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JANUARY 12, 2009

Audience Atomization Overcome

Why the Internet Weakens the Authority of the Press
Posted by Jay Rosen

In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people
on the receiving end were atomized-- connected "up" to Big Media but not across to each other. And now that authority is
eroding. I will try to explain why.
It’s easily the most useful diagram I’ve found for understanding the practice of journalism in the United States, and the hidden
politics of that practice. You can draw it by hand right now. Take a sheet of paper and make a big circle in the middle. In the
center of that circle draw a smaller one to create a doughnut shape. Label the doughnut hole “sphere of consensus.” Call the
middle region “sphere of legitimate debate,” and the outer region “sphere of deviance.”
That’s the entire model. Now you have a way to understand why it’s so unproductive to argue with journalists about the deep
politics of their work. They don’t know about this freakin’ diagram! Here it is in its original form, from the 1986 book The
Uncensored War by press scholar Daniel C. Hallin. Hallin felt he needed something more supple—and truthful—than calcified
notions like objectivity and “opinions are confined to the editorial page.” So he came up with this diagram.
Let’s look more carefully at his three regions.
1.) The sphere of legitimate debate is the one journalists recognize as real, normal, everyday terrain. They think of their work as
taking place almost exclusively within this space. (It doesn’t, but they think so.) Hallin: “This is the region of electoral contests
and legislative debates, of issues recognized as such by the major established actors of the American political process.”
Here the two-party system reigns, and the news agenda is what the people in power are likely to have on their agenda. Perhaps
the purest expression of this sphere is Washington Week on PBS, where journalists discuss what the two-party system defines
as “the issues.” Objectivity and balance are “the supreme journalistic virtues” for the panelists on Washington Week because
when there is legitimate debate it’s hard to know where the truth lies. There are risks in saying that truth lies with one faction
in the debate, as against another— even when it does. He said, she said journalism is like the bad seed of this sphere, but also a
logical outcome of it.
2. ) The sphere of consensus is the “motherhood and apple pie” of politics, the things on which everyone is thought to agree.
Propositions that are seen as uncontroversial to the point of boring, true to the point of self-evident, or so widely-held that
they’re almost universal lie within this sphere. Here, Hallin writes, “journalists do not feel compelled either to present opposing
views or to remain disinterested observers.” (Which means that anyone whose basic views lie outside the sphere of consensus
will experience the press not just as biased but savagely so.)
Consensus in American politics begins, of course, with the United States Constitution, but it includes other propositions too, like
“Lincoln was a great president,” and “it doesn’t matter where you come from, you can succeed in America.” Whereas
journalists equate ideology with the clash of programs and parties in the debate sphere, academics know that the consensus or
background sphere is almost pure ideology: the American creed.
3.) In the sphere of deviance we find “political actors and views which journalists and the political mainstream of society reject
as unworthy of being heard.” As in the sphere of consensus, neutrality isn’t the watchword here; journalists maintain order by
either keeping the deviant out of the news entirely or identifying it within the news frame as unacceptable, radical, or just plain
impossible. The press “plays the role of exposing, condemning, or excluding from the public agenda” the deviant view, says
Hallin. It “marks out and defends the limits of acceptable political conduct.”
Anyone whose views lie within the sphere of deviance—as defined by journalists—will experience the press as an opponent in
the struggle for recognition. If you don’t think separation of church and state is such a good idea; if you do think a single payer
system is the way to go; if you dissent from the “lockstep behavior of both major American political parties when it comes to
Israel” (Glenn Greenwald) chances are you will never find your views reflected in the news. It’s not that there’s a one-sided
debate; there’s no debate.
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Complications to keep in mind.

The three spheres are not really separate; they create one another, like the public and private do. The boundaries between
regions are semi-porous and impermanent. Things can move out of one sphere and into another—that’s what political and
cultural change is, if you think about it—but when they do shift there is often no announcement. One day David Brody of
Christian Broadcasting Network shows up on Meet the Press, but Amy Goodman of Democracy Now never does.
This can be confusing. Of course, the producers of Meet the Press could say in a press release, “We decided that Pat
Robertson’s CBN is now to be placed within the sphere of legitimate debate because… ” but then they would have to complete
the “because” in a plausible way and very often they cannot. (“Amy Goodman, we decided, does not qualify for this show
because…”) This gap between what journalists actually do as they arrange the scene of politics, and the portion they can explain
or defend publicly—the difference between making news and making sense—is responsible for a lot of the anger and bad
feeling projected at the political press by various constituencies that notice these moves and question them.
Within the sphere of legitimate debate there is some variance. Journalists behave differently if the issue is closer to the
doughnut hole than they do when it is nearer the edge. The closer they think they are to the unquestioned core of consensus,
the more plausible it is to present a single view as the only view, which is a variant on the old saw about American foreign
policy: “Politics stops at the water’s edge.” (Atrios: “I’ve long noticed a tendency of the American press to take the side of
official US policy when covering foreign affairs.”)
Another complication: Journalists aren’t the only actors here. Elections have a great deal to do with what gets entered into
legitimate debate. Candidates—especially candidates for president—can legitimize an issue just by talking about it. Political
parties can expand their agenda, and journalists will cover that. Powerful and visible people can start questioning a consensus
belief and remove it from the “everyone agrees” category. And of course public opinion and social behavior do change over
time.
Some implications of Daniel Hallin’s model.
That journalists affirm and enforce the sphere of consensus, consign ideas and actors to the sphere of deviance, and decide
when the shift is made from one to another— none of this is in their official job description. You won’t find it taught in J-school,
either. It’s an intrinsic part of what they do, but not a natural part of how they think or talk about their job. Which means they
often do it badly. Their “sphere placement” decisions can be arbitrary, automatic, inflected with fear, or excessively narrow-
minded. Worse than that, these decisions are often invisible to the people making them, and so we cannot argue with those
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people. It’s like trying to complain to your kid’s teacher about the values the child is learning in school when the teacher insists
that the school does not teach values.
When (with some exceptions) political journalists failed properly to examine George W. Bush’s case for war in Iraq, they were
making a category mistake. They treated Bush’s plan as part of the sphere of consensus. But even when Congress supports it, a
case for war can never be removed from legitimate debate. That’s just a bad idea. Mentally placing the war’s opponents in the
sphere of deviance was another category error. In politics, when people screw up like that, we can replace them: throw the
bums out! we say. But the First Amendment says we cannot do that to people in the press. The bums stay. And later they are
free to say: we didn’t screw up at all, as David Gregory, now host of Meet the Press, did say to his enduring shame.
“We are not allowing ourselves to think politically.”
Deciding what does and does not legitimately belong within the national debate is—no way around it—a political act. And yet a
pervasive belief within the press is that journalists do not engage in such action, for to do so would be against their principles.
As Len Downie, former editor of the Washington Post once said about why things make the front page, “We think it’s important
informationally. We are not allowing ourselves to think politically.” I think he’s right. The press does not permit itself to think
politically. But it does engage in political acts. Ergo, it is an unthinking actor, which is not good. When it is criticized for this it
will reject the criticism out of hand, which is also not good.
Atrios, the economist and liberal blogger with a big following, has a more colorful phrase for “maintaining boundaries around
the sphere of legitimate debate.” He often writes about the “dirty f*cking hippies,” by which he means the out-of-power or
online left, and the way this group is marginalized by Washington journalists, who sometimes seem to define themselves
against it. “In the late 90s, the dirty f*cking hippies were the crazy people who thought that Bill Clinton should neither resign
nor be impeached,” he writes. “In the great wasteland of our mainstream media there was almost no place one could turn to
find someone expressing the majority view of the American public, that this whole thing was insane.” Sometimes the people
the press thinks of as deviant types are closer to the sphere of consensus than the journalists who are classifying those same
people as “fringe.”
How can that happen? Well, one of the problems with our political press is that its reference group for establishing the
“ground” of consensus is the insiders: the professional political class in Washington. It then offers that consensus to the country
as if it were the country’s own, when it’s not, necessarily. This erodes confidence in a way that may be invisible to journalists
behaving as insiders themselves. And it gives the opening to Jon Stewart and his kind to exploit that gap I talked about between
making news and making sense.
“Echo chamber” or counter-sphere?
Now we can see why blogging and the Net matter so greatly in political journalism. In the age of mass media, the press was able
to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized— meaning
they were connected “up” to Big Media but not across to each other. But today one of the biggest factors changing our world is
the falling cost for like-minded people to locate each other, share information, trade impressions and realize their number.
Among the first things they may do is establish that the “sphere of legitimate debate” as defined by journalists doesn’t match
up with their own definition.
In the past there was nowhere for this kind of sentiment to go. Now it collects, solidifies and expresses itself online. Bloggers
tap into it to gain a following and serve demand. Journalists call this the “echo chamber,” which is their way of downgrading it
as a reliable source. But what’s really happening is that the authority of the press to assume consensus, define deviance and set
the terms for legitimate debate is weaker when people can connect horizontally around and about the news.
Which is how I got to my three word formlua for understanding the Internet’s effects in politics and media: “audience
atomization overcome.”