Journalism. Michael Schudson

or it doesn’t. The milk smells spoiled or it smells fresh or sometimes you are not quite sure and you taste it for a second source of empirical evidence, adding taste to smell. You certainly do not conclude that it doesn’t matter because everything is relative and everything is positional and everything is subjective anyway so go ahead and serve the milk to your kids. We move through our lives figuring out what is real versus what is imagined, what is external reality versus what is a wish or a fear – every hour, every day.

      What I will try to do in the pages to follow is to make a case for the utility of a professional journalism that seeks truth and chips away at it with a competent command of journalistic fact-gathering practices, turning documented facts into stories and analysis that engage an audience, and with an effort to assert itself rather than to defer to power.

In a reflective and illuminating recollection of his 20 years as editor in chief of the UK’s the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger writes a dramatic chapter on the efforts of a Parliamentary committee to pinion him, if not imprison him, for his newspaper’s publishing Edward Snowden’s revelations of America’s and Britain’s surveillance of their own citizens. And he concludes the chapter with a sentence that begins, “You need proper journalism because …” He leaves the sentence unfinished. He follows it with this: “But how did that sentence end? Because … we are independent of other forms of power? Because what we do is in the public interest? If we couldn’t agree on what the public interest looked like, how could we expect others to rally to that bedraggled cause?”⁴ Rusbridger’s unfinished sentence swings in the wind. This book is my effort to complete it.

Notes

      1 1. John Hersey, “The Legend on the License,” Yale Review 70 (1980), 1–25 at 2 (1980).

      2 2. Thomas S. Crane, Letter to the Editor, New York Times, May 9, 2019.

      3 3. Cited in Marion Marzolf, “American ‘New Journalism’ Takes Root in Europe at End of 19th Century,” Journalism Quarterly 61 (1984), 529–36, 691 at 531.

      4 4. Alan Rusbridger, Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2018), p. 335.