Volume 10 Number 2 1997
Michael Schudson is prominent among American writers on the sociology of the news media, and this collection of his essays since 1982 is a very American - or rather United States - book. Neither news media not scholarship from elsewhere is discussed, even the very extensive and theoretically congenial work on Canadian (specifically Toronto-based) news media by Ericson and his colleagues (Ericson, Baranek and Chan 1987, 1989, 1991).
The genre is also distinctively American: elegantly written scholarly commentary on the state of the union. A British academic would probably feel insulted to have such a work called 'high class journalism' but I imagine Schudson would not. He clearly intends to be accessible to the educated non-specialist and explicitly endorses the news media as a key enabler of the informed citizenry essential to democracy. Unlike similar books - for example Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death (1988) - however, Schudson's is not a polemic. There is ample academic grounding of his arguments from historical and political science sources.
One consequence of Schudson' s choice of implied reader, however, is that he does not locate himself theoretically; his position has to be inferred. It emerges as strongly pluralist and supportive of liberal democracy, but probably mildly left on the US spectrum. He is also determinedly optimistic - or rather systematically sceptical of those who bemoan lost golden ages of democracy and citizen participation. Equally, he is very scathing of left-wing commentary on the US media, notably from Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman (1988), deriding them for one-dimensional conspiracy theory (p. 3-4). His arguments are that there are "multiple voices in the American news media"; that the market can be seen to work, with capitalist owners supporting outlets and positions which could be seen as inimical to their interests; that there is a "vital area of acceptable controversy" in which public debate has brought about change. He also maintains that "Media owners, obedient to market demands.. rarely seek to use the press as a soapbox for their own political views or the views of whatever political orthodoxy they subscribe to ..." Even if one accepts that Rupert Murdoch is too easily demonized by being over-simplified, it is hard to think that Schudson could have written that from a British campus. The book's index does not list Murdoch, R.
The chapters, after the introduction, are arranged in three sections: `The News in Historical Perspective'; `Myths of Media Power' and `Citizenship and Its Discontents'. The first is largely an exploration of the history of US newspapers and newsgathering practices. Some of its insights illuminate the present, like the account of the growth of the news interview, the development of the `inverted pyramid' of the news story, and the expansion of overt interpretation as a legitimate part of the journalist's craft. But these forays into the epistemology of news are frustratingly under-developed. Schudson raises the possibility that the interview is a form of modern surveillance, and encodes the news media's intimacy with the powerful, but does not consider its relative cheapness as a method of working or its contribution to the `personalization' of news.
The last section focuses on debunking political analysts from both left and right who see the `blizzard' of information in contemporary society as either contributing to a bewildered apathy or to a dangerous desire to influence matters of which the populace understands little. Here Schudson endorses the notion of the `critical reader', much better able to select what is useful and impose meaning upon it than determinists of both right and left have assumed. He makes the point that the existence of political institutions and of information says nothing about the use to which they are put. The passage captures the style of the book perfectly. On the one hand there is no hint that within the study of culture - the field with which he allies himself in the introduction - the relationship between reader and text has been one of the defining issues. Instead he is humorously empirical: "As it happens, not long ago people did listen to literally hours of political addresses ... at antiwar rallies in the 1960s ... I can say from personal experience that there is a big difference between attending a rally and actually listening to the speeches" (p.l91).
For the non-American reader, the section of the book on media mythology is likely to be the most engaging. Here Schudson neatly demolishes a set of `telemyths' which have reached far beyond the US: that John F. Kennedy owed his success to being televisual, that the Vietnam war was abandoned because of the impact of television coverage, and that Ronald Reagan's popularity was created and sustained by his adept use of television. Chapter 7 is particularly interesting, as Schudson dismembers journalists' own defining myth - Watergate. He points out how uneasy the Washington Post was during much of the investigation, and how much the downfall of Richard Nixon was due to the bravery of government officials combined with due judicial process. Conversely the effect of these quintessential journalists-as-hero on either an expansion of investigative journalism or recruitment into the trade was very limited.
Overall, the book is less a sociology of the news media in terms of scrutiny of its organisations, changing technologies and daily practices than a vigorous defence of the idea of a craft of mediation. His prescriptions are either robustly practical and middle-range or hopelessly naive, depending upon one's perspective. For example, he suggests that democracy would be better served if journalists set out more systematically to report the statements and activities of those political candidates who do not have the cultural and material capital of being the incumbent (p. 215). This sits uneasily with some of his other observations, for example, about the increasing sophistication and resources of political and business lobbying organisations and the implication of new media technologies within the US. Not only is there now `national' television news, despite time differences, but the East Coast heavyweight newspapers are becoming national in reach, so that journalism is more and more dominated by Washington DC and its hermetic world. I had high hopes of this book, based principally on a 1989 paper, but find myself disappointed - and not because the work is so US-focused. I have already noted the astonishing absence of reference to key players like Rupert Murdoch and to important academic work like Ericson, Baranek and Chan. Where, too, is David Altheide's influential work on the impact of television on our understanding of the world and on the conduct of events like the Gulf War (for example Altheide 1985)? Indeed television itself gets very little serious discussion, nor does the vexed issue of representations. Even if one concedes a key component of Schudson's optimistic scepticism that media impact is too easily over-estimated, addressing women and media in two anecdotal paragraphs (p.176) cannot be serious. And in the end even a reader broadly sympathetic to Schudson's stance and mission must surely get frustrated by his obtuse reluctance to engage with the contemporary political economy of the media.
The Power of News is valuable for students of press history. The chapters on telemythology stand out both for their substantive argument and their illumination of how the self-referential routines of news manufacture can part company with `public opinion'. In the end, however, the book tells us most about how American intellectuals want their press to be, rather than how it is.
Meryl Aldridge