Restoring Sanity, Ethics and the Public Interest in News Media: Can it be done?

This week’s readings provided a broad, but solid and significant sampling of the role the news industry plays in American democracy and the participation of its citizens. I appreciated Gamson’s interest in grounding arguments about what citizens should demand of their free press in a political theory framework, emphasizing that participatory theory in particular should require news organizations to foster collective identity and empower citizens to take an active role, a necessary starting point for any criticism of the media. Using this framework and others, it is evident that our media system does not live up to the needs of its citizens in a democratic society. And with recent technological and commercial changes in the media environment, more than ever do these shortcomings of the media seem magnified and their implications more urgent. One implication in particular Iyengar raises in his article: the increased polarization of the American electorate.


What Iyengar demonstrates is hardly surprising to anyone remotely following the news: that Republicans and conservatives watch Fox News and democrats and liberals are more likely to turn to other sources: MSNBC and NPR in particular. But, instead of just assuming the correlation, Iyengar empirically verifies it, which is useful nonetheless if anyone is going to make larger claims about the role our news media plays in influencing the political world: of both citizens and the elites alike. What Iyengar does no do is to trace the causality of political affiliations to these politically pre-disposed news outlets. But, as we have discussed before in class, attributing responsibility of the fracturing of America is difficult when it comes to disentangling the news media from consumer demands. Regardless of causality, the fragmentation and politicization of news sources – whether on Fox, MSNBC, CNN or within the proliferation of online news – certainly reflects the fracturing of American society into polarized corners that cannot seem to reasonably talk to one another nor understand one another. And this seems to be fostering a more reactionary and in turn, more extreme political debate that does not bode well for a healthy, informed, deliberative democracy. The news media seems far from producing that resounding collective “WE” Gamson talks about. And they're not the only ones who've noticed this...


The Rally to Restore Sanity hosted by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert last weekend was a response to these very issues. 200,000 people took to the national mall to voice their disapproval of the deterioration of public discourse, which Stewart and Colbert attribute much of to cable news. It was a strange event, perhaps just more of a spectacle, organized by political comedians and without any substantive policy aim, but it clearly demonstrated that thousands of people are concerned with the state of American public discourse, demanding, however humorously, for a more reasonable, rational debate.


If the commercialization of news organizations is a driving factor in the poor quality of the news environment or as Iyengar explains that “rational media owners stand to gain market share by injecting more rather than less political bias,” then Paul Starr has a strong case for the philanthropic support of not-for-profit news organizations. And with the recent decline of newspapers, new non-profit journalistic models that are both local and national in scope are proliferating with the sole intent to provide news in the public interest. Starr mentions a few publications that were beginning when he wrote the article over a year ago and since several more throughout the country have been founded, (and Google even recently donated millions of dollars to innovations in journalism, including to public, non-profit journalism.) Yet if consumers weren’t paying for this information before, then who will start reading this now? I’m excited by and interested in these new types of journalistic undertakings, but to what extent they can accomplish the goals Starr sets out for them is to be determined.