GOOD JOURNALISM

Abstract

Journalism as a genuinely public profession is facing serious economic, cultural, political and professional challenges. There is a growing need for journalism criticism that would help the profession of journalism to retain its relevance in late modern media societies. This article argues that such criticism must be sensitive to the experiences and viewpoints of people and organizations outside the traditional professional community of journalists. The paper presents results from a qualitative interview study aiming to articulate such criticism. The study formulates various evaluative dimensions for journalism criticism, underlines some concrete problems of journalism as production of public discussion, and outlines the changing styles and vocabularies used to articulate journalism's social responsibilities. These empirical results are interpreted in a framework provided by two major contributions to social theory, Pierre Bourdieu's “field theory” and Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action.

Keywords:

• communicative action
• journalism criticism
• journalistic field
• professionalism
• public sphere
• qualitative interviews

Notes

1. The project was a joint venture of the Journalism Research Centre (University of Tampere, Finland) and the Finnish Journalist's Union. The Union provided a large part of the financial resources. In addition to the members of the Board of Communication Policy, I wish to thank the group of students and researchers, Marianna Laiho and Asta Rajala who were involved in the original project. The article at hand has gone through a number of revisions after several seminars and conferences, and I cannot trace all the contributions. However, the final version has greatly benefited from my visit to the University of Madison-Wisconsin and the lessons learned from Professors Lewis Friedland and Mustafa Emirbayer. The anonymous referees of Journalism Studies were also very helpful.

2. There were altogether 79 respondents. Their average age was 45 years, the youngest being 24 and the oldest 61. Men outnumbered women by 47 to 32. Many respondents had a lower university degree or spent some time in higher education. Geographically, the respondents were concentrated in southern Finland and in larger cities. Every effort was made to ensure that people in each (or most) sector included both rank-and- file workers as well as people officially in charge of the organizations’ policies (due to the size of the sample and due to other concerns this was not always possible). The respondents’ experiences in taking part in news production varied from being interviewed almost weekly to single experiences of being used as a source or being part of a collective that was covered. The market sector (23 interviews) consists of interviews with marketing people in large or semi-large Finnish companies (6), with stock exchange professionals or financial advisors of different sorts (6), with people working in publishing in different kinds of Finnish journalistic outlets (5) and with PR professionals in various kinds of organizations and special PR companies (6). The civil society sector (18 interviews) consists of interviews with representatives from both traditional NGOs (well integrated into society) as well as from newly emerged, more radical citizens’ organizations (12) and with foreigners living in Finland and being able to follow Finnish-language journalism (6). The sector of governance (24 interviews) consists of interviews with representatives from the education sector (6), with people from the social security and welfare sector (6), and with members of the police, judges at different court levels and attorneys (12). The experts sector (14 interviews) includes discussion with energy (8) and technology (2) experts in different institutions, and people with a special interest and knowledge about genetically manipulated food (6). All the respondents were promised anonymity, although not all of them insisted on it. It should be said, though, that some were particularly concerned about it.

3. Very roughly speaking, these sectors correspond to a set of challenges for 21st-century journalism: the economic pressures of the market, the assumed crisis in the status of knowledge, the developing modes of political activity in civil society and the changing roles of public apparatuses in western welfare democracies.

4. The interviews usually lasted about 1.5 hours, and the total amount of material is about 1300 pages of transcription (single spaced).

5. One way of making sense of the materials is indeed to say that it sheds some light on the rules and boundaries of the Finnish “journalistic field”. For Bourdieu (cf. Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 97ff.), a field is a configuration of objective relations between subjectively experienced actor positions. Despite this objectifying (sociological) emphasis, however, the very idea of the field theory is to suggest that action in the field must be seen through the metaphor of a play or a game (cf. Bourdieu, 1998b, p. 77). A field cannot be totally reduced to its conditions of existence, and the game metaphor suggests that there is meaningful action, unpredictability and even virtuosity in all fields. The skills and competences of playing—different forms and amounts of capital in a given field—are, in turn, collected and ultimately embodied in the habitus of the players. Thus knowledge of how a given social field operates and how one acts there is contained not in theoretical knowledge but in a particular logic of practice (cf. Bourdieu, 1990, p. 80ff.), that is, in the internalized values and taste disposition of actors, or in the feel of game (cf. Bourdieu, 1990, 1998b). It is this internalized sense of the journalistic field that the respondents help us to describe. As for the more “objective” conditions of Finnish journalism, some basic facts may be helpful. Finland has belonged firmly to the Northern European camp of “cooperative-democratic” media systems, characterized by a relatively strong professionalism of journalists, a well-based and relatively stable public service broadcasting tradition and, internationally speaking, a widespread newspaper readership based on home delivery of mainly provincial newspapers (cf. Hallin and Mancini, 2004; Salokangas, 1999). The historical development of Finnish journalism follows broadly speaking the trajectory described in other Nordic countries (for instance and particularly in Sweden; see Djef-Pierre and Weibull, 2001; Ekecrantz and Olsson, 1994), where the once relatively cooperative relationships between the news media and various structures and institutions of society have been turning into a more competitive one. At the same time the once relatively closed sector of media ownership has been opened up, leading to ownership concentration. It is also noteworthy here to point out that recent economic success sectors within the media industry have tended to be based either on strategic audience segmentation (for instance life-style or generations) or on more sensationalistic, popular rhetoric.

6. All the interviews were transcribed, and transcriptions were treated first as a large pool of interview talk. All three themes were identified in an interpretative collective of researchers and students with a number of close readings through the materials. After this, the material was thematically organized and the themes were analyzed in more detail in group meetings. The final interpretation here was made by the author.

7. The interview transcriptions have been slightly edited: some small sounds and repetitive words have been omitted, three dots (…) signifies a sentence that the respondent him/herself never finished, dashes in parentheses (- - -) signify a section I have omitted here for the sake of readability. The coding after the quotes is purely technical, referring to the interviewer, the interviewee and the page of transcript.

8. For varying uses of the term: Ettema and Glasser, 1998, pp. 30–7; Gitlin, 1980; Hackett and Zhao, 1998; Jamieson and Capella, 1997; Tuchman, 1978; Zelizer, 2004, pp. 140–2. In Goffman's original sense, some situations of story production have been somewhat paradoxical for the interviewees: they have not been able to answer the basic question of social interaction: “what is going on here” (Goffman, 1974).