-
Preface: A Note on Methods
- University of Massachusetts Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
[ ix ] Preface A Note on Methods - Acentral theme of this book is that in order to understand the news business , it is important to understand the news as a business. I have tried to pay attention, first and foremost, to the economics of this field. The fundamental fact about the news business in America is that it has been conducted, overwhelmingly, as a private enterprise. Whether for-profit or not, the institutions that engage in mass communication have been almost entirely in private hands, separate from the government. But while they operate as businesses, the news media are not merely businesses. The practice of journalism is, at one and the same time, a business and a vocation; it is a cultural enterprise lodged inside a business enterprise. More often than not, the result has been an uneasy relationship between news and business. In the history of journalism there is a recurring tension between the contents of the news and the forms of business that produce them, between what have been referred to as the “sacred” and the “profane” sides of the news field. In step with changes in the larger economy, the business model for journalism has changed over the last three centuries. From a small-scale shop to a factory-sized corporation to a global conglomerate, the news business as a business has kept pace with broader trends. That process has in turn created a recurring set of crises in which the values of journalism have come into conflict with the values of business. In each ensuing crisis, a change in the economics of news has led to a change in the definition of news itself. From the “penny press” of the 1830s to the “yellow journalism” of Hearst and Pulitzer in the 1890s, and from the pioneering of the broadcast networks by David Sarnoff and William Paley in the 1920s to the building of giant media behemoths like Time Warner and News Corp., journalists and executives have continually been forced to redefine the relation between the “business side” and the “news side” of the news business. It has been a contested terrain. Each new phase of journalism history contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction and renewal. Common metaphors for the press (and, since the twentieth century, “the media ”) are the lens or the mirror. The news media allow us to “see” our society, or the media “reflect” our society. For all their popularity, however, these metaphors [ x ] PREFACE were never adequate and are sometimes downright misleading. The media are not neutral instruments; they are made up of people who have their own motives, both economic and non-economic. While individual media are distinct, they also combine to create a complex institution whose power waxes and wanes relative to the power of others. The media interact with those other institutions. To take one example, news is the oil that allows the wheels of capitalism to turn; without information about prices, you cannot have a continental market. The media do not make capitalism perfectly efficient, but they make it what we might call “efficient enough.” The news media also make the system of representative democracy possible. As Federalist No. 10 pointed out, citizens of a continent-sized nation cannot possibly manage their own affairs directly; they rely on elected officials to do that for them. In order for the people to learn about those elected officials (to acquire what John Adams called the “divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers”), the people need information. The news media also serve as a watchdog, barking at the smell of corruption and biting the ankles of the malefactors. In the process, the media can be seen as powerful institutions in their own right, assessing the performance of other powerful institutions. The media do not succeed in keeping our democracy perfectly honest, but it may be “honest enough.” The media do not stand still. They are usually in flux, and once in a while, one of those forms goes extinct. More often, new ones are added to the scene, resulting in a proliferating array. Like organisms, media outlets evolve, in no particular direction, as a result of differential rates of success in adapting to their environments , which they can sometimes also shape, as a beaver shapes a stream into a pond. As in the process of natural selection, we can see “older” forms coexisting alongside newer ones...