University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 7-Jul-01 http://www.newswise.com/articles/2001/7/NEWS.UIL.html
Newspapers, Web News Shortchanging Public and Democracy Library: LIF-SOC Keywords: NEWSPAPERS MEDIA COMMUNICATIONS JOURNALISM WWW Description: The news about news isn't good. U.S. newspapers not only are failing readers, they also are failing democracy. Internet news is an equally poor messenger, similarly tainted by the "advancing power of the news corporation."
U Ideas of General Interest -- July 2001 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Contact: Andrea Lynn, Humanities/Social Science Editor (217) 333 -2177; a-lynn at uiuc.edu
THE MEDIA Newspapers, Web news both shortchanging public -- and democracy
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- The news about news isn't good. U.S. newspapers not only are failing readers, they also are failing democracy. Internet news is an equally poor messenger, similarly tainted by the "advancing power of the news corporation." So say the authors of a new critique of the news media from colonial times to cyberspacial.
In their book, "The Form of News" (Guilford Press), communications professors John Nerone and Kevin G. Barnhurst, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at Chicago, respectively, claim that newspapers of the 1920s-1970s "assumed the crucial role of mapping the social world" so that citizens could make informed political decisions, but contemporary "corporate" newspapers have abandoned such civic-culture reporting, and instead of mapping the world, they are only "indexing" it.
Because they believe the newspaper is "an instrument of democracy," the authors dared to ask how and when it has lived up to its mission; if and how it has reconciled its sacred political work with its "profane commercial operations"; and how it might be reworked in a changing media environment.
With the newspapers' change in mission has come another change -- from multivocality to monovocality. "The logic of corporate journalism" has diminished newspapers' distinctiveness. Papers owned by the Gannett Co., the authors argue, exemplify this trend, "with their cookie-cutter designs, weak local ties, bland conservative politics, and overall obeisance to the demands of the chain."
But the Web goes even deeper into the abyss, the authors said. What Gannett did by purging, "the Web does by bingeing. The modern newspaper achieved monovocality by suppressing the multiple voices of the various streams of content it drew from." The Web disentangles those streams and opens itself up to all of the voices. "This potentially endless multiplication of options for the reader makes it impossible for the Web newspaper to impose a voice on its matter." Other observations:
o Reporters, now often aligned with newsmakers, have become "celebrities who speak from a position of race, gender, or other difference, as the notion of a universal observer has crumbled."
o The most striking quality of online newspapers is "the dominance of promotion. The visual relationship of online operations to their sponsoring newspapers resembles that of advertising to journalism." Put another way, the line between the medium and the advertiser has blurred radically.
o Eventually Web news will absorb many functions of print. But, "The form of the Web moves news even further from event-centered reporting and toward analysis, interpretation and prediction."
"Newspapers used to do things better," the authors wrote. "They engaged readers better. They invited people (albeit especially white men) into politics better. They presented multiple voices better. They encouraged argument better. They told stories better. · We hope that the newspaper survives and evolves into a formation that will encourage civic culture in new ways. No other institution offers more promise for the regeneration of civic life."
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http://www.newswise.com/articles/2001/7/NEWS.UIL.html
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