mass-communication-theory

126 Section 2 The Era of Mass Society and Mass Culture
thousands of dollars and countless hours to the investigation and reporting of the
substandard care received by wounded veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical
Center in 2007. Few can match the two years, $400,000, and army of reporters,
editors, and staff that the New York Times dedicated to its account of doctors euthanizing
elderly patients in a New Orleans hospital during the worst days of the
Hurricane Katrina disaster (Jeffery, 2009).
But even this is changing. Many blogs do indeed engage in original journalism
and many maintain paid, professional staffs. For example, journalists at
Thuthout.org belong to The Newspaper Guild/Communications Workers of
America. The Huffington Post, among its paid reporters and editors, employs a
ten-reporter investigation team that produces stories that once run on its own blog
are available and free to any other media outlet. Talking Points Memo, theblog
that broke the story of the illegal firing of U.S. attorneys, ultimately leading to the
resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales (McLeary, 2007), has professional
reporters in its TPMuckrakers unit. Watchdog sites like The Smoking Gun and Fact-
Check undertake tasks once considered essential to good journalism—wading
through government and corporate reports and documents, filing Freedom of Information
lawsuits to force the publication of materials governments want kept hidden,
and measuring government and corporate statements against objective reality—that
in the face of declining profits and increased concentration of ownership are disappearing
from traditional media outlets (Chapter 4).
The question facing blogs and their social responsibility, then, is really no longer
whether they practice journalism. It is whether or not they can remain independent
of the pressures that seem to limit more traditional outlets. “Blogging has
entered the mainstream, which—as with every new medium in history—looks to
its pioneers suspiciously like death,” argued technology blogger Nick Carr
(2008a). Not death, but constant reinvigoration, responded Atlantic Monthly’s Andrew
Sullivan. Blogging, he wrote, “is generating a new and quintessentially postmodern
idiom that’s enabling writers to express themselves in ways that have
never been seen or understood before. Its truths are provisional, and its ethos collective
and messy. Yet the interaction it enables between writer and reader is unprecedented,
visceral, and sometimes brutal. And make no mistake: it heralds a
golden era for journalism” (2008, p. 106). You can read more about several controversial
efforts to support Web-based news gathering and revitalize traditional
news organizations’ commitment to news in the box entitled “Saving Newspapers
or Saving Journalism?”
OTHER NORMATIVE THEORIES
Denis McQuail (1987) cites other normative theories of media developed in other
parts of the world. Each assigns a particular social role to media. Developmental
media theory advocates media support for an existing political regime and its efforts
to bring about national economic development. Several developing South
American countries—Honduras and Brazil, for example—exemplify developmental
media theory. By supporting government development efforts, media aid
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