What Makes Media Public?: Dealing with the "Current Economic Crisis"

The god term of journalism—the be-all and end-all, the term without which the entire enterprise fails to make sense—is the public.

—Carey 1987, 5

As a doctrine and a movement, public journalism has suffered through theoretical critiques, practical difficulties, fiscal exigencies, professional resistances, and the explosion of new media technologies. Though public journalism has not supported a single definition, Jay Rosen, the movements' most vocal intellectual representative, suggests that public journalists "are not merely chroniclers of the political scene, but players in the game who can (and should) try to shape the outcome" (1992, 8).¹ Hundreds of newspapers and television outlets have taken part in experiments in becoming more "public."² In practice, this has often meant that they convene public forums so that people can voice or form opinions on matters of vital concern, such as the "idea exchanges" of the Wichita Eagle, under the direction of Davis Merritt.³ The Kettering Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, and other institutions supported a number of projects along these lines. It is unsurprising that such a well-organized movement's theoretical foundations, practical applications, and institutional resources set off a raging debate about the meaning of "public media" during the 1990s.

Though the winds fanning the flames of this dispute have slackened, it is not clear that the question public journalism raised has been satisfactorily answered. That is, how should journalists serve a public? More generally, we might ask: What criteria define media uses that could be termed "public"?⁴ Defenders of the traditional investigative role of print media do not argue that the public is unimportant; they believe that it is best served by a "watchdog" press. Similarly, new media enthusiasts do not deny that Web 2.0 could have a pivotal role in a more democratic future; universal access to publication, they argue, is exactly what makes new media technologies public. Proponents of traditional, public, and new media define the ends that "public media" should satisfy in drastically different ways: informing the public, convening the public, or providing the public with access to the means of content creation. Each of these ends may be useful at times, but they are often used simply to legitimate one's favorite media, in general. Comparing or reforming traditional and public journalism projects in terms of their ability to generate consent, for instance, begs the question. That this debate was never adequately resolved has import for the future of media, especially in formulating intelligent experiments in hybridization, for how can one evaluate the public import of new media technologies without getting clear about the meaning of that slippery qualifier, public?

I argue that John Dewey's insights into the evaluation of public ends provide resources for more effectively inquiring into and reconstructing media uses according to the needs of publics. Rather than presupposing one account of "democracy" or "public" and then applying it to media artifacts or practices, Dewey helps us see that publics dealing with problems can determine what count as public uses of media. According to such a contextual approach, media objects are not simply means to be judged by their successes or failures in satisfying certain "public" ends defined in advance, for they also determine what ends can be achieved in relation to a public problem.⁵ Though media objects may affect a public's ability to deal with a problem in many ways, I suggest that one important question is of their educative role both in providing conceptual frameworks for understanding problems and in building capacities for acting to address them. Whether or not and how media objects help to form effective publics—and thus are barriers to or openings for addressing problems—are questions requiring contextual inquiry. Their effects for understanding and dealing with problems should determine when, where, and how they should be more informative, preference creating, or accessible—among other ends—as I will show with reference to the problem that has come to be called "the current economic crisis."

This pragmatic...