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tor with delegates from a Sunday school
teachers’ convention.
The book’s basic problem is not in
its execution; it is in its concept. What
this Missouri team discovers is that
some (in fact, quite a few) journalists
do their job well, and a good number
do it considerably above and beyond
the call of any duty. Not all that surprising.
The same, I suspect, is true of real
estate brokers or brothel keepers. What
else did they expect to learn Nothing,
it would seem, since this book’s intent
shines through only as public relations,
not academic or journalistic inquiry.
The result is that it has all the intellectual
depth of a press release.
Let’s return to the subtitle for a
moment to ask, what way of life are
journalists saving Whose life, more
precisely, are they saving from what
And how are they doing this—deliberately
or as a byproduct of some other,
less elevating, activity Then there’s the
book’s title—“What Good Is Journalism”—and
the lack of an adequate
response on its pages, all of which
prompts a question of my own: If a
university press provided 171 empty
pages for a defense of journalism’s
raison d’etre, how might those pages
best be used
Perhaps a good place to start would
be in systematically searching the history
of journalism for excellence and
achievement. This book has some history
in it, but where is Martha Gellhorn
and David Halberstam, Seymour Hersh,
Roland Thomas, Evelyn Shuler, and
Herbert Bayard Swope Editors like
Ben Bradlee Crusaders like Nellie
Bly, I.F. Stone, George Seldes, Randy
Shilts, and Winifred Bonfils Great city
reporters like Mike Berger of The New
York Times Beat reporters like Edna
Buchanan, who was a crime correspondent
for The Miami Herald Poets like
Richard Harding Davis Critics like A.J.
Liebling, Gay Talese, H.L. Mencken, and
P.J. O’Rourke History makers like J.A.
MacGahan, whose revelations about
the Bulgarian Atrocities led, in time, to
the redrawing of Central Europe’s map;
Floyd Gibbons, whose account of the
sinking of the Laconia for the Chicago
Tribune helped propel America to war
in 1917; Wilfred Burchett’s reporting
that revealed the lies about the effects of
radiation on Hiroshima’s population,
and Ernie Pyle, whose war reporting
reflected a nation’s will as perhaps
no other reporter has done before or
since (The authors might respond
that they were concerned only with
contemporary journalism; but, if so,
where are the honorable exceptions
to the U.S. news media’s uncritical approach
to the Iraq War in 2002-2004
Such an approach, however, might
call into question the project’s upbeat
mission statement.)
Yet to contemplate fully what good
journalism does, examining its peaks
of achievement is not enough. That
exercise would merely prove, perhaps
in some greater depth, the point this
book superficially did, thus leaving
us back where we began and aware of
little we did not already suspect about
journalists. More challenging and useful
would be the construction of a new
framework to consider journalism’s
benefits and the forces that help or
hinder them. This means creating a far
wider vantage point than the process
of journalism.
The Past Informs the Present
As a starting point, I’d suggest taking
a look at a book that is not about the
press at all. It’s a study of everyday life
in preindustrial societies, written by the
late Cambridge University historian,
Peter Laslett. “The World We Have Lost”
shows us what life was like before journalism,
when people relied on friends,
family, the local priest, and the gossip
of the marketplace for information.
Then, people usually traveled no more
than five miles from their homes during
their whole lives; what happened
three valleys away often remained an
uncorroborated rumor. Subsistence
and family matters consumed nearly
all their energies; these people weren’t
property owners, nor did they expect
to live very long. They had, therefore,
little investment in wider society and
consequently very little interest in it.
Their discourse was what passed by
word of mouth in the highly limited
circles they inhabited.
Knowing what this world was like
makes tracing journalism’s impact
possible. What journalism has done
for many years is to facilitate society’s
discourse, which today is personal,
local, regional, national and global
and sectional. Each of these spheres
has aspects in which citizens have an
interest, or in which they are interested
in gaining more information. Though
journalists might, at times, suffer from
a lack of information, shortage of time,
conflicts of interest and, sometimes,
just plain boneheadedness, what they
do—imperfectly, at times—facilitates
the discourse.
Among their tasks are these: keeping
people informed of elected and appointed
officials’ activities; investigating
what the powerful usually prefer
kept out of public view; giving voice to
those who lack an effective one; providing
an arena for debate, communicating
back to officials how citizens feel; finding
information about extraordinary
occurrences; holding a mirror up to
society, correcting misconceptions,
showing people how others lead their
lives; giving information to help readers
live, travel, consume and engage with
what is of interest to them; providing
entertainment and, most crucially of
all, supplanting rumor.
Combine this exploration with a tour
of journalism’s historic high spots and
far more important questions emerge.
What enables a journalist to do these
tasks well Does doing well depend
on the conditions in which a journalist
works—a sympathetic legal framework
or the lack of official interference in
editorial freedom, for example (Maybe
America’s way of life is responsible for
saving journalism rather than the other
way around.) An even more fundamental
question to ask might be whether
journalism, as an occupation, should
set out to do good. Or should it be—is
it actually—an honest attempt to find
out and publish no matter what the
consequences
What limitations are there on the
roles that journalism performs Does
the way journalism is performed impose
its own limitations And what
best promotes good journalism A
benevolent proprietor A management
that doesn’t demand a 30 percent
Nieman Reports / Winter 2007 91