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Shifting the balance: citizens, employers, journalists and the Internet.

Article Excerpt
As any journalism student learns, journalism defines itself by high ideals. While the weight each ideal is given varies from person to person, discussions about the meaning of journalism generally focus on concepts like truth, balance, fairness, objectivity, independence, monitoring the powerful and so on. At the heart of it all is a deep sense of service and responsibility to readers and viewers. As Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach have put it: "Journalism's first loyalty is to citizens" (51).

As any working journalist knows, these ideals take a beating in the workplace. In an oft-quoted comment, A.J. Liebling once said, "freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one" (30). This remark deftly exposes the chasm that separates the ideal from the reality of professional journalism. No matter how devoted journalists are to their various ideals, most are also employees whose assignments and output are ultimately subject to the scrutiny, assessment, approval and agenda of those who employ them.

In essence, the central existential problem facing professional journalists boils down to the fact that they serve two masters--one being the citizens who read, view or listen to their work and depend upon journalists to live up to their high ideals, and the other being the people or institutions that employ journalists and depend upon them to contribute to the welfare of the corporation. Balancing the interests of these two groups has never been easy. In this paper, I will briefly discuss the increasing pressure to shift that balance towards corporate interests and suggest how the rise of the Internet as a mass medium may afford journalists the opportunity to shift that balance back towards the interests of citizens.

Journalists and Employers

At one time, most employers of journalists at least gave lip service--and some perhaps really believed--that the best way journalists could contribute to the welfare of the company was by being given the freedom to live up their journalistic ideals. The old notion of the "Chinese Wall"--the belief that the newsroom should operate completely independently of the business side of the operation--epitomized this idea. In a sense, there was an implied contract between the journalist and the employer that gave the journalist the ability to put the needs of citizens first, at least in making day-to-day journalistic decisions. Employers respected the professional integrity of their journalists, and journalists respected their employers. Of course, there were always publishers who violated this unwritten code, but the code itself was considered the accepted norm of the industry.

In recent years, however, there have been increasing questions about whether this implied contract does or even should exist. During past decades, as journalistic operations have become smaller units in a shrinking number of enormous global corporate entities, as marketing and entertainment values permeate news operations, as profit agendas cause newsrooms to shrink, more and more questions are being asked about whether journalists are still free to do the kind of journalism they learned about in textbooks. In a 1999 article for Nieman Reports that examined this trend, journalist Lou Ureneck summed up the troubling situation this way:

Greed is wrecking the newspaper business. Budgets are being squeezed to the point that some newspapers no longer adequately report news about their communities. Media conglomerates that increasingly control the press care more about keeping their shareholders content and less about the quality of the news they convey or their responsibilities as special members of larger communities. (1)

New forms of corporate organization and stockholder ownership are pushing journalists to pay more attention to serving the interests of their corporate masters. In Canada, where the dominant newspaper chain, CanWest Global, has come under criticism for forcing its newspapers to run corporate-imposed editorials and for spiking or revising columns and reviews deemed contrary to the owners' beliefs, one CanWest newspaper summed up the new equation nicely. In an editorial responding to criticism of these practices, the company's flagship National Post opined: "Press freedom is freedom from state censorship, it is not the freedom of journalists to write whatever they choose, regardless of the opinions of their employer." (2)

The Rise of the Internet

The other major development of the past decade is the rise of the Internet as a mass medium: the number of people accessing the Internet worldwide has grown from about 20 million people in 1995 to about 500 million today. In North America, about 180 million people are Internet-connected (compared to about 112 million who read a daily newspaper.) (3) Although broad statistics such as these can be misused--not everybody who is connected is a frequent user--studies indicate that as new users become more familiar with the Internet, their use of the medium grows. (4)

There is no question that the Internet has had an enormous impact on the practice of journalism,...