Michael R. Smith
Taylor University at Fort Wayne, Director of Journalism Studies
The author gratefully acknowledges the recommendations of Dr. Robert Schihl of Regent University.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. Postmodernism: Some definitions
II. Historic background of postmodernism
III. Philosophical foundation for postmodernism
IV. The basis of objectivity in the newsroom
V. Postmodernism's influence in the news reporting
VI. Conclusion
VII. References
ABC news anchor Peter Jennings introduced a report in early December by saying that the men featured in the segment were interested in the true meaning of Christmas (Jennings, 1995). Yet nowhere did the report talk of a Christ child who would become the savior of mankind; instead the report concentrated on a grass-roots effort of some activists in a Durham, N.C., community to dis courage low-income residents from overspending on Christmas presents. News need not be con cerned about ordinary truth let alone transcendent truth because objectivity is a fallacy, according to network news executives (Olasky, 1988, p. 59). The Durham, N.C., television news report is an example of the kind of journalism practiced today where the conventions of objectivity have been re -defined to suggest that no reality is an absolute reality and all realities are equal. Modern newspapers follow a similar approach where "journalists feel free to shape their material according to their own purposes in the same way that novelists do" (Veith, 1994, p. 137). To understand this trend in jour nalism, it is helpful to explore the role of postmodernism philosophy in shaping the culture and the conventions used in news reporting.
Postmodernism: Some definitions
Blackburn (1994) defined postmodernism as a reaction against a naive confidence in objective or scientific truth (p. 294). It rejects the idea of progress in utopian assumptions about evolution, social improvement and efforts in education to produce reform. It denies the idea of fixed meanings, or any correspondence between language and the world, or any fixed reality or truth or fact to be the object of enquiry" (p. 295). The postmodernist approach considers objectivity to be a veil that hides its real nature of power; by stripping objectivity of its disguise, some postmodernists seek liberation, while others "retreat to an aesthetic, ironic, detached, and playful attitude to one's own beliefs and to the march of events" (p. 295).
Gitlin (1989) referred to postmodernism as the art of erosion:
Discussions of postmodernism revolve around anxiety and questions concerning the disposition people should possess about the modern world in the West (p. 348).
Historic background of postmodernism
As a historic movement, postmodernism is the result of a long series of philosophical reactions to the nature of truth but all the more reactionary, as suggested by Michel Foucault (1926-1984), because "the whole conception of a Western philosophical tradition benignly seeking the truth is a systematic concealment of the processes in which political powers establish and legitimate them selves through a violent exclusion of those whom they define as mad or otherwise beyond the bounds of reason" (Urmson and Ree, 1989, p. 133). Making meaning and power relationships are central in postmodernism.
Waugh (1992) traced the history of postmodernism to the early 1980s as a modification of modernism, literary criticism of the narrative, to include stories people share about all knowledge including science, law and history (p. 1). Gitlin (1989) found that postmodernism is the aftermath of premodernism and modernism (p. 349). The theme for premodernist work is a unity of vision and "cherishes continuity, speaking with a single narrative voice or addressing a single visual center" (p. 349). It was characterized by sequence and causality in time or space and claims to represent a reality that is something else. Modernist work desired unity but is characterized by shifts among a multitude of speakers, perspectives and materials. Reality is called into question and the established order is criticized to emphasize the line between art and life.
Miller (1989) described the premodern world as the blend of Greek speculative cosmological ideas and Hebraic theological cosmology (p. 2). Plato (427-347 B.C.) and Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) dominated Greek thought by the first century and again with the fall of the Roman Empire. The premodern worldview stressed the separation of the celestial from the terrestrial spheres, a reliance on tradition as a source of authoritative knowledge and a view of humanity as central to the universe. However, over time the Christian theology fused with Aristotelian science until the issue of the earth's place as the center of the universe was challenged in the Copernican-Galilean controversy and the attack on Aristotle became an attack on the theological authority of the Christian church.
With Rene Descartes (1596-1650), the modernist view of the world is said to have begun (p. 3). He divided the cosmos into matter and mind (or spirit) and suggested science be applied to matter and mind (spirit) to theology. This dualism became a cornerstone for a Western understanding for epistemology. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) modified this dualism to recognize appearance, phenom ena, and the intangible, noumena, which covers those ideas that no sensory experience was possible such as God (pp. 4-5). This division of knowledge and faith marked modern culture; however, devel opments in sciences with emphasis on a detached and objective search for facts led to the emergence of a new worldview (pp. 7-8). The idea of evolution suggested that "the world is not so much a creation as a creating" (p. 9). The acceptance of Einstein's theory of relativity physics led to chal lenges of absolutes in time and space; furthermore, quantum physics demonstated that the notion of objectivity can only be relative since "there is no observation in which the object observed and the subject observing are absolutely separate" (p. 10).
These influences contributed to the postmodern condition that says all knowledge is a cultural artifact (p. 11). Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) used this idea to argue that language is a form of human activity, a game, and the significance of a specific language game such as science is not that it captures something of the nature of reality; rather, it supports particular goals. In short, "knowledge is not so much found as made, or better, it does not grow so much as it is grown" (p. 11). Truth is considered relative and knowledge is considered incomplete.
With postmodernism, the search for unity as expressed in premodern times is dismissed (p. 350). "Instead we have textuality, a cultivation of surfaces endlessly referring to, ricocheting from, reverberating onto other surfaces" (Gitlin, 1989, p. 350). The present is the theme because everything has been done. "Modernism tore up unity and postmodernism has been enjoying the shreds" (p. 351). Mass media produce the images today that are mass produced and empty. Furthermore, all theories are comparable to all other theories; nothing is superior because all is discourse (p. 356). Discourse is the means for domination where "the dominated collaborate with the dominators when they take for granted their discourse and their definition of the situation" (p. 357).
Philosophical foundation for postmodernism
Foucault, one of the leading philosophers who contributed to postmodernism, was influenced by Marx's idea that all of life is power relations (p. 357). Foucault challenged the idea that everything is structured like a language and argued for post-structuralism, which said power operates through complex social structures. Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) developed structuralism, a system for understanding the structure of language which said relationships between words, the sound, and the concept is arbitrary. Structuralism says that language becomes the reality rather than allowing reality to be created through language. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) taught that reality is constructed in the mind, as its own creation (Osborne, 1992, p. 113). Influenced by Hegel, Karl Marx (1818-1883) explained that the reality that is outside man, which is presented as freedom, actually enslaves people in a world of objects; however, people continue to imagine that they are free and project this impression into their understanding of the world (Urmson and Ree, 1989, p. 193). Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) added to the system by denouncing the Christian idea of good and evil, by arguing that no universal morality exists (Urmson and Ree, 1989, p. 223) and explaining behavior in terms of power relationships (Collinson, 1987, 121).
Waugh (1992) identified a number of other philosophers who influenced postmodernism includ ing Heidegger (p. 1-2). Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) found that the radical split between a person and knowledge leads to a detached subjectivity. He discussed phenomena, those things that appear to the consciousness, and determined that existence is filled with anxiety and meaningless. Louis Althusser (1918-1990) reworked Marx and defined ideology as an imaginary relation to the real, which functions to structure the individual's development. This idea influenced literary studies and Roland Barthes (1915-1980) who argued that all reality is a myth, a form of narrative. Jacques Derrida (1930- ) examined the hidden structures in language and suggested the use of deconstruction to attack the idea of a fixed meaning (Gache, 1987, p. 3); Veith (1994) defined deconstruction as the view that "all meaning is socially constructed on a particular view of language" (p. 51). Postmodernism says that every human creation is analogous to language, a text, making life a series of texts interacting with other texts, creating a jail of language (pp. 52-53). To get at meaning, deconstructionists try to break out of the language prison by identifying the ways societies construct meaning through language to expose the true significance of the idea that is beneath the surface masking the true intent of those in power (pp. 53-54). In the same spirit, post-structuralists reject the idea of an absolute truth and insist that terms construct meaning by suppressing or excluding other terms. Postmodernist ideas draw from a wide range of philosophical influences, which contributes to this philosophy's tendency to spill over many boundaries including journalism.
The basis of objectivity in the newsroom
In philosophy, the notiion of objectivism is the belief that "there are certain moral truths that would remain true whatever anyone or everyone thought or desired" (Flew, 1980, p. 319). However, for journalists the notion of objectivity suggests an approach to gathering and reporting information that is impartial and fair. "A story is objective when it is balanced and impersonal; the reporter does not include his or her opinions, feelings, biases," writes Mencher (1996, p. 89). However, Mencher cites Walter Lippmann who said as a tradition, journalism represents reliable and impartial informa tion. These characterizations are not that helpful in getting at the essense of objectivity.
Knowlton and Parsons help some by explaining that journalism historians consider the introduc tion of the telegraph in the United States in 1844 as leading to the convention of objectivity in the newsroom (1994, p. 89). The high cost of using the telegraph forced editors to pool their use of this high-speed technology and split the cost; however, the reporter who sent his news text to the various newspapers had to cleanse it of any undue partisanship to meet the varying standards of competing newspapers. "The modern idea of the unbiased story was born" (p. 89). Czitrom (1982) found that the use of the telegraph by New York publishers such as Benjamin Day and James G. Bennett before the Civil War helped change newspapers from personal journals and political party organs into a disseminator of news (p. 18). In addition, once the telegraph was used by reporters, the amount of material available for newspapers to print increased dramatically leading some critics to accuse this overabundance of material as contributing to the decadence of life (p. 19). The telegraph-mediated news presented a distorted picture of the world by conveying the trivialities of human events in a frantic pace that mirrored the harried existence of readers of the Industrial Age.
Schudson (1978) offered a different view of the telegraph's contribution to the convention of objectivity by asking why the wire service's style of neutral reporting would be widely adopted by the newspaper industry (p.4). In Schudson's model, objectivity resulted when two ideals of reporting clashed. The educated classes wanted information, but the lower classes wanted a good story (p. 89) in the tradition of the Realists, reporters-turned-novelists such as Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris and Willa Cather (p. 73). Without the support of political parties, the Penny Press depended on advertising (p. 93) and street-sales, not subscriptions, for its subsidies (p. 17). Schudson argued that the Penny Press, the period between 1833-1861, invoked advertising to benefit itself by promoting a newspaper's exclusive coverage while the more respectable newspapers such as The New York Times appealed to decency (p. 108). The choice of newspapers had a moral dimension, with The Times receiving social approval (p. 117), which was associated with rationality and control over one's life (p. 119). The upper classes identified with The Times and a sense of self -denial while the lower classes preferred the self-indulgent model of the Penny Press with its news articles heavy on entertainment value.
By 1914, the cities were teeming with immigrants and society was becoming impersonal. People were seen as objects, making it easier to rely on facts stripped of the personal element (p. 121). Realism replaced religion as the guide (p. 122). Realism was the writing style that used a matter-of-fact, straightforward style to reflect life as it actually is (Shaw, 1972, pp. 315-316). In the 20th century, the technique emphasized photographic details to probe the atmosphere of bleak situations. But just when reporters were used to working with facts, professionals fresh from a war where they learned about manipulating public opinion began to ply their skill for industry (Schudson, 1978, p. 136). Public relations became a threat to journalism, not so much because it emphasized information that was to the advantage of a client, but because its practitioners were doing the work of reporters and practicing 19th century spin control (p. 138).
Marsden (1994) noted that by 1931 historians such as Carl Becker denounced the view that "academic study was a scientific investigation of 'the facts,'" saying all we have are interpretations (p. 373). Schudson (1978) said reporters responded by embracing objectivity, even though they knew it wasn't possible, to differentiate their work from the public relations practi tioners (p. 151). Schudson argued that objectivity resulted because of the widespread acceptance of relativism, a crisis in the democratic market society where values were considered arbitrary (p. 158). Just as voters lost confidence in the idea that the majority choose the best candidate, reporters lost confidence in the idea that writing facts revealed the truth (p. 158).
Schiller (1981) found that by 1835, Americans expected factual rather than partisan accounts in newspapers. Richard Adams Locke's Moon hoax in The New York Sun of 1835 was convincing because it relied on the rhetoric of science (p. 77). The lower classes expected public enlightenment and value-free journalism, reporting that didn't reflect the values of the wealthy and power and this expectation formed the basis of objectivity (p. 80). For Schiller, this expectation of readers paved the way for acceptance of an objective universe and the rise of a single-science standard that explains the mechanisms of all life's activities.
Olasky (1988) also identified the Penny Press era as a turning point in American journalism when newspapers pushed for larger circulation, particularly in the cities (p. 62). They became more concerned about increasing the speed and number of news articles and realized that both goals could be achieved by focusing on the material world alone, and avoiding the deeper questions that help explain the news of the day. By describing the who, what, when and where of the news, an article was said to be objective. The why and how questions that demanded interpretation were left unex plored. With the rising interest in Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis, reporters began to question even the idea that learning who, what, when and where concern a person's class-bound vision of a world that is presented as one thing but is something else (p. 63). Objectivity as a practice prevented the reporter from inserting his observations into the article for fear he might unduly bias the report. Instead, the reporter depended on sources to provide the observations. "Since a variety of views were strongly held, this belief suggested that probably none of them was right, but all of them might have some truth" (p. 63). This multiple subjectivities approach took no sides and presented all views, none of which was totally right but might possess some modicum of truth.
Schudson (1978) found that when reporters said that they were practicing objectivity, that meant that used official sources, thereby freeing them as writers of any responsibility for the content of their reports (p. 162). By using official sources, the news report constructs an image of reality that reinforces the official viewpoint of those in power (p. 185). During the 1960s some reporters who were frustrated with this convention pioneered New Journalism by writing their opinions into the news articles (Olasky, 1988, p. 66). This technique was discouraged on most mainstream, general -circulation newspapers, opening the door for reporters to feign objectivity by using the official sources approach but by carefully selecting quotations and evidence to build the kind of narrative needed to direct the reader to the desired conclusion (p. 67).
Postmodernism's influence in the news reporting
Postmodernist considers knowledge and representation of knowledge as undergoing a shift (Waugh, 1992, p. 5). As early as 1948, Toynbee observed that disintegrating societies fail to exercise discrimination in all facets of life and drift into uncritical tolerance (pp. 432-439). Waugh (1992) wrote that Toynbee would consider the postmodern age to be the final phase of Western history where all knowledge is produced through discourse (p. 5). "There is no position outside of culture from which to view. There is no Kantian 'view from nowhere,' no conceptual space not already implicated in that which it seeks to contest" (p. 5). In the past, the critique of reason found in the Enlightenment was countered with an alternative, but postmodernism has given up on a replacement, given up on truth (p. 6). "We are always in a situatedness in world where knowledge can never be absolute because the object of knowledge is always expanded by the attempt to know it. Objectivity always arrives too late" (p. 8).
For postmodernist writers of literature, fiction isn't used to highlight truth, fiction is a substitute for truth (Veith, 1994, p. 136). The historic linkage between fiction writers and news reporters supports the idea of crossover but the trend in newsrooms today is to use the techniques of a fiction writer and may include shaping the material according to their own purposes (p. 137). These writers defend the approach saying that in postmodernism, all perceptions are imaginative constructions of one kind of fiction or another.
This kind of thinking can lead to reporters arriving at opposite conclusions. When 20/20 broad cast an hour-long show April 21, 1994 about environmental threats to ordinary people, the ABC program was panned and praised. Extra! Update, a publication of Fairness in Accuracy in Reporting that favors a liberal agenda, criticized the report because it "minimized or denied environmental concerns" (Grossman, 1994, p. 1) and suggested corporations such as ABC are bent on protecting the status quo and the cross-membership of powerful people who support business as usual. However, MediaNomics, a publication of the Free Enterprise and Media Institute that favors a conservative agenda, praised the 20/20 report on the environment, saying reporter John Stossel "looked at the cost of exaggerated fears" (Gabron, 1994, p. 1). The report said the 20/20 program didn't press for more laws, but urged that the audience to use perspective to avoid "hugh regulatory bureaucracies that not only take our tax money, they also take a little bit of our freedom" (Gabron, 1994, p. 1). Gabron ended his review noting that this hour-long show topped the Nielsen ratings for its time slot, suggest ing that big audiences mean successful programming.
Print reporters also follow this strategy. MediaWatch (1995) found that a Washington Post report on Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich's To Renew America and former Speaker Jim Wright's Reflections of a Public Man, to be a filmsy comparison (p. 8). Wright's book was never sold in bookstores and was offered in bulk to lobby organizations while Gingrich's book was on the bestseller list for 12 weeks and is approaching the half-million sales mark. Other examples abound. Throughout 1995 print and broadcast reporters refer to President Clinton's involvement in the Whitewater Affair to be similar to President Nixon's role in the Watergate scandal. While much of this kind of reporting is meant to be an attempt to avoid partisanship, the cumulative effect is that it reduces the concepts of truth and objectivity to constructions of reality after the postmodernist model. Anderson (1990) said constructionists do not have a God's eye view of reality but say that people live in a symbolic world, "a social reality that many people construct together yet experience as the objective 'real world'" (p. 6). The world is a collection of multiple realities with different stories and different languages and different ways of experiencing.
Schiller (1981) ended his examination of objectivity by noting that sociologist Herbert Gans called newspapers the "strongest remaining bastion of logical positivism in American," a worn-out approach from bygone days (p. 184). In its place, Schiller's idea for reforming the press was the following: "We must strive for a public sphere in which the people themselves, rather than undelegated groups from their midst, will be lord of the facts" (p. 197). That suggestion is so vague as to be useless. Does that mean readers should abandon mainstream efforts of producing news products and produce their own publications? Or does it mean that readers should practice the techniques of postmodernism and make their own meaning?
As more and more journalists rebel from the double-standard of objectivity as subterfuge, they may resort to the techniques of metafiction and meta-television, where the creators bring attention to the text as a text and ask the audience to become aware of their status as an audience and their role in this communication process (Olson, 1987, pp. 284-285). Reception theory says that the meanings of the audience are the only meanings there (p. 285), but Mumby (1992) found that meanings can be fixed (p. 579). This fixing can create "the conditions under which a certain form of 'common sense' prevails and allows one group to oppress another" (p. 580). Should meanings of a world without faith be fixed as normal and preferred, the opportunity to present news highlighting issues of spiri tual import may be used only if the content suggests that no absolutes exist as is the case with reli gions in the New Age Movment (Veith, 1994, p. 198).
However, the intellectual revolution afoot spawned by postmodernism offers many opportuni ties to interject support for a system of absolutes as offered by Christianity (Allen, 1989, p. 2), including journalism. Allen wrote:
Nonetheless, journalists will continue to frame the same news stories that are written from a variety of interpretations and read from a variety of interpretations. Consider the1994-1995 case of O. J. Simpson who was considered a football hero or subject to dark rages, married to a woman considered a battered wife or a party girl (Thistlethwaite, 1995, p. 270). The variety of roles does not reflects the genuine reality of the two people's identities, but who they are or were was produced in history. It is a matter of meaning and that is subjective and built, not objective and fixed.
Press reform in the face of postmodernism will require that reporters who possess an assump tion of the existence of absolute truth such as a belief in the Bible must "work toward honest selec tion of details, fair and ample quotation of biblical Christian spokesmen, and examination of the spiritual/material interface" (Olasky, 1988, p. 179). If nothing else, modern American journalism must recognize the tendency of mass media to encourage conformity in society by avoiding chal lenges to the status quo (Downing, Mohammadi and Sreberny-Mohammadi, 1990, p. 362).
Where traditional Christianity was once considered a key power broker in the hegemonic order, it must now compete against all other views for a hearing and the more honest reporters will present this ideology as legitimate as any other news. While objectivity may be socially constructured and defined as a social construct, newspapers must still be printed and the business of information must go on. By recognizing that recording the day's events is fraught with the hazard of selection, com pression and distillation of events and issues into short reports, writers and readers can continue to profit from each other. Acknowledging the influence of postmodernism's emphasis on relativity and creating one's own reality will go far to help all those involved in the process to intelligently ques tion all aspects of news reporting. By questioning the assumptions of the process, particularly the content, writers and readers ultimately will fashion a better model of news. Until then, the best the creators of news products and their audiences can do is ruthlessly read and read widely. The habitual questioning may lead to a more robust hearing for topics such as absolute truths, ideas that are in oppostion to nearly evey tenet of postmodernism.
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