The power of journalism

Sarah Elgohary     

Spring 2016

LACS 110 

Journalism and media     Professor Murillo 

1.    In Waisbord’s text, he describes two traditions that have characterized the evolution and development of journalism in Latin America. Explain what those two broad traditions are, first by giving concrete examples from some of the countries he writes about in the text, and second, by explaining how those traditions parallel or compare to the many eras in U.S. journalism that we have discussed in class. essay 

Journalism is a distinct   occupation that involves writing about social problems in society. A journalist has a very high-level career of reporting on the events, facts, and people that are the "news of the day." This is in order for a society to be informed and aware of public issues. In a democratic society, access to free information plays a central role in maintaining a stable, civilized, society, while at the same time distributing power equally among governments, businesses, individuals, and other social institutions. The role and status of journalism, along with that of the mass media, has undergone profound changes over the last two decades with the advent of digital technology and publication of news on the Internet. This has created a shift in the consumption of print media channels, as people increasingly get their news through e-readers, smart phones, and other electronic devices, challenging news organizations to fully create their digital division of information as well as improvise on the context in which they publish news in print. 

There are two traditions in journalism in Latin America  they are Partisan Press Journalism and professional journalism .   Partisan Press journalism is a type of journalism in which newspapers television radio, and other communication media  openly support a political party and whose news stories are one sided. In addition, partisan press journalism was only for upper class people who could afford to buy newspapers  and have influence on political parties. However after 1800s partisan press newspapers became a form of public property. Americans believed that as republican citizens they had a right to the information contained in newspapers without paying anything. To gain access readers subverted the subscription system by refusing to pay, borrowing, or stealing. Editors, however, tolerated these tactics because they wanted longer subscription lists. First, the more people read the newspaper, more attractive it would be to advertisers, who would purchase more ads and pay higher rates. A second advantage was that greater depth of coverage translated into political influence for partisan newspapers. Newspapers also became part of the public sphere when they became freely available at reading rooms, barbershops, taverns, hotels and coffeehouses.[ An example of partisan press is when President James k. Polk once persuaded a leading publisher to fire an editor who was critical of Polk's policies When it comes to press freedom, Brazil has had a somewhat spotty historical record. Until 1808, Portuguese colonizers prohibited printing presses in the country. As a result, a strong newspaper tradition was not established in Brazil until the mid to late 1800s. From 1889 on, with the creation of the Brazilian Republic, the country's political system has alternated between authoritarian and democratic phases. Consequently, freedom of the press has been restricted and in some cases completely abolished for significant periods in Brazilian history. The situation was not very different throughout the Velha República (Old Republic), which lasted from 1889 to 1930. Newspapers and prominent editorial writers influenced decisions made by the Brazilian ruling classes— landowners, merchants, and political and military figures—but never attained the kind of mass circulation reached by the Penny Press in the United States at the same time period.

http://www.pressreference.com/Be-Co/Brazil.html# 

: http://www.pressreference.com/Be-Co/Brazil.html#ixzz46zMrRW7S ixzz46zLwMoco

ugust 02, 2001 - Latin America has been through quite a few profound political transitions over the past two decades. What part has the press played in this process? Is there a kind of regional model that defines its relationship with political power?

You can't really talk about a "regional model," but of similar experiences. According to conventional wisdom, the more democracy you have, the more press freedom there is, but this still varies from one country to the next. In the past, a sizeable part of the Latin American press had close ties to political and economic interests through its owners. Those interests routinely took precedence over journalistic impartiality. But during the 1970s, journalists became very politicized. Many became subversive and partisan writers, distorting the role of the press and badly undermining its credibility. However in the 1980s, as democracy spread across the region and a new generation of journalists less marked by past events came to the fore, a very refreshing and positive change took place

Mexico and Guatemala are two of the most interesting cases. The Chiapas uprising in Mexico had the effect of cutting short press allegiance to the ruling party, the PRI, which went hand-in-hand with rampant corruption. Chiapas came on so suddenly that the government of President Carlos Salinas didn't have time to put together a media strategy to deal with the situation. As a result, part of the Mexican press began reporting very openly on events. I think it's safe to say that to a large extent, this new attitude on the part of the press sounded the death knell of one-party domination and opened the way for Vicente Fox's victory in the presidential elections in 2000.

In Guatemala, during the short-lived seizure of full powers by President Jorge Serrano on May 25,1993, censorship was imposed and the press defied the government for the first time. The newspaper Siglo Veintiuno (21st Century) renamed itself Siglo Catorce (14th Century) and ran black columns in the place of censored material, exposing the government's attempt to stop the press from reporting on events. Colombia should also be mentioned: many journalists have and continue to risk their lives there reporting amid threats from guerrilla forces, paramilitary groups and drug-lords.

In the past, the Latin American press has often been submissive and engaged in self-censorship, sometimes to the point of complicity with the powers in place. Why has this changed?

In my eyes, the two most important factors are the return to democracy and the revolution in technology. The South American dictatorships of the 1970s created a spineless and obliging press, but as these regimes began to crumble, the media became more independent. With the return to democracy, journalists became even more daring and inquisitive.

In some places, such as Argentina, the press' credibility and influence grew as political parties became discredited. During the 1989-99 rule of President Carlos Menem, the Argentine press published a remarkable series of investigations into corruption and money-laundering that shook the government. At one point, opinion polls showed that the public trusted the press more than any other institution in the country, including the Catholic Church.

The revolution in technology, which began with photocopies and faxes and moved onto satellite TV and the Internet, has diversified information sources to the point that nobody can seriously hope to impose any kind of control. The relative cheapness of the technology has made the spread of information more democratic than ever before.

In the United States, in the first one hundred-plus years of the republic, journalism tended to be highly opinionated and partisan. Indeed, the first few generations of U.S. journalists–the years from Madison and Jefferson to Jackson and Lincoln–were diametrically opposed to what many Americans think is intended by the First Amendment: a commitment to neutral, values-free news reporting. Horace Greeley did not write, “Both the East and the West have their relative merits for a recent college grad”; he wrote, “Go West, young man.” And that was not his only pronouncement. Greeley’s New York Tribune, the great American journal of the mid-nineteenth century, was never neutral. It prodded the still-new nation to address the sin of slavery, to consider the dangers of imperialism and to recognize the need to provide for the common welfare. Greeley’s writers were anything but impartial observers; one of his regular correspondents, and arguably among the greatest journalists of the nineteenth century, was a German scholar named Karl Marx. The Tribune was typical of its times and, with other newspapers of its kind, essential to the progress that America achieved in the period of transition from revolutionary republic to global superpower.

The Dark Ages

In recent journalism history textbooks, this period, especially the decades immediately following independence, has been referred to as the Dark Ages of American journalism–with the premise that the less said about it, the better. Upon closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that partisan journalism had its strengths, not the least of which was its tendency to contextualize political issues so that citizens could recognize seemingly random events as part of a coherent pattern. Such an approach tends to draw people into public life. Observers note that nations around the world with partisan press systems tend to have high voter turnouts and more passionate political cultures. In the United States, the high-water mark for partisan journalism was arguably the 1820s and 1830s, and in the northern states this era is characterized as one of broad democratic participation among those who were allowed to vote

During the first decades of the twentieth century, the crisis spawned by sensationalism and right-wing crony partisanship reached a boiling point. In the 1912 presidential race, all three challengers to President William Howard Taft–Democrat Woodrow Wilson, Progressive Theodore Roosevelt, and Socialist Eugene Debs–criticized the corruption and venality of the press. It was in this cauldron of controversy that professional journalism was spawned. A driving force was the publishers themselves who understood that partisan and sensationalistic journalism was undermining their business model. They had to accept self-regulation to protect their profits and to ward off the threat of organized public-reform efforts.

Professional journalism was the solution to the crisis. It was the revolutionary idea that the owner and editor of a newspaper would be split, and a “Chinese Wall” put between them. News would no longer be shaped to suit the partisan interests of press owners, but rather would be determined by trained nonpartisan professionals, using judgment and skills honed in journalism schools. There were no such schools in 1900; by the end of World War I nearly every major journalism school in the nation had been established, often at the behest of newspaper owners. Professionalism meant that the news would appear the same whether the paper was owned by a Republican or a Democrat. Professionalism meant that there was no longer any reason to be concerned about the monopolistic nature of newspaper markets since owners would not abuse their power and, besides, so the theory went, more newspapers in the same community would merely reproduce the same professional content, so they were redundant.

There are many positive  and negative TO Professional journalism. The strengths of professionalism are self-evident. It gives editors and reporters a measure of independence from the owners’ politics and from commercial pressures to shape the news to please advertisers and the bottom line. It places a premium on being fair and upon being accurate. It makes it a cardinal sin, a career killer, to accept bribes or to fabricate stories. No wonder so many Americans think that the problem with U.S. journalism is that there is too little “objectivity,” as professional journalism is often characterized, albeit inaccurately. But even the strongest proponents of neutral journalism now recognize that values play a crucial role in story selection, deciding what gets covered and what does not, not to mention how the coverage is framed. Journalists covering a story can never be objective in the sense of a number of mathematicians who would all come up with the same answer for a problem. Instead of objectivity, the preferred terms today are fairness, accuracy, and balance.

Professionalism looked awfully good compared to what it replaced and was largely welcomed across the board. Yet criticism of the weaknesses of professional journalism and its biases began almost immediately, and by the second half of the twentieth century had become widespread in both journalists’ memoirs and in sociological criticism of the news. As Ben Bagdikian famously put it, the core problems with professional journalism as it developed in the United States are threefold: 1) reliance on official sources; 2) fear of context; 3) a “dig here, not there,” built-in bias concerning what areas of power are fair game and what are off-limits.

Professional journalism places a premium on legitimate news stories based upon what people in power say and do. The appeal is clear. It removes the tinge of controversy from story selection–“Hey, the Governor said it so we had to cover it”–and it makes journalism less expensive: Simply place reporters near people in power and have them report on what is said and done. It also gives journalism a very conventional feel, as those in power have a great deal of control over what gets covered and what does not. Reporting often turns into dictation as journalists are loathe to antagonize their sources, depending upon them as they do for stories. Indeed, successful politicians learn to exploit journalists’ dependence upon official sources to maximum effect. This dependence also makes possible what the modern public-relations industry does in its surreptitious manner.

The best-case scenario for journalists relying on official sources is when people in power have strong debates over fundamental issues, providing a good deal of wiggle room in which journalists can operate. The 2005 debate over privatizing Social Security is a good example, as President Bush and leading Democrats squared off in opposite corners. The worst-case scenario, where those in power are in general agreement and are not debating an issue, is a nightmare for democratic journalism. If journalists raise an issue that no one in power is debating, they are instantly accused of being ideological and unprofessional and attempting to force their own views into the news. It is criticism few journalists enjoy–it can be a career killer–so the reliance on official sources has a tremendous disciplinary effect on the range of legitimate news stories. It also means the public is at the mercy of those in power to a far greater extent than was the case under partisan journalism.

Context is often eschewed by professional journalism because it opens the door to the charge of partisanship. It is awfully difficult to contextualize a story well without showing some partisan inclinations or making some controversial value judgments. So professional journalism tends to pummel people with facts, but rarely pummels people with a nuanced appreciation of what the facts might mean. This helps explain the numerous studies that show that sustained consumption of the news on a particular subject often does not lead to a better understanding of the subject and sometimes leads to more confusion. AS a result, thismeans that professional news can have the ironic effect of making public life more confusing and less interesting and attractive, thereby promoting depoliticization. This is one area where professional journalism as it developed in the United States stands in direct contrast to its partisan predecessor. If nothing else, partisan journalism put stories in context and attempted to find the common thread between them.

“Dig here, not there” refers to the implicit or unspoken biases built into the professional code. They tend to be the biases that are favored by media owners, and journalists who climb the organizational ladder tend to be those who have the least problem internalizing them. For example, it is unusual for local news media to do hard-hitting critical examinations of the most powerful families and commercial institutions in their own communities. It is one of the great weak spots of our journalism, because if the local media in Decatur, Illinois, do not investigate the big shots of Decatur, it is highly unlikely the local news media of Fresno, California, will send a delegation of reporters to Decatur to do the job for them.

At a more macro level, as Bagdikian points out, our news media have internalized the notion that corporate power is largely benevolent, capitalism is synonymous with democracy, and the United States is a force for good in the world. So it is that corporate malfeasance gets barely a sniff of investigative journalism, unless blatant transgressions affect investors, while stories concerning governmental malfeasance, especially in programs intended to benefit the poor and working class, are stock-in-trade.When professional journalism is looked at in this light, it can be seen as a mixed blessing. Not only does professional journalism have biases, it has the audacity to insist that it is unbiased.

Corradini,, L. (2001, August 2). UNESCO - Communication and Information Sector - Media in Latin America: Rise of a new watchdog. Retrieved April 26, 2016, from http://www.unesco.org/webworld/points_of_views/200802_diament.shtml