Book Review: Speaking Up: The Unintended Costs of Free Speech in Public Schools
by John P. Ferre, University of Louisville
Dupre, Anne Proffitt (2009). Speaking Up: The Unintended Costs of Free Speech in Public Schools. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Most undergraduate communication majors who have studied media law know the 1988 Hazelwood decision. They certainly know that Hazelwood recognizes the authority of public school officials to limit what appears in school-sponsored student publications. They may also know that the potential restrictiveness of Hazelwood has motivated several states to pass laws that protect student expression. But they probably know little else about freedom of speech in public schools, even though public schools have been the locus of First Amendment decisions that not only establish legal boundaries, but also illuminate our values and influence the environment in which one in five Americans is enrolled—and where most of today’s undergraduates will eventually send their own children. The contested dimensions of free speech in public schools are thus subjects that will involve our students well into the future.
In this very readable primer, Anne Profitt Dupre of the University of Georgia School of Law examines key legal decisions from the last several decades regarding student expression, textbooks and school libraries, religion, and academic freedom. Despite Dupre’s rather obvious thesis that public school First Amendment cases are “rife with complexity and controversy” (p. 237), her book should be considered for either required or secondary reading in media and society and media law courses because of its breadth, depth, and illumination, in some places rising to the level of legal affairs reporting that Nina Totenberg does for National Public Radio.
Three cases anchor Dupre’s discussion. In Tinker v. Des Moines School District (1969), the Supreme Court supported public school students who were suspended from school for wearing armbands to protest the Vietnam War. Over Justice Hugo Black’s objection that “taxpayers send children to school on the premise that, at their age, they need to learn, not teach,” Justice Abe Fortas wrote famously in the majority opinion that neither students nor teachers “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” The second case, Bethel School District v. Fraser (1986), involved a high school senior who was prohibited from speaking at his graduation ceremony because he gave a student election speech laced with sexual innuendos. In this case, the Supreme Court supported the right of school authorities to enforce civility. “Vulgar speech and lewd conduct is wholly inconsistent with the ‘fundamental values’ of public school education,” wrote Chief Justice Warren Burger. Two years later, the Supreme Court decided the third case, Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, saying that public school officials may restrict utterances in school-sponsored activities if doing so serves a relevant pedagogical purpose. Dupre shows that in the span of just one generation, the Supreme Court shifted its stance toward public education from suspicion to deference.
These three cases focus on the right of students to express them-selves. By contrast, Island Trees School District v. Pico (1982) focuses on the right of students to receive information. In Pico, five high school stu- dents sued their Long Island school board for removing such books as Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut and Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver from a school library. The school board claimed that the books were not “in good taste, appropriate and relevant,” but the students argued that because the books were educational, removing them was an act of censorship. The case generated seven different opinions from the Supreme Court, but the majority agreed that schools could choose whatever books to put in their libraries but they could not remove titles for political, religious, or other ideological reasons. Dupre points out that the Pico decision says nothing either about criteria by which books are selected for libraries or about the motivations of school librarians who cull books from shelves to make room for new titles.
Another chapter deals with religious coercion in public schools. Dupre begins with the 1940 case, Minersville School District v. Gobitis, in which the Supreme Court ruled that public schools could require Jehovah’s Witnesses to salute the American flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance despite their religious objections. Just three years later, in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, the Supreme Court reversed itself, explaining that the First Amendment protected students from such coercion. Public schools grew more secular with Engel v. Vitale (1962), which prohibited compulsory prayer in public schools, and with Abington Township School District v. Schempp and Murray v. Curlett in 1963, which prohibited compulsory Bible reading in public schools. In 1968, the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Epperson v. Arkansas invalidated an Arkansas law forbidding public schools to teach evolution. These cases presaged today’s so-called Lemon test, which requires that legislation have a secular purpose, neither advance nor inhibit religion, and avoid excessive government entanglement with religion.
Students who read Speaking Up will get a clear sense of the logics and passions that produced the state of free speech in public schools today. They will not, however, learn much about “the unintended costs of free speech in public schools,” the promise of the book’s subtitle, other than that litigiousness had led public schools to divert time and money away from education to legal counsel to the detriment of both educational standards and confidence in public education. “Despite the fact that constitutional rights do not pass the schoolhouse gate into the private school,” Dupre wryly observes, “parents are clamoring to get their children through the portal” (p. 35). But the subtitle’s misnomer raises only a quibble with a book that authoritatively discusses the boundaries we set on free expression in places where our children learn many of life’s most important lessons.
Book Review: Woodward and Bernstein: Life in the Shadow of Watergate
by Bryce Nelson, University of Southern California
Shepard, Alicia C. (2007). Woodward and Bernstein: Life in the Shadow of Watergate. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
How would you like to sell your old reporter’s notebooks for $5 million to the University of Texas library? Many might, but only Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein seem to have the fame and chutzpah to pull off such a sale.
Like Woodward, Alicia Shepard, who has taught journalism at American University and written for the American Journalism Review, is a prodigious worker. To cover the lives of the two writers from their Pulitzer-caliber Watergate coverage beginning in 1972 to the exposure of their source “Deep Throat” in 2005, Shepard interviewed dozens and explored many documents. Although she interviewed the duo for a 2003 article, neither would speak for this book.
Despite their lack of cooperation, Shepard produced a book that scholars and students will consult for decades. Like most biographers, she thinks her subjects are very important. Yet, she does not hesitate to cite critics such as their Washington Post Watergate editor Barry Sussman, who still says, “I don’t have anything good to say about either one of them.”
Shepard writes that Woodward and Bernstein’s example increased investigative reporting in the nation, and they “popularized and made the use of anonymous sources an acceptable journalistic practice, although even today it is still the profession’s trouble spot.” While many young journalists (and many other Americans) believe that Woodward and Bernstein almost single-handedly brought down President Nixon, Shepard correctly does not agree. Neither do Woodward and Bernstein.
Few could work as hard as Woodward, and it is perhaps unfair that Bernstein’s sporadic career seems secondary by comparison. But the more active Woodward has done more to blot his journalistic copybook in recent years. Shepard writes about the major role he played in the story fabricated by Janet Cooke about the non-existent eight-year-old heroin addict. “There is no question that the biggest journalistic failure in the Post’s history (the Cooke story) blew up on Woodward’s watch,” said Howard Kurtz, the Post’s media critic. Shepard links these mistakes to Woodward’s strong desire for “holy shit!” stories—the sensational eye-openers.
While Woodward has produced far more “big books” than Bernstein since the two stopped collaborating, he also has been criticized for relying too much on his superb access and for not doing the shoe leather reporting done for Watergate. “Woodward has become far more controversial than he ever was during Watergate,” as he has increasingly been viewed as a mouthpiece for the powerful.
Whatever Woodward’s later successes and failures, Shepard feels that the collaboration between Woodward and Bernstein was essential for success in Watergate. Bernstein was the better writer and conceptualizer. For Wood-ward, “English was a second language.” Woodward was the dependable foot soldier who got every reporting job done. Woodward’s friend on the Post, Richard Cohen, says, “Woodward is pure infantry. Carl is pure Air Force. Bob keeps coming at you,” with interview after interview.
While Shepard quotes criticism of the two, she sometimes is too lenient. She even writes that Woodward “has never been shown to get his facts wrong” when the two authors admit in All the President’s Men that they got major facts wrong at least twice.
Although a valuable work, Shep-ard’s book needs more of her own conclusions and guidance. Like many re-porters’ books, it seems too much like a string of good quotes thrown together. Perhaps, like Woodward, Shepard is a better reporter than a writer. Her book seems a bit hastily written and edited and is sometimes hard to follow.
The scholar would find the book more valuable if the book had endnotes and offered more on the origins of material. Still, this is a worthy book to assign to journalism history courses, either graduate or undergraduate, especially if coupled with the solid stalwart All the President’s Men.
It is little wonder that Woodward and Bernstein have inspired generations of ambitious journalists and students, or that the extent to which they have done so has been vastly exaggerated. Here were two metro reporters who went quickly from making less than $19,000 a year to a stage where “They were rich. They were famous. Everything they did made news.”
As their Post editor, Ben Bradlee, exclaimed, “That was some ride, and no one even remotely involved in it will ever be quite the same.”
Book Review: The Manship School: A History of Journalism Education at LSU
by Will Norton, Jr., University of Mississippi
Garay, Ronald (2009). The Manship School: A History of Journalism Education at LSU. Baton Rouge: Loui-siana State University Press.
In his readable volume on the Manship School, Ronald Garay describes Dean John Maxwell Hamilton and his faculty as having a broad view of mass communication education. Journalism education would be in better shape today if more faculties had the vision evident at Louisiana State University during the last two decades.
Similarly, James W. Carey often regaled listeners with his vision of journalism education. He usually referred to writing and speaking on public issues as what the ancient Greeks defined as Rhetoric, one of the liberal arts. The Greeks prepared young men in the art of communication and debate in the amphitheaters of the city-state of Athens. They prepared their students to present the issues of the day to their citizens, to inform, explain, and persuade with clarity that which was significant for the survival of that great society.
As universities were established, they continued the discipline of rhetoric. However, on most universities, departments of rhetoric were divided into departments of literature and speech. Faculty members in U.S. departments of English focused primarily on teaching literature and not composition. A professor or a visiting lecturer might teach a creative writing course and/or a course in the writing of poetry, and graduate assistants or lecturers would teach freshman composition. Faculty in speech departments gradually developed graduate programs oriented toward the social sciences with graduate students teaching the skills (speech and debate) courses.
Meanwhile, after many years in which courses in the practice of journalism were taught at universities throughout the nation, the press association in Missouri implored the University of Missouri to create a school of journalism. Thus, the first school of journalism was established in 1908, and journalism education has progressed with the development of media during the twentieth century.
However, today, newspapers are facing declining circulations, network television news audiences are the smallest since the earliest days, and general interest magazines are virtually non-existent. The advertising industry is dealing with major role changes. Generally, mass media and mass media markets no longer seem to exist. Clearly, graduates of journalism and mass communication programs face great challenges in pursuing careers in news media. Thus, journalism and mass communication programs have a serious identity problem—indeed, a survival problem. Those with vision will survive, indeed, thrive.
As graduate programs developed in journalism, the director of the M.A. program at the University of Wisconsin created a very social sciences-oriented program.
Doctoral programs would follow a similar pattern. Wilbur Schramm, the first director of the Writing Workshop at the University of Iowa, returned to campus after World War II and found that his position had been filled.
As a result, he was offered the position of director of the School of Journalism and quickly created the nation’s first Ph.D. program. Because he had been so impressed by the social scientists at the Office of War Informa-tion, he created an inter-disciplinary doctoral program with a heavy emphasis in the social sciences. Public opinion polling was being developed by Dr. George Gallup, and the news media were the primary distributors of that data. So the connection seemed obvious.
Other universities followed the programs at Wisconsin and Iowa. Gradually, a greater and greater gap (philosophically and pedagogically) developed between graduate programs and undergraduate programs. As journalism programs increased and grew, it became more difficult to find exceptional media professionals who also were exceptional social scientists and could teach at both levels.
Today, this divided identity is a big issue facing programs throughout the nation as universities increasingly demand major grants and social science research at the graduate level and more intense learning in writing, editing, and display of information at the undergraduate level.
Dean Hamilton and his faculty perceived the split identity and focused on the rhetorical identity of public affairs for their educational enterprise. Garay, a longtime faculty member and former Manship associate dean, provides a history of the school within the context of the development of education for the mass media.
Hugh Mercer Blain, an LSU English professor, created the first LSU journalism courses and curriculum with the support of President Thomas Boyd. Thus, LSU became one of the first universities to offer journalism education. Blain’s efforts resulted in the establishment of national recognition for the school.
Journalism programs were established in liberal arts colleges; broadcasting, advertising, public relations, and political communication were added to these programs; doctoral programs were started and modest research programs gained in stature and respect.
Garay tells of students, faculty, directors, and alumni who were vital in the LSU school’s growth and development: Raymond Strother, a political consultant; Wes Gallagher, a former head of the Associated Press; and Tom Ryder, former CEO and chairman of Reader’s Digest, are some of those mentioned. Garay described the development of student media, The Reveille, KLSU-FM, and Tiger-TV.
After early pioneering work, the school seemed to lose momentum, but the book focuses on its return to the luster of its glory years after the appointment of Dean John Maxwell Hamilton and its emergence as an independent school. Indeed, the account of the move to independence is a story that could be told of many journalism and mass communication programs during the last half century.
A major element in that return to greatness is related to a generous gift from the Manships. They had been influential in Louisiana mass media for a century. Charles Manship Sr. bought the State-Times in 1909 and launched the Morning Advocate in 1925. Nine years later, the family began broadcasting on WJBO, Baton Rouge’s first radio station. The principle on which Manship media operated was printed on the front page of the first edition of the Morning Advocate: “editorials are not for sale,” and news items cannot be suppressed.” The Manships intended to produce news media “commensurate with the hopes and plans of Baton Rouge.” Manship’s commitment to truth and fairness and his investment in outstanding talent and up-to-date technology resulted in the Manship media company being dominant in the area and a leader in the community.
Douglas L. Manship followed his father into the business and pioneered Baton Rouge television. In 1965, WBRZ was signed on the air as a Baton Rouge television station. The family had developed an outstanding media empire. However, its greatest accomplishment may have been the result of its generous gift to name the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University.
Under the visionary leadership of a dean with a great network, the Manship School has emphasized the role of news media leaders in public affairs and issues. The school’s focus is on being a leader in the study and practice of news media and public affairs. The commitment is to producing graduates who can function as communicators “in a multi-media environment through the cultivation of communication skills, critical thinking skills and ethical practice.” Perhaps the only question is whether “Mass Commu-nication” should be in the school’s name.
Book Review: Living Ethics Across Media Platforms
by Loren Ghiglione, Northwestern University
Bugeja, Michael (2008). Living Ethics Across Media Platforms. New York: Oxford University Press.
Michael Bugeja’s ethics textbook, Living Ethics Across Media Platforms, appears designed to serve students across a variety of fields, from advertising to public relations to journalism, and to encourage personal responsibility in a morally converged as well as media-converged world. Living Ethics re-titles and updates with more than 100 new sources and excerpts an ethics book from more than a decade ago. The prose is straightforward—no arcane definitions or philosophical gobbledegook here—and the advice for students appears wise.
The book’s first nine chapters (Influence, Responsibility, Truth, Falsehood, Manipulation, Temptation, Bias, Fairness, and Power) build toward a final chapter on personal and professional value systems. In that chapter, as he does throughout the book, Bugeja makes good use of others’ expertise.
John Arends, president of a family-owned branding and marketing agency, says living ethics is a five-to-nine, not nine-to-five, job: You need to use your off-hours to prepare for the ethical challenges likely in the day ahead. Gene Policinski, executive director of the First Amendment Center, recommends young people begin to create “a ‘moral compass’ or code of ethics for themselves—and then compare that with the employers they hope to work for.”
The book clearly has the student in mind. Advice throughout pushes students to question their behavior. In his chapter on manipulation, Bugeja cautions: “To guard against hoaxes and your own preconceptions, you must analyze your secret self and acknowledge your fears, desires, convictions and values that might invite manipulation” (p. 161).
The chapter on temptation provides a plagiarism primer. Helpful journal exercises end each chapter. Useful lists (moral absolutes, civic absolutes, seven principles of moral convergence, five principles common to ethics codes worldwide) abound, though Bugeja tries too hard with his list of twenty-six first principles, each headed by a brief slogan that begins with a different letter of the alphabet.
Bugeja’s book reports on important topics that other authors fail to cover adequately. He discusses the tension between those consultants who advise media companies to develop their brands by targeting certain audiences versus those who argue news media should cover all communities, not just those targeted in marketing reports. He tells the story of Highlights for Children, where editors live the magazine’s motto: Children are the world’s most important people. Every letter to the magazine—hundreds arrive each month—is answered individually.
Bugeja does not avoid controversy. In a fascinating chapter on power (and compassion), he makes the case for why media companies should not be publicly traded. He also strongly argues for media rigorously fact-checking content, going against the newsrooms that refuse to do so because of the fear, as he notes, “that a source will argue about an assertion or otherwise compromise a reporter.” He quotes journalist Chris Adams: “With the ubiquity of e-mail, it’s very easy to check back with sources, even on deadline, to make certain nothing is inaccurate.”
Now for a few nitpicks about the book. Bugeja, the gracious, generous director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University, makes a habit of complimenting people in person. That carries over to this book.
Professionals cited are invariably “distinguished,” “prominent,” “eminent,” or “great.” Perhaps a textbook for journalism students should rely less on effusive adjectives; however accurate they may be, they grate.
The citation of experts, a strength of the book, occasionally becomes overkill (or overquote). One paragraph squeezes in quotes from the Random House dictionary, textbook authors Edward Spencer and Brett Van Heek-eren, and Socrates. Another paragraph manages quotes from three more sources—Ben H. Bagdikian, Davis Merritt, and Jay Rosen.
A more important concern with this textbook, one that transcends the nitpick category, is that Living Ethics argues that advertising and public relations “do not operate on different standards from those that apply to news journalism.” All three—advertising, public relations, and journalism—em-brace objectivity as a process, says Bugeja, just “at a different stage of the process.” But when you look at how people in advertising, public relations, and journalism approach, say, tobacco products, responsible for killing millions of people worldwide, you have to wonder whether Bugeja, in his idealism, is overstating his point. He rightly wants to avoid the elitism of journalists who stare down their snouts at practitioners of advertising and public relations.
In his discussion of “rainbows of truths,” however, he fails to address adequately the untruths that have characterized the advertising, public relations, and journalism associated with the tobacco industry. Perhaps we have moved beyond the era of suppressed medical evidence, misleading public relations by the Tobacco Institute, and tobacco company advertising that in effect lied. But the impacts of the tobacco industry on the public’s health and the ethics of the news media deserve a more candid and complete assessment than this book provides. (As I write, the Onion, the satirical weekly newspaper aimed at young people, carries an advertising insert from R.J. Reynolds for Camel Snus, which a YouTube critic says “tastes like Frosted Flakes on steroids.”)
Similarly, the book raises—but fails to discuss adequately—the argument by obesity expert Judith S. Stern that the food industry has a social responsibility to put calorie labels on all foods and media professionals have a duty to provide balanced, stereotype-free reporting, and advertising campaigns that do not mislead about obesity. Bugeja simply says, “But public relations practitioners writing or lobbying on behalf of the food industry routinely resist those efforts” (p. 228).
In summary, this is an ambitious, innovative textbook seeking to rethink the teaching of ethics by emphasizing personal responsibility across all media and media fields. It might be helped by more discussion of distasteful, dollar-driven media practices. But it benefits enormously from its attention to personal lessons about ethics and values that the digital-age student needs to know.
More from Bugeja:
- Returning to the Digital Newsroom (SERIES)
- The Economics of Curricular Convergence
- Ethics are easy when nothing is at stake
- Discussing JMC with… Michael Bugeja, Iowa State University
Book Review: The Age of Oprah: Cultural Icon for the Neoliberal Era
by Grace Jackson-Brown, Missouri State University
Peck, Janice (2008). The Age of Oprah: Cultural Icon for the Neoliberal Era. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
In The Age of Oprah: Cultural Icon for the Neoliberal Era, Janice Peck examines the rise of Oprah Winfrey as a cultural iconic theologian (pp. 8-9). The book outlines the phenomenal rise of Oprah Winfrey from the mid-1980s until about 2006. During that time, Winfrey became one of the most influential and wealthiest persons in the world, heiress of a $450 million media empire that included her top-rated namesake television talk show; the Harpo Productions Studio; O, The Oprah Magazine; Oprah.com; and ownership of considerable stock in the cable station Oxygen.
How did Winfrey (whose net worth is often estimated at more than $2 billion) accumulate such wealth and garner such a devoted fan following? Peck traces the socio-politics of the Progressive Era and New Thought ideology to modern day “Mind Cure” psychology. It is this “Mind Cure” psychology that Winfrey used to “Re-brand” her talk show from its public identification with “trash TV” to having it become the centerpiece of a positive life-changing, multi-media, therapeutic experience for her audiences and fan followers, according to the ascension described by Peck in The Age of Oprah.
It was during The Oprah Winfrey Show’s thirteenth season, in 1998, that Winfrey announced that the show would take on a new look and proclaimed, “We are launching change your life T.V.” (p. 6). In her introductory chapter, Peck begins building her case that Oprah Winfrey developed in-to a theological cultural icon and points out that “the use of religious terminology in connection with Winfrey” became “commonplace,” pointing out numerous references throughout the book.
Oprah was successful not only in re-building the image of her television talk show, but in creating an image of herself that culminated in “Brand Oprah” (pp. 200-210). In 2005, The Oprah Winfrey Show reached its “highest rating since 1996… yielding advertising revenue of $208 million” (p. 207). Momentous actions by Winfrey included starting the successful Oprah Book Club (credited with $160 million in book sales from the mid-1990s to 1998, p. 201); the equally successful premier of O, The Oprah Magazine in 2000; buying a 20% stake in Oxygen Media, an Internet/cable venture targeted to women (p. 189); and the launch of the Winfrey “Personal Growth Summit” tours in 2000, 2001, 2005, and 2006. In August, 2004, after The Oprah Winfrey Show earned its best May sweep ratings in seven years, Winfrey announced plans to extend the show through the 2010-11 season, which would mark its twenty-fifth year in syndication (p. 206).
Peck draws concluding observations in the final chapter of The Age of Oprah regarding the implications of her study, which can be utilized to teach and learn in the subject areas of media and society or media and politics, or to conduct further research. Peck concludes that Winfrey’s iconic success was, in part, due to the neoliberal social climate from which she emerged in the United States. She contends, in turn, that Winfrey as a theological cultural icon helps to build and advance the neoliberal ideology among her devoted fans and audience following.
The Oprah Brand was created and promoted using marketing that was based on the idea that anyone could succeed, all they had to do was believe. In 2007, Winfrey featured Rhonda Byrne on her television show, author of The Secret, a DVD and book “promising the key to attaining health, wealth, and happiness” through a positive thinking philosophy or “wish fulfillment” (pp. 212-13). According to Peck, the aforementioned philosophy is based on a neoliberal ideology that is replacing Keynesian ideology to explain class and wealth accumulation (p. 214).
According to Peck’s argument, “New Thought” neo-liberalism is supported by the class or groups “situated between labor and capital in the social division of labor,” or between the capitalists and working classes and “…this class stratum performs a dual function of reproducing the political relations of power between the capitalist and working classes and reproducing capitalist culture…” (p. 214). Peck sums up the ideological function of the Oprah Brand and Winfrey this way,
The “ideological function” of Winfrey’s “ask-believe-re-ceive” cosmology consists in positing a natural economic order operating independently of human intervention, while also insisting that individuals are absolutely free, hence absolutely responsible for whatever exigencies the market throws their way. This contradiction becomes the basis upon which Winfrey’s enterprise summons powerful “utopian fantasies” (p. 221).
Finally, Peck criticizes the neo-liberalism role in politics by the summary statement that “…neo-liberalism’s defining political practice is precisely that of depoliticization.” The latter is demonstrated by what Peck refers to as the crisis in the multi-party system of Western democratic states in which the politics of all parties appear the same. She compares news media coverage of the politics of then-presidential candidate Barack Obama with Winfrey:
What is striking about much of the popular press coverage of Obama is the emphasis on style over substance. Detailed examination of political is-sues and policy proposals take a back seat to considerations of the candidate’s “charisma,” “eloquence,” and “mesmerizing ability to connect with people,” exhibiting a degree of fawning found in much of the media treatment of Win-frey…It is this lack of substance that characterizes depoliticized politics (p. 223).
The Age of Oprah offers material that might be useful in teaching and learning about the intersections that exist between media, culture, and politics.
Book Review: No Time to Think: The Menace of Media Speed and the 24-Hour News Cycle
by Grace Jackson-Brown, Missouri State University
Rosenberg, Howard and Charles S. Feldman, eds. (2008). No Time to Think: The Menace of Media Speed and the 24-Hour News Cycle. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group.
No Time to Think: The Menace of Media Speed and the 24-Hour News Cycle edited by Howard Rosenberg and Charles Feldman covers topics relevant to teaching and learning in the subject areas of media, society, politics, and cultural studies. No Time to Think conducts a critical examination of the speed at which news and information are delivered—especially as a result of Internet innovation.
In No Time to Think, Rosenberg and Feldman examine the news cycle in a series of essays. The Internet and cable, in their view, deliver news at such an accelerated speed to the public that often it is relayed as “live” events as they happen, but sometimes online even before they happen. One example noted is the acuity and adroit use of the Internet by Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. A noted key example was the Obama campaign staff’s quick response to Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff’s red telephone advertisement, when it “whipped up a 30-second response ad that quickly sped to broadcast and cable networks and uploaded to You Tube—before that evening’s newscasts” (p. 3).
The following question, however, might be asked: Is the speed of the Internet only one stage of innovation that those within news media have traversed in the race to be the first or the fastest to publish news? If not, what are the unique characteristics of news via the Internet? No Time to Think devotes considerable space analyzing how news is told on the Web by traditional journalists, as well as bloggers, often with little editing or cross-checking of facts and a great amount of opinion. Professionals, public commentators, “experts,” lay persons, and casual public observers with an Internet connection all have access. But the authors of No Time to Think also consider prior ages of innovation, such as in the chapter titled, “Two Revolutions: French and Mexican,” which examines the history of the inventions of the telegraph and movie news reels. The authors credit the growth of newsreel theatres in London and the United States as being the predecessor to Ted Turner’s CNN 24-hour news channel.
The ten chapters of No Time to Think are interspersed with quotations from news professionals and others, as well as anecdotal examples, which could be used in journalism classrooms to stimulate discussions about recent changes that have occurred in news media. Chapter titles that reflect upon the content that can be found in the pages of No Time to Think include: “Blog On!,” “A New Protestant Reformation: Citizen Journalists to the Rescue,” “In-Depth Instant Results,” and “Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside: A Conversation.”
Rosenberg and Feldman lament the fact that newspapers as we have known them have begun to disappear or to cease printing (ch. 7, “Desperate Newspapers Play Catch-Up”)—even though it must be noted that the number, so far, is a tiny fraction of the 1,400 U.S. dailies and have mostly included papers in financial trouble for decades (exacerbated by the worst recession in sevenety-five years), such as the Rocky Mountain News and Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Rosenberg and Feldman point to the Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin, which after ninety years of publication (as an evening publication in a two-newspaper town) became a URL (http://www.madison.com/cap times/) in 2008. Disappearing dailies has become a trend—about 10% of dailies folded in the last fifteen years—but it has not become as prevalent as supposedly common wisdom suggests.
And despite Rosenberg and Feldman’s criticisms about the menacing effects of the speed of news and the 24-hour news cycle, no real substitution is offered, and no substantive cure is given for the decline of traditional print and broadcast news media usage that could revive loyalty among readers or a general audience. The only advice given by Rosenberg and Feldman is to emphasize media literacy among media users, apparently to make them more critical and broader purveyors of news.
No Time To Think offers material that might be useful in teaching and learning about the intersections that exist between media, culture, and politics.
Book Review: The Cluetrain Manifesto
by Kyle F. Reinson, St. John Fisher College
Levine, Fredrick, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger (2009). The Cluetrain Manifesto. New York: Basic Books. pp. 290.
At first, The Cluetrain Manifesto looks like another business self-help book: an artifact from book stores in airports and train stations. But the tenth anniversary edition, which includes a new introduction and new chapters by the authors and guest contributors, is really about a growing subversive conversation. This is precisely why journalism and mass communication educators should be familiar with the book’s theses. Yes, theses.
“The 95 Theses” are proclaimed concisely and spritely at cluetrain.com, the precursor to the book’s first edition in 1999. They begin with: “Markets are conversations.” Having used the punchy, and sometimes redundant, ninety-five theses for in-class exercises, I can attest that they resonate with students. For them, highly trafficked open-source social networks they create at Facebook.com and Twitter.com are preferred because they are conversational, authentic, and human—and these networks have reached critical mass, certainly to the delight of the authors.
According to Techcruch.com, Twitter attracted more than 20 million unique U.S. visitors in June of this year. The same month, the Audit Bureau of Circulations released its first Consolidated Media Report for newspapers. That report spanned the twenty-six weeks ending March 29, 2009, and showed the Chicago Tribune and its related Web offerings secured about 4 million unique visitors in February (its lowest month)—and a little more than 5 million unique visitors in December (its highest month). The subversive conversation of Cluetrain is now a mainstream conversation, taking its place alongside media conglomerates that have long built and guarded the gates of information.
David Weinberger’s chapter, “In Defense of Optimism,” offers an insightful exploration. His retrospective is an ideal follow-up for students getting their first exposure to the ninety-five theses. It apprehends the powerful interests benefiting most politically and economically from the scarcity of information. Weinberger, a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Institute for Internet & Society, warns of continuing threats from the Internet’s access providers, the content cartel and its enablers, the government, the people who sell us stuff, the digital divide, and lastly, the people. He maintains the abundance of the Internet will find enemies in those who seek to maintain or reinstate scarcity.
Class discussions based on Weinberger’s chapter and the ninety-five theses alone would be an inclusive way to engage students in the exercise of critical thinking. The entire book affords directed independent study opportunities and ideal entry points for student reflection on subjects ranging from personal career choices to important social issues. A reading of Cluetrain scheduled toward the end of the semester, for example, would set the stage for rich student essays addressing Weinberger’s assertion that “the Web allows a fuller, more natural expression of who we are than mass culture does.”
The book’s built-in reflections on the original work—and the ten years of current events since its first publication—could spark a series of lively classroom moments where students and instructors debate the merits of social media. The book is a catalyst for questioning “business as usual” in every strata of society, and there may be nothing healthier for students these days than second-guessing all forms of authority, even those within academe. Just as tough questions need to be asked of our institutions, Cluetrain stands at the door of institutional and generational change and keeps knocking.
Dan Gillmor’s addition to the new book, “Journalism as a Conversation,” should challenge journalism students, specifically, to consider their own understanding of what makes truth and how accuracy matters in new media environments. Gillmor has a voice on Twitter himself, and directs the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepre- neurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School. He advocates more reader involvement in the news gathering process, which is timely in light of Twitter’s recent mobile impact on breaking news.
Where should social media find its place in the classroom and in higher education at a time when not only markets, but government, our healthcare system, and myriad institutions are being forced to have conversations in new ways and on new terms? For a partial answer, I appropriated Twitter for an in-class assignment during the summer session. Students created Twitter accounts solely for the purpose of in-class microblogging to debate the relevance of “The 95 Theses.” Students were engaged in a subversive conversation of their own, and shared their thinking not only with their instruc- tor, but the entire Twittersphere. Surrendering my control of the learning experience to social media, in a sense, gave the book’s authors the last word.
Book Review: Broadcast Journalism: A Critical Introduction
by Tom Grimes, Texas State University
Chapman, Jane and Marie Kinsey (2009). Broadcast Journalism: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge. pp. 278.
Broadcast Journalism: A Critical Introduction is a collection of essays by British, Australian, and New Zealander broadcast instructors who have a lot of media experience. These essays are edited into a book by Jane Chapman and Marie Kinsey, who are both British university faculty. If you examine the professional credentials of the contributing essayists, there is little doubt that they are skilled, seasoned media and teaching professionals who add impressive value to the universities at which they have appointments. But there’s a problem.
This textbook is presented in the British idiom. Words are spelled in British English: “programme,” “organised,” “emphasised,” and so on. And punctuation throughout the book is British, to wit: ‘…in which the public, I fear, is deeply interested’. Most essayists featured in this collection overuse quotation marks around words, which they use to give those words emphasis. The authors also use single rather than double quotation marks, which makes matters worse. This conceit will be irritating to American journalistic eyes, which have been trained to be sparing with quotation marks in the first place, and who are used to following strict rules regarding when single and double quotation marks are used as well. For those of us who have to fight students’ proclivity for not using apostrophes in possessive nouns, odd text-messaging protocols such as “w/o,” “lol,” and the (mis)use of the personal pronoun “i,” all of which creep into their news stories, putting these British-isms into their heads isn’t a path down that most faculty would want to go.
Chapman and Kinsey, in telling a story, refer to the great David Dimbley of the BBC. If American students have a difficult time placing Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, or even Brian Williams, you know David Dimbley won’t register. The book reports the cost of television productions in pounds sterling (e.g., £89.5 million) instead of dollars. Although some contributors include American examples of what it is they want to illustrate, there are still incompre- hensible (for American students) passages that go wasted. Leslie Mitchell, a Senior Teaching Fellow at Stirling University in Scotland, for example, makes the important observation that it’s good to help radio listeners vis- ualize what they’re hearing. He suggests, for instance, that rather than report the height of a series of electrical towers (which he calls pylons) that are 65 meters high (oh lordy!), a writer might compare their height to commonly known structures, such as Lord Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, which they are larger than, or the pinnacle of St. Paul’s Cathedral, which they are smaller than. See? A perfectly good teaching point gets waylaid by the British idiom. It seems to me to be adding unnecessary complexity to an already difficult pedagogical task.
Consider the chapter entitled “Freedoms and responsibilities: law for broadcast journalists” by Tim Crook, a Senior Lecturer on Media Law and Ethics at the University of London. Crook goes into depth on media law and customs in the United Kingdom and tries to compare some of those U.K. customs and laws to their counterparts in the United States. Why? Isn’t American media law complicated enough? Conveying to American students the lineage of media law and ethics, as it derives from the First Amendment and decades of American media patterns and practice that have been built around the First Amendment, could easily spin out several semesters of courses alone. Unless you are in a comparative media culture course, I just would not complicate things with unfamiliar laws and traditions. This book will be more at home at their British HMV chain than our Barnes & Noble.
Book Review: Principles of Convergent Journalism
by Tom Grimes, Texas State University
Wilkinson, Jeffrey S., August E. Grant, and Douglas J. Fisher (2009). Principles of Convergent Journalism. New York: Oxford University Press.
Principles of Convergent Journalism is a noble attempt to deal with the rat’s nest that is media convergence. It is a rat’s nest because media convergence is in the early stages of inventing itself, of refiguring how media make money with this new model. A metaphor comes to mind that seems apt: analogical media are like a warm air mass and digital like a cold air mass. There is no way the two can combine without creating a lot of havoc and, in many cases, destruction. Principles has made a workman-like attempt to deal with what we know so far about the nature of convergence and how we can prepare students to work in this fractious media environment.
A little background first. There are at least two schools of thought on convergence. One school could be represented by the big Austin, Texas, ad agency GSD&M (BMW, AT&T, and MasterCard are among its clients), and the Lawrence, Kansas, media conglomerate The World Company (profiled a couple of years ago by ABC News’s 20/20 and the New York Times as a model of media convergence). For GSD&M, advertising’s core is where it has always been: the creation of original, attention-getting, and persuasive messages. GSD&M hires staff to help its creative talent translate those messages into the appropriate new media formats. The same principle is true with respect to The World Company. This Kansas newspaper, television, and Internet company tries to hire people who know how to tell a story that’s interesting and packed with first-rate reporting. The World Company also hires staff to train reporters, editors, and photographers to enter content using various platforms on which The World Company distributes its products. The World Company requires only that its reporters not be afraid to produce content for different platforms. Training in new media is helpful but it is not required. In other words, GSD&M and The World Company have created a clear division of labor between software and hardware providers, and content providers.
The other school of thought is characterized by media producers who fuse the message and the way it is conveyed. This category of people, I believe, is vulnerable to being seduced by the latest technology. The seduction is understandable because new technologies often introduce interesting new media production and consumption behaviors. However, in this seduced state, the pencil and reporter’s notebook have no pop, no zing; they are “sooooo old media.”
Consider a media consumption behavior that prompted the notion of multi-tasking, and with it, the proliferation of media production behaviors that were designed to play to multi-tasking. The consumption end of the equation was led by a generation of key-punching teens who reduced all long-hand creations to software that did a lot of the work for them, thus creating the opportunity to pack many different tasks into fewer efforts. Because of this behavior, widely adopted by teens faster than their elders, teens were mistakenly viewed as having a special ability to efficiently “multi-task,” that is, split their attentional resources efficiently among a number of competing tasks. This notion has been irrefutably debunked by experimental psychologists and mass communication researchers. Millennials may multi-task, but not efficiently. Not even close to efficiently.
Now consider some message production behaviors that are designed to target the mythical multi-tasker. Some of those behaviors include the cascade of TV screen clutter that competes with the principal message that is on the screen at any given moment. What, in fact, these producers are concocting is what art critic Robert Hughes once called “the shock of the new,” a newness that is, in itself, the message—the message of what is avant-garde, exciting, hip, now. The more dizzying the message, the greater its entertainment value. And that is what we are talking about: entertainment value, not more efficient methods of communication to Millennials. This goose chase got started when one of the originators of MTV, Robert W. Pittman, speculated in a New York Times op-ed piece in 1990 that “TV babies” process information differently than adults. They can “process information from different sources almost simultaneously,” he wrote. His advice to message producers was to play to the ability of TV babies to take it in all at once. And thus, the proliferation of goofy, distracting graphics along with those vexatious lexical screen crawls that attentionally compete with simultaneously spoken words. It is a brew that leads to comprehensional bedlam.
University communication faculty who subscribe to this view are likely also sucked in by the gizmotics of message conveyance like their professional counterparts, and can end up spending more class time on that than on content. Wilkinson, Grant, and Fisher recognize this and diplomatically call this the “gee whiz aspect” of converged media instruction; that is, the preoccupation of some journalism faculty with hardware and software. Principles of Convergent Journalism correctly focuses on content. The authors of Principles have sought to find those attributes of new media that look to be stable, and then explain how a journalist can expect his or her work to be integrated into new media. The most positive attribute of Wilkinson, Grant, and Fisher’s textbook may be a windage that tacks toward the supremacy of journalistic content. It would appear that GSD&M, The World Company, and Wilkinson and his colleagues are of one mind with respect to convergence and how to manage it.
LIVE Chat Replay: New Media Tools and J-School
Dennis Chamberlin, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and Michael Bugeja, former bureau chief for United Press International, tested their journalism skills during the week of November 8 with an enterprise piece on “The New Poverty,” documenting how the failing economy in Iowa is affecting all strata of society.
Chamberlin and Bugeja chatted about their return to the newsroom, and shared their thoughts on what changes J-Schools need to make, which new media tools classes should incorporate and the differences between today’s reporter and yesterday’s.
Please feel free to continue the conversation in the comments.
