Foreclosing Deliberation

Abstract

This study examines how journalists responded to intellectual dissent from prevailing understandings of the 9/11 attacks in a controversy surrounding an essay by Professor Ward Churchill. By triangulating textual analysis with interviews of Colorado newspaper journalists, we explore how reporters and editors made sense of their participation in a foreclosing of deliberation. The findings suggest that paradigm repair is not sufficient as a framework for how professionals perceive their work when news construction conforms to hegemonic logic. We introduce the concept of professional realism, whereby journalists lower expectations for themselves as participants in a marketplace of ideas. Professional realism is less about repair of normative journalism than a retreat from deliberative principles and a defense of news practices that reaffirm cultural boundaries of political dissent. We nonetheless document ambivalence and regret in journalists' evaluation of their work, along with a kind of backstage, personal resistance to anti-deliberative practice.

KEYWORDS:

• 9/11
• deliberation
• dissent
• journalism
• paradigm repair
• professional realism
• reflexivity
• Ward Churchill

Notes

1. Reported to authors in separate interviews with a Rocky reporter and a Post editor.

2. Space does not allow for an explanation of the charges against Churchill. The purpose of this paper is not to evaluate CU's investigation and firing of Churchill but to understand Journalists' metadiscourse about their profession and insights it provides about the mediation of cultural and organizational hegemony.

3. We do not provide full identification for excerpted quotes from interviews and news articles, nor list articles in the References, to honor confidentiality and anonymity agreements with the journalists we interviewed. We indicate whether the reporter or editor quoted is from Boulder or Denver newspapers. Wire reporters were based in Denver.