In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Pragmatic Liberalism and the Press in Violent Times Edmund B. Lambeth If international and domestic terrorism is entering a new and possibly more destructive and nihilistic era-as some knowledgeable specialists predict-it behooves journalists and scholars of mass media to consider how, if at all, the media criticism that reaches journalists can be improved in the years ahead. Whether or not the forecasts of new forms and degrees of terrorism materialize, intelligent and informed evaluations of news media performance in reporting political violence will continue to be needed. Yet the literature assessing how effectively journalism reviews handle their responsibility toward the media coverage of terrorism is minuscule. Most of what exists is scattered within scholarly publications on the media and terrorism, which do not reach most reporters and editors . Moreover, the responsibility of journalism reviews toward the news media coverage of terrorism has yet to be defined.1 This article explores whether the philosophy of "pragmatic liberalism " expounded by political scientist Charles W. Anderson can add substance and a new sense of direction to both scholarly and professional media critics worried over how journalists in democratic societies cover political violence and extremism at home and abroad. Although journalism reviews within North America will be the primary focus, Anderson's analysis and taxonomy of political deliberation in the pragmatic liberal tradition can be usefully applied to criticism of democratic news media coverage in other regions and political cultures. Twenty years ago the weekday tranquility of Indianapolis, Indiana, was shattered when customer-turned-kidnapper Anthony Kiritsis seized a mortgage company executive, wired a sawed-off shotgun to his head, and, during a sixty-hour siege, demanded and received televised apologies for asserted commercial wrongs. Within the next month, Hanafi Muslims seized control of B'nai B'rith International Headquarters and two other buildings in Washington, D.C., killed a student reporter, and captured 130 citizen hostages at gunpoint. Two months later, a small-town bank robber 232 Pragmatic Liberalism and the Press in Violent Times 233 in Youngstown, Ohio, took a woman and two children hostage and visited hours of televised anxiety on citizens in three states. These nationally reported episodes, all occurring within months of each other in 1977, deepened an already developing debate among journalists , law enforcement officers, politicians, and citizens in North America . How should news media respond to the several species of both domestic and international violence that had, alarmingly, become a continuing, if not endemic, feature of public life? Although emphasizing that the Hanafi incident required in-depth coverage, the Columbia Journalism Review took exception to the volume and visibility of most news media coverage. It asked: "By what standards ... other than fear oflosing out to the competition and the inherent excitement oflive pictures of, say, a man in imminent danger of having his head blown off ... do such events qualify as significant in terms of the values supposedly cherished by serious journalists?"2 The real significance of this period in the late 1970s may be precisely in the reflection it stimulated. Thoughtful journalists turned inward to reflect on the interplay of their professional values and public obligations. Academicians intensified their empirical studies of political violence, the tempo of which quickened noticeably in the 1970s and 1980s. The early work of Walter Jaehnig, a young Indiana University journalism professor, mirrored both these intellectual turns. He examined the coverage of news media reporting on the burgeoning episodes of terrorism and concluded that journalists were becoming "captives of the libertarian tradition."3 By asserting an unencumbered democratic right to report political violence without major governmental restrictions and by claiming a virtual exemption from an obligation to reckon with the consequences of their behavior, unrestrained elements in the press demonstrated what Jaehnig termed the "moral poverty" ofjournalism's laissez-faire heritage.4 It was difficult to disagree, in the abstract, with principles of "minimum intrusiveness" and "complete, non-inflammatory coverage" by the news media. These were the stated goals that emerged from the 1976 report ofthe United States Justice Department's Task Force on Disorders and Terrorism.5 But the Task Force acknowledged that it "may well be impossible for the profession to agree upon standards that might guide, if not govern, its members in this difficult area of servicing the public."6 At the time, Jaehnig viewed the terrorism of the late 1970s in North America as not having been "aimed directly at the community and its values." Perhaps more prescient than he then knew, Jaehnig went on...

Share