purely a derivative case of economics,
though, again, there are good historical reasons for doing so. Rather,
for reasons that are both political and moral, I want to pursue a frame-
work of difference, a framework in which communications and eco-
nomics stand in opposition, as contradictory practices. This is a rela-
tion, at least in theory, of countervailing power in which the phenomena

of communications contain and control economics in the name of pub-
lic life and discourse. The bias of communications toward the common
and communal is, in turn, checked by economics wherein sufficient free-
dom is maintained to support a sphere of private life and action.
Communication and public life, in the sense I wish to use these
terms, must refer to something other than the state or public broad-
casting. Similarly, economics and private life must refer to something
other than commerce and monopoly capitalism. Public must refer to a
domain outside both the state and the economy.
Thus, as an example, if the public sphere has been dirempted by
the creation of an international or global economy, the answer is not
simply to internationalize the public sphere, which can only be accom-
plished via state power, but to re-create public life as a countervailing
force at the local level. It is not a matter of thinking globally and acting
locally; it is a matter of thinking locally and acting globally.
I want to develop this argument by outlining the incommensurable re-

lation between economics and communications. That is the heart of the
legacy left us by Harold Innis and, as with Innis, it comes down to
making a plea for time. I will make it through some well known but not
always well understood propositions.
Communications and economics are, in the first instance, human
practices. However, they are practices that stand in a contradictory re-
lation to one another; they are, historically though not ontologically,
mutually exclusive activities. Economics is the practice of allocating
scarce resources. Communication is the process of producing meaning,
a resource that is anything but scarce—indeed, is a superabundant, free
good. It is hard to apprehend and take full account of this contradic-
tion because the practice of communications, like all other human
practices (religion comes to mind) has itself been so transformed by the
theory and practice of economics that the former (communications as a
practice, meaning as a resource) can hardly be recognized given the
dominance of the latter.
The contradiction at the level of practice means that reflections on
these practices also contradict one another. The disciplines that emerge
to reflect back on the practice and aim to make the bases of the prac-
tices explicit, to codify everyday knowledge in theoretic terms, simi-
larly stand in contradictory relation to one another. Communications
and economics as disciplines, therefore, cannot be reconciled with one

another; they confront one another blankly because they proceed from
incommensurable premises. There is no way of integrating the propo-
sitions of each into a consistent framework or of making these disci-
plines simple complements wherein each borrows from the other the
resources necessary for its respective completion.
I go too far. In our time communications and economics can only
be reconciled by an evacuation of the resources of meaning in the ser-
vice of profit and power. Therefore, the only useful relation between
communications and economics is a countervailing one at the level of
both theory and practice. Communications and economics derive from
different motivational structures and produce incommensurably alter-
native pictures of human action and social life. They can cancel or neu-
tralize one another; they can check off each other's biases but otherwise
they will be fiercely resistant to any form of integration. They consti-
tute a contradictory order of things: their root meanings and conse-
quences are opposed both in theory and in practice.
This argument will be difficult to sustain in a compressed essay, and
much will have to be left to the imagination of the reader. Moreover, a
series of strategic retreats will have to be made at certain critical junc-
tures. For example, because economics as practice and discipline relies
upon the resources of communication—it is rather difficult to organize
work or enunciate a theory without recourse to language—a strong case
can be made for making economics a special case of communications, a
case made with unusual force by the economist Donald McCloskey.4
However, I want to bypass the more delicate and refined parts of the
argument to make a bald, but I think necessary, case for the analytical
independence of communications and economics as revealed within
modern history. That independence is necessary to salvage a domain
of politics and culture that can resist the insidious imperialism of the
economic and give us the possibility, though not the assurance, of a pub-
lic life.
There is only one form of economic theory and practice these days:
the neoclassical form, the form that reflects and explains modern cap-
italism. As theory and practice, it is one of the great achievements of
the human mind in action, but it exacts a terrible price in the domain
of politics and culture. Let me repeat and restate what is now a very
old story.
Economic theory, or at least its neoclassical mainstream, though
these days the mainstream has no tributaries, has as its basic assump-
tion that individual behavior is motivated entirely by self-regarding
preferences. This assumption, which Steven Jones has called "calculat-
ing avarice,"5 has proven to be a very powerful one for organizing
human activity through the institution of the market. Neoclassical eco-
nomics starts from the assumption, and its institutions manifest the
fact, that the desires that motivate human action are individual and
subjective and therefore unknowable to an observer, unsharable via
conscious acts, or purely exogenous. These subjective desires, these
given and individual preferences, are expressed in human action as an
attempt to maximize utility or the pleasure and happiness that the sat-
isfaction of desire brings. Of happiness and despair we may have no
measure, but we do have a theory.
Mary Douglas, whom I am both quoting and paraphrasing in what
follows, has argued that economic theory has its impenetrable cohe-
siveness—that is, its resistance to all disciplines beyond economics and
to all social practices other than the economic—because of the profes-
sional intensity of its discourse and because Western thought is impreg-
nated with the experience of the market.6 As Albert Hirschman has
pointed out, the idea that greed is the dominant human motive came to
be gradually accepted only after the sixteenth century, when the market
itself became dominant and was expected to be a motive force that
would curb the passion for power.7 The economic mode of thought and
the economic as a differentiated sphere of activity enjoys, in the words
of Louis Dumont, "an ideological supremacy over the political in the
liberal and capitalist world thanks to its embodying a purer and more
perfect form of individualism."8 In the market the focus is upon indi-
viduals exchanging privately owned goods; the individual and the
rights that accrue to the individual from ownership are the given of the
economic mode of thought, the rarely questioned starting point of the
analysis. This is true, paradoxically enough, even with the most ex-
treme critiques of capitalism. Those on the left, because they are no less
worshipful of the market, individualism, and individual rights, contin-
uously fall into the assumptions of the objects of their contempt. As a
result, socialist economics rarely becomes more than neoclassical eco-
nomics at the extreme: monopoly, the technocratic state, and the self-
regarding individual.
We may understand the limits or margins of economics from our
own experience—after all, we do encounter in ourselves and others ac-
tions and motives that are selfless and other-regarding; we need not re-
sort to sociobiology to explain altruism. Still, economics has no room
for moral feelings. Gary Becker was rewarded with the Nobel Memo-
rial Prize in Economics by imperializing three central economic assump-
tions—maximizing behavior, stable preferences, and equilibrium—to
illuminate all types of decisions, including those in politics and family
life. And, of course, he was correct, though in the way self-fulfilling
prophecies are correct and not, as economists often pretend, the way
natural laws are correct. The assumptions of the market have so in-
vaded and transformed all human activity and relations that little re-
mains outside the imaginative orbit of the market. Interest group poli-
tics (about all that is left to politics) crime and deviancy, incantations of
individual rights, charity and virtue, alternative families—all are now
plausibly explained by economic assumptions. At the morbid margins
of the social, economists can do little more than wring their hands and
lament cultural lag or insist that moral progress somehow does not
keep up with material progress.
Neoclassical economics presumes a society of people with prefer-
ences but is silent on the question of how society can exist at all. "In
analyzing the market for private goods, classical economics jumps
from individual self-interest to community interest, the interest of so-
ciety, the common interest, by invoking the magic of the invisible
hand. .. . Behind it lies the community engaged in its normative debate
and the laws, conventions, and social values to which the narrative de-
bate gives rise."9 It is this normative framework of the social, and the
debate and the discourse that sustain and express it, that economics
must either ignore or transform into an economic activity, a mere pur-
suit of self-regarding preferences. And that is historically exactly what
has been pursued and achieved, though in two rather different ways. In
this sense, economics as practice and discipline is devoted to the sup-
pression of communication; the conceptual device through which the
suppression is pursued is information.
Economics has no sense of the social beyond that provided by the
market. The social is a mere derivative of the self-regarding pursuit of
utility by atomized selves. Because the maximizing assumption leads to
neither a theory nor a practice of the social, noneconomic social theory
has generally been unhappy with the claim of economics to explain the
operation of modern societies. Unfortunately, the formulation of a re-
sponse to economics is either in terms laid down by economics or in the
spaces left uncovered by economic theory. The social sciences, again in

their mainstream form, simply transferred the assumptions of utility
theory from the individual to the social. Utility, no longer in our heads,
is relocated in our genes or the environment. Sociobiology is an exam-
ple of the first strategy; behaviorism and sociological functionalism are
examples of the second.
Behaviorism and functionalism in turn provided the underpinning
for our understanding of communication at large, but these positions,
as I have attempted to suggest, are derivations of the limitations of eco-
nomics rather than independent views of communications. Certain as-
sumptions about communication eventually underwrite neoclassical
theory (the theory of representation, the self-righting process in the free
market of ideas) and have undergirded the belief that the quest for util-
ity can produce a progressive social order—economically, morally, and
politically progressive. The "invisible hand" works in the marketplace
of both ideas and products. The utilitarian conception of human con-
duct and society, then, was twisted out of its originally subjective
framework and resituated in the objective world of environment, biol-
ogy, or social structure. It is a form of utilitarianism nonetheless: the
objective utilities of natural ecology, the utilities that promote the sur-
vival of the human population or the given social order.
Ayn Rand somewhere wrote that "civilization is the progress toward

privacy. The savage's whole existence is public." Thus speaks an au-
thentic voice of the economic spirit, one that rules out communications
from the outset. For nothing is more primitive, in the sense of primor-
dial savage, at the root of our humanity, and nothing more public, in
the sense of common and shared, than communications. In this sense
communications establishes the challenge to the self-regarding prefer-
ences that undergird economic thinking. Communication is nothing if
not a collective activity; indeed, it is the process by which the real is cre-
ated, maintained, celebrated, transformed, and repaired. The product
of that activity—meaning—establishes a common and shared world.
Words are the names of, the other side of, practices. And despite its
vagrant history in this century, communication has never shed the trace
of its origins in the common, communal, and community, any more
than politics, despite the depredations of our time, has lost its trace of
origin in the polis. Both are the names of certain forms of human prac-
tice grounded in a shared intersubjective world of common action. As
the quote from Ayn Rand suggests, this century has turned against the
common, the public, and the political in the name of the private, the
subjective, and the economic. One aspect of our being prevents com-
plete success in this enterprise. There can be private property, private
selves, and perhaps even private thought, but there cannot be private
languages, as Wittgenstein, among others, taught us. Language is the
one collective and sharable phenomenon we have: not something cre-
ated and then shared but only created in the act of sharing. While intel-
lectually this century has devoted itself to finding some way by and
around language to a state of pure vision and epiphany, language, the
irreducible bedrock of human tools and talents, keeps reminding us of
a shared and associated life. There is no removal of communication
from its ancient associations with sharing, participation, association,
fellowship, and the possession of a common faith. Communication is
the process, in the happy words of Stanley Cavell, of wording the
world together: not some mere transmission of language, an extension
of messages in space, but the maintenance of a society in time; not the
act of imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs.
The archetypal case of communication, once saturated by the eco-
nomic worldview, is the extension of messages across geography for the
purpose of control. However, primordially and politically, the origin of
communication is at one with the origins of ritual and religion: not the
transmission of intelligent information but the construction and main-
tenance of an ordered, meaningful cultural world that can serve as a
container for human action—a world of time rather than space. In this
sense, communication can at best act as a control and check upon the
economic motive, the motive of self-interest—can prevent self-interest
from taking over the entire household of the social.
Mary Douglas, in an essay that has shaped the views outlined here,
though it is not an essay concerned with communications in a direct
way, has summarized an aspect of this outlook:
Humans speak, they use rhetoric and scrutinize one another's
speech. Their individual conflicts surface and are overruled as they
try to persuade one another to compromise or stand firm. Faced
with conflict, contestants have to resort to the rhetoric of the com-
mon good to support their private claims. De Tocqueville, writing of
public associations, identified the basic mechanism of the normative
debate that sets the ground rules for any form of social structure,
whether that of a market, the state, or the voluntary associations
with which he was primarily concerned. Citizens, he argued, "con-

verse, they listen to one another and they are mutually stimulated to
all sorts of undertakings." As a result, they may even "learn to sur-
render their own will to that of all the rest and to make their exer-
tions subordinate to the common impulse."10
The classical tradition of sociology, for which Durkheim can serve
as an exemplar, showed an intense interest in religion even though it is
a highly secular tradition, skeptical about the history and claims of re-
ligion. (Here it bears a certain similarity to the religiously ironizing
spirit of Harold Innis.) Because language, religion, and ritual preceded
the world of practical action, it was in such forms that the search for
the integrative mechanisms of the social were sought. Inspired by the
complexity of anthropological studies of social reproduction, Durk-
heim invented notions of "collective representations" and "collective
conscience" to explain how societies were held intact in the midst of
conflict and strain. When he applied his analysis to modern societies,
though my chronology is off here, he tried to show how capitalist soci-
eties depended for their very existence and stability on an inherited,
precapitalist society—the so-called precontractual elements of con-
tract. Gesellschaft society, the society regulated by utility and contract,
could not work without the integrative mechanisms of gemeinschaft
society: nonutilitarian values, beliefs, traditions, and so on. To the old
slogan that money is to the West what kinship is to the rest, he added
that kinship performs a continuing integrative function in advanced so-
cieties. (The fact that all such mechanisms are now, in a Foucauldian
phase, seen as derivatives of the market and the power implicit in mar-
ket relations is a measure of our impoverishment.) In a sense, Durkheim
inverted the relations of base and superstructure: the capitalist economy
thrives on the root system of traditional society. Therefore, to destroy
that root system is to destroy the very possibility of a stable social order.
In many ways, this is precisely what capitalism does. It is implicit in
Joseph Schumpeter's mournful requiem to the creative destruction un-
leashed by capitalism;11 it was more directly faced by Charles Cooley's
assertion that capitalism promoted lawlessness as the condition of its
own rule.12
We live in a world where the imagination of the market, what
Harold Innis called the penetrative powers of the price system, have
transformed all social relations. And in this sense we, particularly in
the United States, are testing the proposition that the market can be
used as regulative mechanism for all these relations, subordinating pol-

itics, religion, culture, family, and community life to its rule. It would
require far more time and space than is available to show how interest
group politics and the instrumentalization of language that comes in its
wake, the rights revolution, the penetration of the law into family life
and the state into the community are but an extension of the market
mentality. It is an attempt to transform communication into an instru-
ment of manipulation or the pursuit of rights, that is, a weapon in the
competition for scarce social goods. These activities do not extend
communication but destroy it, and that was prescient truth in Harold
Innis's notion that improvements in communication make communica-
tion not only more difficult but also more problematic.
Economists recognize that market transactions do not include all
rational transactions. Measuring the spillover to the community from
individual market transactions is one approach to the nonmarket used
by economists. Externalities are a powerful tool for analyzing certain
problems in a market society. But externalities are fundamentally a the-
ory of market failure, and market failure is, as Mary Douglas notes,
"an elaborately backhanded way of studying the collective interest."13
The approach to communication and politics through market failure,
oddly enough, was attempted by the greatest American student of com-
munications, John Dewey, early in this century. The Public and Its
Problems is an analysis of the eclipse of the public by the forces of in-
dustry and the market and a plea for the restoration of the public as a
real force in the political realm.14 In that sense, it was squarely in the
tradition of Jefferson and the Federalist Papers: an attempt to recreate
a republican tradition of politics and social life adequate to the modern
era. The public in eclipse was the face-to-face public of direct interaction.
In trying to restore this public Dewey argued against individualism and
pointed to a shared domain of cooperative experience and identity for-
mation. Individualism, as I noted earlier, assumes that transactions
occur between discrete individual persons, bound only by contract,
and, properly speaking, such transactions concern only the individuals
directly involved. Dewey argued that a public interest arises whenever
there are indirect consequences of individual private transactions.
Therefore, the public and a public interest came into existence when-
ever externalities were created. But while externalities had steadily ex-
panded, the domain and competence of the public had steadily shrunk.
The interdependencies created by industry and commerce were no-
where matched by the interdependencies of public life. It was Dewey's

hope, forlorn as it turns out, that the new instruments of mass commu-
nication could transform the great society into a great community,
bring externalities into conscious awareness, and create or restore pub-
lic life on a scale matching that of industry.
Dewey created an unusually abstract and regressive definition of
the public, one defined by the function of dealing with externalities. Be-
cause the public interest became a mere externality of private markets,
the domain of the public and the community was a pure derivative of
private action. The public sphere, rather than possessing a prior and in-
tegral identity as a constraint on private life, was a mere residual to the
ever widening private sphere, continuously involved in a self-defeating
chase to catch up. Dewey was well intentioned enough. He was trying
to counter elitist notions of democracy put forth by Walter Lippmann
and a subsequent army of social scientists who reduced communication
to the transmission of information from those who monopolized
knowledge to those who needed to be controlled in its name.15 But
Dewey's necessary response gave away the essential tension that must
exist between markets and publics, between the self-regarding actions
of individuals and the other-regarding actions of communities. Econo-
mists have been willing to deal with externalities. However, the goal of
economics is to reduce externalities by viewing them as examples of
market failure and, therefore, to cut away the community in the name
of the individual and his or her self-regarding preferences. Economists
are even at times willing to admit to the existence of public goods as de-
fined by Paul Samuelson as goods that are freely available and from the
enjoyment of which no one can be excluded. But what counts as a pub-
lic good and a private good ultimately rests on a collective decision. As
Mary Douglas puts it, public availability is conferred by the collectivity
itself, but:
From the point of view of a community based on market relations,
public goods can only be envisaged as a residual class, a set of goods
which inherently escape from market conditions, products which
cannot be appropriated or costs which cannot be reclaimed. From
the standpoint of such a society the fact that transactions in these
goods have to be external to the market will appear as the crucial
characteristic. Being without bounds or centre the market type of
society is not well placed to think of collective goods except as resid-
ual to all the private good.16
The entire history of modern communications is the turning of the

resources not only of information but of meaning itself into a phenom-
enon of the market. This is true not only with those forms of meaning
that are mass produced and marketed and therefore subject to the ex-
plicit controls of the price system but extends as well to all other as-
pects of culture and meaning down to the most ordinary transactions
of daily living. This is what Harold Innis meant by the penetrative
powers of the price system.
In summary: the practices of communications and economics and the

disciplines that rationalize them contain two opposing conceptions of
the self, politics, and community life. The communications side of this
divide asserts that we are not bearers of selves wholly detached from
our aims and attachments; our preferences are not simply exogenous.
As Michael Sandel argues, "certain of our roles are constitutive of the
persons we are—as citizens of a country or members of a movement
or partisans of a cause." If we are "partly defined by the communities
we inhabit, then we must also be implicated in the purposes and ends
characteristic of those communities. . . . The story of my life is always
embedded in the story of those communities from which I derive my
identity—whether family or city, tribe or nation, party or cause." In a
communications view, the narratives and stories, and the purposes they
embrace, which emerge out of these communities, "make a moral dif-
ference, not merely a psychological one. They situate us in the world
and give our lives moral particularity."17
What are the practical differences, to paraphrase Sandel's question,
between communication understood through the prism of the market
and communication understood through the prism of community?
What are the practical differences between a politics of rights and in-
terests and a politics of the common good? If the party of communica-
tions is correct, our most pressing project is a moral and political one,
one that cannot be contained within the theory of markets or a politics
and morality derived from the market. The project is, to put it too sim-
ply, to revitalize our understanding of communications independent of
economics and to revitalize, as a consequence, the political possibilities
of the civic republican tradition.
Economists are willing to grant a conception of community based
on conventional individualist assumptions that take for granted the
self-interested motivations of persons. This account conceives commu-
nity and communication "in wholly instrumental terms and evokes the
image of a private society where individuals regard social arrangements
as a necessary burden and cooperate only for the sake of pursuing their
private ends." They may even be willing to imagine a community
"where individual interests are not uniformly antagonistic but in some
cases complementary and overlapping," where some may take account
of the welfare of others and seek to promote it, where interests overlap
the way indifferent surfaces overlap. Individuals may have motives that
are self-regarding but benevolent, but in any case the social is a deriva-
tive of the individual. What economists cannot admit is a strong sense
of the social, the communal, and the public, the strong view that
Michael Sandel, whose words I am quoting, outlines:
On this strong view, to say that the members of a society are bound
by a sense of community is not simply to say that a great many of
them profess communitarian sentiments and pursue communitarian
aims but rather that they conceive their identity—the subject and not
just the object of their feelings and aspirations—as defined to some
extent by the community of which they are a part. For them, com-
munity describes not just what they have as fellow citizens but what
they are, not a relationship they choose (as in a voluntary associa-
tion) but an attachment they discover, not merely an attribute but a
constituent of their identity.18
It was this sense of community that John Dewey rediscovered and
that Harold Innis never abandoned. Innis's analysis of the relations of
time and space was precisely an analysis of the difference between in-
strumental communities formed through markets and the extension of
the market into politics and social life and constituent communities in
which the right was prior to the good, identity prior to self-interest,
language and meaning prior to market information. His conception of
monopolies of knowledge was designed, though this would take much
elaboration, to describe the consequences for politics and culture when
economics overtakes the public sphere. In an Innis-like statement
Dewey returns at the end of The Public and Its Problems to a conclu-
sion, here stitched together, that remains as much of a challenge to us in
the age of globalization and the information society as it was in 192.7 at
the moment broadcasting entered society:
The generation of democratic communities and an articulate democ-
ratic public can be solved only in the degree in which local commu-
nal life becomes a reality. Signs, symbols, language are the means by
which a fraternally shared experience is ushered in and sustained.

Conversation has a vital import lacking in the fixed and frozen
words of written speech. Ideas which are not communicated, shared,
and reborn in expression are but broken and imperfect thought. Ex-
pansion of personal understanding and judgment can be fulfilled
only in the relations of personal intercourse in the local community.
We lie, as Emerson said, in the lap of an immense intelligence. But
that intelligence is dormant and its communications are broken until
it possesses the local community as its medium.19
Notes
1. Arjun Appadurai, "Disjunction and Difference in the Global Cultural Econ-
omy," in Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, ed. Mike Feather-
stone (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1990), 195-310.
2. Walter B. Wriston, The Twilight of Sovereignty (New York: Scribner, 1991).
3. Harold A. Innis, Empire and Communications (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1950), and Harold A. Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1951).
4. Donald N. McCloskey, The Research of Economics (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1985).
5. Steven Jones, The Economics of Conformism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984).
6. Mary Douglas, "The Normative Debate and the Origins of Culture," in Risk
and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 1991), 116-17.
7. Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1977).
8. Douglas, Risk and Blame, 159-60.
9. Ibid., 117.
10. Ibid., 117-18.
11. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (Boston: Unwin
Paperbacks, 1987).
12. Charles Cooley, Life and the Student Roadside Notes on Human Nature, Soci-
ety and Letters (New York: Knopf, 1917).
13. Douglas, Risk and Blame, 118.
14. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: Holt, 1917).
IS.Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan, 1911).
16. Douglas, Risk and Blame, 146.
17. Michael Sandel, Liberalism and Its Critics (New York: New York University
Press, 1984), 6-7.
18. Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1981), 148-50.
19. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 117-19.
Part II
Introduction / The Problem of
Journalism History, 1996
Michael Schudson
"The Problem of Journalism History," published in 1974, marked a

turn in the writing of journalism history. It prefaced by a few years a
critical reaction to standard accounts of the American news media. In
the next decade, "objectivity" as the celebrated ideal of professional
journalists would be recast as nothing more than a "strategic ritual."
The rise of journalism as an independent profession would be reframed
in a manner unflattering to journalists; journalism's professional norms
and values would be seen as the sociohistorical constructions of a com-
mercializing culture rather than as transcendent ideals to which mor-
tals were drawing ever closer.1 Journalistic triumphs in the Pentagon
papers, Watergate, and other truth-telling episodes during the Vietnam
years would even be reframed as exceptions to the rule whereby the
news media marginalized and trivialized antiwar protest.2
This newly critical edge in the study of journalism in the 19705 was
related to the changing climate of political criticism in and around
journalism itself. This was the era when journalists chafed at their tra-
ditions, notably the ideal of objectivity, and experimented with the
"new journalism," more literary, more openly subjective, and more self-
reflective about the process of newswriting itself.3 The academic coun-
terpart to this was a sharp rejection of the assumption that the history
of the American press was a history of progress toward freedom.
In a cold war world, the American press was easily portrayed as
a bastion of liberty and conscience in contrast to the propagandistic
media of the communist world. This superficial sociology of the press
79
80 / Introduction to Part II
did have its critics.4 Still, it had settled pretty comfortably and compla-
cently into conventional wisdom by the time Carey wrote his essay. In
the journalism schools, it doubled as a foundation myth for journalism
education. Part of Carey's achievement was to give this myth a name—
"Whig history"—that stuck. The further achievement of the essay is
more visible now than before: Carey criticized Whig history without
trashing it and held out an alternative model. That is what gives the
essay its continued currency.
A characteristic feature of Jim Carey's work is his constitutional in-
capacity to be contemptuous of any human efforts at understanding.
Carey criticized Whig history without evincing disdain for it. He did
hope it would soon be succeeded. But Whiggishness, he insisted, was
valuable, not wrong. It was simply used up. This generosity of spirit en-
abled Carey to see, in the 1985 interview, that the critical work of the
19708, turning Whig history on its head, was also useful—and also
mistaken. In the wake of the transformation of Eastern Europe and the
Soviet Union, in the wake of Tiananmen Square, it is much easier to
recognize that the virtues of the American news media deserve as much
attention as their defects.
Whig history not only held a belief that the metastory in American
journalism history is one of progress. It also took a stance of identify-
ing with journalism and journalists, as Carey observes in "Putting the
World at Peril." Journalism historians would have done well to worry,
like anthropologists, about the dangers of "going native." It is not sur-
prising that much of the best journalism history comes from people
with degrees in history rather than in journalism or communication.
Some of them teach in journalism or communication programs—James
Baughman, George Juergens, Thomas Leonard, John Nerone, for in-
stance—but many others do not, including the late Steven Botein,
Charles Clark, Sally Griffith, Michael McGerr, Donald Ritchie, and
Mark Summers.5
Carey is correct that his essay did not cause the change in the writ-
ing of journalism history. This is more evident today than it was earlier
because it is more obvious that the anti-Whig history of the 19708 was
only in bits and glimpses a fulfillment of Carey's vision. Carey's call for
a history of consciousness, a history of reporting, is the most fervent of
his pleas in these pieces, the most important, and the one most often
honored in the breach. But there are now elements of a history of re-
porting. There is a history of reporters, to which the work of Donald
Introduction to Part II I 81
Ritchie and Mark Summers has contributed.6 There is a history of re-

portorial practices and forms, where the work of Thomas Leonard and,
I like to think, my own work have been important.7 There is a growing
critical literature on journalism as a literary practice that could and
should inform historical research.8 Much of this—although the work
of Michael Cornfield is a notable exception—focuses on the front-page
news story. The larger "curriculum" of journalism that Carey insists we
survey has secured little notice among American journalism scholars.
But Carey's broadest challenge—a history of consciousness re-
vealed through the "report"—has by no means been achieved. His-
torians in history departments, though rarely attending to journalism,
have increasingly made valuable contributions in the adjacent field of
the "history of the book." This work has been valuably coordinated
through conferences and summer schools at the American Antiquarian
Society. In this literature, the focus is typically on the history of readers
and reading, on trying to establish an understanding of "conscious-
ness" or "mentality" from the study of how people incorporated
printed materials into their daily lives. Relatively little of this work has
centered on the reading of newspapers, but Richard Brown, William
Gilmore, and David Paul Nord have made notable contributions in this
domain.9
But probing the psyche of another age through its popular journal-
istic forms—this is work scarcely begun. Even when you grasp what is
clearly a part of the story, it is a matter of great difficulty to figure out
just what these changing forms portend for "consciousness." I traced
the history of the interview and of the summary lead in the period from
1860 to 1920, but I did not arrive at anything more than speculative
suggestions about what this notable transformation may have meant in
and for consciousness. It will require a historian of broad reading in the
cultural and intellectual history of late Victorian America to be able to
locate and articulate just where the changes in the "report" fit into other
aspects of changing consciousness. Edmund Wilson made some useful
suggestions in his chapters on Lincoln and Grant, but this task must be
much more fully developed into an understanding of late-nineteenth-
century realism in general—of which reporting was a vital piece.10
The task of relating journalism and the consciousness represented
in fiction at the end of the last century was seized in part by Shelley
Fisher Fishkin in showing the literary lessons that linked the journalis-
tic and literary careers of key writers—Theodore Dreiser, Mark Twain,
Stephen Crane.11 It is developed more ambitiously by Amy Kaplan in

The Social Construction of American Realism. In this study of the fic-
tion of William Dean Howells, Edith Wharton, and Theodore Dreiser,
Kaplan shows how realism serves as a response to new social tensions
of the day. She agrees with other contemporary critics who insist that
realism is not to be seen as a text standing outside society but as a cul-
tural or discursive practice within it. She writes of the realist novelist's
assertion of authorial voice in terms very close to what has been
claimed for the reporter's assertion of authority. The realists, she ar-
gues, were not only "engaged in the construction of a new kind of pub-
lic sphere" but also were "formulating a new public role for the author
in the mass market." They claimed an "expertise to represent the com-
monplace and the ordinary, at a time when such knowledge no longer
seemed available to common sense."12
Kaplan recognizes the newspaper as a literary form. She also sees
the way in which the realist novelists, Howells in particular, engaged
with it and distinguished their own efforts at realism from it. She does
not, however, examine the newspapers themselves.
It is not, of course, easy to do so. We have no "auteur theory" for
the newspaper. What is the object of study? Only the news story has a
conventional, individual author. But the reader may be touched by the
amalgam, the ensemble, the crazy-quilt multivoiced many-layered post-
modern object that the newspaper has been from its earliest days. Turn-
of-the-century thinkers wrote of the newspaper (and of the city and
of the fair) in terms very familiar to those who characterize the post-
modern aesthetic. But is the newspaper as a whole the creator of "con-
sciousness"? Or is the "story" the carrier of the age's sense of meaning?
If so, is it the realism of the "hard news" story? Or its formulaic fea-
tures? Or is it the melodrama of the human interest story?
We don't know. These questions have barely been addressed. The
shift away from Whiggism has not been a self-conscious move toward
the cultural history Carey urged. Rereading his essay now, I find it re-
markably prescient, precise, just plain right about the vital importance
of a cultural turn in journalism history. But the cultural turn has not
quite happened yet. In this respect, Carey has been much more than a
voice in the wilderness, but much less than the leader of an intellectual
movement.
The institutionalization of journalism history in schools of journal-
ism and mass communication has been a mixed blessing. It has kept the
Introduction to Part II I 83
subject alive, given it a market, provided it a moral purpose, and al-

lowed it to choose its intellectual bedfellows at will. But its practition-
ers have been too often isolated from the history profession at large,
operating their own rather anemic organizations connected to some
broad cultural trends but surprisingly innocent of others. The strength
this location might provide is to keep journalism history down-to-
earth, connected to real live journalists who are alumni and guest
speakers, and to students who intend to become journalists. Historians
in history departments are not routinely connected to the world they
write about in nearly so intimate a manner. Journalism history in the
journalism schools has the opportunity to be not just armchair com-
mentary but, in its own small way, a constitutive feature of journalistic
practice.
In 1985, before it became newly fashionable, Carey spoke of edu-
cation as citizenship. In this, he anticipated the broad sociological un-
derstandings of citizenship popular of late. Citizenship is not just a
political-legal status but "those social practices which enable a compe-
tent citizen to participate fully in the national culture."13
In this regard, journalism is a central institution for cultural citizen-
ship. But what kind of citizenship is imagined in and through the news
report? Do norms of objectivity or fairness keep the reader at bay
just as the state keeps people at arm's length? Did the old partisan
press imagine a more active citizen—but only at the cost of imposing
a "coercive cultural conformity"?14 The early press is sometimes ro-
manticized as a source of the intimate knowledge of public life that
makes active citizenship possible. But this seems to me a hasty conclu-
sion. Tocqueville himself made a hasty judgment here, attributing the
large number of small newspapers in the country to the necessity of
providing information about the many local seats of government. But
the local newspapers at the time Tocqueville visited printed scarcely
any information about their hometowns. Their aim was to make a liv-
ing for a printer, to boost local commerce, or to champion a candidate
or party for state or national office rather than to inform local citizens
about local matters. They operated still on the eighteenth-century
model that saw "news" as whatever it was that was printed in the
metropole, not whatever was interesting near home.
This is the political dimension of the consciousness-forming that
the news participates in. It offers a direction that Carey does not fully
address in the two essays that follow. Both of them, however, especially
the latter, strongly suggest that direction. This, I think, is part of the
challenge for journalism history in 1996—not only to truly undertake
to understand journalism as culture, just as Carey hoped, but to under-
stand it also as citizenship. This is not to revive Whiggism—not to see
news as an ingredient in the evolution of true citizenship—but to ana-
lyze citizenship itself as a cultural construct, and to see news as one fea-
ture in the construction and representation of its changing formations.
Notes
1. Gaye Tuchman, "Objectivity as Strategic Ritual: An Examination of Newsmen's
Notions of Objectivity," American Journal of Sociology 77 (1972.): 660-79; Michael
Schudson, Discovering the News (New York: Basic Books, 1978); and Daniel Schiller,
Objectivity and the News (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981).
2. Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1980).
3. See, for instance, Ronald Weber, ed., The Reporter as Artist: A Look at the New
Journalism (New York: Hastings House, 1974).
4. James Aronson, The Press and the Cold War (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,
1970).
5. James Baughman, The Republic of Mass Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1991); Steven Botein, "'Meer Mechanics' and an Open Press: The Busi-
ness and Political Strategies of Colonial American Printers," Perspectives in American
History 9 (1975); Charles Clark, The Public Prints (New York: Oxford University Press,
1994); Sally F. Griffith, Home Town News: William Allen White and the Emporia
Gazette (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); George Juergens, News from the
White House (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Thomas Leonard, The
Power of the Press (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Michael McGerr, The
Decline of Popular Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); John Nerone,
"The Mythology of the Penny Press," in Media Voices: An Historical Perspective, ed.
Jean Folkers (New York: Macmillan, 1988), 157-82; Donald Ritchie, Press Gallery
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991); Mark Summers, The Press Gang
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). David Nord, whose articles on
many aspects of journalism history have been exemplary, has a master's degree in history
and a doctorate in mass communication from the University of Wisconsin at Madison,
the communication program that has been the leader in turning out historically oriented
scholars. Nord's most influential articles include "Teleology and News: The Religious
Roots of American Journalism, 1630-1730," Journal of American History 77 (1990); and
"A Republican Literature: A Study of Magazine Readers and Reading in Late-Eighteenth-
Century New York," American Quarterly 40 (1988). People in journalism and commu-
nication programs have contributed to the somewhat separate tradition of scholarship
concerning the First Amendment and its history, although the most significant monument
in that arena is the work of historian Leonard Levy.
6. Ritchie, Press Gallery, and Summers, The Press Gang.
7. See Leonard, Power of the Press; Michael Schudson, "The Politics of Narrative
Form," Daedalus 3 (1982): 97-112; and Michael Schudson, "Question Authority: A
History of the News Interview in American Journalism, 18605-19305," Media, Culture
and Society 16 (1994): 565-87. Both Schudson essays are reprinted in Michael Schud-
son, The Power of News (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).
Introduction to Part 7 7 / 8 5
8. Barbie Zelizer, "Where Is the Author in American TV News? On the Construc-

tion and Presentation of Proximity, Authorship and Journalistic Authority," Semiotica
80 (1990): 37-48; Barbie Zelizer, Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the
Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1992); Michael Cornfield, "The Press and Political Controversy: The Case for Narrative
Analysis," Political Communication 9 (1992): 47-59; Michael Cornfield, "The Watergate
Audience: Parsing the Powers of the Press," in Media, Myths, and Narratives: Television
and the Press, ed. James W. Carey (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1988); and Norman
Sims, Literary Journalism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press,
1990).
9. Richard Brown, Knowledge Is Power (New York: Oxford University Press,
1989); William Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life (Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press, 1989); David Paul Nord, "A Republican Literature: A Study of Magazine
Readers and Reading in Late-Eighteenth-Century New York," in Reading in America:
Literature and Social History, ed. Cathy Davidson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1989); and David Paul Nord, "Working-Class Readers: Family, Community, and
Reading in Late-Nineteenth-Century America," Communication Research 2 (1986). The
"history of the book" has developed equally in European history, where noted practi-
tioners include Roger Chartier in France and Robert Darnton in the United States. See,
among their many works, Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern
France (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987); and Robert Darnton, The Kiss
ofLamourette (New York: Norton, 1990).
10. Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore (New York: Oxford University Press 1962).
11. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Prom Pact to Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity Press, 1985).
12. Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1988), 13.
13. Bryan S. Turner, "Postmodern Culture/Modern Citizens" in The Condition of
Citizenship, ed. Bart van Steenbergen (London: Sage, 1940), 159.
14. Michael McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics, 21.
4 / The Problem of Journalism History
The study of journalism history remains something of an embarrass-

ment. Can it be justified as a form of knowledge, an entry into the cur-
riculum, an activity to which one can usefully devote one's professional
life? By our behavior we answer the question affirmatively and yet a
doubt remains. Each generation of journalism historians has been dis-
satisfied with the nature of our knowledge and the forms of our pre-
sentation. Writing in a short-lived newsletter, Cor onto, about 1950,
Ted Peterson argued:
In many schools and departments of journalism, history of journal-
ism is the least rewarding course in the curriculum. The reasons are
various. One is that all too often history is the orphan, or at least
the grubby little cousin, who must depend on charity for its care and
feeding. Young instructors teach it from sufferance; senior faculty
members teach it because they have worked up a set of notes that it's
a shame to waste. They drone about the dull, dead past and somno-
lent students cache away a store of names, dates, and places to see
them through the cheerless examination season.
Peterson finally concluded that the trouble was not intrinsic to the
subject matter, but in the way journalism historians had handled their
material. He argued that Frank Luther Mott had laid down a solid fac-
tual foundation for the field and that we now needed "interpretive
studies utilizing the factual information about the press, per se, that
Mott and his predecessors have given us." Peterson in Magazines in the
Twentieth Century and Edwin Emery in The Press and America have
86
The Problem of Journalism History I 87
attempted just that: building an interpretation on the raw data, I think

it is fair to say, Ralph Casey's elucidation of the great interpersonal
forces affecting the press as the spine of their story.
Despite these achievements, and there are others that might be
cited, the thought remains that our subject matter has not been domes-
ticated, or to invert the metaphor, has been so tamed that all vitality
has been drained from the enterprise. It has recently been argued that
journalism history is dull and unimaginative, excessively trivial in the
problems chosen for study, oppressively chronological, divorced from
the major current of contemporary historiography, and needlessly pre-
occupied with the production of biographies of editors and publishers.
As in 1950, the persistent apathy of student response to historical stud-
ies is offered as proof of the criticism.
There is truth in all these charges, though I think they often mis-
take the fish story for the fish. For example, student response to all
history, not just journalism history, has been in decline. This is because
the American sense of history has always been lamentably thin and
students are drawn, for reasons Tocqueville recognized, to the more
abstract and generalizing social sciences. Our major response to this
must be to accept a challenge: the major problem with American social
thought is its scientific and ahistorical character, and our dual task
remains a thoroughgoing critique of the behavioral sciences and the
permeation of our studies and our students' thought with historical
consciousness.
Furthermore, the existing critiques of journalism history are super-
ficial: they fail to get at a deeper set of historiographical problems. For
example, we have defined our craft both too narrowly and too mod-
estly, and, therefore, constricted the range of problems we study and
the claims we make for our knowledge. We have, in general, failed to
base our work on an adequate sense of historical time, and we have
likewise ignored the most fruitful research of modern historians that
might serve as the basis of fresh interpretations of our subject matter.
I cannot here deal with all these problems. However, one paradox-
ical issue can be treated, namely, that the most fundamental failing in
journalism history is but the reverse of our success. Our field has been
dominated by one implicit paradigm of interpretation—an interpreta-
tion I will call, following Herbert Butterfield, a Whig interpretation of
journalism history. This interpretation, which is absorbed in the invisi-
ble culture of graduate school, has so exclusively dominated the field
that we do not even have, to mention the most obvious example, a

thoroughgoing Marxist interpretation of press history.
Herbert Butterfield used the notion of a Whig interpretation to de-
scribe the marriage of the doctrine of progress with the idea of history.
The Whig interpretation of journalism history, to put it all too briefly,
views journalism history as the slow, steady expansion of freedom and
knowledge from the political press to the commercial press, the set-
backs into sensationalism and yellow journalism, the forward thrust
into muckraking and social responsibility. Sometimes written in classic
terms as the expansion of individual rights, sometimes in modern terms
as growth of the public's right to know, the entire story is framed by
those large impersonal faces buffeting the press: industrialization, ur-
banization, and mass democracy.
The problem with this interpretation, and the endless studies and
biographies executed within its frame, is simply that it is exhausted;
it has done its intellectual work. One more history written against
the background of the Whig interpretation would not be wrong—just
redundant.
Much journalism history is now devoted to proving the indubitable.
In art the solemn reproduction of the achievements of the past is called
academism. And that is the term that describes much journalism his-
tory. It is not that the Whig interpretation was wrong or failed to teach
us anything, but it is moribund and to pursue it further is to guarantee
dead ends and the solemn reproduction of the achieved. Our historians
are so set on this interpretation that they largely rewrite one another,
adding a literary cupola here, a vaulted arch there, but fail to look at
the evidence anew and afresh. We are suffering from what, in another
context, Morris Janowitz has called "the dead hand of competence."
Our studies need to be ventilated, then, by fresh perspectives and
new interpretations even more than by additional data. I would like to
suggest that developing the cultural history of journalism might inspire
such a ventilation. In fact, I take the absence of any systematic cultural
history of journalism to be the major deficiency in our teaching and
research.
I place an emphasis on cultural history because I think we should
consider anew the objectives of our historical effort and the materials
of our craft. We often think of our efforts as aimed at reconstructing
the events, actions, institutions, and organizations of the past. We wish
to know when a particular newspaper was founded, the progression of
its editors and editorial policies, when and how particular technology
was innovated and diffused, when particular judicial decisions or leg-
islative acts affecting the press were promulgated, under what circum-
stances and with what effect. There are innumerable such studies,
which, knitted together into a general history, create that documentary
record known as journalism history. This documentary record, when
subject to certain rules of interpretation, forms the positive content of
the discipline: an interpreted record of the events and actions of the
past. This is, in general, what we choose to remember of the past.
However, there is another dimension of the past, related to this
documentary record, but not simply derivable from it. This dimension
we call cultural, and I illustrate it with an artlessly simple example
drawn from John William Ward.
The documentary record of military history includes an attempt to
determine, for example, how, when, and under what circumstances
Caesar crossed the Rubicon. But this is not the only dimension of that
event and, for many purposes, not the most important dimension
either. The cultural history of that event is an attempt to reconstruct
what Caesar felt in crossing the Rubicon: the particular constellation of
attitudes, emotions, motives, and expectations that were experienced
in that act.1 To verify that Caesar crossed the Rubicon is to say nothing
of the significance of the event, a significance that derived from Cae-
sar's defiance of a convention giving Republican law authority over the
soldiers of the state.
Cultural history is not concerned merely with events but with the
thought within them. Cultural history is, in this sense, the study of con-
sciousness in the past.2 As such, it derives from three assumptions: first,
that consciousness has a history; second, that as Charles Cooley never
tired of arguing, the solid facts of society are the imaginations we have
of one another; and third, that while human actions illustrate in a gen-
eral way a certain uniformity across time and space, the imaginations
behind such actions illustrate a considerably wider variety. Most peo-
ple make love and war, have children and die, are educated and work
constrained by the physical limits of biology, nature, and technology.
But for us to understand these events we must penetrate beyond mere
appearance to the structure of imagination that gives them their signif-
icance. If most men march off to war, they do so in the grip of quite dif-
ferent imaginations: some march to recover holy lands for their god,
others to protect their nations from foreign devils, others reluctantly
and sullenly as the exploited slaves of an imperial power. The facts of

warfare give none of this information directly, but the significance of
military action lies in how it is imagined.
The task of cultural history, then, is this recovery of past forms of
imagination, of historical consciousness. The objective is not merely to
recover articulate ideas or what psychologists nowadays call cognitions
but rather the entire "structure of feeling": "The most difficult thing to
get hold of, in studying any past period, is this felt sense of the quality
of life at a particular time and place: a sense of the ways in which the
particular activities combined into a way of thinking and living."3 We
want to show, in short, how action made sense from the standpoint of
historical actors: how did it feel to live and act in a particular period of
human history?
How does all this relate to journalism history? Our failure to de-
velop the cultural history of journalism has led us to exclude from our
literature any serious attention to what I believe is the central history
story we have to tell, namely, the history of reporting. We have legal
histories of the press, institutional histories, technical histories, even
some economic history of the press. But the history of reporting re-
mains not only unwritten but also largely unconceived. The central
story in journalism has been largely banished from our remembrance
of things past.
Prior—both logically and chronologically—to journalism's being
an institution, or business, or set of rights, or body of technology, jour-
nalism is a cultural act, a literary act. The technology of journalism ex-
isted prior to news or newspapers. Journalism is essentially a state of
consciousness, a way of apprehending, of experiencing the world. The
central idea in journalism is the "idea of a report" and the changing no-
tions of what has been taken to be an adequate report of the world. Be-
cause we are a news-saturated people it may seem strange to argue that
the desire to know, understand, and experience the world by getting
news or reports about it is really a rather strange appetite. But it is less
obtuse to suggest that there is a vast difference between what is taken
to be an adequate report of the world by those who queue up before
Tom Wolfe and the new journalism versus those readers wholly satis-
fied by the New York Times. In fact, our failure to understand journal-
ism as a cultural form has left us virtually bereft of intelligent commen-
tary on the "new journalism."
The central and as yet unwritten history of journalism is the his-
tory of the idea of a report: its emergence among a certain group of

people as a desirable form of rendering reality, its changing fortunes,
definitions, and redefinitions over time (that is, the creation and dis-
appearance of successive stylistic waves of reporting), and eventually, I
suppose, its disappearance or radical reduction as an aspect of human
consciousness.
I call this a cultural history for the following reason. By culture I
merely mean the organization of social experience in human conscious-
ness manifested in symbolic action. Journalism is then a particular so-
cial form, a highly particular type of consciousness, a particular orga-
nization of social experience. This form of consciousness can only be
grasped by its history and by comparing it to older forms of conscious-
ness (mythic, religious) that it partially displaced and with other forms
with which it emerged and has interacted—the scientific report, the
essay, and aesthetic realism.
When we grasp the history of journalism, we grasp one form of
human imagination, one form—shared by writer and reader—in which
reality has entered consciousness in an aesthetically satisfying way.
When we study changes in journalism over time, we are grasping a sig-
nificant portion of the changes that have taken place in modern con-
sciousness since the Enlightenment. But to do this we must temporarily
put aside our received views of what journalism is and examine it
afresh as a cultural form, a literary act, parallel to the novel, the essay,
and the scientific report. Like these other works, journalism is a cre-
ative and imaginative work, a symbolic strategy; journalism sizes up
situations, names their elements, and names them in a way that contains
an attitude toward them. Journalism provides what Kenneth Burke
calls strategies for situations—"strategies for selecting enemies and al-
lies, for socializing losses, for warding off evil eye, for purification, pro-
pitiation and desanctification, consolation, and vengeance, admonition
and exhortation, implicit commands or instructions of one sort or an-
other." Journalism provides audiences with models for action and feel-
ing, with ways to size up situations, and it shares these qualities with all
literary acts.
Journalism is not only literary art: it is industrial art. Stylistic de-
vices such as, for example, the inverted pyramid, the five-W (who,
what, when, where, and why) lead, and associated techniques are as
much a product of industrialization as tin cans. The methods, proce-
dures, and canons of journalism were developed not only to satisfy the
demands of the profession but also to meet the needs of industry and to
turn out a mass-produced commodity. These canons are enshrined in
the profession as rules of communication. They are, like the methods of
the novelists, determiners of what can be written and in what way. In
this sense the techniques of journalism define what is considered to be
real: what can be written about and how it can be understood. From
the standpoint of the audience the techniques of journalism determine
what the audience can think—the range of what is taken to be real on a
given day. If something happens that cannot be packaged by the indus-
trial formula, then, in a fundamental sense, it has not happened: it can-
not be brought to the attention of the audience or can be presented
only in distorted fashion.
When we study the history of journalism we are principally study-
ing a way in which people in the past have grasped reality. We are
searching out the intersection of journalistic style and vocabulary,
created systems of meaning, and standards of reality shared by writer
and audience. We are trying to root out a portion of the history of
consciousness.
Journalism as a cultural form is not fixed and unchanging. Jour-
nalism has changed as it has reflected and reconstituted human con-
sciousness. Journalism not only reveals the structure of feeling of previ-
ous eras, it is the structure of feeling of past eras, or at least significant
portions of it.
For example, my colleague Albert Kreiling has tried to show how
the history of the black press is much more than the documentary
records of black papers and editors, successes and failures, or quarrels
among black editors and writers. He has tried to describe the black
press first and foremost as a record of black consciousness—its origins
and transformation—in modern times. We do not study the black press
because it passively reflects black consciousness; the press is not merely
a source of data about black social history. Black consciousness is
forged in, it exists in the black press: the arena where black conscious-
ness is created and controlled by the canons of black journalism. It is
not the only place, of course: one need not derogate art, pulpit, and
politics to show that black journalism does not passively reflect black
consciousness. To study the history of the black press or any other
press is to recover the consciousness of people in the past and to relate
that record to the present.
The Problem of Journalism. History I 93
There is, however, another and better explored side to the cultural
history of the press. The press itself is an expression of human con-
sciousness. Whether we think of the press as an institution, a set of
legal prerogatives regarding expression, or a body of technology, it is,
first of all, an expression of a certain ethos, temper, or imagination. The
press embodies a structure of feeling derived from the past, and as this
underlying structure of feeling changes, the press itself is altered. The
press should be viewed as the embodiment of consciousness. Our his-
tories in turn must unpack how a general consciousness becomes insti-
tutionalized in procedures for news gathering and reporting, forms of
press organization, and definitions of rights and freedoms.
We have made some progress here for we have realized that any un-
derstanding of the freedom and rights of journalists must take into ac-
count the changing fortunes of general legal consciousness identified by
terms such as natural law, legal realism, and sociological jurisprudence.
That body of literature often called "four theories of the press" has
also attempted to show how general patterns of consciousness iden-
tified by political handles such as liberalism and Marxism have been
institutionalized into specific patterns of press organization, news per-
formance, and definitions of freedoms and rights. However, this work
has never gone far enough, either historically or comparatively, and
suffers from an overly intellectualistic cast. It has not shown how forms
of consciousness shared in narrow intellectual circles have become
generally shared and how they have been altered in this process of
democratization.
The cultural history of journalism would attempt to capture that
reflexive process wherein modern consciousness has been created in the
symbolic form known as the report and how in turn modern con-
sciousness finds institutionalized expression in journalism.
Our major calling is to look at journalism as a text that said some-
thing about something to someone: to grasp the forms of conscious-
ness, the imaginations, the interpretations of reality journalism has
contained. When we do this the presumed dullness and triviality of our
subject matter evaporates and we are left with an important corner of
the most vital human odyssey: the story of the growth and transforma-
tion of the human mind as formed and expressed by one of the most
significant forms in which the mind has conceived and expressed itself
during the past three hundred years—the journalistic report.
Notes
1. John William Ward, Red, White and Blue (New York: Oxford University Press,
1969), 4-5.
2. To do this requires that we overcome the prejudice against consciousness as a his-
torical fact. A useful place to begin this task is with Erich Neumann's The Origins and
History of Consciousness (New York: Pantheon, 1954).
3. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (New York: Harper and Row,
1966), 47.
5 / "Putting the World at Peril":
A Conversation with James W. Carey
James W. Carey's influence on journalism historians can be traced in

part through the pages of Journalism History, for he wrote the first ar-
ticle appearing in the first volume of Journalism History. That article,
"The Problem of Journalism History," has been taken as the starting
point by more than a dozen authors of later Journalism History articles
on methods and interpretive approaches, while it has been cited as a
key source by numerous additional writers in this and other journals.
Tom Reilly, Journalism History's founding editor, interviewed
Carey in August 1985 at the annual convention of the Association for
Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in Memphis.
Q: In your 1974 Journalism History article, "The Problem of Journal-
ism History," you were critical of the state of journalism research and
writing. Has anything changed since then?
jwc: I would still be critical of the literature on journalism history; I'm
drawn to criticism as a moth is to light. I would not be critical in the
same way, however. Much has changed since 1974. There is a much
more diverse and varied body of writing in the field than there was then
and in the years immediately previous to the article. I argued in 1974
that the field was dominated by one implicit paradigm of interpretation
that viewed the history of the press as one steadily advancing the cause
of freedom and knowledge. I called that a "Whig interpretation of
journalism history," using the phrase much as Herbert Butterfield had
in his elegant little book.
95
96 / "Putting the World at Peril"
Today there is no longer any one point of view or fixed school of

historiography or single center of training that dominates journalism
history. Journalism education, at least in the historical area, has changed.
Journalism historians now draw upon much more diverse sources of
inspiration, pursue different methods, and conceive the subject matter
in quite different ways. I take this ventilation of the field to be generally
good, although I do have some reservations here and there.
The "social capsule" of journalism history has broken open for
reasons that have little to do with history research and writing per se.
Journalism history as a field reflects many of the social forces that have
been impinging on Americans generally over the past decade, forces
that encourage new types of diversity. These forces have brought about
changes in the categories through which people identify themselves and
work their experience into knowledge. We have been going through a
period of social disorganization in the sense that Chicago sociologists
use that term: a loosening of the coordinates of individual identity, a
breakdown in fixed habits and standards of life. This social disorgani-
zation has the effect of setting off social movements through which in-
dividuals redefine themselves and their world.
In the 18908, during another period of social disorganization, John
Dewey and others later grouped into the sociological school of sym-
bolic interactionism attempted to describe how people interacted with
one another in ways that led them to develop a new sense of reality. In
the 18905 industrialization, the decline of the farm and agriculture, the
growth of cities, mass immigration from abroad and from rural areas—
what the history books generalize as industrialization, urbanization,
and democratization—had the effect of rendering inadequate the social
order into which people had to fit themselves. The old identity answers
formed around religion, region, community, and agricultural work no
longer served to describe people's experience to themselves, including
their experience of themselves.
As a result, a series of social movements were set in motion: pop-
ulism, progressivism, nativism, temperance, and so on. Some were
explicitly political, some largely cultural. But all, whether backward
looking or forward looking, were attempts by people to find new ways
of fitting into the social world, new ways of answering the question
"Who am I?" as a political, social, economic animal. The categorical
structures that emerged out of that period—Protestant, Catholic, Jew,
"Putting the World at Peril" I 97
atheist; working class, middle class; Irish, Italian, WASP—held for much
of the twentieth century.
In thinking about this it is important to understand that, to take
one of the identity terms, ethnicity was invented in the 18908. There
were no Italians in Italy, only in the United States. In the old country,
people were from Sicily, or Genoa, or Palermo; here they were Italians.
There they were from Cork or Mayo, Munster or Ulster, here they were
Irish. Ethnic groups were made in the diaspora, in the immigration, not
at home. In the 18905 people built new ways of belonging to society
that were new structures of feeling and experience, new ways of an-
swering the insistent question "Who are you?" A characteristic answer
was "I'm working class and Irish and Catholic." Such an answer told
you not only who you were but also who your children would be, what
your lineage was, what your life chances were, and, among other things,
how you would vote.
That categorical structure held until after World War II, when a
new set of changes in the economy, in housing patterns, in educational
experiences came to the fore. The blue-collar economy and workforce
was steadily dismantled and replaced by a pink- and white-collar work-
force and an "information" rather than an industrial economy. Sub-
urbs grew at the expense of inner cities; new patterns of social and
geographic mobility emerged. Taken together, these complex changes
rendered ineffective the traditional ways in which people described
themselves. People remained in some sense religious and ethnic, but in
altogether altered ways. Loyalties to cities, regions, political parties, in-
stitutions, even occupations attenuated.
In the 19608 intellectual and social identity started to become reor-
ganized and, as in the 18905, a new set of social movements was set in
motion. Feminism emerged as a new kind of ethnicity for a new era.
The complex racial landscape, once made up of Celts, Anglo-Saxons,
Teutons, Franks, and Slavs, became redefined into black and white.
The ethnic landscape disappeared into a racial one in which the very
meaning of racial identity was transformed. Divisions of race and gen-
der were superimposed over and significantly depressed the previously
existing categorical structure of social identity. Regional differences de-
clined except as markers of "lifestyle." Northerners, Southerners, East-
erners, and Westerners continued to exist, but they largely came to sig-
nify the differences weather makes for lifestyle.
Some of these changes spilled directly into historical writing, so
that we got women's or feminist history, black or racial history. But

that direct expression masks the fact that all of us who have lived
through the complex interactional process, who have attempted to fig-
ure out personal identity in relation to these complex social move-
ments, end up seeing history, or being in history—including the history
of the press—rather differently. That history had never quite assimi-
lated labor history, religious history, the history of ethnic groups in re-
lation to the "mainstream" press. Now all of a sudden the mainstream
press had to be reexamined in relation to women, for example, and the
old "paradigm" of the Whig history had very little in its conceptual
tool kit to help one in doing that.
As a result of these social changes, new movements of historical
writing that would allow for a "new history" of a "new social structure"
emerged. This history rereading, in turn, required new concepts and
methods. Reading the press against, say, black/white-male/female rela-
tions is rather different than reading against a grid of labor/bourgeois-
religious/secular. Not only are new documents needed but old docu-
ments must be reread against a new background. All of a sudden the
field starts to crack open, new possibilities are revealed, a new diversity
is permitted and in many cases encouraged because it can answer ques-
tions that are not merely academic but insistently personal. All scholar-
ship is, after all, autobiography.
The historical reassessment from 1974 forward, which involves a
lot of dubious enterprises, including the sacking and pirating of French
philosophy, stems from a changed social landscape and results in a
changed historical landscape—a changed landscape, but a shapeless
one as well. At some point the new distinctions and concepts will settle
out and down and become more or less permanent parts of our inheri-
tance, but that may take another generation.
I do not know which of the distinctions will retain their power as
both social and historical categories because this remains an open set of
possibilities. Are people more likely to think of themselves along the
lines of gender or of race? That does not exhaust the possibilities, for
we have also been rethinking the political categories of liberal, radical,
and conservative. But at some point, just as notions such as working
class, Catholic, Jew, doctor, and so on settle out as acceptable cate-
gorical structures, and others, such as nativist and immigrant, were
discarded, we will produce a new symbolic social structure. How jour-
nalism history will then settle out—thematically, theoretically, identifi-
cationally, methodologically—is something we won't know for another

decade.
Q: How would you like to see the field of journalism history settle out
thematically?
jwc: Let me answer that with a more or less philosophical comment. I
would like to see the field settle out into a conceptual vocabulary and a
series of methods that constantly expand the category of "us," the peo-
ple we are like, and constantly diminish the category of the "other," the
people we are not like. We have to preserve the intellectual tension that
comes from merger and division, that comes from pitting private iden-
tity against public identity, that maintains a complex private categori-
cal structure but merges it into a more or less uniform public identity of
the citizen.
You can build intellectual and social systems that are radically re-
ductionist and narrowing; "I'm a historian, intellectual historian, I'm a
feminist, black intellectual historian," and so on until we can only meet
as committees of three. Or you can attempt to preserve these categories
because they answer to the question of who we are and pose significant
intellectual and historical problems, but continuously expand and merge
these limiting categories. Kenneth Burke said one time in conversation
something like the following: When I talk to another Presbyterian, I
talk about Presbyterianism; if I talk to a Catholic, I talk about Chris-
tianity; if I talk to a Jew, I talk about the Judeo-Christian tradition; if I
talk to a Muslim, I talk about Western civilization; if I talk to a Bud-
dhist, I talk about the human community. Every division is merely an
opportunity for a merger.
Certainly the most paradoxical fact of our time is that the civil
rights and the women's movements, which at their outset aimed at de-
pressing and eliminating the last public stigmata inhibiting and dis-
figuring full social participation—race and gender—have ended up in-
scribing race and gender more deeply into public consciousness. The
first thing I hope is that we reorganize the conceptual structure of our
work in such a way that we keep enlarging the sense of our identifica-
tion with what other people are doing and progressively enlarge the
boundaries of human life. And that we avoid becoming so narrow, so
specialized in either social or intellectual terms, so tuned in to a partic-
ular and peculiar psychology, that the human community shrinks.
At the level of historiography, that means that we think of our-
selves more and more as scholars and less and less as historians or
whatever. We need to say there is a common human enterprise in which
all scholars—whether they are physicists or philosophers, historians or
sociologists, historians of journalism or historians of the labor force—
are engaged. These enterprises always have a theoretical and a reflex-
ive-argumentative dimension. Doing history is not so radically differ-
ent from doing sociology, doing sociology is not so different from
doing philosophy, doing philosophy is not so radically different from
doing physics. If we get really good at this we may also realize that
doing physics is not much different from doing art and that doing art is
not much different from doing religion. In each of these separate activ-
ities one sees common humanity.
People should feel less of a need to identify themselves as historians
or journalism historians or, please God, a member of a history division.
They should say, well, of course I am a member of the history division,
but that exhausts only a small part of what I am. I am part of a wider
scholarly and intellectual community and, still more importantly, a
part of a wider community of citizens.
I can answer the question in a slightly different way. A life of re-
sponsible citizenship, a life without anger and resentment, depends
upon our constantly enlarging the human community with which we
identify, of seeing not only that we are men and women but that every
woman is a man and every man a woman; that there is no human ex-
perience so foreign or so alien that we cannot, at the least, identify with
it. Raymond Williams says somewhere in one of his early books that
the reason we need a common culture is that we cannot live without
one. I think he has it right.
At a much lower level, when I wrote the Journalism History piece I
was arguing against the tendency, as pronounced now and then, to di-
vide the world into those who do theory and those who do history.
That division is inscribed into the structure of our professional soci-
eties, but it is an absurd division. These organizational divisions need
not disappear, because they are useful devices through which papers get
written and conventions organized. But their cognitive and emotional
significance has to decline so that they do not identify what we do or
who we are. They are absolutely arbitrary and absolutely debilitating
for intellectual work, for they cut off argument and debate almost pre-
cisely at the point where such argument must go forward.
Q: It sounds like a sort of historical global village, or an academic

global village.
jwc: It is, I suppose, but I have always had difficulty with the some-
what bucolic concept of a global village. That is an old idea that can be
traced back at least to Samuel Morse. But I do believe that the aca-
demic community as a whole is more important than the artificial divi-
sions between the sciences and humanities and between the several dis-
ciplines within each. That is because I believe education is the principal
mission of universities and that everything a university does is and
must be an aspect of teaching. It is this larger academic community in
which I want to have primary membership. So, I suppose you have
found one way of putting the case.
Q: Is one of the uses of history to broaden the study of journalism?
jwc: My general answer is yes. One of the important tasks of historical
writing is to give or restore voice to people who for whatever reason
have been without a voice in the community. In some sense history has
silenced them. Feminist historical writing and black historical writing
have recovered the voices of the powerless. I am sure there is much
more to be done on distinctive regional and class voices. At the time
I wrote the piece for Journalism History relatively little was known
in the United States of the kind of anonymous history that was so im-
portant in Europe. Peter Lazlett's The World We Have Lost, which I
had read a few years before, is an example of such writing, of what be-
came better known as the history of the peasant, of the voiceless, of
those who did not leave written records, of those who did not lead a
life of power.
This has been an extremely democratizing tendency in historical
scholarship that was, relatively speaking, bypassing American history
and journalism history to an even larger degree. In focusing on a few
powerful editors and newspapers, journalism history was leaving un-
studied some of the straightforward categories of historical subjects
such as the labor press. The documentary record was not to be taken
seriously if it was a record of what the working class, as opposed to the
middle class, felt and said; it was not to be taken seriously if it was a
record of what the marginal, deviant, and rebellious said as opposed to
the straight, approved, and established.
There are people who remain in these unrecovered regions, and I
thought, and still feel, that journalism history might recover these his-
torical possibilities. Such recovery would increase the variety of human

experience that is there for us to consult and by representing a wider
number of people make our scholarship more various. That may also
require trying to do more with certain classes of people who worked
within journalism but about whom we know little. We know a lot
about editors of given periods but we know little about reporters.
There are people within the standard role structure of journalism
whose contribution or whose imprint is relatively unrecorded.
Q: Given all this, how do you look at disciplines, departments, fields
of study?
jwc: In a way, I don't look at them, or I don't care about them, or I
think they are insignificant. Disciplines divide up the world into things
I and my friends do versus things done by others. We need disciplines
because we need administrative units, departments, sequences, pro-
grams, associations. They help us get the daily work of distributing
money and educating students done. But otherwise these structures
should not be taken seriously. In fact, all important work is done in
the interdisciplines. You shouldn't take disciplines seriously because
you can never predict in advance where you are going to find intelli-
gence, including intelligence on the problem that interests you at the
moment.
We can pretend, if you wish, that the group of people who gather
under the discipline "communication research" own the study of com-
munications, stake it out as their piece of intellectual turf. But in order
to do this they must develop precise and defined notions of what com-
munications is in ways that make it distinguishable from all other so-
cial processes; they must show how it is not politics, not economics,
not anything else for that matter. In the process they mutilate the in-
tellectual concerns that brought them to study communications in the
first place. The problem with this compartmentalization is that it will
not work operationally. At any given moment the people writing
about communications under the disciplinary umbrella of communi-
cations may have absolutely nothing to say about the phenomena in
question. Do we then close down the enterprise? "All right children,
the work is over, the subject is dead, we don't have anything to say
about the matter; let's pack up and go home." Of course you don't
do that.
If the "discipline" dries up, you have to go looking at the work
of shepherds tending different sheep in different valleys. You have to

look outside the discipline for people who have something interest-
ing to say about the phenomena in question. Why build barriers be-
tween disciplines in the first place, if you are going to have to even-
tually batter them down whenever the going gets rough, when the
problem is intractable or the disciplinary scholarship loses its spark,
verve, interest? The quest for the definition of a field is a bemusing en-
terprise regularly engaged in by scholars, particularly from marginal
disciplines.
Of course we tend to rule out so much good scholarship because it
does not fit within the discipline when we actually should be including
much more. If one wants to understand communications one would be
well advised to read much more than the literature of communications,
and if one wants to understand journalism history one better read very,
very widely outside of journalism history. One must not only pay at-
tention to what historians in general are doing but also to the best
work in sociology, anthropology, and a wide range of fields. Moreover,
to live within a discipline or field—journalism history, for example—is
to commit oneself to a life of unbelievable dullness.
One has to ask the question "Who is it that is writing, independent
of discipline, the most interesting and provocative work on the ques-
tions that concern society, social life, our common humanity—work we
ought to bring to bear on our own research?" It may be that other his-
torians are doing such work. But there are no guarantees. At any given
moment the historical discipline may have dried up and so it is neces-
sary to go elsewhere—to literary criticism or law or business.
Q: Can journalism historians still teach relevant lessons to students
today and to practitioners in the field?
jwc: Of course they can. They can teach relevant lessons to anyone and
everyone. Of course, they must take up important problems if they are
to do so; they must take up problems that are of more than antiquarian
interest, problems that open us up to the future as well as the past, that
cast light on our ability to live as free people, to function as a liberal
democracy, problems that relate to the health, tradition, and outlook of
our community. There is no intrinsic limitation, although we may not
be smart enough, intelligent enough, to pull it off. But there is nothing
in the enterprise that makes relevant lessons from journalism history
impossible.
Q: One problem today is that a lot of teachers in the field are con-
fronted by demands for relevance and practicality in what they are
teaching in the classroom. And this being a very practical-minded dis-
cipline—field, I should say—there is not much support for history in
the journalism curriculum.
jwc: You will never win that argument with a student or indeed any-
one else as long as you divide up the curriculum into those courses that
are practical and those courses that are impractical or academic. If
there are two kinds of subjects, practical and impractical, history will
always end up in the category of the impractical. You have to reformu-
late the entire argument in a way that blurs this distinction.
A suggestion as to how to go about doing that was made by the
late Richard Hofstadter in his book Anti-lntellectualism in America. In
a chapter on businessmen and the business press he points out that the
meaning of "practical" to nineteenth-century businessmen was quite
different from the meaning we give to "practical" today. He suggests
that businessmen then tended to believe that the world of business was
the most open, changeable, unpredictable sphere in which one could
operate. There was, therefore, no way of predicting in advance what
it was that a businessman might find useful in working within this
domain.
Business was looked upon as a cultivated, civilizing, cosmopolitan
activity precisely because it was not narrow, it could not be narrow in
its outlook, skill, or knowledge. Was it good to know languages? Of
course it was good to know languages. How could one predict when
the knowledge of another language might open up an opportunity in a
foreign market, or permit one to better understand the conditions of
trade in a strange and irregular culture? Was it good to know history?
Of course it was good to know history. If you knew what people tried
in another time, you might be able to reinvent an opportunity, devise a
new strategy that avoids the pitfalls of a failed one.
In other words, here is a view that suggests that everything is use-
ful because life is too open and unpredictable to be narrowed into the
routines and algorithms that pass for the practical today. The only re-
striction on people is that they don't have time to learn everything, so
choices must be made. But that dilemma suggests a sound education as
the key to keeping an open and fertile mind, one not bogged down in
detail and routine, as the conditions of lifetime learning.
The argument your question refers to is a little different. It is still
an anti-intellectual argument, however, because it claims that all you

need to be a success is a relatively narrow body of knowledge. All our
experience refutes that claim and we have a responsibility not to let stu-
dents get their way in these matters. If history is conceived of as some-
thing impractical, as outside a narrow band of professional knowledge,
then it is hard to see how a knowledge of history fits into life as a
whole. Yet I do not know how to put narrow boundaries around what
it is that journalists should know. They have to know so much if we are
to survive as a reasonable and humane society.
Besides, I have no way of knowing what life is going to be like in
the year zooo and beyond. I would suggest that under conditions
where you cannot predict the future, where one cannot tell in advance
what it is that is most practical, you must encourage the widest possible
exposure to the best currents of thought and scholarship available. In
other words, I would be tempted to resolve the practical-impractical
question simply by saying everything is practical and history is among
those practical things. But we have to believe it ourselves.
There is another side to the question. What is practical in the eyes
of those personnel directors who hire our students? What do we do
about this one? We have to deal with personnel people who themselves
may not have a very generous or ambitious outlook, who may in fact
be rather bad businesspeople. We have to convince them of the value of
history. My feeling today is that they may convince themselves before
we convince them. They may return to hiring more liberally educated
students because they are dissatisfied with the narrowly trained, intel-
lectually unimaginative students that we turn out. They will blame that
narrowness on us, incidentally, for we are presumably in charge of the
academy. Business may turn to broadly educated students because they
see the limitations a narrow education brings. Businesses operating in
international markets will see it first, but the word will eventually get
around to the domestic media as well.
The teaching of the history of journalism is one step toward a
broad, practical education. There are many ways of understanding this
country. You can accomplish it through a study of its religious insti-
tutions or its political institutions or indeed virtually any of its institu-
tions. These institutions are not identical, but the central elements,
problems, dilemmas of one tend to be the same as for all the others. If
matters of race, class, gender, ethnicity are central elements in making
America what it is, they are central elements in making the American
press what it is. To study journalism history is another way of develop-

ing an adequate understanding of one's own country, a way of grasping
the society and culture in which one's life and destiny are implicated.
Seen and taught that way, journalism history is an immensely practical
subject.
I am enough of a pragmatist to believe that the distinction between
the practical and the impractical, which descends to us from the dis-
tinction between the sciences and the humanities, the objective and the
subjective, fact and value is simply not a useful distinction. The issue,
then, is that our students' definition of what is practical differs from
our definition of what is practical. But who is in charge of the fun-
house? It is our responsibility as faculties to establish as intelligently as
we can a pertinent, disciplined curriculum of study, and then to defend
that curriculum with our students.
There is another side to the problem of practicality, one bound up
with the problem of what to do with youth in America. Often when I
talk to the parents of students they ask me, first of all, about the job op-
portunities for journalism students: Is my son or daughter going to get
a job? When? It all sounds so crass as opposed to our high-mindedness.
But parents usually have something different in mind. They understand
that becoming an American these days involves leaving home, setting
up one's domicile. That is the only way you can establish identity as an
adult. It cannot be done if young people stay at home and remain de-
pendent on the largesse and goodwill of their parents. To establish that
separate adulthood you have to be employed. So parents are often say-
ing, "Look, our lives will work better and be enormously less compli-
cated if our children at age twenty-two or twenty-three do what they
are supposed to do: leave home, say goodbye to mom and dad, and es-
tablish their own home, their own identity, their own way of life." To
enable that to happen we have to have an economy expansive enough
that young people can enter it at an orderly rate.
That is an important problem, but let us not confuse it with the
problem of practicality that gets regularly hooked into it. We can give
our students all the "practical education" they want but if there is no
work for them, if they can't establish their own lives, then they frus-
trate themselves, their parents, and us. That is a problem we cannot
solve as a university faculty. It is another of those responsibilities of cit-
izenship. I think it is important that we listen to parents when they
raise the question with us of just how it is that their children are to be-
come adults. And we have to respond to that. But we cannot solve that
problem by adding one more course in newswriting and one less in his-
tory, which is an entirely different matter. In fact, insofar as that substi-
tution leads to more narrowly trained students, students with less vigor
and inventiveness, then we have only dampened the vitality of the
economy and hurt everyone's chances for a better future.
Q: What do you think of the movement to " operationalize Carey"?
jwc: I always thought that an unfortunate phrase. It sounded like an
attempt to pick over one's body in an immoral way. It was, however,
generously intended, an attempt to bring my argument "down to
earth," to attach the argument to a series of researchable problems. I
think that represents a sound and generous instinct. On the other hand,
I do not think much has been done to "operationalize Carey." Many of
the new directions of journalism history, as I suggested earlier, do not
derive from anything I said or did but rather from certain long-run
changes in American society and culture, changes that brought new
problems onto the agenda and, simultaneously, recast some old prob-
lems. I had nothing to do with that; it is simply part of our life and
times. Work on the new journalism, on feminist or black history, did
not come about because of any attempts to apply my own arguments.
It just came about as part of a general attempt to create imaginative re-
constructions of particular excluded groups.
I also argued in that Journalism History piece for an attack on a
specific problem, namely, the history of reporting. In the intervening
years that problem has been attacked in bits and pieces, though no one
has handled it in a large-scale or satisfactory way. We have had some
very decent work on the new journalism as a different way of report-
ing, as an eruption of a new form of journalistic consciousness, and
much interesting work has been done on the relation of journalistic ac-
counts to the process of reality construction.
There also has been considerable writing about the penny press
that goes beyond the economics of that form of the newspaper and in-
vestigates the style of journalism that developed with the penny press:
new ways of looking at the city and the world, new ways of conceiving
just what the story is. The penny press raises the question of how re-
porters were located in the new commercial and industrial cities of the
second third of the nineteenth century. Michael Schudson's Discover-
ing the News is frequently quite acute about all this in recognizing that
the penny press arose in what he calls an "objectivization of society."

People came to see society, as opposed to community, as something
outside and independent of them. There is a modern division between
the sphere of the "we" and the sphere of the "other." Schudson's work,
Dan Schiller's work, and the work and the group of people from
Iowa—Douglas Birkhead, Gary Whitby, Roxanne Zimmer, Charlotte
Jones—collectively constitute an attempt to rethink the matter of the
language of journalism, styles of reporting, the aesthetic and economic
aspects of the words out of which a public world of meaning is con-
structed. Many of these concerns trace the work of all sorts of people
writing the history of journalism these days.
But again, these changes have been less an attempt to operational-
ize Carey than an attempt to deal with concrete changes in American
life, in our attitudes toward the past and present of the society. All I did
was to increase the pace, particularly among some students, at which
this happened by providing people with justifications they could use
within their own graduate departments and with their advisers. It
encouraged some people to do what they always wanted to do but
couldn't figure out a way to do because other people wouldn't allow
them to do it.
Q: You said in that essay, "We don't need another Whig history of jour-
nalism. " Do you feel the movement to operationalize Carey might have
symbolized a resentment or a desire of most of the historians at that
time to move away from the existing body and style of writing journal-
ism history—that there was a latent urge, and this sort of sparked it
among those who wanted to get away from the Emery approach, the
Mott approach, and so on?
jwc: I've answered that to a certain degree, but let me put a slightly dif-
ferent gloss on it. The Whig interpretation of journalism history identi-
fied the history with the institution. Ed Emery, to take an important
and obvious figure, fully identifies with journalism as a human activity:
with the editors, papers, struggles of the profession. I don't mean that
he isn't critical; he just isn't alien. He stands to the subject of journal-
ism in a much different posture than he would if his subject were the
history of slavery. He chronicles a world that on the whole he admires
and wishes to advance. He honors not only the First Amendment but
also the craft and profession and takes its most noble purposes to be his
own and tries to record the uneven but steady progress and the record
of achievements of the craft and institution.
In my essay I recommended that we find a new vocabulary in
which the concept of culture was more central, in which there was a
more trenchant focus on the language of journalism as opposed to the
institution, the reporter rather than the editor, and, finally, a language
in which there was more critical distance, that was more open to the
moral and political ambiguities of journalism. I was not proposing a
new vocabulary that was both mine and correct to displace a vocabu-
lary grounded in "Whig" concepts that were wrong. I simply argued
that the Whig interpretation had done its work, it was an exhausted
genre, that it has yielded whatever substantive and useful conclusions
were contained within it and that it was hard to do much of flash and
originality with that vocabulary.
There were parts of the story of journalism that hadn't been told
and couldn't be told unless a new vocabulary were available. Such a vo-
cabulary would not only cast up new problems but also place some
older problems—the problem of freedom, for example—in a new light
and thereby yield new insight and understanding. Work in recent years
has given us parts of a new vocabulary and has done some of the re-
dressing of the historical record that I thought was needed. Now we
face a different problem.
A new generation of journalism historians does not in general have
the same identification with the profession. Having come to maturity
within the academy, they pretty much identify with the academic life
rather than the professional community. They are therefore prone to
commit an opposite error, to articulate a more or less anti-Whig in-
terpretation of the press, an interpretation that can be similarly self-
serving because it starts from the premise that the academy is somehow
superior to the world of journalism. If in earlier work we had the acad-
emy pretty much looking up to and revering journalism, we now pro-
duce an often contemptuous view from the academy toward journal-
ism. Academics can now produce a form of criticism of journalism that
they would never apply to their own work within the universities.
Let me give you a somewhat misdirected example from sociology. I
am an admirer of Gaye Tuchman's book Making News, but much of
the sociology of news gathering takes the most ordinary and mechani-
cal aspects of journalism—beat reporting and the wire services—and
makes them somehow the representative case of all journalism; the

multiform types of journalism are reduced to an essence discovered in
the breaking Associated Press stories. The reverse of the analogy would
occur if journalists trying to comprehend the university limited their
study to courses such as Sociology I and Political Science I. We would
accuse them of having identified the lowest level, the most ordinary,
most mechanical part of university instruction with the institution as a
whole. Just as the academy is much more than its introductory courses,
journalism is more than breaking news and beat reporting.
If you identify journalism with its more mechanical reporting, you
have the basis for writing an anti-Whig interpretation of the press: a
story of not much more than capitalist degradation.
Both the Whig and anti-Whig interpretations prevent us from ade-
quately characterizing the ambiguous role the press actually plays in
American life. The Whig and anti-Whig interpretations of the press or
of education are true to limited degrees but you have to bring the skills
of a poet to those interpretations or they wall you into a lopsided view.
The truth of poetry is its ambiguity; the truth of journalism is also its
ambiguity.
Q: How does someone write a history of reporting?
jwc: The same way you write a history of Western civilization, of the
British Crown, or the Protestant establishment, or France of Louis the
Fourteenth. You do it very carefully, for it is very difficult to do. I do
not think there is anything intrinsic to the history of reporting that
makes it more difficult or complex than anything else we undertake. If
it is difficult to do, it is because it has not been done before and we are
not sure how to do it and it seems somewhat vaguer than our more es-
tablished topics. At any period of time there are topics that seem to be
clear. How many books have been written about the British Crown?
The problem is clear to us because it has been done before and we
merely need to improve on an established model. But it is a clear topic
only because there are dozens of books on the topic that can guide us.
The history of reporting is vague only because we do not have such
books. Clarity and ambiguity are not inherent in problems and topics.
The difference is merely, to twist a phrase of Thomas Kuhn, the differ-
ence between normal and abnormal science, normal and abnormal his-
tory. Quantum mechanics was vague and uncertain when people only
"Putting the World at Peril" /111
knew how to do classical mechanics. So the problem is merely one of

familiarity.
When a new problem is undertaken you may have to attack it with
unfamiliar sources and procedures, and we may have to be more gener-
ous in judging the results. We have to accord students or historians the
privilege of writing essays rather than treatises when they undertake a
new problem. We would expect a certain unity or integration between
the treatment of Henry the Eighth and Elizabeth the First in a history of
the British Crown. But if, like Elizabeth Eisenstein, you undertook a
history of the printing press, you had better expect the first efforts to be
a series of quite separate essays, loosely hung together on some com-
mon theme. If you undertake a history of reporting, you are likely to
begin with essays on topics such as "How the writers of the penny
press understood the world," "Journalists in Chicago at the turn of the
century," "Revolutionary pamphleteers." There may be little in com-
mon between these essays, little that binds them together conceptually
or methodologically. We have to tolerate the style of the essay and the
necessary disjunctions in the material as a prerequisite to first attempts.
When an established figure with impeccable credentials tries this
type of essay writing, we do not much question it. Robert Darnton's
widely praised The Great Cat Massacre is a series of essays on the cul-
tural history of modern France. He suggests at the outset that he felt it
necessary to start writing histories of France in a somewhat different
way. He was not quite sure how to do that. As a result, he selects out a
series of episodes in French life that haven't been written about before
or have been treated badly and writes about them in a different way.
His chapter on nursery tales in France is only marginally connected to
his chapter on Rousseau and his readers; they are connected by a few
concepts, a common mood and atmosphere. They are not logically or
methodologically integrated. They do not have a parallel structure.
Darnton's success will embolden other historians to undertake
many of the same subjects and the next attempts will be better inte-
grated, the analysis more internally consistent. The same thing will be
true of the history of reporting. Work will begin as loosely connected
essays and, if it is successful, end up as an integrated analysis. At that
point, once the work is done, we will wonder what all the fuss was
over. We just haven't had anyone attempt anything coherent about the
topic up to this time; we are still at the age of essay writing.
Look at another example, Daniel Czitrom's Media and the American
Mind. The chapters in that book don't quite connect together. There is
a common imagination that stretches across them and they all repre-
sent common episodes in the history of the mass media, but they are
definitely a series of essays and were accepted as such by the Wisconsin
history faculty. That faculty had to apply somewhat unorthodox stan-
dards in accepting the work as a dissertation because it was abnormal
rather than normal in its subject matter.
Emboldened by Czitrom, someone might try a book like Journal-
ism and the American Mind with a subtitle of Essays on the History of
Reporting. Such a book could not be a unified argument. It would have
to collect essays about journalists writing at different times, under dif-
ferent circumstances, for different media and would inevitably lack
unity and parallel structure. But once that was published someone else
would come to the conclusion that they could do it better by selecting
different writers, at different papers and different times, and thereby
pronounce a more unified picture of the history of reporting. Then the
question of how do you write a history of reporting evaporates, for one
only has to point to the book that has been written.
The major point is this: you get essays before you get integrated
volumes, and that is why innovations in scholarship occur outside
the academy or from figures no longer bound by the rules of the acad-
emy and discipline. It is hard for students to take such risks, for they
live under great uncertainty and strict time, and they pay dearly for
failure.
Q: A special issue of Journalism History might be done on that idea.
Just invite essays on the history of reporting and see what turns up. In
a journal it doesn't have to be connected.
jwc: I know what you mean. We just finished an issue of Communi-
cation on feminism and popular culture. That is a subject no one is
quite sure how to write about and there is a lot of casting about for a
formula. A few years back women's history made little sense and no
one knew how to answer the question "How do you write women's
history?" Now that we have a number of distinguished examples of
the type, the mystery has fallen away and there are books and essays,
heavily cross-referenced, all over the place. It is always a discovery
procedure and after the discovery it all looks perfectly normal. But it
is a struggle when you take up topics that heretofore have been
untreated.
Q: How do you keep up with your reading?

jwc: I have no idea. I'm blessed with a great library and over the years
with librarians who edit out a lot of the junk for me and call the signif-
icant work to my attention. I've also been blessed with colleagues who
read widely and call things to my attention.
Q: Is there one book you want graduate students to read if they are
going to work with you?
jwc: If I am going to serve on their committee and otherwise do busi-
ness with them, I want them to read Tocqueville's Democracy in Amer-
ica. I realized I've gotten away from requiring it in recent years but it is
the basic book. The reasons are several. It is the single best book ever
written about America. Its major chapters are as insightful today as
they were at the time of its publication in the 18305. The period in
which it was "researched," written, and published—the Jacksonian
years—is a period that very much interests me. It has generated a sec-
ondary literature that I very much admire: Riesman's The Lonely
Crowd, for example. Riesman used the book at Harvard for years in
his undergraduate Introduction to Social Relations course. A book of
last year I much admire was Tocqueville-inspired: Robert Bellah et al.,
Habits of the Heart.
Democracy in America has had a circular effect: it is important in
itself and it is important because of the number of major works that
have been inspired by it. I respect not only the judgments contained
within it but its overall view of American society and the calmness, ma-
turity, and generosity of the judgments it registers. The fact that it was
written just before and published during the opening era of the penny
press gives it an additional importance because I still look to that era as
a seedbed for much of what is modern in modern America. Finally, it is
a book that "teaches" marvelously. So I like students who haven't read
it beforehand to read it before doing business with me.
Q: Do you ever watch television for relaxation?
jwc: Of course. I watch television all the time because I am a Cubs
fan. Cable television is the greatest thing that has happened in recent
years for baseball fans. I also love the movies, and cable television has
been a boon for movie watching. Beyond sports, movies, and some
news I watch relatively little, but that is only because I don't have
enough time.
Q: As we come to the end, can you say anything further about your at-
titudes toward education and scholarship?
jwc: I don't have much more that is distinctive to say about that. I
think all education, all scholarship is ultimately an aspect of citizen-
ship. That may sound, these days, rather wimpy. Education is always
about how to live in the world. I suppose there is some part of me that
wants to say that to teach and to write is not simply or foremost a
means of finding the truth or pursuing a profession. To teach and study
is to occupy the ground with our fellow citizens within the life of the
community. The problem of dedicating oneself to the pursuit of truth is
that the truth we find today a new generation of historians and schol-
ars will displace with a new and, I hope, better truth. It is only the best
guess one can make now about what might be helpful and useful to the
community. There is a continuous process of intellectual revolution.
There will always be something new swimming into view. The trick is
to hold on to what is useful from the past as one opens up to what is
newly discovered.
Q: Are you trying to prepare students for these changes?
jwc: I'm trying to prepare them for the natural and inevitable displace-
ment of what we know now by something more we know, by some-
thing different that we come to know. That is the way life is. When I
emphasize citizenship in this, I am thinking of a wonderful line of John
Dewey where he says something to the effect that every thinker puts a
part of the world at peril. The very act of thinking means calling the
world into question, loosening up established beliefs and procedures,
the way we've done things up to now. In that sense to think is to engage
in a perilous and disquieting undertaking. And that is why thinking is
part of citizenship and not just part of technical and professional life,
reserved for a small group of experts.
Teachers and writers have particular ways of living in the world,
but whether they do so responsibly, successfully, with political judg-
ment, with solidarity with their fellow citizens depends on how they
understand education. I never think I'm engaged in professional edu-
cation, whether it is the professional education of journalists or the
professional education of teachers, Ph.D.'s. I would like to think I'm
engaged in civic education at both levels. We end up making a living
with our education, but the end of education is to prepare one for life
in society, for public life in the widest sense, for life among our fellow
men and women.
Q: Can we teach students to be hopeful about this uncertainty, to look
forward to putting the world at peril?
jwc: The reason that I have always been drawn to John Dewey and the
American pragmatists is that he and they were a group of people who
lived with hope, and that hope shines through their writing. Their two
greatest values were hope and solidarity. What is it that makes us hope-
ful? What is it that promotes solidarity with our fellows? What is it
that defeats pessimism, narrowness, parochialism? This I take to be a
profoundly conservative instinct. What are those values and attitudes
of the past that contribute to a progressive and democratic way of life?
How, in the face of difficult and intractable problems, do we continue
to march in the footsteps of our ancestors and still remain open to the
belief that what we know today will be displaced tomorrow? Someone
is always coming up with a better idea. How do you remain ready and
open to give up one notion in favor of a better one and yet not collapse
into the silly state of believing that just because something is new it
is inevitably better? This very possibility creates a certain optimism.
Despite all our difficulties I think any look at the record leads us to be
hopeful.
Q: I take it you are suggesting that there is something hopeful in simply
believing that good ideas are inevitably going to come along and that
the trick of teaching and learning is to be open to them.
jwc: I said earlier on that there is no way of predicting in advance
where a good idea is going to come from. No one has a monopoly on
them. You can't tell in advance whether they will come from someone
in your own culture or someone outside it, someone writing today
rather than someone who wrote yesterday, someone older or someone
younger, someone within the academy or someone without. As we
don't know in advance where good ideas will come from, the trick of
education is to act in such a way as to not foreclose, limit, or restrict the
movement of intelligence. A few years ago, when I had a deep personal
quandary, it was a very young and much more inexperienced person
who pointed the way out. Following that experience, I thought of all
the barriers that inhibit the flow of intelligence across generations—in
both directions.
It was an ethical principle of pragmatism that anything that inhib-
ited communication was wrong because it constricted the intelligence

available to the community. All of us are situated in the world differ-
ently, all of us have a different body of experience on which to draw, so
often the knowledge you need to deal with a current problem is going
to come from someone older or younger or different in some important
way. The pressures of differentiation, specialization, the division of
labor have the cumulative effect of depressing communication, of
erecting boundaries and borders across which communication cannot
pass. So one has to find devices to keep the conversation going and to
get it to move from one unexpected quarter to another.
Part III
Introduction / Famed Psychic's Head Explodes:
James Carey on the Technology of Journalism
Carolyn Marvin
How communications technologies structure ways of thinking and feel-

ing in common is a lifelong concern of James Carey's work. Along the
way, he has acknowledged a debt to Harold Innis, the economic histo-
rian for whom differences in message transportability among media
make all the social and cultural difference in the world. When Carey
began his career as a media analyst, the staple devices for examining
media in society were biographies of media figures and histories of
media entities. Innis's work was different. He offered a powerful ana-
lytic framework that connected changes in the history of transporta-
tion and communications technology to dramatic changes in social
structure. Carey's own distinctive development of these ideas, reflected
in the following two essays, has deeply influenced the terms of media
analysis by scholars in the field.
To explore that thinking, we must understand a little about the
Innisian concepts at its foundations. For Innis, media in which the mes-
sage does not change much over time are time-binding. They are pre-
servers of culture, and their mode is memory. Such media are exemplified
in architecture, stone, and especially religious tradition mediated through
oral communication, the communication of one body directly with an-
other. The messages of time-binding media are unstable over space; they
become distorted if they travel any distance. Tradition is an excellent ex-
ample. The habitual customs and gestures of a community are difficult to
maintain at a distance. Removed from the communities and generations
of believers that have nurtured them, they are easily misinterpreted.
119
120 / Introduction to Part III
In space-binding media, messages are not distorted much across

distance, but cannot last long. They are extenders of culture, and their
mode is power. Print and broadcast journalism are space-binding
media that combine the easy transportability of paper with rapid elec-
tronic distribution by telephone, video, and computer. Contemporary
journalism is time-shortened and ephemeral. Unlike media crafted from
messages painstakingly sedimented across the centuries, like the Iliad
or the Odyssey, contemporary media saturate the moment. They fill up
every nook and cranny of public space. Wherever time-binding and
space-binding technologies flourish together, powerful political states
emerge, long-lasting and broadly extended across territory. The main-
tenance of political units as small as tribes and as large as empires de-
pends on media.
What does it feel like to live in the worlds created by different forms
of media? To answer this question, Carey asks how techniques take
over and reshape moral models of human society. Techniques become
metaphors that predispose particular ways of thinking. They provide
potent images about how we are connected to one another. What is lost
when cultural elements that are deliberately cultivated and patiently re-
worked over time surrender to those that favor speed, novelty, and ex-
pansion as the measure of social connection? How models of the civic
adjust to the built communicative environment is the foundation of
Carey's interest in the practical imagination of contemporary journal-
ists who see the world as an environment to be mastered through ex-
planation. Repertoires of explanation are journalistic technologies as
much as the telephones, printing presses, satellites, and computers on
which journalists also depend. In the essays reprinted here, Carey's
focus is not on the machines of journalism but on the pseudoenviron-
ment of media explanations that furnish contemporary culture.
Technology, Carey has said, is the creation and expression of human
purposes embodying concrete life. How journalistic conventions struc-
ture belief for a community is a decidedly technological subject, for
these conventions offer a blueprint for the architecture of relations we
call society.
"The Communications Revolution and the Professional Commu-
nicator" was written in the late 19605. It departs from conventional ac-
counts of the period that depict journalism as a kind of scientific exper-
iment in search of truth, gradually improving its tools and testing its
results over time. Other accounts from this era picture journalism as a
Introduction to Part III I 121
literary genre, a popular art possessed of a moral purpose, which is

also the discovery of truth. By contrast, Carey sees journalistic technique
as an arena in which competing groups lay claim to different ideas
about what truth is. Through media representations, groups jockey for
status around these ideas, and so create themselves. Presciently, Carey
used a relatively hidden group, lesbians and gays, inhibited by social
mistreatment from publicly identifying themselves, to illustrate how a
previously invisible group could assemble and constitute itself through
media. The subsequent rise of the gay rights movement through media
representation is a textbook case of a group pitting its own self-images
against those prevailing in mainstream media and exercising tangible
influence over them.
To discuss journalism in terms of groups instead of measuring it
against a true account of the world was an unusual move. It was even
subversive, since the first law of professional journalism is that its of-
ferings ought not adopt any group's world view. Exactly how messages
create or undo groups is the concern of the second Carey essay, written
nearly twenty years later than the first. The title, "The Dark Continent
of American Journalism," contrasts the sunny, rational ideology of
professional journalism as a technique of revelation and discovery to
the messy, vast, and uncharted terrain beneath reported events. Carey
argues that journalism generally fails to map this terrain in its presen-
tation of the world. Who, what, when, and where are questions for
sunny rationality. How and why lurk at a deeper, less accessible level.
They constitute the moral skeleton of the narrative function. Carey
found them largely missing in contemporary journalism.
His concerns were directed to the so-called prestige press, the term
often applied to the elite national press and its imitators. But there is
more to the metaphor of a dark continent. It refers not only to a ter-
rain, but in an indirect way to the tribes that live on it. Tribal societies
were long defined as groups whose social organization depends more
on ritual than technology. Carey's metaphor of the dark continent sug-
gests that reportorial techniques are a kind of ritual, both for members
of the journalistic tribe and for those who observe their efforts.
Like technology, ritual is a subject that has fascinated James Carey,
and he has often written about it. Like technology, ritual is a cultural
blueprint for maintaining communities. What communities are main-
tained by the rituals of respectable journalism? Not those of ordinary
citizens, Carey says. High-profile journalism organizes a conversation
122 / Introduction to Part HI
carried on more or less exclusively between elite journalists and opin-

ion leaders. Its insider codes are well understood by these participants,
but obfuscating to outside observers. Carey believes contemporary jour-
nalism not only fails to help most citizens understand the world they
live in, but keeps them confused about it. He does not claim that jour-
nalism never informs us or enriches our understanding of the world.
But he proposes that nuanced explanations of how and why are too
little honored in the culture of journalism. Journalistic technique re-
sponds more to immediacy and power than to patient reflection or
subtle shades of understanding. Technique has transformed the jour-
nalist's historical mission. Instead of serving up a frankly partisan, un-
ashamedly moral point of view growing out of a life fully lived in com-
mon with other community members, the journalist must be the
professional servant of facticity and objectivity. This vision fails to
ground explanation in a system of propositions about what the world
is and should be like. A world without an "ought," says Carey, is a
world that cannot be explained. Instead, it must be ritualized.
Ritualized how? Carey offers an Aristotelian catalog of types of
journalistic explanations that supply motive, cause, consequence, and
significance. The average journalistic portion has too much motive and
too little history to provide the symbolic environment in which com-
munities can constitute themselves deliberately and self-consciously.
Take the ritual practice of yielding interpretive authority to experts.
This technique visibly distances journalists from any responsibility for
explaining the world, since they must not claim a particular worldview
on their own authority. Such strategies for dividing journalists and
readers create contempt by the journalist for the reader, Carey argues.
The process works both ways, since public contempt for the press is all
too familiar. Distrust now governs the political process as well, so that
citizens believe their leaders act exclusively for self-aggrandizing mo-
tives. At least, this is the account offered by the respectable press. Carey
charges that where media ought to provide multifaceted connections
across lives in a democratic society, they have bifurcated the body poli-
tic into the used and the using. From this follows the reduction of all
social complexity to black and white, right and wrong. Delicacies of
nuance and complication are lost. Only crude polarities remain. These
are less likely to produce reasons to understand than sides to take.
So how have things come to this?
Carey's portrait is intended to show that the contemporary na-
Introduction to Part III I 123
tional press is ideologically rootless, and therefore incoherent. To say

that a press must be ideological to be coherent is to strike at the heart
of journalistic belief in an independent truth about the world. It implies
that there is only the truth authorized by the group to which one be-
longs. This is the truth that makes a group and keeps it intact. Toward
their group and its truth, members feel bonds of emotion and loyalty.
Toward other groups these feelings will be strikingly different. The idea
that emotions are more compelling than facts as a way of keeping
groups together is deeply antithetical to professional journalism. The
Enlightenment notion of reason assumes that group loyalties are divi-
sive, and that emotions connected to them should be overcome. Reason
is seen as the enemy of emotion. It is certainly not an instrument for
every group to shape differently to its own history and experience.
Still, the impulse to communicate remains deeply group-oriented
and social. Since emotion may be the most attended to of all group
guides about the importance of things, the impulse to communicate has
strong emotional components as well. And here lies an explanation for
the tenacity of the journalistic techniques Carey finds troubling. There
is a strong group impulse to make even technologically engineered
communities cohere. For every technique journalists invent to deny
group loyalties, other techniques re-create them. If belonging to a com-
munity makes life coherent, we should not be surprised by backdoor
efforts to reconstruct feelings of belonging banished by disciplinary
codes of professionalism. The journalistic creation of villains and he-
roes, of morality plays, of fabulous dangers and exalted victories, al-
lows us to revel in the satisfaction of subscribing, if only briefly, to a
community of like-minded persons who also are indignant, hopeful,
devastated, or triumphant at the prospects laid out before them.
What else are personal motive explanations than a way of reshap-
ing a complex and distant world to the mythically potent actions of a
familiar cast of godlike actors? There may be weaknesses in such ac-
counts as an explanation of the larger world. But it is very close to the
community model of social interaction Carey prefers, despite his con-
cerns for its deployment as a journalistic technique. Personal motive
explanations are indifferent to the systemic, depersonalized reasons of
politics, government, and economics. They render life as a saga. They
tell tales of passion, envy, hope, and disappointment. They address
birth and death, ordeal and trust, initiation and betrayal.
Personal motive explanations follow a model of neighbor and fam-
124 / Introduction to Part HI
ily talk. Family talk is multilayered. It seeks intimate details. It tracks

the dramas of life, including marriage, divorce, illness, who is on our
side, and whom we should avoid. Family talk is repetitive and pre-
dictable in its effort to create a world that is familiar and sturdy but
punctuated with arresting and entertainingly bizarre stories of relatives
and social intimates, especially when they are feuding. Its narratives are
deeply affecting and provide some of the sturdiest social glue known to
humans.
It happens that the impulse to make a complex world manageable
on the close-range, intimate model of family talk is a much discussed
journalistic development. This is the so-called tabloidization of the re-
spectable press, the blurring of traditional lines of content that used to
divide the prestige press from the less respectable press and its sensa-
tional sex-and-scandal menu. A classic example was journalist Connie
Chung's report of a mother's claim (and who could doubt a mother!)
that her son, Representative Newt Gingrich, then Speaker of one of the
big houses on the block (the House of Representatives), had once called
the most prominent lady in the neighborhood, first lady Hillary Clin-
ton, the mistress of the big white house down the street, a "bitch." This
was family talk about the temperature of relations between one family
in the neighborhood and another. If the neighborhood happened to be
a national one, it was no less family talk for that.
In its various forms—talk shows, celebrity magazines, scandal
sheets—the despised tabloid press is one of the oldest and most subver-
sive. Tabloids possess a distinctive ideological content. The high are
brought low, the gloriously irrational succeeds against the most deter-
mined rationalist explanations, and the world is turned upside down in
the time-honored fashion of faits-divers stories. The tabloid world em-
braces conservative social values at the same time it lifts up the forgot-
ten and downtrodden. It regards the rich and famous ambivalently.
It sees them as ordinary folks in disguise and as selfish miscreants. No
less a press of personality and motive than the respectable press, it de-
scribes a redeemable world in which miracles happen. It is the return of
the repressed, from which it constructs the world. Its stories are richly
detailed. It endlessly recaps and amends its most affecting tales until
they are perfectly familiar. It offers a highly moral, or at least moralistic,
view of the world.
Tabloids devote considerable attention to how and why, the ques-
tions that make sense of who, what, when, and where. The low regard
Introduction to Part HI I 125
in which tabloids are held by respectable journalists and media critics

is therefore of some interest. Tabloid explanations address moral di-
mensions that are surely real, if incomplete, in the vast universe of the
human condition. But it is not incompleteness alone—a quality it shares
with the prestige press—that makes it anathema. Its stigmatization has
more to do with its preferred subject matter. Tabloids are preoccupied
with the relationship of social boundaries and taboos to the physical
body. In the tabloid world, the physical body is the social body in its
most elementary and unvarnished form. Of special interest is bodily
transformation through the social processes of death and reproduction.
Tabloid staples consist of the body distorted, confined, maimed, re-
stored (occasionally resurrected!), or otherwise altered by a variety of
agents that speak symbolically about what social boundaries do. The
most charged of all social boundaries are those that touch the body.
Consider gender, age, and race relations. Consider abortion. Consider
war. The annihilation of social distance by technology is not the only
destabilizing thing we have to worry about. Social interaction in its
closest, most intimate forms also challenges the cohesion of communi-
ties. This, at least, is what the tabloids tell us.
At one level, the controversy about the tabloidization of the news
rehashes an older debate about mass culture. Though neither the re-
spectable nor the tabloid press is satisfactory by the standards of many
thoughtful critics, the fact remains that the press is popular. Its audi-
ence is large and faithful. It satisfies something, even if its critics believe
it satisfies the wrong thing. Is this the familiar lament that the problem
with democracy is that it's too democratic? How do we know what a
successful press is?
For many years, the British Broadcasting System seemed a paragon
of dignity and rational democratic virtue compared to the vulgar, com-
mercialized American press. Is British society less riven with strife,
more coherent in its sense of itself, a more humane society because of
its national media system? Are British citizens more informed about the
world they live in? These claims would be difficult to defend, except in
rabidly nationalist terms. Is our faith in the effect of the press mis-
placed? Are all groups that are connected more by technology than by
tradition fractured societies that cannot be knit together by any stories
at all? Do stories subject to professional news codes of objectivity and
facticity fail to enchant? Or is it that the press unites us after all, but in
ways that seem problematic, even horrifying?
126 / Introduction to Part III
Contemporary journalism constructs mythic stories about great

ordeals that test communities. Such a story was the trial of the most fa-
mous murder defendant in American history, the legendary football
hero O. J. Simpson, an icon of popular culture and a shining example
of African-American success in the high-stakes game of national celeb-
rity. Simpson was accused of brutally murdering his ex-wife and a friend
outside the home where his young children slept. Americans were riv-
eted. In its early days, media commentators compared the impact of
this story to the first landing on the moon and the assassination of Pres-
ident John F. Kennedy. Whether this was true matters less than that
audiences received such interpretations. Giant scandals and screaming
headlines are our Greek tragedies, lasting not for centuries as time-
binding messages do, but echoing and reverberating throughout cul-
ture, pushing along a rising commercial wave of circulation and rat-
ings, books, T-shirts, bumper stickers, souvenirs, and satellite stories
about major and minor plot characters.
Like the Greek tragedy it resembled, the O. J. Simpson trial was
about gods imperiled and defiled, great wrongs done, and fears of doing
more. It was a story about fairness in basic things. In matters of life
and death, does racial mistrust overwhelm the judicious weighing of
guilt and innocence? Is justice deformed by money? Can the police be
trusted? If jurors cannot live in harmony, can the country? It was also a
story about expectations. Are celebrity gods omnipotent and invinci-
ble? When life fails them, do they act out their despair more grandly
than the rest of us? What has become of the American family? These
are not trivial questions, and the answers to them are as elusive as ques-
tions about what economic policies will create the proper distribution
of national wealth. Both kinds of questions have everything to do with
the structure and feel of the communities we live in.
For most Americans, O. J. Simpson was not a member of any com-
munity they lived in, but the focus of a community of aspiration and
feeling anchored by media bonds. The question in these two essays is
whether media bonds make communities stronger, more enriching for
their members, and more honorable, or whether they are always unsta-
ble and explosive. To answer, we must decide what the proper function
of media is. Is it to make us better? Should its practitioners be wise de-
fenders of a common good? Is the job of media to right wrongs? Or to
foster interesting conversations among citizens who are the only gen-
uine agents of social change? If we believe that democracy depends on
Introduction to Part HI I 127
the press and not on ourselves, have we lost it already? Is it a triumph

of civic good sense or a mark of professional failure if audiences are
skeptical of stories media tell?
From a different perspective, can any reasonable critic deny the
existence of a wealth of serious media analysis beyond the daily papers
and the nightly news for those willing to search it out? Quite aside
from the moral and civic responsibilities of media professionals, does
any moral or civic duty lie with audiences? If citizens care to engage
the democratic dialogue, are they obliged to consult a range of infor-
mation sources, and with some care? Should they expect to invest as
much in their mediated relationship to the polis as they do in other re-
lationships they expect to be rewarding? Do we bemoan technological
mediatedness while expecting the automated delivery of civic judg-
ment from the press like so much fast food? Can media ever dispense
well-informedness on the technological model of water from the tap
or electricity from the switch—that is, at no trouble to ourselves?
James Carey might see these questions as making his point that we
have come to imagine our social relations on a model of technological
efficiency when they ought to reflect our irreducible humanity.
He certainly argues that the press is no simple writ of truth, what-
ever else it is. It is a set of contentious ideas about what society is and
ought to be. It is the largest national arena in which Americans en-
counter one another, strive for recognition and identity, and live to fight
another day. In the two essays that follow, James Carey also challenges
certain self-congratulatory views of the press in a democratic society.
Not only does he challenge us to inquire what it feels like to live in the
worlds that different media create. He challenges us to wonder what
other worlds there might be.
6 / The Communications Revolution
and the Professional Communicator
In this essay, I would like to offer a perspective or set of terms with

which to characterize and analyze the contradictory tendencies within
what is commonly called the "communications revolution." I also
want to use this perspective to examine the development of a distinct
social role, a role I have designated with the accurate but unfelicitous
label "professional communicators." Finally, in a more polemical mood,
I would like to comment on the dilemmas facing one group of profes-
sional communicators, namely, journalists, and the implications such
dilemmas present for contemporary communications policy.
As the outset candor requires that I note two weaknesses of this
essay. First, it is highly suggestive in character and telescoped in argu-
ment. Second, the essay implicitly relies on American experience. The
justification for such reliance, ethnocentrism aside, is provided by Ger-
trude Stein's wry observation that the United States is, in fact, the oldest
nation since it came first into the twentieth century and has been there
the longest. Miss Stein was suggesting that the absence of dominant
conservative elements in American society results in an exceptionally
rapid rate of social change, and certain tendencies in industrial societies
are thereby revealed in this setting with an exceptional starkness.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Western countries were hit

with two successive waves of revolutions, revolutions separated in time
but tied in logic. The first was the industrial revolution, which reor-
ganized the nature of work and the structural basis of class and com-
128
The Communications Revolution I 129
munity. The second was the revolution in communication and popular

culture, which reorganized the basis on which art, information, and
culture were made available and the terms on which experience was
worked into consciousness. While some commentators chose to treat
these revolutions as independent events, it is obvious they stand as cause
and effect, successive moments in the same process.1 The timing, inter-
relationship, speed, and extensiveness of these revolutions vary consid-
erably from country to country, but both the direction of change and
the major implications of these revolutions is everywhere the same.
The industrial and cultural revolutions were remarkably tele-
scoped in the United States between 1840 and i86o.2 The communica-
tions revolution presaged by the growth of the telegraph and the
"penny press" in the decades before and after the Civil War decisively
began in the 18905 with the birth of the national magazine, the devel-
opment of the modern mass newspaper, the domination of news dis-
semination by the press services, and the creation of primitive elec-
tronic forms of communication.3 By the 19205 the dominant tendencies
of this revolution were clear, although they continue to work them-
selves out even into this decade.
The most explored, though still dimly understood, dimension of
this revolution was the rise of national or mass media of communica-
tion—media that cut across structural divisions in society, drawing
their audiences independent of race, ethnicity, occupation, region, or
social class. Modern communications media allowed individuals to be
linked, for the first time, directly to a national community without the
mediating influence of regional and other local affiliations. Such na-
tional media laid the basis for a mass society, understood in its most
technical and least ideological sense: the development of a form of so-
cial organization in which intermediate associations of community,
occupation, and class do not inhibit direct linkage of the individual
and primary groups to the state and other nationwide organizations
through mass communication.4
The rise of national media represents a centripetal force in social
organization. Such media greatly enhance the control of space by re-
ducing signaling time (the gap between the time a message is sent and is
received) in communication, by laying down direct lines of access be-
tween national centers and dispersed audiences, and by producing a re-
markable potential for the centralization of power and authority.5
In the more benign and uncomfortably anthropomorphic language
of Talcott Parsons, one can suggest that the revolution in national

media worked to overcome the increasingly particular orientations of
groups generated by the intense division of labor inherent in industrial-
ization. Solidarity or integration in industrial societies requires the
growth of communication forms specifically oriented toward emphasis
on collective values and symbols of identification.6 As Joseph Gusfield
has argued, a differentiated social system can be maintained only if the
"conflict o f . . . groups is balanced to some extent by cohesive elements
in the cultural and social system which moderates the intensity of con-
flicts and . . . provides loyalties to ... rules under which the social sys-
tem is to operate."7 National media give public and identifiable form to
symbols and values of national identity and also block out of public
communication areas of potential conflict.8
A second and equally self-evident dimension of the communica-
tions revolution was the development of specialized media of commu-
nication located in ethnic, occupational, class, regional, religious, and
other "special interest" segments of society. These minority media,
while virtually unstudied, are in many ways more crucial forms of com-
munication because they are building blocks upon which the social
structure is built up and they serve as intermediate mechanisms linking
local and partial milieus to the wider community. An example is the
weekly community newspaper, which links concerns of the local com-
munity to the wider world of city, state, and nation.9
Specialized or minority media index the progressive differentiation
of social structures. They mirror a process whereby groups formerly
dependent upon face-to-face contact are organized into groups by pro-
viding collective symbols that transcend space, time, and culture. Fi-
nally, while such media address themselves to a narrow dimension of
their audience's life, they create national communities of interest by al-
lying themselves with national bureaucracies and selecting their audi-
ences on a national basis.
Lest I be accused of obscurity, allow me to comment briefly on the
growth of homosexual magazines such as One and Mattachine Review.
Such magazines turn a locally based, decentralized, tenuously con-
nected subculture into a highly identifiable group and, above all, into
an audience. Constituting a class of discredited people, homosexuals
create a common culture by transcending geographic boundaries
through such media. They build this common culture into an encom-
passing ideology, an explanation of their behavior, and an argument
stipulating their relationship to the larger society. By going public, that

is, by publishing, they nationalize this culture, create a national speech
community, a standardized body of symbols, and a characteristic ex-
pressive style. Such publications give voice to—indeed, create—shared
feelings and common orientations; they consolidate and stabilize for
the reader his identity and the reality of his group. In the pages of such
publications are formulated the politics, complaints, and aspirations of
the group; friends and enemies are identified along with evidence of
their goodness and badness; success stories are printed, tales of heroes
who have made it in "straight" society, along with atrocity tales or ex-
amples of mistreatment by the larger society. "Exemplary moral tales
are provided in biographical and autobiographical form illustrating a
desirable code of conduct for the stigmatized."10 Divisions of opinion
within the group are expressed and managed. In One and Mattachine
Review one finds rationalizations for the position of homosexuals and
justifications couched in legal, moral, and historical terms; famous ho-
mosexuals in history are celebrated along with lists of their achieve-
ments; the biology, physiology, and psychology of sex are analyzed to
demonstrate the Tightness of the "gay" life; legal articles pleading the
case for the civil liberties of homosexuals are included.11
The relative obscurity of this example should not obliterate the
central point: minority media of communication represent a centrifugal
force in social organization through their capacity to organize differ-
entiated speech communities and to confer national identity on groups
and nationalize their interest; by marking off boundaries of conflict
and accommodation with the values and institutions of the larger so-
ciety; and by transforming groups into audiences. By this last point I
merely mean that magazines, journals, and other forms of mass com-
munication become more important than face-to-face interaction in
the processing of information within the group, in the assigning of sta-
tus, and in the development of collective ideologies and values. While
we recognize these processes easily with magazines for defined sub-
cultures, they must also be seen in journals and newsletters aimed at
persons having suffered colostomies and ileostomies, at parents of re-
tarded children, at scientists, lawyers, and doctors, at theosophists and
other practitioners of the occult, indeed, at an infinite world of work,
leisure, and politics.12
Collectively, then, the first two dimensions of the communications
revolution represent centrifugal and centripetal forces in social struc-
ture that create entirely new publics, transform existing groups into
audiences, and nationalize sentiment and interest.
The third and least explored dimension of the communications
revolution was the development of a new social role, the professional
communicator. We still know little of the origin of the role, the occupa-
tions that collectively constitute it, the functions that the role serves, or
the norms and constraints of role occupants. Moreover, the profes-
sional communicator can only be understood against the backdrop of a
general theory of communication, and this, obviously, we do not have.
Despite these limitations, it is possible to suggest some features of this
social role. A professional communicator is one who controls a special
skill in the manipulation of symbols and who uses this skill to forge a
link between distinct persons or differentiated groups. A professional
communicator is a broker in symbols, one who translates the attitudes,
knowledge, and concerns of one speech community into alternative but
suasive and understandable terms for another community. The role op-
erates in two directions: vertical and horizontal. Vertically, professional
communicators link elites in any organization or community with gen-
eral audiences; horizontally, they link two differentiated speech com-
munities at the same level of social structure.
The clearest example of a professional communicator is a language
translator who stands between two different linguistic groups and con-
verts one language into its general equivalents in another. While this is
a pure manifestation of the role, many other communicators—such as
reporters, editors, artists, public relations people, public information
officers, specialized writers in science, medicine, and law, engineering
and technical writers, speechwriters and ghostwriters—function as
brokers or links between elites and masses and differentiated speech
communities. Most of these roles are associated with mass media of
communication, but a functionally equivalent set of occupations was
developed to operate in face-to-face circumstances—for example, agita-
tors, detail people, negotiators, salespeople, field representatives of na-
tional organizations. In each case one faces a role that mediates between
two parties by use of a skill at manipulating symbols to translate the
language, values, interests, ideas, and purposes from the idiom of one
group into an idiom acceptable to a differentiated speech community.
The distinguishing characteristic of professional communicators—
as opposed to the writers, novelists, scholars, and others who produce
messages—is that the messages they produce have no necessary rela-
tion to their own thoughts and perceptions. Professional communica-

tors operate under the constraints or demands imposed on one side by
the ultimate audience and, on the other hand, by the ultimate source.
Their skill is not so much intellectual and critical as a skill at interpre-
tation and communication (or obfuscation).
The professional communicator takes the messages, ideas, and pur-
poses of a source and converts them into a symbolic strategy designed
to inform or persuade an ultimate audience. Thus, reporters translate
government handouts and press conferences into "stories" for wider
audiences; the advertising artist converts the intentions and purposes of
the client into a persuasive strategy; the public relations person creates
symbols that convey the "right" corporate image. It is a bit blasphe-
mous to lump all such occupations into one role (the case of the re-
porter and journalist is crucial and will be treated later), but they all
share in common a brokerage or linkage function and a skill or capac-
ity at the manipulation and translation of symbols. They differ along a
number of dimensions: the degree of independence of the communi-
cator; the relative freedom of the communicator in creating a new mes-
sage versus more passively transmitting a performed message; the de-
gree to which the communicator is in the employ of or tied to the
source or is in alliance with the ultimate receiver; the number of medi-
ated positions between the communicator and the ultimate source and
the ultimate audience.
By failing to treat these occupations as different faces of a func-
tionally equivalent role, we have failed to build up a theoretical ap-
paratus for interpreting the meaning and effect of the professional
communicator.13
At this moment we can at least say that a dimension of the com-
munications revolution was the creation of a distinct occupational cat-
egory, the development of programs, largely through universities, for
training and providing recruits to the role, and the simultaneous
growth of occupational associations and codes of professional conduct
that conferred distinct role identity and the elements of an occupa-
tional ideology upon various classes of professional communicators.
These three dimensions of the "communications revolution" should be

encompassed by one theoretical framework, for they are tied by history
as well as logic. However, the two general theoretical stances within so-
cial theory (and I am taking some decided license with sociology here)
does not permit such inclusiveness. Most aggregate social theory points
in one of two directions. The first ties social theory to the process of
what we might call massification. This position identifies the central
tendency in society to be the eclipse of local, regional, and partial
groups and affiliations by the growth of national centers of power and
communication. Simultaneously, it observes the erosion of individual
and group differences and a massive homogenization of social life, a
process that reduces the luxuriant variety of nineteenth-century life to
a uniformity of style and sentiment. Consequently, this position, of
which Tocqueville and J. S. Mill are the great precursors, sees all the
tendencies of industrialization—communication, work, education—as
directed toward the centralization and homogenization of life. Ideolog-
ically, it has been concerned with the implications of these changes for
the growth of totalitarianism because of either centralized elite power
or homogenous mass movements.
The second general stance in sociological theory emphasizes not
the massification but the progressive differentiation of social life. It em-
phasizes the crucial role of the division of labor in creating distinct
worlds of work and community. It stresses not the sameness of social
life but its overwhelming variety; not the centralization of power but its
dispersal; not the threat of totalitarianism but the exceptional opportu-
nities for individuality and freedom accompanying the decline of as-
cription. Following Durkheim, this position sees the division of labor
creating a new form of social order that enhances freedom and individ-
uality but also creates new modes of structural interdependence, which
insures the stability of social life. In the differentiation of work com-
munities and the corresponding separation and specialization of insti-
tutions, it discovers an upgrading in the productivity and efficiency of
society.
I have deliberately polarized these positions and sketched them
very loosely. I do so not to understate the acuity of sociologists but to
isolate again dominant tendencies in industrial societies: a tendency
toward decentralization and centralization, massification and differ-
entiation. The crucial task in social theory is to develop more ade-
quate models that simultaneously account for these two processes
that point in opposite directions and that treat the contingencies in
social change resulting from the overemphasis on either of these proc-
esses. Following Parsons, I would suggest that social change involves
a process of differentiation, the solution of integrative problems stem-
ming from differentiation, and the creation of value patterns that le-
gitimize new social arrangements and give coherence to the general
orientations of the total society.14 The crucial problem in the social
theory of communication is to isolate the way in which communica-
tion processes mirror, index, and facilitate the processes of differenti-
ation, integration, and legitimation (or, alternatively, frustrate them).
I have suggested that a beginning can be made on this problem by
closely examining the centripetal and centrifugal tendencies within
mass communication and the crucial role of professional communica-
tors in mediating and integrating the orientations of differentiated
persons, groups, and institutions.
The division of labor, or to use Parsons's more inclusive term, the
structural differentiation of society, is, I think, the key to unlocking the
dynamics of social communication, for the division of labor is central
to the creation of speech communities. Speech communities develop
when common facilities or channels of communication are available to
support interaction. These communities are normally described as cul-
ture areas with a territorial base, for in traditional societies common
cultures can develop only through face-to-face contact. However, the
development of specialized means of mechanical and electronic com-
munication (along with rapid transportation) ensures that "people who
are geographically dispersed can communicate effectively."15 Culture
areas, under such conditions, are no longer constrained by geographic
boundaries, and they consequently overlap and lose their territorial
base. As Tamotsu Shibutani reminds us, next-door neighbors may
today be strangers, and we speak of people living in the nongeographic
worlds of art, science, fashion, and politics.16
Modern speech communities are almost always bound together by
common channels of mass communication. The division of labor has
the effect of producing a bewildering variety of these communities.
Such communities can be identified with the following characteristics:
a body of acceptable utterances; a common terminology of motives, ex-
planations, and accounts; a distinct if not idiosyncratic expressive style
in speech, writing, and other modes of communication; a special vo-
cabulary including an argot; and a specific social focus. In each com-
munity there are norms of conduct, values, prestige ladders, and a com-
mon outlook toward life. Shared perspectives, in other words, arise
through common communication channels and "the diversity of mass
societies arises from the multiplicity of channels and the ease with
which one may participate in them."17 Some of these communities are

organized around ethnicity and religion, some around politics and cul-
ture, many around work and leisure.
It is fair to conclude, I think, that the impact of structural differen-
tiation and the development of distinct speech communities is centrifu-
gal, increasing the functional capacity of the social system but also
creating severe problems of communication and coordination. While
there can be no doubt that the division of labor, as Durkheim sug-
gested, substitutes structural interdependence for a common moral
consciousness as a basis of social solidarity—an interdependence we
become aware of in times of strikes, riots, and severe unemployment—
it is a very tenuous solidarity, dependent upon a series of negotiated
agreements between differentiated sectors and resulting in a thinning
out of the moral and evaluative center of social organization.
The centrifugal pull of the division of labor is mirrored by the rise
of specialized forms of communication. Indeed, these forms, as I sug-
gested, provide an impulse to the creation of speech communities by
ferreting out incipient groups in society and giving them semblance,
form, rhetoric, and symbols. Yet balanced with this tendency is the de-
velopment of national media—today particularly television, but also
national magazines, newspapers, and, to a lesser degree, films—that
cut across speech communities, drawing their audiences out of all spe-
cialized subsectors. Such media attempt to create a consensus or at
least a center of value, attitude, emotion, and expressive style. Their
success in doing this is highly problematic, but national media strive
for this consensus. They also tend to block out of communication those
values, attitudes, and groups that threaten the tenuous basis of social
order. National media enact a ritual celebration of the basis of social
order and provide degradation ceremonies that punish actors and ori-
entations deviant from social norms.
The decade of the 18905 and those that followed progressively wit-
nessed not only the growth of mass or national media and the ex-
foliation of minority media but also the development of university
departments, institutes, and training programs designed to provide
a continuous supply of trained professional communicators. Simul-
taneously, professional associations designed to solidify and enhance
these new occupations were created. Not only were new occupations
innovated but existing occupations were redefined. Consequently, roles
such as artist, writer, and journalist were partially transformed into

those of reporter and propagandist. Let me briefly comment on the case
of journalists.
Journalists were classically conceived as independent interpreters
of events. They were not viewed solely or even largely as technical
writers, who served as links between governmental and other insti-
tutional elites and wider audiences. Journalism was traditionally con-
ceived as a literary genre rather than as a species of technical writing.
Journalism was not characterized merely as reporting that put the
words and actions of others into simpler language, but as a fluid in-
terpretation of action and actors, an effort to create a semantic real-
ity that invested the ordinary with significance. Journalists tradi-
tionally induced their audiences to come to terms with old realities in
new ways.
With the rise of "objective reporting" in the latter part of the nine-
teenth century, the journalist went through a process that can be fairly
termed a "conversion downwards," a process whereby a role is de-
intellectualized and technicalized.18 Rather than independent inter-
preters of events, journalists became reporters, brokers in symbols who
mediated between audiences and institutions, particularly but not ex-
clusively government. In this role they lose their independence and be-
come part of the process of news transmission. In this role they princi-
pally use not intellectual skill as critics, interpreters, and contemporary
historians but technical skill at writing, a capacity to translate the spe-
cialized language and purposes of government, science, art, medicine,
finance into an idiom that can be understood by broader, more amor-
phous, less educated audiences.
Objective reporting became the fetish of American journalism in
the period of rapid industrialization. Originally the development of this
form of journalism was grounded in a purely commercial motive: the
need of the mass newspaper to serve politically heterogeneous audiences
without alienating any significant segment of the audience. The prac-
tice apparently began with the wire services. They instructed their writ-
ers and reporters that any distributed copy had to be acceptable to both
Democratic and Republican subscribers, and as a result writers became
skilled at constructing nonpartisan—that is, "objective"—accounts of
events.19
This commercially grounded strategy of reporting was subsequently
rationalized into a canon of professional competence and ideology of
professional responsibility. It rested on the dubious assumption that the

highest standard of professional performance occurred when the re-
porter presented the reader with all sides of an issue (though there were
usually only two), presented all the "facts," and allowed the reader to
decide what these facts meant. These conventions of objective report-
ing were institutionalized in journalism curricula when they were de-
veloped in universities beginning in the 18908. Whereas these schools
began exclusively as training grounds for newspaper reporters, they
soon broadened out to encompass the more inclusive occupations indi-
cated by the phrase professional communicator: advertising writers,
artists, other propagandists, public relations writers and advertisers,
science and technical writers, television and radio broadcasters, agri-
culture and religion writers, and a host of equivalent occupations and
specialties.
The development and institutionalization of objective reporting ul-
timately led to the eclipse of the traditional journalist roles of advocacy
and criticism. It is not that these latter features disappeared, but they
were reduced to secondary aspects of the journalistic enterprise; re-
newed emphasis upon them is a phenomenon of this decade. It is im-
portant to recognize that the canons of objective reporting turn the
journalist into a professional communicator, from an independent ob-
server and critic to a relatively passive link in a communication chain
that records the passing scene for audiences.
Objective reporting severely compromised the independence of the
journalist in at least two additional ways. First, as an adjunct of objec-
tive reporting there developed norms and procedures governing how
reporters could utilize sources. The net effect of the press conference,
the background interview, the rules governing anonymous disclosure
and attribution of sources, and particularly the growing use of the pub-
lic information officer within government is to routinize the reporter's
function and to grant the source exceptional control over news dis-
semination. As a result, not only can government and other sources de-
liberately place messages, without alteration, before the public, but
through the "leak" and other forms of anonymous disclosure they can
utilize the press as an alternative channel for diplomatic and other pri-
vate communication.20 The "canned" press conference in which ques-
tions are planted and to which "safe" reporters are admitted by pass
further strips away the independent, critical function of the journalist.
Second, the psychology of the reporting process also chips away at

reporters' independence. Because reporters mediate between the audi-
ence and sources, they are pulled in two directions: serving the inter-
ests of the source or the interests of the audience, which are rarely
identical. Often, if not usually, reporters develop contempt for both
parties they serve: the audience because it is so often apathetic and un-
interested, the source because it is so often dishonest. Resolution of
the strain in the reporting process normally supports the interests of
the source rather than that of the audience. The explanation for this
phenomenon is best provided by two principles derived from the social
psychology of George Herbert Mead. First, reporters are dependent on
their sources for information and build up over time a certain intimacy
and empathy with them. Consequently, they are disposed to "take the
role" of the source, to see events and problems from the standpoint of
the source. Second, although reporters receive little feedback from their
amorphous and disorganized audiences, they are likely to receive con-
siderable feedback—both commendation and criticism—from sources.
As a result, reporters are disposed to internalize the attitudes and ex-
pectations of the source, and indeed to turn the source into the ulti-
mate audience.21 As a consequence of these psychic mechanisms and
the procedures of objective reporting, independent journalists are re-
duced to brokers in the communication process and a broker allied
structurally if not sympathetically with the persons and institutions
they report.
There is a final, more general, and more deleterious effect of the
professional communicator, the norms of objective reporting, and the
intense division of labor accompanying advanced industrialization. I
suggested, following Durkheim, that the division of labor represents a
centrifugal tendency in society that thins out the moral center of social
organization. For stability, this fragmenting tendency must be counter-
acted by modes of communication and symbols that, in the words of
Lloyd Warner, "everyone not only knows but feels," symbols that en-
able people in mass society to engage in "thoughtful and emotional col-
laboration for common ends."22 It is the absence of integrating modes
and styles of communication, of emotionally charged symbols of na-
tional community and general, integrating ideas and values that under-
lies, in part, the instability of contemporary American society. The de-
velopments in communication I have already described have played
their part in creating this dilemma. As Thelma McCormack has writ-

ten, "The supreme test of the mass media ... is how well it provides for
the integration of experience."23 Modern media of communication,
through the people who own and staff them, do not provide this inte-
gration. Partly this is due to the fragmenting effects of minor media,
partly to an intellectual and cultural weakness of the general society,
and partly, I think, to the entire process of objective reporting, which
has become, as the Commission on Freedom of the Press recognized in
1947, not an aid but a menace to understanding.24
What are lamely called the conventions of objective reporting were
developed to report another culture and another society. They were de-
signed to report a secure world of politics, culture, social relations, and
international alignments about which there was a rather broad consen-
sus concerning values, purposes, and loyalties. The conventions of re-
porting reflected and enhanced a settled mode of life and fleshed out
with incidental information an intelligible social structure. Human in-
terest, entertainment, trivia, and the daily events in Washington could
be rendered in the straightforward "who says what to whom" manner,
for they occurred within a setting of secure structures and meanings.
That is, one can be content with "giving the facts" where there are gen-
erally accepted rules for interpreting the facts and an agreed set of po-
litical values and purposes. Today no accepted system of interpretation
exists and political values and purposes are very much in contention.
Politics, culture, classes, generations, and international alignments are
not part of an intelligible mode of life, are not directed by shared val-
ues, and cannot be encased within traditional forms of understanding.
Consequently, "objective reporting" does little more than convey this
disorder in isolated, fragmented news stories. Even worse, the canons
of objective reporting filter historically new phenomena through an
outmoded linguistic machinery that grossly distorts the nature of these
events. This came dramatically to light in the reporting from Vietnam.
In such reporting a disorganized, fluid, nonrectilinear war was con-
verted by journalist procedure into something straight, balanced, and
moving in rectilinear ways, into a war of hills, tonnage, casualties, divi-
sions, and hill numbers. The conventions, in other words, not only re-
port the war, they endow it, pari passu, with an order and logic that
simply mask the underlying realities. Audiences, as a result, read about
and experienced the war, indeed were obsessed by it, but were unable
to personally understand it, nor were they able to see it as an event in

their common national life.
Despite the reassuring sense of disinterest and rigor conveyed by the
term objective, it is important to recognize that all journalism, includ-
ing objective reporting, is a creative and imaginative work, a symbolic
strategy; journalism sizes up situations, names their elements, structure,
and outstanding ingredients, and names them in a way that contains an
attitude toward them. (This is a paraphrase of some lines of Kenneth
Burke.) The conventions of objective reporting were developed as part
of an essentially utilitarian-capitalist-scientific orientation toward events.
The conventions in other words implicitly dissect experience from a
point of view. It is a point of view that emphasizes, as one would expect
from utilitarianism, the role of personalities or actors in the creation of
events and ties the definition of news to timeliness. What it lacks, of
course, are precisely those elements of news that constitute the basic in-
formation on which popular rule rests: historical background and con-
tinuity, the motives and purposes of political actors, and the impact of
technology, demographic change, and other impersonal forces that
contribute so much to the shape of contemporary events. Yet despite
their obsolescence we continue to live with these conventions as if a
silent conspiracy had been undertaken between government, the re-
porter, and the audience to keep the house locked up tight even though
all the windows have been blown out.
George Herbert Mead, writing on the aesthetic function of news,
once said: "Whether this form of the enjoyed result has an aesthetic
function or not depends on whether the story of the news serves to in-
terpret to the reader his experience as the shared experience of the com-
munity of which he feels himself to be a part."25 Except in the rare in-
stances of assassination, news no longer functions aesthetically, for it
does not bring back into an integrated whole the fragmented pieces of
modern experience. Consequently, not only does the modern world re-
quire new ideas, orientations, and symbols of national and interna-
tional unity, it also requires new norms and procedures for the process
of public communication and for the control of professional communi-
cators. Certainly that much is needed if news is to meet the criterion
and objectives established many years ago by Robert Park: "The func-
tion of news is to orient man and society in an actual world. In so far as
it succeeds it tends to preserve the sanity of the individual and the per-
manence of society."26
Notes
1. For a similar argument, see Asa Briggs, Mass Entertainment (Adelaide: Griffin,
1960).
2. W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1960), 138.
3. Theodore B. Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1958).
4. On the social organization of mass societies, see William Kornhauser, The Poli-
tics of Mass Society (New York: Free Press, 1959).
5. The most astute student of these matters was the late Harold Innis. See Harold
A. Innis, Empire and Communication (Oxford: Clarendon, 1950).
6. An excellent study of the growth of such forms of communication in Israel was
provided in an exceptional and underutilized series of articles published in the 19505 by
S. N. Eisenstadt. See S. N. Eisenstadt, "Comparative Study," Public Opinion Quarterly
i9 (1955-56): I53-67-
7. Joseph Gusfield, "Mass Society and Extremist Politics," American Sociological
Review 37 (1962.): 32.8.
8. Warren Breed, "Mass Communication and Sociocultural Integration," Social
Forces 37 (1958): 109-16.
9. For an excellent study of the community newspaper, see Morris Janowitz, The
Community Press in an Urban Setting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).
10. Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Engle-
wood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 25. The entire paragraph leans heavily on this re-
markable book.
11. See Howard Becker, Outsiders (New York: Free Press, 1963), 38.
12. A useful though inadequate index of this differentiation is the N. W. Ayer Di-
rectory of Newspapers and Periodicals, which lists 11,293 newspapers and 9,400 peri-
odicals in the United States.
13. Existing models of communication are virtually mute on the matter of messages
mediated through professional communicators. One exception is Bruce H. Westley and
Malcolm S. MacLean Jr., "A Conceptual Model of Communications Research," journal-
ism Quarterly 34 (1957): 31-38. What is basically needed is a series of ethnographic ac-
counts of these occupations, done through participant observation and reported with a
detailed, sensitive hand. The existing pieces of survey research on reporters, editors, tech-
nical writers, and similar occupations are almost uniformly uninformative. A glittering
exception is Ian Lewis, "In the Court of Power—The Advertising Man," in The Human
Shape of Work, ed. Peter Berger (New York: Macmillan, 1964). Walter Gieber of San
Francisco State College has written an interesting though unpublished analysis of news-
workers entitled "The Attributes of a Reporter's Role."
14. Talcott Parsons, Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives (Engle-
wood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 21-23.
15. Tamotsu Shibutani, "Reference Groups as Perspectives," American Journal of
Sociology 60 (1955): 566.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., 569.
18. The role of journalist never did develop effectively in the United States, it must
be admitted. See Tocqueville's comments on American journalists in Democracy in
America, vol. i (New York: Schocken, 1961), chapter 40.
19. This interpretation is provided by Fred Seibert. See Fred Seibert, Theodore
Peterson, and Wilbur Schramm, Four Theories of the Press (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1967).
20. Muhammad Alwi Alhlan, "Anonymous Disclosure of Government Information
as a Form of Political Communication," unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of
Illinois, 1967.
21. See Geiber, "Attributes of a Reporter's Role," and Walter Geiber and Walter
Johnson, "The City Hall 'Beat': A Study of Reporter and Source Roles," Journalism
Quarterly 38 (1961): 289-97.
22. W. Lloyd Warner, American Life: Dream and Reality (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1962), 2.47, 249.
23. Thelma McCormack, "Social Theory and the Mass Media," Canadian Journal
of Economics and Political Science 27 (1961): 488.
24. Commission on Freedom of the Press, A Free and Responsible Press (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1947).
25. George Herbert Mead, "The Nature of Aesthetic Experience," in Selected Writ-
ings: George Herbert Mead, ed. Andrew Reck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), 302.
26. Robert Park, Society (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1955), 86.
7 / The Dark Continent
of American Journalism
Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. Even

Science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe
unit, and must fix on a point in the stars' unceasing journey when his
sidereal clock shall pretend that time is at Nought.... No retrospect
will take us to the true beginning: and whether our prologue be in
heaven or on earth, it is but a fraction of that all-presupposing fact
with which our story set out.
—George Eliot, Daniel Deronda
Journalists are writers of stories and, after hours, tellers of stories as

well. The stories they tell are of stories they missed, stories they got,
stories they scooped, and cautionary little tales that educate the ap-
prentice to the glories, dangers, mysteries, and desires of the craft. One
such story—one that might be called "the quest for the perfect lead"—
features Edwin A. Lahey, a legendary Chicago Daily News reporter.
Like most stories invoking legends, it is perhaps apocryphal, but its sig-
nificance is less in its truth than in the point it attempts to make.
The story begins with a celebrated murder case of 1924, the
Leopold-Loeb case. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were teenage
graduate students at the University of Chicago when they kidnapped
and killed fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks in an attempt to commit the
perfect crime. They made one mistake—a pair of Leopold's eyeglasses
was found at the scene of the crime. They were arrested, brought to
trial, and defended by the famous barrister Clarence Darrow. He had
them plead guilty but successfully argued against the death penalty.
144
The Dark Continent of American Journalism I 145
Both were sentenced to life terms for the murder plus ninety-nine years
for the kidnapping.
Nathan Leopold was paroled in 1958 and finished his life in Puerto
Rico doing volunteer medical work. Richard Loeb was killed in State-
ville Penitentiary in 1936 after making a homosexual advance toward
another prisoner. Eddie Lahey, who covered the story for the Daily
News, began his report with this lead: "Richard Loeb, the well-known
student of English, yesterday ended a sentence with a proposition."
Even if the story is invented, its well-knownness tells us something
of the imagination and desires of American journalists. What makes
the lead so gorgeous is not only how it encapsulates most of the ele-
ments of the news story—the five Ws and the H—but also how it does
so through a delightful play on words—journalistic prose brushing up
against poetry, if only in the ambiguity it celebrates. The lead also illus-
trates a necessary condition of all good journalism: a profound collab-
oration between writer and audience.
Lahey marks this collaboration by the assumption he makes about
the knowledge his audience brings to the story: that they were constant
readers who would remember Richard Loeb as an actor in a twelve-
year-old drama; that they would remember who Loeb was at the time
of the 192.4 crime and therefore catch the irony of the "well-known
student of English"; that they could appreciate from the drills of
schoolmasters the play on preposition and proposition; and, finally,
that they would grasp the dual meaning of sentence.
If the assumptions Lahey makes about his audience and the clever-
ness of his language set the lead apart, the desire it expresses and the el-
ements contained within it make it emblematic of all journalism. All
writing, all narrative art, depends upon dramatic unity, bringing to-
gether plot, character, scene, method, and purpose. The distinctive and
tyrannical aspect of daily journalism is the injunction that the elements
be assembled, arrayed, and accounted for in the lead, the topic sentence,
or at best—here is where the inverted pyramid comes in—the first para-
graph. The balance of the story merely elaborates what is announced at
the outset. (The long, often interminable stories of the Wall Street Jour-
nal, and many similar feature stories, are the exception; they, as T. S.
Eliot said of Swinburne, diffuse their meaning "very thinly throughout
an immense verbal spate.")
In Lahey's lead, the character, as is usual with American journal-
ism, has pride of place: Richard Loeb is the subject of both the story
146 / The Dark Continent of American Journalism
and the sentence. The scene, when and where, is given in the Stateville
dateline (conveniently a place and a prison) and in the commonest
word in any lead, yesterday. The plot, the what, is cleverly implied,
though left undeveloped, by the action and reaction—"ended a sen-
tence with a proposition." Only the how is omitted from the lead (he
was killed with a razor) and awaits another sentence.
And where is the why, the explanation of the act, the elucidation of
the purposes, however misaligned, of the actors? Why did Richard
Loeb make an advance, if indeed he did? Why did James Day, for that
was his name, murder Richard Loeb, if that is what he did? No one,
certainly not Eddie Lahey, knew. The why was merely an insinuation. It
would be established, if at all, only by the courts. James Day was, in
fact, acquitted on grounds of self-defense. Was it all an elaborate mis-
take, a behavioral ballet of misunderstood intentions? Lahey merely in-
sinuates a why—he appeals to his readers' commonsense knowledge of
what goes on in prisons, of what men are like in captivity. We must
read the why into the story rather than out of it: Richard Loeb as a
prisoner of sexual desire as well as of the prison itself.
The omission of the how and the insinuation of the why is ab-
solutely unremarkable: indeed, it is the standard practice of daily jour-
nalism. How could it be otherwise? At one level, how merely answers
the question of technique: in this case, the killing was accomplished
with a razor. In other cases, how tells us that interest rates were low-
ered by increasing the money supply, the football victory was achieved
with a new formation, the political candidate won through superior
precinct organization. The how is clearly of less importance than the
what, and in our culture the who, and can be relegated safely to subse-
quent sentences and paragraphs.
At another, and deeper, level, answering how requires detailing the
actual sequence of acts, actors, and events that leads to a particular
conclusion. How fills in a space; it tells us how an intention (the why)
becomes an accomplishment (the what). How puts the reader in touch
with the hard surfaces of human activity, the actual set of contingent
circumstances. Loeb did this, Day did that—a blind chain of events,
finally detailed for a jury, leading to a hideous outcome. When the
description becomes fine-grained enough, how merges into why: a de-
scription becomes an explanation.
Why answers to the question of explanation. It accounts for events,
actions, and actors. It is a search for the deeper factors that lie behind
the surfaces of the news story. "A story is worthless if it doesn't tell me
why something happened," says Allan M. Siegal of the New York Times.
Well, Mr. Siegal goes too far. If we threw out all the stories in the Times
that failed to answer the question "Why?" there wouldn't be much
newspaper left beyond the advertisements. Nonetheless, the why ele-
ment attempts to make things sensible, coherent, explicable. It satisfies
our desire to believe that the world, at least most of the time, is driven
by something other than blind chance.
How and why are the most problematic aspects of American jour-
nalism: the dark continent and the invisible landscape. Why and how
are what we most want to get out of a news story and are least likely to
receive or what we must in most cases supply ourselves. Both largely
elude and must elude the conventions of daily journalism, as they
elude, incidentally, art and science. Our interest in "what's new," "what's
happening," is not merely cognitive and aesthetic. We want more than
the facts pleasingly arranged. We also want to know how to feel about
events and what, if anything, to do about them. If they occur by luck or
blind chance, that is a kind of explanation, too. It tells us to be tragi-
cally resigned to them; indeed, luck and chance are the unannounced
dummy variables of journalistic thought, as they are of common sense.
We need not only to know but to understand, not only to grasp but to
take an attitude toward the events and personalities that pass before us,
to have an understanding or an attitude that depends upon depth in the
news story. Why and how attempt to supply this depth, even if they are
honored every day largely in the breach.
That news stories seldom make sense in this larger context is the
most frequent, punishing, and uncharitable accusation made in daily
journalism. Listen to one comment, this about daily reporting from
Washington, among the many that might be cited:
The daily news coverage travels over surfaces of words and events,
but it rarely reaches deeper to the underlying reality of how things
actually happen. Its own conventions and reflexes, in large measure,
prevent the news media from doing more. Until this changes too, cit-
izens will continue to be confused by the daily slices of news from
Washington. Periodically, they will continue to be shocked by occa-
sional comprehensive revelations of what's really happening, deeper
accounts which explain the events they thought they understood.
This obsessive criticism of daily journalism is true as far as it
goes, though it is unforgivably self-righteous. What it overlooks is that
depth—the how and the why—are rarely in any individual story. They
are properties of the whole, not the part, the coverage, not the account.
To expect the dramatic unity of a three-act play in a twelve-paragraph
story in a daily newspaper is to doom oneself to perpetual disappoint-
ment. But if a story can be kept alive in the news long enough, it can be
fleshed out and rounded off. Journalists devote much of their energy to
precisely that: keeping significant events afloat long enough so that in-
terpretation, explanation, and thick description can be added as part of
ongoing developments. Alas, management and the marketing depart-
ment devote much of their energy to precisely the opposite—making
each front page look like a new chapter in human history.
Journalism must be examined as a corpus, not as a set of isolated
stories. The corpus includes not only the multiple treatments of an event
within the newspaper—breaking stories, follow-ups, news analysis, in-
terpretation and background, critical commentary, editorials—but also
the other forms of journalism that surround, correct, and complete the
daily newspaper: television coverage, documentary and docudrama,
the news weeklies and journals of opinion, and, finally, book-length
journalism. Two decades after the Vietnam War its why is still being
established in books such as Loren Baritz's Backfire. The story of bus-
ing and racial desegregation in Boston—the how and the why—cannot
be found in the massive coverage that won the Boston Globe a Pulitzer
Prize. The story wasn't remotely complete until the publication of
J. Anthony Lucas's Common Ground, though even that remarkable
book subordinated the why of the busing story to the how—to the
close-grained, personified flow of events. The story behind the story
was that there was no story at all. All the standard explanations—
racism, bureaucratic incompetence, political manipulation, journalistic
irresponsibility—ebb away under the relentless detail of Lukas's narra-
tive. Similarly, the story of apartheid in South Africa never could be ad-
equately described or explained in the New York Times no matter how
many stories were devoted to it or how relentlessly. Anthony Lewis
banged away at it in his columns. Joseph Lelyveld's Move Your Shadow
deepened our understanding beyond that provided in breaking stories
of this riot or that, this government action or that, but it hardly ex-
plained either the origins or the trajectory of that political system. If
anything, the book made apartheid politically more ambiguous, as it
deepened our moral revulsion.
Journalism is, in fact, a curriculum. Its first course is the breaking
stories of the daily press. There one gets a bare description: identifica-
tion of the actors and the events, the scene against which the events are
played out, and the tools available to the protagonists. Intermediate
and advanced work—the fine-grained descriptions and interpreta-
tions—await the columns of analysis and interpretation, the weekly
summaries and commentaries, and the book-length expositions. Each
part of the curriculum depends on the other parts.
It is a weakness of American journalism that the curriculum is so
badly integrated and cross-referenced that each story starts anew, as if
no one had ever touched the subject before. It is also a weakness of
American journalism that so few of the students ever get beyond the
first course. But keep things in perspective. It is similarly a weakness,
say, of American social science that the curriculum is incoherent and
badly cross-referenced and so few of the "students" take more than the
introductory course. It is worse. Most of the students think the intro-
ductory course is the curriculum, and this naive assumption is rein-
forced by the pretensions of teachers and textbook writers.
The weaknesses of American journalism are systemic; they are of
a cloth with the weaknesses of American institutions generally, includ-
ing education. Both journalism and education assume the constant stu-
dent and the constant reader. American journalism assumes the figure
who queues up every day for a dose of news and beyond that the com-
mentary, analysis, and evidence that turn the "news" into knowledge.
American education assumes the "constant" student who engages in
lifelong learning, who, unsatisfied by the pieties and simplicities of the
"introductory course," goes on to explore subjects in depth and detail
and along the way acquires a mastery of theory and evidence. This is
both wrong and self-serving. But, to rephrase Walter Lippmann, more
journalists and scholars have been ruined by self-importance than by
liquor.
Many of the relations between the course and curriculum of American

journalism, and many of the problems of description and explanation,
are exemplified by an episode within the "big story" of recent years,
the story of the American economy. Since at least 1980, we have been
treated to a daily saga of runaway budget deficits, high unemployment,
tax reform and reductions, roller-coaster stock market prices, corpo-
rate takeovers and consolidations, mounting trade deficits, rapidly ris-
ing military expenditures, and high, though moderating, interest rates.
An instructive episode in this larger story opened in January 1982

when William Greider of the Washington Post published a long essay
in The Atlantic entitled "The Education of David Stockman." The
piece was based on eighteen "off-the-record" interviews with the then
director of the Office of Management and Budget taped during the first
nine months of the presidency of Ronald Reagan. The essay revealed
Stockman's growing doubts about the wisdom of the economic policy
Reagan was pursuing. Stockman recognized early that no matter how
cleverly numbers were massaged, the president's economic policy would
produce massive budget deficits and the economic stimulus from tax
reduction would not generate sufficient revenue to offset increased ex-
penditures for defense. The doctrines of supply-side economics on
which Reagan had conducted his successful campaign were, in Stock-
man's estimation, naively optimistic—or "voodoo" economics, as
George Bush had called them during the heat of the Republican pri-
maries. The supply-side tax reduction of Ronald Reagan turned out to
be no different from the demand-side tax reduction of John Kennedy,
except it was much more skewed toward the rich and powerful. Rea-
gan's economic policy was a return to traditional Republican "trickle
down" economics that helped the poor by first benefiting the rich.
Greider's essay revealed in stark terms the considerable pulling and
hauling within the administration and Congress over economic policy.
It underscored the compromises and trade-offs, the caving in to special
interests, the triumphs of expediency over principle that are inevitable
in putting together a revenue and expenditure program. It set out the
terms on which the private debate among presidential advisers was
conducted and defined in "brutal terms" the genuine problems that
Congress and the president would have to confront. It took us behind
the calm exterior of the federal bureaucracy into a war of conflicting
opinions where political choices were made amid ambiguity and uncer-
tainty. To a certain extent, it demystified the process of budget-making
by demonstrating that the experts had no magic wand or profound in-
sights into the economy. They turned out to be pretty much like every-
one else: confused about what was going on in the economy; badly di-
vided among themselves as to remedies; not much more in control of
the situation than the rankest amateurs. The piece revealed as well, at
least as Greider saw it, an awesome paradox: Reagan's stunning legis-
lative victories, which had dominated the news during the first months
of his term, trapped him in the awesome fiscal crisis with which we
still live. At least one of the roots of the paradox was in the Greider-
Stockman revelation that the one impregnable, off-limits part of the
budget was defense. This was the biggest peacetime arms buildup in the
history of the republic—one that in five years would more than double
the Pentagon's annual budget.
Despite the picture of conflict, indecision, and uncertainty over
economic policy the Atlantic essay revealed, Reagan himself presented
a confident image on television and in the newspaper: an image of fiscal
control and responsibility, of a new era of stable growth, balanced bud-
get, stock market expansion, and lowered inflation—a calm and elo-
quent reassurance despite privately held doubts of many of his advis-
ers, including Stockman.
For anyone familiar with bureaucracies, Greider's article rang true,
particularly in contrasting the smooth and reassuring exterior of cer-
tainty and an interior space of policy-making dominated by conflict
and disarray. But did the article explain anything? Hardly. It did ac-
count for Stockman's position on economic policy by showing some-
thing of the ideological commitments from which it derived. The essay,
however, was primarily an answer to the question of "how," a thick de-
scription of the actual process of policy-making, an etching of the space
between intention and accomplishment that eludes so much of daily
journalism. Greider's publisher, E. P. Button, described the essay this
way when it was reprinted in book form: "The Education of David
Stockman is a narrative of political action with overtones of tragedy as
the idealistic young conservative reformer discovers the complexities of
the political system and watches as his moral principles are under-
mined by the necessities of compromise." It sounds like a soap opera;
indeed, the sentence has the cadence of the introduction to the old
radio soap opera Our Gal Sunday. And it is, in a way, a soap opera.
While the essay is flat-footed and straightforward, it does have a strong
narrative line. It opens with its one literary twist: a tour of the Stock-
man farm in western Michigan, situating the protagonist in his native
habitat, among the conditions and people that formed him. The essay
thereby sets up a contrast between the quasi-heroic protagonist who
has learned solid ideological lessons in the outlands and the adminis-
tration insiders who defeat him in the cloakrooms and boardrooms of
Washington. The essay's revelatory power is in its consistent narrative
focus—from David Stockman's point of view—and a dramatic line—
from Michigan innocence to Washington defeat—that, while it is an
exaggeration, makes the entire episode coherent and the descriptive de-
tail informing.
But the story had an additional twist. Although the Greider-
Stockman conversations were "off the record" (not for publication in
any form), certain details were put on "background" (for anonymous
publication only). Washington Post reporters pursued the leads the pri-
vate discussions opened up and published the results. They found
White House sources to corroborate important information in the
Stockman interviews so they could write independent stories. Other
Washington journalists were covering and writing about these same
matters. Therefore, the essential facts in the Greider essay appeared in
the daily press attributed to those ubiquitous characters of Washington
journalism: administration sources, senior officials, senior White House
aides, key congressional aides, Defense Department advisers, and so on.
The key point, in Greider's mind, was that the Atlantic essay contained
nothing that was not widely known among Washington journalists,
nothing that had not already appeared in the daily press. Nonetheless,
the article created one of those brief storms typical of a Washington
season: a squall of comment, charges, and recriminations that dissi-
pates as quickly as it appears. Stockman was called into the president's
woodshed for a licking and emerged striking his breast and intoning
many mea culpas. Greider was pilloried for betraying principles of the
press. He had, so it was charged, withheld information from his own
paper and the public to publish it where it would get more attention.
When the Atlantic article appeared, Greider was transformed from
a reporter to a source: he was now a who, the subject of a story. Some
reporters who called for interviews obviously had not read the piece
and wanted Greider to summarize it. They showed little interest in the
substance of the article—the depiction of the process of policy-making,
the specific polices developed, the paradox of legislative triumph and
fiscal crisis—but much interest in the specific personalities inhabiting
the story. They wanted to know about motive: Why did Stockman give
the interviews? Why did Greider conduct them? Why did Stockman tell
Greider the things he did? Why did Greider withhold such information
from his own paper?
Greider tried to explain the ground rules for the interviews and the
content of the article, but he found that sophisticated explanations did
not hold up well in telephone interviews with reporters writing to
deadline and in search of a pithy lead. Press accounts of the article by
journalists who had read it were "brutal summaries" that sacrificed psy-
chological nuance, character, plot, subtlety, and ambiguity—all those
qualities that Greider thought made his piece distinctive and useful.
As I said earlier, the perplexing thing about the controversy was
that the essential information contained in the Atlantic piece had been
earlier reported in the daily press, though attributed to "senior budget
officials." All Greider had done was to thicken the narrative and put
Stockman's name in place of the anonymous source. It was now Stock-
man revealing his private doubts about the administration program.
But if the information was already available, why the controversy? The
answer is simple: in American journalism, names make news, and ex-
planations in the news pretty much come down to the motives of the
actors in the political drama.
Greider concluded that the conventions of daily journalism "serve
only a very limited market—the elite audience of Washington insid-
ers—while obscuring things for the larger audience of ordinary citi-
zens." Insiders can read names into the anonymous sources and can
ferret out motives from the interests lying behind the innocence of the
text. The text may answer how and why, but in ways accessible only to
those who already know the rules of Washington and the reportorial
game, those who already understand the background of government
policy-making: the players and interests at loose in the process, the al-
liances that exist between officials and reporters. Greider came to be-
lieve that his Atlantic article refuted the simple and shallow version of
reality that the news created when complex episodes were carved into
daily slices. He also rediscovered an old lesson of journalism, a lesson
recently restated by the journalist-turned-historian Robert Darnton:
journalists write not for the public but for one another, for their editors,
for their sources, and for other insiders who are part of the specialized
world they are reporting. It is in this context that the deeply coded text
of the daily news story develops. Such stories provide a forum in which
"participants in political debates can argue with each other in semi-
public disguises, influencing the flow of public dialogue and the content
of elite opinion without having to answer directly for their utterances."
Journalists and other insiders become so adept at the deep reading of
veiled messages that they forget they are unintelligible to the ordinary
reader or, if they are intelligible, convey an entirely different message.
Washington news is valued precisely because it is an insider's conversa-
tion, one interest group speaking to another, with reporters acting as
symbol brokers coding stories into a conversation only the sophisti-

cated few can follow. Greider summarizes:
This inside knowledge provides a continuing subtext for the news
of Washington; very little of it is conveyed in intelligible terms to
the uninformed. The "rules" prevent that, and so also do the con-
ventions of the press, how a story is written, and what meets the
standard definition of what is news. The insiders, both reporters
and government officials, will read every news story with this sub-
text clearly in mind. Other readers are left to struggle with their
own translation.
The Atlantic article broke through this coded text; it presented the
"unvarnished private dialogue of government" that was supposed to
remain private, implicit, known only to insiders capable of penetrating
the bland, reassuring rhetoric of the official news story and the official
handout. By making the private public, the Greider piece diminished
the value of every insider's knowledge and revealed the rules of the
game to a wider audience. Greider attempted, in short, to give a lesson
in how to read the daily news and how to add description and expla-
nation to accounts that regularly omit them. In doing so, his piece con-
tradicted the reassuring image of order and progress conveyed by
breaking stories.
What are the lessons to be learned from the Greider-Stockman
episode? First, daily journalism offers more description and explana-
tion than one would ordinarily think, but they are not transparently
available on the surface of the text. Despite the commitment of jour-
nalists to objectivity and facticity, much of what they have to report is
obliquely stated, coded deeply into the text and recoverable only by
"constant readers" who can decode the text and who bring to it sub-
stantial knowledge of politics, bureaucracy, and, as here, budgets. Sec-
ond, the most important descriptions and explanations of journalism
are lost when they are sliced into daily fragments, thin tissue cultures of
reality, disconnected from a narrative framework. Third, the reader can
discover such descriptions and explanations only when the separate
stories are reintegrated into a more coherent framework and when the
episodes of the news have a narrative structure that contains elements of
drama, nuances of character, and precise chronological order. Finally,
the episode demonstrates how overwhelmingly dependent American
journalism is on explaining events by attributing motives, purposes, and
intentions in the budget struggle and, then, in the newspaper accounts,
the motives of Stockman and Greider themselves. The origins of these

habits, including the habit of relying on motives for explanations, is re-
vealed in some commonplace history of American journalism.
A Wall Street Journal radio ad of some time back said something like
the following: "The business section of the daily newspaper will give
you the 'who, what, when, and where,' but only the Wall Street Journal
gives you the 'why and how.'" This is the hyperbole of advertising, of
course, but the claim holds some truth. The Journal's feature stories are
not written against a deadline, and they consume luxurious amounts of
space. They allow for a certain lushness of detail and description and
use a variety of literary devices, particularly personification, that give a
certain illusion of explanation. At the other extreme, the staples of the
Journal are the endless columns of price quotations from the financial
and commodity markets, and these numbers are, in a way, the arche-
type of the news story. The numbers tell sophisticated readers what has
happened (the market is down), how they should feel about it (that's
bad), and what they should do about it (it's time to get out). The reader
can extract a description and explanation from the statistics. The num-
bers merely signal an event; the description and explanation are within
the knowledge of the reader, and this knowledge constitutes the paper's
collaborative counterforce.
What is unexceptional about the Journal ad is its heroic and naive
realism. The ad assumes that the stories in the Journal record a trans-
parent truth of an objective reality. Perhaps this naive realism still flour-
ishes only among journalists. To the contrary, most scholars would
argue that the stories written by journalists manifest the reality-making
practices of the craft rather than some objective world. Journalists need
not apologize for this. All writing, even scientific writing, is a form of
storytelling aimed at imposing coherence on an otherwise chaotic flow
of events. That is the point, after all, of the George Eliot quote that
heads this essay. Even scientists must start with the make-believe of a
beginning: the fatal pause between the tick and the tock, a moment of
unfulfilled silence in which the scientist's story of the universe can
begin. Journalism, then, is a fiction in the sense that all stories are fic-
tions. They are made by journalists out of the conventions, procedures,
ethos, and devices of their craft. The language of journalism is not
transparent to nature or the world. Journalists speak an invented code,
often, as the Greider-Stockman story indicates, a densely compacted
code, and in this sense participate in a making, a fiction. As I previously

suggested, the raw data of journalism are always slipping away toward
the story forms, the genres, the structures of consciousness with which
the journalist tries to grasp hold of the suicide at the bridge or the bu-
reaucrat in the policy conference. The raw materials of the making, the
events, the data of journalism maintain their own unblessed existence
outside the news columns. Well, one must retreat. Press conferences,
pseudoevents, and media events are now so inextricably knotted into
the world that the issue is as complicated as our sex lives. Nonetheless,
journalism, like all fictions, is a creative and imaginative work, a sym-
bolic strategy, a way of rendering the world reassuringly comprehen-
sive or, failing that, of assigning events to fate, luck, and chance. Jour-
nalism, then, like everything else, often fails, but journalists do not
accept, because we will not tolerate, mystery for very long, particularly
if it involves politics and economics, matters of ultimate threat or reas-
surance. So the initially unintelligible is bashed at until it is in some
kind of shape.
News is not, then, some transparent glimpse at the world. News
registers, on the one hand, the organizational constraints under which
journalists labor: the processes by which beats are defined, stories are
selected and edited, the random eruption of events are reduced to rou-
tine procedure, the editorial resources of a publisher are allocated, and
"authorities" are defined and consulted. The news registers, on the
other hand, the literary forms and narrative devices journalists regu-
larly use to manage the overwhelming flow of events. These devices are
partly economic and bureaucratic. They guarantee the production of a
certain number of words and stories every day. They guarantee that the
journalist, under the most outrageous circumstances of time and situa-
tion, can instantly turn an event into a story. These literary devices are
tropisms; the journalist turns to them as a plant turns to light. Writing
has to be virtually that automatic if the journalist is to produce stories
on demand. They guarantee that the daily newspaper will be full of
news at a cost that ensures a product salable to advertisers and readers.
There is a harmonics to journalism; the stories write themselves. Yet
the stories slip away toward the literary devices and dramatic conven-
tions that are part of the culture as a whole. If, for example, one can
earn a profit selling "ideological stories" in European newspapers but
cannot in the United States, it tells us, at the least, that the dramatic
conventions of the ideological are not sufficiently resonant with Amer-
lean culture as a whole. They do not seem to get at the truth as we un-
derstand it.
The forms of American journalism are receptacles into which can
be poured the disconnected data of everyday life. As Carlin Romano
says, journalists present to the world not a mirror image or truth but a
coherent narrative that serves particular purposes. Even that must be
amended. As a rule, the newspaper presents a disconnected and often
incoherent narrative—in its individual stories and in its total coverage.
If the newspaper mirrors anything, it is disconnection and incoherence,
though it contributes to and symbolizes the very condition it mirrors.
In fact, journalism can present a coherent narrative only if it is rooted
in a social and political ideology that gives a consistent focus or narra-
tive line to events, that provides the terminology for a thick description
and a ready vocabulary of explanation.
The crucial events, the shaping influences, in the history of Ameri-
can journalism were those that stripped away this ideological context:
the decline of the partisan press, the emergence of the penny papers,
and the deployment of the telegraph as the nervous system of the news
business.
The Wall Street Journal is, in a sense, the archetype of the Ameri-
can newspaper: a paper for a commercial class interested in and with
an economic interest in the news of the day. The American newspaper
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a producer good for a
commercial class rather than a consumer good for a consumer class. It
reflected the economic, political, and cultural orientations of that class.
News of the day was primarily news of the rudimentary and disjointed
markets of early American capitalism: of prices, transactions, shipping,
the availability of goods, and events that affected prices and availabil-
ities in markets near and far. There was political news, too, but it was
political news in a restricted sense: news that could influence the con-
duct of commerce, not news of every conceivable happening in the
society. Much of what is today called news—burglaries and fires, for
example—was inserted in the paper as paid advertisements; much
of what is today called advertising—the availability of goods, for ex-
ample—appeared in the news columns. It is no coincidence that the
most popular name for American newspapers in 1800 was The Adver-
tiser. But the word advertising had a special meaning: not the purchase
of space but the unpurchased announcement of the availability of
merchandise.
The commercial and trading elites and the papers and newsletters
representing their interests were central to fomenting conflict with
Britain when the crown hampered their commercial activities. Follow-
ing independence, the commercial press retained its interest in politics;
that is, it "reported" on matters affecting the fate of merchants and
traders. But this class was deeply divided over issues such as the na-
tional bank. The partisan press, aligned with different factions of the
commercial class, gave venomous expression to these differences. But
the thing to remember is this: because the press was organized around
articulate economic interests, the news had meaning, could be inter-
preted through and explained by those interests. A partisan press cre-
ated and utilized an ideological framework that made sense of the news.
The second critical fact about the partisan press concerns the mat-
ter of time. The cycle of business is the cycle of the day: the opening
and closing of trade. The press of the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries was not technologically equipped to report on a timely, daily
basis, but it shared with business the understanding that time is the
essence of trade. As a result, the natural epoch of journalism became
the day: the cycle of work and trade for a business class. The techno-
logical impetus in journalism has been to coordinate the cycle of com-
munication with the cycle of trade.
While journalism lives by cycles ranging upward from the hour, its
natural metier is the stories of the day, even if it recycles them over
longer or shorter units of time. Journalism is a daybook that records
the significant happenings of that day. Its time frame is not posterity,
and journalists' flattering, self-protecting definition of their work as the
"first rough draft of history" does not alter that fact. The archetype of
journalism is the diary or account book. The diary records what is sig-
nificant in the life of a person for that day. The business journal records
all transactions for a given day. The news begins in bookkeeping. Com-
merce lives by, begins and ends the day with, the record of transactions
on, say, the stock and commodity markets. The news begins as a record
of commercial transactions and a tool of commerce. Every day there is
business to be done and there are prices to be posted. In this sense, the
origins of journalism, capitalism, and bookkeeping are indissoluble.
In the 18305, a cheap, daily popular press—the penny press—was
created in the major cities. The penny press did not destroy the com-
mercial press. The latter has continued to this day not only in the Wall
Street Journal and the Journal of Commerce, Barron's, and Business
Week, Forbes, and Fortune but also in private newsletters and private
exchanges that grew after the birth of the penny press with the enor-
mous expansion of the middle class. The Wall Street Journal doesn't
call itself "the daily diary of the American dream" for nothing. But the
penny press began the displacement of the commercial-partisan press
in the 18305, though it took seventy years to do so.
While scholars disagree over the significance of the penny press,
one can safely say three things about it. First, the penny press was a
consumer good for a consumer society; it reflected all of society and
politics, not just the world of commerce and commercial politics. The
gradual displacement of partisanship meant that any matter, however
minor, qualified for space in the paper: the details not only of trade and
commerce, but the courts, the streets, the strange, the commonplace.
The penny papers were filled with the odd, the exotic, and the trivial.
Above all, they focused on the anonymous individuals, groups, and
classes that inhabited the city. They presented a panorama of facts and
persons, a "gastronomy of the eye"; in another of Baudelaire's phrases,
they were a "kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness."
Second, the penny press displaced not merely partisanship but an
explicit ideological context in which to present, interpret, and explain
the news. Such papers choked off, at least relatively, an ideological
press among the working class. At its best, the penny press attempted
to eliminate the wretched partisanship and factionalism into which the
press had degenerated since the Revolution. It tried to constitute,
through the more or less neutral support of advertising, an open forum
in which to examine and represent a public rather than a merely parti-
san interest.
Third, the penny press imposed the cycle and habit of commerce
upon the life of society generally. Because in business time is money, the
latest news can make the difference between success and failure, selling
cheap or selling dear. Time is seldom so important in noncommercial
activity. The latest news is not always the best and most useful news.
Little is lost if the news of politics or urban life is a little old. None-
theless, the cycle and habit of beginning and ending the day by reading
the latest prices was imposed on social activities generally. Beginning in
the 18308, the stories of society were told on a daily basis. The value
of timeliness was generalized by the penny press into the cardinal value
of journalism.
The events of journalism happen today. The morning reading of
the New York Times is important because it establishes the salience of

stories for the day. It also determines salience for the television net-
works, the newsmagazines, the journals of opinion issued weekly and
monthly. Even the stories in books begin in the announcements in news
columns: a family named Clutter was murdered in Holcomb, Kansas,
yesterday. With the penny press, all forms of writing became, increas-
ingly, a parasite of "breaking news."
The telegraph cemented everything the "penny press" set in mo-
tion. It allowed newspapers to operate in "real time" for the first time.
Its value was ensuring that time became irrelevant for purposes of
trade. When instantaneous market reports were available everywhere
at the same moment, everyone was effectively in the same place for
purposes of trade. The telegraph gave a real rather than an illusory
meaning to timeliness. It turned competition among newspapers away
from price, even away from quality, and onto timeliness. Time became
the loss leader of journalism.
The telegraph also reworked the nature of written language and fi-
nally the nature of awareness itself. One old saw has it that the tele-
graph, by creating wire services, led to a fundamental change in news.
In snapped the tradition of partisan journalism by forcing the wire ser-
vices to generate "objective" news that papers of any political stripe
could use. Yet the issue is deeper than that. The wire services demanded
language stripped of the local, the regional and colloquial. They de-
manded something closer to a "scientific" language, one of strict deno-
tation where the connotative features of utterance were under control,
one of fact. If a story was to be understood in the same way from
Maine to California, language had to be flattened out and standard-
ized. The telegraph, therefore, led to the disappearance of forms of
speech and styles of journalism and storytelling—the tall story, the
hoax, much humor, irony, and satire—that depended on a more tradi-
tional use of language. The origins of objectivity, then, lie in the neces-
sity of stretching language in space over the long lines of Western Union.
Similarly, the telegraph eliminated correspondents who provided
letters that announced events, described them in detail, and analyzed
their substance. It replaced them with stringers who supplied the bare
facts. As the telegraph made words expensive, a language of spare facts
became the norm. Telegraph copy had to be condensed to save money.
From the stringer's notes, someone at the end of the telegraphic line
had to reconstitute the story, a process that reaches high art with the
newsmagazines: the story divorced from the storyteller.
If the telegraph made prose lean and unadorned and led to a jour-
nalism without the luxury of detail and analysis, it also brought an
overwhelming crush of such prose to the newsroom. In the face of what
was a real glut of occurrences, news judgment had to be routinized and
the organization of the newsroom made factorylike. The reporter who
produced the new prose displaced the editor as the archetype of the
journalist. The spareness of the prose and its sheer volume allowed
news, indeed forced news, to be treated like a commodity: something
that could be transported, measured, reduced, and timed. News be-
came subject to all the procedures developed for handling agricultural
commodities. It was subject to "rates, contracts, franchising, discounts
and thefts."
Together these developments of the second third of the nineteenth
century brought a new kind of journalism, a kind that is still roughly
the staple of our newspapers. But, as I explained earlier, this new jour-
nalism made description and explanation radically problematic:
"penny" and telegraphic journalism divorced news from an ideological
context that could explain and give significance to events. It substituted
the vague principle of a public interest for "class interest" as the crite-
rion for selecting, interpreting, and explaining the news. It brought the
newsroom a glut of occurrences that overwhelmed the newspaper and
forced journalists to explain not just something but everything. As a re-
sult, they often could explain nothing. By elevating objectivity and fac-
ticity into cardinal principles, the penny press abandoned explanation
as a primary goal. Simultaneously, it confronted readers with events
they had no way of understanding. It filled the paper with human in-
terest material that, however charming, was inexplicable. And, finally,
it divorced the announcement of news from analysis of it and required
readers to maintain constant vigilance to the news if they were going to
understand anything.
The conditions of journalistic practice and the literary forms journal-

ists inherited together strictly limit the degree to which daily journalism
can answer how and why. How something happens or how someone
accomplishes something demands the journalist's close, detailed atten-
tion to the flow of facts that culminate in a happening. The dailiness
and deadline of the newspaper and the television news show usually
preclude the opportunity to etch in the detail that intervenes between

an intention and an accomplishment, a cause and its effect. Moreover,
the journalist's typical tools, particularly the telephone interview, are
inadequate to a task that demands far more varied resources. Journal-
ists cannot subpoena witnesses; no one is required to talk to them. As a
result, "how," the detail, must await agencies outside of journalism,
such as the grand jury, the common trial, the blue-ribbon commission,
social surveys, congressional investigating committees, or other, more
leisured and wide-ranging forms of journalistic inquiry: the extended
series, magazine article, or book.
Explanation in daily journalism has even greater limits. Explana-
tion demands that the journalist not only retell an event but account
for it. Such accounting normally takes one of four forms: determining
motives, elucidating causes, predicting consequences, or estimating sig-
nificance. However, the canons of objectivity, the absence of a forum or
method through which evidence can be systematically adduced, and
the absence of an explicit ideological commitment on the part of jour-
nalists renders the task of explanation radically problematic, except
under certain well-stipulated conditions.
First, the problem of objectivity. Who, what, when, and where are
relatively transparent. Why is invisible. Who, what, when, and where
are empirical. Why is abstract. Who, what, when, and where refer to
phenomena on the surface of the world. Why refers to something
buried beneath appearances. Who, what, when, and where do not mir-
ror the world, of course. They reflect the reality-making practices of
journalists. Answering such questions depends upon conventions that
are widely shared, even if they are infrequently noted. We no longer, for
example, identify figures in the news by feminine nouns: poetess,
Negress, Jewess, actress. The who, the identification, now obeys a dif-
ferent set of conventions that attempt to depress the importance of
"race" and gender, conventions that journalists both use and legiti-
mate. But for all the conventionality of who, what, when, and where,
they are accessible because our culture widely shares a gradient against
which to measure them. As Michael Schudson has suggested, the no-
tion of when, of time, in journalism is not as transparent as words like
recent, immediate, or breaking seem to suggest. Nonetheless, time in
journalism is measured against a standard gradient of tense, of past,
present, and future, that is widely shared in the culture.1
There is no accessible gradient for the measurement of causes, the
assessment of motives, the prediction of consequences, or the evalua-

tion of significance. No one has seen a cause or a consequence; motives
are ghostly happenings in the head; and significance seems to be in the
eye of the beholder. Explanations do not lie within events or actions.
Rather, they lie behind them or are inferences or extrapolations that go
well beyond the commonsense evidence at hand. Explanation, then,
cuts against the naive realism of journalism with its insistence on ob-
jective fact.
The first injunction of journalists is to stay with the facts; facts pro-
vide the elements of the story. But causes, consequences, and motives
are not themselves facts. Because journalists are above all else empiri-
cists, the why must elude them. They lack a framework of theory or
ideology from which to deduce evidence or infer explanations. To ex-
plain is to abandon journalism in the archetypal sense: it is to pursue
soft news, "trust me" journalism. Explanatory journalism is, to use an
ugly phrase, "thumbsucker journalism": stories coming from the jour-
nalist's head rather than the facts.
Something is philosophically awry about all this, of course. The
facts of the case are always elaborate, arbitrary cultural constructions
through which who, what, when, and where are not only identified but
judged, not only described but evaluated. But such constructions can
be pinned down only by ordinary techniques of journalistic investiga-
tion. Not so with why. For to answer the question "Why?" one must go
outside the interview-and-clip file, to the library, the computer, govern-
ment documents, historical surveys. But there are no conventions to
guide journalists in sifting and judging evidence from such sources and
no forum in which conflicting evidence can be weighed.
More than the organization of the newsroom, the nature of jour-
nalistic investigations and the professional ideology of journalism sup-
press a journalism of explanation. The basic definitions of news exclude
definition from the outset. News focuses on the unusual, the non-
routine, the unexpected. Thus, it necessarily highlights events that in-
terest us precisely because they have no explanation. This is part of the
meaning of human interest: deviation from the accepted routine of or-
dinary life. News is when man bites dog. Unfortunately, no one knows
what possessed the man who bit the dog; even psychiatrists are not
likely to be much help.
Much of journalism focuses on the bizarre, the uncanny, the inex-
plicable. Journalism ritualizes the bizarre; it is a counterphobia for over-
coming objects of fear. Stories of the bizarre, uncanny, horrible, and

unfathomable are like roller-coasters, prizefights, stock-car races—
pleasurable because we can be disturbed and frightened without being
hurt and overwhelmed. Where would we be without stories of UFOs
and other such phenomena, stories at once intensely pleasing and in-
tensely disturbing? In the age of the partisan press, such stories were
consigned to folklore, the oral tradition, and other underground modes
of storytelling. With the penny press, they came into the open and took
up residence in newspapers as the unexplained and unexplainable
desiderata of our civilization.
The impossible French have even given such stories a name: faits-
divers. This most easily translates as "fillers," but we might better ren-
der it idiomatically as "random, uncanny occurrences." Such stories,
according to Roland Barthes, preserve at the very heart of modern soci-
ety an ambiguity of the rational and irrational, of the intelligible and the
unfathomable. Carlin Romano cited one such story: "Guest Drowns at
Party for 100 Lifeguards."2 But think of some other newspaper samples:
"Chief of Police Kills Wife"; "Psychiatrist's Son Commits Mayhem";
"Burglars Frightened away by Other Burglars"; "Thieves Sic Their Po-
lice Dog on Night Watchman." We are here in the realm of perversity,
chance, accident, coincidence. "Man and Wife Collide with One An-
other in Auto Accident"; "Father Runs over His Child in the Drive-
way"; "Man Drinks Himself to Death at Party to Celebrate His Di-
vorce." Every such story is a sign at once intelligent and indecipherable.
The factors of coincidence, unpredictability, and the uncanny float
some events to the surface of the news from the many that fit a type, ex-
plaining why a few murders get reported of the many committed, a few
accidents detailed of the many occurring.
Consider this from the Associated Press:
A confirmed AIDS victim who allegedly spat on four police officers
during a traffic arrest was charged Friday with assault with intent to
commit murder.
John Richards of Davison, Ohio, was charged with the felony
warrant because "it appears the man knows he has AIDS and was
trying to transmit it by spitting on the officers," said Assistant
Genesee County Prosecutor John McGraw.
What is going on here? This is of course the season for stories
about AIDS because of the menacing potential of the disease. But what
did Mr. Richards think he was up to? And what, even more, was going
on with the police? It is precisely the bizarre and inexplicable quality of

the event that makes it a story. It gives new meaning to the phrase
deadly weapon; it conjures up a time when our saliva will be registered.
Or consider the following from the Chicago Sun-Times of January
7, 1986:
Tale of True Love
He Escapes Death, Gives Girlfriend His Heart
PATTERSON, Calif. (AP) A i5-year-old boy
who learned that his girlfriend needed a heart
transplant told his mother three weeks ago that
he was going to die and that the young woman
should have his heart.
Felipe Garza Jr., who his half-brother said
had seemed to be in perfect health, died Satur-
day after a blood vessel burst in his head.
His family followed his wishes, and Felipe's
heart was transplanted Sunday into Donna
Ashlock.
His half-brother, John Sanchez, 2,0, said
Felipe told their mother, Maria, three weeks ago:
"I'm going to die, and I'm going to give my heart
to my girlfriend."
This is the type of story that faits-divers defines; as a result, it ap-
peared everywhere: the straight press; the weekly tabloids; television
news, national and local; the newsweeklies; even many of the prestige
papers. It is the generality of its distribution and the uncanniness of its
content that makes it so informing an example. Naturally, as the story
travels from the most to the least respectable journal, the bizarre ele-
ments become even more pronounced. But its appeal and significance
are universal.
Stories like those cited here appear in the daily press, where they
are oddments and filler. They are main news of the tabloid weeklies. In
the National Enquirer, the Star, and the Weekly World News the limits
of the bizarre are pushed out one standard deviation, but the type is
common to the press in general. From the tabloid weeklies: "She Be-
came Great Granny Three Times in One Day"; "Dog Eats Boy's Nose";
"Chinese Genius Is Only Five and Ready for College"; "I Won't Be a
Fat Farm Flop—700 Pound Behemoth Vows." What is filler for the
straight press is feature in the tabloids. What is filler in the evening

news, often designed to give an upbeat if totally improbable ending to
a half hour of mayhem and melancholy, is feature for Charles Kuralt's
On the Road. As we shall see, the same instructive relation between the
straight press and the weekly tabloids occurs in the realm of motives.
The world of the inexplicable contrasts sharply with the fore-
ground of daily news, the world of politics and economics. In the latter
domains, we are unwilling to leave events to chance or dismiss happen-
ings as bizarre, mysterious, or coincidental. The world of politics and
economics is a world of threat in which we can lose our lives, our pos-
sessions, our freedom, our entire sense of purpose. In that world, we
seek reassurance that someone or something is in control. We are intol-
erant of mystery in politics even when politics is mysterious, for this is
the sphere of the menacing. Whenever such threat and reward systems
confront us, we demand explanation, coherence, significance, and in-
telligibility. So once we leave the realm of faits-divers, the how and why
get answered by one device or another despite the limitations of daily
journalism.
We start from this proposition: when matters of fundamental impor-

tance surface in the news, they cannot be treated as secular mysteries
left unexplained. They must be accounted for, must be rendered sensi-
ble. The economy and the political system form the sacred center of
modern society. With them, we are unwilling to sit about muttering
"It's fate" or "So be it." We insist that the economy and the polity be
explicable—a domain where someone is in control, or natural laws are
being obeyed, or events are significant and consequential—or that de-
spite all the bad news of the moment, the signs in the headlines auger
well for the future.
The importance of economics and politics in each individual's life
guarantees that people will come up with explanations—ideological
explanations—even if the press and the politicians are silent on these is-
sues. As a result, explanation is an arena of struggle within journalism,
a struggle to control the natural ideological forces set in motion by the
appearance of disturbing and perplexing events. The press explains
such events by elucidating motives, demonstrating causes, predicting
consequences, or divining significance. The order of these forms of ex-
planation is logical, not chronological. Different events are explained
different ways; any given story will mix these forms of explanation to-
gether; and the same story will be subjected at different times to dif-
ferent forms of explanation. But the order of explanation runs as fol-
lows: if you can find a motive, state it; if you can't find a motive or a
cause, look for consequences; if you can find none of the above, read
the tea leaves of the event for its significance. Motive explanations,
however, dominate American journalism and create, as we shall see, all
sorts of havoc.
To unpack these complicated matters, I will use one extended ex-
ample. In March 1985, the Department of Commerce issued its monthly
report on the balance of payments of the American economy. These
monthly statements had regularly shown a deteriorating American po-
sition in the international economy. The March statement was unex-
ceptional; indeed, it was a considerable improvement over the report of
the previous October. Here is the Associated Press story that opened
this chapter in the trade crisis:
The nation's trade deficit climbed to $11.4 billion in February, the
worst showing since September, as exports fell 7.7 percent, the gov-
ernment reported Thursday.
The deficit was n percent higher than the $10.3 billion deficit
in January and was the biggest monthly imbalance since the $11.5
billion deficit in September, the Commerce Department said.
Then, after one more paragraph of description, the story offered
this unattributed explanation: "The poor performance has been blamed
in part on the dollar's high value, which makes U.S. goods more expen-
sive and harder to sell overseas while whetting Americans' appetite for
a flood of cheap exports." The explanation undoubtedly came from the
Department of Commerce briefing but, interestingly, it did not carry
the argument a step further: the high value of the dollar could have
been blamed on the large federal deficit, continuing high interest rates,
the need for enormous federal borrowing, and the influx of foreign cur-
rency chasing investments.
The monthly stories of the trade deficit normally do not receive
much attention beyond the business and financial press and usually dis-
appear within a day or two. However, the March 1985 report showed,
among other things, a further worsening of our trade balance with
Japan. This story might have disappeared except that the voluntary im-
port restrictions on Japanese automobiles were about to expire. The
question on the political agenda was whether the import restrictions
should be kept at the same level, raised, lowered, or eliminated alto-
gather. Action on automobile import restrictions was but a prelude,

however, to overall trade policy on a number of American products—
shoes, textiles, steel—that had been faring badly in international trade.
The Reagan administration generally supported free trade, but it also
was negotiating with the Japanese to gain greater access to Japanese
markets for American manufacturers of, among other things, telecom-
munications products. The second matter that made the March Com-
merce Department report of greater than normal significance was that
planning was under way for an early May "economic summit" in Bonn,
West Germany, between Japan, the United States, and the other major
Western countries. At that conference, trade policy was to be a princi-
pal item of discussion.
The story of the balance of payments and trade policy was contin-
uously at the "front" of the news from early March until it was pushed
aside by the controversy surrounding President Reagan's visit to the
Bitburg cemetery containing the graves of World War II German sol-
diers, including the burial sites of members of the SS. The trade story
declined in prominence through an odd conjunction of circumstances:
the attention to German-American relations symbolized by the ceme-
tery visit offended President Mitterrand of France, who largely sabo-
taged attempts to plan future meetings on trade policy.
One of the early reactions to the trade crisis was a 92-0 vote in the
Senate condemning the Japanese for restrictive trade practices. A flurry
of charges and countercharges allowed journalists to keep the trade
story alive for a protracted period and to examine it from every con-
ceivable angle. Many other interest groups also wished to keep the
story in the headlines, and there was considerable behind-the-scenes
struggle to define and explain the trade crisis. The struggle was an at-
tempt to control public sentiment toward the Japanese and toward tar-
iff and trade policy generally.
The question facing journalists was this: why was there an increas-
ingly negative balance of payments with Japan and other countries?
The significance of the journalist's attempt to answer the questions was
this: the answer arrived at would be one of the central elements in de-
termining the course of government economic policy.
The first explanation offered was based on motives. Such stories
pitted wily Japanese against innocent Americans. The Japanese in their
desire to dominate international markets were playing by unacceptable
rules of the game. Through a variety of devices, they were securing ac-
cess to American markets and technology, engaging in unfair competi-

tive practices, and excluding American products and producers from
Japan.
This explanation was advanced by leaders of declining industries,
by Senators Robert Packwood and John Danforth, and by members of
Congress from districts economically depressed by the flood of imports.
Senator Packwood wrote in the New York Times that, to cite the head-
line, "Japan's Not Entitled to 'Free Lunch.'" He argued that "America
can successfully compete in the Japanese market—if we can get into it.
The problem is the jaded Japanese bureaucracy." The Chicago Tribune
reported a speech by Lee lacocca, then the Chrysler Corporation chair-
man, in which he demanded that the "Japanese play fair with us." He
claimed that "Americans see it as a one-way trade relationship, a well-
ordered plan by Japan to take as much as it can and put very little
back." Joseph A. Reaves of the Chicago Tribune reported from Tokyo
that "Americans see the Japanese as conniving protectionists who want
to get rich exporting their goods around the world while buying only
Japanese products at home." The troubles of individual industries in
dealing with the Japanese were reported. James Mateja, the automotive
writer of the Chicago Tribune, interviewed a representative of the au-
tomotive replacement parts industry who argued that neither low qual-
ity nor high prices kept his industry out of the Japanese market. It was
restrictive trade practices: "If you have equal access to the specifica-
tions, and if you can retain business at the best price, then our prices
would knock their socks off. I don't know how they accept price quotes
now." A consensus position offered on Japanese motives was summa-
rized by a Tribune business writer: "They [U.S. officials in Tokyo] say
the Japanese simply aren't playing fair in the trade game. American
companies trying to do business in Japan face an impenetrable wall of
government-imposed barriers designed to protect Japanese firms."
The "motive story" of trade was not restricted to analyzing the
Japanese. Clyde Farnsworth of the New York Times reported that
pressing "trade issues are reshaping the political lineup in the United
States as Democrats and Republicans maneuver for advantage while
trying to deal with an influx of imports from Japan and other coun-
tries." He claimed that "Democrats now smell blood on the issue" and
were going after twenty-two Republican Senate seats. The Democrats
were going to tie trade problems to the Republican free market eco-
nomic policy that was causing an overvalued dollar.
Farnsworth's story hints at a shift in the form of explanation of the

trade crisis story: from motives to causes. It was the Japanese them-
selves who pointed out not only the restrictive trade practices of the
United States but also, more importantly, that the trade deficit was
caused by the overvalued dollar, the poor quality of American goods,
the taste standards of the Japanese market, and the fact that the strength
of the recovery of the American economy created unprecedented de-
mand by Americans for foreign products. The explanation, in other
words, did not reside in the motives of the Japanese or in individual
Americans but in collective international economic conditions: the
more or less natural laws of modern economics or the unintended con-
sequences of normal economic activity.
Ronald Yates of the Chicago Tribune reported the comments of
Toshiaki Fujinami, president of a small Japanese paper products com-
pany: U.S. senators were "just trying to shift the blame for the declin-
ing American economy away from the huge U.S. budget deficit and the
over-valued dollar to Japan." Edwin Yoder in the Providence Journal
warned against "misreading causes of the U.S. trade deficit" and claimed
that "Reagan-Congress fiscal policy" and the ludicrous budget deficit
of $200 billion a year "is the sword we throw ourselves on every day."
He offered his own quick explanation:
The budget deficits generate historically high "real" interest rates,
adjusting for inflation. They suck prodigious sums of foreign capital
into the United States, keeping the dollar drastically overvalued
against other major currencies.
The stark weighting of the terms of trade to our disfavor func-
tions as an export tax on U.S. goods, an import subsidy to foreign
goods and an incentive to U.S. employers to move plants "offshore"
if they can. Those that can't move close. In this witch's brew, one
partner's trade practices, even Japan's, are a piddling ingredient—the
equivalent of one eye of newt.
Chicago Tribune editorials and editorial columns by Stephen Chap-
man pointed out that the "real" motives of Lee lacocca and others like
him were less gaining access to Japanese markets than restricting for-
eign competition. They pointed out that Japan's trade restrictions are
"just handy excuses for American ones." Chapman argued that the
Japanese had not refused to buy American goods: "American exports
to Japan had risen by 9 percent last year." What, then, caused the trade
deficit? The strong dollar. "Foreigners, including the Japanese, are eager
to buy a share of our booming economy. As long as foreigners invest

more here than Americans invest abroad, Americans will have to im-
port more goods than they export. That's not bad trade." Another rea-
son: the American economy recovered faster than Japan's and Western
Europe's. "Consequently, American businesses and consumers have
more money to spend than their foreign counterparts. So the U.S. im-
ports more than they do."
Hobart Rowen of the Washington Post reported that a study by
the Institute of International Economics showed that each country had
roughly equivalent barriers to trade. The study attributed trade tension
to the distorted relation between the dollar and the yen. Rowen noted
that the institute's conclusion "conflicts with frequent assertions by ad-
ministration officials and business executives that the imbalance in
trade is a result of Tokyo's barriers to U.S. imports."
As this example shows, journalists writing about causes depend
upon "experts," "think tanks," and other organizations attempting to
influence policy. Journalists often can handle motive explanations based
upon only their own knowledge or a few well-placed sources. But with
causes, journalists are largely at the mercy of others, not because the
subject is necessarily more technical but because the form of the expla-
nation is one in which social scientists specialize and therefore have an
overwhelming advantage.
United States and international economic conditions were not the
only causes cited for the trade deficit. A slowly emerging crop of stories
admitted to Japanese trade barriers but rooted those barriers not in the
motives and intentions of Japanese leaders but in Japanese cultural
habits. The New York Times's Nicolas Kristof suggested that the cul-
tural barriers to trade "cannot be easily negotiated away." Even the
Japanese often have difficulty breaking into the Japanese market. He
cited Jon K. T. Choy, an economist at the Japanese Economic Institute
in Washington, who explained that the "Japanese system doesn't simply
discriminate against foreigners—it discriminates against newcomers."
The Japanese "place a premium on a long-term relationship with sup-
pliers, doing business with those who have faithfully performed their
obligations in the past. This is what makes it difficult even for new
Japanese companies to break into the market." Even more: Americans
don't speak Japanese, whereas the Japanese speak English and under-
stand American culture; the Japanese resist foreign goods because they
consider their own superior; American products have incomprehensi-
ble instructions and are not sized and detailed to the Japanese market.
(Pampers, for example, were inappropriately shaped to the Japanese
bottom.)
The cultural cause of the trade deficit was elaborated in other arti-
cles that examined the shopping habits of the Japanese ("The Wary
Shoppers of Japan," New York Times) and Japanese attitudes toward
everything foreign ("The Hideous Gaijin in Japan," Newsweek).
There was something disingenuous about cultural explanations of
trade deficits. Most of those reporting such explanations were advocat-
ing free trade in one way or another. However, the theory of free trade
assumes the absence of cultural barriers to commerce and operates in
terms of a purely rational model of economic activity where price and
quality govern the terms of trade.
While such stories increasingly emphasized the causes of the trade
deficit, other reports continued to analyze motives. The motives in
question were those of the Reagan administration. A long wrap-up
story in the Chicago Tribune relied on an expert on Japan, Chalmers
Johnson of the University of California. He linked the trade deficit to
the fact that "U.S. foreign policy is controlled by the State Department,
which, like Reagan, sees Japan more in terms of the Soviet-America ri-
valry than in its economic role." As long as Prime Minister Nakasone
was seen as a firm ally against the Soviets, "his inability to produce real
Japanese concessions on trade will be forgiven." Similarly, the econo-
mist Robert Solow, writing in the New York Times, suggested that the
Reagan administration did not really favor investment, productivity, or
growth. "Its goal is to shrink the Federal Government, to limit its ca-
pacity to provide services, at least civilian services, or to redistribute in-
come to the poor or to regulate private activity." In other words, the
trade crisis was a nonstory because the budget deficits driving the terms
of trade derived from Reagan's intention to reshape domestic politics.
These multiple explanations of the trade deficit, and the blizzard of
stories reporting them, were made more complicated by two other
types of stories concerning Japanese-American relations. First were sto-
ries about the personal relations of Reagan and Nakasone, a "Ron"
and "Yasu" show: two embattled leaders trying to control angry forces
of economic warfare at loose beneath them, sending delegations from
one capital to the other to soothe relations. The other set of stories
transmitted messages between the Japanese and American bureaucra-
cies: charges, recriminations, demands for concessions, threats of what

was ahead if this practice or that was not abandoned.
The causes of an event are intimately linked to its consequences.
Therefore, every story that explains an event by elucidating causes also
states, more or less directly, the consequences that flow from it. If the
balance of payments problem is caused by budget deficits, and if the
budget deficits are to continue for some time, then a train of conse-
quences follows—at least until the Gramm-Rudman deficit controls kick
in. But the Gramm-Rudman mechanisms have their own consequences.
Causes are usually emphasized more than consequences, because con-
sequences are in the future and thus as much a matter of prophecy as of
knowledge. Even so, many stories cited the predicted consequences of
the trade imbalance for employment, and even the future of United
States-Japanese relations. Edwin Yoder's piece evoked a reenactment
of World War II: "Only fools underrate the mischief o f . . . cultural bar-
riers in history and the teaching of this sad history is that the United
States and Japan have had difficulty understanding one another be-
fore. . . . No one is looking for a reprise of those old enmities."
If all else fails, find the significance in the event. What does the
trade crisis tell us about ourselves? Bill Neikirk in the Chicago Tribune
told us: "Here's what's happening: They [the Japanese] sacrifice more
than we do. . . . They anticipate and manage better than we do. . . .
Their system of compensation promotes worker loyalty and holds
down welfare payments. They have maintained higher efficiency, better
management, and lower wages. . . . We have been outperformed." In
short, the real significance of the trade crisis is that our economy and
civilization are declining, having lost the habits of character that made
us once a great nation.
I have argued that "why" is the question most often left unanswered,
or answered with an insinuation. Attempting to answer "why" places
American journalists on soft ground, where they are subjected to and
reliant on experts. When explanations do appear, they are of particular
types consonant with American culture as a whole. That should not
surprise us. Despite everything said about the political biases of Amer-
ican journalists, they are, John Chancellor says, "pretty much like
everyone else in their basic beliefs."
I suggested earlier that American journalism always begins from
the question of "who." Although I exaggerate, you will not go far
wrong assuming that names make news. The primary subject of journal-
ism is people—what they say and do. Moreover, the subject is usually
an individual—what someone says and does. Groups, in turn, are usu-
ally personified by leaders or representatives who speak or act for them,
even when we know this is pretty much a fiction. Edward Kennedy
speaks for liberals, Jesse Jackson for blacks, Gloria Steinem for liber-
ated women. Sometimes a composite or a persona speaks for a leaderless
or amorphous group: "scientists say"; a suicide note from a teenager
stands for all unwritten notes. Their sayings and doings are representa-
tive of a class. If journalists cannot find a representative individual,
they more or less invent one, as leaders were invented or selected by the
press during the 19608 for the student antiwar movements.
Because news is mainly about the doings and sayings of individ-
uals, why is usually answered by identifying the motives of those in-
dividuals. Why tells us why someone did something. This is the sense
in which American culture is "individualistic": We assume that in-
dividuals are authors of their own acts, that individuals do what
they do intentionally, that they say what they say because they have
purposes in mind. The world is the way it is because individuals want
it that way. Explanation in American journalism is a kind of long-
distance mind reading in which the journalist elucidates the motives,
intentions, purposes, and hidden agendas that guide individuals in
their actions.
This overreliance on motive explanations is a pervasive weakness
of American journalism. Motive explanations are too easy. It takes time,
effort, and substantial knowledge to find a cause, whereas motives are
available for a phone call. And motives are profoundly misleading and
simplifying. Motive explanations end up portraying a world in which
people are driven by desires no more complicated than greed.
Journalism is not the only forum in which motives are established.
The courtroom is the great American scene in the drama of motives. To
compare journalism to the courts is not farfetched. The adversary
model of journalism, with the press as prosecutor and public represen-
tative, is clearly derived from the courts. The journalist is detective, the
investigator, trying to establish the facts of the case and the motives of
the actors. The "detective story" and the journalism story have devel-
oped in tandem since the emergence of the penny press.
A New Yorker cartoon of a few years back featured two detectives
staring quizzically at a corpse. One remarked to the other, "It's an old-
fashioned crime—it has a motive." The cartoon is testimony to a de-

mand we make of the courtroom and the press: that they present little
episodes in what Max Weber called the "quest for lucidity," the de-
mand that the world make sense.
In a murder trial, for example, there will be two points of con-
tention. First, what was the act and was it committed by the accused?
But the answer to those questions depends critically on a third: what
was the motive? The nature of the act cannot be determined and guilt
cannot be assigned until the act is motivated, until a statement of in-
tention is attached to it that makes it intelligible to us. In fact, to make
acts intelligible is the greatest demand of a courtroom. We make acts
intelligible by showing the grounds a person had for acting. These
grounds are, however, not the cause of an act. If I make a person's mur-
derous act intelligible by portraying his motive, I do not mean the mo-
tive caused the murder. After all, many people have such motives, but
they do not commit murder. The motive makes intelligible but it does
not cause; it is understanding action without understanding causation.
Because I understand the motive behind a murderous act, I do not nec-
essarily approve of it. It merely means that the motive is a plausible
ground for the act. Acts must be placed within learned interpretive
schemes so that we might judge them as being murder, suicide, man-
slaughter, self-defense, first degree, and so on. And those terms are not
exactly unambiguous.
Let us take the matter a step further. Suppose in our hypothetical
crime a husband murders his wife. What interpretations might be made
of his behavior? How will it be motivated? How will the action be
made intelligible to us (which is also an attempt, let us remember, to
make it intelligible to the accused)? We have a standard typology of
motives we can bring to bear. He did it for her money—a technically
rational motive in a utilitarian culture. He did it because he found her
sleeping with another man—the motive of honor. He did it out of
anger—it was an act of passion, of emotion. Finally, we might even
imagine that he did it because this is what men always do in this society
under such circumstances—it is explained by tradition.
This example illustrates a number of things. First, the courtroom is
simply a compacted scene of the most ordinary and important aspects
of social life: it consists of interpreting experience, attaching expla-
nations to ambiguous phenomena, using cultural resources—standard
typologies of motives, for example—to explain human activity.
Similarly, American journalists explain actions by attributing mo-

tives. The motives they attribute are, in the first instance, rational, in-
strumental, purposeful ones. We can understand murder for money
much better than murder for honor. Similarly, journalists attribute ra-
tional motives to politicians. In 1980, the New York Times explained
that Jimmy Carter was opening his campaign on Labor Day in the
South because of what Mr. Carter's campaign advisers "concede to be
a serious effort by Ronald Reagan to win votes here." Carter had many
reasons to begin in the South: tradition, his affection for his native re-
gion, the honor he wished to bring to his associates. Nonetheless, the
motive selected was the one that showed it was a rational act designed
solely to win the election.
The explanation of conduct by rational motives is a literary and
cultural convention. Just how conventional it is, is revealed when we
encounter, for example, Soviet journalism, where stories were framed
in terms of large collective forces—capitalism, history, imperialism—
rather than individual motive. Individuals merely personify the larger
forces that are in the saddle driving during the actions of individuals.
But for us, individuals act. Individuals make history. Individuals have
purpose and intentions. Therefore, to answer the question why in
American journalism, the journalist must discover a motive or attribute
one to the actor.
Explanation by rational motives is the archetype of journalism as it
is of the culture. But such explanations are often too arbitrary. William
Greider, for example, was dismayed when journalists asked about the
motives behind his Atlantic article rather than about the substance of
the article itself. Similarly, the questions put to political candidates are
less about what candidates are saying than why they are saying it, lead-
ing to the well-known complaint that no one writes about the issues
anymore. It is simply assumed that everything candidates do is de-
signed to win the election, and that pretty much exhausts the meaning
of what is said. Indeed, it seems at times that journalists and political
candidates are in a silent conspiracy to focus attention on the hidden
states of mind and intentions of politicians and away from what they
are concretely up to and saying. When a story breaks this mold, it is
often refreshing in its candor. A December 10, 1985, New York Times
story from Moscow by Serge Schmemann was striking precisely be-
cause it reported directly on what Gorbachev said about U.S.-Soviet re-
lations without one word of speculation as to motives:
Mikhail S. Gorbachev told 400 American business executives today

that while the Geneva summit meeting had opened the way to better
Soviet-American relations, trade would remain limited until Wash-
ington lifted "political obstacles."
"I will be absolutely frank with you," the Soviet leader told the
representatives of about 150 American companies in Moscow.. . .
"So long as those obstacles exist... there will be no normal devel-
opment of Soviet-U.S. trade and other economic ties on a large scale.
This is regrettable but we are not going to beg the United States for
anything."
. . . Mr. Gorbachev held out for the carrot of "major long-term
projects and numerous medium and even small business deals." But
first, he said, Washington would have to lift the restrictions imposed
on trade with the Soviet Union.
The obstacles he listed included legislation denying most favored
nation status and import-export credits to Moscow unless it permit-
ted emigration of Jews and restrictions on high-technology exports.
Mr. Gorbachev also cited what he called "the policy of boycotts, em-
bargoes, punishments and broken trade contracts that has become
habit with the U.S."
The story conveys the sense of Russian rhetoric that is, one imagines,
the real substance of summit diplomacy.
Motive explanations are not only arbitrary but easy. They deflect
attention rather too quickly and casually away from the what and onto
the why. Sometimes the motive is incorporated into the very definition
of the who, as when the New York Times in a breaking story from
Japan mentions that "saboteurs today knocked out key rail commu-
nications and signal systems, forcing the shutdown of 2.3 commuter
trains. . . . The saboteurs [were] described by authorities as left-wing
extremists." Similarly, Bernard Goetz quickly became known as the
"subway vigilante," an identification that told us immediately what he
did and why he did it. More to the point, journalists approach the ac-
tion of politicians as drama critics approach a play, looking for a sub-
text in the script. The Wall Street Journal tells us that then-Representa-
tive Daniel Rostenkowski, chairman of the House Ways and Means
Committee, had "several motives" behind his enthusiasm for tax re-
form: "He isn't eager to get ambushed by the White House again; tax
revision can be a vehicle to reassert his committee's and his own imper-
atives"; the average voter supports tax simplification; and it is "an
issue that can move the Democratic party closer to the political center."
In short, Rostenkowski is interested in everything but tax reform.
This tendency to focus on motive explanations led Leon Sigal to

complain that news stories focus on the who rather than the what and
the why of disputes. As he said, journalists tend to ask who was re-
sponsible for an event rather than what was the cause. It is not that
journalists substitute who for why but rather that they substitute one
kind of why—a motive statement—for another kind of why—a cause
statement.
In continuing stories, motives are often reduced to boilerplate, a
continuing thread of standard interpretation inserted in every story.
Since 1969, for example, we have had a steady stream of stories about
political violence in Northern Ireland. A recent one from the Associ-
ated Press was carried in the Times:
BELFAST, Northern Ireland, Jan. i—Just one minute into the new
year, Irish Republican Army guerrillas killed two policemen and
wounded a third in an ambush that the I.R.A. said opened a renewed
campaign against British security forces.
After five paragraphs describing the killings, the following boiler-
plate paragraph was inserted:
The predominantly Roman Catholic I.R.A. is fighting to drive the
British from Northern Ireland and unite the Protestant-dominated
province with the overwhelming Catholic Irish Republic.
That paragraph appears in virtually every story from Northern Ire-
land with little or no variation. It is the explanatory paragraph, the mo-
tive paragraph, the paragraph that sets the story in context. The trou-
ble is that it is a gross, oversimple, and unchanging explanation for
complex and changing events. Not even the IRA is that simple, inter-
nally unified, or unchanging. The boilerplate acts to select stories as
well as to select explanations. Stories from Ireland are selected, at one
point in the transmission system or another, to fit into the one over-
arching boilerplate explanation available for all events in the province.
Rational explanations by motives—and here the IRA is rational on
an American model—commit journalists to viewing individuals, partic-
ularly political actors, as possessing far clearer and more articulate
purposes than they usually do. As a result, they create a picture that
renders politics far more orderly and directed than it ever is for the par-
ticipants. Journalists introduce a clarity into events that rarely exists
for those caught up in the muddled flow of happenings, the ambiguities
of situations, and the crosscutting and contradictory nature of pur-

poses and intentions.
That motives obey literary and even legal conventions rather than
simply mirroring what is going on can be seen in the contrasting treat-
ment of two New York killings. In December 1985, Paul Castellano
and Thomas Bilotti were gunned down on a mid-Manhattan street. Be-
fore the blood was dry on the sidewalk, the Times had identified the
killer and the motive: "John Gotti, a fastidious, well-groomed forty-
five-year-old resident of Queens, is believed by law-enforcement offi-
cials to be a central figure in an internal fight for leadership of the Gam-
bino family." The law enforcement officials were then quoted to round
out the explanation: "John Gotti is a major organized crime figure in
the Gambino crime family and heir apparent. . . . Gotti will emerge as
the head of the other capos—that's what the struggle is all about.
Bilotti was Gotti's rival and he's gone, and there may well be some
more killing before it's settled." Well, we know why members of the
Mafia commit murder, and they normally do not bring libel suits.
That case contrasts nicely with a more mysterious one. In June
1985, a seventeen-year-old Harlem resident, Edmund Perry, a graduate
of Phillips Exeter Academy, a member of the freshman class at Stan-
ford, was killed by an undercover police officer near St. Luke's Hospi-
tal on Manhattan's Upper West Side. It was an improbable killing, and
the Times covered the case very circumspectly. The paper was cautious
in attributing motive, was hesitant to convict anyone involved. The
case did not fit the type. Racism is one nonrational motive we all un-
derstand. As a result, the episode was dramatically awry. It should have
been the racism of the police officer that motivated the killing. Why
should a successful black youth on his way to great things mug and at-
tempt to rob an undercover officer as alleged? The killing did not fit an
acceptable, sensible pattern of motivation, and so the Times was care-
ful not to resolve the case for its readers.
Motive explanations work only when they fit a certain ideal type of
rational, purposeful action. But when they are made to fit the type, they
are often too simple or radically misleading or generate an unnecessary
cynicism. In anticipation of the first celebration of Martin Luther
King's birthday as a national holiday, NBC reported that President
Reagan was to visit a school named after the slain civil rights leader.
The visit was described as "part of his attempt to improve his image
among blacks," an image, we were told, that was "on the rise." Even
Ronald Reagan is more complicated than that.
It is not the literal truth of the motives journalists unmask that is in
question. Surely, people are driven by self-interest. But that is not the
only motive that drives them; all self-interested action is knotted into
and contained by other, larger, and often more honorable motives. The
real problem is that the motives journalists describe and report are the
motives that we live. The notion of the "hidden agenda" is now so de-
structively widespread in the culture because we have so unfailingly
described our political leaders as possessed by undisclosed and manip-
ulative intentions. Paradoxically, Marxism has become the ideology of
late bourgeois America because our vocabulary of motives pretty much
comes down to whose ox gets gored. Therefore, journalism becomes
the unmasking and revealing of the "true" motives behind appear-
ances. Power, wealth, and control become the primary objects of peo-
ple's actions because we assume that everyone is driven by selfish inter-
est. This compulsive explanation excludes the possibility that anyone
can be motivated by the common good or the public interest, and so we
should not be surprised if individuals are not so motivated. Greed, in
the most general sense, explains everything. The one state of mind with
which we feel comfortable is the rational, instrumental one. Actions
that do not fit this scheme largely confuse and befuddle us.
The final and most unfortunate aspect of motive explanations is
the overwhelmingly technical bias they give to journalism. If people are
uniformly out to better their own self-interest, and what they say and
do is designed to further that end, the only sensible questions are: Are
they successful? Are their means well adapted to their ends? Are they
pursuing a rational course of action? We therefore ask: Will the presi-
dent sign the communications bill? Who is winning the election? What
do the opinion polls say? Does health care reform have a chance? Tech-
nique becomes all important because we assume that all individuals,
groups, and institutions care about is winning and that the technical
success of their strategies is all that is in question. All life becomes
a horse race in which the press reports the progress of the contestants
to the wire and announces the winners and the losers. Meanwhile,
everyone forgets what the race is about and the stakes we have in the
outcome.
It is often said that the press reduces politics to a clash of personal-
ities, wills, and ambitions. The only purpose of politics becomes the de-
sire to win elections. The real meaning of objectivity is that the press
takes that desire, and all such rational desires, as given and assesses
everything a politician does in that light. We get, therefore, stories of
success or failure, victory or defeat, cleverness or ineptness, achieve-
ment or mismanagement, defined by technical expertise, not by the
content of character or nobility of purpose.
Journalists pretty much keep their own counsel on rational mo-
tives. Sources are used to "objectify" what the journalist already knows.
Other actions and other motives cannot be fully explained because,
while they are conscious, they are not rational or believable. The old
saw that men kill for money and women for love simply argues that
while both men and women are motivated by conscious motives, men
are motivated by reason, and women are not. Glaus von Bulow, inno-
cent, makes sense; Jean Harris, guilty, does not. If individuals announce
that they are motivated by honor, loyalty, duty, or other nonrational
motives, the journalist cannot quite take them seriously, nor can we:
therefore, they have to be unmasked. Actions motivated by tradition,
values, and affections pretty much escape our understanding and end
up as the human interest exotica that fill the space between the self-
interest stories and provide the features for the National Enquirer and
Charles Kuralt.
When we move to nonrational motives, we move, in fact, into the
domain of causes. Nonrational motives move people as irresistible
forces over which they have no control. To deal with them, journalists
must call on the experts. Experts play the same role in journalism as
they do in the courts. They straighten out minor technical matters such
as ballistics and resolve major matters of cause and interpretation. If
journalists cannot find a rational motive, they have to bring in psychia-
trists, psychologists, sociologists, and other experts on national charac-
ter and the behavior of strange people to provide an irrational one.
English rioting in Brussels, blacks rioting in Brixton, terrorists "riot-
ing" everywhere pretty much fall outside rational assessment, so only
the experts can make them comprehensible. This is particularly pro-
nounced on television, where breaking stories on the evening news are
explained by experts on Nightline or the morning news. Unfortunately,
the experts do not always agree, and it usually comes down to whom
the journalist chooses to trust.
If the irrational is the first domain of causal explanations, the sta-
tistical is the second. Explanations by causes are particularly well
adapted to the periodic reports of government and the significant find-

ings that turn up in scientific journals. Youth suicide is up, and the New
England Journal of Medicine has an explanation based on the "rate" of
depression in all age groups. Child abuse is on the rise, and a sociolo-
gist tells us of the disorganization of the American family. Mortgage
rates hit a six-year low, and an economist informs us of the money sup-
ply and the Federal Reserve Board. Auto sales are down 15 percent,
and an expert in consumer behavior tells us about the psychology of
consumer expectations. The homeless are filling up the city, and a bu-
reaucrat reminds us of the consequences of "deinstitutionalizing" the
mentally ill.
Stories of causation turn the journalist to the experts, even though
the experts are not always disinterested. In fact, organizations are often
created for the sole purpose of providing journalists with explanations.
When a new and perplexing report comes out, someone with an expla-
nation has to be found, and, therefore, "institutions of explanation"
are available for every problem affecting the national interest.
A few years back, there was a move afoot to increase the amount
of what Philip Meyer called "precision journalism," the application of
social science methods to the problems journalists regularly report.
Precision journalism was designed to get at aggregate motives of large
numbers of people so that journalists would not always be guessing at
the motives of voters, or of racial groups or other subclasses of the pop-
ulation. It was also designed to free journalists from relying on experts
by making them more self-sufficient investigators of large-scale prob-
lems for which statistics and computers provide the only answers:
problems of population, migration, collective behavior, or problems of
analyzing public records from the courts, the police, the assessor's of-
fice. The movement has yet to yield much, except that newspapers con-
duct horse race polls in elections. Otherwise, given the nature of break-
ing news, journalists still pretty much rely on experts for the stipulation
of causes.
Causal stories are often personified, of course. The growth of pop-
ulation, shifts in migration patterns, changes in the composition of the
labor force or the mix of occupations are often exemplified in indi-
viduals and the reasons they have for migrating, changing jobs, having
children, and so on. For example, the increasing rate of suicide among
young males is often rendered by focusing on a particularly tragic
death or a group of suicides in a community overcome by grief. But
such suicides represent a class of acts that must be accounted for by

larger historical forces than simply the motives of individuals.
When a farmer in Hills, Iowa, killed three people and then com-
mitted suicide, the New York Times headlined the story "Deaths on the
Iowa Prairie: Four New Victims of the Economy." The deaths were
"but the latest in a series of violent outbursts across the Middle West"
caused by the sagging farm economy.
The reverse side of cause stories is consequence stories, and they
frequently are embedded one in the other. Youth suicide, falling inter-
est rates, and declining sales all have consequences in addition to
causes. They are fateful signs with which to read the future of the com-
munity and the nation. When Chrysler and Mitsubishi signed an
agreement to build a new joint production plant in Bloomington, Illi-
nois, the newly formed company, the Diamond Star Motor Corpora-
tion, announced that the workers to be hired would be recent high
school graduates. A television story on the announcement did not em-
phasize the motives of the company—new workers are cheaper and
less given to unionization—or the cause of the policy—the problems of
training older workers without automotive experience. Instead, the
story emphasized the consequence: the opening of the plant would not
reduce unemployment. It would merely siphon off new entrants into
the job market.
A decision to emphasize consequence over causes and motives is a
decision to emphasize the future over the past. Consequences are pre-
dictions of what will happen rather than a recounting of what has hap-
pened. They open up the future and often unintended consequences of
events. As they are as much matters of prophecy as prediction, con-
sequence stories also throw journalists into the arms of experts, the
futurologists of one kind or another who are able to divine the far hori-
zons of human life.
The final form of explanation in journalism is significance. Events
that are in no way the result of intentional human acts nor the result of
vast historical causes surface all the time. Their consequences are
opaque and unknowable. They are, nonetheless, signs that must be
read, portents of something larger, events to be prized and remembered
as markers, a peculiar evidence of the state of civilization, or the dan-
gers we face or the glories we once possessed.
Any event can be read for significance. Carlin Romano calls these
"symbolic events" and cites the spate of stories about President Reagan
on horseback following his surgery for cancer of the colon. Such stories
show that the presidency continues, the ship of state, forgive the pun,
rests on an even keel. At such a moment, only the most cynical ask why
he is on horseback. People treat it for what it is—a sign full of meaning
for the body politic.
The murder and suicide victims in Hills, Iowa, were treated by the
Times as casualties of the economy. The Iowa City Press-Citizen ad-
mitted that explanation but tried to see in the event a larger, tragic
significance:
There are accounts of bank transactions and economic explanations
and other hypotheses as the murder and suicide story unravels. But
that's not what it is really all about. It's about people—alone, desper-
ate, and powerless with nowhere to turn....
Target prices, price supports, ceilings, sealing crops. The termi-
nology doesn't matter. It's welfare. Farmers know it. And farmers are
proud people. Nobody really wants to live that way. But for now
there is no choice. . . .
But if there's one thing that is clear from Monday's tragic series
of murder and suicide, it is that the farm crisis is not numbers and
deficits and bushels of corn. It is people and pride and tears and
blood.
The time has come for the state and the country to reach out to
farmers who are suffering—not because they are failed businessmen
and women but because they are human beings whose lives are
falling apart—fast.
Significance can be found in a grain of sand—indeed, in any epi-
sode, however minor, that surfaces in a community. But as a form of
explanation, significance is most manifest in stories of deaths, birth-
days, anniversaries, inaugurals, coronations, weddings—in, to twist a
phrase of Elihu Katz, the high holy days and the high holy events of the
press. The inauguration of a president, the death of a beloved public
figure, the two-hundredth anniversary of the Revolution or the Consti-
tution, the commemoration of the onset of World War II or the inva-
sion of Normandy—these become rituals of reflection and recollection:
symbols of unity and disunity, triumph and tragedy, hope and despair.
They are marked by an altered role for journalists. In writing about
them, journalists abandon their pose as critics, adversaries, and detec-
tives, and become members of the community, citizens, reverent and
pietistic. In these events, they aid us in the search for meaning rather
than motives, consolation rather than causes, symbolism rather than

consequences.
Two events of the recent past demonstrate aspects of the search for
significance. The first was the tenth anniversary of the evacuation of
Saigon and the "loss" of the war in Vietnam. The war is still too close,
the memory still too green, to completely abandon the question of why
we lost the war. Nonetheless, the widespread and often enormously ex-
pensive coverage of the anniversary took the form of a stocktaking:
Where were we ten years later? What did we learn from it? What does
it reveal to us about ourselves?
The second event says something about the struggle over signifi-
cance rather than its mere elucidation: Reagan's visit to the cemetery
at Bitburg. In one sense, this was a harmless ceremonial event amid a
busy European tour. But it came to bear significance as a gesture of con-
trasting meaning: a gesture of final reconciliation with an old enemy
now a valuable ally and, simultaneously, a gesture of forgiveness of
that which could not be forgiven—the Holocaust. The struggles over
whether Reagan should make the ceremonial stop and over the mean-
ing of going or not going reveal the power of presidential gestures and
the way in which the press collaborates in the quest for meaning while
innocently reporting the news.
Perhaps the best and most revealing recent example of a "signifi-
cant" story started out as a far more ordinary event. In the late fall of
1984, a seventeen-year-old black man was shot on the South Side of
Chicago. The murder perhaps would not have been reported or re-
ceived any particular play except that Ben Wilson happened to be one
of the best high school basketball players in the country. Destined for
stardom, he already had signed a tender with the basketball program at
the University of Illinois. He was about to embark on an education, an
escape from the ghetto, and perhaps a life of fame and riches.
The first stories concentrated on what had happened on a Friday
afternoon after school: Who killed him and why did he do it? Was Wil-
son responsible in any way for his own death?
Between the time of the stories of the murder of Ben Wilson and
the stories of the trial, conviction, and sentencing of his killer, the fate
of this young man gave rise to other kinds of stories.
At first, Ben Wilson became the personification of the problems of
growing up black, of the constant threat of gang violence, and of the
toll taken by ghetto life. Wilson became a "news peg," a tragic death to
be explained by the impersonal causes of poverty, unemployment, ig-
norance, illiteracy, and hopelessness. Ben Wilson's death, in a way, ex-
plained his killer. Distinguished reporting of these conditions even had
an effect. Gang violence was reported to be down 40 percent in the
wake of Wilson's death and the coverage of it.
The coverage, however, also looked for the significance of the
death of this young man. The significance was found in public forget-
fulness a generation after the civil rights struggle and a half generation
after the War on Poverty. In an era of affluence, concern for private
gratification, and lack of interest in the problems of public life, stories
of the "ghetto" were not in. The Chicago Tribune used the death of
Ben Wilson to forcefully remind its readers of the meaning of life in
urban America. The tragedy of the stories was that it took the mis-
fortune of Ben Wilson to bring these persistent concerns and problems
back into the newspaper.
I have emphasized throughout this essay that journalism is a curricu-

lum and not merely a series of news flashes. Everything can be found in
American journalism, generally understood, but it is disconnected and
incoherent. It takes astute and constant readers—such as journalists
themselves—to connect the disconnected, to find sense and significance
in the overwhelming and overbearing glut of occurrences.
American journalism is deeply embedded in American culture. Its
faults and its triumphs are pretty much characteristic of the culture as a
whole. The forms of storytelling it has adopted are those prized and
cultivated throughout much of our literature. The explanations it of-
fers are pretty much the same as those offered in the intellectual disci-
plines. As journalists move from explanations by motives to causes to
consequences to significance, they roughly mirror the movement of
scholars from utilitarian to causal to functional to hermeneutic expla-
nations. Journalists, however, obsessively rely on motive explanations
and thereby weaken the explanatory power of their work.
Journalists, because of their professional ideology and the indus-
trial conditions under which they work, offer thick descriptions pretty
much between the lines. They explain events by insinuating, often sotto
voce, motives typical of our obsessively practical culture. Otherwise,
they rely on experts, not always of their own choosing, to supply them
with causes and consequences, or they sum up the folk wisdom and
commonsense significance of the community. This renders journalists
active participants in making reality and not merely passive observers.
It also makes them frequent victims of the forces around them rather
than defenders of a public interest or a common good.
As a wise man once said, journalism has taken its revenge on phi-
losophy. As the unloved child of the craft of letters, journalism concen-
trates on the new, novel, transient, and ephemeral. Philosophy, the
crown of the literary craft, once concentrated on the eternal, enduring,
momentous, and significant. Journalism's revenge has been to impose
the cycle of news on philosophy, indeed, on all the literary arts. I exag-
gerate, of course, but all writers and artists look for their subjects in
today's headlines.
Many have argued that the overriding problem of American cul-
ture is that it has no sense of time. American managers administer for
the short run; American politicians look no further than the next elec-
tion. Whether one looks at the susceptibility to fashion of our scholar-
ship, the transience of our interests, the length of our memories, the
planning of our institutions, or even, Reagan aside, the tenure of our
presidents, everything seems to have the life span of a butterfly in spring.
The daily news bulletins report this spectacle of change: victories,
defeats, trends, fluctuations, battles, controversies, threats. But be-
neath this change, the structures of society—the distribution of income
and poverty, the cleavages of class and status, race and ethnicity, the
gross inequalities of hardships and life chances—remain remarkably
persistent.
If you look at the entire curriculum of journalism, you will find
much reporting of the enduring and persistent, the solid and unyielding
structures of social life. It is the part of journalism that offers genuine
description and explanation, compelling force and narrative detail, and
yet it is not the part of journalism we generally honor. At some lost mo-
ment in our history, journalism became identified with, defined by,
breaking news, the news flash, the news bulletin. When that happened,
our understanding of journalism as a democratic social practice was
impossibly narrowed and our habits of reading, of attention, of inter-
pretation were impaired. Journalists came to think of themselves as
being in the news business, where their greatest achievements were de-
fined by being first rather than best, with uncovering the unknown
rather than clarifying and interpreting the known. Scholars too often
take journalists at their word and neither read nor analyze anything be-
yond the wire services. They are as ignorant of the curriculum of jour-
nalism as the most addled teenager. We are then doubly betrayed. To
restore a sense of time to both journalism and scholarship is going to
take a lot of work and a lot of luck. All of us might begin by reading
more wisely.
Notes
1. Michael Schudson, "Deadlines, Datelines, and History," in Reading the News,
ed. Robert Karl Manoff and Michael Schudson (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 79-108.
2. Carlin Romano,"The Grisly Truth about Bare Facts," in Reading the News,
38-78.
Part IV
Introduction / "We'll Have That Conversation":
Journalism and Democracy in the Thought
of James W. Carey
Jay Rosen
Stopping me in a hallway, James Carey once offered the intriguing sug-

gestion that journalism and democracy were really "names for the
same thing." He then added—characteristically—"We'll have that con-
versation." A few months later we did, and so can you, by contemplat-
ing the two splendid essays that follow.
Carey claims the American political tradition as one of his intel-
lectual homes. Within that tradition, particularly its First Amendment
chapter where we work these things out, democracy and the press
are assumed to have a relationship of importance, but not of identity.
Journalism informs democracy, journalism guards democracy, jour-
nalism serves (or, in some stories, saves) democracy. But journalism is
democracy?
Carey's way of approaching the subject is, in fact, so contrary to
our habitual language for discussing the press, and so confounding to
the American journalist's self-image, that he virtually stands conven-
tional press theory on its head. In his view, the press does not "inform"
the public. It is "the public" that ought to inform the press. The true
subject matter of journalism is the conversation the public is having
with itself. If this conversation does not happen or falls apart, then
journalism doesn't work—for us—although it may work well for jour-
nalists seeking to further their professional status. "We have virtually
no idea what we need to know until we start talking to someone,"
Carey writes in "A Republic, If You Can Keep It"; only in the "wake of
conversation" do we discover a need for news and views. Ideally, then,
191
192 / Introduction to Part IV
the public informs the press of what might be pertinent to its discus-
sions, and journalism as a public art begins there.1
Carey frequently calls the public the "god-term of journalism—the
be-all and end-all, the term without which the entire enterprise fails to
make sense."2 While journalists like to remind us that democracy is im-
possible without them, Carey likes to remind journalists that they are
impossible without us—"us" meaning a political community organized
as a discoursing public. If journalism and democracy are really "names
for the same thing," the thing they both stand for is politics in the key
of conversation, which is the music Carey hears in his head. Conversa-
tion permits us to be citizens in the fullest sense: people who live not
just near, but among, one another, in the common space we designate
with the adjective public. Journalism at its best arises from and feeds
into public life, which is "our" conversation to the degree that we de-
termine to have it.
That democracy requires a healthy public debate and a free press
to serve it is a familiar proposition, perhaps overly familiar, and not the
one Carey wants to advance. These essays dare us to think differently.
Here, journalism is seen as one mode of interaction among strangers.
Unless these strangers are also in practice as citizens—unless we stand
in a conversant relationship to one another—then the press may just as
easily undo democracy, making us even stranger to one another than
we were before the journalists went to work. A vital public life is not
the consequence of a free press, Carey asserts. Rather, the prior exis-
tence of a rich public life is our only guarantee that the free press clause
will work in our favor, that journalism will actually improve the body
politic. A journalism "independent of the conversation of the culture,
or existing in the absence of such a conversation" will soon become a
"menace to public life and an effective politics," Carey concludes.
Objectivity as an Identity
This is not the way of thinking reporters, and editors learn as they
make their way in the field. And that's putting it mildly. Two well-worn
conceptions dominate the mind of the American press. Neither is de-
fended with much vigor or insight, and neither leaves much room for
Carey's concerns. The first is the doctrine of "objectivity," which calls
on the press to separate facts from values and itself from interested ac-
Introduction to Part IV I 193
tors. The second is the notion of the journalist as "watchdog" or critic

of official authority.
Objectivity is the closest the press comes to a working epistemol-
ogy. But as Michael Schudson shows in Discovering the News, the epis-
temology has never really worked. Objectivity has been seen as a
"myth" almost since its rise to dominance in the 19208 and 19305.
Journalists assert a belief in objectivity not because they have a reliable
method for separating facts from values, but out of a deep sense of pes-
simism that any secure "values" or truly reliable "facts" can be found.
Objectivity is better understood as a set of procedures for operating in
a world of almost limitless subjectivities, an attitude summed up in the
"balanced" news story's implied message to readers: get both sides and
decide for yourself.3
The sides we are encouraged to "get" nearly always number two.
This is not because political conversation inevitably works that way.
Rather, picturing the field of politics as lying between opposite poles
carves out a preferred position for the press: in the middle between par-
tisan extremes. Journalists often seek this position as a kind of safety
zone, a space from which "politics" is effectively banished. Here is a
passage from a 1992 report in the New York Times reviewing charges
of media "bias" after the presidential campaign. ("Bias," of course, is
the shadow thrown by objectivity on public dialogue about the press.)
The Times reporter writes:
So much energy these days is devoted to media bias that there are
now groups that do nothing but monitor the press for hints of par-
tiality. But like the report financed by M&M/Mars that advocated
chocolate consumption as a way to cut cavities, the studies by these
groups tend to yield results that suit the purposes of those who con-
ducted them.
Thus it is not surprising that in their surveys of the election cov-
erage, Accuracy in Media, a monitoring group with a right-wing
orientation, and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a group on
the left, came to different conclusions.
A.I.M. argued that most major news organizations ignored some
stories damaging to Mr. Clinton while F.A.I.R. concluded that the
media had devoted more attention to questions about Mr. Clinton's
draft record than to those about Mr. Bush's involvement in the Iran-
contra scandal.4
Note how the arrangement of polar opposites dissipates the "en-
ergy" supposedly devoted to critiques of the press. Press criticism turns
194 / Introduction to PartIV
out to be just another form of politics—and therefore discardable as

criticism. This is how objectivity shapes the political imagination of the
press. The public world appears dominated by the manipulated asser-
tions of partisan actors, whose "facts" cannot be trusted. The press
stands in the middle between these extremes, criticized from both sides
because it favors neither. Beneath the apparent message of the "bal-
anced" news report—get both sides and decide for yourself—is a sub-
tler claim: "Trust us, the press, because everyone else wants to shade
the facts their way. We as journalists have no 'way,' and that's why
we're reliable."
The Adversarial Style in the Press

Such a claim feeds the second image that rules the mind of the press:
the notion of a "watchdog" or "adversarial" institution. Journalism is
here defined as a critic of established power, which is typically repre-
sented by conniving, or, in the archetypal example of Richard Nixon,
"stonewalling," government officials.5 The film and book versions of
All the President's Men condense and mythologize this conception of
the press as heroic antagonist to a corrupt and secretive government.
As Schudson has noted, the claim that two Washington Post reporters
saved the republic from Nixon and his men is largely imagined.6 Imag-
ined, too, is the effect that Watergate supposedly had in reviving the
muckraking tradition in journalism. Investigative reporting remains an
exceptional and expensive practice, hardly characteristic of the press's
daily operations. But none of this matters to the myth of Watergate,
which has assumed, in Schudson's words, a "sustaining" power in the
American press. The myth "offers journalism a charter, an inspiration,
a reason for being large enough to justify the constitutional protections
that journalism enjoys."7
Among the practices sustained by the mythology of Watergate is the
peculiar style of aggression now common in the Washington press corps
and among those lower down in the professional pyramid who aspire
to elite status. The reporter-as-crap-detector, ferreting out the lies and
evasions that pass for public discourse, is the identity of choice in polit-
ical journalism today. Not the exhaustive fact finding of the investiga-
tive team, but the mocking incredulity of the public prosecutor, the
practiced cynicism of the savvy "inside" analyst—these carry forward
the message of Watergate: government is not to be trusted, and the peo-
pie who shall do the mistrusting for us are journalists.8 Adam Gopnik,
a writer for The New Yorker, offered a perceptive critique of this cul-
ture in late 1994. As he noted: "Any ordinary television viewer who
has watched Presidential news conferences over the last couple of Ad-
ministrations can't have failed to pick up a tone of high-minded moral
indignation in the reporters' questions, which seem designed not so
much to get at a particular fact or elicit a particular view as to drama-
tize the gulf in moral stature between the reporters and the President."9
This moral gulf—the product of press conventions as much as re-
cent political history—can be seen as part of objectivity's regime, an-
other way the press chooses to present itself as "free" of politics. The
president is seen by journalists as the political figure par excellence. He
has a party, a rhetoric, and, presumably, a program. With promises to
keep, audiences to impress, reelection to win, the president is never not
being "political" in the sense of seeking his own advantage. Journalists,
by contrast, have no advantage of their own to seek. This frees them to
be good "adversaries," all-purpose critics of the always political presi-
dent. The gulf between their truth-seeking questions and the president's
truth-shading answers is standing proof of journalism's independence
from politics: proof of its "objectivity."
Thus objectivity and the adversarial style are really features of the
same environment, a self-aggrandizing professional culture that at-
taches the journalist to politics in order to make possible the peculiar
act of detachment that identifies the press to itself. Journalists seek the
isolation of the truth teller; they regard the press as the one institution
without an agenda in a field of shameless self-servers. As Carey notes
in "The Press, Public Opinion, and Public Discourse: On the Edge of
Postmodernism," one historical reference point for this identity is the
twentieth century's long battle with demagoguery and propaganda.
Another is the ideology of the progressive era with its latent urge to
unmask.
Today, the adversarial style best typifies the journalist's withdrawal
from the political community. Refusing to grant itself a political iden-
tity (or at least none we can usefully discuss), the press helps itself to an
outsized role in politics as our "official" representative before a manip-
ulative class of office holders, spinmeisters, and insiders. The contra-
diction—claiming a political role but no political identity—is a difficult
one to sustain: hence the need for dramatic gulfs in moral stature be-
tween the press and politicians. These gulfs prove the "innocence" of
the press, even as they convict the president of shading the truth before
he utters a word.
The refusal to craft a self-conscious political identity, while hardly
guaranteeing an "unpolitical" press, has worrisome results. For one
thing, it prevents journalists from improving their contribution to pub-
lic life. Gopnik notes that the culture of aggression "still has to thrive
within the old institutions of the commercial press," which suppress
"political thought in the interests of an ideal (or at least the appear-
ance) of objectivity."10 Journalists are forced to lead a double life, he
adds. They "relish aggression while still being prevented, by their own
codes, from letting that aggression have any relation to serious political
argument, let alone grown-up ideas about conduct and morality."
It is a stinging indictment, backed up by a growing body of schol-
arly literature.11 Carey's work has a special place in that literature, pri-
marily because it starts further back in our understanding of what jour-
nalism is (and was). His critique is thus richer when it is carried
forward, amounting to a sketch of a possible politics as much as a brief
for a better journalism. In "The Press, Public Opinion, and Public Dis-
course: On the Edge of Postmodernism," Carey argues that in our pre-
sent predicament "all terms of the political equation—democracy, pub-
lic opinion, public discourse, the press—are up for grabs; all such terms
are historically variable even as they define each other in mutual relief."
Putting everything "up for grabs" gives his work on the press an exciting
feel, as if long-dead phrases (like "liberty of the press") might suddenly
come to life in the next few pages. At least, it works that way for me.
Journalism as Worldmaking
Carey makes two moves that most students of the press do not. The
first involves his theory of communication, especially the idea that "a
medium implies and constitutes a world." The second roots our under-
standing of democracy—and of journalism—in a particular image of
the American republic. Both have important implications for the polit-
ical identity and role of the press.
Since everything is up for grabs, why do we need journalists? A
commonsense answer would stress the importance of "information."
We need the news to keep us informed, so that we can stay on top of
things.12 Carey doubts that journalists are best understood as convey-
ers of information. In perhaps his most famous essay, "A Cultural Ap-
proach to Communication," he identifies "two alternative conceptions

of communication" that have influenced American thought since the
term entered our discourse in the nineteenth century.13 One he calls a
"transmission view," by far the most common in our culture. Here
communication is equated with the delivery of "messages" across dis-
tance. Typically, the messages are of an informational sort, and they are
assumed to be important for making decisions or controlling action. At
the "deepest roots of our thinking," he observes, "we picture the act of
communication as the transmittal of information across space."14 With
plenty of spaces to cross, Americans are inclined to believe in the social
significance of such an act. Carey refers to "the regularity with which
improved communication is invoked by an army of teachers, preach-
ers, and columnists as the talisman of all our troubles."15
In contrast to the transmission metaphor stands the "ritual" view:
"Here, communication is linked to terms such as 'sharing,' 'participa-
tion,' 'association,' 'fellowship,' and the 'possession of a common
faith.' This definition exploits the ancient identity and common roots
of the terms 'commonness,' 'communion,' community,' and 'communi-
cation.' " A ritual view directs our attention not to the movement of
messages in space but to the "maintenance of society in time"; not "the
act of imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs."16
Perhaps the simplest example of a ritual act of communication is a
church sermon, which typically serves not to "send a message" or con-
vey facts, but to draw the congregation together in the celebration and
contemplation of a shared faith.
Important for our purposes is Carey's description of the newspaper
in a transmission view, as compared to what it looks like under a ritual
understanding. A transmission perspective sees the newspaper as a
vehicle for disseminating news and knowledge. It also leads us to ask
about the "effects" of this process on audiences. We see news "as en-
lightening or obscuring reality, as changing or hardening attitudes, as
breeding credibility or doubt." A ritual view treats newspaper reading
as a different sort of act, concerned not with the conveyance of facts
but with our placement in an imaginative space—one that is interest-
ing, dramatic, satisfying to the imagination, from a ritual perspective.
What is arrayed before the reader is not pure information but a por-
trayal of contending forces in the world. Moreover, as readers make
their way through the paper, they engage in a continual shift of roles
or of dramatic focus. A story on the monetary crisis salutes them as
American patriots righting those ancient enemies Germany and

Japan; a story on the meeting of the women's political caucus casts
them into the liberation movement as supporter or opponent; a tale
of violence on the campus evokes their class antagonisms and resent-
ments. The model here is not that of information acquisition, though
such acquisition occurs, but of dramatic action in which the reader
joins a world of contending forces as an observer at a play.
Carey's point (in "A Cultural Approach to Communication") is
not that the transmission view of communication is "wrong," but that
it cannot illuminate much of what is happening when we encounter the
news. Consider a routine that millions of Americans follow: We set our
clock radios so that we can wake to the news. We may be seeking a
modicum of information: a few words about the weather, a traffic re-
port, the scores of last night's games. But there is another, and perhaps
deeper, purpose. While sleeping, while dreaming, we are "away," off in
a private universe. By waking up to the news we return to the public
world, resetting our inner horizon to a point "out there" somewhere—
where the city awaits, where work is located, where the day is starting
for others we know and love. The news, as we sometimes say, "gets us
going," but not because it offers information without which we could
not or would not "go." Waking up to the news provides daily passage
into a larger, more public world, one we assume lies beyond our imme-
diate horizon. The morning routine is an act of self-placement.
Other examples are not hard to find. A feature on the president's
image adviser invites us behind the scenes, where appearances are con-
trived for an unwitting audience from whom we are now separated by
our superior knowledge of the mechanics of manipulation. A television
report showing action from the Persian Gulf war puts us inside the
cockpit of a fighter jet, zeroing in on an enemy target with high-tech
precision. We might call this the "positioning effect." It occurs regard-
less of whether the journalist-as-author takes a "position" or produces
a neutral, "objective" account. If positioning is part of what journalists
do, then it is reasonable to ask how they should do it. That is, how do
we want to be positioned? But this is only one in a class of novel ques-
tions illuminated by Carey's ritual view. As soon as journalists are no
longer seen as information providers, they emerge in a variety of more
interesting guises: as dramatists, model makers, timekeepers. They
build public stages, people them with actors, and frame the action in a
certain way. They create a certain kind of public space and issue us an
invitation to it. Journalism can be included in what Goodman calls

"ways of worldmaking."17 For each of these guises there could, in the-
ory, be a public philosophy that tells journalists (and the rest of us)
what the world looks like when it is well made, properly framed, pro-
ductively paced, when we are positioned well by the press. "Objectiv-
ity" is what we have instead of such a philosophy. The two essays that
follow try to address that conceptual loss.
Mapping the Political Terrain

If we delve further into Carey's thinking on communication, other use-
ful complications emerge. Take, for example, his desire to reorder "the
relation of communication to reality."18 Rather than regarding lan-
guage, descriptions, reports of things as "reflections" of the world out
there, he directs our attention to the manner in which communication
creates the world we classify as "real." He writes: "Reality is not given,
not humanly existent, independent of language and toward which lan-
guage stands as a pale reflection. Rather, reality is brought into exis-
tence, is produced, by communication—by, in short, the construction,
apprehension, and utilization of symbolic forms."19
Carey has no wish to deny the "hardness" of reality. He is not say-
ing that nothing is real, that all we have are our impressions. What he
does say is that nothing is experienced as "real" that does not pass
through an act or form of communication. The world exists indepen-
dent of our minds. But it is entropic, unknowable and quite surreal un-
less we have maps to guide us, forms for organizing our impressions,
containers into which we can pour our experience so that it takes some
meaningful shape. "To put it colloquially," he writes, "there are no
lines of latitude or longitude in nature, but by overlaying the globe with
this particular, though not exclusively correct, symbolic organization,
order is imposed on spatial organization and certain, limited human
purposes served."20
Hannah Arendt made a similar observation in her classic work The
Human Condition:
Prior to the shrinkage of space and the abolition of distance through
railroads, steamships, and airplanes, there is the infinitely greater
and more effective shrinkage which comes about through the survey-
ing capacity of the human mind, whose use of numbers, symbols,
and models can condense and scale earthly physical distance down
to the size of the human body's natural sense and understanding. Be-
fore we knew how to circumscribe the sphere of human habitation
in days and hours, we had brought the globe into our living rooms
to be touched by our hands and swirled before our eyes.21
Like a globe, another sort of model for reality, the news as a sym-
bolic device makes the world more graspable, reducing it to human
scale—the dimensions of a front page, the duration of a newscast. In
this form, the symbolic form journalism gives it, the world gets related
to our "natural sense and understanding," as Arendt wrote. Carey's
point is that our sense of "reality" comes into being through these acts
of reduction and relation. Nothing sinister is happening. We are not
being told lies. Rather, we are lying in the space created by the telling of
the world's daily story. This way of thinking about the news—as pro-
ducing "the world" for us—is not entirely foreign to the discourse of
journalism. Consider the slogan of WINS, an all-news radio station in
New York: "You give us twenty-two minutes, we'll give you the
world." Or, as Time magazine used to boast in some of its televised ads:
"Throughout your world, throughout your land, Time puts it all right
in your hand. Read Time and understand."
Carey reminds us that all symbol systems have a dual property
about them. In one sense they are representations "of" the world, in
another sense they can be understood as models "for." The example he
offers is a blueprint for a house. On the one hand it represents the
house by picturing what it looks like. "That's the house," we might say
if someone asks, pointing to the blueprint. But a blueprint is also a set
of instructions for making a house; we can use it to build something.
Carey says we are constantly employing communication for both pur-
poses: to represent the world, but also to create the world in habitable
form. In a key distillation of his thought, he writes: "We first produce
the world by symbolic work and then take up residence in the world we
have produced."22
Picture a cabinet secretary in Washington, D.C., being driven to
work in the morning. His day begins with a mandatory reading of the
morning papers, which not only inform him "of" events but form "for"
him a reality he then inhabits. If the papers happen to feature him in
conflict with the president's national security adviser, then this "world
of contending forces"23 becomes one in which he will reside for the day,
or for much longer, depending on how the story "plays." The public
meaning of his service to the president rests on "symbolic work" done
by others—chiefly the press. The secretary must "take up residence," as

Carey put it, in a frame constructed for him by journalists. But so do
the rest of us whenever we take the news seriously.
Here, then, is one way of understanding the press as a public actor
with a political identity. Journalists suggest to us models for under-
standing public life even as they employ those models to represent a
world beyond their own suggestions. Like all symbolic forms, political
news has both an "of" and a "for" aspect. The same news columns
that inform us of the personality clash within the administration form
in us a view of what an "administration" is: a collection of personali-
ties revolving around the "big" personality in politics, the president.
During the time I happened to be drafting this essay, the Washing-
ton press corps was in the midst of a fascinating episode in symbolic
work. It was redrawing its model of politics in order to install another
man in the slot usually reserved for the president. In the aftermath of
the spectacular 1994 election, in which the Republican Party won con-
trol of both houses of Congress, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich
was perceived to be the most important single actor in national poli-
tics—more important than President Bill Clinton, who was thought to
be the "big loser" in the balloting. Almost immediately, journalists
began writing the tale of Washington politics under the assumption that
what Gingrich said or did, might do or had done, was now the baseline
for political reality, the best way to tell the story of what American pol-
itics had become. Rituals of scrutiny ordinarily reserved for the presi-
dency (and candidates for that office) came into effect for Congressman
Gingrich, who was now cast as the story's chief protagonist.
My purpose in raising this example is not to object to the selection
of Gingrich as protagonist. The press certainly had its reasons, begin-
ning with the indisputable reality that the Republicans now controlled
Congress. But no argument on factual grounds can fully explain the
construction of this particular "model" for grasping the political pre-
sent. After all, the part of chief protagonist could plausibly be played by
the "American voter," who had spoken so loudly in 1994, or by "stag-
nating incomes and dim prospects for the middle class," which, accord-
ing to some commentators, was inducing a low-level panic in Ameri-
cans despite the outward signs of a healthy economic climate in the
United States. Perhaps something even vaguer was at work: something
like a "collapse of political certainties in the post-cold war era." Come
to think of it, why have a "chief protagonist" at all? Why arrange the
story in that particular way? What other images exist for "mapping"
the terrain of the political? What sort of political "house" do we want
to take up residence within? What "way of worldmaking" does the
body politic need? These, in a word, are political questions. But they
are also questions about communication as a human activity, a public
art. They have to do with the kind of nation we wish to be; they also in-
volve the way we make and share meaning, and our purposes in doing
so. No theory of the press that is not also a theory of politics, no polit-
ical philosophy that is not also a philosophy of communication can
grapple successfully with the "worldmaking" dimension of journalism.
That is why we read James Carey.
The Image of a Republic

All communities larger than a tiny village are imagined, says Benedict
Anderson. They can be distinguished "by the style in which they are
imagined."24 As I have tried to suggest, the manner in which we picture
the American political community is shaped by the quality (or quali-
ties) of our journalism. But the point should not be overstressed, for
journalism is itself shaped by the style in which American politics is
done and described.25 Carey is continually reminding us of this: media,
politics, and our language for discussing both tend to influence each
other. Thus he writes in "The Press, Public Opinion, and Public Dis-
course: On the Edge of the Postmodern": "What we mean by democ-
racy depends on the forms of communication by which we conduct
politics. What we mean by communication depends on the central im-
pulses and aspirations of democratic politics. What we mean by public
opinion depends on both."
Within this web of relationships Carey hopes to recover, for pur-
poses of political and journalistic imagination, the image of a republic,
a particular "style" in which the American nation can be vivified. A re-
public has a beginning, and we need to see that it can have an end.
(Everything is up for grabs.) To picture America moving through time
as a republic is the way of seeing Carey urges on us—as citizens, as
journalists, as scholars, and as political beings. This particular repub-
lic, he tells us, was founded on a certain conception of what public life
could be, codified in the First Amendment freedoms we praise so lav-
ishly. In "A Republic, If You Can Keep It," Carey interprets them this
way: "The [First] amendment says that people are free to gather to-
gether without the intrusion of the state or its representatives. Once
gathered, they are free to speak to one another openly and freely. They
are further free to write down what they have to say and to share it be-
yond the immediate place of utterance."
From this Carey derives the true purpose of journalism, which is to
amplify what the rest of us produce as a "society of conversational-
ists." That is how we were constituted when the republic was founded
in 1789, and that is the constitution we need to recover today. "Public"
conversation is not the snarling pundits or bland professionals we see
on political talk shows. It is "ours to conduct," says Carey. It must
exist "out there" in the country at large, in the conduct of public life at
all levels of society, in the way we relate to each other as strangers.
When "the press sees its role as limited to informing whomever hap-
pens to turn up at the end of the communication channel, it explicitly
abandons its role as an agency for carrying on the conversation of the
culture."
Journalists earn their credentials as democrats not by supplying in-
formation or monitoring the state—although both may be necessary.
As energetic supporters of public talk, they should be helping us "culti-
vate certain vital habits: the ability to follow an argument, grasp the
point of view of another, expand the boundaries of understanding, de-
cide the alternative purposes that might be pursued." Behind this view
of what journalists are for is Carey's feel for the American political tra-
dition. Not the machinations in the Oval Office in 1974 but the delib-
erations at Philadelphia in 1789 illuminate, for him, the true promise
of journalism as a servant of the republic.26
Here, finally, is a political identity the press might claim and culti-
vate. Here too is the model of politics journalists should strive to as-
semble, the "positioning effect" we might ask them to achieve. The
press ought to see itself not as our one-stop source for political knowl-
edge, not as our official prosecutor of the high and mighty, not as thrill
supplier to a pop-eyed nation, but as an experienced field guide in the
landscape of public talk, a guide who knows where it is happening,
what it takes, why it matters. The press should also amplify and ex-
tend, perhaps in some cases sponsor, the sort of conversation among
citizens that makes us what we are and yet need to become—a republic.
Carey suggests that "we value the press in the precise degree that it sus-
tains public life, that it helps keep the conversation going among us."
We should "devalue the press to the degree that it seeks to inform us
and turn us into silent spectators." On these grounds we might fashion
a public critique of the press, a set of expectations that can guide jour-
nalism training, scholarship, and ethics.
Conclusion: Carey and the Conversational Ethic

We greet in the work of James Carey a deeper, more thoroughly
grounded philosophy of the press than either First Amendment law or
the academic study of journalism generally has offered. I have hardly
done justice to this philosophy here, slighting in particular Carey's view
of the journalist as a "professional communicator," his learned treat-
ment of the "problem of the public,"27 and his venturing into the de-
bate over postmodernity. But these are on display in other sections of
this book. The more time one spends with his writings, the more the
parts fit together to make a whole, which, miraculously, has space for
many others besides Carey himself. That is one thing that makes him a
"public" intellectual: the room he leaves for further discussion.
I discovered this in the most immediate way when I arranged for
Carey to give an after-dinner talk to journalists who are struggling to-
ward a more public approach to their craft—an approach, in fact, like
the one Carey recommends.28 He delivered a highly animated version
of the essay that follows, "A Republic, If You Can Keep It." For jour-
nalists, that piece has a stark undertone: you work for us, and don't
forget it. So there was every chance of provoking a defensive response.
But Carey overwhelmed his audience with goodwill, conversational
flair, and the sheer urgency of a man gripped by ideas he must share to
possess. The conference got an electric start, and the chatter of ideas
lasted, as I had hoped, through several hours of drinks and conviviality.
After midnight, when I bid goodnight to the remaining stragglers in the
cocktail lounge, there were only two: Jim Carey and a journalist he had
befriended.
"We'll have that conversation," Carey's hallway promise to me, is
for him the promise—in another sense the premise—of democracy as a
way of life, which is the way he wants us to experience it. Journalists
who have no feel for this life, no will to imagine it, are dangers to them-
selves and to the rest of us.
Notes
1. For a similar argument, see Christopher Lasch, "Journalism, Publicity and the
Lost Art of Argument," Gannett Center Journal 4 (1990): i-n.
2. James W. Carey, "The Press and the Public Discourse," The Center Magazine,
1987,5-
3. The literature on objectivity in journalism is large. For representative treatments
see, in addition to the Schudson and the Carey essays in this book, Theodore L. Glasser,
"Objectivity Precludes Responsibility," The Quill, February, 1984, 13-16; Robert A.
Hackett, "Decline of a Paradigm? Bias and Objectivity in News Media Studies," Critical
Studies in Mass Communication i (September 1984); D. C. Hallin, "The American
News Media: A Critical Perspective," in Critical Theory and Public Life, ed. J. Forester
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press): 121-46, and The Uncensored War: The Media and Viet-
nam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Leonard Sigal, Reporters and Officials:
The Organization and Politics of Newsmaking (Lexington, Mass.: Heath, 1973); and
Gaye Tuchman, "Objectivity as Strategic Ritual: An Examination of Newsmen's Notions
of Objectivity," American Journal of Sociology 79 (1972.): 110-31.
4. E. Kolbert, "Maybe the News Media Did Treat Bush a Bit Harshly," New York
Times, Nov. 22,1992, 03.
5. Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of America's News-
papers (New York: Basic Books, 1978), chapter 5.
6. Michael Schudson, The Power of News (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1995), chapter 7.
7. Ibid., 163.
8. On the savvy style and the journalist as insider, see Joan Didion, "Insider Base-
ball," in After Henry (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 47-86; Todd Gitlin, "Blips,
Bites and Saavy Talk," Dissent, Winter, 1990,18-26; and Jay Rosen, "The Political Press
and the Evacuation of Meaning," Tikkun, July 1993, 7-10, 94.
9. Adam Gopnik, "Read All About It," New Yorker, Dec. 12, 1994, 86.
10. Ibid.
11. See, in addition to Carey's "The Dark Continent in American Journalism" in
this volume, Robert M. Entman, Democracy without Citizens: Media and the Decay of
American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); T. E. Patterson, Out of
Order (New York: Knopf, 1993); Jay Rosen, "Politics, Vision and the Press: Toward a
Public Agenda for Journalism," in Jay Rosen and P. Taylor, The New News v. The Old
News (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1992), 3-36; and L. Sabato, Feeding Frenzy:
How Attack Journalism Has Transformed American Politics (New York: Free Press,
1991).
12. Schudson, Discovering the News, chapter 8.
13. James W. Carey, Communication as Culture (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989),
chapter i.
14. Ibid., 15.
15. Ibid., 18.
16. Ibid.
17. N. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978). Murray R.
Edelman's Constructing the Political Spectacle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1988) also makes fine use of this perspective.
18. Carey, Communication as Culture, 25.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., 26.
21. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1959), 2.50-51.
22. Carey, Communication as Culture, 29-30.
23. Ibid., 21.
24. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and
Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 6.
25. Schudson, The Power of News, 12-15.
26. In seeing public talk as the key to a healthy politics Carey is hardly alone. Some
important recent works that take a similar perspective are James S. Fiskin, Democracy
and Deliberation: New Directions for Democratic Reform (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1991); David Mathews, Politics for People: Finding a Responsible Pub-
lic Voice (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Robert D. Putnam, Making Democ-
racy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1993); and Daniel Yankelovich, Coming to Public Judgment: Making Democracy Work
in a Complex World (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991). Two texts com-
patible with Carey's perspective on the First Amendment are L. C. Bollinger, Images of a
Free Press (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), and C. R. Sunstein, Democracy
and the Problem of Free Speech (New York: Free Press, 1993).
27. The key texts here are John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York:
Holt, 1927), and Carey's treatment in Communication as Culture, especially chapter 3.
For elaborations and applications, see J. D. Peters, "Democracy and American Mass
Communication Theory: Dewey, Lippmann, Lazarsfeld," Communication n (1989):
199-220; and Jay Rosen, "Making Journalism More Public" and "Making Things More
Public: On the Political Responsibility of the Media Intellectual," Critical Studies in
Mass Communication n (December 1994): 362-88.
28. For a full discussion, see Rosen, "Making Things More Public," 362-88.
8 / "A Republic, If You Can Keep It":
Liberty and Public Life in the Age of Glasnost
A story from the Constitutional Convention, probably apocryphal, sets

the overall theme for this essay. Benjamin Franklin, then eighty-four,
was the oldest delegate to the convention. A citizen of Philadelphia and
a well-known public figure, Franklin was asked each day at the conclu-
sion of deliberations by those gathered outside Independence Hall:
"Mr. Franklin, do we have a government and if so what kind is it?"
And each day Franklin answered, "We have no government as yet." On
the ultimate day, as he left the convention and was asked the predict-
able question, he answered, or so the story goes, "We have a govern-
ment; a republic, if you can keep it." If you can keep it!
Franklin's remark reminds us that republican forms of government
were and still are odd and aberrant occurrences in history. The natural
state of humankind is domination; submission is the natural, our nat-
ural condition. Political communities founded on civic ties rather than
blood relations or bureaucratic rule are rare creatures in history; they
have a definite beginning, a point of origin in historical time, and,
therefore, they presumably have an end. The suspicion that public lib-
erty is aberrant in nature, that domination is our natural existence, was
one obstacle Franklin and the Founding Fathers had to overcome.
Their reading of history convinced them that the last republic vanished
some i,800 years earlier, when Caesar crossed the Rubicon in defiance
of an edict of the Roman Senate. The founders, then, were acting
against history and against nature in willing a republic into existence.
Writing a constitution was an attempt to lay a foundation, to create,
207
208 / "A Republic, If You Can Keep It"
in the words of Bruce Smith, whose analysis I am closely following,

a public space in which the two critical republican roles, citizen and
patriot, might exist. Citizenship is a term of space; one is a citizen in re-
lation to contemporaries with whom one occupies the same space.
Patriot is a term of time, a relationship to one's patrimony and posterity.
A patriot is a lover of place; not my country right or wrong, but a lover
of what happened in this particular place and might yet happen again.
The foundation of a political society, a republic, unites it in space
and time. The art of political creation is to lay a foundation that will
make citizens into patriots and patriots into citizens. Only when that is
achieved will it be possible to prevent republican government from
lurching back into domination; only then will it be possible to deliver
republican government, public life, against all the vicissitudes of his-
tory, down unchangeable to posterity.
The typical way in which the Constitution and the Bill of Rights
are discussed these days is as legal documents: the province of lawyers,
a nest of juridically derived meanings, an instrument to adjust and avoid
disputes, to advance and promote interests, to protect and enhance
rights. In fact, the sole meaning of the First Amendment for most peo-
ple these days is "rights." We are a people who have rights. We do not
constitute ourselves as a people in any other sense, except in outbreaks
of militant nationalism. Behind this rights-based image of the First
Amendment is a powerful organizing symbol, that of the dissident and
the dissenter. This side of the First Amendment—the Emersonian side,
according to Steven Shiffrin—appeals to the individualism, the rebel-
liousness, and the antinomian, nonconformist spirit within all of us, to
a greater or lesser degree.
When a legalist view of the Bill of Rights prevails, the various cases
decided by the courts are arrayed under the correct clauses such that
we have interminable surveys of cases that fall under the speech clause,
the assembly clause, the religious clause, and we are brought up to date
as to whither stand our rights. The construal of the Constitution and
the Bill of Rights as legal documents, an enumeration of rights, a means
of settling or at least anesthetizing disputes, is a tradition and view I
deeply cherish and cannot imagine living without. This view is rein-
vented in each period of dissent and rebellion against onerous and il-
legitimate demands and duties. But the powerful imperialism of the
"rights tradition" has smothered all other meanings of our founding
documents, even in those periods and among those people who have no
"A Republic, If You Can Keep It" I 209
quarrel with the legitimacy of authority. The assertion of rights has be-
come a mere tropism, as automatic as a plant turning toward light. In
the biological world, however, tropisms get organisms in trouble when
the environment radically changes. We now often act as if the Consti-
tution were a suicide pact, as if it had been written in Masada rather
than in Philadelphia. We act as if democracy will perpetuate itself auto-
matically if we only pay due regard to the law and rights. It is as if our
ancestors had succeeded in setting up a machine that, in the words of
John Dewey, "solved the problem of perpetual motion in politics."
The historian Louis Hartz once cracked that "law has flourished
on the corpse of philosophy in America." He meant, of course, that the
law threatens to absorb the entire culture. Thus, the very meaning of
speech, never mind the First Amendment, is increasingly denied, as Lee
Bollinger has argued, by the notion of extremist speech, as, for exam-
ple, in the famous Skokie case. But to allow the margin to define the
center, the periphery to impose meaning on the core, however valuable
the peripheral meanings, is to evacuate the entire culture of republican-
ism under the pretense of saving it.
But this is not the whole story. The law is more than cases. The law
is also, and in the first instance, a narrative: a set of stories about who
we are and from whence we came and where we would like to go. As
Mary Ann Glendon has put it, the law employs certain symbols and
projects visions about a people, about, in short, what we were and are
and yet might be again. In this view, the Bill of Rights is less a legal doc-
ument than a political document. It is a constitution. To be redundant
about it, it constitutes us as a people. A constitution is something be-
sides the imposition of law. It is an act and foundation through which
people constitute themselves as a political community. It embodies
hope and aspirations. It is an injunction as to how we might live to-
gether as a people, peacefully and argumentatively but civilly and pro-
gressively. The audacious statement, so audacious we could not write it
today except in nationalist tones, that opens the Constitution, "We the
people," signifies a common and republican culture that cuts across
and modifies all our vast and individual differences. Under this reading,
merely legal rights guarantee little if in daily life the actual give and
take of ideas, facts, and experiences is aborted by isolation, mutual sus-
picion, abuse, fear, and hatred. Or to put it in words similar to John
Dewey's of fifty years ago, we have come to think of the First Amend-
ment as a law, something external and institutional. We have to acquire
it, however, as something personal, as something that is but a com-

monplace of living. And to help us do that we should look to what in
this context must seem like rather odd and out-of-the-way places,
namely, the countries of Eastern Europe.
The most dramatic event of recent times is the collapse of the total-
itarian governments of most of Eastern Europe or, better, the emer-
gence of a free public life in most of the states of the old Warsaw Pact.
For the past year or more American journalists and intellectuals have
been traveling east in order to teach these newly liberated peoples the
practical arts of writing a First Amendment, managing a modern news-
paper or television station, or, more elementary yet, writing and editing
Western-style journalism. We regularly assume these days that we have
something to export to the peoples of Eastern Europe. We are less open
to the thought that we might have something to learn from them, that
they might teach us something about democracy and civic culture. This
curious astigmatism results from the fact that we assume that the liber-
ation of the people of Eastern Europe resulted from something we did
on their behalf and not from the internal dynamics of their own efforts.
We explain these complex political changes in terms of broadcasting
signals drifting over the Iron Curtain infecting a previously immune
population with a desire for Western consumer goods and ideas of free-
dom current in America. There is something, though not much, to this
notion, but it avoids the conclusion that flatters us less, namely, that the
liberation of Eastern Europe resulted from what Poles, Czechs, and
others did for themselves, and not primarily from what we represent or
what we inadvertently did for them.
How did they pull off this particular miracle? The image of totali-
tarianism that dominates our imagination—Orwell's 1984—allows no
room for what happened. Of all the depredations visited on the citizens
of Airstrip One, it is not the censorship or the wall posters or the pres-
ence of Big Brother or the ubiquitous television screen or the surveil-
lance or the reeducation of the informer children—all of which Orwell
helped become the totems of totalitarianism—that stays with one the
longest. Rather, it is the silence, the absence of talk, the loss of memory,
the pitiless destruction of the private and public world you cannot for-
get. The novel begins and ends wordlessly: Winston squirreled in an
out-of-sight corner writing words in his prized notebook; Winston
staring at the television screen in the Chestnut Tree Cafe. Rebellion be-
gins with writing and ends in silence. There is cant and there is interro-
"A Republic, If You Can Keep It" I I I I
gation; there are furtive, stolen glances, and there are hurried coded
messages. There is simply no conversation except in the pubs and the
hidden room, and very little of it there. No danger Winston faces is
quite as unnerving as that of starting a conversation; nothing more de-
moralizing than Julia's vacant memory.
We can happily ignore the coercion, social control, and domina-
tion, for we are by and large, on those terms at least, happily free of it.
Not so the endless and endlessly repetitive news, the reduction of all
thought to cliche, and the pervasive presence of bureaucracy: news,
cliche, bureaucracy, and, finally, silence are all too familiar and much
more unnerving than the technology and the terror. The destruction of
mind, the deracination of character, the invasion of the private, the di-
remption of the public appear within but exist without the totalitarian
and technological apparatus that sustains the fiction.
Orwell's 19 #4 is a prophetic book and valuable in that regard for
what it tells us to guard against. But it is not good prophecy. In Eastern
Europe there was, in fact, enormous resistance to the powers of the
state and, more importantly, the will to create a free public life despite
totalitarian coercion. Eastern Europeans managed to create, however
fragile it is now, whatever its prospects may be, a civic life of a dis-
tinctly republican kind, and central to that creation was the art of
memory.
Milan Kundera pays testimony to that art when, at the opening of
his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, he says that "the strug-
gle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
Similarly, the workers at the shipyard in Gdansk inscribed a tombstone
dedicated to their fallen comrades in Solidarity with the words of
Milosz: "The poet remembers." Both examples pay testimony to the
heroic acts of imaginative memory of the past forty-five years, acts that
formed the basis, the foundation, of a free public life. The best known,
and perhaps the most heroic, was that of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In
early February 1945 Solzhenitsyn was arrested on the East Prussian
front as a political criminal on the evidence of unflattering remarks he
had made about Stalin and Soviet literature in letters to a friend. Dur-
ing the next twelve years he endured interrogations, prisons, labor
camps, and exile, and he was "rehabilitated" in 1957.
He had always wanted to be a writer but prior to his arrest he could
never find a subject, his subject. Once he was in prison his dilemma
was resolved: he had to retain and make unforgettable the experience
through which he was living and to transmit the meaning of that expe-
rience to posterity. But how does one write in prison? No writing paper
or pens or pencils, no typewriters, or VDTs. As a result, he recovered,
as have so many others, the most primitive form of writing: he wrote
without setting anything down on paper, learning to compose anytime,
anywhere—"on forced marches over the frigid steppe, in thundering
foundries, in crowded barracks." As he put it in his autobiography, The
Oak and the Calf: "As a soldier falls asleep as soon as he sits down on
the ground, as a dog's own fur is the stove that keeps him warm in the
cold, so I instinctively became adjusted to writing everywhere." He
converted his experience into verse, stored the compositions in mem-
ory, and when he was finally released from the gulag, the words came
forth as prose and poetry in a memorable series of books. The follow-
ing lines from "God Keep Me from Going Mad" recall the tenacity and
purpose of the effort:
Yes, tight is the circle around us, tautly drawn,
But my verses will burst their bonds and freely roam
And I can guard, perhaps, beyond their reach,
In rhythmic harmony this hard-won gift of speech.
And then they can grope my body in vain—
"Here I am. All yours. Look hard. Not a line . . .
Our indestructible memory, by wonder divine,
Is beyond the reach of your butcher's hands!"
Many similar episodes could be cited. For example, Nadezhda
Mandelstam's recounting of how she and friends met to commit to
memory the literature being destroyed by the OGUP, the committee in
charge of counterrevolutionary struggle. She recalls in her memoirs
how, when she was working in a punitive factory, she used the rhythms
of mechanical looms to help her remember the lines of poems as she
rushed back and forth between them, the entire scene reminiscent of
the conclusion of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. The point is this: the
act of creating a public sphere in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe
did not begin with Western broadcasts floating across the Iron Curtain.
It began in acts of recovery and the tenacious storage in memory of the
experience through which people were living. It was only this that al-
lowed people to maintain a desire for normal life or a memory of what
normal life was and might yet be again.
This resistance everywhere required dealing with censorship. In
1984 The Blackbook of Polish Censorship was published after having
been smuggled out of Poland in 1977. As Stanislaw Baranczak has

commented about it:
Everybody who read the document was genuinely struck by the extent
and meticulous elaboration of the censor's guidelines and reports. The
document proved that censorship had literally every kind of publica-
tion under its control, from wedding invitations, to circus posters, to
obscure quarterlies dealing with Mediterranean archaeology.
Here are samples of the guidelines from the censorship book:
All information concerning the participation of representa-
tives of Israel in congresses, international conferences, or perfor-
mances organized by Poland should be cleared.. ..
Information on direct threats to life or health caused by
industry or chemical agents used in agriculture, or threats to the
natural environment in Poland, should be eliminated from works
on environmental protection.
No information concerning Poland's export of meat to the
USSR should be permitted.
All criticism of Marxism should be eliminated from reli-
gious publications. . . . All material critical of the religious sit-
uation in countries of the socialist community should be elimi-
nated. No material concerning the hippie movement in Poland
may be permitted for publication if it expresses approval or tol-
erance. Nationwide data on increases in alcoholism should not
be permitted for publication.
Among the more ingenious ways of circumventing censorship, as
recounted by Baranczak, was that of Stefan Kisielewski, who wrote his
most outrageous statements precisely so they would be censored,
thereby making their way into classified bulletins and brought to the
attention of the political elite. Perhaps the most distinguished body of
literature written under censorship is the genre of prison letters. Such
letters were composed under the direct control of the secret police,
forced to obey rigid guidelines—no more than four pages, no foreign
words or expressions, precise margins, nothing crossed out, no refer-
ences to anything but family matters. Nonetheless, Vaclav Havel's Let-
ters to Olga is one of the great political documents of our time and, as
Baranczak correctly says, one of the great articulations of human free-
dom. While inquiring about the health of his wife and children, while
commenting on his own health and state of mind, his once-a-week
four-page letters added up to an entire philosophy of freedom.
By devices large and small—writing between the lines; creating
novels about historical events that were disguised commentaries on con-
temporary affairs; strengthening the arts of memory; "flying" universi-

ties; public lectures in private apartments; choosing internal migration
and "writing for the desk drawers"; reviewing Nazi-era films as if they
were products of state socialism; circumlocution and densely coded
messages—East European writers constituted the basis of a free public
life. Again, Stanislaw Baranczak:
Poland, as an ironic result of decades of constant indoctrination,
persecution of free speech, and official backing of obedient quasi-
writers and quasi-artists .. . despite all this, or perhaps because
it, the phenomenon of an independent culture ... has been able
not only to survive and develop but also to secure its position
successfully.
The pivotal year was 1976, when the full power of the regime's
monopoly of publication was recognized, and it became "necessary to
go from weak and futile protests against abuses of censorship to creat-
ing a network of publishing and circulation which would remain out-
side the regime's control." Emboldened, given courage by an older gen-
eration of artists and writers, a number of young people were willing
to take the risk of serving as underground printers, editors, distribu-
tors, and so on. For the first time in postwar history, all the links of
the chain of communication fell into place: there was someone to
write for the independent circuit, someone to manage the process
of independent publications [and thus to form a market for them].
What began in clandestine speech spread to writing and then print-
ing and later to yet more vulnerable media such as cinema and theater.
Despite living under regimes almost as repressive as that described
by Orwell, East Europeans, in country after country, managed to create
a free public life. They had no help from the press; in fact, the press was
their enemy. They created a life that, though it was submerged and
clandestine, preserved, maintained, and developed public discourse, ar-
gument, and debate. The entire episode speaks to the importance of
human memory; the sheer stupidity, incompetence, and destructiveness
of censorship; the critical need for vital independent traditions of art;
and, despite the bedazzling advances in technology in our time, the
need for the simplest practices: to speak clearly and effectively, to write
with passion and directness, and to retain culture by the unaided pow-
ers of the mind. It was not by accident that only in the later stages of
the revolution did film, broadcasting, and photography become agents
of change, for these media require concentrated capital, rely upon skills
not easily concealed, and are more vulnerable to state interference. With
one exception: as one Czech put it, "Xerox was the best dissident for
many years."
East Europeans did not have a public life; they simply acted as if
they had one. Jonathan Schell has written of this "as if" philosophy in
his introduction to Adam Michnik's Letters from Prison. Michnik
helped devise an opposition strategy that could address itself to "inde-
pendent public opinion rather than totalitarian power." In explaining
this approach, Schell writes:
Its simple but radical guiding principle was to start doing things
you think should be done and to start being what you think society
should become. Do you believe in freedom and truth? Then speak
freely. Do you love truth? Then tell it. Do you believe in the open so-
ciety? Then act in the open. Do you believe in a decent and humane
society? Then act decently and humanely.
Vaclav Havel explained a similar strategy (or it is a philosophy?) in
Letters to Olga:
It is I who must begin. One thing about it, however, is interesting:
once I begin—that is once I try—here and now, right where I am,
not excusing myself saying that things would be easier elsewhere,
without grand speeches and ostentatious gestures, but all the more
persistently—to live in harmony with the voice of "Being," as I
understand it within myself—as soon as I begin that, I suddenly
discover, to my surprise, that I am neither the only one, nor the
first, nor the most important one to have set out upon that road....
Whether all is really lost or not depends entirely on whether or not
I am lost.
It is time to leave the broad savanna of Eastern Europe for the vil-
lage of America. It is dangerous to compare the struggle for freedom in
Poland, for example, with its maintenance in an already free society,
but it is equally dangerous to assume that the Polish experience has
nothing to teach us. Of course, their newfound way of life is very frag-
ile indeed, about where it was in 1914. But our way of life is very frag-
ile, too. They had to win a free public life from a repressive state; we
have to win one from the media consultants and our own ingrained
habits of living. Our task may be the more difficult even if it is without
comparable risks. But let me put a grace note to this, courtesy of the so-
ciologist Richard Flacks. Flacks recounts how a member of Solidarity
told him that the movement had come about because Polish workers
had been able to learn from the experiences of Poland in 1956, 1967,
1971, and 1975. That is, they were able to conserve and pass on polit-
ical experience. Flacks was dumbfounded, given his feeling that Amer-
ican students were unable to learn from earlier generations of student
protesters—for example, those in Berkeley in 1964. How could it be,
he wondered, that workers in Poland could learn lessons of the past
when information was totally controlled by the state, and where the
state systematically erased the memories of past protest? The state in
our presumptively free society does none of those things, yet we are,
in Joseph Featherstone's acid phrase, the "United States of Amnesia."
Flack's Polish respondent replied that because the Polish people do not
believe they have trustworthy mass media it never enters their mind to
rely on the official media, or any public media, to transmit any useful
information: "We have to create our own frameworks of communica-
tion and memory."
These independent frameworks of communication and memory
were assumed to exist by the framers of the Constitution and the Bill of
Rights, and such frameworks were thought to be worth protecting and
enhancing. The documents assume, in short, a set of personal disposi-
tions and the existence of certain social conditions. We now are faced
with the task of recreating, by deliberate and determined endeavor, the
forms of political life that in our origins two hundred years ago were
largely the product of a fortunate combination of persons and circum-
stances.
We value, or so we say, the First Amendment because it con-
tributes, in Thomas Emerson's formulation, four things to our com-
mon life. It is a method of assuring our own self-fulfillment; it is a
means of attaining the truth; it is a method of securing participation of
members of society in political decision making; and it is a means of
maintaining a balance between stability and change.
It is the third of Emerson's clauses, the clumsily expressed notion
of political participation, that is critical here. If we think of the First
Amendment against the background of recent East Europe experience,
the interrelation among its parts becomes clearer. While the First
Amendment contains four clauses—religion, speech, press, and assem-
bly—one must think of them less as separate clauses and more as a
compact way of describing a political society. In other words, the
amendment is not a casual and loose consolidation of high-minded
principles. It was an attempt to define the nature of public life as it ex-

isted at the time or as the founders hoped it would exist. To put it in an
artlessly simple way, the amendment says that people are free to gather
together without the intrusion of the state or its representatives. Once
gathered, they are free to speak openly and fully. They are further free
to write down what they have to say and to share it beyond the imme-
diate place of utterance.
But where does freedom of religion fit into this? Of all the free-
doms of public life in the eighteenth century, freedom of religion was,
perhaps, the most difficult liberty for Americans to adjust to. Com-
pared with other forms of speech, religious heresy was the one most
likely to be viewed as both a personal and a community assault. From
the banishment of heretics to the hanging of witches, religious persecu-
tion often could count on popular sanction. And yet the intricate rela-
tionship of public freedoms also was evident to Americans in the
colonies. The First Amendment was designed to resolve the dilemma.
As such, free speech and free press were a little like bargains struck
with the devil. No one could be excluded from the public realm on the
basis of religion, the one basis upon which people were likely to ex-
clude one another. In turn, that clause has allowed us to open up pro-
gressively the public realm, to make it more broadly inclusive, to re-
duce the barriers to entrance based on the secondary criteria of class,
race, and gender.
The interconnections among the clauses of the First Amendment
would be clearer if some of the draft language often attributed to
Madison had been adopted. The language of progressive verbs, rather
than nouns, would allow us to see the interrelations among assembling,
speaking, and writing. It would show more clearly the injunction in the
First Amendment to create a conversational society, a society of people
who speak to one another, who converse. Other words might do: a so-
ciety of argument, disputation, or debate, for example. But I believe we
must begin from the primacy of conversation. It implies social arrange-
ments less hierarchical and more egalitarian than its alternatives. While
people often dry up and shy away from the fierceness of argument, dis-
putation, and debate, and while those forms of talk often bring to the
surface the meanness and aggressiveness that is our second nature, con-
versation implies the most natural and unforced, unthreatening, and
most satisfying of arrangements.
Under this conception of the First Amendment, the press, whether
conceived of as a technology or an institution or simply as a recording

device, is largely an extension and amplification, an "outering" of con-
versation. But the conversation is ours to conduct with one another
and its amplification merely extends its reach. A press independent of
the conversation of culture, or existing in the absence of such a conver-
sation, is likely to be, in practical terms, whatever the value of the right
the press represents, a menace to public life and an effective politics.
The idea of the press as a mass medium, independent of, disarticulated
from, the conversation of the culture, inherently contradicts the goal of
creating an active remembering public. Public memory can be recorded
by but cannot be transmitted through the press as an institution. The
First Amendment, to repeat, constitutes us as a society of conversation-
alists, of people who talk to one another, who resolve disputes with one
another through talk. This is the foundation of the public realm, the
inner meaning of the First Amendment, and the example the people of
Eastern Europe were quite inadvertently trying to teach us.
The "public" is the God term of the press, the term without which
the press does not make any sense. Insofar as the press is grounded, it is
grounded in the public. The press justifies itself in the name of the pub-
lic. It exists, or so it is said, to inform the public, to serve as the extended
eyes and ears of the public. The press is the guardian of the public inter-
est and protects the public's right to know. The canons of the press orig-
inate in and flow from the relationship of the press to the public.
While the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are silent on the mat-
ter, the public is the deepest and most fundamental concept of the en-
tire liberal tradition. Liberal society is formed around the notion of a
virtuous public. For John Locke, to be a member of the public was to
accept a calling.
This notion of a public, a conversational public, has been pretty
much evacuated in our time. Public life started to evaporate with the
emergence of the public opinion industry and the apparatus of polling.
Polling (the word, interestingly enough, derived from the old synonym
for voting) was an attempt to simulate public opinion in order to pre-
vent an authentic public opinion from forming. With the rise of the
polling industry, intellectual work on the public went into eclipse. In
political theory, the public was replaced by the interest group as the key
political actor. But interest groups, by definition, operate in the private
sector, behind the scenes, and their relationship to public life is essen-
tially propagandistic and manipulative. In interest-group theory the
public ceases to have a real existence. It fades into a statistical abstract:

an audience whose opinions count only insofar as individuals refract
the pressure of mass publicity. In short, while the word public contin-
ues in our language as an ancient memory and a pious hope, the public
as a feature and factor of real politics disappears.
The strongest advocate of a diminished and vanishing public was,
as I argue elsewhere, Walter Lippmann. While Lippmann seemed to
lament the passing of the public, he conceived of citizens primarily, if
not exclusively, as the objects rather than the subjects of politics. This
view turned the First Amendment primarily into a possession of the
press and the interest groups with whom the press engaged in both com-
bat and accommodation. Toward that combat citizens stood largely as
spectators and ratifiers. In truth, the conversation of the culture was
taken outside the public realm and into private spaces.
However artlessly and awkwardly, I want to contrast the situation
just described with the requirements of republican life. Republics re-
quire conversation, often cacophonous conversation, for they should
be noisy places. That conversation has to be informed, of course, and
the press has a role in supplying that information. But the kind of in-
formation required can be generated only by public conversation; there
is simply no substitute for it. We have virtually no idea what it is we
need to know until we start talking to someone. Conversation focuses
our attention, it engages us, and in the wake of conversation we have
need not only of the press but also of the library. From this view of the
First Amendment, the task of the press is to encourage the conversation
of the culture—not to preempt it or substitute for it or supply it with
information as a seer from afar. Rather, the press maintains and en-
hances the conversation of the culture, becomes one voice in that con-
versation, amplifies the conversation outward, and helps it along by
bringing forward the information that the conversation itself demands.
President John F. Kennedy said in 1962.:
Most of us are conditioned [a telling word] for many years to have a
particular viewpoint: Republican or Democrat, Liberal or Conserva-
tive or Moderate. The fact of the matter is that most of the problems
that we now face are technical problems, administrative problems.
They require sophisticated judgments which do not lend themselves
to the kinds of social movements that involve the citizenry and which
stir the country. They deal with problems that are beyond the circum-
spection of most men.
Kennedy had read his Lippmann. But pretty much the same thing
was said to the shipyard workers at Gdansk who formed Solidarity:
These affairs are beyond you; you're not technically qualified to judge.
Let us take care of these matters; you are simply interfering with the
normal process of government.
The important thing about public conversation is that, in an old
saw of E. M. Forster's, we don't know what we think until we hear
what we say. Conversation not only forms opinion, it forms memory.
We remember best the things that we say, the things that we say in
response to someone else with whom we are engaged. Talk is the
surest guide to remembering and knowing what we think. To take in
information passively guarantees that we will remember little and
know less, except for a trace of the passion of the moment. And soon
we have no interest in information or knowledge at all. If we insist on
public conversation as the essence of democratic life, we will come, as
Christopher Lasch put it, "to defend democracy, not as the most effi-
cient form of government but as the most educational one, the one that
extends the circle of debate as widely as possible and thus asks us all to
articulate our views, to put them at risk, and to cultivate the virtues of
clarity of thought, of eloquence and sound judgment."
A press that encourages the conversation of its culture is the equiv-
alent of an extended town meeting. However, if the press sees its role as
limited to informing whoever happens to turn up at the end of the com-
munication channel, it explicitly abandons its role as an agency for car-
rying on the conversation of the culture. Having embraced Lippmann's
outlook, the press no longer serves to cultivate certain vital habits: the
ability to follow an argument, grasp the point of view of another, ex-
pand the boundaries of understanding, decide the alternative purposes
that might be pursued. A free press is a necessary condition of a free
public life, but it is not the same thing as a free public life. If I am right
in contending that we should value the press to the precise degree that
it sustains public life, that it helps keep the conversation going among
us, and that we devalue the press to the degree it seeks to inform us and
turns us into silent spectators, then there are two diremptions of the
central meaning of the First Amendment against which we must be on
guard. The first is the tendency of the press to treat us like a client, a
group with a childlike dependence and an eight-year-old mind inca-
pable of functioning at all without our daily dose of the news. The his-
torian John Lukacs has pointed out that one of the things that aston-
ished Europeans about America in the nineteenth century was that we

regularly overestimated the intelligence of ordinary men and women.
These Europeans felt America expected more from its people than they
could deliver. That, of course, was a mistake, but it is infinitely prefer-
able to its opposite, namely, the systematic underestimation of the
intelligence of people. Such an underestimation is the contemporary
mistake made not only by the press but by all our major institutions—
education, government, and business.
Second, the press endangers us when it disarms us, when it con-
vinces us that just by sitting at home watching the news or spending an
hour with the newspaper, we are actually participating in the affairs
that govern our lives. At least the people of Eastern Europe never swal-
lowed that. Sociologists Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton coined the
awkward but apt phrase "narcotizing dysfunction" to describe the
condition in which participation in the media becomes confused with
participation in public life.
Paul L. Murphy noted that the decision in the libel case New York
Times v. Sullivan, and in many parallel cases, was an attempt by the
Supreme Court to create a robust society of debate. We have, he con-
cluded, secured freedom of speech for the street-corner orator. Unfor-
tunately, the constituency of that orator is no longer on the corner, lis-
tening; it is at home watching television. However, if one looks at
voting statistics and other evidence of participation in politics, or ex-
amines the knowledge people have of public affairs, or the declining
attention to news on television or in print, one must conclude that the
political constituency has disappeared altogether. Out there, there is no
there there. The press has a great interest in the restoration of this con-
stituency if only to assure its own financial survival. But that con-
stituency will be found neither on the street corner nor in the audience
until it has some reason to be either place. Since there is no public life,
there is no longer a public conversation in which to participate, and,
because there is no conversation, there is no reason to be better in-
formed and hence no need for information.
Or, to take another example: at a minimum the press has to ac-
tively lead the fight to reform the financing of political campaigns.
Until the structure of campaigning changes, there is little hope of ro-
bust debate. Because we cannot control campaign financing, there is a
growing movement to put term limitations on elected officials. That is,
by and large, not a particularly helpful idea, but it should be under-
stood as a substitute for the reform of campaign financing. When we

learned a few years ago that the chances of staying in Congress were in-
finitely better than the chances of a Soviet official's retaining his seat in
the Politburo, we realized how sclerotic our politics had become. With-
out reform of campaign financing, there is no possibility of public de-
bate. However, newspapers and television, particularly the latter, have
no interest in campaign reform for they are the financial beneficiaries of
a system that clogs the public mind, chokes the public voice, and keeps
the legislature full of winningly familiar and compliant co-conspirators
in the diremption of the public realm. The situation would not be so
parlous if our legislatures and political parties were themselves driven
by debate. Then, even if we did not get a chance to discuss the issues,
we could at least have the pleasure of watching someone else do it. We
could thereby form our imaginations off public argument. Debate is no
longer any part of campaigning, despite the ersatz confrontations ar-
ranged every four years by the networks and the League of Women
Voters. By rule the cameras on the floor of Congress can focus only on
the speaker of the moment, lest the dirty little secret get out that con-
gressional debate occurs without congressional listeners: the words are
spoken only for the Congressional Record and the chance viewers back
home who stumble across C-SPAN. Contrast that with the British House
of Commons, also courtesy of C-SPAN, where one can actually see the
benches, hear the debate, and form an opinion by selecting among
carefully nuanced positions one that more or less matches one's own.
That is all pretty dour as prognosis, so let's balance it with three
hopeful examples—one of what an individual can do, a second of what
a newspaper can do, and a third of what a public institution can do.
The individual story originally appeared in the Philadelphia In-
quirer on February 4,1989. "An era ends for a voice in education," the
Inquirer headline said, and the article went on as follows:
The prose was always simple and direct. Listen to an excerpt from
the Oakes Newsletter of March 1984: "High schools face enormous
problems. Thousands of ill prepared students [this was 1984] are
disinterested in their courses. Poor attendance. Cut classes. Students
have difficulties concentrating on their studies because of struggling
with problems at home such as alcoholism, abusive adults, and
poverty or face hurdles such as pregnancy or drug dependence. High
schools must endeavor to cope with all these problems while push-
ing, cajoling, and encouraging pupils to learn."
Helen Oakes described her newsletter from its beginning nine-

teen years ago as "an independent monthly dedicated to improving
public education." Every month—quarterly for the last few years—
Oakes carefully researched an important educational issue and then
presented her findings to the readership of her little periodical.
But Oakes, 64, announced last week that her January news-
letter, on the problems of new teachers and the looming teacher
shortage, would be her last.
With that decision, what some have described as a one-of-a-kind
record of an urban school system's struggles and evolution came to
an end. The circulation of the Oakes Newsletter was a mere 1,300.
Her readers passed it from hand to hand. She would send copies to
the Mayor, City Council, School Board members, other influential
people, regardless of whether they subscribed. She only had 600 paid
subscriptions at $10.00 per year, and her work was underwritten by
the Alfred and Mary Gouty foundation. Over nearly two decades,
there have been 156 newsletters, each four pages long, each written
in the same low-key explanatory style even at the height of the
school district's financial, education, and labor troubles.
As she is leaving her work, one citizen of Philadelphia, Happy
Fernandez, who helped found the Parents Union in 1972. during a
time of escalating labor strikes, says, "The Oakes Newsletter was
invaluable. I was coming from a neighborhood organization that
had never looked at the issues of the whole system. A number of
the newsletters helped us understand the budget dynamics that were
the driving force behind the strikes. We gobbled up the stuff like the
Bible and would wait for each new issue to come out."
To its credit, the Inquirer, when Oakes retired, said:
Most public officials know only two ways of communicating: emo-
tional displays in public and conspiratorial whispers in private. As a
result, the public's real need for discourse that is open and rational is
rarely served. One of the few exceptions is Helen Oakes, who instead
of adding decibel level to the traditional cacophony of the school
scene, or wheeling and dealing behind the scenes, set her thoughts
down on paper in a personal letter that she sends out eight times
a year.
This tiny story of Helen Oakes tells us more about the value of
freedom of the press than a year's worth of issues of the New York
Times. In fact, the main reason for defending freedom of the press for
the New York Times is to ensure that we can defend and enhance that
freedom in the case of people like Helen Oakes.
A second example concerns a newspaper. What follows is a con-
densed version of what happened based on a recent essay by Jay Rosen
of New York University. Columbus, Georgia, a city of 175,000 in south-

western Georgia, has, like many American cities, experienced signifi-
cant growth in recent years. And that growth has caused all sorts of
problems. The local paper, the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, commis-
sioned a poll of area residents to seek their opinion on what the city
needed to do. They also received about eighty-five questionnaires from
influential citizens. On the basis of these two sources of information,
the paper published a report entitled "Columbus—Beyond 2,000" in
daily installments in the spring of 1989. The report identified key issues
including transportation bottlenecks, low wages, the lack of nightlife, a
faltering school system, and the perceived dominance of a local elite in
city politics. The editor recalled that, after the series was published, the
paper sat back and waited for someone to do something—but no one
did. So the editor, the late Jack Swift, decided to leap across the chasm
that normally separates journalism from its community.
At the newspaper's expense, he planned a town meeting to turn up
the public heat on local government. Members of the newspaper staff
were trained in the art of moderating public discussion by the Kettering
Foundation in Ohio. A six-hour meeting in December 1988 drew three
hundred people from a variety of income levels and social standings.
Off the momentum of that meeting, Swift organized a barbecue at his
home for seventy-five prominent citizens, again from diverse back-
grounds. The result was a loosely organized citizens' movement calling
itself United Beyond 2.000, after the newspaper series. It included a
steering committee and a variety of task forces to address specific issues
such as recreation, child care, teenagers, and race relations. As it ex-
panded, the citizens' movement remained a concern of the newspaper,
but it was not the paper's creature. United Beyond 2000 devolved into
a coordinated mechanism for civic groups and their leaders, a path of
entry for citizens whose civic involvement was ordinarily low, and a
signal to government that public opinion was organized and active.
The newspaper supported the movement with a community bul-
letin board featuring letters from readers and a series of articles on the
region's problems, focusing particularly on the lack of a clear agenda at
different levels of local and regional government. The editor did not
merely deal with current problems. Employing the metaphor of tribal
fire, he noted that newspapers should share history, celebrate heroes, re-
inforce common values, retell legends. Among the legends they retold
was the story of the 1912 lynching of a black youth by a white mob in
Columbus. No one was convicted and the event passed out of local his-
tory. Swift resurrected it as "The Incident at Wynn's Hill," researched and
written by a reporter whose ancestors were among the city's founders.
This entire episode illustrates, as Jay Rosen insightfully argues,
how journalism might, as one of its central functions, expand the defi-
nition of public time, the temporal framework within which discussion
takes place and we consider our collective history. As Rosen says, "In a
racially mixed Southern city, to re-install a lynching in the community's
collective memory"—and to do it for a reason other than inducing col-
lective guilt—"is a decidedly political act, an extension of 'public time'
backward to include a troubled and forgotten past."
The experiment by the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer raises a number
of troubling issues for professional journalists and, rather unfortu-
nately, it has been rationalized by the owner of the paper, the Knight-
Ridder Company, as an exercise in romance and profitability. However,
such issues need not detain us. The lesson of the episode is the example
of a newspaper attempting, without becoming a simpleminded com-
munity booster, to reconceive its public function and to assist in the
reemergence of a public conversation about the public interest.
A final example from McLean County, Illinois. The county seat at
Bloomington was concerned about the cohesion of the community
with the arrival of a new Chrysler/Mitsubishi manufacturing plant and
the many new residents who followed in its wake. How could the
transformed community be brought together and equipped with a
common memory and vocabulary so that the newcomers could talk to
the "oldcomers" in creating an authentic civic culture? The county his-
torical society undertook this task by first identifying six groups that
collectively constituted the history of the community: Yankees, Irish,
African-Americans, Anabaptists, Germans, and Upland Southerners.
The society considered doing an oral history of these groups but finally
rejected it as an exercise in, to use their splendid phrase, the "strip-
mining of memory." Instead, they created a remarkable series of events,
the centerpiece of which was a living museum in which people in the
community were asked to exhibit and portray the histories of their own
families, to dramatize the history of McLean County by dramatizing
family history, by simply talking about and displaying the artifacts that
sedimented that history and brought the past of the community to life.
Public life stands for a form of politics in which, in Jefferson's
phrase, "we could all be participators in the government of our af-
fairs." Political equality in its most primitive mode probably meant

simply the right to be seen and heard. When one or a few dominate the
life of a people, the others, denied the opportunity to be seen and
heard, despair of public joy and go in search of private pleasure. Only
when citizens can speak and act with some promise that their fellows
will see and hear and remember will the passions that are true and last-
ing grow. And, therefore, unless we can create or restore what Tocque-
ville called the "little republics within the frame of the larger republic,"
within political parties and trade unions, within local communities and
workplaces, within places that can aggregate public opinion and sus-
tain public discourse, political objects must remain indefinite and tran-
sient and political action short-lived and ineffective.
The two-hundredth anniversary of the Bill of Rights coincided
with the war in the Persian Gulf. Following the war academic and jour-
nalistic commentators attempted to assess the coverage of the war and
the legality and efficacy of the censorship and pool arrangements of the
American military. We were so busy discussing that First Amendment
problem that we forget and ignored the real problem. The war in the
Gulf, not in specifics but as an emanation of our foreign policy and do-
mestic policy, should have been discussed in 1988 and again in 1990. In
those political campaigns, among the silliest and most tragic in our his-
tory, there was no conversation or debate anywhere: not in the press,
not among the candidates, not among the people. We had an opportu-
nity then to discuss whether, in the wake of the end of the cold war, it
might not be time to end the long period of liberal internationalism
that dates back to Woodrow Wilson and the domination of the na-
tional security state that dates back, at least, to World War II. We missed
the opportunity to conduct that conversation of the culture, and we
may not get another one any time soon.
"What a nation is, is essential. What it does can only express what
it is," according to William Pfaff. What the United States does on the
international stage is of some consequence. But our enduring success
lies in the quality of our civilization and, in particular, of our political
society. Our success in postwar years lay in the creation of a vital and
energetic society, attempting, at least, to extend social justice and en-
gage the imagination of the young. Foreign relations rightly dominated
our attention during the period now ending. The true test the United
States now confronts, the national challenge, is within.
We must turn to the task of creating a public realm in which a free
people can assemble, speak their minds, and then write or tape or other-
wise record the extended conversation so that others, out of sight,
might see it. If the established press wants to aid the process, so much
the better. But if, in love with profits and tied to corporate interests, the
press decides to sit out public life, we shall simply have to create a
space for citizens and patriots by ourselves. Like the people of Eastern
Europe, we will have to constitute a free public life, whatever the odds.
That was Franklin's message at the close of the Constitutional Conven-
tion: a republic, if you can keep it.
9 / The Press, Public Opinion, and Public
Discourse: On the Edge of the Postmodern
The vast growth of the social, steadily encroaching on both public

and private life, has produced the eerie phenomenon of society,
which rules everybody anonymously, just as bureaucracy, the rule
of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.
—Mary McCarthy
At this late date in the history of the American republic it may be impos-
sible to recover a useful and usable conception of public opinion and
public discourse, despite notable attempts to do so. There is more than
a whiff of the romantic in the verb recover, so let me explain. Phrases
such as "the recovery of the public sphere," used rather often these
days, do not necessarily imply that there was once, long ago, in some
pristine past, an era in which the public reigned, in which our ancestors
lived a free and uncoerced life of communal bliss and that we, now
armed with spiritual travelers checks, can haul back to the present and
reestablish. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, back there, there is no there
there. The "recovery of public life" is not an attempt to recapture a
period or historical moment or condition but, instead, an attempt to
invigorate a conception or illusion or idea that once had the capacity
to engage the imagination, motivate action, and serve an ideological
purpose. Public life refers to an illusion of the possible rather than to
something with a given anterior existence. To place public life in the
past is merely to situate it in a context where it can be thought rather
than in a landscape where it was real.
228
The Press, Public Opinion, and Public Discourse I 229
The reason contemporary politics and with it the press and public
opinion often seem so meaningless is that they have been severed from
any imagination of a possible politics that can serve as a basis of action
and motivation. Gripped by what C. Wright Mills called "crackpot
realism," we have pretty much concluded that "public life" is not only
an illusion and a species of the pastoral but an undesirable objective of
both politics and everyday life. We may still hold to some notion of
democracy as a desirable state of affairs but it is, to appropriate the
title of Robert Entman's book, a democracy without citizens.
This evacuation of the public realm, a contemporary feature of
both theory and practice, is driven, of course, by the ruthlessly priva-
tizing forces of capitalism that often make such a life unthinkable.
However, the evacuation of the public realm is also a product of pro-
gressive thought. Most ideological positions, left and right, actively
struggle against the notions of the public, public discourse, and public
life. In short, whatever political allegiances obtain, they are in agree-
ment on one point: a modern political community must be, empirically,
theoretically, and normatively, a community of power, not discourse, an
arena of naked and manipulative struggle between interest groups, an-
other item in the culture of consumption and coercion. This is the way
the world works and, in truth, the only way it can and ought to work.
There is simply no conceivable alternative. Because modern political
culture was formed as a reaction to totalitarianism, we are convinced
that the only alternative to the omniscient state is an elite and managed
democracy conducted as a propaganda contest in which the public is a
spectator and ratifier of decisions made elsewhere. Why are we so
imaginatively impoverished?
A sense of conceptual loss, then, will pervade this essay, a loss of,
to paraphrase some lines of Lawrence Levine, a rich, shared public cul-
ture.1 American culture was from the outset deeply divided by race, eth-
nicity, class, and, above all, religion. Nonetheless, it was also typified
by a shared culture, less hierarchically organized, not adjectivally di-
vided by labels such as high, mass, and popular, and not, strictly speak-
ing, the property or province of any one group. Today our only shared
culture is a commercial one, a substitute for a political culture, and
what exists of politics is formed as a metaphor of commerce and an im-
perative of markets. While that culture, with its commitment to mar-
kets, can do many things, it cannot produce a politics, or it can produce
nothing more than a politics of interests.
230 / The Press, Public Opinion, and Public Discourse
The object then of this reconsideration of the press, politics, and

public opinion is to move toward a shared political culture, particu-
larly in terms of our understanding of the First Amendment and, there-
fore, our understanding of what have come to be thought of as the
"rights" of assembly, speech, and press. To defend free speech so that
people may be unfettered in forming their own opinions and choosing
their own ends is a rather different matter from defending it on the
grounds that a life of political discussion is inherently worthier than a
life unconcerned with public affairs, worthier than a life merely self-
absorbed and self-interested. These questions have been raised anew by
the spectacle of recent presidential politics.
Have We Reached a Watershed?

The parenthesis enclosing the 1988 and 1992, presidential primaries
and elections may turn out to be, though the wish is certainly father to
the thought, a watershed period in American politics and in the history
of public opinion. In the aftermath of the 1988 election there was wide-
spread disgust with American politics and with the press itself, a dis-
gust that muted the normal happiness of political victory and the end
to yet another endless season of campaigning.2 It was a monumentally
smarmy campaign, reduced to a few slogans and brutal advertisements
that produced yet another record low in voter turnout. A predictable
round of seminars and symposia followed, decrying the "degradation
of democratic discourse" and the immiseration of the press in horse
race and gossip column journalism. The theatrical and hermetically
sealed quality of the campaign was caught by Joan Didion:
When we talk about the process, then, we are talking increasingly,
not about "the democratic process," or the general mechanism af-
fording citizens of a state a voice in its affairs, but the reverse, a
mechanism seen as so specialized that access to it is correctly limited
to its own professionals, to those who manage policy and those who
report on it, to those who run the polls and those who quote them,
to those who ask and those who answer the questions on the Sunday
shows, to the media consultants, to columnists . . . to the handful
year in and year out, the narrative of public life. What strikes one
most vividly about such a campaign is precisely its remoteness from
the actual life of the country.3
The widespread disenchantment of the public with the spectacle of
politics—with what Didion called "insider baseball," a game only for
the players, not even the fans—was evident not only in low voter
turnout but also in the large, 9 percent, decline in the television audi-
ence for the political conventions. The conventions were saved only by
commercial demography; as one advertising specialist put it, "the up-
scale target audience was there."4 Following the election there were re-
newed calls for the press to reconstruct its approach to politics, includ-
ing an exhortation from one of the most distinguished practitioners of
the craft, David Broder.5 Cries of "never again" were heard in some
newsrooms around the country and a few, most notably the Charlotte
Observer^ laid plans for radically altered forms of election coverage in
the future. Despite that, the 1992 primary season opened pretty much
as a reenactment of the worst of the lessons learned in 1988. The dif-
ferences that initially obtained came largely as a result of matters out-
side the control of either press or politics. Tom Harkin's favorite-son
status lowered the visibility of the Iowa caucus, giving a long run-up to
the New Hampshire primary. With abundant time and an initial pri-
mary in a small and accessible state with a strong tradition of town-
meeting governance, the campaign managed to escape the confines of
television and spread out into towns and hamlets. Driven by the ab-
sence of a significant Republican contest and the unusual candor of
Paul Tsongas, the primary was direct and intimate and produced an
unusually high level of issue-oriented political discourse. Voter interest
and turnout was up as the campaign fanned out from New Hampshire
to the multiple primaries of Super Tuesday. At that point, political hope
dissipated; the campaign reentered the simulated world of media: Bill
Clinton's character moved to the forefront, his dalliance with Gennifer
Flowers became an obsession, his Vietnam draft status an easy and
never-ending story. Feeding-frenzy journalism reigned and voter inter-
est declined such that by the New York primary, voter turnout was al-
most one-third less than in 1988. Everything journalists and politicians
promised to avoid after 1988 were again the norm as the campaign
swung into summer.
But then something began to change. Partly it was a spontaneous
movement among voters to reclaim the campaign for themselves, sym-
bolized by the second, or Richmond, debate, in which the candidates
directly faced voter questions. Partly it was the gravitation of the cam-
paign into the talk-show circuit—Larry King, Arsenio Hall, Tabitha
Soren, Rush Limbaugh. Partly it was the use of e-mail, partly the use of
computer bulletin boards, partly the fax machine, partly the use of 800
numbers, partly call-in radio, and partly private satellite hookups that
signaled a shifting of ground. The phrase that caught on to describe
this shift was "new news": new technological forms eroding historic
relations of press and politics and the emergence of a new public opin-
ion as an altered force in political campaigns.6 To many traditional
journalists and some politicians, this was disaster, for it displaced a
cozy and predictable game into a new, uncertain, less manageable land-
scape. The traditional power and influence of the press evaporated,
displaced by the entertainment industry, celebrities impersonating jour-
nalists, and new, less mediated, contact between citizens and candi-
dates. The broadcast networks, a bastard by-product of the Fairness
Doctrine and a vaudeville tradition, which had, against all odds, cre-
ated exceptional moments of electronic journalism, were particularly
threatened by the migration of political discourse out of the newsroom
and into a new electronic highway of chattering classes and masses.
This is a story that, like all good stories, has a villain: Ross Perot.
Perot's campaign, totally electronic, had circumvented party organiza-
tion and presidential primaries. Perot even avoided a national conven-
tion as volunteers got him on the ballot in state after state. Conse-
quently, Perot did not have to campaign in the states, ignored local
newspapers, radio, and television, and in effect told the national press
"I can win without you or against you." This was not a third-party
candidate but a no-party candidate. Perot demonstrated that it was
possible to run with one's own money and avoid restrictions on federal
matching funds. He laid down new rules for presidential politics: avoid
specifics, stay away from journalists, hold as few press conferences as
possible, stay off the serious interview programs, cultivate electronic
populism by exploiting call-in radio. Who needs Sam Donaldson if you
can speak directly to a disorganized mass?
All this gave rise to the worst fear of journalists formed by the
experience of World War II: the new media had greased the highway
of modern politics for demagogues and demagoguery. The electronic
revolution had created—only the technical words were missing—mass
politics and mass society. Journalists had encountered the postmodern
form of politics and public opinion, and it left them little role in cam-
paigns. If, as Joan Didion put it, campaigns raise questions that go
"vertiginously to the heart of the structure" of the press and politics,
what then was the future of journalism and the meaning of public
opinion?7
Even if some of this seems dead wrong, we ought to begin on a

note of empathy for journalists. Journalists, like the historians they in
some ways resemble, have always been prey to false dawns, and to eras
artificially defined as having ended. The journalist and the historian
alike inhabit the same world as politicians, even if one standard devia-
tion removed, and, like politicians, they absorb an inexhaustible supply
of nirvana and Armageddon. The politician needs to believe that the
events in which he or she is taking part belong to a sequence that is
nearing its heroic or, when the dawn is dimmest, its craven and predes-
tined conclusion. The language of blurred continuity, with which we
understand and describe our own lives, at least most of the time, is
anathema to the political leader and often the journalist and historian
as well.
Journalists are genetically marked—the phrase is not too strong—
by the characteristic struggle and fear of this century, particularly one
imprinted—the word is not too strong—by World War II and its after-
math. Journalistically the twentieth century can be defined as the strug-
gle for democracy against propaganda, a struggle inevitably waged by
an "objective" and "independent" press. That struggle culminated in
the seizure of the means of communication by the demagogues of the
19305 and 19405—Hitler and Stalin—and their cold war reincarna-
tion, the ghost that haunts American journalism, Joseph McCarthy.8
Perot's eruption into American politics recalled, if only implicitly, this
episode. For those on the other side of the postwar divide, however,
that struggle no longer seems apposite: the fear of demagoguery a curi-
ous hangover of a forgotten age—that simply couldn't happen again,
could it? Similarly, the quest for independence or objectivity seemed to
a younger generation a curious absence of passion and commitment: a
deliberate sitting out of history.
This historical divide, which is also a generational one, is the vary-
ing reference point of the hyperbolic division between the modern and
the postmodern. If a medium implies and constitutes a world, then the
world of modern journalism, a particular world of communication,
democracy, and public opinion, a world built on the model of the mod-
ern newspaper and later network television, seemed to be running to
the sea in red ruin. But, for the moment, the important lesson is this: all
terms of the political equation—democracy, public opinion, public dis-
course, the press—are all up for grabs; all such terms are historically
variable even as they define one another in mutual relief. Whatever
democracy as a way of life may be, it is constituted by particular media

of communication and particular institutional arrangements through
which politics is conducted: speech and the agora, the colonial news-
paper and pamphlet in the tavern of Philadelphia, the omnibus daily in
the industrial city, the television network in an imperial nation. Simi-
larly, a medium of communications is defined by the democratic aspi-
rations of politics: a conversation among equals, the organ of a politi-
cal ideology, a watchdog on the state, an instrument of dialogue on
public issues, a device for transmitting information, the tool of interest
groups. And, the meaning of public opinion gravitates between the ab-
stract and the concrete, between public sentiment and public judgment,
between references to a concrete way of life, a mode of political action,
and the statistical concatenation of individuals' desires and sentiments.9
To belabor the point: What we mean by democracy depends on the
forms of communication by which we conduct politics. What we mean
by communication depends on the central impulses and aspirations of
democratic politics. What we mean by public opinion depends on both.
None of these phenomena are natural, none of the terms transcendent,
all are found only within history: they exist only within language,
within the particular historical conjunctures in which we define them.
However, something is afoot in modern societies that seems pecu-
liarly tied to communications, to the decline of certain media, which
have defined the context of communications and democracy since the
end of World War II—perhaps longer. The media have decisively
changed in the past twenty years, both as technologies and as institu-
tions. But democracy has changed also as the ends of political life have
been conceived in recent years. For example, there is a widespread de-
sire for less pro forma political representation, whether by the press or
elected officials, and for more real political participation; more demand
that the state act like a corporation solving problems by producing new
solutions on demand rather than muddling through difficulties.10
What is changing is not some preternatural form of journalism,
some transcendent form of democracy and public opinion, but rather a
useful social arrangement, now in rather deep trouble, that was a mod-
ern invention. Modern journalism and modern democracy, invented
around the 18905, have had a pretty long run. But there was democ-
racy before modern journalism; there will be democracy after it,
though there are difficult and dangerous transitions to be negotiated.
Let me contrast, if only to jump start an argument, two ideal types of
public opinion, journalism and democracy, which, because everything

needs a name, we can call journalism in a public society constituting
our original understanding of the press and the First Amendment, and
journalism in a national society, the modern phase, which now seems
to be coming to an end. That will serve as a prelude to a brief conclu-
sion on the dangerous and hopeful potentials of journalism, democ-
racy, and public opinion in the years ahead.
Evolution of the Public

Our basic understanding of journalism, politics, and democracy emerged
in the public houses, the taverns of colonial America, though it was
powerfully controlled by images of Greece and Rome and the language
of republican political theory. Pubs were presided over by publicans
who were often, as well, publishers. Publicans picked up information
from travelers who often recorded what they had seen and heard on
their journeys in log books stationed at the end of the bar and from
conversations in the pub. They recorded it, printed it, in order that it
might be preserved and circulated. To it they added speeches, orations,
sermons, offers of goods for sale, and the political opinions of those
who gathered in public places, largely merchants and traders. In other
words, the content of the press was by and large the spoken word—the
things being said by public men in public places. In turn, conversation
and discussion, public speech, was animated by what was read in the
newspapers that circulated in the same public houses. As a French
diplomat described it in 1783, "They have printed the news at once;
they are read avidly in the Circles, the taverns and public places. They
dispute the articles; they examine from all sizes, since all the individu-
als without exception take part in public affairs and are [therefore] nat-
urally talkers and questioners."
Journalism, in other words, reflected speech, was largely made up
of speech: the ongoing flow of conversation, not in the halls of state
and legislature, but in public houses. This gives us our original under-
standing of the public: the public was a group, often of strangers, who
gathered to discuss the news.11 Describing Philadelphia on the eve of
the Revolution, Sam Bass Warner observes that
gossip in the taverns provided Philadelphia's basic cells of commu-
nity life... . Every ward of the city had its inns and taverns and the
London Coffee House served as central communication node of the
entire city. . . . Out of the meetings at the neighborhood tavern came

much of the commonplace community development... essential to
the governance of the city . . . and made it possible . . . to form effec-
tive committees of correspondence.12
Lest we be swept away by romanticism, the tragic flaw in this con-
ception of the public should be noted, a flaw that had something to do
with the decline of the public sphere—at least in concept. It was a pub-
lic effectively restricted by race, class, and gender; that is, the public con-
sisted of middle-class men who had an interest and stake in public af-
fairs, commerce, business, or trade. Later, when public space began to
fill with workers and artisans of another class, these merchants re-
treated into private space, into the men's clubs that are still a feature of
large cities.13 However, these fatal imperfections do not diminish the
historical importance of the public as it was then defined, or the power
of the concept in illuminating politics.
The public, in this phase, was not a fiction or an abstraction: a
group of people sitting at home watching television or privately and in-
visibly reading a newspaper or numbers collected in a public opinion
poll. The public was a specific social formation: a group of people,
often strangers, gathered in public houses to talk, to read the news to-
gether, to dispute the meaning of events, to join political impulses to
political actions. The public was brought into existence by the condi-
tions of the eighteenth-century city and by the printing press itself. The
public was activated into a social relation by the news and, in turn, the
primary subject of the news was the public: the opinions being ex-
pressed in public by merchants, traders, citizens, and political activists
of the time. The emphasis on the public as a society of strangers does
not imply that those who gathered to discuss the news were in fact
strangers but that the discussion occurred in an open context, in a place
that was open to strangers and whose presence had to be taken into
account.
In our time, the public is pretty much an abstraction, a term of ex-
hortation and reflection. "The public's right to know" is the worn and
unintelligible slogan of modern journalism. That press justifies itself in
the name of the public; it exists to inform the public, to serve as the ex-
tended eyes and ears of the public. The press protects the public's inter-
est and justifies itself in its name. The power of the term public comes
from the fact that while the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are
silent on the matter, it is the deepest and most fundamental concept of
the entire liberal tradition. Liberal society is formed around the notion
of a virtuous public. For John Locke, to be a member of the public was
to accept a calling.
But the historical public is of a rather more humble origin. The
public is a group of strangers that gathers to discuss the news as well as
a mode of discourse among them. For the public to form, urban life
had to develop sufficiently for strangers to be regularly thrown into
contact with one another and there had to be newspapers and pam-
phlets to provide a common focus of discussion and conversation. The
public, then, was a society of conversationalists, or disputants if you
prefer a more aggressive term, dependent upon printing.
For the public to gather, however, there had to be a public space,
places where strangers could gather to discuss the news and where
there were expectations, however imperfectly realized, that everyone
would take part in rational, critical discourse. Public space, in turn, de-
pended on public habits, manners, and talents: the ability to welcome
strangers, to avoid intimacy, to wear a public mask, to shun the per-
sonal, to clamp some control on affect, and in general to achieve some
psychological distance from the self. Thus, the public was taken to be
critical and rational: critical in the ordinary sense that nothing in pub-
lic was to be taken for granted, that everything was subject to argu-
ment and evidence; and rational, again in the ordinary sense, in that the
speaker was responsible for giving reasons for believing in any asser-
tion—there was no intrinsic appeal to authority. Critical and rational
are terms that in our day have gone transcendental, to be debated as
abstract and essential qualities, present or absent in the self. However,
the terms must refer to ordinary human practices: a willingness to an-
swer questions, to be forthright, to disclose hidden motives, and to
avoid dragging in notions like God or Science to save an argument
when it begins to go badly.
Looked at from another angle, the public was more than a group
of people or a mode of discourse; it was a location, a sphere, a sector of
society. The public sphere was a seat of political power. Power, then,
was not exclusively located in the state or its representatives nor in the
private sector—the household and company. Power was located as well
in the world between the state and the private sector: in the public and
in public discourse. And it was only in this sphere that power could
wear the face of rationality, for it was the only sphere in which private
interest might, even in principle, be transcended.14
For our purposes, the critical factor was that the press, journal-
ism—its freedom and utility—was not an end in itself, but was justified
in terms of its ability to serve and bring into existence an actual social
arrangement, a form of discourse, and a sphere of independent ratio-
nal, political influence: to provide one mode in which public opinion
might form and express itself. The press did not so much inform the
public or educate the public or serve as a vehicle of publicity or as a
watchdog on the state—the roles it would assume in a later period.
Rather, it reflected and animated public conversation and argument,
furnished material to be discussed, clarified, and interpreted, informa-
tion in the narrow sense, but the value of the press was predicated on
the existence of the public and not the reverse. Freedom of the press
was an individual right, to be sure, but the right was predicated on the
unspoken premise of the existence of the public.
Today, we generally read the First Amendment as a loose collection
of clauses: religion, assembly, speech, and press. Read against the back-
ground of public life, however, the First Amendment is not a loose col-
lection of separate clauses, but a compact description of a desirable po-
litical society. In other words, the amendment is not a casual array of
clauses or high-minded principles, and it does not deed freedom of the
press as a property right to journalists or any particular group.15 On
this reading, the First Amendment describes the public and the ground
conditions of public debate rather than merely enumerating rights pos-
sessed by groups. It was only in the modern period that we developed
the notion that the First Amendment protected rights and that the doc-
trine of rights could be used as a trump card to depress debate. Under
my reading, the First Amendment was an attempt to define the nature
of public life as it existed at the time or as the Founders hoped it would
exist. To put it in an artlessly simple way, the First Amendment says
that people are free to gather together, to have public spaces, free of the
intrusion of the state or its representatives. Once gathered they are free
to speak to one another, to carry on public discourse, freely and openly.
They are further free to write down what they have to say and to share
it beyond the immediate place of utterance. The religion clause, which
might seem to be a rather odd inclusion, is at the heart of the interpre-
tation. Religion was the fundamental social divide and division of the
eighteenth century. In a society that still spoke a religious language in
public and private, heresy was the major sin, as is clear from, for ex-
ample, Milton's Areopagitica and, therefore, was the major reason for
exclusion from the public realm and excommunication from public

life. The religion clause merely says that people may not be excluded
from public space and discussion even on the basis of religion. Today
religion is less problematic and the vexing exclusions are based on race,
property, and gender. It was the religion clause, however, that estab-
lished the dynamic for further dismantling the boundaries and exclu-
sions of public life. Despite our contemporary disengagement from
public life, the public remains the implicit term of the First Amendment
and the "God term" of liberal society and the press alike: the term
without which neither the press nor democracy makes any sense. This
originalist conception of a public, a conversational public, a public of
discussion and disputation independent of both the press and the state
has pretty much been evacuated in our time. It has a philosophical ex-
istence and, because with us law feeds on the corpse of philosophy, it
continues in the language of Supreme Court cases such as Whitney v.
California, or Red Lion, for example.
Public life stands for a form of politics in which, in Jefferson's
phrase, "We could all be participants in the government of our affairs."
Political equality, in its most primitive mode (and here I am borrowing
and twisting some lines from Bruce Smith), simply meant the right to
be seen and heard—to have a public life. When the life of a people is
dominated by a few public figures, political celebrities, the rest of us,
denied the opportunity to be seen or heard, abandon the possibility of
public joy and satisfy ourselves with private pleasures. Only when we
can speak and act as citizens—and have some promise that others will
see, hear, and remember what we say—will an interest in public life
grow and persist. Therefore, the object of our politics remains the cre-
ation and restoration of what Tocqueville called the "little republics
within the frame of the larger republic." This is an imperative task if
we are to aggregate an authentic public opinion and sustain political
discourse. Without it all "political objects must remain indefinite" and
transient and "political action short-lived" and ineffective.16
The Modern Era of Journalism

The transition from the original understanding of the press and politics
to journalism in the modern era was long and twisted. Throughout the
nineteenth century, the public sphere split into regional and class-based
warring factions organized around political parties and a partisan press.
Journalism became an organ of such parties or, however independent,

ideologically aligned with political parties. Journalism expressed and
reflected a bifurcated public sphere as individuals joined in politics
through party and press. Participation still occurred through party and
press and through the demonstrations and street parades and street life
that were expressions of both. As the franchise was extended, legal par-
ticipation rose to unprecedented and unrepeated levels. Voter turnout
averaged 77 percent in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
Popular politics, as Michael McGerr puts it, "involved more than
suffrage rights and record turnouts."17 Elections required visible sup-
port mobilized through popular journalism and political parties. Thus,
the transformation to a separation between politics and the public had
begun.
The modern era of journalism stretches from the 18905 to the
19705. It begins with the birth of the national magazine, the develop-
ment of the mass urban newspaper, the domination of news dissemina-
tion by the wire services, and the creation of early, primitive forms of
electronic communication. It culminates in the network era of televi-
sion when the entire nation could be assembled by three commercial
networks, and on certain high holy days of politics—the Kennedy as-
sassination, the quadrennial political conventions—the nation was so
assembled.18 The nation sat down to be counted as citizens of a conti-
nental, twenty-four-hour-a-day republic.
In the United States, truly national media and a national audience
displaced from a local public did not emerge until the 18905 with the
creation of national magazines and a national network of newspapers
interconnected via the wire services. Such media were eventually sup-
plemented by radio and by motion pictures produced in Hollywood
and distributed nationally in the 192.05. The rise of national or mass
media, first via print and then the airwaves, created "the great audi-
ence": a new collectivity in which we were destined to live out a major
part of our lives. These media cut across the structural divisions in so-
ciety, drawing their audience irrespective of race, ethnicity, occupation,
region, or social class. This was the first national audience and the first
mass audience and, in principle, it was open to all. Modern communi-
cations media allowed individuals to be linked, for the first time, di-
rectly to the "imaginary community of the nation"19 (at least for na-
tions as large as the United States) without the mediating influence of
regional and other local affiliations. Such national media laid the basis
for a mass society, understood in its most technical and least ideologi-
cal sense: the development of a form of social organization in which in-
termediate associations of community, occupation, and class did not
inhibit direct linkage of the individual and primary groups to the state
and other nationwide organizations through mass communications.
The rise of national media represented a centripetal force in social
organization. Such media greatly enhanced the control of space by sig-
nificantly reducing time (the gap between when a message is sent and
when it is received as a function of distance) in communication, by lay-
ing down direct lines of access between national centers and dispersed
audiences, and by producing a remarkable potential for the centraliza-
tion of power and authority.
The period from the 18905 onward saw the creation of a variety of
social and cultural movements that were reactions against and im-
pulses toward the formation of a national society through a national
system of communication, attempts to master, tame, and direct the cur-
rents of social change. A new class structure organized around a newly
dominant class—the plutocrats—a structure Henry Adams lamented
and Charles Beard described, was also created. These movements—
some modern, some antimodern, some even postmodern—expressed a
restless search for new identities and for new forms of social and cul-
tural life. Taken together, these movements offered new ways of being
for a new type of society. These were movements organized by the new
media, defined by media, commented upon by media, formed within
media, or at least as a response to new conditions of social life brought
about in part by new media.
Our images of democracy and the press, to summarize, were
formed within the structure and ideology of community life. As late as
the turn of the century, democracy was seen as confined to small geo-
graphic areas and small populations. The New England town meeting
was the icon of democracy, and the newspaper and journalist gave life,
meaning, and dignity to the local community—to the classical form of
the public. This image of the pub, the publican, and the publisher all
rolled into one, presiding over the meetinghouse where the public gath-
ered to discuss the news, representing in his person the public interest,
and publishing a public newspaper that summarized and reprinted
public opinion—what people were saying in public—this was the clas-
sic conception of democracy and the press, derived from ancient politi-
cal life and realized in the local and decentralized life of the republic in
its first century. This bucolic image of democracy and the press was
overwhelmed by the forces of industry and geographic expansion, and,
consequently, there arose a need in this century to form both a new
conception of democratic action and a new conception of the press
within democracy. Both were born within the most important social
movement of the turn of the century, at least from the standpoint of
journalism, the progressive movement, which both redefined the past
and projected a new democratic future.
The progressive movement contained three separable but closely
connected moments. First, it was an attack upon the plutocracy, upon
concentrated economic power, and upon the national social class that
increasingly had a stranglehold over wealth and industry. The eco-
nomic dimension of the movement, however, also included the struggle
by middle-class professionals—doctors, lawyers, journalists, social
workers—to become a national class, to find a place in the national oc-
cupational structure and the national system of class influence and
power. The national class of progressive professionals was, in many
ways, merely a less powerful imitation, the shadow movement, of the
national class of plutocrats, the new titans who ran and controlled in-
dustrial America.
Journalists were central to this new progressive class of profession-
als. They formed themselves into national groups and lobbied to pro-
fessionalize their standing through higher education. They sponsored
histories of their profession and a new reading of the First Amendment
along with ethical codes of conduct to justify their newfound status in
the new middle-class professional world. They tried to figure out new
ways of reporting on and commenting about this new world—a new
professional ideology, in other words—that justified their place in the
new order of things.
Progressivism was also a movement of political reform at the na-
tional level and, even more, an attempt to reclaim the cities from the
political bosses and the urban machines. In many cases this was an at-
tempt to uproot the political influence of ethnic working-class groups
who had earlier seized city politics from local commercial and cultural
elites. Progressivism was devoted to "good government" (read: honest,
middle-class government) and created the chain of Better Government
Associations that one still finds in major American cities. Progressivism
was for merit and against patronage, for science and against tradition,
for middle-class politics and against working-class privilege.
Journalists were usually allies of the movement for better govern-

ment. That is, they were committed to certain middle-class ideals of
honesty and uprightness. They warred against the machines if only be-
cause the machines did not need the press to govern; they did quite well
with patronage and ward organization whereas reform movements
were dependent upon the publicity only the press could give and thus
assiduously courted and flattered the new journalists. But journalists
were aligned with the reform and progressive movements by ideology
and conviction, in certain beliefs about modernity and the role of the
press in a movement that was at once economic, political, and cultural.
Progressivism, in another guise, was a cultural movement that
sought to define new styles of life, patterns of child rearing, modes of
family life, taste in art, architecture, urban planning, and personal con-
duct. Progressive education, progressive child rearing, progressive art,
progressive science, and progressive taste were as important in this
movement as progressive economics and politics. Progressivism in cul-
ture became, in general, part of the outlook of the new journalists who
took up residence in the new national media that formed the discourse
of the nation.
The three wings of progressivism were joined to one common de-
sire: a desire to escape the merely local and contingent, an enthusiasm
for everything that was distant and remote, a love of the national over
the provincial. The national media of communication, particularly
magazines and books but also newspaper journalists who found them-
selves pursuing a career that took them from city to city and paper to
paper, assignment to assignment, were the arena where the progressive
program was set out and the place where the struggle for its legitima-
tion occurred.
The initial impact of the progressive movement on journalism was
the rise of "muckraking," which in its initial stages directed its attack
against the "plutocracy" and the business class. Muckraking arose
within magazines rather than newspapers, for these new national media
had no affiliation with politics, let alone with a given political party.
While they owed, as Michael McGerr has pointed out, something to
the crusading tactics of newspapers, muckraking magazines, like sensa-
tional newspapers, did not dwell long on any topic.20 They were hit-
and-run artists who could expose corruption in an institution and spur
the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act, but they did not have the
persistence to constitute a tradition of journalism or to sustain a con-
tinuous politics. What muckraking did do was to further a tradition of

journalism that took as its task the unmasking of power: to serve as a
watchdog not only of the state but of the full range of interest groups.
For much of the nineteenth century political parties served as the prin-
cipal means of influencing the distribution of economic resources and
government privileges. When interest groups and pressure groups de-
veloped late in the century as a new vehicle for affecting governments
increasingly involved in regulation of the economy, voting for party
candidates in elections became less important. Muckraking gave rise to
propaganda analysis: the unmasking of attempts by groups to control
and manipulate the press. Both muckraking and propaganda analysis
were attempts to unmask the power, privilege, and special interests that
stood behind the presumed general beneficence of both private and
public institutions. This was an American version of what became
known in Europe as Ideologiekritik. Muckraking, however, was
framed within the language of American democracy; muckrakers first
of all took themselves to be representative of the people—protectors of
the people's interests and not an independent intellectual class; second,
their style was straightforward, descriptive, and aimed at provoking
public action rather than theoretical reflection; third, while they aimed
their efforts at unmasking the power of the business class, economic in-
stitutions, and business ideology, they examined concentrated power
and propaganda in all its forms: labor unions as well as manufacturers'
associations, universities as well as businesses. A paradigmatic figure in
all this was Upton Sinclair, who in three significant volumes exposed
the power and privilege, the corruption of the meatpacking industry in
The Jungle, of higher education in The Goose Step, and of the press it-
self in The Brass Check.
Muckraking demonstrated and turned into an operative principle
for the press that democracy was no longer competition between polit-
ical parties bearing explicit programs and ideologies but competition
between interest and pressure groups who used the state political par-
ties, the press—indeed, any apparatus available—to control the distri-
bution of economic rewards and social privilege. By definition interest
groups operate in the private sector, behind the scenes, and their rela-
tion to public life is essentially propagandistic and manipulative. When
interest groups arrive on the scene, the public ceases to have a real ex-
istence. Moreover, the struggle among interest groups turns language
into "public relations"; that is, an instrument in a struggle for advan-
tage rather than a vehicle of the truth. All appearances become unreli-
able, all language suspect, all appeals to the public interest a sham move
in the struggle for private advantage.
It was in this situation that the traditions of modern journalism
and the particular conceptions of the media and democracy formed
themselves in mutual relief. The press, in effect, broke away from poli-
tics. It established itself, at least in principle, as independent of all insti-
tutions, independent of the state, independent of political parties, inde-
pendent of interest groups. It became the independent voter writ large;
its only loyalty was to an abstract truth and an abstract public interest.
This is the origin of objectivity in journalism, as Michael Schudson has
shown.21 Objectivity was a defensive measure, an attempt to secure by
quasi-scientific means a method for recording the world independent of
the political and social forces that were shaping it. In this rendition, a
democratic press was the representative of the people, of people no
longer represented by political parties and the state itself. It was the
eyes and ears of a public that could not see and hear for itself, or indeed
talk to itself. It went where the public could not go, acquired informa-
tion that the public could not amass on its own, tore away the veil of
appearances that masked the play of power and privilege, set on a
brightly lit stage what would otherwise be contained offstage, in the
wings, where the real drama of social life was going on unobserved.
The press seized hold of the First Amendment and exercised it in the
name of a public that could no longer exercise it itself. The press be-
came an independent profession and a collective institution: a true
fourth estate that watched over the other lords of the realm in the name
of those unequipped or unable to watch over it for themselves. The
press no longer facilitated or animated a public conversation, for pub-
lic conversation had disappeared. It informed a passive and privatized
group of citizens who participated in politics through the press. What
conversation remained was orchestrated by the press in the name of a
superior knowledge and superior instruments of inquiry into just what
was going on.
But, paradoxically enough, this new role of representative of the pub-
lic was contained within a sentiment that was increasingly antipopulist
and antipublic. A principal architect of these sentiments was the major
American journalist of this century, Walter Lippmann. Lippmann's
Public Opinion is the founding book of modern American journalism.
But journalism plays a modest role in Lippmann's world, a world
ruled by interests and regulated by science in which the public faded to

a spectator. It was not the task of journalism to tell the truth, for jour-
nalism had nothing to do with the truth. News was a blip on the social
radar, an early-warning system that something was happening. Noth-
ing more. Journalists primarily served as conduits relaying truth arrived
at elsewhere, by the experts—scientists in their laboratories, bureau-
crats in their bureaus. The truth was not a product of the conversation
or debate of the public or the investigations of journalists. Journalists
merely translate the arcane language of experts into a publicly accessi-
ble language for the masses. They transmit the judgments of experts,
and thereby ratify decisions arrived at by that class—not by the public
or public representatives.
But journalists performed, in Lippmann's view, one other vital
function. The chief function of news is publicity. News kept the experts
honest; it kept them from confusing the public interest with the private
interest by exposing them to the hot light of publicity. Lippmann had
more faith in publicity than in the news or in an informed public. "The
great healing effect of publicity is that by revealing man's nature, it civ-
ilizes him. If people have to declare publicly what they want and why
they want it, they won't be able to be altogether ruthless. A special in-
terest openly avowed is no terror to democracy; it is neutralized by
publicity."22
The central weakness of the tradition of independent journalism,
the kind of journalism espoused by Lippmann and practiced in the
craft, is this: while it legitimized a democratic politics of publicity and
experts, it also confirmed the psychological incompetence of people to
participate in it. Again, it evolved a political system of democracy with-
out citizens.23 While preserving a valuable role for the mass media, it
evacuated the role of political parties and citizens. Political parties,
weakened by independent journalism, were decimated by television,
which reduced parties to devices for raising money for television adver-
tising and turned politics toward the cult of personality without party.
Citizens, denied a public arena, became either consumers of politics or
escapists from it.
In other words, the dissolution of the public theoretically was but
a prelude to dissolving it practically. In the spot occupied in democratic
theory by the public, Lippmann and others inserted interest groups and
the cadres of experts in their employ. This reduced the public to a phan-
tom and created the situation in which citizens are the objects rather
than the subjects of politics.24 It turned the First Amendment into a

possession of the press and of interest groups with whom the press en-
gaged in both combat and accommodation. Toward that combat citi-
zens stood largely as spectators and ratifiers. In truth, the conversation
of the culture was taken outside the public realm and into private
spaces. It became increasingly a scientistic journalism devoted to the
sanctity of the fact and objectivity, but one in which the hot light of
publicity invaded every domain of privacy. We developed a journalism
that was an early-warning system but one that kept the public in a con-
stant state of agitation or boredom. It is a journalism that reports a
continuing stream of expert opinion, but because there is no agreement
among experts it is more like observing talk-show gossip and petty ma-
nipulation than like bearing witness to the truth. It is a journalism of
fact without regard to understanding through which the public is im-
mobilized and demobilized and merely ratifies the judgments of experts
delivered from on high. It is, above all, a journalism that justifies itself
in the public's name but in which the public plays no role, except as an
audience; it is a receptacle to be informed by experts and an excuse for
the practice of publicity. The issue could no longer be one of the First
Amendment protecting public debate, for there was no longer any pub-
lic debate to protect. For example, public opinion no longer refers to
opinions being expressed in public and then recorded in the press. Pub-
lic opinion is formed by the press and modeled by the public opinion
industry and the apparatus of polling. Today, to get ahead of the story,
polling (the word, interestingly enough, from the old synonym for vot-
ing) is an attempt to simulate public opinion in order to prevent an
authentic public opinion from forming. With the rise of the polling in-
dustry our entire understanding of the public went into eclipse. The
public was replaced by the interest group as the object of analysis and
as the key political actor. In interest-group theory, the public ceases to
have a real existence. It fades into a statistical artifact: an audience
whose opinions count only insofar as individuals refract the pressure of
mass publicity. In short, while the word public continues in our lan-
guage as an ancient memory and a pious hope, the public as a feature
and factor of real politics disappears.
The media and democracy increasingly reduced themselves to a
game in which, at its best, sources erected ever more complicated veils
of appearance over events and journalists tried ever more assiduously
to pierce the veil. But the mystery behind the mystery was that there
was no mystery at all. It was a dialectic of appearance and demystifica-

tion that tied the state, interest groups, and the press together in a sym-
biotic relationship against the fragmented remains of the public. Some-
times the press had the upper hand in the dialectical struggle; at other
times, interest groups dominated and the press did little more than
serve as their extension. As Robert Entman has described it, the game
was played because each side had something the other needed. Interest
groups and sources had newsworthy political information that had
been subsidized to ease its collection and presentation, the indispens-
able raw material needed to construct the news. Journalists could "pro-
vide publicity slanted favorably or unfavorably." Elites sought to "ex-
change a minimal amount of potentially damaging information for
as much positively slanted coverage" as could be obtained. Journalists
sought to "extract information for stories" that would bring "acclaim
or acceptance from editors and colleagues."25 Elites and journalists, in
other words, mutually manipulated one another to mutually shared
ends. The public stood toward this game as an increasingly bored and
alienated and, above all, cynical spectator, learning to distrust appear-
ances mounted by both elites and journalists and, most damagingly, to
distrust all language, to look at language as a mere instrument of inter-
est and obfuscation. In this context, journalism could no longer link
political impulses with political action; it could produce publicity, scan-
dal, and drama, but it could not produce politics.
Today, Americans have lost interest in politics. Indeed, the title of
E. J. Dionne Jr.'s book Why Americans Hate Politics expresses a more
active alienation from public life than is revealed merely by the pro-
gressively lower voter turnouts that have marked the entire modern pe-
riod. The absence of participation is evidenced too by active disengage-
ment from political parties—the rise of the independent voter, and
more often the independent nonvoter—and by declining political
knowledge. There is active opposition to public life and an absence of
public spirit in favor of a private and apolitical existence.
The best evidence for this was the long-term decline in political par-
ticipation as measured by voting and shadowed by knowledge of and
interest in politics. Political participation declined throughout the pe-
riod of national journalism with temporary blips and recoveries in cer-
tain periods such as the Depression and World War II. But the trend has
been clear and no attempts to reverse it bureaucratically—extension of
the franchise, easing voter registration restrictions, democratizing the
candidate selection process through primaries—has reversed it.26 The

decline has been even sharper than revealed by the conventional mea-
sures of voting in presidential elections. Those measures ignore the even
more precipitous declines in primary, local, and off-year congressional
elections. The steepness of the decline also has been masked in recent
times by the greater participation of African-Americans, particularly in
the South, as practices that artificially restricted voting among racial mi-
norities have been removed.
Above all, the press lost credibility and respect; it was no longer be-
lieved. As poll after poll showed, journalists had earned the distrust of
the public and were increasingly seen as a hindrance to, rather than an
avenue of, politics and political reform. The watchdog press, the ad-
versary press was exposed to greater skepticism during the period of its
greatest success, namely, during the Vietnam War and the Watergate af-
fair. While the press dismissed the rising tide of criticism during these
episodes as merely reactionary politics, the problem went deeper. In the
public's eyes, the press had become the adversary of all institutions, in-
cluding the public itself. "My newspaper" of older usage became "the
newspaper"; it had severed its contact and allegiance with the public.
As the press sought greater constitutional power for itself and greater
independence from the state, as it sought to remove all restrictions on
its activities and its newsgathering rights, it was forced to press the
legal case that it was a special institution with special rights—rights
that were independent of the rights of free speech and rights that were
different from, and often opposed to, the rights of ordinary men and
women. In a series of court cases in the 19605, the press sought special
privileges and powers and developed a view of the First Amendment
that would secure them. Justice Potter Stewart developed a constitu-
tional theory justifying an adversary and watchdog press:
The primary purpose of the constitutional guarantee of a free press
was . . . to create a fourth institution outside the government as
an additional check on the three official branches. . . . The relevant
metaphor is of the Fourth Estate.
The Free Press guarantee is, in essence, a structural provision of
the Constitution. Most of the other provisions in the Bill of Rights
protect specific liberties or specific rights of individuals. . . . In con-
trast, the Free Press Clause extends protection to an institution.27
Ultimately this view creates a passive role for the public in the the-
ater of politics. The public is an observer of the press rather than "par-
ticipators in the government of our affairs" and the dialogue of democ-

racy. The role of the citizen is not to participate in the formation of pol-
itics but to become a member of a veto group restraining decisions once
they pass a certain boundary. The vision of active and continuous citi-
zen involvement fails to describe not only the reality of American poli-
tics but even the end or object or desirable state of its politics. It is the
media that must be protected rather than citizens' ability to participate
in politics. The individual citizen was seen as remote and helpless com-
pared to the two major protagonists—government and the media.
The fourth estate view supported the press in its news-gathering
cases. It focused on the activities of journalists rather than the activities
of the public. In this view, journalists would serve as agents of the pub-
lic in checking an inherently abusive government. To empower it to
fulfill such a role, the press had to possess special rights to gather
news. Thus, under the fourth-estate model a free press essentially was
equated with a powerful press possessing special privileges of news
gathering.28
The view of the press as the representative of the public could only
be sustained if the following conditions were met: the public had to be-
lieve that the press was authentically its representative and therefore in
a responsible and fiduciary relation to it; the public had to believe that
the press was not in cahoots with the state, with the most powerful of
interest groups, or both; and the public had to believe that the press
was capable of representing the world, that is, of rendering a reason-
ably unbiased, true, and factual account of it. In all these senses of rep-
resent the press has been found wanting.
It is time to betray this argument, however, for despite the heavy
weather one can bring to bear on modern journalism, the truth is also
that the press has been a bulwark of liberty in our time and no one has
come up with a better arrangement. The watchdog notion of the press,
a press independent of all institutions, a press that represents the pub-
lic, a press that unmasks interest and privilege, a press that shines the
hot glare of publicity into all the dark corners of the republic, a press
that searches out expert knowledge among the welter of opinion, a
press that seeks to inform the private citizen, these are ideas and roles
that have served us well through some dark times. Not perfectly, not
without fault, but well—and they have formed the accepted notions of
democracy and the press in our time. But, as the century has pro-
gressed, the weaknesses of modern journalism have become increas-
ingly apparent and debilitating. The press, in the eyes of many, increas-
ingly got in the way of democratic politics rather than serving as a sup-
porting institution. As a result, modern journalism is now under assault
by technology, by the distemper of the times, and by social changes the
modern press has been unable to master.
Journalism Encounters the Postmodern

I opened this essay with an image of dismay brought on by the cam-
paigns of 1988 and I99Z. In that period we started to feel the force of
something that had been under way for close to two decades. Sometime
in the early to mid 19705, to choose an almost arbitrary time, the entire
pattern of communication, the existing structure of the media, of mod-
ern journalism and the press, started to break up. The causes were tech-
nological and economic, and only later were they processed through
politics and transformed to an ideology. The symptoms and symbols of
the change were two technologies, satellites and computers, the conse-
quences of which, in combination with other devices, reconfigured the
map of communications and social relations. Satellite broadcasting put
everyone in the same place for purposes of communication—or, in-
versely, eliminated distance as a cost factor in communication. Com-
puter technology not only altered all the parameters of numerical cal-
culation, but through miniaturization also widely diffused large-scale
capacity for information processing, storage, and retrieval.
While computer and satellite have enlarged the scale and scope of
communications, they have also, and paradoxically, narrowed and lim-
ited it. Cable television, a product of satellite and computer, has radi-
cally expanded channel capacity, the variety of television services avail-
able, and the capacity to segment the television audience. Cable is
practically as old as television, for it was the last mile of the network
system relaying over the air signals to remote hamlets where topogra-
phy created signal disturbance. Wedded to satellites, cable now pene-
trates to 60 percent of American homes, and multichannel systems
fragment the audience into narrow niches based upon taste, hobbies,
avocations, race, ethnicity—indeed, a potentially limitless world of
work and leisure. Even politics is turned into a hobby. When cable is
combined with other innovations, some actual, some still potential—
the growth of superstations, direct satellite broadcasting, interactive
teletext and videotext, VCRs—two consequences follow. The "great
audience," the audience assembled by newspapers and television, is

splintered and dissolved, and newspapers and network television, which
reached their peak of profitability and influence in the 19708, recede as
both economic and political forces.
The consequences of technology are never clear until they are
processed through politics. And the consequences of satellites, comput-
ers, and cable television did not emerge until, to take but two exam-
ples, they were wedded to the ideology and policies of the Reagan and
Thatcher administrations in the United States and Great Britain. The
general name for these policies is privatization: deregulation of broad-
casting, cultivation of high tech industry, and fostering renewed com-
petition in telecommunications. In the United States, restrictions on
cable were removed, network broadcasting was hamstrung, the public
interest and fairness doctrines were dismantled, the Bell System was
broken up, and private competition in telecommunications was en-
couraged. The notion that there was a public interest in broadcasting
or in the press generally was simply set aside. Private competition was
deemed adequate because in the absence of a viable notion of a public,
a public interest was simply inconceivable within the ideological frame-
works that ruled politics. Since 1934 American broadcasting had lived
under the fairness doctrine, which attempted to make a public interest
articulate by requiring broadcasters to examine issues of public impor-
tance and to reflect all sides of political issues. In effect, the fairness
doctrine was an attempt to create a public space within an essentially
commercialized system of broadcasting. The doctrine led to the cre-
ation of first-class journalism organizations within television networks
that were ruled, even more than newspapers, by heavy capital require-
ments and commercial imperatives toward entertainment and profit. In
1986 the Federal Communications Commission threw out the fairness
doctrine and with it the entire notion of broadcasting as a public space.
As Mark Fowler, the FCC chairman under Reagan, put it, "Television
is just another household appliance, a toaster with a picture."29
This view is now beyond controversy; it has bipartisan support,
which is to say all resistance has collapsed to the notion that communi-
cation is exclusively a private activity. The only dispute concerns which
private industry will gain the largesse of government support: cable or
broadcasting, Hollywood producers, or the telephone companies. Pub-
lic broadcasting comes under increasing attack by those who say that it
is politically biased and, even more, that it is inefficient and unneces-
sary given the imperatives of the market. As a result, proposals to ei-

ther sell it off to private interests or merge it with Radio Free Europe
and the USIA into a propaganda superagency are seriously entertained.
In Europe public broadcasting systems are turned into private
commercial enterprises or subjected to new competitive pressure from
the private sector. Country after country has either given up state-run
television or permitted the growth of private networks. In short, we
have neither a public sphere within politics nor a public sphere within
broadcasting.
With the progressive weakening of public broadcasting around the
world, communications is seen more uniformly as a matter of private-
market transactions. In turn, as the costs of television increase, as state
systems are faced with declining revenues, as global communications
companies such as Time Warner straddle the globe, the phenomenon of
coproduction takes on a new importance. News and culture are in-
creasingly made by joint operations that cut across national and lin-
guistic boundaries. That is, the production of culture, including most
importantly the news, becomes disarticulated from existing national
societies and polities. Pastiche cultures, postmodern cultures assembled
by a cross-national production process, turn the world into an audi-
ence for homeless communications.
These economic changes were congruent with developments on a
much wider plane. In the 19705 governments all over the industrialized
world were becoming more conservative. The first leap of oil prices in
the middle 19705 meant that inflation was becoming the great enemy
of stability, and anti-inflationary strategy dominated the thinking of all
governments. This led to monetary control and the first attempts to ex-
pand high tech, telecommunications industries. Even such socialist
governments as were elected—in France, Australia, and New Zealand,
for example—adopted highly conservative economic policies and en-
couraged the further privatization of journalism and communications.
That was the Zeitgeist. The movement toward privatization, which is
global in scope, encompasses the deregulation of telecommunications
and the constriction of public space, the elimination or decline of pub-
lic or state-run broadcasting, the simultaneous fragmentation of audi-
ences into narrower and narrower segments, and their reassembly into
transnational markets for news and entertainment and the creation of
pastiche cultures that originate without regard to national traditions.
The connection of a fragmented structure of production to a frag-
mented structure of home reception results in a further diremption of

the public sphere: the entire notion of public communication and a
common culture of politics evaporates in the "new Balkans" where
groups and individuals occupy political space outside a common arena
of discourse and communication. The notion of citizens of a common
polity who participate in a common political tradition becomes in-
creasingly difficult to imagine. The release of market forces in telecom-
munications that affected everything, including books, newspapers,
and magazines, was fueled not only by purely economic considerations
but by the firmly entrenched belief that there was no longer a public in-
terest or a public sphere. All that was left were acquisitive individuals
and their interests. The very starkness of this notion and its consequent
inability to create a sense of community constituted not a safeguard but
a threat to political freedom.
These complex and interrelated changes in the world of journalism
and democracy emerged in the new technology of politics in the 1992
election. Many of the most troubling phenomena—citizens councils,
call-in radio, public debates with public questioners, spontaneous grass-
roots nominating movements—represented attempts, however danger-
ous, by a fragmented and dispersed public, one that had not completely
lost and forgotten the image of a truly public life, to use the new tech-
nology and new media, designed purely for commercial purposes, to
re-form themselves, outside the journalistic establishment, as a public
and to reassert both a public interest and public participation in the
sphere of national politics.
This movement does not, at the moment, have much theoretical
support because of the commitment of all segments of the political
spectrum to an ideology of rights-based liberalism. That position be-
gins from the claim, and here I am paraphrasing Michael Sandel, that
we are separate, individual persons, each with his or her own aims, in-
terests, and conceptions of the good, each seeking a framework of
rights that will enable us to realize our capacity as free moral agents,
consistent with a similar liberty for others.30 Alas, to challenge this
view one must question the claim of the priority of the right over the
good and the picture of freely choosing individuals it embodies and the
Hobbesian state it must inevitably create.
As Sandel puts it, "the priority of the self over its ends means I am
never defined by my aims and attachments, but always capable of
standing back to survey and assess and possibly to revise them."31 This
is what it means to be a free and independent self, capable of choice.

And this is the vision of the self that finds expression in the ideal of the
state as a neutral framework. In the rights-based ethic, it is precisely be-
cause we are essentially separate, independent selves that we need a
neutral framework of rights that refuses to choose among competing
purposes and ends. "If the self is prior to its ends, then the right must
be prior to the good."
But what can journalism, the First Amendment, and public opinion
mean under this tyranny? Unless we are willing to entertain the possi-
bility, again to paraphrase Sandel, that we are defined, at least in part,
by communities we inhabit—indeed, that we are the animals that are
forever creating and destroying communities—and that we are impli-
cated in the purposes and ends characteristic of those communities, I
see no possibility of recovering a meaningful notion of public life or of
public opinion. Unless we can see the story of our lives as embedded in
the story of a public community, a community of general citizenship
rather than one restricted by class, race, gender, and so on, while si-
multaneously believing that our lives are also embedded in communi-
ties of private identity—family, city, tribe, nation, party, or cause—can
journalism and public opinion, the press generally, make a moral and
political difference, not merely a psychological one. Only then can
journalism and public opinion situate us in the world and give our lives
moral particularity.
I would hope that we have learned by now, after twenty years or
more of painful struggle, that the expansion of individual rights and
the concomitant diminishing of common judgment is hardly the recipe
for social progress it is held out to be. Its major effect is the displace-
ment of politics from smaller forms of association to more comprehen-
sive ones, and in these latter forms political participation is inevitably
reduced even as it seems to expand. Where some kinds of liberals de-
fend the private economy and some kinds defend the liberal state, both
economic and social liberalism concentrate power in the corporate
economy and the bureaucratic state and lead to the erosion of those in-
termediate forms of association that have at times sustained "a more
vital public life."32
It is often argued these days that the needs of diversity eliminate
the possibility or desirability of a politics of the common good. This is
the argument for diversity made by those who are already deracinated
and who wish nothing more than to deracinate others. The plea for di-
256 I The Press, Public Opinion, and Public Discourse
versity is simply a plea for sameness or a plea for those identities in-
vented by and confirmed in the state. The sad lesson of this century is
that minorities who thereby seek protection through the state will be
extinguished or turned into instruments of state power without an in-
dependent cultural life. This, not some senseless nostalgia, is why we
need to recover public life.
Notes
1. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hier-
archy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).
2. Jay Rosen, "Politics, Vision and the Press," The New News v. The Old News,
ed. Jay Rosen and P. Taylor (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1992.).
3. Joan Didion, "Insider Baseball," in After Henry (New York: Vintage Interna-
tional, 1992), 49-50.
4. Ibid., 51.
5. David Broder, "Democracy and the Press," Washington Post, Jan. 3,1990, Ai5.
6. Jon Katz, "Rock, Rap and the Movies Bring You the News," Rolling Stone,
March 5, 1992..
7. Didion, "Insider Baseball," 50.
8. Edwin F. Bayley, Joe McCarthy and the Press (Madison: University of Wiscon-
sin Press, 1981).
9. George E. Marcus and Russell L. Hanson, Reconsidering the Democratic Public
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993).
10. Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
11. Alvin Gouldner, The Dialectics of Ideology and Technology (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1976).
12. Sam Bass Warner, Private City: Philadelphia in Three Stages of Its Growth
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968).
13. Gouldner, Dialectics of Ideology and Technology, and Jiirgen Habermas, The
Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989).
14. Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, and The Phantom
Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
15. See the essay "A Republic, If You Can Keep It" in this volume and James W.
Carey, "Liberty and Public Life in the Age of Glasnost," in Crucible of Liberty: 200 Years
of the Bill of Rights, ed. Raymond Arsenaut (New York: Free Press, 1992).
16. Bruce Smith, Politics and Remembrance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1985).
17. Michael McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1986).
18. Daniel Dyan and Elihu Katz, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.).
Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983).
20. McGerr, Decline of Popular Politics.
21. Michael Schudson, Discovering the News (New York: Basic Books, 1978).
22. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Free Press, 1922 [1965]).
23. Robert Entman, Democracy without Citizens (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1989).
24. Benjamin Ginsburg, The Captive Public: How Mass Opinion Promotes State
Power (New York: Basic Books, 1986).
25. Entman, Democracy without Citizens.
26. Congressional Quarterly, Congressional Elections Since 1789, 5th ed. (Washing-
ton, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1991); Richard M. Scammon and Alice McGillivray,
American Voter 18 (Washington, D.C.: Election Research Center, 1989).
27. Potter Stewart, "Or of the Press," Hastings Law Journal ^6 (1975): 633-34.
28. Lee Bellinger, Images of a Free Press (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1991).
29. Les Brown, Les Brown's Encyclopedia of Television, 3d ed. (Detroit: Visible
Ink, 1992.).
30. Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits to Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982.), and Michael Sandel, Liberalism and Its Critics (New York: New
York University Press, 1984).
31. Sandel, Liberalism and Its Critics, 5.
32. Ibid.
PartV
Introduction / James Carey's Academy
G. Stuart Adam
I have followed Jim Carey's work and career since 1975, when I met
him for the first time at the annual convention of the Association for
Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, which was con-
vened in Ottawa that year, and heard him talk insightfully about the
theories of the Canadian economic historian Harold Adams Innis. It
was a surprise and a delight for me, a Canadian, to discover an Ameri-
can scholar studying the work of an individual whom we regard as the
father of Canadian communication studies. In due time, this American
scholar would be regarded as a principal interpreter of Innis's work,
and no one in Canada would think now of exploring Innis's complex
theorizing without consulting Carey's interpretation of it.
In many respects, the studies of Innis and that other Canadian,
Marshall McLuhan, are typical of Carey's approach to learning and
scholarship. In essays of considerable detail and length he has exam-
ined and dissected the ideas of several important theorists in order to
prepare the way for ambitious theorizing of his own. Part of his rep-
utation is based on these dissections, which are penetrating and elo-
quent; part of his reputation is based on his original contributions to
cultural theory; and yet another part of it is based on his role as a prag-
matist and advocate challenging ideas and concepts that in his genera-
tion have dominated the crafts of scholarship and teaching, and the
university itself.
The boundaries between the divisions I am suggesting for classify-
ing his work and making statements about his reputation are by no
261
262 / Introduction to Part V
means fixed. His essays on Innis and McLuhan—"Harold Adams Innis

and Marshall McLuhan" (1967) and "Canadian Communication The-
ory: Extensions and Interpretations of Harold Innis" (1975)—exemplify
what I have in mind when I refer to his analysis of important theorists.
The most illuminating illustration of his utterly original approach to
cultural analysis is to be found in his essay "Technology and Ideology:
The Case of the Telegraph" (1983). It is one of the best examples of in-
tellectual craftsmanship I can think of.
The work on the academy with which we are concerned in this sec-
tion is no less intellectual. Speaking generally, Carey's theorizing is
never disconnected from the world. But its practical face is especially
evident when the university is his subject. The essays in this category
arise for the most part out of disagreements with his professorial col-
leagues and his fellow administrators over how to know, judge, and
make their world. They are theoretical reflections, to be sure, but they
are equally policy statements. For example, "A Cultural Approach to
Communications" (1975) and "A Plea for the University Tradition"
(1978) are exhortations directed at his colleagues to reconsider the
ways in which they view their subjects and their work. "Political Cor-
rectness and Cultural Studies" and "Salvation by Machines: Can Tech-
nology Save Education?" are similarly exhortations to his fellow aca-
demics to measure and assess carefully influential ideas he regards as
unworthy. The details of these latter two essays, the following chapters
in this volume, say a great deal about Jim Carey and his ideas—and his
view of the community in which he has made his home.
In a sense, there are two Jim Careys. One is friendly, charming, elo-
quent, open, polite, agreeable, conversational, and passionate; the other
is no less passionate, but more adversarial and unambiguously com-
mitted to views that are in sharp contrast to the views of those about
him. The second Jim Carey—the adversarial Carey—is more evident in
his formal written work, and "Political Correctness and Cultural Stud-
ies" is a good illustration of this. In it Carey argues that writers on the
right, whose politics he mainly opposes, are partly correct in their var-
ious critiques of cultural studies and the university. He argues at the
same time that writers on the left, whose politics he might be tempted
to embrace, are mainly wrong in the way in which they practice cul-
tural studies and influence university policies.
Similarly, in "Salvation by Machines: Can Technology Save Educa-
Introduction to Part V I 263
tion?" he argues vigorously with two beliefs expressed forcefully by

many of his colleagues. The first is that computer technology will so in-
fluence the structure of work in America that there should be a whole-
sale investment in teaching so-called computer literacy; the second is
that the same technology will open up new possibilities for democratic
life. To him, each belief is nonsense.
His reasoning in both cases commences with the concepts of com-
munity, democracy, and culture—desirably a common culture. Carey
regards any idea that diminishes the commitment to communal life and
the democratic values appropriate to such living with deep suspicion.
This includes, of course, ideas that subordinate the interests of ordi-
nary people to the interests of narrowly defined groups, including uni-
versity professors and computer engineers. Part of the case he makes
against his colleagues in the university rests on the observation that
they have turned themselves into an interest group chasing private and
political opportunities at the expense of public and pedagogical duties.
But more of this later.
The immediate occasion for "Political Correctness and Cultural
Studies" was the publication of a series of texts on the current state of
education in America by critics identified with the right. The themes of
those commentaries vary, but there was and continues to be a consen-
sus of sorts among these critics that postmodern thinkers and their dis-
ciples have used the power they possess over appointments and cur-
riculum to challenge the values and ideals on which America and, more
broadly, the West have functioned.
Prominent among these critics is Roger Kimball, who in the pref-
ace to his book, Tenured Radicals, says that the blame for what he calls
a crisis in the humanities lies with the advocates of race and gender
studies, for whom there is no horizon but a political one, and the "le-
gions of deconstructionists, poststructuralists, and other forbiddingly
named academics"1 who dwell in a variety of departments from En-
glish to media studies. Central to Kimball's case is the observation that
the new breed of academics read and teach the canon of the West's
greatest works of high culture, if they read it at all, as statements from
the stations of power—class, race, or gender—rather than formula-
tions of the ideal. They read it as an element in such systems of domi-
nation as patriarchy and imperialism; and they unmask, they say, struc-
tures in which there are mainly victims and victimizers.
Kimball's objections to such readings are many, but most funda-
mentally he says they can do nothing but blur the mind to the distinc-
tions—between good and not so good, between ordinary and great, be-
tween virtue and evil—that matter. So he is angered by doctrines that
dismiss Plato and Aristotle as dead white males rather than revere them
as sources of magnificent expressions of culture, and he is contemptu-
ous of those who might say that distinctions between Shakespeare's
plays and episodes of Bugs Bunny disguise political interests.
The blurring of such straightforward and fundamental distinctions
and the endless preoccupation with victims and victimizers has pro-
duced a number of collateral effects on campus, including speech
codes, not as devices to promote the civility required to engage in the
search for truth, but as devices to achieve political equality at the ex-
pense of truth. These speech codes have exercised critics and been
largely responsible for publicizing the new theorizing because they
have been used to challenge the use of certain words or the expression
of certain ideas and the use of certain texts on the grounds that they are
sexist, racist, or not politically correct.
By the time Jim Carey wrote his piece on the subject I am confident
he was well briefed on the elements in the debate and ready for Kim-
ball's critique. Furthermore, he might have accepted a good part of this
critique were it not for the fact that Kimball says that cultural studies,
the field Jim Carey takes to be his own, is part of the problem. Kimball
writes:
It must be understood that, whatever legitimate interest the aca-
demic study of popular culture may hold . . . [it] has been pursued
primarily as a means of attacking the traditional academic concen-
tration on objects of high culture. This can be seen in any number of
modish academic movements, but is perhaps most completely exem-
plified by the movement called cultural studies.2
Not so, is Carey's response. He doesn't accept that popular culture
should be set outside the sphere of serious study. (What, after all, is a
democratic culture?) He believes that the ideals and values Kimball and
like-minded writers proclaim are not given but made; and although he
is as anxious about the future of civilization as Kimball is, there is
much about Kimball's elitism that disturbs him.
So Carey rejects Kimball's uncritical attachment to canonical texts,
and he rejects the belief that America and the West are or ought to be
synonymous. Carey does not say the right always proclaims the wrong
ideals or that ideals do not matter. Rather, he says that it is a matter of
judgment on the concrete facts of cultural life to determine that such

ideals as justice, truth, fairness, equal opportunity, and civic duty are
actual forces in law, politics, and civil society. Furthermore, where
Kimball and others might see culture as classical, European, and rela-
tively fixed, Carey sees it as fluid, changing, and desirably democratic
and inclusive. Central to the fluidity, inclusiveness, and democracy that
Carey sees is American civilization, where cultural practices were es-
tablished in communities that were substantially removed from the in-
fluences of European and classical high culture. As he notes, "cultural
studies, as I practice it, [is] quintessentially American." So Kimball gets
it wrong. He misunderstands cultural studies and culture, especially the
democratic elements of culture in America. But the tenured radicals
also get it wrong. If the right defends high culture and thereby defends
the interests of a social class, the left rejects democratic culture and the
democratic purposes of the university.
The defection of the academic left in cultural studies originates in
what Carey views as an unforgivable error. Many of his colleagues,
some of whom no doubt engaged in cultural studies under his influence,
decided along the way that the broad, rich, and community-forming
meanings of culture are less worthy of study than the narrower identi-
ties of race, class, and gender. Carey says correctly that in the lexicons
of the cultural left these categories have "assumed a position as the new
'base' and culture has become a mere epiphenomenal expression of
these elements." The reference to "base" is to the Marxian axiom that
the foundation on which the whole structure of society rests is the
economy and that it in turn gives birth to a system of class and domi-
nation. In the older lexicon, culture is subordinated to ideology, and
ideology camouflages and secures economic interests. In the new lexi-
con of cultural studies, the economy is jettisoned and attention is
mostly given to race and gender and to systems of domination of a very
different order. To make matters worse, the concept of culture is mar-
ginalized or, as he would say, turned into an epiphenomenon. In his
brand of cultural studies, the idea is to demonstrate that culture is a
primary rather than a secondary phenomenon.
So the colleagues on whom he would like to depend for intellectual
support in the university and for political support in the arenas where
politics is appropriate have decided in their formal scholarship and in
the university to work against rather than for the construction of the
public and the democratic order. In his words, they have chosen to
"work within rather than across" what he calls the "fault lines of cul-
ture"—race, class, and gender—and thereby to contribute to the frag-
mentation of society. Additionally, they have turned their backs on or-
dinary men and women by thinking of them as members of a mass
rather than as members of the public or of families and communities.
Finally, they have turned the university into a political battleground—
their battleground—by erasing "the necessary lines between the analy-
sis of culture, the production of culture, and the political contest over
culture." Carey is saying that the study and the production of meaning,
both of which take patience and time and are appropriately the busi-
ness of professors, should be conducted more or less on neutral ground
and more or less in light of the formative public values of the culture at
large. He is saying that the political contest in its current incarnation
corrupts universities. They are, after all, sites for education, not legisla-
tion. Ironically, an important consequence of this narrowing focus is to
reduce the value of university education, particularly to members of
minority groups whose class or ethnic positions make it essential that
they break through the fault lines of the social system and culture and
thereby participate more fully in society. A rich and broadening educa-
tion can abet such breakthroughs.
Carey has another complaint against many of his colleagues on the
left. They are silent, he says, about the "major tendency of higher edu-
cation, the increasing presence of corporate control over the curricu-
lum." That is a recurrent theme in his commentaries on the university.
It forms part of the argument of "Political Correctness and Cultural
Studies," and it is a central theme of "Salvation by Machines." In both
essays, the occasion for this reflection is the expression of a false be-
lief—an article of national faith, he says—that the so-called crisis in ed-
ucation can be answered and fixed by the computer. Computer literacy,
it is said, will enable increasing numbers of graduates to lead produc-
tive and useful lives; it may even provide links between citizens and the
state and thereby produce a more democratic order.
Carey's response to these beliefs is preemptive and dismissive. He
says, for example, that the impulse to look to machines to improve
things is old and recurrent, and it arises when America's competitive
edge in military might or in business is threatened—by the Russians or
by the Japanese. Such an impulse never reflects education's primary
task to educate individuals for citizenship. More fundamentally, ex-
pression of the belief that technological development will provide an
answer to the problems of institutions of learning is a reminder that a

civic education is "often held in contempt." In Carey's ideal world, a
general education forms the meanings and capacities that make acts of
citizenship possible. It makes liberty creative and public rather than he-
donistic and private. It is about the civilized order, not the techniques
of personal survival. So no one should be sanguine about the campaign
to fix the university and solve economic and political crises through the
expansion of computer education. The demand for such an expansion
expresses the interests of business rather than democracy. Furthermore,
as a footnote to such observations, skeptics should note that the pro-
posed coalition between high tech and higher education "would further
reduce the independence of the university, further confuse the values of
the student, and further distort the aims of education rightly conceived:
the creation of enlightened and cultivated citizens. The deeper confu-
sions in higher education simply are not touched by the solutions of
high technology." So much for technology.
The broad view Carey expresses in this essay is by now familiar.
Education is dominated by the same interests that dominate the econ-
omy. The aim of education in the age of the corporation is to prepare
consumers and obedient workers rather than citizens: "The new plans
for high tech education threaten to convert the entire society into a
meritocracy and technocracy and to extirpate any residual sense of a
common and collective life that extends beyond the moment or the
morrow."
Harsh words.
I have seen Jim Carey many times since we first met—back in Ottawa
at Carleton University where he is regularly invited to speak, at the
Poynter Institute in Florida where we were in residence together, at the
conventions of the AEJMC whenever and wherever they occur, in his
home, and once in Columbia, Missouri, where together we partici-
pated in a colloquium on the future of journalism education. I remem-
ber well the frustration he expressed with a number of his fellow pan-
elists at that colloquium, but especially with those who praised the
development of race and gender studies in journalism schools and en-
couraged the development of courses in the new technologies of com-
munication. It is important to stress that he was not objecting to the
feminist understanding of social phenomena or the examination of
racial conflicts. His inclusive beliefs predispose him to encourage such
understandings because they can enrich the common culture and make
it more inclusive and egalitarian. Neither was he being technophobic.
He knows as well as anyone that computers are here, even desirably
here, to stay. He was impatient, I now understand more clearly, with
the inclination to write these matters into the curriculum as substitutes
rather than add-ons. He was impatient with the lack of interest in the
civic virtues and the intellectual and literary capacities that good jour-
nalists must possess and that must inform the creation of a curriculum.
But in that setting he was as charming, attentive, and tolerant as he al-
ways is. The passion and the disagreements, however fundamental,
were well submerged beneath his public style.
So what does he really think of the university? My answer turns on
the circumstantial evidence of his public manner and on the textual
evidence in the essays reprinted here. The public style persuades me
that he loves the university just as much as the university—his col-
leagues, in short—loves him. At conferences, in the audience or at the
podium, his energy is always up and his eloquence is stunning. He lis-
tens, he argues, and he persuades. He is not faking it; he loves ideas and
the opportunity to express them. He loves, in short, what the university
provides—a safe house for the imagination and a site for conversation
and friendship. At the same time, the university in America frustrates,
disappoints, and even angers him. In "Political Correctness and Cul-
tural Studies" he argues that no one would blink an eye at the phe-
nomenon of political correctness were it not for the fact that it crys-
tallized a belief that all was not well in the academy. He notes that
political correctness "names and coalesces growing resentments against
higher education and the academic establishment." Think of what he
else he says:
"Universities . . . are not pleasant places to be these days,
filled with a lot of ill-natured arguments and uncivil habits
that are destroying the possibilities of public life."
"University faculties are not known for having open minds
or selfless egos and they often do a lot of damage to their
students."
"We have tolerated academic practices that actively con-
tribute to the ignorance of students and fail the most decent
expectations of the public."
"The decadence besetting the academy is not political correct-

ness but a genuine lack of interest in education."
"The independence of the university is now pretty much
gone, and where it remains it is largely a pretense."
Carey believes that there is a crisis in education and that it is spiri-
tual. The crisis, he says, is that "education has no relevance to the
political order, to public life" but has, instead, become utilitarian and
driven by economic factors and narrow political purposes. That in the
end is what frustrates him. I would say it only frustrates him. It doesn't
turn him away from the place that is the natural home for an intellec-
tual like him. So he continues to argue for its improvement. He contin-
ues to harangue and to persuade his colleagues around the country that
they should feel as passionately about the university and its purposes as
he does.
The creation of "a common culture with enough durability to
transform today's students into tomorrow's leaders, persons who feel a
sense of care and responsibility for their fellow citizens and for the no-
blest of our democratic traditions," he writes, "is still the essence of
university life and any humane program of education even in the age of
high tech."
Notes
1. Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Ed-
ucation (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), vii.
2. Ibid., 39.
10 / Political Correctnessand Cultural Studies
Among the games—in the best sense of that word, the Wittgensteinian
sense—at play in the field of communications is one with which I feel
particularly identified, namely, cultural studies. While cultural studies
embraces an astonishing variety of people and positions (no one has a
registered trademark on the name), it can be simplistically divided, if
only to jump-start an argument, into two broad camps: one that draws
primarily upon continental sources and regularly invokes names like
Derrida, Foucault, and Althusser; and one that draws primarily upon
American sources and regularly invokes names like Dewey, James, and
Rorty. I take myself to be part of the Dewey group not only for theo-
retical reasons but also because, like Dewey, I have not yet given up
faith in liberal democracy, in reformist measures to make society more
just and decent. I haven't given up the quest, typically if idealistically
American, for an open, nonascriptive basis of community life: one in
which neighbors help one another out—you know, lend the lawn
mower, come to the funeral, take part in the town meeting—but do not
ask one another too many questions about their private lives and pretty
much ignore the color of skin, the shapes of noses and eyes, and the dis-
tribution of X and Y chromosomes. I also agree with Dewey and Rorty
that we would be a lot better off if we were more rather than less demo-
cratic: less greedy, more open, less given to nostalgia, less dominated
by corporations and bureaucracies, more receptive to new groups. It
would even be nice to have a few more children around—and if they
happen to be eight kids in a Cambodian or Vietnamese family that
270
Political Correctness and Cultural Studies I 271
show up next door, it would be swell to remember we were all once

immigrants.
I now find myself in a curious position. While I take cultural stud-
ies, as I practice it, to be quintessentially American, unexceptional, and
even ethnocentric, Roger Kimball, one of the most prominent conserva-
tives leading the attack on the contemporary university, has identified
cultural studies as part of the problem and one of the sources of this
vexation, rather than, as I thought, part of the solution. He comments
that the "one thing your literary deconstructionist, your Lacanian fem-
inist, your post-structuralist Marxist, your New Historicist, and your
devotee ... of cultural studies can agree on is that the new Western hu-
manistic tradition is a repository of ideas that are naive, repressive, or
both." Well, I do not think the Western tradition is naive or repressive,
at least not intrinsically and uniquely so, and I doubt that everyone
within the theoretical claques he identifies are in agreement about the
Western tradition or much else. The only thing they might agree upon
is that the Western tradition is an invention, something made up on the
way to modernity. As a constructed and porous tradition, it is in a state
of constant modification and reinvention and ought to be assessed in
terms of its political uses and consequences, though not by those crite-
ria alone.
My position is curious because, while I disagree with Kimball's
main line of argument, he does have a lot of smart things to say about
higher education, particularly about the pretensions of contemporary
"theory" and faculty and their contemptuous and condescending atti-
tudes toward the public. I feel no need, therefore, to make a wholesale
defense of the university, of tenured radicals, of the state of the human-
ities, as most writers on this subject apparently do. There are things
wrong with universities that Mr. Kimball has yet to dream of: they
often are not very pleasant places to be these days, filled with a lot of
ill-natured arguments and uncivil habits that are destroying the possi-
bilities of public life, but this has been going on for twenty-five years or
more. University faculties are not known for having open minds or self-
less egos, and they often do a lot of damage to their students, particu-
larly those, generally minorities and the underclass, who might benefit
from real education and a less ideological, more pragmatic, and gener-
ally more civil form of intellectual discourse. Still, I do not know what
this has to do with cultural studies.
Cultural studies, in fact, does not represent a homogenous point of
272 I Political Correctness and Cultural Studies
view: it is not a body of propositions or methods commanding univer-

sal assent from those who practice scholarship under its banner. There
are, however, a few things upon which there is general agreement. Cul-
tural studies arose as a revolt against formalism and was antipositivist
and antifoundational: a form of both interpretive and critical theory.
More to the point, it rejected the views that culture was epiphenomenal
or a collection of given and canonical texts or an exogenous force that
determines conduct and institutions from the outside. Rather, culture,
from the cultural studies view, is a process, in Stanley CavelPs happy
phrase, of "wording the world together." Kimball and the rest of the
attack squad find these views reprehensible, for they yearn for the time
when our knowledge of the world was guaranteed and a Great Under-
writer—God, Science, Method, or Objectivity—assured us that every-
thing would turn out right and there were reliable and unambiguous
standards for assigning texts and artifacts to the categories of high and
mass culture. But Kimball's opposition to cultural studies is less philo-
sophical than political: he believes such philosophical views are neces-
sarily the stalking horse of left-wing politics.
Cultural Studies and the Left

While in truth most practitioners of cultural studies are of the left,
there is virtually no agreement among them as to what is left, where is
left, or even who is left. Cultural studies, in fact, bears no essential or
necessary politics. It does contend that the process of making meaning
is never a happy or easy matter, the mere expression of an underlying
consensus gentium embroidered in our genes, but always a process of
struggle and conflict, at once agonistic and antagonistic. While this
troubles me on many days and I often wish we were a happier family, I
haven't known that many happy families and I take such conflict to be
transparent to conservatives for whom combat is among the higher
pleasures. Finally, while the making and contesting of meaning suffuses
social space, two particularly important sites of struggle are the media
of communication and the educational system—independent but deeply
interrelated agencies for the production, not just the transmission, of
culture, as any editor and critic ought to know from experience.
There are sharp differences, of course, among practitioners of cul-
tural studies, differences that will become relevant later over the rela-
tion between ideology and culture, over the conceptions of power and
hegemony, reason and desire, and, in particular, over the privilege ac-
corded the experience of knowing subjects. But those differences have
been effaced for the moment by the attack on political correctness.
While cultural studies has become increasingly precise and pertinent in
charting and explaining social conflict, in uncovering the meanings em-
bedded in social practice, in laying out the dimensions and politics of
social struggle, such studies have themselves come under forceful at-
tack. The conservative critique of "political correctness" has identified
cultural studies as part of "the problem of higher education," as one
of the forces—along with feminism, ethnic studies, deconstructionism,
multiculturalism—corrupting higher learning in America. Paradoxi-
cally, the necessary lines between the analysis of culture, the production
of culture, and the political contest over culture have been erased. Prac-
titioners of cultural studies have always considered that work to be
part of a wider political struggle. The movement against political cor-
rectness has noted this fact and sought to make the struggle explicit.
Equally paradoxical, cultural studies, which has prided itself on the
close analysis of social struggle, finds itself, generally speaking, pretty
much unequipped to deal with this struggle. To this point scholars in
cultural studies have put up a brave front—"the political correctness
scare means we (the left) have the initiative, that they (the right) are
desperate"—or overindulged in paranoia—"left-wing campus thinkers
have replaced the Soviet Union as easy enemies"; "political correctness
is an organized conservative campaign to turn back gains made by
women and minorities"—but these are sound bites inserted as a con-
fession that the left, particularly the cultural left, lacks both an analysis
and an effective counterattack. We have come face to face with an ide-
ology, something that has stepped out of the textbooks and is directed
against us., and we seem to be surprised that it speaks in tropes and
hyperbole rather than flattened academic discourse.
"Political correctness" is not a manufactured enemy, except in the
sense that the business of ideology is the manufacture of enemies.
Rather, "political correctness" is an effective political attack because it
acts as a condensation symbol that names and coalesces growing re-
sentments against higher education and the academic establishment.
While much of the political correctness literature is a disinformation
campaign designed to discredit higher education, it could never be po-
litically effective and the academic left never forced into the role of a
scapegoat except for one overriding fact: public resentment against
274 / Political Correctness and Cultural Studies
higher education is real. Such resentment cannot be dismissed out of

hand or caricatured as psychological transference from the cold war or
a mere expression of racism and sexism: this is the sure route to politi-
cal suicide. Until we admit that there is much more wrong with univer-
sities than is imagined by the most acerbic critic of political correctness,
we will be in no position to mount a counterattack. Until we admit, at
least to ourselves, that we have tolerated academic practices that ac-
tively contribute to the ignorance of students and fail the most decent
expectations of the public, we will have no means to dislodge the often
cynical right-wing critique of the university. The decadence besetting
the academy is not political correctness but a genuine lack of interest in
education. It is not that students are being ideologically indoctrinated,
though some try that, but that students approach us, and we approach
them, as consumers—bored and disaffected consumers, ingesting what-
ever is fashionable and forgettable this semester, a situation in which
neither they nor we take real responsibility for their education.
The Conservative Assault on Cultural Studies

Cultural studies is vulnerable to the assault from the right because of
two theoretical weaknesses in its formulation: as regards, first, the idea
of a common culture and, second, the role of ideology within that cul-
ture. Communications programs in particular, and universities in gen-
eral, are vulnerable to the same attack because they have tolerated
practices that no one can defend publicly, and that silence turns higher
education into one more interest group, like the Department of De-
fense, with little claim on public affection or relation to the public
good.
The Desertion of "A Common Culture"

One of the central tenets of the conservative attack on political correct-
ness is that cultural studies has deserted the idea of a common cul-
ture—the idea, in the words of Roger Kimball, "that despite our many
differences, we hold in common an intellectual, artistic, and moral
legacy, descending largely from the Greeks and the Bible, supplemented
and modified over the centuries by innumerable contributions from di-
verse lands and people." Rather than exploding such nonsense, the cul-
tural left has largely agreed with it: they simply put a different value on
"the Greeks and the Bible." Cultural studies at the outset was an at-
tempt to affirm a common culture. On one side of the Atlantic, Ray-
mond Williams argued that the reason we need a common culture is
that we shall not survive without one. On the other side, American cul-
tural studies arose in opposition to the Eurocentric notion that you
could understand American democracy, institutions, and character as
something that arrived on the Mayflower. In both England and the
United States, cultural studies was an argument not against a common
culture but against the simpleminded notion that American (or British)
culture was a direct and genetic tributary of a biblical, Greek, Roman,
and so on watershed.
While there has not been an "American experience," there has
been experience in America, and American culture has been an attempt
to formulate and express that experience. Until this century—despite
slavery, emancipation, the bloodiest civil war in history, women's suf-
frage, mass immigration, the settlement of a continent, and the rise of a
distinctive and indigenous labor movement (to state but a tiny portion
of the catalog)—the official documents of American culture were Euro-
pean, and American culture was understood backward through those
documents. It was not until pragmatism, American studies, symbolic
interactionism, the American literary renaissance, and so forth that a
systematic attempt was made to delineate the distinctive characteristics
of that experience. To allow the right to steal and deform the experi-
ence, to reify it as something passed down from the Greeks and the
Bible, is both a political and a moral disaster. But it is an equal disaster
to reduce that culture to race and gender (and to treat class and ethnic-
ity as if they were vanishing moments), as if these were universals of
Western culture rather than concrete manifestations of identity formed
within American culture.
What makes cultural studies and the left vulnerable to arguments
such as those made by Kimball is the attempt to deny that there is an
American culture or, worse, to see American culture as a mere deriva-
tive of something called the West or, more often, capitalism. We have
learned, I trust, that capitalism is not only an economy but also a cul-
ture; in fact, it is several different and often quite incompatible cul-
tures. Similarly, the West is hardly a uniform set of meanings, messages,
institutions, or histories. The West is an artifact, an artifact useful to
left and right for inverse reasons: for one the West is the history of sci-
ence, philosophy, and the high European culture; for the other it is a
276 I Political Correctness and Cultural Studies
history of imperialism, greed, and capital formation, of racial and gen-

der exploitation. Neither history is particularly useful for understand-
ing American experience or culture, though both histories play a major
role in it. The conservative history erases everyone but a tiny caste; the
radical history deracinates the society, paradoxically, as a means of
making history multicultural. The America encountered on both sides
of the political correctness argument is an imaginary America. Of
course, every nation is an "imagined community" in the sense Benedict
Anderson has given to that phrase. But the America imagined in the po-
litical correctness debate is disconnected from the experience of the
majority of citizens, historic and contemporary. One side to the debate
imagines cultural experience in Pilgrim terms as something transported
from the Old World. The other side imagines it in antebellum terms:
white, black, and pariah people. Such history can serve as a stick with
which to beat an opponent, but, as the contemporary history of the
Democratic Party alone demonstrates, it achieves its victories only at
the price of an impossible narrowing of the social base.
Culture and Ideology

The second vulnerability of cultural studies concerns the way in which
the relationship between culture and ideology is currently formulated.
One wing of sociology began as an attempt to undo the relationship of
base and superstructure in classical Marxist theory, to grant a measure
of autonomy and effectivity to the culture while keeping in view the
complex interrelations between separable "moments" in the social for-
mation. Over time, however, something rather important has been lost.
The economy has been obliterated from theoretical view. Neither is the
economic seen as thoroughly cultural from the outset, nor is culture
seen as existing in moments of the economic. In fact, what has hap-
pened is that race and gender have assumed a position as the new
"base" and culture has become a mere epiphenomenal expression of
the primordial and determinative elements. Culture is now reduced to
ideology and ideology in turn reduced to race and gender. Despite all
the theoretical elaboration of the concept of ideology over the past two
decades, the form of argument is now virtually identical to classical
Marxism except that the forces and relations of production have dis-
appeared. Ideology has swallowed culture, and race and gender have
swallowed ideology. This anomalous development is often papered over
with the notion of hegemony, but when hegemony crosses the Atlantic
it sounds pretty much like the same Ideologiekritik we have been living
with since the 19305.
Hegemonic analysis has worked well in some settings, such as Italy,
because the political system has been, to be circular about it, hegemonic.
It has worked well in other settings, such as Great Britain, because of
the deftness with which Stuart Hall and others have carried through
the analysis. In both cases they have stayed close to Gramsci's original
formulation: ideologies achieve hegemony not by serving the interests
of one class—even the white male class—and setting aside others, but
by speaking to relatively enduring (Ricoeur) or quasi-transcendental
(Habermas) human needs and desires. These desires are not merely
economic, though they are that too, but broadly moral, aesthetic, and
civic. Hegemonic politics works not by dividing and exploiting, for ex-
ample, class differences, but by effacing those differences in order to
constitute a civil society even if such citizenship is largely illusory. In
this sense hegemonic analysis must move beyond ideology to culture
and recognize that human interests cannot be exhausted by any social
category and that any political movement bound by such categories
must, in a complex heterogeneous society, fail. The emphasis on civic
bonds and common symbols, on a shared public culture, is what turns
ideology to hegemony, naked class domination to civic cooperation.
Let me put this another way. In recent years cultural studies has de-
veloped the critique of ideology into a high art and the linchpin of its
program. As the critique of ideology became more precise and pro-
nounced, the absence of a left ideology became more apparent. The left
has a dozen different critiques of ideology; it just does not have an ide-
ology, in the sense of a general and embracing plan of political action.
Unfortunately, the left has been so busy analyzing ideology, it forgot to
develop a political program that can speak to the relatively enduring
desires of a wide spectrum of citizens. As a result, to twist some lines of
Todd Gitlin, the left is fighting over the English department while the
right occupies the White House.
Effective ideologies speak to a wide range of human concerns; they
become hegemonic when they are formulated across the "natural"
fault lines of a culture—in our case the fault lines of race, class, and
gender. Cultural studies, of late, has chosen to work within rather than
across those fault lines and, as a result, it finds itself increasingly with a
constituency confined within universities, though even there it cannot
win a significant vote in anything but a demoralized faculty senate.

That hardly provides a base for an assault on the citadels of power.
This is what I assume Gitlin means when he questions whether empha-
sizing race, class, and gender will reach a big enough audience: "If
white males are the problem, then I don't see anything but catastrophe
ahead of us."
The first step to wisdom on these matters is to recognize that there
are real differences among Americans on a wide range of issues: reli-
gion, law, the schools, higher education, the arts, abortion, divorce,
children, population, immigration, natural resources, crime control, a
just wage—you name it. These differences are not ideologically in-
duced in the first instance; they are neither artificial nor superficial, but
grounded in frequently hard-won experience and genuine differences in
values. They cannot be papered over or explained by race, class, gender,
and ethnicity. Empirically, people defined by race, class, gender, and
ethnicity turn up on both sides of every one of these questions, and they
turn up in significant numbers. The left has attempted to deal with these
differences by explaining them away, attributing them solely to one kind
of prejudice or other, or setting them outside of politics by, paradoxi-
cally again, adopting the conservative rhetoric of "rights" or "keep the
government off our backs" or the antidemocratic strategies of manipu-
lating the courts and the bureaucracy and, to a lesser degree, the media.
The left has tried every strategy except the ideological/hegemonic one of
honestly addressing itself to these problems, of developing a program
of political action that has a reasonable chance of success because it is
formulated in terms congruent with American culture and experience,
is addressed to our problems rather than their problems. As a result,
the left has been steadily losing what little influence it has on American
life and shows little likelihood of regaining it unless there is a prolonged
economic crisis—a crisis in which the poor will suffer most, as usual.
Moreover, any salvation offered the dispossessed will most likely come
from the right because the left, or at least the cultural left, hasn't the
vaguest notion of an economic program.
We have to admit that there is a faint hint of absurdity in the entire
political correctness argument. The society is falling down around our
ears and we are arguing about status issues in higher education. For-
eign observers—to steal, twist, and extend an example of Richard
Rorty's—when they tick off American problems, usually point to
violent cities, structural unemployment, declining productivity, failing
banks, useless schools, bought legislators, cheap handguns, middle-

class contempt for the poor, gargantuan thefts of the public treasury,
selfish unwillingness to be taxed, and so on. Meanwhile, we are argu-
ing about political correctness so that a perceptive foreign journalist
soon will add "whiny, defensive, self-involved universities" to the list
of problems. One can respond that the right, having already seized con-
trol over economic and political institutions, is now turning its atten-
tion to their cultural counterparts. Alternatively, one can suggest that
the right, having failed—or even having deliberately failed—to address
the most pressing social problems, has masked that failure by attacking
universities, the media, and similar agencies of culture. But those easy
responses ignore the crucial fact emphasized in sociology that social
struggles always and simultaneously take place along economic, politi-
cal, and cultural fronts. If that is true, the worst way to deal with the
attack is to meet it on its own ground by getting involved in purely di-
versionary issues.
The Failure of the Cultural Left

The left, however, is currently unable to mount a broad counterattack;
having deconstructed every ideology, it is silent on its own program.
And it is silent largely because it does not have a program beyond a few
pet projects and a few slogans—slogans that are increasingly uncon-
vincing. The cultural left cannot speak to the general public not only
because it is jargon besotted, not only because it is vacant of ideas, not
only because it can never admit it was wrong, but because it has for-
mulated its fundamental ideas—every disclaimer to the contrary not-
withstanding—around the notion of "the masses," around contempt
for ordinary men and women. What Robert Reich has called the "se-
cession of the successful," the attenuation of any sense of a common
culture or community with those left behind by the spectacular eco-
nomic advances of the Reagan years, applies to more than the conser-
vative middle class. Moreover, and finally, the left in recent years has
won some tactical victories by adopting the essentially conservative
language of individual rights and opposing government in general, but
these victories have been at the price of its own long-run strategic in-
terests. The only protections for the poor, weak, and disadvantaged,
the only safety nets they have, are the welfare state, recently disman-
tled, or secondary institutions standing between the individual and the
state—family, neighborhood, parish, trade unions, voluntary associa-

tions. But only a communitarian ideology and an emphasis on collec-
tive action and rights can prevent the destruction of those institutions.
There will not be a left-wing victory via a right-wing ideology.
For these reasons, for its general irrelevance to the most pressing
problems facing people, the debate over political correctness has pretty
much run into the sand. In a short season, the debate has grown old
and tired. Intellectual fashions last about a year these days and, like
much else, political correctness has become an anachronism before it
has been understood, has become numbingly repetitive and dominated
by moral and ideological posturing before it has produced a modicum
of understanding, let alone a diagnosis, of higher education. To con-
tinue the debate is to run the risk we shall bore one another to death—
and boredom, particularly among intellectuals, is a greater danger to
the body politic than many of the better known catastrophes about
which much is written these days. But universities remain vulnerable
because they have become expensive and they no longer can be de-
pended upon to deliver on their promises.
Political Correctness in the University

The critics of higher education from the right (Allan Bloom and Wil-
liam Bennett, Dinesh D'Souza and Charles Sykes, Roger Kimball and
Page Smith) and the various left documents that purportedly respond
to them (Speaking for the Humanities: The Politics of Liberal Educa-
tion), along with their lesser known antagonists (Henry Louis Gates
and Henry Giroux, Catherine Stimson and Stanley Fish, Gerald Graff
and Barbara Herrnstein Smith), have little or nothing to do with, have
even no connection to the university and the system of higher education
as I know it and encounter it on a daily basis. The problems subsumed
under the catchphrase "political correctness" absorb the tiniest frac-
tion of the vital energies of the academic community and represent an
even smaller portion of administrative activity or faculty conflict. The
university described in the literature of political correctness is a fantasy,
and the pseudodebate that results has nothing to do with higher educa-
tion. It is a sign of the exhaustion of the academic community, left and
right, and its irrelevance to the major tendencies in higher education".
The debate is, to pirate Pierre Bourdieu's distinction, a contest be-
tween the dominated and dominant elements of the dominant class
and, like many intraclass conflicts, it is full of sound and fury signifying
nothing. If we wish to be identified with neither of these class fractions,
it is time to pick up our marbles and go elsewhere. Why don't we adopt
George Aiken's strategy for ending the Vietnam War and just declare
ourselves—whoever we are—the victors in the debate and go home?
That is a happier prospect than a protracted diatribe—a status conflict
in the older sense of that phrase—between the National Association of
Scholars and the Teachers for a Democratic Culture. Such a contest will
inevitably become a verbal joust in which we serve once again as the
objects rather than the subjects of politics, spectators of someone else's
political program rather than participants whose advice and knowl-
edge are sought. When the latter group tells us in its organizing state-
ment that "reforms in the content of the curriculum have also begun to
make our classrooms more representative of our nation's diverse peo-
ples and beliefs and to provide a more truthful account of our history
and cultural heritage," those of us actually in representative classrooms
don't know whether to laugh or cry. Similarly, when Roger Kimball in-
forms us that the 19605 radicals are now taking over the university
when in truth they can rarely take over a department (and if they can't
take over a department they are unlikely to be able to take over a
precinct, let alone the country), we must know we are on the track of
the real kitsch. This is a debate that confuses garnering publicity and
producing a celebrity with making political gains.
I am not suggesting that the issues at the root of the political cor-
rectness debate—the role of race, class, and gender in education, cur-
riculum reform, affirmative action, and the like—are trivial. Quite the
opposite. But the debate about them as currently constructed has virtu-
ally nothing to do with what is going on in most college classrooms, is
silent about what is happening to the administration of most universi-
ties, is riddled by a lot of petty silliness and ambition, and evidences a
genuine lack of interest in education. Moreover, the debate is informed
by a vision of a purely imaginary America, an irrelevant imaginary, of
interest only to a protected academic class. Those are the reasons we
should unhinge ourselves from the debate. But, even more, in the de-
bate as currently constructed, the left is going to lose, even deserves to
lose, and that loss will be a genuine catastrophe for all of us.
If I am in what follows harder on the left than on the right, it is
because my general sympathies are, theoretically as well as politically,
with those who wish to defend, at least in principle, women's studies
and black studies, affirmative action, and increased minority enroll-

ments, and to attest to the genuine contributions to scholarship made
by deconstructionist theory and other largely continental imports.
However, I also believe that many of these programs are working badly
and should be subjected to the most searching scrutiny. I admire the
courage of, say, Stephen Carter, who takes the risk, in Notes of an Af-
firmative Action Baby, of losing leftist respectability by undertaking
such an examination or Eugene Genovese's simultaneous critique and
endorsement of women's studies. Similarly, the deconstructionist cri-
tique of discourse, in which the instability of signifiers always reveals
the subtle play of ideology, has itself become ideologically rigid and
narrowed.
Indeed, the general problem is that the left early on decided that no
real response was necessary to the work of Bennett, Bloom, et al. Thus,
Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind and similar works re-
mained virtually without serious discussion on our campuses. But if
higher education fit the model of seriousness and rectitude with which
its defenders, particularly its defenders on the left, often describe it,
such books would have been subjected to the most serious, rigorous,
systematic, and evenhanded debate one might imagine. Instead, the cri-
tique of higher education was largely dismissed with slogans: "the
killer Bs," reactionary, journalistic. Reaganism applied to education.
The political right has largely had the field to itself, and the most tren-
chant criticism of "the killer Bs" came from figures such as Sidney
Hook and John Searle rather than from the ideological opponents of
the right.
The left, then, has little more to say than "We're all right, Jack." In
this view, higher education needs only a little bit of ideological fine-
tuning: less of the new criticism and more deconstruction, more money
in affirmative action and minority studies, less tradition and more of
the new avant-garde. The left is even silent about the major tendency of
higher education, namely, the increasing presence of corporate control
over the curriculum, the funding, and the basic policies of the entire in-
stitutional apparatus. And the surrender has a cause: the left has been a
major though silent beneficiary of the increased presence of the corpo-
rate on the campus. Like everyone else, the left really believes that the
only significant problem of higher education, beyond residual racism
and sexism, is money. If we had more—particularly more to underwrite
lower teaching loads, more travel, more conferences, and less academic
demand—everything would be all right.
This is a recipe for failure, for, as Christopher Lasch has put it, one
of the major "reasons for the rightward drift of public opinion is the
widespread fear that our educational system is falling apart." Lasch
was speaking of primary and secondary education, but the educational
crisis is currently generalized to everything from Head Start to research
universities. The right is listened to because it at least acknowledges the
crisis and has some intelligent things to say about it. As I said earlier,
their counterparts on the left seem to be barely aware a problem exists.
(Don't they have any children? Can they afford to send them to exclu-
sive private schools? Have they ever visited a contemporary classroom?
Don't they read the papers?)
Virtually every proposal for serious reform in the educational sys-
tem has come from one conservative think tank or another. The right of
course doesn't want to put any money into education, and George Bush
was the education president the way Herbert Hoover was the prosper-
ity president. But the stinginess has at least a justification: they argue
that nothing can be done about the education problem by throwing
more money at it. Serious structural reform must precede serious in-
creases in funding. The experience of parents with schools confirms
this diagnosis, for the schools have continued to deteriorate even as
more money has been put into them. Much of the additional money
has not gone into education, of course, but rather is an investment, and
not a very good one, in heightened security. Even successful programs
like Head Start have been sacrificed to the budget. Nonetheless, the
conclusion seems inescapable. The left's belief that the schools are fail-
ing because they have been too resistant to cultural change simply is
not believed by most parents. Whenever ordinary men and women re-
sist this conclusion and point to the abysmal ignorance of their own
children (and to the active intergenerational deskilling that is occur-
ring), the degree to which the schools seem determined to displace
parental authority rather than work with it, or the responsibility of the
schools for part of the general economic problems everyone is experi-
encing—loss of jobs, declining productivity, the evaporation of stan-
dards of workmanship—they are quickly dismissed as racist, sexist, or
reactionary, or more likely all three and a little more. In short, any seri-
ous leftist response to the crisis of the schools has to address itself to
problems experienced by most people, and unless such responses are

forthcoming, public opinion will continue to move to the right.
The problem of education could be safely contained within the sec-
ondary school system for a number of years. Higher education, in other
words, could be safely protected because it was fulfilling its primary
function for the most affluent of parents: it was buying their children a
position within the occupational structure. I know this flies in the face
of the general belief that upper-class parents are interested in education
and working-class parents are interested in jobs. (I actually think the
opposite is true: the lower their position in the social structure, the
more regard people have for the general virtues of education.) How-
ever, the upper-class worship at the altar of education did not come
from an elevated appreciation of disinterested learning. People do not
pay inflated Harvard tuitions, to choose an example at random, be-
cause they want an educated child (though they hope that benefit might
come with the bargain), and their children are not swept away with a
love of learning. The largest major at Harvard, according to the latest
figures I have seen, is economics—not because students fell into a swoon
over the subject, but because Harvard does not have an undergraduate
business school. Utilitarianism finds its natural home among the mid-
dle class. Higher education satisfactorily served the purpose of guaran-
teeing employment and, more, an elevated place in the status and occu-
pational structure. While it did that, even if it failed in virtually every
other way, the critique of higher education fell largely on deaf ears.
Once higher education began to fail in its primary mission, the provi-
sion of middle-class employment, all bets were off and the ideological
critique of the right became effective.
Both the left and the right seem to believe that the raison d'etre of
education is to serve as a site on which to conduct a political struggle.
Parents generally, the public specifically, are not particularly enamored
of this view. They may be willing to admit that all education has ideo-
logical implications, if they could follow the abstruse way in which
such an argument is usually framed. But that is a long way from agree-
ing to the proposition that the primary, maybe even the sole, purpose of
education is the conduct of ideological struggle. To such people, who I
happen to believe are in the majority, the issues within the political cor-
rectness movement are pretty much beside the point. They are less wor-
ried about whether the curriculum is Eurocentric or has some other
focus than about whether there is any kind of curriculum at all. The ar-
gument is not whether there should be affirmative action programs, but

whether decent education is provided on a nondiscriminatory basis to
all who want and can benefit from it. I do not find them opposed to
women's or ethnic studies but only concerned that any kind of studies
be conducted seriously and inculcate not only personal pride but also
genuine intellectual and analytical skills.
What's Really Wrong

The issues raised in the debate over political correctness are important
if they are taken up one by one. Combined into a diagnosis they are a
disastrous and incendiary melange. But whether these issues are taken
individually or collectively, I remain unconvinced that the critics on the
right or the increasing, though discordant, respondents from the left
have seized on the fundamental problems or that they proceed from an
adequate analysis of the university as an institution or even that they
have much of a view of the way in which American society and Ameri-
can politics are put together. In fact, I don't even think they have situ-
ated the specific matters they address—the canon, political correctness,
affirmative action, and so on—in the right context. So here is a brief
catalog of the underlying changes in the university that provide the
deep structure to its surface politics.
Good-bye, Independence
The American university has never been an ivory tower, never com-
pletely independent of its surrounding society. Very few of them are ar-
chitecturally walled off from their host communities. Land-grant uni-
versities were from the outset campuses without walls, dedicated to
serving their states. The relationship between the university and the so-
ciety has always been a tense and uneasy one—moments of accommo-
dation alternating with assertions of autonomy. The core of university
activities—teaching and the curriculum—has been the domain of the
greatest academic freedom and autonomy and always the most stoutly
defended against outside interference. The independence of the uni-
versity is now pretty much gone, and where it remains it is largely a
pretense.
Perhaps the first breach came with the development of intercolle-
giate athletics, followed by the seizure of control of boards of trustees
by the business community. It was this seizure that fired left-wing criti-
cism of the university earlier in the century, as exemplified by Thorstein
Veblen's The Higher Learning in America and Upton Sinclair's The
Goose-Step. Despite the fact that corporate control is even stronger in
universities today, it is rarely the object of sustained analysis or attack.
This is partly true because the corporate community no longer at-
tempts to exert direct control over the curriculum or the habits, man-
ners, and speech of the faculty, but it is also true because such control is
now simply accepted as the necessary price of an affluent academy and
a privileged faculty.
Similarly, in the years after World War II, as universities became the
research arm of society, the Department of Defense, the various insti-
tutes of health, and indeed the entire federal apparatus became a daily
and directive presence on the campus. During the 19605 the New Left
made a run at expelling the defense establishment; that establishment,
and the federal government generally, is now more firmly in control of
much of higher education with rarely a word of protest. The silence
comes from one point that is generally shared by left and right: both
have rejected the genuinely radical and genuinely conservative princi-
ple that the university ought to be an ivory tower; they agree that the
university is not and should not be an autonomous and self-governing
community. As a result, the university did not get rid of the Department
of Defense—it merely acquired a new set of interest groups with claims
on teaching and research. Today, boards of trustees increasingly repre-
sent the claims of these new groups and have little interest in the wel-
fare of the educational institution or the student body except as the stu-
dent body represents certain interests. When you add to this mix the
increasing power of accrediting agencies representing the interests of
professional groups and the directive role alumni play and pay in de-
termining what should be built and where and what should be taught
and how, you must come to one inescapable conclusion: for genera-
tions now, universities have been quietly sold off, piece by piece, to the
highest bidder. No one is particularly opposed to this process; the only
argument concerns which ideological clique ought to be in charge.
The brackish politics and the criticism of the university are played
out, then, in a context in which the university has pretty much disap-
peared as an independent and unitary institution. The university is lit-
tle more than a balance sheet that is the crossroads of the social and the
site of interest-group struggles over the next generation of citizens,
workers, and knowledge: cannon fodder for one kind of extrinsic pur-
pose or another. Intellectual culture is depreciated by being assimilated
to a notion that cultural studies emerged to oppose, namely, that cul-
ture is an exogenous force acting on and directly shaping the individual.
As the edges of the university become more porous and indistinct,
its internal structure collapses. The only authority left is the authority
of money, and that, above all else, is the thing most susceptible to out-
side control. The real lesson of the 19605 is that when push comes to
shove, as it frequently did, the only structure left is a dialectic between
the crowd and the police. The university in this sense has become a
mass society with no internal structures of authority and decision mak-
ing. The university senate, however composed, is exposed as a sham: it
is neither a debating nor a legislative body representing the collective
will and interest of the institution, but a mere crowd or ineffective as-
semblage of special interests who can make a mess but cannot govern
an academic community because there is no academic community to
govern.
Doctor, Lawyer...
Despite all the talk in the political correctness debate about the core
curriculum, this part of the university has been declining in significance
for decades. In fact, it was pretty much abandoned by colleges of lib-
eral arts at the major universities. Despite distribution requirements,
most students seek a professional education and, indeed, some of the
soundest education is now found in professional schools. This is be-
cause the faculty of professional schools must take real responsibility
for undergraduate students or be thoroughly disgraced. This is hardly
true in the old liberal arts, where faculty do not have and do not want
a relationship with students in which they are publicly responsible for
what students learn and what they become. And in my experience, this
is true everywhere, even in our most elite institutions.
The liberal arts have themselves become professionalized because
those disciplines are driven by doctoral programs, and the curriculum
increasingly reflects not the needs of students but the professional in-
terests and research needs of faculty. Professionalization, then, has a
double edge: the spread of education in the professions throughout un-
dergraduate school, and the professionalization of the liberal arts as
those disciplines increasingly reflect the professional interests and sta-
tus of the faculty. The curriculum is further professionalized, often

silently, by the spread of the internship system, which in liberal arts col-
leges is another way students can acquire a professional education with-
out its showing up on the university transcript. Internships, in which
credit is given for work, the so-called real world experience, eat up an
increasing amount of student class time. For the university it is cheap
and invisible training that allows students to feel they are being pre-
pared for an occupation, but it also turns education over to business
firms, professional societies, and, increasingly, every other interest
group in the society. Internships, not so incidentally, also involve the
systematic exploitation of student labor and the creation of a larger, re-
dundant supply of adult labor.
The Symptoms of a Bad Education

During the 19608 the doctrine of in loco parentis was pretty much
thrown out everyplace. This left the student services wing of the cam-
pus, what we used to call the dean of students' office, without much to
do except paper and custodial work. Unemployment is not accepted
easily anywhere and, therefore, student services had to find a new basis
for its work and authority. In parallel with the culture as a whole, the
new justification was the medicalization of the student body. Every stu-
dent problem is now turned into an occasion for therapy and a course,
frequently an academic one, analyzing the cause, symptoms, and cure
not only of traditional student ailments but also of a legion of newly in-
vented ones. Naturally, in the era of racism, sexism, homophobia, and
multiculturalism, student services is having a field day. These are real
problems, but because they are defined not as educational problems,
like learning how to think clearly about the nature of equations or the
structure of atoms, but as mental problems that must be cured by ther-
apy and indoctrination, they lend themselves as much as or more to the
curative powers of the counseling center and the student services build-
ing. Because the latter are financed through student fees (largely out-
side of tax and tuition money and often easier to raise), student services
has had an opportunity to grow faster and more rapaciously than the
academic wing of the university. This growth is further impelled and
justified by the more traditional doctrine that "the major part of a stu-
dent's education (and, perforce, reeducation) occurs outside the class-
room," even if it is education in the self-recognition of symptoms. This
not only drains resources from instruction—from the curriculum—but

also diminishes the status of instruction and creates one more large bu-
reaucracy that increasingly operates outside of, often gets in the way
of, or at the least compromises, the academic mission of the university.
Student services also have been one of the sites of the principal
force in the erosion of education, namely, credit inflation. Universities,
of course, promote internal internships for unpaid, nonacademic work,
thus rewarding students with credit for doing some of the scut work of
administration. But credit inflation involves the wholesale conversion
of the extracurricular into the curricular, thereby giving credit for what
was once leisure, club work, or therapy. In addition, courses that were
once worth, say, three hours are raised to four credit hours without a
corresponding change in either the amount or the difficulty of the work
involved. Student services has plenty of co-conspirators in this, because
the dilution of the curriculum through inflation has certain decided
advantages for faculty and students: fewer hours of less intense teach-
ing and learning; more hours taught in the real world by outside firms,
faculty, and nonfaculty; more advising turned over to nonacademic
staff. The consequence is the active devaluing and dilution of the aca-
demic curriculum by everyone concerned, a devaluing that in turn has
created more problems with which student services has to deal and
more counseling and courses with which to deal with them. For exam-
ple, we are apparently now beset with an alcohol problem on campus.
Part of that problem, if it is a problem, comes from the curious notion
that leisure is somehow education. But the major part of the problem
results from the fact that Friday, never mind Saturday, has become a
classless day pretty much everywhere, so that the drinking weekend be-
gins on Thursday. This is an indirect and unanticipated consequence of
accommodating the faculty's desire to have open stretches of time for
research, but it has real consequences for undergraduate education. But
the major point is this: with so much credit inflation going—and I
haven't mentioned the frequent travesty of study-abroad programs—it
is impossible to estimate the value and content of the old 124-hour
graduation requirement, but I would estimate that it is worth about 80
hours these days.
These are a few of the underlying problems and forces in higher ed-
ucation that escape the current debate on political correctness but that
provide the real setting in which the surface political struggles are
played out: the loss of autonomy, the absolute penetration of the uni-
versify by the haphazard forces of the social, the dissolution of a struc-

ture of legitimate governance and authority, the medicalization of stu-
dents, the professionalization and instrumentalization of the curricu-
lum that turn it into an ideological battleground, the inflation of credit
and devaluation of academic study. These are the problems that will
have to be solved before any meaningful attempt can be made to debate
Western civilization, affirmative action, women's and ethnic studies, or
any of the other issues, as important as they are, that critics scrape off
the political surface of university life.
The central issue is whether education is to be understood in in-
strumental or noninstrumental terms. Professional education is neces-
sarily instrumental and, inevitably, to some degree ideological; that is,
the purpose and ideology of the professions are imposed on the educa-
tional process. But only insofar as education at the core of university
life is conceived as noninstrumental can education be insulated from
the purposes that political and economic interests wish to project onto
it. I am here following and lightly paraphrasing some lines of Ernest J.
Weinrib and, as a result, using instrumental in a rather special way. Of
course, all education has a purpose and end in view. But unless we can
agree that education has purposes that are intrinsic to it, purposes that
constitute virtues embedded in practice, then the university will be ex-
ploited by hierarchically entrenched groups, will be turned to extrinsic
purposes, purposes that stand functionally outside the academy. The
dismissal of education as necessarily and inevitably ideological implies
not only that education is an instrument available for use by groups
whose primary identity is outside the academy, but also that education
can be nothing else. It denies the possibility there can be any noninstru-
mental understanding of any form of pedagogy. If that is true, higher
education will become, as so much of it is now, solely the instrument of
the powerful. Make no mistake about that: the instrumentalization of
education is not a recipe for the weak inheriting the earth. Unfortu-
nately, the point of agreement between the left and the right, between
most of the current critics of the academy and, in a phrase of Henry
Louis Gates's, "the rainbow coalition of feminists, deconstructionists,
Althusserians, Foucauldians, people working in ethnic and gay stud-
ies" whom they criticize, is that the university is an apparatus of a po-
litical or economic interest. For all these groups all education is neces-
sarily and desirably instrumental and ideological: education always
represents an interest rather than pursues a virtue. It all comes down to

whose ox gets gored.
The big losers in this great debate are the students and through
them the country at large. Higher education in America reminds me of
the Detroit Big Three when they dominated the automobile industry.
Without competition they could engage in all sorts of inefficient prac-
tices and merely trade blame between labor and capital and their re-
spective competitors. But the system finally started to collapse. And
who lost? The workers and the rest of us. We have to pay for a failing
economy. Similarly, the big losers in the current debate are the students,
particularly those most disadvantaged who would benefit most from a
more purposeful, more honest, more honorable, and less ideological
form of education. As it stands, it is the newcomers to higher education
who are the big losers. They are welcomed to higher education at the
moment we so devalue a degree along with the entire educational en-
terprise that a goal cherished and sought for generations becomes, in
personal, political, and economic terms, one more empty promise.
117 Salvation by Machines:
Can Technology Save Education?
Among the articles of national faith few have stronger resonance than
our belief in technology and education. Technology, freed from encrus-
tation of the old world, purged of its bondage to old cities, old elites,
and older ways, set down in the garden of America, has always prom-
ised us a general redemption: freedom from want and immiseration,
freedom from weakness and corruption, freedom for a better life of
peace, prosperity, and plenitude. The twin pillar of education rein-
forces the commitment to technology, for it guarantees not only the
knowledge with which to carry the social and technological project for-
ward but also underwrites the viability of a republican way of life; it
ensures the knowledge that will make us free.
Technology and education have always underwritten the quest for
power, prosperity, and profit, for wealth, welfare, and beneficent
progress. But they also underwrote the dream of a democratic republic:
a mechanism capable of holding together, despite classical democratic
theory, a large land and a large population, and rendering a people suf-
ficiently educated that they might govern themselves. The dream of
democracy has often been the equal of the dream for wealth and
power, but of late the tables have turned. To go back to basics, to re-
store education, has been shorn of democratic pretension. The purpose
of education, like that of technology, is to make us more leisured, but
hardly more equitable or more community centered, hardly more dem-
ocratic or public spirited. That part of the national dream is back under
the night of the republic.
292
Salvation by Machines I 293
Technology is the enduring savior of American education, and vir-

tually no other subject has been on the national agenda over the past
twenty-five years. And each time technology moves to the center of at-
tention, of consciousness, it does so in response to crisis. In the late
19505 the crisis was signaled by the launching of Sputnik and Soviet ad-
vances in weapons technology: a falling behind in space exploration that
warned of a loss in military domination. A decade later there was an-
other technological crisis, though of a rather different sort. The Vietnam
War, which among other things was a massive technological failure,
triggered an antitechnology movement that spawned a new humani-
ties—special programs for special interests, destruction of the classical
curriculum, abandonment of requirements and prerequisites—aimed at
cultivating identity in a new class and resisting the military-industrial
complex.
The current technological crisis emerged around 1980 when mili-
tary competition with the Soviets resurfaced at a moment of economic
failure, at a moment when we began to permanently surrender markets
to the Japanese and other countries of the Pacific Rim. Economic stag-
flation, the hostage crisis in Iran, dwindling productivity, high unem-
ployment, and a loss of national resolve all signaled that we had to do
something about education, had to develop, in the words of one com-
mentator, a "national plan of action, a kind of space shuttle program
for the knowledge systems of the future." The current technological
crisis is the launching pad from which we enter the postindustrial soci-
ety, the information age, a new and bedazzling world in which "we
must establish a knowledge industry in which knowledge itself will be
a salable commodity like food and oil. Knowledge is to become the
new wealth of nations."
Well, it has always been the wealth of nations. The desire is not so
much for knowledge as to carry forward a project of social reconstruc-
tion, a restoration of status quo ante, in which all institutions are re-
built in the image of one particular America. We are told rather often
these days that our nation is at risk, but the only risks that interest any-
one are economic and military ones. And, therefore, draconian mea-
sures are called for if we are to dominate the knowledge and military
markets of the day. We must imitate the Japanese and endorse a form
of statism in which a huge collaborative effort—in the words of the
day, "a partnership"—integrates the federal government, the major cor-
porations, and higher education in a crash course in military and eco-
294 / Salvation by Machines
nomic survival. Measures that at one time would have been seen as
radical and statist in the extreme now have conservative benediction.
As one executive of the Illinois Bell Telephone Company said, though
he said it ruefully and expectantly at the same time, "It sure sounds like
socialism." He just lacked the right vocabulary.
The technological and educational crisis is a regional as well as a
national one. Each region of the country is engaged in a bidding war to
keep and attract nomadic corporations—particularly those in high-
tech fields—and the executives who run them. The divisive regionalism
that was the major fault line of nineteenth-century politics has been re-
born, and education is an enlistee, usually a willing one, in the struggle.
The federal policy of resource distribution through the tax system has
been a success, and the old industrial states that financed the develop-
ment of the underdeveloped land of the South and Southwest are now
paying twice for their charity and beginning to strike back.
Our economic and military problems have many roots, but the one
that is increasingly singled out is the mediocrity and recalcitrance of
our schools, the lack of sufficient emphasis on science, computer sci-
ence, and theory, and the failure to sufficiently integrate education with
the corporate and government sectors. In this rendition of our troubles,
education has but one purpose: to sustain our competitive edge against
the Russians and regain it against the Japanese. The dream of an edu-
cated populace has completely faded from view and is secretly held in
contempt. Beyond a few gestures at equality, gestures aimed at keeping
the streets clear, education has no relevance to the political order, to
public life. As Jonathan Kozol has recently demonstrated once again,
education is not even any longer supposed to transmit the minimum
competence of literacy necessary for political participation. Education
is charged now with tasks such as restructuring the labor force and
providing applied research. The age of the federal grant has come to
an end; corporations are the new partners of education, but it is far
from a benevolent or disinterested patronage. The quid pro quo is a
new labor force—docile but ambitious—and a new entrepreneurial
spirit in academic research. With minor exceptions here and there, the
federal government's interest in higher education is reduced to military
research.
I believe we must maintain a healthy skepticism toward the current
diagnosis of our ills and the remedies now suggested. Our problems are
real enough and there is much that is wrong with education, but the
problems are hardly solved by hyperbole and wishful thinking. Beware

of all the participants in this game of social reconstruction: computer
companies in search of new markets, educational institutions in search
of new sources of funds, and a federal establishment whose sense of na-
tional purpose is pretty much limited to missiles and missionaries. Our
problems go deeper than this and are not amenable to an easy or short-
range solution. No one, despite the rhetoric, has an interest in the pub-
lic interest. This is the age of private good, and the conspiracy between
students, faculty, the state, and the corporate sector is to evacuate pub-
lic life, to render it invisible and unnecessary to the precise degree it in-
hibits personal success and profit. In fact, it is no longer even sensible
to speak of a public good; it is not a concept accessible to the contem-
porary imagination. All education is now education for private life or
for ignorance.
It is possible to address these questions on education and technol-
ogy with probity and prudence, to carefully assess the possibilities that
a new generation of technology offers for rebuilding the workforce,
regaining our competitive position in the world economy, eliminating
yet another missile gap, and curing the "pervasive mediocrity" of the
schools. I am going to forswear that tactic largely because of the stri-
dency and utopianism of the views being propagated by what I will call
the protechnologists: those who believe our problem is the pace of
technological development and believe reflexively that the major or
sole purpose of education is to promote that development. They are all
pursuing a scorched earth policy of the intellect, reducing all knowl-
edge and achievement to a single technical equation and defining civic
and public life solely in technological terms. For example, a special
issue of Newsweek following the 1984 presidential election was en-
tirely sponsored by Apple Inc. on behalf of its line of computers. The
first page contained a picture of a computer. On its illuminated plasma
screen was inscribed the following commercial message:
Last Tuesday
several million of you demonstrated the
principle of democracy as it applies to politics.
One person, one vote.
Throughout this magazine
we're going to demonstrate the principle
of democracy as it applies to technology.
One person, one computer.
The message has a certain comic quality given the desperate straits
of the home computer market and the demonstration that home com-
puters are worth little except to the professional writer. But it is more
the arrogance and anti-intellectualism that arrests one. Over three thou-
sand years of thought about democracy reduced to the slogan "One
person, one vote." The tricky issue of technological democracy or cul-
tural democracy reduced to "one person, one computer." This is hardly
a vision of life adequate to a free people.
We are understandably forgiving of advertising—perhaps inured to
it is a better word—and so treat the ad as so much hyperbole, on a
plane with hymns to hemorrhoids, despite the fact that it speaks to our
common life and not our private discomforts. However, the sentiments
of the ad merely express in commercial speech the deepest current of
the prevailing ideology: the rhetoric of the computational sublime, the
belief that the deepest failings in our politics and our understanding of
the world will be solved once the computer takes up its place in our
education, imagination, and social practices. Indeed, one of the canon-
ical texts of the computer movement, Edward Feigenbaum and Pamela
McCorduck's The Fifth Generation, is a long, tedious exposition of the
same faith. To wit:
In short, no plausible claim to intellectuality can possibly be made in
the near future without an intimate dependence upon this new in-
strument. Those intellectuals who persist in their indifference, not to
say snobbery, will find themselves stranded in a quaint museum of
the intellect, forced to live petulantly, and rather irrelevantly, on the
charity of those who understand the real dimensions of the revolu-
tion and can deal with the new world it will bring about.1
It is not merely the arrogance of such an argument that is offensive;
the book as a whole contains no telos, no end in view, no sense of what
this technology is supposed to achieve beyond mere survival. What is
this new world the computer will bring about? What is so desirable
about it? What aspects of a valuable way of life will it preserve? What
aspects will it extinguish? Alas, on this subject the technologists are
silent, and even the claims made on behalf of high technology and com-
puters are suspect.
Let us assess those claims particularly as they bear upon the needs
and outcomes of education. Forty years have passed and the age of the
computer is, finally, some might say, under way. This new instrument is
now making its conquest of the habits of work and imagination with
dazzling speed. The federal government, by its own estimates, will leap
during this decade from 30,000 computer systems to a million. There
are now about 325,000 computers in the schools and their deployment
grows exponentially, encouraged by generous though self-serving poli-
cies of computer manufacturers racing to secure shares of the market.
Computer camps have sprung up across the country as anxious middle-
class parents try to keep their children in the competition for declining
professional employment. Between five and seven million households
now have computers, though the numbers change so fast any estimate is
virtually useless and most of the computers serve as mere icons once the
novelty of games wears away. While the diffusion of computer technol-
ogy is much slower than that of many earlier technologies—telegraph,
telephone, television—we have now clearly passed out of the incu-
bation phase and into a period of saturation. Everyone will now be ex-
pected to have some minimal exposure to computers so that all are
comfortable with the new technology. But to what end, particularly as
regards education?
Computer education is justified by the need to create a computer-
literate workforce and to prepare people for the jobs of the future. It is
argued that such a workforce is necessary to national defense and to
improve productivity. The shortage of computer workers and knowl-
edge workers has raised the problem of computer literacy to a national
crisis. Let us leave aside for the moment the vexing fact that computer
and high-tech imports from Japan are now outstripping domestic pro-
ductivity. There is truth to the assertion that the economy requires
more computer specialists, programmers, engineers, and systems ana-
lysts, but it presents a terribly misleading picture of the actual structure
of employment opportunities.
The positive effects of computer technology on employment or on
the skills necessary for employment are minimal. Computerization elim-
inates many jobs, "deskills" or otherwise reduces the competence re-
quired in others, and leaves the majority of work absolutely unaffected.
Through automation, computerization simply eliminates many indus-
trial jobs. Jobs in computer manufacture that are not exported to cheap
labor countries—and that is by far the majority—are five-dollar-per-
hour assembly-line jobs in toxic environments. Most of the projected
7 percent growth in high-tech employment is of this kind. The fastest-
growing segment of the employment market is in low-tech service occu-
pations—waiters, janitors, kitchen help, hospital orderlies—and these
jobs require little or no education. The computer offers little realistic

hope to those abandoned by the decline of the smokestack industries.
We have been creating what has been widely described as a two-tier,
highly pyramidal labor force: a small cadre of engineers, professionals,
managers, and bureaucrats sitting atop an increasingly deskilled and
proletarianized work force.
Many jobs—those of real estate sales personnel, retail clerks, super-
market checkers, bank tellers, and travel agents—are being computer-
ized but left fundamentally unchanged. Computer education is not
going to help them because there is no sensible way in which they can
be said to be computer literate. They continue to do with computers
the same things they did without them, and, while their work is facili-
tated, they become more expendable because replacements can be so
easily trained: the skill is in the machine and not in the head. The super-
market checker dragging packages across sensing devices needs less
manual and mental skill than the old-fashioned cash register clerk.
There are a few occupations with minimal interaction with the
computer and therefore some marginal change in the occupation: draft-
ing, journalism, word processing. A few days to acquaint the worker
with the machine is all that is necessary, not formal education. But even
this change often eliminates all sorts of traditional crafts—think of
what happens in the newspaper production plant—and worsens the
work conditions of remaining occupations: the increasingly factorylike
work conditions of copy editors and word processors, for example.
Finally, we come to the aristocrats of the computer workforce:
programmers, operators, scientists, business managers, engineers. The
growth in these positions will be small—i million in the next decade
compared to the 3 million that will be lost to computers. (The signifi-
cant exception, though again it is not an occupation demanding formal
education, is the need today for service, maintenance, and repair per-
sonnel for computers.) The true mind workers of the future will be few
in numbers despite widespread fantasies of a white-coat society. There
is virtually no room at the top of the labor market pyramid given the
social relations of work in America, and high technology will be used
to preserve existing relations of power, status, and income rather than
to disturb them. We will simply go through recurring cycles in which
professional labor markets are flooded with entrants. The simple truth
is that there are far more people who wish to work in the knowledge
professions than there are spots available, and there is no easy way
around this fact except in a few cases—law and counseling may be ex-
amples—where relatively speaking the demand for services magically
rises to meet the supply of professionals. Incumbents of all the profes-
sions can be expected to continue to invent devices of closure, largely
those of credentials, to protect valued and scarce positions. And the
consequences of the difference between getting in and being kept out is
likely to grow in a way reminiscent of professional sports, where the
last player into the "big leagues" lives like a king whereas the last one
kept out cannot even practice the craft, let alone earn a decent living.
To summarize in the words of Douglas Noble: "The relative distribu-
tion of mind work, sophisticated, intellectually stimulating, and po-
tent, will undoubtedly remain at or below present levels for the next
few decades, if the masters of high technology continue to remake our
world as they have begun to."
There is, in short, hardly anything revolutionary in the effect of
computerization upon employment except to make the conditions of
work generally less satisfactory, and computer education hardly pre-
sents a challenge to education except in preparation of relatively small
numbers of mind workers in computer science. This hardly provides a
warrant for reshaping education in the image of computer literacy.
If computerization will have minimal effects on education for em-
ployment, perhaps it will place new demands and offer new oppor-
tunities for that other and most important part of our education, our
education for life as free men and women, our education as citizens.
Here the situation is more mixed. There is no doubt that the effect
of computers on government and the political process is a subject of
real interest and even congressional concern. Unfortunately, the con-
cerns are pretty much limited to two areas: government efficiency and
civil liberties. Alas, while computerization and automation displace in-
dustrial workers, they do not seem to have a similar effect on the mid-
dle class, particularly in government bureaucracies. Office efficiency
may increase by virtue of computerization, at least by measures of time
relative to output, but white-collar employment paradoxically increases
as well. Similarly, while the computer in principle endangers civil lib-
erties via the invasion of privacy (interlinked data banks, computer
matching, computer profiling), there is a strong privacy lobby in Amer-
ica that is likely to watch developments very closely. Efficiency and civil
liberties, in short, have lobbies, interests, constituencies, and watch-
dogs. Democracy does not.
There are fantasies, of course, that computers will empower people

and make citizen participation more effective, and therefore computer
literacy is seen as an important part of civic education. As the computer
scientist J. C. R. Licklider has argued:
The information revolution is bringing with it a key that may open
the door to a new era of involvement and participation. Computer
power to the people is essential to the realization of a future in
which most citizens are informed about and interested and involved
in the processes of government.... The political process would
essentially be a giant teleconference, and a campaign would be a
month-long series of communications among candidates, propa-
gandists, commentators, political action groups and voters.
It is difficult to discern the notion of democracy embedded in this
nostalgia for the future. We are being warned that we must seize com-
puter technology before the future is wrested from us—an echo of the
theme in the Apple ad I quoted earlier. But this ignores the fact that we
have a computer society, as Douglas Noble has argued, without any cit-
izen participation in its construction or ratification up to now. It has
been accomplished by fiat, by the designs and interests of the few, and
it is mere silliness to suggest that if we educate people in computers an
impotent citizenry will suddenly be empowered. Real control of the
new technology is vested outside the political process and there it will
firmly remain. No matter how computer literate the population, citizen
decisions in this area will be postpolitical: shall we use FORTRAN or
Pascal? This is simply another example of how politics has been taken
out of politics. To be a citizen in this kind of computer society one does
not need either a basic or an advanced education in computer literacy.
Indeed, it is questionable whether one needs or can benefit from an ed-
ucation at all. Jefferson's vision of a free and independent citizenry
based upon education is irrelevant to a world in which all a citizen does
is to ratify decisions already made by a small cadre of elites. Indeed, as
I will suggest again later, engineers are among the best-educated and
most talented members of the society, particularly in the area of com-
puters, but they are also the most apolitical except on those issues that
affect them as workers, as professionals. In short, if we are thinking of
saving education for democracy, for a life of citizenship, computer tech-
nology will not advance that salvation one whit given the conceptions
of politics and education that currently rule in technological circles.
We ought by now to be disabused of the notion, implicit in much
contemporary rhetoric, that technological progress leads to political

progress or that technology by itself can enhance politics. While watch-
ing the dispirited and dispiriting debates of recent years, one could not
help but recall the Lincoln-Douglas debate of more than 125 years ago.
Even if we allow for the circus and carnival atmosphere of those de-
bates, one cannot help but be impressed by the large crowds, often fif-
teen to twenty thousand, that assembled under the hot Illinois sun or
the cold and damp of a prairie rain; that came in on foot, wagon, and
railroad car to unlikely places like Ottawa and Charleston and Gales-
burg; that listened for three hours to sustained debate on the most im-
portant questions of politics of the day—slavery, abolition, the Dred
Scott decision, westward expansion; that frequently interjected their
own views (from the Ottawa transcript: "A Hibernian—Give us some-
thing besides Dred Scott"). One cannot argue that the curve of demo-
cratic process and participation has been steadily upward as it has been
technologically augmented. The technology of the foot, the horse, and
the megaphone offered as many and probably more genuine opportu-
nities for democratic participation than are afforded by advanced com-
puter systems despite the illusions of empowerment contained in the
keyboards, the plasma screens, and the imagined town meetings of "in-
teractive systems."
The purpose of modern technology is not to reconstruct democ-
racy. From the outset it is designed to exercise more effective control
over the population. Therefore, it should not surprise us that the cur-
rent movement to save education with a new generation of technology
is also a sustained attack upon democracy and democratic institutions.
It is no accident that our failings are located these days in the masses of
people rather than in our elites, in public education rather than private,
in the overpaid and inefficient American worker, in the technophobia
of the ordinary citizen, in the absence of Japanese habits among our
workers, or in the scientific illiteracy of ordinary people. This analysis
conveniently displaces commentary from the elites who run our institu-
tions. For example, the much maligned American worker is blamed for
declining productivity and the high cost of American products. This is
the same worker who was paid the highest wages in the world from
1865 to 1975 and was able to maintain productive dominance through
the proper mechanization and organization of work.
In the analysis of declining productivity far less attention is paid to
the effect on the economy of thirty thousand firms that are the prime
contractors of the Department of Defense and therefore work in mar-

kets protected from competitive pressures, which allows such firms to
make profits without worrying about the bottom line. Similarly, it may
be argued that American industry is losing ground because American
managers have lost their knack at productivity. They prefer financial
manipulation such as leveraged buyouts and greenmail to actually man-
aging. More time and energy go into buyouts, takeovers, golden para-
chutes, and other techniques of piracy and protection than go into
investing in new products and processes, improving quality, training
and retraining workers, and engaging in research and development.
I am not then making a simple antitechnological argument. It is
simply that our problems go much deeper than technology and, there-
fore, cannot be remedied by a technological fix. The problems of our
schools, our politics, our economy are rooted in our culture, in the
flawed operation of our institutions, in the patterns of our motivation,
and in the ugliness of our social relations. These things cannot be fixed,
though they may be temporarily patched, by automating the office, by
displacing the waning capacity of traditional literacy with competence
on new machines, or by investing all our scarce energies in research and
development. Social reconstruction is necessary, but it will scarcely
help to rebuild everything that has failed us of late and to discard like
wastrels and drunkards all the values, including the democratic ones,
that have given us civility, productivity, and common concern.
The search for a "fifth generation" is driven not only by military
competition with the Soviet Union and economic competition with the
Japanese but also by a survivalist mentality. The outward gaiety of yup-
pie culture and the frenetic activity of a consumer culture mask the fact
that our only goal at the moment is to survive. Beyond that we have
nothing in view. But can a people live with no other end in view but
survival? We are evacuating all our political and cultural traditions and
becoming mere reaction formations to our competitors. The public is
now constantly assaulted with a survivalist rhetoric. We have, it ap-
pears, but two options before us. We can become, or so it is hoped, a
high-tech, high-power, highly concentrated defense state with high un-
employment and a large and growing unemployed, unprotected, unem-
ployable class. Or we can sink into a weak, agrarian, dominated, de-
pendent economy, an imperialism in which we are the colonial outpost.
The public is kept frightened and agitated by the doom and gloom pre-
dictions of what will happen unless the plans of the corporate sector
are implemented. But note what no one is saying: this crisis, our prob-
lem, might provide the basis for a more humane, stable, cooperative
economic order. Where are you, Peter Kropotkin, now that we once
again need you?
One must be wary of the crisis mentality and agitation in its name.
It is the oldest ruse of the propagandist. It not only renders the public
quiescent, credulous, and accepting, it is also self-serving for those who
want to deal with our problems by reconstructing society in the image
of the corporation and the computer. In the words of Atari's chief sci-
entist, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." But the re-
mark of one of the popularizers of the computer literacy movement is
more to the point: "The real measure of a revolution is not its casualty
count but its effect on the survivors."
The problems of the American economy and of education derive
from matters of motivation and the character of American elites rather
than from the direct malfunctioning of democratic institutions. We
have highly trained, technically adept but malfunctioning elites: engi-
neers, businesspeople, professors, and scientists. I don't wish to casu-
ally malign these already-maligned groups. Richard Hofstadter once
suggested that nineteenth-century business publications struck a con-
sistent theme of the equation of the march of civilization with the
growth of commerce, and they did this without a trace of cynicism.
One might make a similar argument about engineers and engineering
as the one-time bearers of a civilization and not merely a specialty
group. Both these groups showed an interest in art, politics, and culti-
vation with a general advance of learning that was not disconnected
from but embedded in their professions and ways of life. As Hofstadter
says, quoting a commercial journal, commerce was a profession "em-
bracing and requiring more varied knowledge and general information
of the . . . history, political complexion, laws, languages, and customs,
of the world than is necessary in any other." Commerce, like engineer-
ing, justified itself by reference to values and attitudes of general learn-
ing and high moral purpose that originated outside its domain. To
serve business or engineering was to serve God, character, and culture.
Hofstadter concludes:
What is essential here is that the role of the merchant was justified not
solely on the ground that he is materially useful, not even on the honor
and probity with which he pursues his vocation but also because he is
an agent of a more general culture that lies outside business itself.
But this vision has gone sour and so has the education that sup-
ports it. American business and engineering, once defended on the
ground that they produced a high standard of culture, are now de-
fended solely on the ground that they produce a high standard of living
(or a high standard of defense). The same can now be said of professors
and scientists.
In today's survivalist culture, the standard of living is the only mo-
tivational prop left among us. Men and women may not live by bread
alone, but in fact that is about all they have to live by. Under the cir-
cumstances, only two options present themselves: to live and act self-
ishly and hedonistically without regard for the commonweal, or to
reduce the purpose of public life to occupational and personal psy-
choses—wealth, efficiency, power, standard of living—without any
sense of what these things are good for or aimed at. The entire society
is converted into a meritocracy and a technocracy, and the public is
agitated and frightened of the dire consequences said to follow if we do
not accept the prescriptions of the experts.
The problem with our elites is that matters of duty and obligation
are merely professional. The criterion for membership in this particular
club is mere success in the climb, the morally neutral ability to perform.
This is the major reason that American government, the American
economy, American institutions generally have not been a success in re-
cent years. Professional elites once reasonably united by a common de-
finition of the purposes of civic life are now fragmented into competing
citadels, and many have shifted their concerns away from the intellec-
tual and moral content of civic life. The commitment to technical, spe-
cialist, meritocratic education has created a double bind: it has divorced
our elites from civic purpose and cultural leadership, and it has made
their interest in civic life solely one of privilege and ritual.
One small example. The best-trained and in many ways intellectu-
ally most competent among our elites are the engineers. Nonetheless, a
Louis Harris poll for Spectrum, the journal of the International Associ-
ation of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, reported that the nuclear
arms issue is far too large and complex an issue for the IAEEE mem-
bership. One respondent commented:
The idea that a group of international electrical and electronics engi-
neers could have the background, the access to pertinent data, and
the familiarity with the track record of the Soviet Union and its lead-
ership to make meaningful inputs to a serious national-security ques-
tion such as posed in your opinion solicitation is not only puerile but
truly leans to the realm of agitation and political rhetoric. We have
no business interfering where we have no competence.
It is remarkable to hear participation in the most important political
question of our time described as "interfering." But if our highest
trained elites are not going to interfere—read participate—who is
going to? The answer is depressingly obvious.
The issue is not merely the irresponsibility of our elites—their tech-
nocratic and meritocratic nature, their divorce from public life and
the commonweal in any role other than that of "experts," their over-
weening commitment to wealth and success—but the peculiar kind of
educational crisis such elites create and represent. The mediocrity of
our schools—insofar as they are mediocre—stems less from a lag in sci-
ence and technology than from a lag in motivation. What we have in
education, as in the society, is a motivation crisis rather than a techno-
logical crisis.
The oldest lesson of capitalism is that for the system to work it
must be sanctified. Capitalism carries with it no exogenous purpose; its
sole motivation is endogenous—the pursuit of pleasure or utility or
individual desire. In a well-known phrase, the spirit of capitalism was
sanctified by the Protestant work ethic, at least historically. In a more
secular age it must import a social purpose, for it contains nothing
within its own resources beyond the search for wealth and personal
success, or in our own time competition with the Russians and the
Japanese. But such purposes will not take us very far for very long.
They are simply too mean and vulgar and dispiriting to get us through
anything but a crisis. They cannot supply the motivational energy to
sustain the steady work any civilization must have if it is to adequately
reproduce itself. What we ought to be truly concerned about these days
is not our technological lag but the alarming increase in adolescent sui-
cides and the drop in the proportion of young people going on to col-
lege, both phenomena particularly marked among the most able young
males. Here motivational problems become personal disaster as well as
social waste.
But why after all should anyone go to college? There is no longer a
civic or ennobling reason to do so, and personal ambition is the only
motivation once the professions are divorced from civic enterprise.
And here the schools are as much a part of the problem as are the elites
who pass on their own self-serving and narrowed motivations to their
children. Where in college or anywhere else in the society can one learn
about or gain connection to the civic life?
We have in recent years attempted to send everyone on to both sec-
ondary and higher education. This noble ambition is driven partly by
the value of equality and partly by the economy. We subsidized new ed-
ucation for all because we believe education connects people to pro-
ductive employment and the subsidy comes back through the tax sys-
tem and through the heightened appetites of middle-class consumption
that drive the economy forward. It is now clear that we are not going to
recover the subsidy through the tax system, and the virtues of increased
consumption are rather in doubt. But we do need a restoration of civic
life through a system of universal public service. This service should fall
on students in public and private schools alike, for both receive the
subsidy, which is likely to increase through tax credits: one year of ser-
vice for those who attend high school; two years for those who attend
a public college; three years for those who attend a private college. The
mechanics are not as important as the principle: universal, nonvolun-
tary public service is the return we expect on education. Such service
will not only serve to keep the young off the streets and out of the em-
ployment market—an unfortunate purpose of current education—it
will also get accomplished some much-needed work that cannot be
financed at the moment through the market or through the tax system.
It will most of all give people some connection at some time in their
lives with civic purpose; it will recreate at least one role from the cata-
log of public roles of Greek democracy when all we have left is jury
duty. Civis romanus sum. I am a Roman citizen. The phrase makes no
sense in a purposeless, hedonistic world. Public service, not technology,
is the end goal of education, and so we might as well link it from the
outset.
The restoration of civic purpose and ennobling motivation remains
the great objective of education in a democracy. In our democracy,
where participation is defined by declining rates of ritualistic voting,
we do not at the moment need the educational apparatus. We need
good technical education for a relatively small number of people. Most
of our occupations do not require the educational credentials placed
upon them. But we need education for a real and thorough cultural lit-
eracy and a real and thorough public purpose. Plans to save education
via technology reveal a deep and pervasive nostalgia for the future: a
desire to escape and outrun our problems by the simple turning of the
wheel of technological progress. But the only thing that will save edu-
cation and the rest of society—if it is to be saved—is to restore to it
some purpose inherent in the many meanings of democracy. Alas, at
the moment democracy does not have a constituency or a technology.
But let us not spit on our luck.
Note
1. Edward A. Feigenbaum and Pamela McCorduck, The Fifth Generation (Read-
ing, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1983).
Afterword / The Culture in Question
James W. Carey
It is a country no one
can understand. And nothing
is more attractive ... than an
indecipherable mystery.
Mario Vargas Llosa, Death in the Andes
Yet even after forty years,

after fifty transatlantic
crossings, after uncountable
transcontinental journeys, the
sense of the American mystery
remains strong with me.
John Keegan, Fields of Battle: The Wars for North America
The essays in this volume are explorations in the culture and communi-
cations of the United States in the last third of the twentieth century.
This country remains, as Vargas says of Peru and as we perhaps can say
of all the Creole nations of the "new world," an indecipherable mys-
tery. Still, in a place where ambition always seems to outrun ability, the
unfulfilled aim of the work, collectively considered, is the same one
that John Updike noted in speaking of novels he admires: they "give us,
through the consciousness of character, a geography amplified by his-
tory, a chunk of the planet." Journalism and media are devices through
which to say something about character and culture in late-twentieth-
century America for the simple reason that they are sites, among others,
308
Afterword: The Culture in Question I 309
where character is formed and expressed and the contest over culture is
played out.
The essays proceed from a number of underlying beliefs, some of
which have drawn the attention of my collaborators. Now is the time
to excavate some of those beliefs, to let a cat or two out of the bag con-
cerning some of the subjects threaded throughout the essays: culture,
ritual, technology, the postmodern, and journalism.
Culture
These essays were written within the general intellectual movement of
"cultural studies" but represent an increasingly strange brand of that
increasingly discordant project. Let us trademark the version of cul-
tural studies represented here, if only to provide a club with which its
opponents can beat it. Let us call it "ethnocentric," meaning that the
object of study is not culture in general but the cultures of particular
national formations, in this case that absorbingly strange formation,
American culture.1
In the introduction to her remarkable Terrible Honesty: Mongrel
Manhattan in the 19205, Ann Douglas admits that she is "by trade and
calling an Americanist," and she believes,
contrary to much current academic opinion, that America is a special
case in the development of the West.... From the start the nation
has had a tangible and unique mission concocted of unlimited nat-
ural resources, theological obsessions, a multiracial and polyglot
population and unparalleled incentives and opportunities for democ-
ratization and pluralism that culminated in the early modern era in
the development of the media. These media have for seventy odd
years now provided much of the world, for good or bad, with its
common language.2
I agree with those conclusions, particularly the last part regarding the
media, but I would inflect them in a somewhat different manner.
Professor Douglas's outlook is often described as American excep-
tionalism. From the standpoint of cultural studies, however, every na-
tion is exceptional, a special case, in the sense that it can be understood
only in relation to its particular history and geography. That is not to
suggest that nations are to be understood solely in their singularity, but
merely that attempts to find large-scale generalizations about society
and culture have proven a failure except when conducted by compar-
310 / Afterword: The Culture in Question
isons, implicit or explicit, with other national societies. Many nations

are special cases in the development of the West (or the East, for that
matter). All the nations of the Americas have had their existence shaped
as outlier societies, on the margins of the West, but each has been
uniquely shaped. Differences among them are never more compelling
than when they seem to the outsider and casual observer to be identical.
Exceptionalism, American or otherwise, then, is the common rather
than unusual condition of nations. Differences in any country are only
known and understood, in both intellectual work and common sense,
as exceptions to some other, presumably more widespread, pattern.
The United States is exceptional relative to the West and to other out-
lier societies of the Western margin. This is hardly a matter of national
pride. What most often seem exceptional about the United States are
not the characteristics Professor Douglas cites—natural resources, the-
ology, democratization, and so on (as important as these are)—but, for
example, the rather darker phenomena of crime, violence, child abuse,
a congenital innocence, the particular and more often than not tragic
situation of African-Americans, the political disorganization of the
American working class. This is a nation in which the membrane of
civilization is especially thin, despite the rarity of explicitly political vi-
olence. In fact, one of the perverse aspects of American exceptionalism
is that the inordinate rates of crime and violence among us are best seen
as the form civil war takes in a society of hyperindividualism where the
bonds of community and group life are powerfully attenuated.
As a methodological injunction, then, exceptionalism is not a bless-
ing extended over a people but an attempt to recognize its distinctive
characteristics in order to speak its distinctive language and deal with
its distinctive problems. What gives rise to the exceptionally attractive
in a people gives rise as well to what is exceptionally hideous or, at
least, powerfully disturbing. Does anyone really understand, to take
one seemingly innocuous example, why Americans start forty times as
many fires per capita as do the Japanese? Why New York City alone
has more fires each year than Japan, where 12.0 million people live in
tightly packed wood houses with paper walls and reed-covered floors?
Something more is at work than the combustibility of the environment.
This uniqueness of the United States, a uniqueness both common
and relative, has long been recognized. Marx, in a paragraph I never
tire of citing, observed:
North Americans belong ... to a country where bourgeois society did

not develop on the foundation of the feudal system, but rather devel-
oped from itself; where this society appears not as the surviving result
of a centuries-old movement, but rather as the starting point of a new
movement; where the state, in contrast to all earlier national forma-
tions, was from the beginning subordinate to bourgeois society, to its
production and never could make the pretense of being an end-in-
itself; where, finally, bourgeois society itself, linking up the productive
forces of an old world with the enormous natural terrain of a new one,
has developed hitherto unheard-of dimensions and with unheard-of
freedom of movement, has far outstripped all previous work in the
conquest of the forces of nature, and where, finally even the anti-
theses of bourgeois society itself appear only at vanishing moments.3
In the Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx similarly remarks on one of the
most contested terrains of cultural studies, particularly in America, that
of religion: "The feverish youthful movement of material production,
which has to make a new world of its own, has left neither time nor
opportunity for abolishing the old spirit world."4 Marx expected this
spirit world to disappear in the United States, yet at the end of the
twentieth century, fueled by millennial impulse to be sure, the spirit
world still grips Americans and religion continues to shape the culture
in deep and surprising ways, in ways that make it unique among the in-
dustrial democracies, as any tour through cable television channels will
attest. Even our forms of disbelief are peculiarly our own. Our disbeliefs
mirror and extend the very impulses they otherwise reject.
The natural home of cultural studies, at least within "developed
cultures," is the nation-state. It is an exercise, to use the language of
Stuart Adam, in understanding how it is that given cultures know,
judge, and make their world. There is no attempt here to deny the im-
portance of transnational and diasporic sites of culture, only to suggest
that such sites are understood relative to the sovereign states that pro-
duce, enable, inhibit, warp, or merely tolerate such formations.
Despite the easy talk about globalization and global culture, to
which I will return, that remains true today. While much commerce is
hypermobile and information and capital are moved over vast dis-
tances at blinding speeds by fax and modem, far outpacing the capacity
of nations to regulate corporations, such organizations still rely on
legal, financial, and other services that are part of a geographically sit-
uated infrastructure and cluster in cities within nations. The continued
importance of national currencies alone, as the European Union dis-
covers—even though such currencies are freely converted and traded—

is enough to restrain the vision of globalization. The global in fact is
not out there; it is embedded in national regimes, even though such
regimes now stand in differing relations to one another. Corporations,
even global ones, come and go, disappearing when their power to com-
mand a market evaporates, or when they fail to control costs or keep
pace with technological change. Nations, however, do not fail in the
same way corporations fail. Except in special and especially important
circumstances, they are not "merged" into other nations or subdivided
into constituent parts.5 As Paul Krugman puts it, nations "may be
happy or unhappy with their economic performance but they have no
well-defined bottom line."6
Nations only go bankrupt in a metaphorical sense; their creation
and destruction is attributable to something more than economic fac-
tors. Indeed, despite all the forces seeking to transcend the nation,
today nations remain the sturdiest of collectivities and nationalism the
most rampant ideology. The evidence for this lies in the relationship be-
tween the centers and margins of social formations. The most powerful
centers are national ones and the critical margins are, simultaneously,
external borders, the ambiguous geographic points at which nations
meet, and internal borders, where lines are drawn between those who
do and those who do not belong to the nation. Both are points at which
national identity threatens to evaporate.
As long as national borders, internal or external, define the critical
margins in the minds of most people and nations retain the monopoly on
legitimate coercion and violence, national consciousness will continue
to be deeper and more powerful than class consciousness and nations
more solid and enduring realities than classes or other subnational for-
mations. Furthermore, a nation is a cultural rather than an ideological
prototype; its character is the outcome of history and culture, including
the history and culture of its economy, rather than of ideology.7
The principal power among men and women, like it or not, is still
nationalism. As early as the late Middle Ages this began to displace re-
ligion as the strongest bond of community among large numbers of
people, as Benedict Anderson has emphasized.8 Carolyn Marvin's re-
markable recent work has shown how nations continue to possess a
religious character and are formed, maintained, and repaired through
ritual, particularly rituals of blood sacrifice and atonement.9 Nations
are not merely textual communities, Anderson's useful insights notwith-
standing, but are embodied in their citizens or subjects and the sacrifices
they are periodically called upon to make, in body and imagination, to
the gods of the nation.
All this makes cultures even more psychologically recalcitrant than
individuals; generation after generation, instead of year after year, they
display the same traits. However much these traits may be reshaped,
adapted, and newly proportioned, they are, relatively speaking, intran-
sigent. A central character in many cultures, the trickster, can stand as
an archetype of the cultural process, for the trickster represents the per-
sistent, recurrent, and contradictory impulses of a people. Thernadier
in Les Miserables, to choose only the most accessible representative of
the trickster, continually reappears, always an optical illusion it takes
us a moment to recognize. While the guise is always different, the char-
acter—ambitions, motivations, moods, and desires—is always the same
and serves to both mock and highlight the more serious and preten-
tiously resolute character types in the culture. Despite the fact that trick-
sters embody antisocial attitudes, despite the fact that they are often on
the side of the irrational and evil, audiences are asked to identify with
them. The trickster provides an example, in a way both significant and
frightening, of the process by which, in Stuart Adam's words, the broad,
rich community-forming meanings of culture are embedded in and im-
plicitly opposed to the narrower identities of race, gender, and class.
I am making yet another form of a Weberian argument. Weber sug-
gested that history operates to determine the future of a nation the way
a game, like craps, in which the dice become loaded, does. According
to Weber, by conceiving a nation's history starting as a game in which
the dice are not biased at the outset, but then become "loaded" in the
direction of each past outcome, one has an analogue of the way in
which culture is formed. Each time the dice come up with a given num-
ber, the probability of rolling that number again increases. Or, to shift
the metaphor slightly, history is recursive, a feedback loop that alters
the probability of action over time. History changes the odds and over-
determines outcomes.10
Ritual
One of the consistent themes of these essays, somewhat less apparent
here than in Communication as Culture, is the contrast between ritual
and transmission views of communication.11 This is not the place to
fully develop that contrast, but rather to underscore a number of em-

phases it contains. To begin from ritual is to situate the inquiry, as John
Pauly points out, in a world of contingency, doubt, and chaos. Chaos is
always at the edge of all of our imaginings; indeed, chaos is the object
of our imaginings. The flash point of our imagination is the hidden
edge of dirt and dissolution, the borders, margins, and liminal spaces
where dissolution most acutely threatens to break through. Culture is
the ensemble of practices through which order is imposed on chaos.
These practices constitute communication in the first instance, for ritual
creates the forms of social relations into which people enter as opposed
to the processes occurring within those forms.12 As Pauly says, we dream
the forms of social order as we enact them in the practice of commu-
nication. When Erving Goffman notes that "the world in truth is a
wedding," he casually throws away a truth in the form of apothegm.13
Ritual, in its primordial sense, is the principal means, though it is more
than a means, through which chaos is controlled and order imposed on
the disparate and contingent impulses of human action. The most em-
bodied form of culture is in ritual, for, as Carolyn Marvin says else-
where, ritual constructs cosmos out of chaos, a fact no less true because
it embraces both ontogeny and phylogeny.
The emphasis on ritual also forces one to begin the analysis of
communication not with technological forms of transmission, on which
more later, but to privilege the oral formation of culture and its sec-
ondary displacement in mass-mediated forms. I use conversation as
what one might call a secondary metaphor for this process for both de-
scriptive and normative reasons. To say that communication begins in
ritual is to say it begins in conversation in the sense that it is embodied.
Conversation requires the actual presence of bodies. To speak is to
"outer" the self in an utterance, to paraphrase a line of Marshall
McLuhan. It is to enter a social relation activating and displaying all
the capacities of the body. In ritual and conversation signs have intrin-
sic agency; they are fiduciary symbols: meanings we acquire not by ex-
amining dictionaries but by embodying and acting out the claims sym-
bols have on us. The body contains not only speech but also memory,
for the primitive form of memory is in act and gesture.14 The oral and
conversational then displays the body in its full apprehensive range; it
utilizes not only sound but also sight, touch, and smell, not only the
aural but also the visual and gestural. It is this simultaneity of presence,
embodied language, and memory that McLuhan abbreviated in the
synesthesia of the senses produced by conversation and oral communi-

cation. It is a mode of the immediately present available in all the sen-
sory channels.
All ritual begins, then, to use John Pauly's apt phrase, in the gridless
ambience of conversation. Such ritual, of course, can be displaced (ab-
breviated, transformed, resituated) in secondary, mediated forms. How-
ever, these forms—the printing press, television, the Internet—do not
so much create communities as remind us of communities elsewhere
embodied in first-order ritual and conversation.15
I privilege the oral over the technologically mediated for normative
as well as descriptive reasons. While I will mention some of the reasons
for doing so later on, here I want to underscore the point made by John
Pauly. Communication understood as a metaphor of ritual and conver-
sation encourages, even requires, a primitive form of equality because
conversation must leave room for response as a condition of its contin-
uance. Conversation enforces a recognition of others in the fullness of
their presence. In conversation we must deal with the full weight of
words for they put not only our minds but also our bodies in play and
at risk. Therefore, to speak conversationally is not only to invite and
require a response, but to temper of necessity our criticisms and alien-
ations, our objections and differences, with expressions, implicit and
explicit, of solidarity and mutual regard. For Dewey communication
was a principle of ethics, not merely a form of action, for it was the
condition of human learning and, therefore, the condition of survival
and prosperity. Whatever inhibits and prevents communication dimin-
ishes the vitality of culture, the reach of experience, and the capacity
for growth.
The most frequent criticism of this view (though criticism is too
mild a word) is that it is hopelessly naive and ignores the facts of con-
flict and power. All I can say to that is the obvious: the emphasis on rit-
ual, the oral tradition, and culture does not exclude issues of power and
conflict; instead it attempts to locate them. All societies are riddled by
antinomies and contradictions: ecological, structural, and cultural.
They are riddled as well by differentials of class, status, and power that
are as ineradicable as the biological programming and cultural re-
sources on which they are based. The trick is to locate the mechanisms
by which differentials of power and intractable conflict are buried, de-
flected, resolved, exercised, and aggregated into interests. Contests over
culture are the stuff of everyday life precisely because there is fre-
quently (not always) some game that is worth the candle: something
worth contesting over. And more is at stake in these conflicts than eco-
nomic interests; it is a prejudice of the vanguard class that aesthetic
moral and political motivations are inconsequential. Ritual, in the first
instance, is a form of contest, and all social conflict takes a ritualized
form. Perhaps rituals of excommunication are the most fundamental of
social forms and no one is quite so excommunicated as at the end of a
rope. Executions are highly ritualized acts, and it is neither in confu-
sion nor in malice that medical examiners list the cause of death fol-
lowing capital punishment as homicide. Homicide describes the ulti-
mate ritual act the state takes against one of its citizens.
Technology
Technology plays an inordinately powerful and shaping role in all soci-
eties, for it is not only, as Carolyn Marvin implies, a group of purpose-
ful instruments but also a "thing to think with": things that shape the
self and the mind rather than merely serve as instruments of action.
Technology is highly differentiated—that is, identifiably disengaged and
objectified—in all industrial societies, but it occupies a peculiar place in
the life of North Americans. Technology, for us, is more than an as-
sortment of artifacts or practices, a means to accomplish desired ends.
Technology is also the central character and actor in our social drama,
an end as well as a means. In fact, technology plays the role of the trick-
ster in American culture: at each turn of the historical cycle it appears
center stage, in a different guise promising something totally new.
While tricksters are usually human, in traditional societies they also
can be animals or have animal companions. In our environment, shel-
tered as it is from the world of nature, technologies can appear as trick-
sters or companions of tricksters in the stories and rituals we tell our-
selves about ourselves. Like the "primitive" trickster, technology is
often on the side of irrationality and evil, but its victims are not to be
pitied, just treated as the necessary by-products of technological change.
While trickster stories are told to amuse, the audience usually identifies
with the trickster and thus symbolically asserts itself over the forces of
the world. While tricksters can be killed, they always come back to life.
And, while they display negative qualities like stupidity and preten-
tiousness and duplicity, they are nonetheless able to vanquish oppo-
nents. As the trickster, technology is the "load" in the dice of American
culture, for at each turn of the historical cycle newly reincarnated tech-
nologies yield and reveal recurrent patterns of consequence and desire.
There are good reasons why this is true. Western technical achieve-
ment has shaped a civilization different from any previous one, and
North Americans are the most advanced in that achievement. Again,
"advanced" is not said with pride but in resignation, a testimony to
fate. For that technical achievement has not merely shaped the exter-
nals of the society but it "molds us in what we are not only at the heart
of our animality, in the propagation and continuance of our species,
but in our actions and thoughts and in our imaginings. Its pursuit has
become our dominant activity and that dominance fashions both the
public and private realms."16
We are a people who have no history (truly our own) from before
the age of progress. Our creedal history is a technical one: a people
freed from the constraints of Europe so that the machine could master
a presumably vacant continent, so that the machine could make history
with us as both master and servant. Wedded to a deep identification
with both science and religion, technology is the center of civic life, the
one unquestioned good, before which we both worship in awe and col-
lapse in fear. Our national storytelling is, to an unusual extent, embed-
ded in the history of technology.
This attitude toward technology is not unknown in most other in-
dustrial nations, but it has particularly taken root in the United States.
Technology, as a character in the American social drama, acts as a
higher authority adjudicating claims of both truth and morality. Or, as
I have said elsewhere, in America it is the machines that possess teleo-
logical insight. This is more than technological determinism, the belief
that the machines make history; technology plays rather more the role
of a superlegislator with a dominating voice in the conversation of the
culture.
Technology, then, ought not be conceived as a force outside cul-
ture, something lying about in the bosom of nature that we just happen
to discover, but as intrinsically cultural in a number of distinct senses.
First, technology is a creation of human practice and ingenuity. It em-
bodies concrete lifeways and therefore anticipates and constructs forms
of life rather than passively mirroring them. In this sense technology is
a symbol of (it represents how the world works) and a symbol for (it
coerces the world into behaving in terms of the representations embed-
ded in the technology). Second, once it is constituted, technology must
be propitiated. In his The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Camp-

bell compares the modern dilemma with that of "primitive" peoples:
For the primitive hunting peoples of those remotest human millen-
niums when the sabertooth tiger, the mammoth and the lesser pres-
ences of the animal kingdom were the primary manifestations of
what was alien—the source at once of danger and of sustenance—
the great human problem was to become linked psychologically to
the task of sharing the wilderness with these beings. An unconscious
identification took place, and this was finally rendered conscious in
the half human, half animal figures of the totem-ancestors....
Through acts of literal imitation . . . an effective annihilation of
the human ego was accomplished and society achieved a cohesive
organization.17
We are not spared, even in an age of advanced technology, the need
to annihilate the ego, to merge into our environment. To twist some un-
likely lines of Marshall McLuhan, if people in earlier ages quelled their
terror by putting on animal strait]ackets, we unconsciously do the same
thing vis-a-vis the machine.18 As humans ritually and psychologically
got into animal skins, so we have already gone much of the distance
toward assuming and propagating the behavior mechanisms of the
machines that both sustain and menace us. Kenneth Burke observed
during a New York electrical blackout that if it continued for long, hu-
mans would pray for electricity as others still pray for rain. And, in
moments of massive technological breakdowns, such as the Challenger
explosion, there is always a predictable search for human error. How
can the machines, on which we have staked so much of our lives, fail us?
The rituals of theory are themselves ways of propitiating technol-
ogy. If human imagination operates mainly by a process of analogy, a
"seeing-as" comprehension of the less intelligible by the more (the uni-
verse is a hogan, the world a wedding), the main analogy of modern
thought is technology. We first build machines and then use them as
models for understanding human nature and conduct, as when the
brain and mind are comprehended as a computer. This is particularly
true with the human body, which is no longer seen as an expression of
divine purposes or the residence of the soul but as a scientific field and
a Utopian fantasy. By analogy, the body has been understood as a par-
ticular kind of machine. This understanding is not merely a symbol or
metaphor of the body but a symbol and metaphor for the body. The ef-
fort to harness the "human motor" has transformed our understanding

of work, society, and modernity itself. As Anson Rabinbach, on whom
I rely for these notions, argues in The Human Motor, the motorized
view of the body gave rise to a particular scientific Utopia: the vision of
society without fatigue, arrest, or wearing out. Alas, despite this under-
standing we continue to run into our biological limits and our bodies
consistently disappoint us, and we seek, therefore, in technology an an-
tidote to our anxiety of limits.19
To view technology as thoroughly cultural is an attempt to escape,
rather than reproduce, the endless and unproductive arguments sur-
rounding technological determinism. From a cultural viewpoint, tech-
nological artifacts are understood, at least in a provisional and hypo-
thetical way, as homunculi: concrete embodiments of human purposes,
social relations and forms of organization. Certain technologies imagi-
natively constitute, express, and compress into themselves the dominant
features of the surrounding social world. A homunculus is a society
writ small. It is also a human person writ small insofar as it serves not
merely as a template for producing social relations but as a template
for producing human nature as well.
This is not a question of determination or causality, at least in any
normal sense. There is no suggestion that the printing press or the com-
puter, for example, determines the essential feature of society or human
nature. But such technologies do not, as Raymond Williams's rewriting
of the notion of determination suggests, merely set limits or create pres-
sures.20 When technology functions as a master symbol, it operates not
as an external and causal force but as a blueprint: something that
makes phenomena intelligible and through that intelligibility sets the
conditions for their secondary reproduction. Once adopted as fact and
symbol, as a model of and instrument for, technology works its inde-
pendent will not by virtue of its causality but by virtue of its intelligi-
bility or textuality: its ability to realize an aesthetically pleasing, politi-
cally useful, socially powerful order of things.
For Durkheim the totem served as a homunculus; for Marx it was
the commodity. My argument is that for the modern period, technol-
ogy as a gross complex (mechanics, electronics) or particular artifacts
(printing press, computer) better suits the purpose of analysis. But it
must be technology seen less as a physical contrivance and more as a
cultural performance: more on the model of a theater that contains and
shapes our interactions than a natural force acting upon us from the
outside. David Bolter catches something of that cultural performance
in his notion of a defining technology:
A defining technology develops links, metaphorically or otherwise,
with a culture's science, philosophy, or literature; it is always avail-
able to serve as a metaphor, example, model or symbol. A defining
technology resembles a magnifying glass, which collects and focuses
seemingly disparate ideas in a culture into one bright, sometimes
piercing ray. Technology does not call forth major cultural changes
by itself, but it does bring ideas into a new focus by explaining or
exemplifying them in new ways to large audiences.21
Henry Adams's image of the dynamo, a condensation symbol of
a whole array of power technologies, served as a homunculus for the
late nineteenth century. Power technology effected the very displace-
ments—the removal of time, place, and vision—that laid the ground-
work for the creation of commodities. But information technology, first
with the telegraph's separation of transportation and communication,
had already begun its displacement of power technology as the ho-
munculus for industrial civilization at the moment Marx was writing
his acid hymn to commodities. A century later, Norbert Wiener could
declaim in Cybernetics that the principal problem of engineering was
not the conversion of energy into power but the economy of a signal,
for he recognized that power machines were no longer agents of their
own, subject only to direct human intervention.22 Power machines now
had to submit to the hegemony of information machines that coordi-
nated their effects. As David Bolter says:
As a calculating machine, a machine that controls machines, the
computer does occupy a special place in our cultural landscape. It is
the technology that more than any other defines our age. . . . For us
today, the computer constantly threatens to break out of the tiny
corner of human affairs (scientific measurement and business ac-
counting) that it was built to occupy, to contribute instead to a gen-
eral redefinition of certain basic relationships: the relation of science
to technology, [of] knowledge to technical power, and, in the broad-
est sense, of mankind to the world of nature.23
None of this contradicts what I said earlier concerning nations and
nationalism. Technology comes to stand for the nation in North Amer-
ica; it is one of the dominant ways in which the very idea of freedom,
the God-term among us, is embodied in material artifacts and played
out on a dramatic stage. For us technology is, in Tocqueville's words,

"the hidden source of energy, the life principle," the ultimate current
running below the surface of our lives. The symbolic and geographic
space of the national genius is the reach of its technology, its space-
binding technology, which shapes the contours of nationhood and its
displacement into its margins.
By placing culture at the center, and by identifying culture, in the
first instance, with ritual and conversation, I want to underscore, on
the one hand, that technology is part of culture rather than an indepen-
dent force of nature and, on the other, to highlight lifeways that might
offset and contain the spatial bias of technology, a bias toward the sub-
jugation of ever further reaches of space to the control of mechanically
transmitted forms of communication. To overcome the bias of space
one must resituate communication as Harold Innis emphasized, in the
body, in ritual and conversation and the endurance of time. Contempo-
rary media by saturating the moment obliterate time, imprisoning it
within the grid of space. The oral tradition is an exercise, to quote the
title of Frank Conroy's memoir, in "stop-time": time-binding media
negate time; they recreate the past in the present through the repetitive
and mnemonic power of the word and the body.
The Postmodern
As the millennium approaches, we confront even more insistent claims
that we are going through a great social transformation, from the mod-
ern to the postmodern, from the industrial to the postindustrial, driven
by the qualitatively new technology of satellites and computers: the
new age of the electronic cottage and global society. There are many
poets and prophets of the withering away of the state and the new
technological (and mediacentric) civilization emerging from its ashes,
"which blind men everywhere are trying to suppress," but few of them
resemble Marx and many more Alvin Toffler. For such, the new society
aborning will create a new generation, children of the eighth day, after
genesis, inheritors and architects of a new future.
There is just enough truth in these claims to give them a surface
plausibility. We are undoubtedly in the midst of an important techno-
logical change, and the distinction between the modern and the post-
modern is as good a set of terms as any other to describe it. However,
the ideologies used to describe this change, for some postmodernism,
for some postindustrialism, and the social process in which it is pre-

sumably embedded, postmodernization or postindustrialization, seem
wide of the mark of the actual state of affairs. The essays in this vol-
ume, along with Communication as Culture, seek a different descrip-
tive vocabulary and a different moral and political vocabulary as well.
The modern era of communications begins during the decade of
the 18905. A precise date is unnecessary, but that decade can serve as
the approximate moment when, in the United States, space and time
were enclosed, when it became possible to think of the nation as every-
where running on the same clock of awareness and existing within a
homogeneous national space. The technologies that made the modern
era possible were the telegraph and the railroad, which from the 18308
forward gradually laid the infrastructure for a national society. In 1883
the telegraph permitted the development of time zones so that one
could determine the precise time, down to the minute and second, at
any point in the nation. This not only created the knowledge of the
time a call was received at the other end of a long-distance wire but
also, more importantly, permitted and encouraged the detailed regula-
tion and control of human activity within the expanded space defined
by uniform time. Similarly, when the railroad linked every important
town and city in the nation, a map of space was created that was also a
map of probable movement. The trunk network of the railroad and
telegraph was then backed and filled as smaller communities were inte-
grated into the spatial-temporal system or allowed to wither and pass
away. When the railroad and telegraph had linked every town and
time, a national system of communications, regular and periodical, was
possible for the first time. On the backbone of that system, a national
community of politics and commerce could be constructed. No longer
would people live in isolated island communities, exclusively attuned
to local rhythms and customs, dimly aware of a nation beyond local
borders except as news irregularly arrived or national emergencies pre-
cipitated a heightened consciousness of the nation.
The creation of a fully national society was, of course, slow, un-
even, and irregular. Long after 1890, many people continued isolated
existences, and many communities held on even though they had been
bypassed by the railroad and telegraph; the struggle of local life against
the national system was a persistent feature of commerce, politics, and
communications for much of this century. Nonetheless, by 1890 every-
one in principle was keeping to the same clock and was accessible to
national wire services, magazines, books, and catalogs on a regular

basis. However intermittently, everyone became part of the Great Au-
dience, the imaginary community of the nation, capable of a singular
focus of attention at a determined time.
The perfection or completion of this national system took place
only over many decades and required the invention of more flexible
and "lighter" means of spatial conquest: film, radio, and television. By
lumping these separate technologies together rather than assigning
them distinct histories, I seek to emphasize that they were created with
the same end in view: the construction and integration of a national so-
ciety in which distant centers of political and cultural authority could
form direct relations with individuals, circumventing the interference of
local, immediate, and proximate institutions. Television completes and
perfects the national system, finishes what the wire services and na-
tional magazine began. With television every home in the nation and,
with only slight exaggeration, every individual within the home, could
be linked to every other home and individual through a common
medium, which is to say, through a centralized source of supply. The
first cable systems, the last mile of the national system of communica-
tion and, as it turned out, the first mile of the new global system, linked
those places inaccessible to over-the-air signals and fulfilled the social
imaginary of the nineteenth century—the eclipse of time and space: one
nation under a common system of communication (One Nation under
Television, as J. Fred MacDonald usefully called it) sitting down to be
counted together, at the "same" time and for same purpose.24 In coun-
try after country, whether driven by commercial or political impera-
tives, the names of television companies expressed the desire and the
result: the American Broadcasting Corporation, the British Broadcast-
ing Corporation, systems that could endow individuals with a new
identity, members of the Great Audience who were also part of a Great
Community, however artificial in its construction.
This national system of communication held until sometime in the
19708. Again, we do not need a precise date on which to fix the begin-
ning of the unraveling of the national system. I think of it as beginning
around 1975 with the launching of satellites for Home Box Office and
direct pay television and the subsequent transformation of small cable
systems, which were merely adjuncts of network television, into inde-
pendent competitors of the networks. The integration of cable, satellite,
and computer not only permitted but also imagined new conceptions
of time and space, beyond those rooted in the national system: a world
of microseconds and global villages. The unraveling of the old system
and the construction of the new will occupy the next few decades, at a
minimum, but some of the consequences of these changes are now ap-
parent, however dimly. Far from reversing general tendencies in the
culture, these changes project traditional attitudes concerning the self
and society—the individual freed from all communal bonds except
those so remote and abstract as to be without force—onto a trans-
national and microtemporal plane. The postmodern in most of its
forms is, distressing or not, quite familiar, though we are in for some
surprises along the way.
Those who are congenitally optimistic paper over the multiple and
overlapping paradoxes in the growth of a new communication system
through happy beliefs that with digitalization, all media (and even all
thinking) become interchangeable or that the synergy of different tech-
nologies will lead to a magical convergence, of nations, political sys-
tems, and economies. But such abstractions merely ignore both the na-
ture, which is to say the intention or purposes, of the new technology
and the social and symbolic ecology within which they are embedded.
Inevitably, a change in the communication system of this magni-
tude produces intense social contradiction and significant personal and
collective disarray. Cultural fragmentation and postmodern homoge-
nization are two constitutive trends of a single global reality. We are
living, engineering and hardware notwithstanding, in a period of enor-
mous disarray in all our institutions and in much of our personal life as
well. We exist in a "verge," in the sense Daniel Boorstin gave that word:
a moment between two different forms of social life in which technol-
ogy has dislodged all human relations and nothing stable has as yet re-
placed them.25 Media may be converging, but only in the minor sense
that computer power permits the conversion of words and images into
numbers, of analog models into digital ones, providing a unified drive
train for what have been heretofore separable means of communica-
tion. However, social convergence does not follow, as it is frequently
implied, technical convergence. Alas, the only social convergence about
these days is found in simulated electronic cottages in research labora-
tories; out on the streets, in cities and neighborhoods where we live, the
separatist tendencies outweigh, at the moment, the convergent ones.
There is a tension and contradiction, today increasingly on a global
scale, between the apparent order of technology and commerce and the
apparent disorder of migration, messages, and settlements. While the

growth of modern communications, technology, and commerce has
made space more uniform, the same process has radically destabilized
time. The industrialization of time reduces the half-life of every phe-
nomenon, collapses and telescopes persistence into an enduring present.
As the spread of the national or modern system of communication met
everywhere with resistence, the postmodern or global system confronts
opposition, frequently described and dismissed as cultural lag. One
form of such resistance is the process of indigenization, whereby tech-
nologically imported culture is nativized in the very act of being ab-
sorbed. Arjun Appadurai has argued that as fast
as forces from various metropolises are brought into new societies,
they tend to become indigenized in one or another way; this is true
of music and housing styles as much as it is of science and terrorism,
spectacles and constitutions.26
Whether this resistance is temporary, as was resistance to the mod-
ern, or merely a rearguard action remains to be seen. However, there is
evidence that the contemporary dynamic in the relations of states and
peoples no longer can be understood explosively, as Harold Innis un-
derstood it, as a movement outward from metropole to hinterland,
center to margin. Today there are radical disjunctions between the flow
of power, culture, and status; between political, economic, and cultural
flows; between the flows of currencies, messages, and migrants. None
of these flows maps onto another with quite the correlation that oc-
curred during the dominance of the national system.
However, these postmodern flows have produced phenomena par-
allel to those that accompanied the creation of the modern system of
communication in the late nineteenth century: a category crisis or cul-
tural meltdown in which established conceptual schemes no longer
make adequate sense of the self or the world; frenzied attempts to build
new conceptual schemes to account for changed circumstances; an at-
tempt to deconstruct metanarratives of the modern and build new his-
torical understandings under the banner of postmodernism; a destruc-
tion of fixed, subjective identities and the search for new forms of
self-understanding and new forms of social relations; the eruption of
new social movements that attempt to reconstruct politics, economics,
and social life; a reconstruction of the dimensions of space and time
through the agency of new communications technology; a new migra-
tion that unsettles established social fronts of the city, nation, and
globe; and, of course, the international expansion of capitalism, which
keeps the whole pot boiling. We are living, in short, in the midst of a
crisis of representation in a nation whose culture is like a bonfire on an
ice floe, particularly prone to recurrent but intense periods in which so-
ciety and social relations go opaque.
If the disturbances of the world were entirely objective ones, distur-
bances in a common environment, we might be able to assimilate them
seamlessly. However, these "objective" conditions are subjectively expe-
rienced as the displacement of identity, or in more fashionable termi-
nology, the decentering of the subject. Throughout the culture we are
confronted by category crises, failures of definitional distinction, and
transgressive leaps. Borderlines between categories become increasingly
permeable, and crossings between fundamental distinctions—between
objective and subjective, black and white, male and female, night and
day, rich and poor—are both common and problematic. To generalize,
everything has been placed in doubt, is under erasure. We can no longer
take the established categories of the culture for granted, whether they
are seen as constructed or biological. This represents a displacement of
fixed and given subjectivities and sets in motion a restless search for
new identities that can act as the countersigns of new practices. In turn,
the category crisis sets in motion the search for new metanarratives
with which to the tell the story of our lives. In short, the twin processes
of convergence and divergence jostle and compete with one another to
form a new social ecology and cultural equilibrium. This is a process,
experienced imaginatively, whereby the world simultaneously comes
together and falls apart.27 We are living amidst a cultural meltdown, to
be hyperbolic about it, a displacement and transgression of the sym-
bolic, but it is unclear what will replace the terms with which we have
navigated our sense of the world and our own nature for at least the
last hundred years. Foucault describes this somewhere as the "insurrec-
tion of subjugated knowledges," but the rather romantic notion of the
return of the repressed disguises rather than illuminates the real social
process. Something will be invented to do the cultural work of map-
ping the social, but that something is at the moment not repressed but
merely undiscovered.
In an essay thirty years ago I suggested that one way to understand
these global processes was that human diversity was disappearing, at
least in a spatial sense.28 Communications, technology, and economic
modernization were reducing the variations in conduct, culture, and

human institutions throughout the world. The contrasts that remained
were, to use Clifford Geertz's phrase, paler and softer than those de-
tailed in the anthropological texts. All of us were increasingly living
one uniform way of life under very similar economic and political cir-
cumstances. However, I also suggested that the end of diversity was not
yet at hand. As spatial diversity decreased, temporal diversity increased.
As differences among people in space declined, differences among peo-
ple in generational terms increased. The axis of diversity, in other words,
had shifted from space to time, from differences between societies to
differences between generations within societies. The sharpest evidence
of this was the development of new age-segregated patterns of living
and, more importantly, the generational styles of popular culture that
bore discontinuous outlooks and sensibilities.
In other words, we were living in a world where under the force of
communications and transportation—all the imperialisms of which we
were daily reminded—it was getting rather hard to find headhunters,
people who climb mountains on their knees, and others who predict
the weather from the entrails of a pig. The good old days of cannibal-
ism and the ritual sacrifice of virgins were gone, perhaps forever. More-
over, the strangest tribes about those days were not on some dark con-
tinent where the people looked familiar, but up close in suburban living
rooms where grandparents, parents, and children confronted one an-
other across a cultural chasm wider than the Pacific.
I was wrong, at least in a portion of that conclusion, as Clifford
Geertz subsequently taught me.29 It is not that spatial differences were
being erased, but that they were relocated from there to here. As he
put it, the age of large undifferentiated total societies facing off against
one another was, relatively speaking, gone. The old comparisons of
East versus West, primitive versus modern, developed versus under-
developed, anthropologist versus native did not work anymore. There
is no longer an East here and a West there, a primitive in Malaysia and
a modern in New York. The natives, if you will forgive me, are every-
where, and so are we. If someone is predicting the weather from the en-
trails of a pig, chances are he is living next door. If there is widow burn-
ing going on, it is likely to occur outside of town rather than halfway
around the world. The most recent case of cannibalism I have encoun-
tered has not been in some dark continent elsewhere but in relatively
enlightened Milwaukee.
The force of this change was caught by Marshall McLuhan's sug-

gestion that the period of explosion, when the West sailed forth to con-
vert the natives, was over. The communication and transportation sys-
tem was now running in reverse; cultures were imploding, taking up
residence next to one another on the television set and in the housing
subdivision. You can now sample many of the tribes of the world by
taking a one-hour stroll through the neighborhoods of most cities or
grazing through cable television channels.
But if space has imploded so that what was once out there is now
in here (next door, around the corner, in the next office, on Channel
51), so has time. The differences in generations grow more rather than
less substantial, and the young adopt the culturally exotic without ref-
erence to space, time, or circumstance. Still, even with those temporal
differences, national groups, not to speak of religious and ethnic ones,
remain stubbornly identifiable over time.
If I can shift the metaphor to an aesthetic one deployed by Geertz,
we can no longer understand the world as a still life through the stand-
ing back of perspectival painting; rather, it is a collage of conflicting
and randomly assorted elements in which the artist is absorbed into the
art. We live amidst enormous cultural and social diversity, part of it the
persisting traces of older ways of life and part of it generated on new
axes of differentiation such as those of gender and sexuality. There
seems to be no end to the delicacy and invidiousness with which we can
describe, impute, and elaborate human difference. We can no longer
count the number of tribes—old and new—that array themselves be-
fore us.
I have tried to describe a displacement in which, to again borrow a
formulation of Geertz, a world of integral societies in distant commu-
nication disappears into a collage of side-by-side and jumbled societies
of clashing sensibilities and unavoidable conflicts. And this makes us
much more sensitive to the variant structures of subjectivity, to the in-
creasingly larger variety of ways in which people think their thoughts,
live their lives, and arrange their institutions.
And that brings the argument full circle, for despite the changes
herein enumerated, the persistence of the underlying forces in Ameri-
can culture remains the most impressive phenomenon, and nothing has
diluted their power to absorb new members into the community. We
may be in a global village, but we have not transcended or eradicated
the force of national culture and we do not appear to be on the verge of
doing so anytime soon. In the United States at least we are again in a

period of social Darwinism, hyperindividualism, and fragmentation.
Antistatist attitudes persist and antipublic ones have reached new in-
tensity, which accounts for resurgent attempts to articulate new public
philosophies as a means of constituting new social practices. However
new this all seems, Americans appear to be learning again how to live
together by experimenting with new ways of living apart.30
Journalism
It is against this backdrop that one must understand the present afflic-
tions of journalism. Like all our social practices, journalism is not im-
mune from the eruption of the postmodern; indeed, this historical con-
juncture and rupture affects journalism in two obvious ways. First, the
development of what is innocently called the "information society" has
destroyed or radically transformed the organizational base of journal-
ism and created a new system for the industrial production of culture.
Journalism, as a result, has ceased to be a distinct activity and has been
submerged within the entertainment, telecommunications, and com-
puter industries. The line between what is a journalism organization
and division and what is entertainment or information or even a phone
call or letter has been effaced. These changes have occurred with the en-
couragement of governments everywhere, largely as a means of main-
taining global competitiveness in telecommunications. The elimination
of government regulation and public service standards in broadcasting
has erased the distinction between journalism, entertainment, and in-
formation, blurred the line between entertainment and news divisions
of broadcasting organizations, and led many newspaper and magazine
companies to desert or marginalize their core journalism activities in
search of a purchase on an ill-defined but potentially profitable infor-
mation industry. The formation of Time Warner, the absorption of ABC
by Disney, the disappearance of journalism organizations, and the loss
of autonomy of journalism divisions within newspaper and broadcast-
ing firms are the outward signs of a radical change in the system by
which journalism is created and disseminated.
Second, it is no longer quite so easy to distinguish journalism from
other forms of writing and imagining. The membrane separating jour-
nalism and the novel and short story, fact and fiction, has been pierced,
and these forms and many others flow into one another. The distinction
between fact and fiction, journalism and the novel, was itself a histor-
ical creation of the early history of printing, driven by needs of the
courts in settling claims of libel. The disruption of distinctions so pain-
fully achieved is part of a general cultural process that Clifford Geertz
has called the blurring of genres, in which established forms of writing
(and film and television making) lose their hard edges. To paraphrase
Geertz, we have pieces of criticism pretending to be science, histories
written in equations, parables passing as ethnographies, travelogues
passing as theoretical treatises, polemics and ideology passing as social
science, journalism passing as fiction, and fiction passing as journal-
ism.31 Words and phrases like docudrama and infotainment, the non-
fiction novel and new journalism signal a reshuffling of the imaginative
cards of journalism, paralleled by disruptions in and redrawing of the
established map of cultural forms. Not only is it now hard to determine
precisely where journalism ends and other forms begin, but lines be-
tween forms of journalism have been similarly disrupted. Can anyone
seriously pretend these days to distingush with any precision between
reporting and advocacy; between news, analysis, and commentary; be-
tween opinion and fact; between the editorial and the news pages; or,
frequently, between what is advertising and what is editorial? Part of
the disarray in journalism is the loss of any sure footing in its imagina-
tive forms. Similarly, the fraternity of journalism can no longer keep
track of its members. Are Oprah Winfrey and Phil Donahue journal-
ists? Is Pat Buchanan both a journalist and a politician, depending on
the day? How about Joe Klein? What is the relation between Hard
Copy and the evening news? When is Joan Didion writing journalism
and when is she writing stories? Does it even matter anymore?
Journalism can hardly be exempted from the crisis afflicting other
departments of life, the confusions of identity that stretch from the
most isolated individual to the most complex organizations. Journal-
ism, like everything else, is rather in disarray these days, beset by a baf-
flement of purposes, a damaged self-understanding, and a confusion of
mission and possibilities. But the disruption of journalism is rather
more disquieting than the fact that we can no longer tell which parts of
the movie are advertising and which parts are the story, for journalism
is central to our politics, to the power of the state, to our capacity to
form livable communities, indeed to our survivability as a democratic
community. Therefore, it is rather important that we get a clear fix on
the changes affecting journalism and both adapt and reinvigorate the
most ennobling traditions of the craft. Many such experiments in recla-

mation—most notably the movement of public journalism with which
Jay Rosen is so closely identified—are under way. To ensure that these
experiments sustain rather than fail us, journalism and journalists need
a more usable history of their own craft than the one that has been be-
queathed them, that story of the march of freedom in the world that I
have earlier characterized as the Whig interpretation of journalism his-
tory. While I do not quite know how to write this more usable history,
I am sure that it must be grounded in three principles.
First, a usable history of journalism might be abbreviated as a plea
for a "return to practice." This theme is part of a philosophical turn
identified, for example, with Bernard Williams and Charles Taylor,
with the reawakening of interest in John Dewey and the general revival
of pragmatism.32 One might describe the "return to practice" as an at-
tempt to dislodge questions such as What is objectivity? and focus in-
stead on the procedures, rules, and conventions by which journalists go
about their business. In short, a return to practice leads one away from
abstractions such as objectivity or the people's right to know to the ac-
tual doings, to the activities whereby journalists make the world. Jour-
nalists do not live in a world of disembodied ideals; they live in a world
of practices. These practices not only make the world, they make the
journalist. Journalists are constituted in practice. So, the appropriate
question is not only what kind of world journalists make but also what
kinds of journalists are made in the process. Finally, then, we must ask
not what the ideals of journalists are but what the spirit that is ex-
pressed in practice is and to what degree that spirit and practice are
consistent with our needs as a democratic people.
To see journalism as a form of culture is to see it as a practice of
world making, of the making of meaning and significance.33 Like all
practices, those of journalists are contingent; that is, they are variable
over time, place, and circumstance. Nothing disables journalists more
than thinking that current practice is somehow in the nature of things,
that the practices nature and history determined were of the essence of
journalism. Current practice is one variable expression of a continu-
ously changing activity. Nothing disables journalism historians more
than thinking that current practice is somehow the destination to
which history has directed the craft in the pursuit of ideals like truth
and freedom. Journalism has a history that is more than the history of
institutions or technologies or economic arrangements. Journalism has
a history as a variable form of comprehending and being in the world,

a mode of conduct and a form of self-understanding derived from that
conduct.
Second, if journalism is a social practice, it should not be confused,
as is done regularly in education and elsewhere, with technology or
media or communication. Media are organizations or bureaucracies
within which some forms of journalism are practiced. Technologies are
means or instruments with which journalism is practiced. Communica-
tions is an undifferentiated social process for transferring meaning that
shares some features with journalism, though not necessarily those
features most important to democratic politics. But communications,
media, and technology are not the same thing as journalism. Journal-
ism can be practiced in large organizations or small ones, by indepen-
dent practitioners or large teams, using the human voice or hand or
printing press or television camera. How and where journalism occurs
is of some importance, but to confuse journalism with media or com-
munications is to confuse the fish story with the fish.
Third, journalism as a practice is unthinkable except in the context
of democracy; in fact, journalism is usefully understood as another
name for democracy. The practices of journalism are not self-justifying;
they are not ends in themselves. Rather, they are justified in terms of the
social consequences they engender, namely, the constitution of a demo-
cratic social order. There were media in the old Soviet Union just as
there was communication and even something resembling a news busi-
ness. There just wasn't any journalism, because there was no democ-
racy, which alone gives rise to the social practice of journalism. Mod-
ern despotic societies, to paraphrase some lines of Charles Taylor, go
through the motions of journalism. Editorials purport to express the
opinions of the writers offered for the consideration of their fellow
citizens; stories in newspapers and on television claim to tell the truth
about current events; mass demonstrations that purport to give vent to
the indignation of large numbers of people are organized. All this takes
place as if a genuine process were forming a common mind through ex-
change. However, the entire result is carefully controlled from the out-
set.34 Soviet journalism was an oxymoron because journalism requires
the institutions of democratic life, either in fact or in aspiration.
I say that journalism needs a more usable history, one focused on
practice, than any heretofore provided it because the existing histories
are largely histories of technology (the printing press or television sig-
nal) or histories of bureaucracies (the television network or newspaper)

or of abstract processes (freedom, objectivity, partisanship) but not of a
continuous social practice possessed of a distinctive nature, grounded
in democratic aspirations, but variable across times, technology, and
bureaucracies.35
Journalism is a particular form of social practice, a form of in-
scribing the world, first in speech, then in print, then in the modern
"advanced" arts of broadcasting and electronics. What unifies the
practice across time, media, and organizations is its democratic context
and something more. Michael Oakeshott has argued that history is the
whole of the real understood under the category of the past. Stuart
Adam, in an original twist on this view, argues that journalism is whole
of the real understood under the category of the present?6 Journalism,
then, must be examined as the practices by which the real is made
under the category of the present. And, as a historical fact, this making
has occurred, even in the most proximate sense, only under conditions
of democracy.
As I argued in an earlier chapter, journalism begins at a verge be-
tween the oral and printed traditions, at the birth of the modern democ-
racies. It is no accident that the Stationers Company was particularly
assiduous in its licensing and censorship of song lyrics, for, at the onset
of the modern world, news was carried by speech and elaborated in
song. Journalism begins as an elaboration of what was being said in the
oral register, generally understood as public opinion or the opinions
being uttered in public. Journalism begins in speech; journalism is about
a world where "public" speaking is a common, taken-for-granted prac-
tice, though a practice undertaken in the awareness of the possibilities
of writing and printing. This is the spirit embedded in practice I men-
tioned earlier. This spirit is one of active engagement, and the practices
include arguing, organizing, assembling, demonstrating, and petition-
ing as well as voting. Sometimes this sort of thing is simply assumed, as
I tried to illustrate earlier, in my discussion of the First Amendment as
a description of practice. When the Bill of Rights asserts "the right of
people to peacefully assemble," one expects, not to put too fine a point
on it, assemblies. It would be a very bad sign were the "people" never
to exercise this right. Precisely for this reason, democracy is character-
ized by a series of explicit efforts to create and sustain an active citi-
zenry, which, of course, is the practical meaning of the clauses of the
First Amendment.37
Journalism also arose in the context of the nation-state. As Bene-

dict Anderson has argued, journalism and the novel emerged within the
context of the nation; they were one of the forms in which the nation
was embodied. In a nice phrase, he describes journalism and the novel
as complex glosses on the word meanwhile. Both imputed to the nation
a form of simultaneity, a shared awareness of the happenings within
the boundaries of the nation. This does not mean that nations are tex-
tual communities. As I argued earlier, nations are embodied first of all
in their citizens and in the active ritualized exchanges among them.
Those exchanges are then given a shared but second-order reality on
the larger stage of the text. But without the presence of the ritual forms,
the textual community would hardly constitute a nation. The nation
was mediated through the public and through what can only be called
public journalism.
The modern system of communications came into existence in the
early 18905 and had a continuous history across a number of different
types of media until, roughly, the mid 19705. One might equate the
modern system of journalism with the "network era," for it runs from
the formation of the Associated Press out of various regional press as-
sociations through the maturity of the television networks. The mod-
ern era is also the national era because the telos of the system was the
construction of a national network that linked every household in the
nation with every other. The defining characteristic of the network was
an implicit equation between membership in the household, member-
ship in the "Great Audience" of the media, and membership in the na-
tion. The modern communication system visualized and produced the
imaginary community of the nation. While such a community could be
imagined for relatively small countries on the basis of the printing press
alone, the temporal and spatial dimensions of a country as large as the
United States, and one continuously expanding throughout the nine-
teenth and part of the twentieth century, required electronic communi-
cations and high-speed transportation, beginning with the railroad and
telegraph, in order to put everyone in the same place for purposes of
communication. The national system of communication interpellated
everyone into discourse—it addressed them—on the basis of their na-
tionality, their "Americanness," rather than their membership in sub-
national entities.
Journalism was the driving force in the development of a national
communication system. The need to integrate the nation through a uni-
form "informational culture" required news to become a commodity

for systematic distribution. Journalism produced much of the traffic
over the railroad and telegraph as well as the wire service and maga-
zine. While newspapers remained local in origin, their content, which
had always contained significant amounts of "distant news," became
even more dependent on the correspondent and the wire service.
If journalism was the driving force in the creation of a national
communication system, it progressively lost ground during the twenti-
eth century to entertainment, to the mass production of culture. The
latter became, beginning with the movies and accelerating with radio
and television, the control mechanism shaping and dominating the
content of the national system. The extent of this change was not fully
apparent until the end of the era, when, with the emergence of cable,
satellites, and computers, the old but refashioned Hollywood studios
came increasingly not only to own the old news business but to situate
that business fully within the culture of entertainment.
Earlier I outlined the dominant motifs of journalism in the modern
era—its characteristic forms and outlooks—to which I here wish to add
but a few grace notes. Like Michael Schudson before me, I attribute the
emergence of objectivity in journalism to the struggle journalists faced
in defining a place for themselves within the modern system of commu-
nication.38 With the end of partisan journalism, journalists were de-
prived of a point of view from which to describe the world they inhab-
ited. That world was less and less governed by political parties, and
journalists were set free of those parties in any event, so journalists,
capitalizing on the growing prestige of science, positioned themselves
outside the system of politics, as observers stationed on an Archime-
dean point above the fray of social life. Journalists attempted to insu-
late themselves (unsuccessfully, it turned out) from the play of interests
and interest groups that increasingly dominated politics. They created
a stationary point in an unstable world from which to review, report,
and comment on politics. This positioning, and the quasi-scientific
method that backed it, also gave them a mission: the unmasking of ap-
pearances, the penetration through the secondary qualities of social life
to the primary realities, the deep truth, hidden from public view. I ear-
lier said that journalists adopted the role of the independent voter—the
voter free of all prejudicial affiliations. Actually, journalists went fur-
ther; they became the independent nonvoter, independent of the very
society on which they reported and commented and whose democratic

forms provided them with their only justification.
While journalists were positioned and given a mission by the ethic
of independence, they were not automatically provided with a justifica-
tion for their outlook and status. This was found in a refashioning of
the history of journalism, what I called a Whig interpretation of his-
tory, aimed at showing that the craft was destined by the very nature of
freedom for this resting point. The First Amendment was reinterpreted
to yield the image of a fourth estate and an adversary press. The claims
of journalists to the status of independent observers, and the freedom
and benefits that flowed from such status, were now shown to be both
in the nature of things—determined by the underlying progressive
forces of history—and constitutionally sanctioned and demanded. Jour-
nalists were now not only independent of the claims of society but
formed an actual estate, an institution, in Potter Stewart's conception,
with a constitutionally defined role relative to other branches of society.
Thus, journalists achieved remarkable freedom from the demands of
membership in society and increasing status, objectively affirmed and
subjectively enjoyed, among the sanctioned elite: a new media priest-
hood for a new media age.
But the relocation of the press clause as the possession of an institu-
tion indirectly provided constitutional protection to technology. It liter-
alized the meaning of press, taking the First Amendment away from a
speaking public. This made journalism synonymous with the technol-
ogy protected by the reinterpreted First Amendment. Journalism was
no longer a practice identified with democracy but a right possessed by
a technology. When the meaning of freedom of speech and press was
further removed from political discourse and identified by the courts
with art, obscenity, gesture, and behavior, the line separating journal-
ists from the media, journalism from communication, imaginative writ-
ing from technology was further erased as the century progressed.
Michael Schudson says in his commentary that journalism must be
understood not only as culture but as citizenship. He subsequently
modifies this to a call to analyze "citizenship itself as a cultural con-
struct, and to see news as one feature in the construction and represen-
tation of its changing formations." I take this to be another way of say-
ing, underscored by Jay Rosen, that journalism and politics mutually
form one another, that they are symbiotic, and this lends credence to the
claim that democracy and journalism are names of the same thing. As I
argued earlier, every conception of journalism and the press stitches the
citizen, implicitly or explicitly, into a given role in the political forma-
tion. The modern notion of the fourth estate and the adversary press,
which are names of practices and positions rather than things, stitched
the citizen into a passive role as a spectator. The practices of writing
and reporting the journalist thinks of as constituting "objectivity" cast
the citizen in the role of student to be educated by the press rather than
a participant in the process of self-government. Objectivity cultivated
the naive belief that if the citizen was educated, knowledgeable, in-
formed, somehow everything would be all right. Unfortunately, this
turned journalism into something of a roman a clef: missives exchanged
among insiders that could only be read if one already understood
everything that was unsaid. Journalism, then, became progressively re-
moved from the public realm, understandable only to insiders. Citizens
were free to accept or reject it but they were not free to argue with it.
This was a journalism in which journalists, while not citizens them-
selves, acted on behalf of citizens, disempowering them while leaving
them with an addiction to news and an aversion to talk and political
participation. Journalists, while not citizens, claimed the rights of citi-
zens as a fiduciary.
Adversary journalism, the journalism of independence and the
fourth estate, had its historic work to do. Such journalism will continue
and will continue to be a valued practice in any future I can imagine.
However, adversary journalism can now no longer be the paradigm of
the craft; as a paradigm, it has reached its end in the postmodern era.
For with it, journalists have lost leadership and control over the process
of public communication. Journalists are now swimming with sharks,
and the noblest purposes of journalism are in doubt. In the new world
of media which journalists inhabit, the public realm is declared com-
pletely unnecessary. The newspaper and the television station, with
rare exceptions, become instruments of marketing, devoid of any polit-
ical purpose or community-forming function. They are mere hand-
maidens of the individual, the device through which individuals free
themselves from any social obligation or relation, or objects of con-
sumption. But when the citizen disappears into the consumer, the jour-
nalist disappears into the propagandist or marketer, for their identities
are reciprocally formed.
Public journalism, of the kind advocated and shaped by Jay Rosen,
in concert with many others, is an attempt to revive public life, to
re-create journalism as a practice.39 It is an experiment whose end is in

doubt but whose purpose is not: it is nothing less than the re-creation
of a participant, speaking public, ritually formed for democratic pur-
poses, brought to life via conversation between citizen journalists and
journalist citizens.
Notes
1.1 have developed this version of cultural studies rather more extensively in "Re-
flections on (American) Cultural Studies," in Beyond Cultural Studies, ed. Marjorie Fer-
guson and Peter Golding ( London: Sage, 1997).
2. Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty; Mongrel Manhattan in the 19205 (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 3.
3. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations for the Critique of Political Economy
(New York: Vintage, 1973), 884.
4. Karl Marx, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," in Surveys from
Exile, ed. D. Fernbach (New York: Vintage, 1974), 155.
5. On the merger and division of nations, see Jane Jacobs's useful The Problem of
Separatism (New York: Random House, 1980).
6. Paul Krugman, Pop Internationalism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996).
7. These lines paraphrase arguments made on many occasions by the historian
John Lukacs. See, for example, John Lukacs, Confessions of an Original Sinner (New
York: Ticknor and Fields, 1990), 12, 194-97.
Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983).
9. Carolyn Marvin, Capturing the Flag: The Symbolic Structure of Nationalism,
unpublished manuscript, 1996.
10. Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press,
1957), 181-85. Seymour Martin Lipset called attention to this example in American Ex-
ceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: Norton, 1996), 2.3-2.4.
11. James W. Carey, Communication as Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989),
chapter i.
12. The structure and antistructure, as Victor Turner calls it. Victor Turner, The Rit-
ual Process: Structure and Antistructure (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969).
13. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Dou-
bleday Anchor, 1959).
14. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989).
15. In the age of the Internet this argument demands more elaboration than I can
give it here. However, in a time of virtual communities, it is well to remember that the
Internet is disembodied and that cyberspace is a cocoon, not a place where one can actu-
ally live.
16. George Grant, "In Defence of North America," Technology and Empire: Per-
spectives on North America (Toronto: Anansi, 1969), 13-40.
17. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1949), 390.
18. Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: The Folklore of Industrial Man
(Boston: Beacon, 1951), 33.
19. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of
Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990).
20. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1977), 8 3 ff.
21. J. David Bolter, Turing's Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), n.
22. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal
and the Machine (New York: Wiley, 1948).
23. Bolter, Turing's Man, 8-9.
24. J. Fred MacDonald, One Nation under Television: The Rise and Decline of Net-
work TV (New York: Pantheon, 1990).
25. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Republic of Technology (New York: Harper and Row,
1978).
26. Arjun Appadurai, "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Political Econ-
omy," in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993).
27. See also Carey, Communication as Culture, and, more important, Benjamin
Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld (New York: Random House, 1995).
28. James W. Carey, "Harold Adams Innis and Marshall McLuhan," Antioch Re-
view 2, no. 2 (1967): 5-37.
29. Clifford Geertz, "The Uses of Diversity," Michigan Quarterly Review 25 (Win-
ter 1986): 105-23.
30. Robert Wiebe, The Segmented Society (New York: Oxford University Press,
I975)-
31. Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 20-21.
32. Charles Taylor, Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1995), chapter 3.
33. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978).
34. Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, chapter 13.
35. There are many exceptions to this generalization, of course, including most
prominently the work of Michael Schudson. See Michael Schudson, The Power of News
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995)- See also Thomas Leonard, News
for All (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
36. Stuart Adam, Notes towards a Definition of Journalism (St. Petersburg, Fla.:
Poynter Institute of Media Studies, 1993).
37. Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (Notre
Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994).
38. Michael Schudson, Discovering the News (New York: Basic Books, 1978).
39. Jay Rosen, "Politics, Vision and the Press: Toward a Public Agenda for Journal-
ism," in The New News v. The Old News (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1992).
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Contributors
G. Stuart Adam is dean of the Faculty of Arts at Carleton University,

Ottawa, Ontario. He received a Ph.D. in political studies from Queen's
University, Kingston. His career as a journalist has included stints as a
reporter and editor at the Toronto Star, a reporter and editorial writer
for the Ottawa Journal, and a freelance producer at CBC-TV. He has
been director of the School of Journalism at Carleton, as well as direc-
tor of the Centre for Mass Media Studies in the Graduate School of
Journalism at the University of Western Ontario in London. His schol-
arly publications include A Sourcebook of Canadian Media Law (1989)
and Notes towards a Definition of Journalism (1993).
James W. Carey is currently professor of journalism at Columbia Univer-

sity. From 1979 to 1992, Carey was dean of the College of Communica-
tions at the University of Illinois. He has published more than a hundred
essays, articles, and book chapters on communications, community,
journalism, technology, and related issues, as well as a collection of es-
says, Communications as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (1989).
He has been called the best-known journalism educator in the world. In
addition to editing numerous journals and collections, he has served as
an officer of many academic societies and on numerous national boards
of directors, including that of the Public Broadcasting System.
Carolyn Marvin is associate professor of communication at the Annen-

berg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She is
347
348 / Contributors
the author of When Old Technologies Were New (1988) and the forth-
coming Capturing the Flag: The Symbolic Structure of Nationalism.
Professor Marvin is interested in the dialogue between literate and oral
practices, ritual as a fundamental form of group communication, and
how communications technologies restructure social distances among
group members.
Eve Stryker Munson is an assistant professor of communications at

Pennsylvania State University. Munson was a reporter, copy editor, and
editor for several newspapers, including the Jackson Sun, the Wichita
Eagle, and the Daily Camera, from 1972 to 1990. She is coeditor of a
collection of essays, A Society to Match the Scenery: Personal Visions
of the Future of the American West (1991).
John J. Pauly is professor of communication and American studies and

chair of the Department of Communication at Saint Louis University.
He received a doctorate in communications in 1979 from the Univer-
sity of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he studied with James
Carey. Pauly's essays on the cultural history of journalism, the sociol-
ogy of mass communication, and qualitative methods have appeared in
a variety of journals, including Critical Studies in Mass Communica-
tion, Communication, Communication Research, Journalism Mono-
graphs, Communication Yearbook, and American Quarterly. From
1989 to 1993 he was editor of a scholarly quarterly published by the
American Journalism Historians Association, American Journalism,
which ran a symposium in 1990 on Carey's first collection of essays
and published the first public bibliography of Carey's work.
Jay Rosen is associate professor of journalism and mass communica-

tion at New York University and director of the Project on Public Life
and the Press. He is also an associate of the Kettering Foundation,
where he coordinates programs in public journalism.
Michael Schudson is professor in the Departments of Communication

and Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. He is the au-
thor of Discovering the News (1978), Advertising, the Uneasy Persua-
sion (1984), Watergate in American Memory (1992), and The Power
of News (1995).
Contributors I 349
Catherine A. Warren is assistant professor in the Department of En-

glish at North Carolina State University. Warren was a reporter during
the 19805 for several newspapers, including the Casper Star-Tribune
and the Hartford Courant. She is currently working on a book on in-
stitutional silence and the abuse of power in medicine.
Index
academic disciplines, 102-3 capitalism, 61, 305; critique of, 66

academic left: defection of, 265-66; loss Carey, James: "Canadian Communica-
of influence, 278. See also left, lack of tion Theory: Extensions and Interpre-
program tations of Harold Innis," 262; child-
Adam, Stuart, xvi, 311, 313, 333 hood education, x; college education,
Anderson, Benedict, 202, 276, 312, 334 x-xi; Communication as Culture, xvi,
Apple Inc., 295-96 313, 322; "A Cultural Approach to
Arendt, Hannah, 199-200 Communication," 4, 196-98, 262;
Association for Education in Journalism early years at Illinois, xii-xiii; "Harold
and Mass Communication, xii, 7, 261, Adams Innis and Marshall McLuhan,"
267 262; "A Plea for the University Tradi-
tion," 262; as teacher, xiv-xv; "Tech-
Baranczak, Stanislaw, 213, 214 nology and Ideology: The Case of the
Bell, Daniel, 18 Telegraph," 262
Berelson, Bernard, 7 censorship, 212-13, 214
Bill of Rights, 208-9, 216, 218, 236 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Stud-
black history, 101, 107. See also race, ies, xii
class, and gender chaos, 4, 61-62
black press, 32, 92. See also media, Charlotte Observer, 231
minority Chicago School, 5; as alternative to em-
Bolter, David, 320 piricism, 8, 24-25; Nobel laureates
Boorstin, Daniel, 324 and,12
breaking news, 187-88 class. See race, class, and gender
broadcasting: deregulation of, 252-53; Clinton, Bill, 201, 231
privatization of, 62-63; public, clocks, 52, 322
252-53; satellite, 251-52 Columbia University, viii; Bureau of
Burke, Kenneth, xii, 99, 318 Applied Social Research, 16
Butterfield, Herbert, 87-88, 95 Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, 224-25
commerce, 303
campaign financing, 221-22 Commission on Freedom of the Press,
Campbell, Joseph, 318 140
351
352 / Index
communication: as community creator economics: language of, 11; neoclassical,

and maintainer, 26-28; democracy 65-68; supply-side, 150
and, 234; public life and, 64, 69; ritual education: as citizenship, 114; corporate
view, 197-98, 313-15; spatial bias of, control of, 285-86, 294; crisis in, 269,
36, 64; transmission view, 197-98, 283-84, 291; instrumentalism of, 290;
313 reform of, 282-83; as site of political
communications: economics of, 60, struggle, 284-85
63-65, 73-74; modern era, 322-23, effects research, 6, 7, 15, 16. See also
334-35; revolution, 129-30, 133; mass communication research
technology as metaphor, 8-9; technol- electricity: decentralizing effects, 48; as
ogy and social structure, 119 Great Reverser, 37, 38; promise of,
computers, 251; democracy and, 43-44, 45-46; as symbol, 44, 45;
300-301; education and, 292-94, technology, 35
297-98, 299; employment and, electronic communication, 36-37, 44, 50.
297-99; growth in, 296-97; literacy, See also communications
263, 266; work structure and, 263 Eliot, George, 144
Constitution, U.S., 208-9, 216, 236 elites, 248, 303, 304-5
Constitutional Convention, 207, 227 Emerson, Thomas, 216
conversation. See public conversation engineers, 300, 303, 304-5
Cooley, Charles, 29-30, 31 Entman, Robert, 229, 248
cultural history: defined, 89-90; task of, Erlich, Paul, 10
90. See also journalism history, cul- ethnicity, 97
tural version exceptionalism, 309-10
cultural studies: American, 265, 271,
275, 309; British, 11, 275; conserva- faits-divers stories, 124, 164-66
tive attack on, 262-64, 274-76; con- Federal Communications Commission,
versation and, 5; critique of ideology, 252
277; divisions in, 270, 272-73; econ- First Amendment, 202-3, 208-9, 210,
omy and, 276; origins of, 12-13 216-20, 230; defined, 238; as practice,
curriculum: corporate control of, 266; 333; press annexation of, 245, 247;
professionalization of, 287-88 religion clause, 217, 238-39; technol-
Czitrom, Daniel, 111-12 ogy and, 336
Flacks, Richard, 215-16
Darnton, Robert, 111, 153 Ford, Franklin, 25-26
Darwinism, 43 "four theories of the press," 93
democracy, 196, 202. See also public Franklin, Benjamin, 207, 227
Dewey, John, vii, xii, 209, 270, 315; on
community, ix, 71-72, 74-75; on new Garden Cities movement, 42, 45
media, 31-32; The Public and Its Gates, Henry Louis, 290
Problems, 71-72, 74-75; solidarity, gay press, 130-31
115 gay rights movement, 121
Didion, Joan, 230-31, 232, 330 Geddes, Patrick, 44, 45-46, 47, 55
diversity, 255-56, 326-27 Geertz, Clifford, viii, 327, 328, 333
Douglas, Ann, 309-10 gender. See race, class, and gender
Douglas, Mary, 41, 66, 69-70, 71, 72 genres, blurring of, 329-30
Durkheim, Emile, xiii, 70, 134, 136, 319 Gerbner, George, xii, xiii
Gingrich, Newt, 201
Eastern Europe: liberation of, 210; public Gitlin, Todd, 277, 278
life in, 211, 212, 214, 215, 218, 224. Goffman, Erving, xiii, 314
See also Poland Gopnik, Adam, 195-96
Index I 353
Great Reverser. See electricity journalists and World War II, 233. See
Greider, William: "The Education of also professional communicators
David Stockman," 150-55
Guback, Thomas, 12 Kennedy, John E, 219-20, 240
Kimball, Roger, 271-72, 274, 280, 281;
Hall, Stuart, 277 on cultural studies, 271-72, 274, 275;
Hardt, Hanno, xi, 24-25 Tenured Radicals, 263-65
Havel, Vaclav, 213, 215 Klapper, Joseph, 16-17
hegemony, 277 Kreiling, Albert, 92
Hobbes, Thomas, 3,13 Kropotkin, Peter, 44-46, 47, 48, 303
Hofstadter, Richard, 303
Hoggart, Richard, xii, 6 labor, division of, 135-36
Howard, Ebenezer, 42, 45-46 Lahey, Edwin A., 144-46
Langer, Susanne, 4
ideology, 277-78 Lasch, Christopher, 220, 283
Illich, Ivan, 13 Lazarsfeld, Paul, 7-8, 221
Innis, Harold A., viii, 10, 70; Carey's left, lack of program, 279-80
study of, 261-62; on communication Leopold-Loeb murder, 144-46
and economics, 63, 64; on conse- Levi-Strauss, Claude, 9
quences of technology, 9; on media, Licklider, J. C. R., 300
119-20; ritual and conversation, 321 Lippmann, Walter, 149, 219-20; Drift
interest groups, 244-45, 246, 247, 286 and Mastery, 22; Public Opinion,
interpretive turn, viii 22-24, 245-46; role in depoliticiza-
tion of public sphere, 23-24, 72
Japan, U.S. trade balance with, 167-73 Locke, John, 20, 218, 237
Jensen, Jay, 12 Loeb, Richard. See Leopold-Loeb murder
journalism: adversarial style, 194-96,
337; causal explanations in, 170-72, market society, 70-71
173, 181-83; consequence stories in, Marvin, Carolyn, xvi, 312, 314, 316
183; as culture, 331-32; as a curricu- Marx, Karl, xiii, 310-11, 319; Eighteenth
lum, 186-88; as democracy, 332; Brumaire, 311
explanatory, 163, 166-67; as fiction, Marxism, 11, 276
155-56, 329-30; how question, mass communication research: propa-
146-48; modern era of, 234, 240; ganda and, 15; standard history of,
precision, 182; public, 331, 337-38; 14-20; World War I and, 15. See also
return to practice, 331-33, 337-38; effects research
ritual in, 121-22; significance stories mass society, 18-19, 129
in, 183-86; as social practice, 332-33; McCarthy, Mary, 228
who question, 173-74, 178; why McCloskey, Donald, 65
question, 146-48, 173. See also mo- McCormack, Thelma, 140
tive explanations; objectivity McLuhan, Marshall, 261; on aesthetics,
journalism history, 95-96, 101 39-41; body as technology, 42; The
journalism history, cultural version, Gutenberg Galaxy, 38; Harold Innis
88-93; existing critiques of, 87; insti- and, 42; The Mechanical Bride, 38,
tutionalization of, 82-83; teaching of, 50-51; and Lewis Mumford, 9, 35,
105-6. See also Whig history 55; and primitive ritual, 318; techno-
Journalism History, 95, 101 logical determinism of, 41-42, 55; on
journalism Quarterly, xii technology, 38-39; Understanding
journalistic report, 90-91, 93 Media, 37, 50, 52
journalistic technique, 120 Mead, George H., ix, 139,141
354 / Index
media: bias of, 193-94; minority, 130-31; Poland, 212-13, 215-16. See also Eastern
national, 136, 240-41; as site of Europe
struggle, 32; space-binding, 120; time- political correctness: as effective attack,
binding, 119. See also journalism 273-74; as intraclass debate, 280-81;
memory, 210-12, 214, 216, 314 as sign, 268
Merton, Robert, 221 polling, 218-19, 247
Mill, John Stuart, 134 postmodern, 321-22, 324-26, 329-30
Mills, C. Wright, viii, 229; The Socio- press, partisan, 157-58, 159; penny,
logical Imagination, 7 107-8, 158-61, 164; print, 52-53; as
motive explanations, 123-24; economic public representative, 250; as watch-
policy and, 168-69, 170, 171; irra- dog, 250
tionality and, 181-82; overreliance on, prison letters, 213, 215
154-55, 174, 186-87; rationality and, privatization, 62-63
176-79; technical bias of, 180 professional communicators, 128; crea-
motive paragraph, 178 tion of, 133-37; defined, 132-33, 138
muckraking, 243-44 progressivism, 242-43
Mumford, Lewis, viii, xiii; The City in propaganda, 15-16
History, 44-45; contrasted with Mar- protechnologists, defined, 295
shall McLuhan, 9; critique of Marshall public: defined by John Dewey, 72, 74-75;
McLuhan, 35, 56-57; The Highway dissolution of, 246, 247; eighteenth
and the City, 42-43; and militarism, century, 235-36; transformation of,
56; The Myth of the Machine, 43, 56; 60,63
The Pentagon of Power, 56-57; Tech- public conversation, 203-4, 217-18,
niques and Civilization, 47-50, 51-54 220, 238; and democracy, 191-92,
220; disappearance of, 221; as
nation-state, 311-13 intellectual style, 5-6; need for, ix,
neotechnique civilization, 49, 53; defined, vx, 219
45, 47; Lewis Mumford on, 54 public discourse, 228, 229
newspapers, 82, 83 public houses (pubs), 235-36
Noble, Douglas, 299, 300 public journalism, 331, 337-38
public life: as local, 239, 241-42; partici-
Oakes Newsletter, 222-23 pation in, 221, 225-27; recovery of,
objectivity, 137-41, 199; conventions of, 228
140-41; "doctrine" of, 192-94; public opinion, 228-29, 255
emergence of, 335-36; problems of, Public Opinion Quarterly, 7
162-63, 337 public service, 306-7
Orwell, George: 1984, 210-11 public sphere, 237, 254
Osgood, Charles, xii, xiii
Rabinbach, Anson, 319
paleotechnic civilization: defined, 45, 47; race, class, and gender, 97, 99, 276,
Lewis Mumford on, 48-49, 52-53, 54 277-78,281-82
Park, Robert, 24, 25, 26, 30, 31, 32, 141 race, class, and gender studies, 263, 265
Parsons, Talcott, 3, 7, 134-35 railroad, 322
Pauly, John, xi, xvi, 314, 315 Rand, Ayn, 68-69
Pepper, Stephen, 56 Reagan, Ronald, 150-51, 168, 179-80,
Perot, Ross, 232, 233 183-84, 185
Persian Gulf War, 198, 226 reality, communication and, 199-200
Peterson, Ted, 86-87 Rogers, Everett, xi
photography, 53 Rorty, Richard, viii, xv, 270, 278-79
Plato, viii-ix Rosen, Jay, xvii, 223-24, 225, 336, 337
Index I 355
Rosenberg, Harold, 38 telegraph, 45,160-61, 322

Rowland, Willard D. Jr., xi-xii, xvi television, 323; cable, 251-52. See also
broadcasting
Sandel, Michael, 74, 254-55 Thought News, 25-26
Schell, Jonathan, 215 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 83, 134, 226, 239,
Schiller, Herbert, 12 321; Democracy in America, 113
scholarship, 34-35 Tracey, Michael, xiii
Schramm, Wilbur, 12 trickster, 313, 316-17
Schudson, Michael, vii, viii, xvi, 335, Tuchman, Gaye, 109
336; Discovering the News, 107-8,
193,194,245 university: corporate control of, 285-86;
Simon, Julian, 10,11 credit inflation, 289; and Department
Simpson, O. J., 126 of Defense, 286; independence,
Sinclair, Upton, 244, 286 285-87; student services, 288-89. See
Smith, Bruce, 239 also education
Smythe, Dallas, xii, xiii, 12 University of Illinois, viii, xi-xiii, xiv, 6,
social convergence, 324 10,12
social life, differentiation of, 134-35 Updike, John, 308
social movements, 96-98 utilitarianism, 20-21, 68
society, and communication, 3-4
Solidarity, 215-16, 220. See also Poland Vargas Llosa, Mario, 308
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 211-12 Veblen, Thorstein, 8, 286
Stein, Gertrude, 128, 228 Vietnam War, 249, 293
Stewart, Potter, 249, 336
Stockman, David, 150-55 Wall Street Journal, 155
survivalist culture, 302-3, 304 Warner, Lloyd, 139
symbolic action and communication, 4 Warner, Sam Bass, 235-36
symbol systems, 200-201 Washington press corps, 194-95, 201
Watergate, 194-95, 249
tabloidization, 124-25 Weber, Max, viii, xiii, 313
tabloids, 124-25,165-66 Whig history (of journalism), 82, 95, 98,
technics, defined, 9 108, 110, 331, 336; defined, 80, 87-88
technological crisis, 293-94, 302-3 Williams, Raymond, viii, 30, 100, 275,
technology: as analogy, 318-19; as 319
homunculus, 319-20; spatial bias of, women's history, 101, 107, 112
321; as trickster, 316-17 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 46-47, 49

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Eve Stryker Munson and

University of Minnesota Press

Chapter i originally appeared in American Communication Research: The Re-

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

Afterword: The Culture in Question

A number of people made this highly collaborative work possible. It is

have been published without him. It is inextricably connected with

Thank you all.

Eve Munson and Cat Warren

Eve Stryker Munson and Catherine A. Warren

James Carey called us one afternoon, late in the process of compiling

way of his students. It was a fitting introduction, Schudson said, be-

math and concluded that a democratic republic ought comprise no

has with extending his childhood into adulthood. Discussions about

He studied business administration because that was the only cur-

The way to understand Carey is to understand the people and insti-

labus of the current reading program. As it turned out, the readings

along with a warning of what we stand to lose if we reduce analysis of

to Richard Rorty to the Chicago Cubs to Stuart Hall. Carey would

"How is society possible?" With that disarmingly simple question

tity, tutoring us in common modes of interpretation. Like Susanne

damental communicative processes in the service of politics, trade, and

else's work (and identity) along a theoretical continuum—here the

steadily narrowed its intellectual vision to a focus on technique and

text of American life, communication technology has proved particu-

dangerously depoliticizes and privatizes our discussion of technology

tion"; economics "reduces" human motives to mere self-interest. Thus

Strictly speaking, there is no history of mass communication research.

episode in the social, political, and ideological struggles of the twenti-

retically or empirically grounded; none was supported by systematic

Klapper concluded that the fears of propaganda, of manipulative

and speculation on propaganda that was a hallmark of the i92,os.5 But

As I said, the theory of mass society was actually a synthesis of two

cal intent and efficacy of the standard history of mass communications

to truth." In the liberal tradition, the conditions of freedom guaranteed

nication effects for it was organized, paradigmatically, around a radi-

newspapers. There is no such thing as informed public opinion, and

of psychology and epistemology. He established the tradition of propa-

and utilitarian views of freedom and communication.17 They in turn

led to Dewey's oft-quoted statement that "society exists not only by

and restructured; new identities emerge; new patterns of social rela-

omization that haunted the European imagination. He recognized that

Scholars live by fictions. It is a belief among them that scholarship is

ture of debate in a field, we know who a writer is implicitly arguing

There is now general agreement on the larger consequences of the

verse the general developments associated with printing, or did they

read in an exegetical sense; its meaning could be unearthed from its

and experiences previously disseminated in different and isolated ways.

communication have the capacity to expand or contract space, expand

assimilated to a behaviorist tradition and, perhaps with greater devas-

systematic statement of the view that electricity might rescue humans

made possible by electricity. Geddes supported this growth of de-

felt that the automobile, the airplane, and electrical communication

Third, the creation of a new worker:

on face-to-face communication and a slow and erratic mail service, in-

characteristic features and advantages of the new technics; for they

ford's analysis as an example of how "we may by a reasonable distrib-

The printing press was a powerful agent for producing uniformity

I do not wish to overemphasize the similarities between Mumford